At last, he saw movement between three cracked ribs and gasped in disbelief. “They have the Wolves,” he breathed. “And they’re smashing them to pieces!”
Kennedy shook her head. “No. They’re breaking them into bits,” she pointed. “Look. See the rucksacks. No one said all the Pieces of Odin had to be intact, did they?”
“And it’s easier to carry them out in bits,” Drake nodded.
He was about to move to the cover of the next exhibit, when all hell broke loose. From the far corner of the room, through a door proclaiming ‘Vertebrate Origins’, a dozen screaming banshees stormed. They whooped, they fired wildly, they laughed like geeks overdosing on multi-double-Yaeger’s at spring-break.
“Germans are here.” Drake said drily before hitting the floor.
The T-Rex shook madly as a lead fusillade smashed through it. Its head drooped, teeth gnashing as if the violence around it had pissed it off badly enough to come back to life. A Canadian flew backwards amidst a cloud of gore. Blood sprayed all over the dinosaur’s jawbone. A Swedish trooper lost his arm at the elbow and flailed about screaming.
The Germans piled in, manic.
From outside the window nearest Drake came that familiar whump whump of helicopter rotor blades.
Not again!
At the edge of Drake’s peripheral vision, a creeping team of SWAT figures stole towards him, all darkly dressed. When Drake glanced that way, the Tweeters went crazy in his ear.
Good guys.
The Canadians went for it, causing mayhem. They burst from underneath the giant belly of the T-Rex, firing frantically. Drake grabbed Kennedy’s shoulder.
“Move!” They were in the line of flight. He pushed Kennedy away, just as Alicia Myles ran into view. Drake raised his weapon, then saw the massive German, Milo, barrelling in from the left.
In one mutual second of pause, all three lowered their weapons.
Alicia looked surprised. “I knew you’d get into this, Drake, you old fuckeroo!”
Milo stopped dead. Drake glanced between the two. “Shoulda stayed in Sweden, dog-breath.” Drake tried to goad the big man. “Missing yer bitch, eh?”
Bullets laced the air around them, not penetrating their tense cocoon.
“Your time will come,” Milo whispered thickly. “Like your little boyfriend there, and his sister. And Parnevik’s.”
And then the world returned, and Drake was instinctively ducking a millisecond after he saw Alicia fall unaccountably to the ground.
An RPG missile blasted through the belly of the T-Rex, sending knives of bone scything in all directions. It swept across the hall, straight through one of the side windows. After a heavy pause there was a gigantic explosion that shook the room, and then a tortured sound of ruined metal and shrieking joints.
Metallic death crashed into the side of the National History Museum.
Drake flattened himself on top of Kennedy as the helicopter’s momentum made it rotate into the museum’s wall, causing a cave-in of heavy debris. The nose smashed right through, sending rubble forward in undulating heaps. Then the cockpit hit the collapsing wall almost vertically, the pilot seen yanking on the cyclic stick in mad panic before being smeared like a fly inside his own windshield.
Then the rotor blades struck… and sheared off!
Spears of flying metal created a kill-zone inside the room. A six foot long spike made a whickering noise as it flew towards Drake and Kennedy. The ex-SAS man flattened himself as much as possible and then felt the top part of his ear shorn off before the scythe sliced off a piece of Kennedy’s scalp and embedded itself three feet into the furthest wall.
He lay stunned for a moment, then whipped his head around. The helicopter had stalled and lost momentum. In another moment it slipped down the side of the Museum like Wile E. Coyote slides down the side of the mountain he’s just hit.
Drake counted four seconds before the resounding crunch of heavy metal rang out. He took time to survey the room. The Canadians hadn’t broken stride, even though one of their own had been chopped apart by a rotor blade. They had reached the side of the room, four guys with heavy rucksacks as well as Alicia and one covering fighter. They were deploying what looked like abseiling units.
The Germans had horror written all over their unmasked faces. Drake didn’t spot the man in white, and wondered if this mission had been too risky for him. He saw SWAT approaching them in a sweeping pattern, the Swedes having surrendered authority when the Americans arrived.
The Canadians were escaping with the Wolves! Drake attempted to rise but found it hard to lift his body, much shaken by the near miss and the astonishing scene.
Kennedy helped out by elbowing him hard before wriggling out from under him, sitting up, and wiping blood from her scalp.
“Perv.” she muttered, in mock anger.
Drake pressed a hand to his ear to help staunch the flow of blood. As he watched, three of the five remaining Swedish Special Forces troops tried to head off the Canadians as the first used his rappel unit to leap out the destroyed window.
But Alicia spun around, her face sporting a playful smile and Drake cringed inside. She skipped forward and darted through them, a black widow of violent execution, bending highly trained soldiers in a way that broke their bones with consummate ease, taking less than twelve seconds to decimate the team.
By then, three Canadians had jumped soundlessly and expertly out of the building.
The remaining Canadian solider sprayed cover fire.
The New York SWAT team assaulted the Germans, driving them towards the rear of the room, dropping all but three of them where they stood. The remaining three, including Milo, dropped their weapons and ran.
Drake flinched as the T-Rex finally gave up the ghost and collapsed in a pile of old bones and dust.
Kennedy cursed as the fourth Canadian jumped, quickly followed by Alicia. The final soldier took a bullet to the skull as he prepared to leap. He fell back into the room to sprawl amidst the burning rubble, just another casualty of a madman’s war, and his race towards apocalypse.
NINETEEN
Almost immediately, Drake’s wits were evaluating and analysing. Milo had inferred something about Ben and Professor Parnevik.
He fished his mobile out, and checked it for damage before hitting speed-dial.
The phone rang and rang. Ben wouldn’t leave it this long, not Ben…
His heart sank. He’d tried to protect Ben, promised the lad he’d be alright. If anything…
A voice answered: “Yes?” A whisper.
“Ben? You okay? Why are you whispering?”
“Matt, thank God. I got a call from Dad, wandered off to talk, then looked back and saw these two goons hitting the Prof. I started to run towards them and they took off on motorbikes with a few others.”
“They took the Prof?”
“Sorry, mate. I would’ve helped him if I could. Damn my Dad!”
“No!” Drake’s heart was still recovering. “It’s not your fault, Blakey. Not at all. Did these bikers have big rucksacks strapped to their backs?”
“Some did.”
“Okay. Stay there.”
Drake breathed deeply and tried to calm his nerves. The Canadians would have been in a hurry. Ben had dodged a nasty one, thanks to his dad, but the Professor was in deep shit. “Their plan was to abseil out of here onto some waiting bikes,” he told Kennedy, then looked around the demolished room. “We need to find Dahl. We have a problem.”
“Only one?”
Drake surveyed the devastation they had made of the museum. “This thing just exploded big time.”