Killer Instincts v5 Page 2

  I'm two decks down, the level I need to reach, and I'm about to exit the stairwell when I hear the sound of booted feet coming down the corridor towards me in a hurry. I slip behind the hatch, let the Uzi sling back along my side, and I draw the Ruger .22 auto from its holster. The thigh rig is custom leather, molded to fit the gun, and holds it tight without need for a snap-catch that might be heard. The pistol has a round chambered, safety off, a little dangerous but it means there's no chance of a tell-tale "click" giving me away.

  I love this gun. Richard acquired it for me seven years ago, after I got back from an extended stay in the Middle East, a "coming home" present of sorts. A heavily converted Ruger MK II .22 automatic, the five-inch barrel is completely shrouded with an integral suppressor, and when fired, the report doesn't make much more noise than dropping a paperback novel onto a desk, just a soft "thump" sound you won't even hear one room away.

  I've seen similar models on the market, built by companies that sell to special military and law enforcement outfits, or private citizens who have all the appropriate permits and pay their fees to the federal government. I highly doubt the sale of this pistol ever made its way into anyone's accounting ledger. More likely, it wound up listed as a factory defect and marked down as destroyed, after a fat envelope of cash passed between hands with a wink and a nod. It's amazing what can be done through discreet back-channels under the guise of flag-waving, anti-fascist militant patriotism. These days, the whole "Don't Tread On Me, Big Brother" shtick is one of Richard's favorite ways of soliciting black market goods and services. Thank you, Patriot Act.

  A man steps through the hatchway and into the stairwell, a battered AK-47 in his hands. He doesn’t notice me lurking back behind the hatch, and he never will. I bring up the Ruger, take half a step forward, and fire three quick shots point blank into the base of his skull, severing his spinal column in less than a second. Subsonic .22 ammunition doesn't always have the oomph needed to get through the skull at odd angles, so instead of killing the computer by trying to shoot through the case, I blow away the cable instead. Either way, it's lights-out for this guy. I catch him with my free hand as he rag-dolls to the floor.

  Yup, that's how I do it. Not pretty, but it gets the job done.

  After I drag the body behind the stairs, I unsling the Uzi and continue down the corridor running along the centerline of the ship. I've memorized the plans for this deck, and I know the hold is three bulkheads aft of the stairwell I just descended. It sounds like a fucking war zone up on the top-deck right now. I can hear the hard thumps of the occasional grenade going off, and if I press my fingers feather-light to the metal of the corridor, I swear I can even feel the irregular vibrations of small-arms fire ricocheting off the steel hull. I can't hear the comms from the team in the bridge - I'm tuned into another channel so that I don't have their constant chatter in my ear distracting me - but I can hear the occasional shout or scream coming from up above, and I only hope it's not my team getting wiped out. The whole point of the plan was for me to go in solo, nice and quiet-like, and secure the women while the rest of the team draws the crew away. However, that only works if a lucky grenade or opportune cross-fire doesn't wipe the three of them out, leaving me all alone on a ship filled with pissed-off Liberians carrying smoking AK-47s.

  I hear the rattle of a chain around the next dogleg in the corridor. I glide up to the doorway, and take the tiniest peek around the corner of the open bulkhead hatch. Twenty feet down the corridor, three men stand around a hatch secured with a steel chain and a padlock the size of my fist. Two of them have AKs hanging at their chests, while the third - better dressed and, unlike the other two, not looking like he woke up in the gutter - has a slick-looking Steyr SMG in his hand. He's berating the other two, who are doing an admirable job of fumbling with the lock and the chain. It looks like I got here just in time, because I have the distinct feeling that the three of them are here to open up the hold containing the women and fill it with auto-fire.

  I take all of this in with a one-second glance, before I slip back behind the hatch. I've got to kill them all without raising an alarm, because if anyone nearby hears something unusual, I'll find myself trying to get a half dozen scared, starving girls out of that hold while being shot at, and the thought doesn't appeal to me. With a soft click, I extend the Uzi's metal stock, and shift the fire-selector to automatic. Snugging the stock into my shoulder, cinching the sling in tight, I lock the weapon to me so it's an extension of my body, and I lean out into the hatchway about four inches, exposing my arm, shoulder, and just enough of my head so I can sight down the weapon.

  And in three seconds, it’s over. I cut down Steyr-man first with a burst through the skull. Before his body even hits the deck, one of the two other gunmen is spinning on his heel, blood gouting from his face and throat. The third man takes only half a step before he takes a five-round burst through the heart, knocking him flat on his back. I have to admit, killing that fast and with that kind of accuracy is a skill that takes a lot of practice and experience to achieve. That I've lived long enough to get so good always gives me a mixture of pride at my own prowess, tinged with an inkling of dull horror that it's been at the expense of more lives than I want to tally.

  I don't want to give anyone a moment to squeeze a trigger for the last time, or pull a frag grenade from somewhere and make a mess, so I rush the twitching bodies, examining my handiwork as I cover the distance. One of the slobs and Mr. Steyr are both long gone. The slob looks like I cored out the center of his chest with a hand trowel, and his boss is missing most of his skull. But the third man, although choking on his own blood and missing an eye and part of his face, is trying to get his AK pulled around, so I line up the Uzi and fire a three-shot burst through his brainpan. His skull finishes coming apart, he twitches twice, then lies still.

  I bring the Uzi up and cover the other end of the hallway for a full five heartbeats, waiting for the pounding feet and the shouts and racking slides that would signal to me I'm seconds from death, but there's only silence. Convinced that no one was close enough to hear the suppressed growl of the Uzi, I draw my Ruger with one hand and reload the SMG as fast as I can with the other. The one-handed reload is slow but necessary, so I can keep the corridor covered with the Ruger just in case.

  Turning to the hatch securing the hold, I see that the padlock's been opened and the chain is just hanging there, tangled around the hatch's locking wheel. I don't know what to expect, and I doubt there's a light on, so I pull the little tactical flashlight from my belt and clip it underneath the muzzle of the Uzi. I then take a deep breath, spin the hatch wheel and pull the door open quickly, getting the Uzi up as fast as I can as I sweep the muzzle of the SMG across the room, looking for a goon hiding in the corner somewhere with an AK or pump shotgun.

  I needn't have bothered. Although the tactical light helped, there is a lone, dim bulb high up in the ceiling, protected by a rusting basket of steel wires. The room is hot and damp and reeking of piss and shit and sweaty fear, about twelve feet deep and twenty wide, with a ten foot ceiling. The room is empty of furniture, just piles of what appear to be army surplus blankets here and there, each pile occupied by a young, filthy wretch trembling in utter, abject, mortal fear. There are a couple of plastic gallon jugs of water in one corner and a foul-looking bucket in the other corner, a half-used roll of toilet paper nearby. Otherwise, the room is devoid of any objects that could be hefted or pried loose or otherwise used as a weapon (or a means of suicide, depending).

  Stepping to the side of the doorway, so I'm out of sight of anyone who might approach the hatch, I risk letting the Uzi hang from its sling, and I put a finger up to my lips, the other hand making a "get up" gesture to all the women on their makeshift beds. They all look at me like I've got a roaring, bloody chainsaw in my hands, and I'm sure they think I'm just another one of their captors. Looking around the room, I try to identify Maryanne, and even when I take the photo provided by Steiger out of my pocket to confir
m what she looks like, it's tough to pick her out. The girl in the photo is laughing, blonde hair well-coiffed and clean, wearing a prom dress or some kind of evening wear. The best approximation I can find is a disheveled, battered girl in the far corner of the room, curled into a fetal position and wearing nothing more than a dingy, over-sized white t-shirt.

  "Maryanne Steiger?" I call out softly to the girl in the corner. I see her stiffen, but she doesn't move.

  "Maryanne, your grandfather sent us. We're here to get you and these other girls off the ship."

  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.