Moon Mask (35 page)

28:

The Hand of Freedom

Port Royal,

Jamaica,

All
hell broke loose.

Running down the west face of the Hand of Freedom building, Raine was pretty much shielded from the blast of C4 which the four soldiers had used to rip open the north wall. Nevertheless, the pounding heat picked him up and hurled him forwards, sending him sprawling across the brittle grass.

Only seconds later he was on his feet again and charging for the door. The lock already picked by Garcia, he had no problem slamming through it, twisting through the second, inner door and into the museum.

Huge chunks of masonry had smashed through the display cases and crushed dozens of artefacts but luckily the explosion hadn’t erupted into a massive fire.

Amidst the destruction he saw the prone form of Benjamin King lying sprawled upon the smashed remains of the display case he had landed on.

He ran to the fallen man’s side. “Benny,” he hissed, touching his bloodied head. He checked for a pulse.

“You
, stay here,” Gibbs ordered Nadia as he climbed to his feet seconds after the explosion had lit up the sky. “All units,” he called into his throat mike. “Move in! Secure King and the book!”

He broke cover, hauling his HK-416 from his shoulder and charged towards the building. “Eagle Eye, we need air support. Now!”

Responding
to the expert skills of David Sykes, the helicopter twisted through the clear Caribbean sky and dropped towards the ground, pulling up at the last possible second and swinging around the hand-shaped building.

From the large halogen lamp attached under the nose of the bird, a brilliant beam of light lit up the smashed building.

Raine’s
fingers expertly found a pulse in King’s neck and he felt the archaeologist stir. He had landed face down on top of a glass and wood display case and now rolled painfully onto his back. His Kevlar body armour had protected him from the brunt of the musket shot and the impact with the display case, but Raine could hear a rattle in the other man’s chest as he breathed. A broken rib, he guessed, hoping he hadn’t punctured a lung. His eyes were dazed and blood ran around his neck and shoulders from a gash on the back of his head.

“Try not to move,” he told him. “You’ve got a concussion and-”

“The dairy,” King gasped. Raine glanced to the top of the stairs, knowing the archaeologist was right. The diary was the primary goal.

“I’m on it,” he said, taking King’s handgun from its holster. Gibbs’ orders be damned- he needed a weapon now. Then, just before dashing into the wreckage, he added with a grin. “Don’t go anywhere.”

On
the balcony the black-clad Team Leader rolled Mrs Marley over. Blood ran down her face from where she had impacted with a large chunk of spinning debris but she was still breathing.

One of the other soldiers came out from the master bedroom. “No sign of the book,” he reported.

The Team Leader needed no extra prompting. He slapped Mrs Marley across the face with such force that it shocked her back to consciousness. Her eyes wandered, terrified, before focussing on the soldier.

“Where is the Kernewek Diary?” the Team Leader demanded.

Mrs Marley sneered at him then spat out a sticky wad of blood and mucus. It splashed against the Team Leader’s unmasked face. He drew back his fist and slammed it into the old woman’s nose. It exploded in blood.

“Where is it?” he growled.

Gasping back sobbing racks of agony, Mrs Marley nevertheless remained defiant. The Team Leader quickly drew his holstered handgun, black, unidentifiable, and pressed the muzzle hard against the woman’s fat kneecap.

“Where is the book?” he said again, his voice cold, icy. Uncaring. Despite the blood that soaked her, Mrs Marley never shifted her defiant gaze from her torturer’s face. “Fine,” the soldier shrugged and squeezed the trigger.

The head of the soldier in the doorway exploded in a splatter of blood and gore, shocking the Team Leader. He whirled in time to see an American soldier with a mop of black hair and intense blue eyes launch himself from his cover on the top step and train his M1911 semi-automatic handgun on him.

Mrs Marley took his lapse in concentration to make her own unexpected move. Mustering agility she didn’t know she possessed, she hauled her feet up and slammed her incredible body weight into the Team Leader. He sprawled across the landing, his own rifle scattering just out of reach.

Raine
dashed forward, hurdling the corpse of the man he’d just killed and homing in on his second victim just as two soldiers ran onto the landing from the bedroom doorway. They opened up with fully automatic rifles, hundreds of bullets hammering into the wall behind him. In the blink of an eye, he scanned his surroundings and then hurled himself away from the gunfire and into the stinking bathroom.

It looked, and smelt, as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years, but Raine didn’t focus on the stench. He knew that in mere seconds the two soldiers would come swinging around the doorway, guns blazing. He hurriedly unlocked the bathroom window and pulled himself outside, tucking his gun into his waistband as he clung onto the plastic guttering that ran around the building, just above the level of the window.

It wouldn’t hold his weight for long, he knew, so he quickly shuffled along it to the next room over. As he had hoped, the master bedroom’s window was open and so he easily slipped back inside the building, landing softly upon the filthy, broken bed.

He heard the shuffle of boots as the two soldiers spun around the wall and into the bathroom. “He’s not here,” one of them called to their leader.

“Forget him,” the team leader snapped. “Find the goddamn book!”

Raine dropped to the floor of the ransacked room and rolled under the bed, remembering the video stream he had seen earlier of Mrs Marley retrieving the diary from under the floor boards.

The floor was now sticky and damp from the blood of the soldier Raine had felled near the doorway. He ignored it and quietly pulled up the first floor board, then the second. The treasure chest was still hidden underneath but, oddly he noticed, the large brass key he had seen was still in the lock.

He lifted open the lid and looked inside.

There was no diary, only a single piece of paper with something scrawled across it. He lifted it out and, in the gloom underneath the bed, read it.

“You want the book,”
Mrs Marley had written defiantly, as though she knew they would come for it,
“then come and get it!”

At that moment, the Super Stallion’s bright light exploded in through the windows and the hole in the building’s north face while, simultaneously, Gibbs, West and Murray ran into the lower floor of the museum and opened fire on the soldiers.

“Ben!”
Sid cried as she ran into the museum seconds ahead of Gibbs’ team.

Gunfire echoed through the ruins of the building as Gibbs, West and Murray fanned out, pummelling the upper level with bullets.

The attackers scrambled for cover, forgetting Raine, and returned fire, strafing the exhibition cases which exploded in violent eruptions of wood and glass.

“Sid!” King called weakly to her, taking cover behind one of the cabinets. Sid ducked behind the same cabinet, narrowly avoiding the hailstorm of bullets.

“Oh my god,” she gasped upon seeing a flow of blood dribbling down King’s neck and shoulders from a wound to the back of his head. His eyes rolled and he struggled to stay focussed.

Sid grasped his face and forced him to look her in the eyes.

“Stay with me Ben,” she pleaded, seeing his eyes loll backwards again. She turned and, shielding her face from flying splinters of wood, she shouted at Gibbs. Her voice, however, was lost beneath the terrible noise of the gunfire. The SOG team had been locked down by the elevated attackers and now struggled to return fire, themselves taking scant cover where they could find it.

Then she remembered the throat mike which had been taped to her larynx earlier that day and, pressing it softly, she called to Gibbs again.

“Ben’s been hurt,” she told him. “We need to get him to safety.”

Face
grim and focussed, Gibbs heard Sid’s voice come in through his radio ear piece. “None of us are going anywhere at the moment,” he replied, unleashing another barrage of fire. Then his assault rifle clicked empty and he hurriedly ejected then inserted a new magazine. “Raine,” he redirected his next query. “Do you have the goddamn book?”

“I
think so,” Raine whispered into his own throat mike, still hiding beneath Mrs Marley’s broken bed. Between the discarded sheets, past the body of the soldier, he had a perfect view between the copious bosoms of the enormous Jamaican woman sprawled across the landing. And there, nestled between her giant breasts was the spine of a book.

“Gotcha,” he hissed as he scrambled forward.

Sid
shielded her head and did her best not to scream as shards of glass and splinters of wood flew all around her, peppering her flesh. She hunched over her boyfriend’s prone body, cupping his face in her hands. His eyelids flickered shut. Not a good sign.

“No, Ben, stay awake!” She slapped his cheek, desperate to ensure he remained conscious. If he went to sleep, she feared he would never wake up again. “Ben!” she shouted at him over the thunder of automatic weapons. His eyes fluttered open, locked on to hers, filling her with resolve.

“Come on,” she said, “I’m getting you out of here!”

She wrapped his arms around her shoulders and struggled under his weight. She could feel his legs desperately trying to work, to help her but it was as though they were made out of jelly.

Filled with determination and fuelled by adrenaline, she let out a loud scream of frustration and dragged him physically towards the door.

“What
the hell is she doing!?” Gibbs demanded of no one in particular as he saw Sid drag King into the fray, struggling towards the door.

“Cover them!” he ordered West and Murray. With their backs to the enemy, the two civilians would be mowed down in seconds. Unless he gave them something else to shoot at.

He broke from cover and ran straight at the enemy position, his finger squeezing his rifle’s trigger, spewing a torrent of burning metal bullets at the attackers.

Despite
himself, Raine couldn’t help but be impressed by Gibbs’ ferocious frontal assault. Not only did the ballsy action force the attackers to duck for cover, but it gave him the opportunity he needed. He darted out of the bedroom and slid to his knees next to Mrs Marley’s now unconscious form.

Dodging
bullets, the Team Leader hurled himself around the corner, out of range of the Americans weapon. He took a second to slam a fresh magazine of ammo into-

He couldn’t believe what he saw.

Right in front of him, only four feet away, having crawled across the landing, the blue eyed American perched above the Jamaican woman’s body, his hand extracting a book from between her enormous breasts. Realising he had been caught, the American looked up at him with a ‘hand-in-the-cookie-jar’ expression on his face and grimaced.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said.

The Team Leader aimed and fired but the American was fast. He rolled over the carcass of the soldier he had shot in the head and vanished back into the stinking bedroom.

Down below, the ugly soldier who had so brazenly assaulted his team’s position ran out of ammo and gave his men the opportunity they needed to scramble out of cover and resume firing down on the Americans.

But the Americans were no long important. He knew where the book was.

“Extraction team,” he called into his radio, “move in.” Then he ordered his two remaining soldiers to hold the Americans back before he dashed off, swinging around the door frame into the master bedroom-

The American was waiting for him!

As soon as he appeared, the blue-eyed devil lashed out with his foot, slamming it into his kneecap. He felt a bolt of pain as tendons tore and he went down hard. He swung his rifle towards his attacker but was taken aback by his speed. The American was faster, jolting his foot into his gun arm just as his finger closed on the trigger. He unleashed a hailstorm of bullets which shattered the window and blasted apart the wall. Chunks of plaster and shards of glass spat at him.

Then the American came in for the kill and the Team Leader knew he had less than a second to live. But he used his attacker’s own speed against him. Just as the American’s hand shot like a striking viper at his throat, his own closed upon his still holstered handgun. He didn’t have time to aim but the shot was lucky and slammed into the American’s chest.

Kevlar cracked and the American’s blue eyes went wide with shock. The sensory overload fried his attacker’s nervous system even though his armour distributed the worst of the impact across its plates and he dropped unconscious to the floor.

He staggered to his feet, reached down and scooped the leather bound book from the American’s hand and then aimed his handgun at his head.

Just then an almighty blast of searing heat picked him up and hurled him across the room.

Rudy
O’Rourke lay on his belly on the balcony. Only seconds earlier, after having head-butted an extremely large chunk of masonry when the north wall had exploded, he had fluttered back into consciousness.

His head pounded as though a Zulu warrior was beating it as a war drum but he nevertheless took in the chaos around him and pinpointed the soldiers standing not six feet away, firing down on his team mates below.

Armed with his SCAR Assault Rifle, fitted with a 40mm FN40GL grenade launcher which had fallen beside him, he had drawn a bead on the nearest soldier and fired.