He found knives and a pistol on the body, as well as a dozen grenades in the bag, but no comms devices, no orders, and nothing to say who they were. There was a map of the city which Jake unfolded and smoothed down, wiping blood across it as he did. There were targets marked, and writing pointing to the targets in lettering he couldn’t read.
“Is that, Chinese?” Louise asked.
“I don’t know. Could be,” Jake answered. “Or Korean?”
“What the fuck is going on?” Cal asked openmouthed, thinking that the world had just gotten even weirder.
“I don’t know,” Jake said again, “but these assholes killed at least one man and put a bullet in a cop. These sure as shit aren’t your regular gun thugs,” he added.
That much was obvious. The weapons bore no trademarks, no manufacturer’s details, and didn’t register in Jake’s mind even though he had been trained and had studied to learn the caliber, capacity, and capabilities of weapons. He popped a round out of one of the magazines and studied the bullet with a furrowed brow, not having seen a round of that size and makeup before.
That certainly isn’t American-made, he told himself. Looking at the metallic tubes with the obvious trappings of a grenade, he studied the cylinders to see if he could make out any legend. Nothing. He had never seen a grenade without warnings or markings showing what it was; the thing in his hand could be smoke or an incendiary. He put it down carefully, then replaced the contents of the bag before zipping it all up tightly. A shout from behind followed by the sound of a woman crying made the three of them turn.
Tromans had gone.
Jake rose uncertainly, walked slowly toward the blood-soaked scene, and looked down on his fellow police officer. His blue-blooded brother. The two had never met before that day, and would be unlikely to have ever met in their entire careers, but he was dead now. Jake, uncertain of what to do, carefully removed his NYPD shield and the precinct badges from the collar of his shirt, as well as his duty belt and equipment, draped the sheet which one of the hotel staff had brought over his body, and laid the badges on top. He rested his duty belt over one shoulder and turned.
He froze, eyes wide, looking past Cal and Louise. The two slowly turned their heads to look in the direction he was staring, and found themselves looking into the murderous eyes of the handcuffed and broken-nosed woman, now awake and pulling one bloody hand free of the restraints.
Cal, as useless as he had felt when the gang had robbed the hotel, acted on instinct. He was the closest person to the now escaped prisoner, and he threw himself at her with an animalistic bellow of rage, but without any regard for his safety or thought for his next move. He was vaguely aware of screams behind him, unsure if it was Louise or someone else, but he was sure it wasn’t the lithe assassin he tried to rush. She was cold, collected, and much faster than him.
She let his bull-rush come, turned her body slightly to divert the force of his attack and rolled him over her hip. As he felt himself losing the control and initiative of his attack, he was stuck once again by feeling useless and incompetent. She had grabbed one of his wrists as he rolled past her, which was now pulled tight as she painfully dragged his arm up straight. Cal’s eyes went wide as he saw her raise her right foot to smash down on his arm and he knew it was going to get horribly broken. He thought about closing his eyes, but couldn’t tear his gaze away from the look of bloodthirsty glee on her face.
A flash and an echoing bang reverberated around the lobby, making his damaged and sensitive ears ring again. At the same time his attacker’s upper body convulsed; her left shoulder pitched backwards with the momentum of the round which had struck her vest. Before she regained her composure and finished him, another flash and bang erupted from a different direction.
Cal blinked and gasped as blood fountained on his face, misty at first but coming thicker quickly. It was hot, and tasted metallic in his mouth. Between blinks of his eyes, he could see her face. Could see it had changed from ruthless anger to unregistered shock, but no pain.
She didn’t waver on her feet or fall to her knees dramatically like in the movies, but was carried forwards by the momentum of the bullet to land face down heavily on Cal like a felled tree. Blood gushed out of the wound on the side of her skull to pulse in great gouts onto Cal’s chest. Scrabbling to get free of the butcher’s scene on top of him, he managed to wriggle out from underneath her body and wipe at his face.
Looking up through a gulp of fresh air, he first saw Jake still holding his weapon aimed at where she had been stood. Glancing to his right, he saw Louise. Her eyes were wide with terror, but the thin trails of smoke lingering and creeping lazily upwards from the barrel of the pistol she held told him the rest. He couldn’t have explained it then, but he knew from his subconscious where the shots had come from. Both had fired shots at the woman about to snap Cal’s arm in half, but being the trained man of the two, Jake had fired first and hit her high in the vest, just left of center-mass. As she spun with the momentum of that first hit, the fateful trajectory of Louise’s shot had resulted in the removal of part of the right side of her skull just above the ear.
Silence reigned in the lobby, as everyone exchanged looks which conveyed any number of questions. None of these questions had the chance to be put into words, as a muted flash and a rolling grumble of thunder vibrated the whole island.
BRINGER OF DEATH
Friday 11:18 p.m. – Atlantic Ocean, off South America
The dull red light inside the command section of the Virginia class fast attack submarine lit the faces of the concerned Navy Commander. His entire crew had been on full alert for over three hours now, as a quick glance at the mission clock running next to him said. Their task, as it had been for weeks, was to patrol the waters and provide advanced warning of vessels moving in unexpected patterns outside of the South American and Caribbean shipping lanes. They were the eyes, or more appropriately the ears, which gave the US Navy and Coastguard forces the much-appreciated heads up.
This elusive radar contact, the one which had disturbed his meal and now made him unable to shake off a sense of dread, had evaded his boat for far too long. His XO, executive officer, tried again to reassure the commander of the sub that it was nothing to worry over.
“Sir, I still believe this was a ghost,” he said for the third time, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice.
“This wasn’t a ghost,” the commander said, meaning that the ping they had detected and been searching for these last hours was not a malfunction in their sensor equipment. The signal he had seen before it disappeared was big, too big to be a pod of whales or some sonar echo to be ignored. He had an impending sense of dread that his crew had accidentally detected something malevolent and dangerous. His mind wandered from the displays to imagine a hidden killer sensing that they had been detected. If he were that imaginary shrouded hunter, he would have slowed to a dead crawl and dropped low to sneak past the American boat above, pinging sonar like a game of Marco Polo played in the pitch-black depths. Eventually he had to accept that his paranoia was putting the crew on edge.
“Stand down,” he called to the command section suddenly, reassuring himself that no submarine in the known world could have avoided their sensor array for that long and only be glimpsed partially once.