Sophia held her sword in her left hand and the Glock in her right. She stayed ten feet behind Czarina at all times. The operative seemed to know the way back. They emerged short of a platform under Grand Central. She wasn’t sure which one but Czarina didn’t look concerned. Then again, in slave mode Czarina could be facing certain death and she wouldn’t look concerned.
It occurred to Sophia that the woman might be playing along and leading her into a trap. But there were no waves of aggression and they would be hard to conceal. Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard the distant echo of gunfire from above.
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ she said to herself.
‘Blue Berets,’ Czarina said. ‘Hostile.’
Sophia gripped her sword and looked at the platform ahead. ‘Additional allies: Nasira, Aviary — she has red hair.’
‘New allies confirmed,’ Czarina said. ‘Nasira, Aviary.’
Denton could read her thoughts now. At least in close proximity. But he could only get at her conscious thoughts, not her memories, not her subconscious. If she ran into him again, she knew she would have to suppress any critical information from her conscious thoughts.
She needed to start thinking garbage and let her subconscious do the work. Just as she’d been taught in Belize: to fight with her subconscious. The same fighting system she’d taught her team, and Nasira had in turn taught Damien and Jay. If she could apply this not just to her combut but to her own thoughts, it just might be the only way to defeat Denton.
‘Are you wearing an earpiece?’ Sophia said.
‘Yes,’ Czarina said.
She cursed herself for not thinking of this sooner.
‘Can you hear Denton on that frequency?’ Sophia asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Give me your radio.’
Czarina placed her SOPMOD carbine carefully on the ground and removed her earpiece. Sophia wiped and inserted it into her left ear. Now she had two earpieces running. One for her team, one for Denton’s team. Or at least she would until their next frequency switch. She needed to take advantage of that and close on Denton while she still could.
She took Czarina’s radio, the mike cable unplugged. She didn’t want to use the throat mike and the attached cable, but she hung onto it just in case and stuffed it in one of her vest pockets. Her vest was soaked and it smelled strongly of salt and mold.
Czarina was radio free now. She held her carbine in both hands again and stared down the tunnel at the platform ahead.
Sophia slipped the radio unit into another pouch on her vest. The battery was three-quarters charged. It was communicating wirelessly with her earpiece, which was all she needed. So far, she’d heard only two Blue Beret commands. They were sparing and precise, transmitting only for as long as they needed to. It seemed they were moving into position on the upper concourse inside Grand Central terminal, but she didn’t know exactly where.
Then she heard it.
‘Standby for detonation,’ Denton said in her ear. ‘Green squadron, hold your position on me — dining concourse, over.’
Sophia pointed to Czarina’s carbine. ‘Can you disable the fingerprint on that so I can use it?’
‘Negative,’ Czarina said without so much as glancing at it. ‘I don’t have the authorization.’
‘Fuck me,’ Sophia said.
‘Is that your command?’ Czarina said.
‘No, I mean follow me,’ Sophia said.
Chapter 30
Damien gripped his lockpicks between bloodstained fingers and unlocked the apartment. Jay was leaning on him to remain upright, and he wasn’t exactly light. Damien called out twice as he entered, but the apartment — like the building itself — had been evacuated, along with most of midtown. Damien had found this old three-story building above a Mexican Grill and helped Jay climb the stairs to the second floor. They had to stop on the second floor because Jay didn’t seem capable of going much farther.
Damien carefully lowered him to the sofa of the second-level apartment, removing his tuxedo jacket first. He kept Jay’s feet on the floor but noticed the lower half of his shirt was stained red.
Even with the meteorite in the ruck, which Damien kept on his back, and Blue Berets and operatives tracking them, he needed to attend to Jay’s injury now or he might bleed out before his Chimera vector-accelerated healing could do anything about it.
Jay was still conscious, still breathing. Both good signs. There were minor signs of shock but he was keeping it together. Damien unbuttoned the dress shirt to check the wounds. The nine-millimeter round had entered through the back of Jay’s thigh, struck his femoral artery and exited through his abdomen. Damien could see the exit wound clearly. Normally that was the priority but in this case Damien needed to stop Jay’s artery bleeding out.
He removed Jay’s belt and tightened it high on the affected thigh as a tourniquet. The bleeding stopped once Damien got the tension right. Now it was down to the exit wound in his stomach. Lacking QuickClot or Celox, Damien knew the only option was to apply pressure to Jay’s stomach to staunch the blood flow.
Damien hunted for a clean towel in the bathroom and instead found a basic first-aid kit. OK, even better, he thought. Pinching a roll of gauze from the kit, he wrapped it firmly around Jay’s torso. He went through two layers before the exit wound stopped bleeding. Then he ran it a third time to finish the roll.
Jay’s pulse was stronger now. Hopefully now the accelerated healing would deal with any internal damage from the round. The entry wound would heal too, without the need for stitches. Damien wasn’t sure about the exit wound, or how the Chimera vectors would fare with infection.
He left Jay for a moment and peered out an open window next to the air conditioning unit. Lexington Avenue was dark. Streetlights flickered. The city was silent except for the soothing drum of rain. There was still some power in this part of midtown, although he didn’t know for how much longer. Opposite him, a monstrous glass building disappeared high into an uncertain atmosphere. Damien didn’t know truly how tall the building was, but it glistened in the storm.
New York City was unnervingly quiet. A howl of wind gathered along the avenue. He checked his watch. 2206. The hurricane had made landfall and it would hit midtown in no time. He didn’t know how much worse it would get before it got better. But he knew it was a problem, and not his only one.
He shut the window and returned to Jay on the sofa. Jay’s eyes were still open and a bit of warmth had returned to his skin. Damien checked for bleeding below his thigh and was glad to find it had stopped. He buttoned the shirt but Jay swatted him and fumbled with the buttons himself.
‘You have to move,’ Jay said. ‘They’ll be on us soon.’
‘We have to move,’ Damien said.
Jay shook his head. ‘Do I look like I can outrun operatives and Special Forces? Right now I can’t even outrun a sausage dog,’ he said. ‘You know, I haven’t had a hot dog in a while.’
Damien heard an engine and checked the window. Over the sound of rain he could hear a vehicle moving south along Lexington. It came into view, stopping a hundred feet short of the Mexican Grill.
‘You hear something?’ Jay whispered from the lounge.
‘Marauder,’ Damien said.
Jay cursed softly.
The Marauder was an armored fighting vehicle, retrofitted for domestic use. The desert colors on its double-skin monocoque hull had been given a black coat for this special occasion. To Damien it looked like a cross between a 4WD and a tank. It had an angry triangular front and rear, ports on the side of the ballistic resistant glass to shoot from, and a gunner platform in the roof with a mounted M2 .50 cal machine gun. Damien could see a masked Blue Beret manning the .50 cal.