Alarms exploded throughout the building and the team turned to face one another.
“The mercs were running,” Dahl said. “Because they left something behind.”
“God help us all,” Hayden said.
Argento’s scream: “Get the hell out of there!”
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
When a man or woman is faced with death, any death, they can make one of only two decisions — fight or die. To fight might encompass a world of choice — battle, flight, hide, a jump into the unknown. But to die — that was easy. If there’s a choice, Drake thought. Fight!
Fight to live with all your being. The alternative is very bleak.
When the explosions began the whole team listened hard, feeling and testing and listening to their gravity, their depth and range. Drake knew they were deep. Leaning over he saw windows blowing out and mortar crumbling. Shocked, he saw a wide crack traveling from the foundation to the top floor, concrete parting and discharging clouds of dust.
“I’m pretty sure my legs ain’t turned to jelly,” Lauren said. “So that’s the building shaking.”
“Oh… what have they done?” Hayden gasped.
Drake couldn’t imagine the mindset of a person who would destroy a hospital full of people to safeguard a forgotten room from another century, but he could visualize his next set of choices.
“Amari’s right there,” he said, swaying. “With a dozen or so mercs, and he’s fast decelerating into insanity. Webb’s probably below us or already moved on to his final undertaking and, knowing Webb, that can’t be good for the world. I’m sorry, guys, but there’s only one decision here.”
“This building’s coming down,” Hayden said.
Kinimaka was already headed for the door, Dahl alongside.
“The people,” Alicia said. “The patients. Oh my God.”
In the midst of all hell, they ran. Chunks of plaster, lighting and plasterboard trim were already breaking free and hanging down, swaying like deadly pendulums. They pounded back to the populated wings of the hospital, saw doctors and nurses running this way and that, patients shuffling along the corridors, and heard the screams of the trapped or the hopeless.
“We get them all out,” Dahl said. “All of them.”
And he darted away.
Drake picked up a nurse who slipped beside them, looked around. “Where’s the… hey, where did that bloody janitor go?”
“Slipped away,” Kenzie growled, angry, then quickly changed her expression. “Wished I’d gone with him.”
Alicia swept her aside. “Then go, bitch.”
But the ex-Mossad agent was there with them throughout the terror. Drake set his mind and helped each person as they came along, shepherding those who wept to the exits, herding a six-strong crowd who couldn’t find their way, carrying air-tanks for a slight nurse and making sure one of Lauren’s tasks was guaranteeing the consistent arrival of elevators. Mai and Kenzie swept in and out like angels of mercy, aiding where they could and ferrying patients to the elevators or stairs.
A constant stream of people crowded the way down and tried to make way for those racing up from below. Another barrage of explosions shattered even the chaos of noise that filled the hospital, quieting every man, woman and child for just a moment.
Then, like another detonation, the panic erupted once more.
Alarm bells shrieked like desperate banshees. Glass shattered out of windows due to the pressure of failing walls above. Strip lights tumbled. Life-saving machines slid to the extent their wires would allow. A drinks machine tumbled over, its glass panel exploding. Hayden ranged along the corridors, ensuring no one was left behind. The staff fought hard too, toiling and risking it all for their patients.
A nurse screamed for help. The room she stood in suddenly skewed. Kinimaka rushed to help, and the view out of the window changed, becoming narrower as the entire building sagged. The nurse was stuck with her hands under the patient, unable to lift him, frustration creasing her face. The Hawaiian grabbed the man under the shoulder and heaved whilst the nurse grabbed whatever paraphernalia he was still attached to and then the two ran, side by side, toward the stairs.
Drake saw the bent walls, the crumbling ceiling. The halls were empty; a couple of lone doctors checking rooms.
“How are we doing?” he cried out.
A nod, a thumbs up. The elevator dinged, still serviceable but not for long. The risk had paid off, though Drake had originally had his doubts. But without their help almost half a dozen patients would still be up here, stranded, just waiting to die.
Sirens screamed from the parking lot. Drake drove the patients downstairs as they parted for paramedics rushing up. “All clear here,” he told them as the doctors arrived, and relief lit their faces.
“Just the ground floor then.”
Drake inclined his head. “What’s it like?”
The paramedic turned a flinty eye to the roof as several trickles of plaster and mortar rained down. “A shitstorm. How long we got?”
“Judging by this—” Drake barely moved as a chunk of concrete shattered at his back “—not long.”
The crowd thinned; the exit must have been flung open, maybe all the windows too. Drake hit ground level last of all his colleagues and saw them in action; making split decisions and taking impossible burdens. The weight of the hospital bore down upon them. What would it take to bring the place down? Why was depraved and detached horror the core principal of so many wealthy men?
Drake came to a room inhabited by four patients and two desperate nurses. The patients were children. He moved in, grabbed two and lifted. Couldn’t quite manage the balance. There was only one thing for it. Against the instincts of a soldier but running with personal compulsions, he dropped his weapons to the floor. No need for them here. If he ended up weaponless, facing mercs outside then so be it. He could only carry the utterly essential.
Freed from extra burdens now, he managed to juggle three children, wrapped them tight in his arms and moved out into the hallways, approaching a wide window. Here, the more able patients were climbing to safety.
Drake deposited the kids into the arms of waiting people — made up of doctors, nurses, civilians and even patients already ferried to safety, and ran back for the others. All else had already faded from his mind. There was no Webb, no Amari, no Beau or Sabrina or even any other mission. The innocents about to be crushed under the weight of another’s madness were all that mattered.
The team rallied. Partitioned walls collapsed: bending, shattering and crumbling, sending plumes of dust billowing forward. Critical walls and pillars held for now, but everyone could sense something vital was shifting. The hallways widened, flowed together into the lobby, once a confluence of seating, desks, a pharmacy and a coffee shop and filled with lots of light, but now transformed by all the elements of a battle zone.
Drake spilled into it with many others, saw a man lying prone on the floor, arms flapping, and hoisted him to his feet. He saw now why the crush had eased so quickly. The whole glass frontage had burst out, either by the weight of the building or explosives, but a wide hole had been breached. A stroke of luck. He scanned the lobby.
Kenzie and Alicia worked together to free a man from the remains of a false wall, his skull and shoulders bleeding. The two antagonists did good work, their differences forgotten for now. Mai helped a paramedic trying to resuscitate a man on the spot, shoulders not flinching as mortar rained down upon them. Kinimaka pulled rubble away from a doorway behind which people were trapped. Some of the chunks he hurled aside would have broken Drake’s back. A gray dust settled over everyone, and helped form complex footprints on the floor. Time screamed by. Another shift in the building’s edifice elevated the panic.