Killer Instincts v5 (3 page)

The girls are all looking at me now. No one is moving. I don't even know if they are comprehending what I’m saying. I stand up a little taller, speak a little more loudly.

"Ladies, I'm part of a team sent to rescue you. We're going to get you all home. But you have to come with me now."

Maryanne is finally looking directly at me. I think it's beginning to come together in her mind that I'm not some horny asshole with an AK looking to drag one of them off as recreation. She sits up, brushes the hair out of her eyes. With a little confidence, she gets back some of her poise and looks a little more like the young woman in my photo.

I make eye contact with her and speak softly, but with purpose. "Maryanne, your grandfather is on his yacht, a few miles away. He's asked us to bring you home. I need your help to get these girls moving. Can you do that for me?"

Steiger had told me Maryanne wasn't your typical 19-year-old bubblehead; she had been third in her high school's graduating class of two hundred and sixty, now studying chemical engineering. She was an equestrian, played lacrosse, and preferred to drive stick. I doubt kidnapping her had been an easy task, and I banked on the kind of temperament she possessed to help me wrangle the rest of the girls.

Maryanne slowly gets to her feet and takes a few cautious steps forward. I resist tapping my own foot with impatience. This was taking just a little too long.

"My grandfather hired you?" she asks.

I nod.

"Describe him to me,” she says. “My grandmother too. What does the inside of the yacht look like?"

I give her the Cliff Notes version, a sentence or two apiece. When I mention the color of the china coffee cups, she accepts me as the real deal.

By the time I finish, Maryanne has come out of her shell. Back straight, shoulders squared. I've run into Serbian freedom fighters with less self-confidence than she is radiating right now. The other girls have picked up on her vibe as well. They see I am no longer a threat, but a chance to get off the ship and back to the real world.

 I'm about to start giving the girls their marching orders when someone cuts in on my channel.

“William, this is Tommy. Kenny is dead."

Well shit, son. Them's the breaks.

"Tommy, I have the girls, everyone appears to be mobile. I am ready to make for the deck. Can you hold things together up there?"

"William, this is James. I’ve lost the SAW, grabbed an AK. We’re attempting to hold the bridge on three fronts and it’s getting hot."

"Roger that. Do you need me to secure the women and clear the deck?"

"This is Tommy. I am covering the deck. There are four assholes that need squaring away."

"I’m on it guys. Be there in two minutes."

"We’ll hold, William. Just don’t take your sweet bloody time getting here!"

I could hear the joke in Tommy's voice, but I know he isn't fooling around. I need to sweep the top deck and relieve the pressure on those guys, or between the port, starboard, and interior hatchways and the fire coming from the deck through the bridge windows, they'll slowly get torn apart.

And now to tell the girls. They've all been watching me, realizing I was talking over the radio, and a couple of them, Maryanne included, have figured out what was going on, that I had to leave.

Maryanne looks at me. "You've got to go?"

"One of my team was just killed. There's only two men left. I need to go up on deck and help, or they'll be overwhelmed on the bridge."

"You can't leave us here. If they come for us, we're all dead."

I jab my thumb over my shoulder, towards the hatchway leading to the corridor. "Someone already tried that. I took care of them before I came in."

Maryanne looks past my shoulder and out into the corridor for the first time. My auto-fire had knocked the three men away from the hatch, so I hoped all she might have seen was a sprawled limb or two and some blood, but it would be sure evidence that her freedom wasn't bought without bloodshed.

She isn't convinced. "That doesn't mean it won't happen again! What if someone runs past and just decides to finish us off?"

I begrudgingly admit she has a point. Especially after Kenneth bought it, going to all this trouble just to have some jackass waste them in a retreating drive-by wouldn't be cool. I raise a finger in the universal sign for "one moment, please" and step out of the hatchway. The AKs belonging to the dead thugs are too heavy, but their boss's Steyr SMG would work, and it was thankfully dropped clear of the blood and bone fragments. I pick it up, wipe clean a small splatter of gore with my sleeve, and then check to make sure its bolt is drawn back, ready to fire. I pull two spare mags out of the guy's pocket. It might be wishful thinking, but I'll give the girls every chance they can get.

Back inside, I hand the Steyr to Maryanne, "I'm going to shut the door and spin the handle closed. If anyone tries to open it and doesn't make it
very
clear they're one of us, put some lead into them the instant you have a clear shot. Tuck the stock into your shoulder tight, look over the top, aim at their bellies, and pull the trigger long enough to say the word 'apple'. You'll probably fire off four or five shots in that time. That gives you six, maybe seven trigger pulls. When it's empty, hold down this button, pull out the mag, push in a new mag until it clicks, then pull this knob back until it clicks hard. Then you're ready to fire again. You get all that?"

Maryanne looks up at me, SMG tucked into her shoulder, left hand on the foregrip. For a moment she reminds me of a photo I once saw, of a female French maquisard resistance fighter, and there is a similar, particularly lethal gleam in Maryanne's eye.

"Short trigger pulls, six or seven times before it is empty. This button. Pull out, push in, pull back. Got it."

The way she says it, I actually believe her.

Back out of the hatch, spin the wheel, one final glance, and then I'm gone. I eschew all pretense of stealth on my approach to the top deck, hoping that speed and an Uzi ready to rip and roar will do the trick in case I plow into anyone along the way. As I approach the hatch leading out onto the deck, I key the main channel.

"I’m about to step onto the deck. Can anyone point me to the shooters?"

"Tommy here. The fuckers are below the windows, trying to get in a lucky ricochet. Our angle isn't any good. Looks like we've secured the other vectors, so I think that's the last of them."

"Roger that, hold tight."

Uzi at the ready, I step out onto the ship's deck. Moving forward swiftly and silently in a combat crouch, I can see that the deck is littered with swaths of spent casings, splintered and shattered crates, and near to a dozen bodies strewn about in various degrees of brutal dismemberment. Up ahead, hiding down at the base of the bridge's superstructure, I can make out four figures in the shadows. Two of them are moving back and forth under the shattered windows of the bridge, occasionally leaning out and shooting while holding their AKs above their heads. They are attempting to send bursts of fire through the windows while keeping themselves under cover. The other two are split, each covering the metal staircases leading down off the sides of the bridge. These flankers are popping off the occasional shot and trying to ricochet a slug through the hatchway and into the compartment.

At this point, I'm fairly certain they don't know there's another attacker aboard the freighter. No one bothers to give so much as a backward glance towards the bow of the ship, and I bet I could have walked up and planted one behind the ear of each of the shooters from an arm's length away. But I decide to take the more prudent approach. I pull the single fragmentation grenade from my tactical harness, pull the pin, give it a three count, and then pitch it towards the two men below the bridge.

"Fire in the hole," I warn over the comms set.

I duck down behind a rusted winch bolted along the ship's starboard railing a moment before the grenade detonates with a sharp crack. I hear a voice cry out a moment later, and I peek around the corner of the winch, SMG at the ready. Both gunmen at the base of the superstructure are down, one of them twitching feebly while the other lies still, apparently tossed several feet backwards by the force of the blast. The remaining two men are frantically alternating between spraying auto-fire at the port and starboard bridge hatchways and back in my direction. Apparently they can't decide where the grenade came from, and might have figured out it was thrown at them from behind, not dropped down from above.

"William here. Two are down, remainder are firing blind. I'm going to make my play, so hold your fire on the deck."

"Tommy here, good luck."

I wait for a lull in the firing, and then eel out from behind the winch motor, already in a combat crouch with the Uzi ready to go. The shooter on the ship's starboard side isn't looking my way, but his buddy catches my movement out of the corner of his eye. It figures; the human eye sees better in the dark with its peripheral vision than it does looking straight ahead, and my motion attracts his attention. Unfortunately, the poor guy forgot one of tactical shooting's most important commandments; always keep your gun and your sight-line mated to each other, so wherever you look, you're pointing your gun. His AK is aimed up at the bridge windows, and in the half second it takes him to process that I'm not a buddy coming to join the party, I stitch him with two quick bursts of 9mm slugs. He stumbles back, arms outflung, and tripping over a scattering of spent brass he slips and drops to the deck with a clatter and a loud gurgle.

The sound and motion draws the eye of the last remaining gunman, who spins in place, the AK already firing as it comes up to his shoulder. He is remarkably fast, at least as fast as I am, and I've had to draw quick or die a few times in my life. Unfortunately the combination of spinning and firing his AK on full-auto means that by the time the shooter brings his weapon to bear in my direction, his shots snap harmlessly over my head.

Close, but no cigar. I put a long burst into him, ripping the shots across his left hip up to the opposite shoulder. The gunman spins and crumples the the deck without a sound.

I key my mic. "William here. The shooters are down, deck is secure."

"Roger that, we have no contact with any hostiles at this time." It was Tommy.

"Okay, I am moving to your position. Hold fire."

"Tommy copies, holding fire."

"James copies."

I advance towards the bridge, Uzi still up and ready for action. I can't be sure either of the two gunmen I fragged isn't playing possum, so when I'm close enough I put a short burst through each of their skulls. Messy, but I'm not going to get butt-shot because I walk past some dirtbag with a pistol in his belt and enough blood in his veins to still draw on me. For good measure, I do the same to the two men I've just shot.

Climbing the port-side staircase, I give a holler before stepping onto the bridge. Tommy has me in the sights of his Galil all the same, in case someone's coming up with me, poking an AK into my back to ensure my good behavior. When he sees it's all clear, he moves the Galil away and continues to cover the deck through the shattered windows of the bridge. I turn and see James holding an AK, his beloved SAW abandoned in a corner with a massive, puckered dent in the receiver, probably the result of an AK round. James gives me a brief nod out of the corner of his eye while covering the hatchway that leads down into the ship directly from the bridge.

Or should I say, what's left of the bridge. You might as well have taken a wrecking ball to the place. There doesn't appear to be an intact pane of glass or a single intact, breakable display anywhere within sight. If it could be shot, smashed, fractured, or cracked, it's happened by now. The gray-painted steel deck under my feet is almost completely hidden by blood, broken glass, and hundreds of spent brass casings from multiple different weapons. Three Liberians are sprawled lifeless and bloody around the room. Two of them appear to have taken double-blasts of buckshot from Kenneth's Benelli 12-gauge. He must have been moving like greased lightning when he breached the room, solid evidence of his SWAT training.

But sadly, this bridge was the last room Kenneth would ever take down. His corpse has been dragged with little ceremony and shoved in a corner away from any dead Liberians, his Benelli propped next to him. I can see he was done in by a single shot that caught him just above his right eye. I step over and from a different angle, I see most of the back of Kenneth's head has been blown away.

James sees me looking at Kenneth. "He was trading shots with some asshole down in the hatch. Just a little too slow pulling back from the lip. Saw him go down out of the corner of my eye. Just dropped like a sack of beans."

"You get the fucker who smoked him?"

James nodded. "Dropped a frag down there, held it as long as I dared first, though. It went off before it even hit the ground. Heard the little bitch squeal for a bit afterward. I seen him dead down there later, and I put half a mag into him just to be sure. No good two-bit piece of shit motherfucker."

I can see James is visibly upset, and I wonder briefly if he's never lost a squadmate to enemy fire before, up close and personal, not some roadside bomb or a guy who’s out on patrol while you're eating chow and comes back in a rubber bag.

I nodded to James and gave him an awkward atta-boy on his shoulder. "You did good, man. Kenny was one hardass dude, but I'm sure wherever he is, he appreciates you bagging that asshole."

"You thinks so, Will?" James asks me, dead serious.

"Sure kid, absolutely. That's how I'd feel."

When did I become the crusty old-timer comforting the new kid? I glance over at Tommy, but the Brit is ignoring us, if he's even paying attention to the exchange. Goddamn, that is one stone-cold operator. His face and arms are bleeding from a dozen small wounds, mostly broken glass. The man looks like he fell through a plate glass window, but the barrel of his assault rifle doesn't waver as he tracks it back and forth across the deck.

"Tommy, we lock up here, you going to be good if we sweep down to the girls' holding room to bring them topside?"