“The end of this alley will bring you out onto the harbour. Time it right and you’ll come out just in front of the targets!”
The Team Leader hung low to the handlebars as he skidded onto the waterfront. To the left was Port Royal’s fish-smelling harbour, decrepit old trawlers moored to the concrete dock. In front of him, the ‘Pirate Party’ still raged. Close to three hundred pirate enthusiasts — dressed as everything, from Long John Silver to Captain Hook to Jack Sparrow and their scantily-clad wenches — milled about with plastic cups of cheap beer and Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum.
They blocked the street directly in front of him, oblivious to the two motorbikes racing into their midst.
“Move!” he yelled at them. “Get out the fucking way!”
The partygoers on the outside of the gathering seemed to notice him then, staring wide-eyed with alcohol induced shock. The Team Leader ploughed into them, lashing out with his legs to kick their knees, crumpling them to the ground out of his way. His one remaining soldier followed with Sid strapped to his bike, while the dead weight of Benjamin King, his head bloody, pressed against his own back.
The stirrings of indignant panic began to simmer among the crowd which still refused to move quickly enough out of his way.
Holding the bike under control with one hand, he wrenched out his handgun and shot Captain Jack Sparrow square in the forehead!
Pandemonium ensued. Some of the partygoers didn’t even know what had happened but were nevertheless caught up in the confusion, adrenaline causing them to run any which way they could. A few even jumped into the dirty water of the harbour to escape the madness that gripped the party as men and women literally clawed at each other to escape the gunman.
They also opened up a tunnel through the heaving bodies which the Team Leader took full advantage of. He raced down the open space, weaving around any stray pirates, faster and faster, gun in hand, remorselessly ready to gun down any idiot who happened in his way.
That idiot turned out to be one Nathan Raine.
Raine’s bike burst out of the alleyway and cut through the throng of people. Assuming he was another lunatic gunman, they screamed and ran away from him as he drove out into the middle of the waterfront and twisted directly in front of the Team Leader.
O’Rourke, SCAR Assault Rifle already mounted on his shoulder, had a perfect headshot. He drew a bead on the Team Leader’s exposed forehead, even as the hostile tried to squeeze the brakes to halt the bike and twist out of the way.
O’Rourke squeezed the trigger.
At that precise moment an almighty explosion bloomed up in the middle of the waterfront as a Hellfire Stinger missile slammed into the ancient harbour, shattering the stonework. Massive chunks of concrete and the older foundations of the harbour blew high into the sky, along with a dozen bodies, the pirate partygoers, hurled high, arms and legs cart-wheeling, agonized screams echoing as the fireball consumed them.
The concussion blast punched into Raine and O’Rourke, dragging them and the bike into the sky, spinning in a tangled mass of limbs, metal, wood and stone.
The Team Leader, unlike O’Rourke had theorised, had not been swerving to avoid his head shot. Instead, ducking low over the handlebars, he led the other bike in a wide berth, skirting around the explosion which the Catalina’s pilot had warned him about a split second before the missile hit the ground.
He raced on through the hailstorm of debris, keeping low, shielding his head from chunks of rock and his exposed flesh from the searing heat, emerging on the other side of the destruction and ploughing on at full speed.
Raine hit the ground hard and felt lumps and chunks of concrete pepper his body, digging into his flesh. He smelt the sickly scent of singed hair and the tingle of a minor burn to his left cheek.
He felt like doing nothing but lying there, flopped out upon the harbour side, exhausted, doing nothing.
Instead, he pulled himself up to his feet and stared in disbelief at the devastation around him — bodies burning, a huge crater surrounded by chunks of rubble. Beyond the curling cloud of smoke he saw the two motorbikes racing into the distance. His own lay on its side not far away.
He ran to it, hauled it up, and glanced at O’Rourke. The big black man stirred and looked up. Grimacing, he called to him; “Go!”
He didn’t need telling twice.
He skidded around and shot off the mark once more.
“Eagle Eye One,” Raine’s voice came over the chopper’s speakers. “I’m still in pursuit. Can you slow these bastards down for me?!”
Despite the military’s best-kept-secrets, David Sykes had heard about Raine’s previous betrayal. He was a traitor to his country, to his uniform, to his men. But he couldn’t deny that he was damn good to have around in a fight.
“We’re on it,” he promised, dropping the helicopter down towards the rooftops.
“Lake,” he ordered. “Keep an eye out for that sneaky bastard out there!”
“Roger that.”
The Super Stallion thundered over the rooftops and the tiny figures of the three motorbikes came into view, two out ahead, one in hot pursuit. They raced down the now deserted harbour side at phenomenal speeds.
Sykes was faster.
Dipping the chopper’s nose, he charged like a raging bull, roaring fast, first over Raine, then sweeping above the targets, moving out ahead of them. He worked the joystick and the foot pedals, altered the chopper’s torque, increased the rotor blades pitch, and dropped the enormous flying machine towards the ground, yards in front of the fleeing bikes, cutting them off—
“Dave!”
Lake’s warning came a fraction of a second too late. He saw it too, the ghostly appearance of the WWII-era Black Cat appearing from nowhere directly in front of them, spewing forth a deadly missile, propelled upon a tail of fire, which slammed into the Super Stallion’s broadside.
In that last moment before death, he did the only thing he could think of to do.
He reached down and pulled on Kristina Lake’s ejection seat.
Raine couldn’t believe his eyes as he tore across the waterfront, the needle on his bike’s speedometer straining.
In the sky directly in front of him, Eagle Eye One erupted in an all-engulfing ball of flame, swallowing the metal carcass of the giant airborne beast. He saw a shimmer in the sky as the black plane pulled up hard to avoid the hellish flames, for a moment silhouetting itself against the fiery destruction.
The two bikes carrying King and Sid squeezed beneath the hovering helicopter a split second before impact and now raced away beyond it. And in a heartbeat’s time, the hulk of the Super Stallion would plummet down to earth, blocking off Raine’s pursuit.
It was insane even for him, he knew. But he did it anyway.
Instead of slowing, he bent over the handlebars to offer less wind resistance, squeezed the bike between his knees and twisted the accelerator as far as it would go.
A hairsbreadth before the burning carcass of the giant helicopter smashed down onto the ground, Raine raced on under it. For an insane moment, he realised, he actually closed his eyes, but he nevertheless felt the incredible heat of the inferno blazing around him, heard the clang of metal striking stone, the pop of exploding gas tanks, followed by the whoosh of igniting jet fuel.
Only yards behind his back tyre, the wreckage smacked against the ground and sent up a billowing wall of heat which actually picked up his rear wheel and threatened to flip him over. Through luck more than skill, he maintained his balance and the wheel smacked back down, caught purchase on the ground and shot him forward, faster than ever.