“You were saying?” Scarlet said.
He watched with growing anxiety as the men on the foredeck wheeled a large mortar into view and began to lock it into place. “And that’s what, exactly?” she said.
“It’s a Sani,” Maria said. “A Russian heavy mortar.”
“Range?” Lexi asked, looking through the binoculars.
“Depends on the model,” Maria replied. “Maybe five hundred meters, or maybe seven kilometers.”
“And we have the Browning,” Scarlet said. “Talk about bringing a bowl of custard to a knife fight.”
“No, we can take them, just make sure we…” Reaper suddenly looked off the ship’s starboard bow. “What the hell is that?”
Everyone followed his eyes to the horizon just in time to see the Hellfire air-to-surface missile tearing through the sky toward their ship.
“Jump!” Camacho yelled.
Bekri hit the alarm and it sounded through the klaxons all over the vessel. “Abandon ship!”
And then a second later there was no ship.
The merc approached fast through the gloom, and Hawke quickly saw he was holding a weapon of some kind. “Christ on a bike!” he yelled at the others. “They’re armed with APS rifles!”
“That’s just arsing fantastic!” Lea said, twisting her head to try and see the threat. She turned and looked over her other shoulder.
Hawke watched as the goon got closer and raised the APS to fire. He knew that because standard rounds had both poor accuracy and velocity underwater, the Russians had come up with the brainwave of redesigning the bullet into a much longer shape, almost like a miniature harpoon. The genius of the Soviet Union, he thought with a shake of his head.
The merc fired and the four inch-long steel bolt tore past him, leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake. The bolts were sharpened to a lethal point and had it hit him it would made just as much damage as a regular bullet, but thankfully it missed and raced off into the gloom of the ocean.
To his far left a second merc came into view, and then a third thundered down from above him. The man on the third scooter tried to hit him with the stock of his APS rifle but narrowly missed before pulling up sharply and turning around for a second attack. Before he could gather his thoughts, a familiar face joined the fray.
“It’s Kruger!” he told the others. “He’s firing!” He pulled the handlebars hard to the right to avoid the bolt, and was instantly reminded of how slow underwater movement really was. The sea scooter chugged painfully slow to the right and he leaned over just as the bolt raced past him leaving another trail of bubbles in its wake.
He spun around one-eighty degrees just in time to see the harpoon-bullet disappear into the gloom of the ocean, and then pulled up hard to gain more elevation. He thought he was getting the better of him, but then he heard a deep, bass roar from the surface a few hundred feet to the north that changed everything.
The former SBS man looked into the distance to where the VCSM had drifted only to see it disappear before his eyes — one minute it was there and then the next it was gone, and all that was left were chunks of burning wreckage and gnarled, bent steel from its carcass.
Reaper was first to emerge from the water. When he came to the surface he thought he’d arrived in hell and the spray dome was still hundreds of feet in the air above his head. Where the VCSM had once been was a wide field of broken, twisted detritus, slowly sinking through the burning oil all over the ocean. The sky above was gray from the storm and black from the fires, and everywhere was the smell of oil and grease and then the storm blew another layer of saltwater and dead fish into his face.
He took a deep breath and slowed his breathing before starting to search for his friends. He trod water while turning three-sixty to scan the horizon but there was nothing but carnage everywhere. The dead body of Maati Khatibi bobbed to the surface a few yards to his right and he offered the kindly professor a quick prayer, but the holy words were broken by the noise of helicopter rotors, and by the sound of it they belonged to a substantial machine.
Then Lexi broke the surface and screamed as she gasped for air. He yelled at her and swam over, and then Camacho appeared though the burning wreckage to the south and also began pushing his way through the water to join them. Maria called out in the smoky gloom, and he turned to see her rising high above him on the swell as the storm stirred the sea again and made things even worse.
“Are you okay?” he called out, spitting more seawater from his mouth.
“Yes.”
“Lexi?”
“I’ve been better, but I’ll live long enough to kill whoever fired that missile.”
“Me too,” Scarlet said, swimming toward them from the south.
“The Professor is dead,” Reaper said.
“That makes at least two then,” Maria called back. “I just saw Bekri’s body over there.”
“How the hell did Kruger get a chopper out here?” Camacho asked.
Maria pointed to the north. “Well, I don’t know but there goes his boat…”
They turned to see the old tuna boat moving away through the smoke.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Reaper said. “Why blow us up and then run away?”
And then it made sense.
Before anyone could think about the question, a second Hellfire scorched through the leaden sky and ripped into the tuna boat’s hull, tearing it to pieces. The detonation was colossal, and Reaper yelled at the others to dive before the shockwave reached them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Alex Reeve was still in shock as Richard Eden pushed her along the carpeted corridor at the heart of Elysium and tapped in the keycode to get into the bunker. Kim was beside them and as he calmly tapped in the secret numbers, they all heard the sound of the Apaches as they continued their attack on the island.
An enormous, deep explosion from somewhere above rocked the whole building, and they all knew they had started shelling the ECHO GHQ with their compliment of Hellfire missiles. Eden shook his head and cursed. The AGM-114 Hellfire was a savage anti-armor air-to-surface missile that would wreak devastating damage on their compound.
“Jesus!” Alex said, as Eden moved them inside the bunker and sealed the door. “How many of those things have they got?”
“Up to sixteen on each chopper, and you said you saw three so we could be looking at nearly fifty of the things.”
“What about the anti-aircraft defenses?” Kim asked.
“We can operate them from in here.”
“We can?” Alex asked, surprised. She had never seen the bunker before, and was shocked when Eden flicked on the lights to reveal what looked to her more like Cape Canaveral’s Mercury Control Center. A waist-high panel full of switches and controls ran around the room and above them several plasma screens began to flicker to life.
“Yes, we can. Don’t forget this facility was built and operated by the French Navy as a listening post during the Cold War.” He turned to face her and smiled. “As a consequence it has all of the trimmings.”
He flicked more switches without hesitation and a few moments later the whole room was buzzing like an industrial quantum computer. Alex stared up at the plasma screens and saw various views of the island in the hot sunshine.