Deep Cover (The Trigger Man Book 2), page 33
“That doesn’t give us long.”
“No, and our priority is getting the crew to safety.” He gritted his teeth and wouldn’t look at her. “During the earlier shooting, the surviving crew barricaded themselves somewhere, but I don’t know where. We need to find them and get them into lifeboats.”
She grabbed his arm and turned him until he looked at her. “Mark, sinking the Cancri is the right course of action. You know that?”
He said nothing.
“Ponsonby and Walsh are terrorists, and this is their base of operations. We are fighting a war against terror here, have been for decades, and it’s bigger now than you could imagine.”
Pierce nodded, but his face remained cold and expressionless. Zang had called him by his first name, broken their agreement on when to be intimate and when not to be, but she didn’t care. She had to convince him of this important fact before he led them both down a path they might not walk away from.
After several seconds, he nodded as the rain pounded down on them both. Lightning flashed in the sky, and a roar of thunder passed overhead. “Okay, I agree with you, Zang. We blow this ship into a billion pieces, but I won’t let the crew die. You take the aft. I’ll take the fore. Call me if you find them before I do. You have a radio?”
She nodded, handed him a second communicator linked to hers. Pierce placed the earpiece into the opposite ear to the one eavesdropping on Walsh and Krige.
“Channel five, Pierce.”
“Good. Be ready to evacuate in twenty. And remember, Walsh, Krige and at least three more mercenaries prowl these decks. They want everyone dead before they leave, and that includes you and me.”
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Pierce had no intention of saving the crew. They didn’t need saving. The MILA limpet mines would never detonate, and Walsh and Krige had no intention of going after the crew so long as they kept themselves stowed away below deck.
Walsh and Krige only wanted diamonds, and from the overheard conversations Pierce had listened to via the stolen radio, the two men had secured over fifty million US in uncut gems and were about to make their escape. Another helicopter was flying in to collect them. With the storm still raging and water drenching every external surface, Pierce didn’t believe the helicopter could land, but the mercenaries could still extract themselves from this vessel via drop ropes.
Twenty-one minutes was how long Pierce had to execute the last stage of his plan before the helicopter arrived.
The Cancri’s aft carried the ore processing and diamond extraction technology. That was where he had sent Zang, knowing she would find the crew bunked down in tool and storerooms. The fore held the bridge, executive quarters, and the helipad, and that was where Walsh, Krige and their surviving mercenaries had gathered. It was there that Pierce would kill them all.
He found he could move quickly under the cover of the structural elements that supported the many conveyor belts, pipelines, mechanical equipment, X-ray detectors and crushers. He spotted a mercenary guarding the door leading into the bridge tower. Light-intensifier goggles rested on his head but were not positioned over his eyes. Too many floodlights on deck and the semi-regular lightning bolts would have blinded him if he wore the goggles.
Pierce hid behind a noisy slurry pipe, lined up the soldier in the M4’s sights, and ended his life with a single, suppressed 5.56x45mm NATO round buried in his skull. The blood spatter on the bulkhead soon washed away in the sea’s spray and rain.
After doubling back and approaching the bridge tower from the starboard rather than the port side, Pierce lined up the second sentry and killed him the same way.
Stepping over the second dead mercenary and balancing against the erratic roll of the ship, Pierce snuck into the bridge tower. Five minutes had elapsed since separating from Zang, so he had time for caution. He took the stairs, covering every corner as he advanced. He kept his breathing even, his finger above the trigger, and his eyes lined down the M4 carbine’s iron sights. The roar of the storm and the crashing water against the hull muffled any noises he made.
He reached the third of five decks before a burst of fully automatic fire sounded in the stairwell. Bullets and sparks bounced around Pierce. A round hit him in his chest rig and knocked him back against the wall. The pain was like a horse kick to the chest, and soon his eyes watered and lungs stung.
Before the shooter could get a second shot, Pierce retreated around a corner and waited. If he was bleeding out, he was bleeding out, for there was no way he would check his wound while another man hunted him.
Thirty seconds later, after the pain eased, and the foe failed to engage, Pierce figured his chest rig’s armour plating had saved him from a serious wound.
But it hadn’t saved him from his infliction.
His hand shook. His legs quivered.
Fumbling as he withdrew a fragmentation grenade from his chest rig, he pulled the pin and threw it up the stairs. Then he ducked into a room behind its steel door and used it as a shield. There came a flash, a compression wave, then noise and smoke.
Pierce pushed open the door with trembling fingers to discover his mangled adversary had tumbled halfway down the stairs. Blood dribbling from vacant eyes, ears and mouth.
Pierce stumbled over the body and continued forward. He tried not to think about his neurological state, because that never helped. His hands soon shook so violently he couldn’t keep his M4 carbine still enough to fire it effectively.
So he slung his carbine over his shoulder and armed himself with the Glock 19.
Then Pierce remembered he had taken a bullet, and now might be the time to check it. He unlatched his chest rig, discovering the bullet hadn’t penetrated the armour plates, but his chest was a mass of red bruises that would hurt more later, as he came down from his current adrenalin rush.
With shaking hands and legs that felt like jelly, Pierce refitted his chest rig and advanced again.
Zang chirped in his ear. “Pierce, are you okay? I heard shooting and an explosion.”
“All good, Zang. Three Tangos down. Only Walsh, Ponsonby and Krige remain. Engaging now.”
“Be careful. Any civilians in your area?”
“Negative. What about you?”
“Found them. Secured them in lifeboats. I’m coming to you now.”
“Roger that.”
With the conversation ended, Pierce reassessed his plan. He’d rather complete this part of his mission without Zang’s involvement, but keeping her away was not an option now. Pierce estimated he had minutes at most before she reached him.
Minutes to complete what he had come here to achieve.
Pierce advanced up the stairs on legs that weren’t as quick to respond as he expected them to be, but he still moved fast.
When he reached the executive quarters, he stepped inside.
Two bodies lay sprawled across the floor, one dead and one alive. The dead man was Khawuta, Ponsonby’s ineffective bodyguard. The man who lived was Ponsonby, who squirmed and crawled behind his desk. “Don’t shoot! I’m innocent.”
“Sure you are.” Pierce checked the room until he was certain they were alone. “Get to your feet, Ponsonby, or I’ll shoot you now.”
“Pierce?” Ponsonby struggled to stand. His eyes were wet with tears and his suit tattered and scuffed, but somehow the Polytope executive had kept his tie straight and top button done up. His hair, however, was drenched and plastered to his thinning scalp. “Walsh and his mercenary friend, they took the diamonds. Let me help you punish them; then we can split the diamonds.”
Ignoring the man’s pleas, Pierce secured the door, then took two detonator switches from his combat rig. One he placed in Ponsonby’s hand, then wrapped packaging tape around the man’s wrist and fingers so he couldn’t release it. He left the Englishman’s thumb free. The other detonator Pierce held in his shaking left hand and pressed down on the button. “This is a game of trust,” Pierce said with a sly smile. “Press down on your button.”
“What? Why?”
Pierce raised his Glock and pressed the muzzle into Ponsonby’s forehead. “Do it, or I will shoot you.”
Ponsonby complied.
Pierce flicked a switch on his radio transmitter. “Right, Ponsonby, I’ve armed three limpet mines I secured to the Cancri’s hull earlier. So long as one of us keeps our finger pressed against the button, they won’t go off. I can release my grip, and so long as you hold yours, we’re fine, and the reverse is true. But if we both release our grip, it’s game over. The entire ship goes up in a fireball we won’t be able to outrun. You understand me?”
Pierce smelled urine. Ponsonby had wet himself.
“Why the fuck would you do that, Pierce?”
“To keep each other alive. You now need me as much as I need you to survive this.”
“Why?”
Pierce grinned. “I’ll tell you later. Now move!”
They advanced into the hall and back to the stairs. Pierce kept Ponsonby in front as a human shield. Never once did Ponsonby’s finger move off the button.
The next level brought them to the empty bridge. A prominent door provided access to the helipad seen through the bridge windows. Pierce heard a second helicopter, its blades whipping somewhere up above, through the darkness and the storm clouds and thunder and lightning. Walsh and Krige would appear here soon enough to make their escape.
Now it was just a matter of waiting.
“Hello, Trigger Man.”
The voice came from the stolen radio earpiece. It wasn’t Kurt Krige who spoke, who had given most of the directions on the overheard conversations, but the spymaster, Idris Walsh.
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“Had to get in the last word, Walsh?” said Pierce.
Conversing with the American spymaster served no purpose. There was no chance either man would let the other live out this night, so the permanency of their future actions made conversation irrelevant. Then Pierce guessed Walsh’s intention, which was to distract him while Kurt Krige moved in to take Pierce by surprise.
“You were my biggest mistake, Pierce. Not killing you earlier was my undoing.”
“You’re right there.” Pierce forced Ponsonby onto his knees, then hid them both behind the control console of the bridge. The Glock shook in his hands, but he’d still use it to take out Krige when he spotted the South African mercenary. The killer had to be close by, so he whispered in Ponsonby’s ear, “Keep your finger on the dead man switch.” He removed his finger from his own switch. “You’re keeping us alive until I kill your partners in crime.”
Drenched in his own sweat and shaking with fear, Ponsonby nodded in capitulation.
“Am I boring you, Trigger Man?” the spymaster chirped again over the radio.
“Walsh, I don’t know why I’m complimenting you, but you were never boring.”
A chuckle came over the radio. “You want to know what is boring? Your friends in Baku. Odd-looking man and his cute girlfriend with the nice tits and barbwire tattoos…”
Pierce said nothing, and neither did Walsh. His foe’s intention would be to provoke distress, anger, maybe even rage, but Pierce held his tongue, because he already knew Valeriya and Yebin were dead.
“They’re boring, Pierce, because I killed them. They wouldn’t talk, so what else could I do?”
Despite his rational mind telling him to keep his cool, every muscle in Pierce’s body tensed as he fought his urge not to race forward and throttle Walsh until his eyes popped and his swollen tongue lay limp in his dead mouth…
Revenge.
Not a calling, but a weakness.
Walsh wanted — needed — Pierce’s rage to consume him, to turn this battle of wits, skill and strength to the spymaster’s favour as Pierce lost control.
“You think you will kill me tonight, Trigger Man? Avenge their deaths?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence. Pierce listened for sounds of a man, for Krige, but with the roll of the ocean and the howling winds blowing spray across the bows, and Ponsonby sobbing next to him, it was hard to hear anything else.
“You came all this way, for revenge. For retribution.”
“What did you call it, Walsh? Covert retribution?”
“Exactly!”
Pierce chuckled. “This isn’t about retribution. This isn’t even about stopping your plans. My friends are dead, so you can’t use them against me. Also, your plans to get rich by radiating the world’s diamond mines died in Central Africa, when Zang and I destroyed Eloko’s operations and informed JSOC and the CIA where you hid the radioactive canisters. All six canisters.”
“Then why are you here? You want the fifty million in diamonds I’m going to walk away with? I can hide forever with that kind of money.”
Pierce looked to Ponsonby, but the Englishman would have only heard Pierce’s side of the conversation. Ponsonby wasn’t reacting to anything but his own fear. “I have your executive friend with me, Walsh, but I guess he’s worth nothing to you now?”
Walsh laughed. “No, you’re right there. I kept him alive so he’d take the fall with the Angolan government, but I see Minister Nunes didn’t survive contact with you either.”
“You can thank Rachel Zang for that one. Another good CIA operator you betrayed.”
More laughter erupted from the spymaster. “Zang’s working for someone else, Pierce, or didn’t you know? She was a CIA plant, inside my operation. It’s why she needed to die in Kazakhstan… Oh, going by your silence, you didn’t know?”
Pierce nodded but didn’t answer. Walsh’s words rang true, considering that Zang had withheld important information from him. But that was a minor issue he would deal with another time. Again, Walsh was looking for the right button to push in Pierce to make him lose control, but it wasn’t working.
He heard the helicopter again, hovering somewhere up above in the darkness. He had to presume they had snipers on board, ready to take him out if he stepped onto the helipad, but also knew the rain and wind would make a clean shot almost impossible. Pierce glanced at his hands, shaking like a ribbon in the wind, and knew he would never get off a clean shot across any distance, at the helicopter or at the two men he still had to face.
Where the hell was Krige?
“This is about putting you down, Walsh. As long as you live, you’ll keep betraying people, playing them like pawns to sacrifice, only so you can get rich. Tonight is about taking you out of the equation.”
“How very fucking noble of you.”
The bridge door burst open as Krige rushed in.
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Krige fired his Steyr AUG, but Pierce was ready and ducked as the volley of bullets thundered past and sent fracture patterns through the bridge’s viewing glass.
Pierce returned fire, but his shaky hands betrayed him, and two of his bullets went wide.
The third shot was a fluke hit, knocking Krige’s rifle from his hand.
Within seconds Krige closed the distance between them, slapped Pierce’s firing arm aside as a fourth bullet ricocheted off the metal roof. His other hand struck towards Pierce’s throat, which Pierce only blocked at the last minute with a pivot of his body and forearm, sliding the blow effortlessly away.
Now they engaged, like two giant tigers clawing each other for the kill.
Pierce soon found his rhythm, anticipated strikes, and blocked them with a fluid motion. But shakes still gripped his muscles, and his arms and legs felt like rubber. He resorted to kung fu parries, a loose and limber style that turned his strikes into a dance, slipping his legs and arms between Krige’s powerful limbs and diverting them away. The roll and pitch of the Cancri threw both men off balance multiple times, but they kept on their feet. To fall was to surrender to the other and die.
Pierce tried for an incapacitating strike many times, but Krige anticipated his every move, except he blocked with force rather than finesse. A grin etched on his grizzled face when he realised Pierce couldn’t control his shaking.
Another strike. Another parry. Then a fist found a path through the melee and hit Pierce in the chest exactly where the earlier bullet had struck him.
The force sent Pierce staggering backward, and the pain was worse than the initial gunshot. He choked for air and almost blacked out.
From the corner of his eye, Pierce spied Walsh on the helipad, reaching for a dropped rope hung from the buffering helicopter above, an old Atlas Oryx used in great numbers during South Africa’s bush war with Namibia many decades back.
Pierce tensed and returned his focus to the hand-to-hand combat. Strikes were to kill. Blocks were to stay alive. His body soon surged with the heat of anger, for he felt consumed with the need to punish this man.
Then he realised he was wrong and focused his mind. He let go of his anger and felt his body respond as it should.
He was in control again.
Krige came at him, confident because he believed Pierce was beaten.
He didn’t see the uppercut, a clean and fluid motion from Pierce’s right arm, that surged up and impacted Krige’s jaw, a blow that shook the mercenary’s brain inside his skull and rendered him unconscious.
Walsh hooked himself to the drop rope.
Pierce skidded across the bridge, past the still cowering Ponsonby, and scooted up his Glock 19. Once on his feet, he ran as he aimed at Walsh, but with the rolling deck and ocean spray, he stumbled, and his shots went wide.
Walsh had the straps around his chest now, ready for the helicopter to sprint him away.
Pierce raced across the helipad, threw himself at Walsh and grabbed him around the waist as they both lifted into the air. He fumbled for a grip on the wriggling spymaster, reached to a pouch on his belt and unbuckled it. Then Pierce slipped and fell back to the helipad.
Three tins slipped with Pierce and bounced with him.
“NO!” Walsh screamed.
Pierce rolled with the impact.
Walsh disappeared into the darkness as the helicopter made good on their escape plan.
Two tins went over the lip and dropped into the chilly ocean water.
