Fear the Survivors (10 page)

Chapter
11: Two on One

Back in Gaza,
the bulk of Ayala’s team gathered for the first time since their first meeting with her back in Tel Aviv. They had spent nearly a week watching the mysterious woman Raz Shellet, and had seen a disturbing amount of activity in that time.

After a while, the woman had stopped collecting materials and started spending more time in her rented apartment. Then, yesterday, she had taken the first of several large boxes with her and set off out of the city. Long after she had left the box buried in a field near a local military base, still under the distant eye of one of the well-hidden Mossad team members, John had gone to the sight and scanned the buried box. He had come back to the team and told them they had to move. She was planting massive explosive devices at key locations, probably as stockpiles, and they probably did not have much more time until whatever she was planning began in earnest.

By that night Raz had already planted five more of the boxes. And so, leaving one lookout in place at a key vantage point, the team gathered in a small rented room nearby. After a brief introduction, Ayala handed the process over to John Hunt, who stood and looked at the men gathered in front of him.

“Gentlemen. As you may have guessed, the time has come to engage our target. I say engage rather than take down because I am afraid taking her down will not be a simple task. For, as you have no doubt also guessed, Raz Shellet is no ordinary terrorist. Raz Shellet represents an evolutionary step in capability from anything you have ever witnessed. She is faster, stronger, and more deadly than all of you combined.”

They started at this, not least of which because they were far from harmless tikes, and the implication that anyone at all was better than the lot of them was a touch hard to swallow. But John was not about to spend time debating the point with them. He needed them to believe it, not academically, but in reality.

“Allow me to demonstrate. Stand up,” he said with authority, and the men rose to the challenge, literally. John turned to Lord Mantil … Quavoce, and smiled, “Quavoce, my friend, would you mind hitting me with that chair?”

The room was curious, if also more than a little skeptical about where this was going. Quavoce looked at John with an expression that asked if this was really necessary. John nodded and turned to face the group.

Seeing the looks on the team’s faces, Quavoce saw that it was, indeed, quite necessary. Once he agreed, Quavoce moved with such force and speed that the room involuntarily stepped back. In a blur, the machine man darted forward, grabbed the legs of one of the small, folding metal chairs in the room, and whipped it around. Just missing the men watching, he spun, accelerating the metal frame around at a speed his mind told him was in excess of a hundred miles per hour by the time it hit John’s stomach. John did not flinch, he merely took one step back to brace his body against the blow … and WHACK.

John skidded back a foot or so and then regained his composure. Quavoce’s hands still held the aluminum legs of the chair but he soon realized that was now moot. The chair was wrapped around John’s torso like a cummerbund. Lord Mantil released his grip and John smiled at the group as he bent the groaning metal from around his middle. They stared at him as he plied it from his body and then, holding the warped frame in one hand, John pulled up his shirt and showed them his unblemished stomach.

“Now, gentlemen,” John said, dropping the metal to the floor and stepping toward them, “you are trained professionals so I won’t beat around the bush. My friend and I represent what you face tonight.” He stepped closer to one of them and the man assumed a defensive stance without thinking.

“You cannot beat us, you cannot kill us,” John said calmly, and then his hand whipped out and gripped the first man’s wrist. The trained Mossad agent instinctively fought his grasp. John continued talking, “If you try …” the man twisted and brought his elbow up into John’s face but John’s hand was there in an instant, “… then she will …” holding the breathless Mossad agent by his wrist and elbow John now twisted him, careful not to hurt any more than his pride, “… without doubt …” two of his colleagues stepped forward to help their friend. The first came in low, a sweeping leg to unbalance John, the second came around the other side and sent a series of well-placed kicks and punches to try and force John to release his friend. “… kill every last one of you.”

As the final two words of John’s sentence came out, he thrust the initial man forward. In the same flash, his right foot lashed backward and upward, catching the sweeping leg of the second man as it went, kicking it up and away and sending him with it. The third man’s fist came in low and fast, straight for John’s face. Bending away from this blow with ease, John’s hands whipped out in unison, the first grasped the wrist of the man grazing past his head, the second shot downward to grab his ankle.

They had no idea what happened next, but before the rest of the group could gather themselves to come against John as well, the two men were tossed lightly into the four other men, sending them all sprawling.

“Enough!” shouted Ayala, but John silenced her.

“No!” John said with venom, “Not enough! I won’t go into battle tonight unless these men understand what they’re up against!”

He came to stand over them and looked at them one by one. He saw fear in some, anger in the others, and confusion in them all, “I am sorry to have done that to you, gentlemen, but I am afraid I had to make my point beyond any doubt.”

They stared at him and he went on, “Like me and my friend here, our target tonight is bulletproof, knife proof, fireproof, and radiation proof. She can blind you at a hundred paces, and fold you in half like a rag doll with one look from her left eye. I know this without any shadow of a doubt because I can do all those things too. So here’s the deal. You leave the fighting to
me and my friend
. Not because you are cowards, or because you don’t know your job, but because you
do
know your job, and you know when to fight and when to run.”

Ayala stepped up to John and rested her hand on his shoulder, and John saw the instinctive fear for her life in the men in front of him, even the willingness to continue fighting in order to protect her. These were good men, brave men, but that was all the more reason not to sacrifice them needlessly to the coming battle.

Ayala spoke to her men now, “I would tell you not to be afraid of John here, but that would be very bad advice indeed. He has sacrificed more than you can know to come here and fight for us, and I have absolutely no doubt that he will sacrifice you too if need be. As will I, for that matter. I can only ask that you not force him to make that decision tonight. Now, if you are all absolutely clear on your place in this operation, we will begin the briefing. Though you cannot join in the actual fight with these two men, you
do
have an important role to fill. If you will take your seats again, we can begin.”

She stepped over to the warped remnants of the chair on the floor and pointed to it. With a wry smile, she turned to the British Agent, “John, you can sit here.”

- - -

Spread out in a wide star from a given point in the center of Gaza City, seven marksmen lay. They lay on their backs, listening to the receivers in their ears, their long, black rifles resting on their chests as they rested in a semi-sleep, allowing their minds to relax without allowing them to completely slip away. The hours ticked by. At the center of this star two other men lay on two rooftops, facing each other, a wide main street between them.

They all waited.

The street was all but deserted. A man was pushing a cart along, laden with various car parts and other dross, while a keen street vendor, arriving early, was beginning to set up his stall. Between the two waiting men were four empty lanes, two in each direction, pockmarked with the occasional scar of the many conflicts the city had suffered.

At twelve minutes past three in the morning, Raz Shellet appeared from her building’s front door. She was carrying a large duffel bag not dissimilar to the ones she had carried out of her building at regular intervals for the last day. It was the second time she had left her building since the team had set up their positions. Unlike the previous time, she turned left instead of right.

They waited.

- - -

Raz felt something was wrong as she left her building. The people of this town were evolutionarily wired to be sensitive to war, they had seen far too much of it in their lifetimes, and she could tell the town was waiting for something, bracing itself. She could feel it. Shutters were closed. Less people were on the streets. People had seen things and they were preparing for something.

It could be nothing, it could be an attack by one of the many groups that had terrorized these people over the years, from the Israeli forces that claimed to be only enforcing the peace to the many insurgent groups that claimed to be defending their rights even as they fundamentally abused them. Maybe they sensed some small part of the battle she was, herself, bringing to this town. Perhaps they sensed that in two days she planned to set off an unprecedented series of explosions across the city. Explosions designed to look like mortar raids. To look like slaughter. To look like genocide. Explosions designed to destabilize this region and plunge it into war.

Her hair hung loosely over her left eye. Like it always did now. She did not really fear these people, whatever attack was coming on them she would welcome it as another step in the direction she wanted to take the world, into a war that would distract it from the real threat that was coming. But even though these men, women, and children held no threat for her, there was something out there that did. For she, like her colleagues, knew that at least one of their fellow Agents had betrayed them. So, unlike Jean-Paul Merard and Preeti Parikh before her, Raz Shellet had pre-computed defense tactics for a fight with another Agent. These were lined up at all times, ready to autoactivate should the need arise.

As she walked down the street, Raz Shellet instinctively scanned every person she saw and every doorway she approached for signs of a waiting Agent, waiting for the traitor to come. And unlike Jean-Paul or Preeti Parikh, Raz’s drooping hair covered her left eye, and hid a fully deployed weapons array, standing at the ready.

- - -

John and Quavoce could not use the subspace link between them for fear it would alert Raz to their presence. For even though they could scramble the signal between them in order to hide their meaning, the very use of the medium in an otherwise subspace-mute world would set off alarms in Raz’s mind.

So they looked at each other across the road, just out of sight of the street below. The seven Mossad agents had been alerted by a single pip on their radios from the lone spotter covering the door when Raz had emerged, and another when she had turned toward them. The seven heavily trained men checked their rifles. They were not to fire more than once from one location. Shoot once then move … quickly. Once the fight had started they were allowed to use the radio, but they should assume that anything they said over it could be heard by their target. They had noted that neither of the two superhuman-seeming men had asked for actual receivers, but they had said they would also be able to hear whatever was said over the channel.

Two of the Mossad men prayed. One more pulled out a small photo of his young son and kissed it gently, then replaced it in his jacket. Underneath their clothes they all now wore black body suits that Ayala had given them. They had all pulled the black hoods up over their heads like balaclavas when they had gotten into position. And they all sensed that no matter how much the Agents had tried to warn them, they were about to see something bordering on insanity.

Another pip came and in their various positions they all sprang to a waiting crouch, still just out of sight in their various hiding spots. The one spotter who was in plain sight watched Raz as she came down the street, his finger poised as he sent pips to his colleagues. First as she left her building. Next as she turned their way. Then as she crossed the first street. Now, as she approached the corner they had agreed upon, he got ready to count down till she was in the kill zone.

pip … pip … pip … pip …

Pip. They all leapt to their knees and seven long-range rifles were leveled at the same moment, seeking their target, four sighting her right away as they had clear lines from their spots. The others were arranged along her potential escape routes and they waited. As they all span, John and Lord Mantil were already airborne, launching themselves off their rooftop purchases above their prey.

Raz heard the pips and instinctively began scanning the area with her various arrays. Suddenly she sensed movement above her, and down each street, in uncanny unison with the telltale pips on the radio, and she flipped her head upward just as she was hit with the first blast from John’s sonic punch. The power snapped her head back but her array was already deployed and she fired instantaneously in return. But her shot went wide as John’s first blast hit her.

Her onboard systems raced as her odds were recalculated. Two assailants. Two Agents. She bent as Quavoce hit her as well, and sensed their lasers already hitting her, and then she suddenly hurled the big bag in her hand into the air between her falling assailants. They saw it coming up and turned their fire on it instead. But it was not naturally combustible and its detonator was hidden deep within. As it came level with them, they both turned their heads away from the blast they knew was coming.