“Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, tops. Why?”
“We should be dead by now if we’d breathed any of it in.”
“How do you know?”
“Long story,” Maddock said. “Let’s just say we’ve got our hands on some insider knowledge. Time to move out. We’re going home.”
Sensing that their attention was elsewhere, the Russian made his move. He reached inside his coat.
Maddock acted on instinct.
Within the impossibly long second between heartbeats his hand reached for his weapon, his reactions so much better than the old man, even so it felt as if he were moving in slow motion. The Russian pulled his hand back out as Maddock released a single shot. A red dot bloomed in the middle of the man’s forehead, snapping his head back. It never returned to its natural position. A silent cry died stillborn on his lips. With his eyes still open he slid to the ground.
He regretted it instantly. Dead men didn’t talk. He’d never know what he’d been doing down here, how he’d brought an extinct species back, or even how many people had died at his hand here, guinea pigs for his mad experiments. The regret didn’t last. Some sick souls deserved to die. It was as black and white as that.
He closed the distance to the dead man, bending over the corpse and pulling back his jacket.
He had expected to find the dead man’s hand wrapped around a gun.
It wasn’t.
His fist was clenched around a glass vial.
He pried it out of the dead man’s grasp and held it up to the feeble light. Was this it? Was this the virus suspended in liquid form ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting world?
Was that it, a suicidal Hail Mary distinctly lacking in grace?
There was no knowing what was going on inside the head of a fanatic, no matter what the cause.
THIRTY TWO
The Super Huey had already set down on the ice outside the compound when Maddock emerged from the building. As he ran toward it he could see that Leopov, Bones and the prisoner were already on board. The rotor blades continued to turn. Head down, he ran toward it.
“Where are Willis and Professor?” he asked, climbing aboard. He had to shout to be heard against the noise of the engine.
“They should be here any minute,” Bones said. “They’re just taking care of business,” but the way he said it made the word sound more like bidness.
“They’ve got sixty seconds and we’re out of here,” said the pilot. “We’ve just had intel that the Russkies have scrambled a couple of MIGs and they’re inbound. We are not sticking around for that. We need to be back out over international waters before they get here. As much as I love you guys, I’m not being held responsible for world war three.”
“Roger that.”
“There they are!” Leopov shouted, pointing at the two men as they rushed toward them. They ran as if the hounds of hell were at their backs.
“Go, go, go,” Willis shouted, launching himself into the cabin. Professor was two steps behind him, and inside the chopper just as the runners left the ground. The wind from the rotors was fierce. The reason for their haste became obvious as they rose into the air. The main building was rocked by first one explosion then another. The backdraft engulfed the helicopter, sending it lurching through the sky as a gout of flame rose into the air. Another blast of air almost sent the chopper completely out of control. The pilot clung onto the joystick with both hands, fighting to keep the bird in the sky.
For a moment it felt as if he was fighting a losing battle as the ice reared up in the windows, showing them once again the bodies sprawled out across it, but he managed to keep it under control, barely.
The aircraft banked and turned.
Maddock could see the whole place was in flames.
In a matter of minutes what had been the Russian gulag would be consumed, leaving no trace of its evil past.
The chopper flew low, skimming the thermals close to the ice, churning up a snow storm as it headed back toward the ice floe and the waiting ship.
They saw the MIGs pass overhead. Only a few minutes after, they stood on the deck and watched as the missiles streaked down toward the ice, making absolutely sure that their secret was kept from the rest of the world.
It was closer than anyone would have liked.
His knew that his own government would never acknowledge their presence on the island, and there would be no funeral for the lost Echo II submariners, and no mention of the man they had liberated from his island prison or the biological terror he had created.
They might not be going home with Pandora’s Egg, but they were bringing back the next best thing, the man who had made the contagion it contained. As far as he was concerned that meant the job was done.
His lone regret was that they had not all made it off the island.
About the Authors
David Wood is the author of the popular action-adventure series, The Dane Maddock Adventures, as well as several stand-alone works and two series for young adults. Under his David Debord pen name he is the author of the Absent Gods fantasy series. When not writing, he co-hosts the Authorcast podcast. David and his family live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit him online at www.davidwoodweb.com.
Steven Savile has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Risen, and other popular game and comic worlds. His novels have been published in eight languages to date, including the Italian bestseller L'eridita. He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers award for his Primeval novel Shadow of the Jaguar, published by Titan, in 2010, and The inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars award for Tau Ceti (co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson). Silver, his debut thriller reached #2 in the Amazon UK e-charts in the summer of 2011. It was among the UK's top 30 bestselling novels of 2011 according to The Bookseller. The series continues in Solomon's Seal, WarGod, and Lucifer's Machine, and is available in a variety of languages. His latest books include HNIC (along with the legendary Hip Hop artist Prodigy, of Mobb Deep) which was Library Journal's Pick of the Month, the Lovecraftian horror, The Sign of Glaaki, co-written with Steve Lockley, and has recently started writing the popular Rogue Angel novels as Alex Archer. The first of which, Grendel's Curse, came out in May. He has lived in Sweden for the last 17 years.