Rogue elements, p.12
Rogue Elements, page 12
“Oh yeah.” Bolan began laying weapons on the bar and loading them.
Chapter Thirteen
Ibarra appeared on the security camera. She approached the conference room door with a very unhappy look on her face. The woman glared at the camera and stabbed the intercom button. “Dwayne. Don’t make this creepy.”
Bolan buzzed the lock. Ibarra took in the bullet-riddled table, the smell of gunpowder and Ricci and Gein oozing out all over the carpet as they assumed room temperature. She took in Bolan sitting at the head of the table, wearing a shoulder holster and resting his hand on an Uzi.
“So?” Ibarra’s facial expression was once again an epic blend of appalled and suicidal bemusement. “Mutiny?”
Bolan slid the Uzi across the table to her. “You in?”
“I’m a good girl, and I do what I’m told. If you say we’re taking the ship, we take the ship.” Ibarra picked up the Uzi and scoffed. “Haven’t seen one of these in ten years.” She suddenly tensed. “You kill Dwayne?”
“No, he’s in there.”
“Ah, yes,” Ibarra made a made an I’ve-made-that-mistake-before noise. “The bed.”
Bolan let it go. “Sifu will be up here in five, and then Eise.”
“Then we take the ship?”
“I don’t know if we have the juice. They have numbers and better guns.”
“Prison break?”
“Best we can, sneaky if possible, or else I’m thinking a massive diversion. Do you know the chopper pilot’s name?”
Ibarra frowned. “I think it was Harris. He hit on me, but it was like a month ago, and I didn’t get his first name.”
“Okay.” The next part was going to get rough. “There’s a swell English fella in the master suite. He’s on our team. Go introduce yourself and get yourself some spare magazines.”
“I love English guys!”
“Why did I know you were going to say that?”
“I love spare magazines!”
Ibarra sauntered into the love nest. “Hi, English guy! I’m B.B.!”
Wellens made an amused noise. “Heard about you.”
“You look like shit. What have you heard?”
“You like English guys.”
“You sexy, James Bond mother...” Ibarra suddenly squealed like a little girl. Bolan was pretty sure she had seen the money.
Bolan drank an energy drink from the conference room mini fridge and waited. Sifuentes came into view. The intercom buzzed. “Yo, Dwayne? What’s up?”
Bolan buzzed him in.
Sifuentes walked in and surveyed the death and destruction. “Dang, bro.” He grinned from ear to ear. “Are we taking the ship?”
“Sifu?”
“Blue?”
“This time, I just don’t think we’ve got enough liquid soap.”
“Damn, so we blow this Popsicle stand?”
“That’s the plan. I got a shotgun in there for you. Pray to God Eise shows up without Hy.”
“I pray to God Hy never shows up again anywhere, ever, like, not even in my dreams.”
Bolan finished his energy drink. “You and me both, Sifu. Load up and get on my six. We get Eise, and we get out of here.”
He put the PPK, Dwayne’s hideaway piece, in place of the Malysh as his new underwear gun. Ibarra brought out a plate of smoked salmon, cream cheese, caviar, duck pâté and a pitcher of protein shake from Dwayne’s refrigerator. Bolan inhaled protein, salt and fat. He was sure he was going to be needing all of it very soon. Sifuentes lit up a cigar from Dwayne’s humidor, and Ibarra joined him.
Eise wandered up uncertainly into the view of the security camera and timidly rapped his knuckles against the door. He just about jumped out of his skin as Bolan buzzed him in. “C’mon in, Eise.”
The young Somali entered, then spotted the bodies. “Oh no! Oh my!” Then he promptly threw up.
“Eise, why don’t you have a seat.”
He collapsed into a chair with several bullet holes in it. Sifuentes handed the young man a bottled water. Eise swirled the water in his mouth and looked around.
Bolan nodded at the floor. “The carpet’s already a mess.”
Eise spit awkwardly and then sipped. His eyes were huge. “Mr. Blue? What have we done?”
Bolan noted that Eise had said we, and he was pleased at the young man’s loyalty. He shoved the AKM across the table. “Take that and follow me.”
Eise awkwardly unfolded the stock and set the fire selector to semiauto. Then he looked at Bolan, who grinned in spite of the situation. The Somali followed him into Dwayne’s private suite. Eise freaked out at the sight of Dwayne cuffed and spread-eagled on the bed. “Oh my!”
Bolan pointed at Dwayne. “That man said he was willing to kill me, and said he was going to make either B.B. or Sifu do it. If they didn’t, he was going to kill them, too.”
Eise was appalled. “And me?”
“He sneered, and said he could simply bend you to his will.”
The young man’s eyes narrowed. Wellens had caught his attention. “Who is this?”
“He’s English. Dwayne told me to execute him. As a test, and so that he could blackmail me with it later to ensure my loyalty.” Bolan nodded at Dwayne’s bound, bloody, semiconscious body. “I told him no.”
“I am glad you did so. I do not know if I would have had that kind of strength.”
“You have the strength to fight your way out of here?”
“I will follow you, and I will not shoot you in the back.”
“That’s all I need to hear.”
Ibarra wandered in, followed by Sifuentes, who raised his hand.
Bolan nodded. “Go.”
“Okay, this is awesome and stuff, and you know I love you, bro. But do we have a plan? There are two dozen Rampart assholes on this tub, with Hy leading them.”
“I counted thirty, and don’t forget the crew.”
“Oh yeah, right, thanks for that!” Sifuentes shook his head. “There are thirty of them! They have grenades! They have squad automatic weapons! Hell, they have RPGs and goddamn chemical weapons!” He pointed out of Dwayne’s suite to the steel security door of the conference room. “This is like the last part of Braveheart that sucked, except in the middle of the goddamn ocean!”
“You’re not wrong,” Bolan admitted.
“Do we have a plan? Just tell me we have a plan.”
Ibarra, Sifuentes, Eise and Wellens looked at Bolan expectantly. Dwayne bubbled a bit. The Executioner sighed. It wasn’t a good one. “We do have a plan.”
Sifuentes eyed Bolan warily. “No disrespect...”
“None taken.”
“Enlighten me?”
“Follow me.” Bolan’s team followed him into the conference room. Everyone took a seat.
Sifuentes looked around and shrugged. “And?”
Bolan checked his watch. “And the mission briefing is in fifteen minutes.”
Wellens laughed.
Ibarra’s face lit up like a little girl’s on Christmas morning.
Sifuentes gushed. “Ho-lee shit.”
“Wait.” Eise looked ashamed, but Bolan was pleased he was becoming more assertive. “I do not understand.”
Ibarra punched the young man’s shoulder in a comradely fashion. “Everyone is going to be at the briefing. All together, one room. Mostly unarmed.”
“Oh!” Eise got it, and then looked queasy about it. “We kill them all?”
“No.”
“No?” Ibarra tilted her head quizzically. “What do you mean, no?”
“Yeah!” Sifuentes nodded in solidarity. “Hy starts the PowerPoint presentation, we kick the door and light ’em up!”
“No, they won’t start the meeting without Dwayne. The good news is, right now Hy thinks Dwayne is currently having a come-to-Jesus moment with all of us.”
Sifuentes’s shoulders sagged. “We’re going to do this the hard way.”
“I’m afraid so. I really need them to think we’re just some inept mercs who didn’t work out, stole Dwayne’s money and they can hunt down at their leisure.”
“But—” Sifu considered that for a few moments “—we are inept mercs.”
Bolan nodded at the Brit in the room. “Colour Sergeant Wellens is an SAS commando, undercover for MI6. British intelligence sent him in to infiltrate Rampart Group after things started getting suspicious. I think we all agree things at Rampart Group are getting a little suspicious.”
Wellens gave Bolan a long, cold, appraising stare.
“But he got caught,” Bolan concluded.
“Blue?” Sifu asked. “Who are you?”
“I’m the kind of guy they send in when guys like Wellens disappear.”
The conference room got quiet for a moment.
“So you were undercover?” Sifuentes asked.
“I still am. We’re still a group of mercs who have gone rogue on Rampart Group. I need that facade to last a little longer, and that may just cost some blood and lives on our part. I’d like to give you all an in-or-out moment, but there’s pretty much no place to go on this one.”
Sifuentes scoffed. “Fuck ’em. Never liked ’em.”
Dwayne’s phone blooped. Bolan read the text.
Dwayne?
Bolan typed back.
Hy?
Bolan’s stomach dropped as Yard responded.
Climb Mount Niitaka.
It was the code that had been sent to Admiral Nagumo, Commander of the Japanese Imperial Fleet in WWII. It was the best kind of code. There was nothing to decipher. It only meant something to the man who sent it and the man who received it, who were both already mutually in the know. It could mean anything. Bolan was 99 percent sure it meant Yard had suddenly gotten suspicious.
Bolan knew that Rick Dwayne had always been a man who had flown by the seat of his pants, and frequently broken protocol. Dwayne was a dick. Bolan texted.
Could you just go fuck yourself for five minutes, Hy? Busy.
Bolan rose from the table. “Gear up! We’re taking the bridge!” His team snatched up the pillowcases Ibarra had stuffed with provisions and ammo. Bolan checked the security screens. No one was running and arming up on any deck, but Yard was nowhere to be seen.
The intercom clicked and Yard’s voice rang out. “Dwayne, I need to hear your voice, right now, and I need to hear you say all the right things. Blue, if I don’t hear Dwayne, I’m going to assume his posthumous orders would be to take you out with extreme prejudice.”
Rampart Group men began moving on multiple screens. Men were leaving the War Room. Men were charging for the armory at a dead run.
Bolan took up the Malysh from the bar. It squirreled in his hand and cut the web of his thumb with its final round as he shot out the monitor with the security feed. He went back into Dwayne’s love nest, raised his .45 and shot all three monitors and the computer for good measure. “We take the bridge! Go! Go! Go!”
Team Blue burst out of the conference room.
Yard’s voice radiated hate through the intercom speaker in the hallway. “Don’t even think about it.”
Bolan held his .45 in both hands as he hit the stairs. The nice thing about Dwayne’s suite was that it was almost at the bridge. The door to the bridge had a small window looking outward. A man wearing a Rampart Group cap suddenly looked out. His eyes flared at Team Blue, coming up the stairs in full assault.
The Executioner fired a double-tap. The window exploded. Blood flew; the dead man dropped away.
Ibarra hissed, “I think you just shot Harris!”
“Right,” Wellens confirmed. “That was Harris.”
Team Blue wasn’t flying out tonight. Bolan shoved the muzzle of his .45 through the shattered window and emptied it in an arc. Sifuentes kicked the door, and Bolan went in with his .44 Magnum revolver drawn.
Captain Nam Hung-Jae glared. Bolan had only met the captain once. He and his four bridge crewmen were all former North Korean navy and didn’t mix much. The good news was they didn’t regularly pack heat on the bridge. All of them were crouching below the gunfire. They lowered their heads and glared from beneath their brows like they just might charge. Bolan put his crosshairs in the middle of the captain’s eyebrows as his team flooded in. “Don’t.”
Yard spoke across the bridge intercom. Bolan was starting to feel some concern about where the man actually was. “Captain, you and your crewmen. Don’t resist. I’ll take care of this.”
Nam and his crew relaxed slightly.
Bolan nodded at the control panels. “Disable steering and power.”
The captain’s permanently down-turned mouth quirked. “Make me.”
Bolan cocked back his hammer. It was admittedly a pretty crappy captain who would sabotage his own ship, and Rampart Group hired only the best. “On your knees. Hands behind your head.”
The captain gave a barely perceptible nod to his men. They slowly knelt; he dropped to his knees.
And popped up like a jumping jack.
If Bolan were a heartbeat slower, Nam’s crescent kick would have scythed the revolver right out of his hands. Bolan leaned back as the captain’s spin continued into a second kick. The Redhawk detonated like a cannon in the confines of the bridge, and Nam’s face collapsed inward. The back of his head blew out across the bridge.
His crewmen flew into action.
Eise brought up his rifle too slow and took a flying kick to the guts and dropped, puking. Wellens took one to the chest and collapsed as if he’d been shot. Ibarra buzz-sawed her opponent with her Uzi, and he fell out of the air. Sifuentes’s shotgun thundered twice, and two crewmen shattered inside as they took buckshot loads at point-blank range. Bolan, Sifuentes and Ibarra shot the fourth crewman simultaneously and rag-dolled him midair to flop on top of his captain.
Sifuentes ran to Wellens; Ibarra hauled up Eise. Bolan put two fresh rounds into the revolver and reloaded his .45. Yard spoke across the intercom almost on cue. His voice was no longer angry. He sounded more like a prison functionary who had strapped the condemned into an electric chair and was asking the person if the head apparatus was too tight. “Surrender, now, and it’s quick for everyone except Blue. Make me take the bridge, and it’s the butcher’s stall for anyone still alive.”
A bullet zinged through the bridge glass, and the members of Team Blue dropped into a crouch. Ibarra glared at Bolan. “Does this seem familiar?”
He nodded and unsnapped the huge, scoped .44 Magnum revolver from his shoulder holster once more. “Hy was the sniper during the attack on the Caprice.”
Rifles fired from the main deck and window glass flew across the bridge like knives. Wellens sat leaning against the wheel. He seemed to be focusing mostly on the act of breathing. There was blood on his lips, but he hadn’t been kicked in the face. “We can’t reach the launch. There’s just no way.”
“You’re right.” Bolan moved forward to one of the shattered bridge windows. “We can’t get to the engine compartment, and even if we could it would end up being a last stand. Wellens, you were in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. You think you can mess up power and steering from up here?”
“I can bugger it up a treat, mate.” Wellens winced and looked around the bridge. “But without explosives, it’ll be nothing they won’t be able to fix, assuming the engineer is still alive, and they have elbow grease, spares and time.”
“All I needed to hear. Get to it.”
Wellens took the Luger from his waistband and shot open an access panel beneath the ship’s wheel. He shot three more times into the guts and nodded to himself in satisfaction as he tried to wiggle the wheel. It was frozen tight. He rose and emptied the rest of his magazine into the wheel’s control panels and gauges.
Yard spoke. “Has it gone Lord of the Flies up there?”
Wellens slid in a fresh magazine and slapped the Luger’s toggle to chamber a round. “And Bob’s your uncle. That should give you twenty-four hours, then. Now, how do we knick down to the launch again?”
“We don’t.” Bolan rose. The last bits of sunset painted the world in pink-and-gold fire. Yard and Rampart Group had night-vision gear. Once the sun fell they would turn off the lights and things would get ugly. “Covering fire!”
Team Blue had questions but they didn’t ask. They rose and poured fire from the bridge windows into the Rampart Group positions. Yard’s people had good bits of ship between them, and Team Blue’s mostly submachine gun and shotgun fire ricocheted off steel. Bolan rested his forearms on the shattered windowsill and leveled his huge hunting revolver. He put the long-eye relief scope’s crosshairs on the launch’s stern. The stentorian six-gun roared, and the launch’s bronze propeller tore off and flew in a glittering arc out over the water. Bolan ignored incoming fire as he precisely put five more rounds where he assumed the engine was. He dropped down as a bee swarm of bullets flew through the bridge windows. He popped the cylinder and ejected smoking .44 Magnum brass.
“So...” Bemusement and horror fought a lovely battle across Ibarra’s face. “You killed the launch?”
“I hope so.” Bolan reloaded and holstered the Redhawk.
Yard’s voice held a horrible sense of curiosity. “You think you can turn this boat into a Flying Dutchman, Blue? You think you’re going to call someone? Or bump into someone on the open ocean? You think you can hold the bridge that long?”
Sifuentes shucked shells into his shotgun. His faith was strong. “So you can fly the chopper!”
“We’re not taking the chopper.”
Sifuentes’s faith was visibly shaken. “No?”
“No.”
“Forgive me,” Eise said. “But then what do we do?”
“We abandon ship.”
Wellens was a navy man, and he got it first. The beaten, starved and tortured former commando actually grinned. “Cheeky bastard!”
“I’ve been called that a time or two. We’re out of here.”
