Black Scorpion (47 page)

That's what he felt like now, a mere forty-eight hours after being barred from entering his own property. No one seemed to notice Michael through all the bustle and activity in the lobby. Just the way he liked it, since it gave him the opportunity to see the Seven Sins as others saw it, appreciating the spectacle and magic of it all the more along with the vision that had spawned both. Even though his goals now stretched far beyond this property and the city, the resort would always form the foundation on which everything else was built, would always be home. That explained why being barred from entry two days earlier angered him so much. He'd already lost one home.

He wasn't going to lose another.

Michael realized he hadn't called Scarlett yet with the news. He pulled out his phone, wondering where she might be on the property. According to the time displayed, and assuming all had gone according to plan, the attack launched on Black Scorpion by Alexander and Raven would be commencing any moment.

More guests brushed past him, the Seven Sins returning to the life he knew and loved. That's when Michael spotted the figure of the rumpled man with the bad comb-over he recognized from both Gaming Control Board hearings. The man was seated within the lobby's Peccato Bar Lounge, checking his phone and seeming to pay Michael no heed whatsoever, until he looked up and their eyes met.

The man's showed no spark of recognition, showed nothing at all before returning his gaze to his phone. But something about his gaze left Michael unsettled enough to start toward him. Searching for the nearest plainclothes members of the Seven Sins security force, in the same moment the explosion sounded outside on the Strip.

 

ONE HUNDRED FIVE

H
OIA-
B
ACIU
F
OREST,
R
OMANIA

Alexander watched his men strapping on their parachutes aboard the Lockheed L-100 Hercules aircraft, a civilian version of the special-ops-favored C-130 and available thanks to the blank check Michael had provided GS-Ultra. It would be flying under the false designation of a commercial airliner to avoid detection or scrutiny. That meant they'd have to make a HALO jump from around twenty-five thousand feet, the altitude typical in this airspace. All the men hired for the mission were trained in high altitude low opening jumps, well used to completing the initial portion in free fall while breathing oxygen from a small tank.

Alexander could feel the chop in the night air as soon as the jump bay opened, already wearing his wet suit over his combat garb. They would be dropping straight into the night and storm while on oxygen for several minutes until low enough to deploy their chutes, through the cloud cover and into the manmade lake that enclosed the mountain fortress of Black Scorpion.

Dropping straight into the teeth of the storm left Alexander feeling virtually weightless in the grasp of what felt like a tornado's funnel cloud that whipped him about in all directions. He and the others managed to shed their oxygen masks and get their chutes opened at the proper time, resulting in a mad jockeying to stay on course. Alexander found himself holding his breath along with everyone else until the lake came up faster than expected, the dark waters feeling like concrete that collapsed beneath him on impact.

He went under into the total blackness, almost twenty feet down before he began the swim back to the surface, fighting against the sensation of decompression the free fall on oxygen had left on his brain. He shed his chute and readied his scuba gear, while inventorying his troops. One of Paddy's operators had died of a broken neck on impact with the water and one of Alexander's shattered his ankle, splitting the bone through the skin. Alexander helped him shed his chute and equipment and then left the man to reach shore on his own.

Alexander felt the chill of the lake waters through his wet suit as he led the remaining twenty-two men slowly to the bottom fifty feet down. Unlike traditionally formed lakes, this unusually large manmade one had a uniform bottom that might as well have been a swimming pool's. Alexander shined his underwater flashlight ahead in search of one of the hatches accessing the tunnel system that ran under the lakebed and linked the former nuclear silos together. He believed he'd swam over three of those silos already, noticeable for the darker patches of lake floor and slight depressions that came with the settling of their camouflaged structures.

Alexander spotted one of the tunnel access hatches just after passing the third depression. He positioned himself properly and started twisting on the wheel, fearing the years may have seen it welded shut or, at the very least, rusty and stuck from disuse. The Soviets, though, built such facilities intending them to last forever and, sure enough, the wheel turned easily after some initial resistance, then opened with a
ssssssssssssssss
into an underwater airlock that maintained a constant pressure to prevent flooding.

Alexander and Paddy lowered themselves into the tunnel first, the last man to reach the ladder closing and sealing the hatch behind him. The men all stripped off their wet suits, shed their scuba equipment, and geared up for the next phase of the mission. Alexander had laid it out for them as best he could with only an old man's memory and thermal satellite imagery taken from a hundred thousand feet up in the sky to go by. The bulk of the men would accompany Paddy up into the complex, leaving him to make his way to the underground living quarters contained amid rock and shale.

Where he hoped to find Vladimir Dracu himself.

And along the way they would mine the tunnel with a bevy of shaped charges that, when added to the explosive force of identical charges placed within the complex, would rupture the structure's integrity and bring it down, flooding it from both above and below. Nothing could be left to chance.

“Raven,” Alexander said, into the microphone extension of his lightweight tactical headset, “do you copy?”

*   *   *

“Loud and clear, big man. What's the word?”

“In the tunnel and heading toward the complex now. Stand by. Move into staging position and wait for my call.”

Raven and her ten-man crew had moved up to a hidden position off the narrow trail within clear view of the waterfall, when something rustled the brush nearby. She and her men tensed, going utterly still and silent as a Black Scorpion sentry appeared out of the darkness. He was lighting a cigarette and had his assault rifle slung uselessly behind his shoulder.

Raven snapped a single fist into the air to hold her men back, then extracted a knife from her belt and slid out in the guard's wake. She pounced on him from behind and drove the blade into his heart between his ribs, felt him stiffen without so much as a sound or breath. She covered his mouth with a gloved hand just to make sure as she lowered him to the ground and dragged him to the cover of some thicker brush.

There were likely more guards lurking about and Raven chose three men to accompany her in a sweep to locate them to eliminate the risk of being spotted and have their presence betrayed. The sweep brought her closer to the mountain itself for a look-see, to use Alexander's term, which left her doubting the old man's tales back in Vadja of some secret entrance to the cave system here beyond the waterfall. As far as she could tell, this was a mountain face and nothing more.

She clung to the hope she was wrong, and that the old man's memory was right. Otherwise, she and her men would have no chance to free the young women and children who'd been stolen from the village, certain then to join the tens of thousands of others who'd preceded them into human trafficking at the hands of Black Scorpion.

Raven wanted Vladimir Dracu dead more than she'd wanted anything in her life. He was the demon, quite literally it seemed now, who haunted her dreams and left her own youth shrouded in anguish and misery, the man behind the bullets that had shattered her life as a mere toddler. He had robbed her of her childhood and left her sentenced to the dark criminal underworld where there could be no trust, devotion, hope.

Or love.

And it all made sense now, her own twisted fate coming full circle. Her mother had died protecting her, just as she would die, if necessary, to save the children held hostage inside this fortress.

But she wasn't going anywhere unless her brother's man, Alexander, breached the entrance to the fortress behind the waterfall for her. Not used to relying on others left her cringing with an unfamiliar sense of dependence. Regardless of this man's reputed prowess, he would need to pull off the impossible just to enter the complex contained within a mountain, never mind beat back the forces concentrated inside.

Raven had begun to fear Alexander's part of the mission had been an abject failure, when his voice finally crackled in her headset again.

“We're in,” said Alexander. “Get your men ready to move.”

*   *   *

The pressurized tunnel ended at a flat rock wall before a ladder and hatch identical to the one they'd used to access it a half mile back. This time the wheel refused to give at all and Alexander summoned one of Paddy's demolitions specialists up the rungs to join him. The man didn't need to ask what was required, just set the proper small charge at the proper joint and backed off with Alexander before detonating it.

The blast sound was more like a cough, enough to rattle the hatch upward and open their route into Black Scorpion's fortress up a narrow chute. It had a single ladder climbing through the darkness and Alexander went first, popping yet another hatch open on a sub-level he didn't recognize from the thermal imaging. But he found his bearings quickly, identifying the steel door on the left to lead to the command and control bunker and the one on the right down a hall to what he felt certain were Vladimir Dracu's living quarters.

As such, he expected that hall to be heavily defended. Not surprisingly, the windowless heavy steel door was locked from the inside, meaning it too would have to be blown, and this time Alexander himself readied the charge from his pack.

“Leave me two men,” he said to Paddy. “The ground floor is yours.”

Paddy winked at him, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning as he adjusted his headset microphone closer to his lips. “Don't do a bloody thing, mate, till I do it first.”

*   *   *

Paddy led his team up a ladder to yet another hatch that, according to his sense of the fortress's structure, led onto the ground floor it was his job to secure. He drilled a small hole in the hatch itself and poked an eye-line device through that was no thicker than a straw. Rotating it provided a 360-degree view to his eye pressed against the bottom half and what he saw wasn't good.

Eight men occupying what looked like an expansive concrete and steel space packed with vehicles. He'd been smelling oil, gasoline, and tire rubber for a few moments and now understood why. The entrance to the mountain he needed to breach was very well defended, the size and scope of the complex surprising him. Hearing it had been constructed within a mountain cave had him picturing something more contained. He was thinking submarine and what he got was an aircraft carrier, but he'd come prepared.

Paddy had learned long ago that nothing beat distraction when it came to overcoming superior numbers and positioning, at least initially. At this point, there was no way he could get his people into position without taking significant casualties and forfeiting the surprise of his team's presence earlier than planned.

Paddy slid the eye-line device out from the hatch and replaced it with a tubular extension rigged to a small tank he removed from his pack containing a simple compound that stunk to holy hell once it mixed with air. Something like the overflow from a septic system, only much worse, and easy enough to take the guards' minds off anything but its source. Make them so sick to their stomachs, they'd want to puke.

Distraction.

Paddy turned the small spigot on the tank and heard the initial hiss of the noxious gas escaping above.

“You read me, mate?” he called to Alexander through his throat mic.

“Loud and clear.”

“Shite's about to hit the fan.”

He signaled his men to pull back down the ladder a bit, ready a mere minute later when the access wheel to the hatch begun to turn above him. Paddy could hear one of the guards retching and coughing from the odor as he started to hoist it open, flooding the chamber with light.

“Evening, mate,” Paddy greeted him, and then opened fire.

*   *   *

Alexander triggered the charge he'd set himself as soon as he heard the gunfire clanging above. He and the two commandos with him backed off and covered their ears, assault weapons dangling at their chests in the ready position. His own M-4 carbine came equipped with an M203 40mm grenade launcher attached beneath its barrel, the additional handling weight well worth the extra firepower it provided.

Pooooofffff!

The latch disappeared in a flash and the door blew open behind a surge of smoke. His men were through the door just as Alexander spotted the red laser line amid the smoke.

“No!” he cried out an instant too late, just as the wall-mounted mines blew a blanket of shrapnel outward that ripped the men apart before they could even scream.

Alexander dove into the smoke, through what was left of the shredded bodies and beneath the bursts of gunfire coming from the other end of the hall. Three shooters, he figured, as he steadied his M4 and fired on full auto in a sweeping motion aimed at the muzzle flashes that had erupted through the smoke-riddled darkness.

He heard cries, screams, enough to tell him he'd felled all three gunmen. Back on his feet and sliding down the hall in the next instant, spotting the trio of bodies lying in a heap halfway down the iron hall. He fired one grenade from his launcher and then a second straight for the door.

The explosions seemed to merge, the flame burst and smoke clearing to reveal a jagged chasm blown in the now charred, smoking steel. Alexander picked up his pace, fresh magazine jammed home and fresh 40mm grenade chambered. Drawing closer to the lair, he thought he heard classical music playing somewhere, expecting movement to flash within, more targets making themselves known to defend their leader.