Fast (26 page)

            Coleman expected this.

            He lifted his colt, holding the weapon sideways so that he was looking over his knuckles down the barrel of the big pistol.

            The terrorist raised one eyebrow and shrugged.

            Coleman smiled back.

            Because Coleman loved physics.

            He knew that bullets were at their utmost speed the moment they left a weapon’s barrel. If the 5.7 mm rounds were only just being stopped by the barrier, then there existed a very good chance that the hard-hitting 10mm round of the colt would punch through a section of damaged plexiglass.

            Coleman pressed his colt to the plexiglass and fired.

            The ten millimeter slug hit the terrorist right in the forehead. The back of the man’s head exploded like someone had dropped a hand grenade in a can of red paint. Coleman saw the spray of blood carry all the way back to the pool.

            The impact knocked the man clean off his feet. His boot toes cracked into the plexiglass. His body crashed backwards. He hit the floor and didn’t move.

            Five other terrorists all stared at the body. For a moment they couldn’t understand how their companion had been killed through the plexiglass.

            As one, they scattered away from Coleman’s direct line of fire.

            ‘That will buy us a little time,’ Coleman said grimly. When he turned around, Vanessa was staring slack-jawed at the dead terrorist.

            Coleman clicked his fingers under her nose. ‘Vanessa, you’re going to see much worse. You need to stay focused.’

            ‘Alright,’ she mumbled, her eyes on the terrorist’s corpse ‘But now we’re trapped. Soon they’ll be able to come at us from both sides.’

            Coleman knew what she meant. He remembered the layout from his skirmish map. He and Vanessa had just sealed themselves in C-lab, the third in a series of sub-labs that interconnected clockwise like the points of a diamond with the main lab at its base. B-lab was the top of the diamond, while A and C labs were left and right. The only other room on this side of the gunmen was a very small chamber branching off the back of A-lab.

            Following Vanessa into B-lab, Coleman lowered another plexiglass barrier behind them. That just left them with access to A-lab and its small rear chamber. He checked his watch.

            ‘Okay, Vanessa. Open all the plexiglass barriers and pool hatches. Everything except what’s keeping the gunmen out of here.’

            Vanessa rushed to the nearest computer. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. ‘Done. They’re all opening.’

            ‘Now get into this pool and swim back to the saturation chamber.’

             She snapped up her head. ‘I can’t swim that far underwater. No one could. I’ll black out and drown.’

            Coleman grabbed her roughly and pulled her towards the pool. ‘You’ll have to take a breath from the main lab. It’ll be full of gunmen, but I’m going to distract them. After you steal a breath, you have two more dives before you reach the saturation chamber. You need to leave this second to meet Marlin and King there at the same time so all three of you can escape. You need to leave RIGHT NOW!’

            Coleman knew it would take about thirty seconds for Vanessa to reach the pool in the main lab. When that happened, he needed to be distracting the terrorists so she could emerge in their midst to steal a breath.

            Vanessa recoiled as another barrier was blasted away two labs back. The terrorists were now just one lab behind them, in C-lab. They were already unfurling the next sheet of cutting charge in plain sight of Coleman and Vanessa.

            ‘You’ll be trapped in here,’ she stated.

            ‘GO!’ Coleman yelled. ‘Go for David.’

            She dove into the pool and swam down. In a moment, Coleman couldn’t see her.

            He was alone.

#

Cairns was livid.

            He surveyed the bedlam in the main lab.

            Somehow the Marines beat him to the templates. Right now those same Marines - no doubt the team Bora should have eliminated - were playing a game of cat and mouse with his men through the northern sub-labs. Cairns heard the loud
CRACK
! of another barrier being cut away as his men tightened their net around the pair with the templates.

            He stopped where a gunman lay with his brains spread all over the floor. The man’s blood had sprayed all the way back to the pool.

            Four more of Cairns’s team had gone down in the last three minutes.

            This was not how he’d envisaged the operation progressing.

            Fortunately it was just a matter of time before he was back on schedule. The Marine and the civilian with the templates were now backed into a corner. Cairns would have them in the next two minutes.

           
This isn’t too much of a delay
, he reassured himself.
It’s just a few minutes.

            Then he heard something unexpected. He spun on the spot and tried to pinpoint the source of the new noise.

            What the hell’s going on?

            It was the sound of almost every plexiglass barrier on the entire level simultaneously opening.

#

Coleman turned his back on the terrorist placing the cutting charge. He walked into A-lab, lowering the plexiglass behind him.

            Sealed in A-lab, he glanced into the rear chamber, a small medical bay.

            Only one barrier separated Coleman and the main lab again.

            He stood deliberately at that barrier.

            Cameron Cairns was in the main lab, kneeling beside the pool.

            Cairns’s authority filled the lab like a hand on every man’s shoulder. Close set eyes stared down his hooked nose into the pool. His hair was cropped short. Two-day-old grey stubble covered his severely angled jaw. He exuded an aura of undeniable malevolence. You could never feel safe around a man like Cairns. Even behind ten inches of concrete, his presence would seep through the pores.

            Coleman felt that way now.

            Eight other gunmen occupied the main lab.

            Cairns stared into the underlab pool where Vanessa was about to emerge. A spent bullet cartridge turned slowly, thoughtfully, in his fingers as he peered into the water.

            Coleman knocked on the plexiglass.

            Leisurely, Cairns looked up, his eyes half lidded like a dozing reptile. A reptile conserving strength for some imminent explosion of activity. His gaze drifted to the templates, lingered there, then returned to Coleman’s face.

            Rising smoothly, he dropped the spent cartridge into the pool and crossed to the plexiglass. He stopped with an arm’s length separating them. Coleman and Cairns stood face-to-face.

            Coleman’s mind raced.

            He needed Vanessa, Marlin and King to all reach the saturation chamber together. Marlin and King had four legs to swim. They would be starting their second-last dive now. Vanessa had three sections to her swim. She would emerge in the main lab for a breath any second. Eight gunmen stood around the pool where she was about to appear.

            Coleman gambled everything on his ability to coordinate the movements of several bodies in motion.

            Strange as seemed, it was a reasonable gamble.

            Coleman had a talent for deciphering patterns. The first sign of his talent came at age seven. A school aptitude test. The assessor checked her stopwatch and raised an eyebrow.

            Coleman had finished the ‘draw the line through the maze’ test unerringly in four seconds. The average student took thirty. The assessor slapped down another maze test, then another, each more complicated, and each as easy to solve for young Alexander. Then it was counting tests, memory tests, square roots, steel rings, wooden blocks.

            ‘Patterns,’ the assessor had explained to the school principal and Coleman’s uncle. ‘He has an affinity for deciphering patterns. Nothing else.’

            Not a natural savant, nothing like that, but certainly worth a few raised eyebrows. High school offered little practical application for his skill. He was as good as anyone at parroting textbook facts. Marine Corps basic training, and then while working through the advanced courses, offered Coleman the first true application for his talent. Lines of fire, troop movement, field resources, deployment points – they were all patterns.

            Coleman wasn’t sure how he did it, but in high stress situations his mind entered cognitive overdrive.

            Standing at the plexiglass eye-to-eye with Cameron Cairns, this was exactly what Coleman was experiencing.

            Some patterns were all about the timing of bodies in motion.

            Coleman taped on the glass and pointed over Cairns’s shoulder as his diversion arrived.

#

Behind Cairns, the creature
crashed
into his gunmen.

            Most of Cairns’s team scattered, but three moved too slow. The creature drew those three into a thorny death roll.

            Within the space of three heartbeats, the main lab transformed into the most ghastly wrestling arena in the world. One unlucky gunman found a tentacle looped right around his head. The limb muffled his screams as it tore off his face. The other two gunmen compensated with their own terrified shrieks.

            The creature thrashed their bodies across the lab floor, tearing away ragged strips of flesh and cartilage. Dragged halfway over the pool edge, the nearly faceless gunman began kicking up foam in a truly ungodly swimming lesson.

            The five free gunmen sidestepped desperately around the debacle, searching for a clean shot.

            Coleman saw Vanessa’s head appear in the pool. She peered around, was nearly booted in the face by the kicking gunman, then dove down again.

            She was the least of the terrorists’ concerns.

            Coleman felt a wave of relief as Vanessa stole a breath and disappeared underwater. He hadn’t known what to expect when Vanessa raised all the barriers. He
did
know, however, there was another creature on this level. That, and the main lab was full of gunmen making a
lot
of vibrations.

            It seemed like a winning combination.

            Coleman studied Cairns though the plexiglass.
How do you like the taste of your own medicine?

            Cairns observed the futile efforts of his gunmen a moment longer. When the issue wasn’t resolved, he strode straight into the bloody bedlam. Snatching the nearest submachine gun, without a moment’s hesitation he hosed the entire ammunition clip through the messy struggle.

            Seven seconds of ear-piercing gunfire transformed the combatants into a human-creature cocktail. Cairns tossed the expended submachine gun back to its stunned owner.