“Fuck me!” Mai yelled. “What is that?”
“Some kind of heavy machine gun,” Drake shouted back. “Bollocks! They have our position. We’re pinned.”
“No time!” Mai cried, but at that moment the big gun coughed again and a shell exploded beside her, sending her body slamming across the shallow depression.
“Mai!” Drake screamed.
Belmonte scrambled over to her. Suddenly a shadow blocked out the sun and Drake looked up to see four enemy soldiers leaping towards him.
The big gun had been used as distraction.
Now Drake, alone, rolled and came up to his knees, blasting one of the men away. But the others were in too close. One knocked his gun away. Another reached for his throat, but too slow. Drake gripped the arm and twisted it down, breaking it at the elbow, then slammed it back up so that the man’s body smashed into one of his brethren. Another came at him from the side. Drake fell back, watched an arm holding a wicked knife scythe through the air a millimetre above his nose, and rolled into the body and around until he was behind the man. Then he drew his own blade and buried it into the nape of his neck.
A bullet slammed through the gap between his legs. He looked up. A truly enormous soldier stood before him, grinning, weapon steady, the blood of good men already dripping from his face.
Drake had no way out. He felt a second of regret…
…the gun fired, but shot wide. An SAS soldier had launched a desperate attack, hitting the giant around the waist. The soldier bounced off. The giant, seven feet of bulging muscle and pure fury, didn’t even wobble. He simply re-aimed the gun and ended the other man’s life. But now Drake was up and Mai was shaking her head, instantly alert, and diving in from the other side.
Drake struck from the front, three punches and a kick in lightning time. The giant took them all without flinching as he concentrated on Mai, recoiling from her deadly strikes but batting them aside anyway.
Drake struck again. “You’ll feel this, you bastard!”
The giant grunted. “I fink you need bigger hands, small man.” He kicked Drake in the chest with the force of an elephant, sending him flying back, stunned and winded. Mai dove in again, breaking her enemy’s arm but, still dazed, found herself being crushed at the giant’s feet.
Then a brief respite came as he stared in confusion at his dangling arm. “It’s no bovver.” He growled, not even wincing as he prodded the jagged bone back through torn flesh. “I’ll mend later.”
The enormous man still held a pistol in one oversized hand. His cackle of madness and delight stung even the death-laden afternoon air with frenzied malice.
For the second time in as many minutes, Drake faced death down the sights of a barrel. With no hope he struggled to thrust his body upright. But the giant fired immediately. No speech, no more chatter, just a spark of ignition lighting his eyes firing the thought that he could finish up here and lumber over to his next target.
With the quickness of a bullet, a shadow dove between Drake and Mai and instant death. Then the shattered body of Daniel Belmonte landed beside them, bleeding badly where the neck met the collarbone, eyes hopeful.
“Did I save the day?”
Still running on adrenalin… he didn’t know quite yet that his wound was fatal.
But the giant just shook his big, shaggy head and raised his gun again. Belmonte noticed and then, against all odds, pushed himself up and grabbed the big man in a hug. Bullets punched through Belmonte’s frame, jerking the body terribly with every impact. As Drake watched, he saw the thief’s last act in this life — to bring his arm around and bury the knife he had taken from Drake right through the giant’s thick neck.
Both men fell in a heap. It still took both Drake and Mai nearly a minute to stand. They both heard Belmonte’s final words, no more than a whisper of breath. “Now I will meet her again.”
By then the battle had moved on. Drake and Mai checked their wounds, scooped up lost weapons, and continued with a nod to Belmonte’s already cooling body.
Hayden obliterated an enemy defense post with Kinimaka, Dahl and several of his Swedish compatriots before looking ahead. Toward the bottom of the slope, the men escaping with the eight pieces had cleared the tent and were heading for an area crowded with helicopters. Hayden cast about. Smoke and fire fogged the area around them. She couldn’t rely on anyone else coming to help, so she set off at a run, now starting to feel the return of fire in her side as the painkillers wore off.
“Let me take the lead,” Kinimaka urged.
But now wasn’t the time to worry about that. Kinimaka had her side, as he always did, and Dahl paced her too. She picked her way down the rest of the slope, stopping briefly as they encountered stiff opposition from behind several stacked barrels ahead. Dahl fired his RPG at the barrels and the opposition went up in flames. Then, with a regretful shake of the head, he threw the weapon away, out of grenades.
Their clothes were torn, their flesh bloody, and their faces set hard with determination and the loss of colleagues along the way, but Hayden and her small contingent forged onward, finally reaching the flat of the valley and facing the field of choppers. The enemy had dug in and some were already shooting.
“See there,” Dahl shouted. He pointed out the large group trying to spirit away the pieces. “Hurry. We have no time.”
The Norseman welcomed the drifting, cloying smoke with its thick stench of spilled blood and death. When the SAS team that guarded him met harsh opposition and fought hard to survive, he managed to crawl and slither his way through the muck and the mud, a venomous snake slipping through slime, until he managed to outflank the battle. Then, still staying low, he slunk to the base of the hill. Along the way, he even managed to collect a discarded weapon, a fully loaded machine-pistol, which brought a thin smile to those bloodless, melancholy lips. Fortune always landed on the side of the privileged, and none were more privileged than he. He glanced back up the hill and saw the thief, Belmonte, dying. He turned away without a flicker of concern. The pieces of Odin were still within reach, and although the plan had changed, there was still a plan.
The only plan that guaranteed the continued dominance of what remained of the Shadow Elite.
Make Cayman place the blasted things in the right holes and send out a warning to the world. If some small destruction ensued, it mattered little to him. After a few minutes they would stop the process by removing a piece.
But, his mind questioned him, it might not be that easy. What if you can’t stop the process?
Then so be it. In the true order of things, the death of the Shadow Elite really should spell death for the world. It would be an appropriate and fitting end for this planet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
As a single unit they attacked the choppers. Dahl ran, firing at a Bell 205 painted jet black, as its occupants desperately tried to slam its doors close and take off. Within seconds, he hit the skids at full pelt and launched his body forward so that he flew into the cockpit, still firing. The windshield and side windows were already shattered. Bloodied men screamed and fell back as he landed among them. Fists and legs thumped against him to no effect. A bullet blasted past his cheek. Dahl wedged himself firmly on the fat stomach of a man’s twitching body and sprayed the rest of the cockpit with lead. Within seconds, the interior grew quiet and still.
Dahl peered out of a side window, finding his next target.
Mai and Alicia zigzagged toward another chopper, this one equipped with weapons and looking much like an Apache, but with several modifications. As they neared the chopper, it rose off the ground, skids twitching into the air, rotors at full speed and generating the thrust required to take off. Mai slung her rifle across her shoulder without slowing down and leapt at the rising skid, grabbing hold and twisting her body acrobatically through the air so that she landed on her feet, facing the still-open door of the cockpit.