The weapon clicked, and the missile took flight with a supercharged hiss. Drake flung himself headlong, firing as he scraped along the ground to make sure the man didn’t let loose any more rockets. The RPG went high, slamming into the surrounding wall and exploding. The only damage to the biker gang came from bricks landing on their hastily covered shoulders and heads.
“Cover me!”
Alicia scrambled across the ground, spying the discarded rocket launcher and a spare shell. Drake immediately opened fire on the girders, seeing his bullets spark and clang off the rusted metal. He bought Alicia half a minute, which was all she needed to load, aim and fire the weapon.
The rocket hit hard, exploding and smearing fire all across the face of the iron. Big girders caromed left and right, stacks toppled over, landing on top of those sheltering behind and below. The screaming began.
Drake slipped behind a container, running its length, Romero and several others at his back. Near the far end, he got a good view of the gantry crane and spotted a man in a suit running up its integral ladder.
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s strange.”
Romero peered around him. “Ya know what? I bet the Russkies told ’em there’d be just the two of us. They’re not expecting a mini-army. Explains the small door charge and the man with the RPG. Rush job.”
“Kudos to Mother Russia.” Drake sprinted forward, firing at anything that moved. “Clear the yard, but leave me some alive!”
He raced up the metal steps two at a time, at first surprised by the instability of the crane structure, but then ignoring it. The suit climbed ahead of him, overweight and puffing. Drake caught up rapidly just as the man reached the top.
“Sit down.” A club over the head with the rifle butt made the man do just that. Drake viewed the length of the gantry, saw half a dozen kidnappers sitting among the struts and aiming guns at his friends below. The height momentarily disoriented him, but then his training took over. He peppered the platform with bullets. Kidnappers yelped in surprise, most losing their grip and tumbling to the yard below. Others fell dead. Only one stood defiantly, aiming his weapon back at Drake.
“I got your boss.” Drake rolled his eyes in the direction of the groans. “Give it up, pal.”
The man shrugged, ponytail falling across one shoulder. “He’s not the boss.”
Drake advanced across the metal bridge, ignoring the slight sway of the structure, and the noise of the creaking, swinging crane. The two men stared down the V of their sights at each other.
“Come to think of it,” ponytail said, “I didn’t like the bastard anyway.”
He squeezed the trigger. But Drake was ready. With anticipation born of superhuman ability, he threw himself off the gantry just as the kidnapper pulled the trigger.
Alicia fired from below, winging the guy and making him fall to his knees, gun clattering.
Drake fell through space. The jaws of the crane came up quick. He let go of his weapon, reached out and grasped the cold steel as his body rushed by. For a second his hands gripped, arresting his fall, but then with the smooth surface offering no purchase his fingers simply slipped away and he continued his fall.
Straight down to the hard concrete.
With milliseconds to prepare, he curled his body, realizing his back was about to take the brunt of the fall. The distance from the crane to the ground wasn’t that far but…
…then he hit.
Alicia saw him coming. Lomas, Tiny and Dirty Sarah were pounding up the gantry steps toward the kidnappers, so she fixed her attention on the falling man. When he landed, she held her arms out and slipped her body under his, letting the impact be absorbed by the both of them.
It still hurt like a mother.
Drake groaned against her chest. After a moment, Alicia realized she wasn’t badly hurt and neither was he.
“Fucksake, Drake,” she whispered. “You should know by now. There’s easier ways to get on top of me.”
Drake was well enough to chuckle into her breasts. “Yeah. But I was all out of Nutella.”
As always, time was against them. The area around the girders had proved to be the main hiding place for the kidnapping gang’s hierarchy. When the RPG destroyed it, most of the men had died, but a few wounded and dying still lay crying in the dirt.
Drake found no compassion in his heart. Whatever small consideration for enemies had existed inside him had been cleaved away the day Kennedy Moore died. Now, he threw one wounded man against the other and ignored their pleas and the aching of his own bruised bones.
“I know you kidnap Europeans and Americans,” he said. “Adults. Some homeless, some down-and-outs. If I find out you kidnap kids, I’ll bring a fucking army down on you and paint the earth with your blood and crushed bones. Do you understand me?”
The men lying before him blinked. Before this, these men had been tough, brutal and dangerous. Now all they could feel was their torn and crushed flesh. All they could see was their own slaughter. The men nodded. One of the two suits they had rounded up wailed; the other sat with blood pumping from his thigh, trying to maintain a ruthless expression on his face.
“Alright. I want to know all about this kidnap operation. The entire chain. Where the orders come from. Your feeding grounds. The whole lot.” He checked his watch. “Oh, and I want it in the next four minutes.”
He glanced up at Lomas. “Prep the bikes. We’ll be leaving in six.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Dahl flung his body headlong down the passageway that led to the arms room as armed gunmen burst through the front door. The others were ahead of him. He’d sent them there a few minutes ago and then waited to arm a few “surprises.”
Bullets slammed into the new plaster-coated walls around him. Boot heels pounded the freshly laid floorboards. Doors were smashed in. At this rate, their new HQ was soon going to become their old HQ.
Dahl rolled to his feet. Komodo passed him a prepped weapon. “We have about four seconds,” he said. “Get your damn vests on” His eyes bore into Ben and Karin especially. When his eyes fell on Lauren Fox and Mike Stevens, the truck driver, he sighed. “Wrong place, wrong time, people. Sorry.”
Then he turned, fell to one knee, swiveled and fired as the first of the enemy came to the corner. His bullet sent the man reeling backward. Blood sprayed the walls by his side. He dove forward. The next man tripped right over his sliding body. Komodo finished him off with a headshot, aware that even civilians wore vests these days. Dahl slid his body around on the polished floor, hitting the far wall with his legs and then pushing off hard…
…coming back onto one knee, gun nestled comfortably on his right shoulder, firing with care and precision.
Bullets thumped through walls all around him. One even nicked his vest, but his aim didn’t waver. He was a big man, an expert soldier trying to balance his courage with skill, and set forth making a mess of the approaching enemy team.
The black-clad enemy force collapsed in the narrow hallway, men in front falling and tripping men behind. Some were compelled to clamber over their dying colleagues. But at last, one of the stragglers took a chance and hurled his body straight at the Swede. Both men grappled and smashed through the plaster wall, making a ragged new hole into the interrogation room.
Komodo stepped up. The corridor was littered with Dahl’s victims, but there were still half a dozen men struggling forward. Komodo let them come, destroying the first’s face with a devastating elbow, twisting the second around in a headlock and breaking his neck, at the same time taking a round in the vest that jolted him, but only succeeded in putting extra fire and venom into his actions.