The Edge of Armageddon (14 page)

Hayden studied the monitors. With most of the station emptied and even agents personally attached to Moore sent into the streets to help, the local hub for Homeland Security felt stretched beyond the absolute limit. The unfolding events across the city had taken precedence over the reunion between Ramses and Price for now, but Hayden did note the lack of contact between the two, and wondered if there was actually nothing for either of them to say. Ramses was the informed one, the man with all the answers. Price was just another dollar-chasing dupe.

Kinimaka helped man the monitors. Hayden went over what had transpired previously between them, where the Hawaiian had advised against forcing information out of both men, and now questioned her reactions.

Was she right? Was he being pathetic?

Something to think through later.

Images flashed before her, all miniaturized upon dozens of square screens, in black-and-white and color vision, scenes of fender-benders and fires, flashing ambulances and terrified crowds. The panic among New Yorkers was being kept to an absolute minimum; although the events of 9-11 were still very much a fresh horror in their thoughts and influenced every decision. For so many people who had a 9-11 survival story, from those who didn’t go into work that day to those who were late or running errands, the dread was never far removed from their thoughts. Tourists bolted in terror, often toward the next jolt of surprise. Police began to clear the streets in earnest, brooking no objections from the ever-testy driving locals.

Hayden checked the time . . . barely 11 a.m. It felt later. The rest of the team were on her mind, the pit of her stomach rolling in acid for fear that they might lose their lives today.
Why the hell do we keep doing this? Day after day, week after week? The odds are less favorable every time we fight.

And Dahl in particular; how did the man stay at it? With a wife and two children the man must have a work ethic the size of Mount Everest. Her respect for a soldier had never been higher.

Kinimaka tapped one of the monitors. “Could be bad.”

Hayden stared. “Is that . . . oh shit.”

Stunned, she watched as Ramses burst into action, running over to Price and head-butting the man to the ground. The terrorist prince then stood over the struggling body and began to kick it mercilessly, each blow procuring an agonized scream. Hayden hesitated once more and then saw the pool of blood starting to spread across the floor.

“I’m going down.”

“I’ll come too.” Kinimaka started to rise but Hayden waved him back down.

“No. You’re needed here.”

Ignoring the stare she raced back down into the basement, beckoned the two guards stationed in the corridor, and opened the outer door to Ramses’ cell. Together, they burst in, guns drawn.

Ramses’ left foot smashed into Price’s cheek, breaking bone.

“Stop!” Hayden shouted in anger. “You’re killing him.”

“You do not care,” Ramses let fly again, shattering Price’s jaw. “Why should I? You make me share a cell with this filth. You want us to talk? Well, this is how my iron will is carried out. Perhaps now you will learn.”

Hayden ran to the bars, fitting the key to the lock. Ramses supported himself and then started stamping down upon Price’s skull and shoulders, as if searching for vulnerabilities and enjoying himself in the process. Price had stopped screaming by now and could only emit low groans.

Hayden flung the door wide, backed up by the two guards. She attacked without ceremony, pistol whipping Ramses behind the ear and shoving him away from Robert Price. She then fell to her knees beside the whimpering man.

“You alive?” She certainly didn’t want to appear too concerned. Men like him saw concern as a weakness to be exploited.

“Does that hurt?” She pressed against Price’s ribs.

The squeal told her that “yes, it did”.

“All right, all right, quit the mewling. Turn over, and let me see you.”

Price struggled to roll over, but when he did Hayden winced at the mask of blood, broken teeth and shredded lips. She saw an ear leaking crimson and an eye swollen so badly it might never work again. Against her better wishes, she grimaced.

“Shit.”

She headed for Ramses. “Man, I don’t even have to ask if you’re crazy, do I? Only a madman would do the things you do. Reason? Motive? Goal? I doubt it even crossed your fucked up mind.”

She raised the Glock, not actually fully prepared to take the shot. The guards at her side covered Ramses in case he came at her.

“Shoot,” Ramses said. “Save yourself a world full of pain.”

“If this were your country, your house, you would kill me right now, wouldn’t you? You would finish all this.”

“No. Where is the pleasure in such a quick kill? First I would destroy your dignity by stripping you and binding your limbs. Then I would break your will by random method, whatever felt right at the time. Then I would devise a way to kill you and bring you back, again and again, finally relenting when, for the one-hundredth occasion, you have begged me to end your life.”

Hayden stared, seeing the truth of it in Ramses’ eyes and unable to prevent a shudder. Here was a figure who would think nothing of detonating a nuclear bomb in New York City. Her attention was so rapt upon Ramses, as was her guards’, that they didn’t react to the shambling steps and ragged breaths stealing up behind them.

Ramses eyes flickered. Hayden knew they’d been tricked. She turned, but not fast enough. Price might be the Secretary of Defense but he had also enjoyed a distinguished military career and now brought what he remembered of it to bear. He slammed both hands down onto one of the guard’s outstretched arms, sending his pistol rattling to the floor, and then buried a fist into the man’s gut, bending him double. As he did this he fell, gambling that Hayden and the other guard wouldn’t shoot him, wagering on his position in more ways than one, and fell onto the gun.

And under his armpit he fired, the bullet taking the dazed guard through one eye. Hayden pushed aside the emotion and turned her Glock onto Price, but Ramses charged her like a bull riding a tractor, the full force of his frame paralyzing, slamming her back off her heels. Ramses and Hayden staggered clear across the cell, leaving Price a clear shot at the second guard.

He took it, using the confusion to his favor. The second guard died before the echo of the bullet that killed him. His body struck the ground at Price’s feet, watched over by the Secretary’s one functioning eye. Hayden struggled out from under Ramses’ great bulk, still holding her Glock, wild-eyed, lining up Price in her sights.

“Why?”

“I’m happy to die,” Price said miserably. “I want to die.”

“To help save this piece of shit?” She clambered across the floor, kicking out.

“I have one more play left,” Ramses murmured.

Hayden felt the ground shaking beneath her, the basement walls juddering and discharging puffs of mortar. The very cell bars started to shake. Resetting her hands and knees she steadied herself and looked up and down, left and right. Hayden glared at the lights as they flickered again and again.

Now what? What the hell is this . .
.

But she already knew.

The precinct was under ground assault.

Hayden gasped as the walls continued to shake. Ramses tried to stand but the room swayed all around him. The terrorist fell to his knees. Price watched in awe as the very angle of the room shifted, joints relocated and rejigged, inclines and slopes distorted by the second. Hayden escaped a falling chunk of mortar as part of the ceiling collapsed. Wires and ducting swung down from the roof, swaying like multi-colored pendulums.

Hayden went for the cell door, but Ramses had retained enough gumption to block her way. It was a moment before she realized she still held the Glock, and by then more of the ceiling was collapsing and the very bars themselves were bending inward, close to shattering.

“I think . . . you’ve overdone it,” Price panted.

“The whole goddamn place is coming down,” Hayden shouted into Ramses’ face.

“Not yet.”

The terrorist rose and lunged toward the far wall, clouds of mortar and chunks of concrete and plaster drifting and dropping down all around him. The outer door buckled and then burst open. Hayden grabbed a bar and hauled herself up and after the madman, Price shambling along behind. They had people up top. Ramses could only get so far.

With that thought Hayden searched for her phone but barely had time to keep up with Ramses. The man was fast, tough and ruthless. He stomped up the stairs, brushing aside the challenge of one cop and hurling him head-first at Hayden. She caught the guy, steadied him, and by then Ramses was pushing through the upper door.

Hayden pounded up in hot pursuit. The upper door stood wide open, its glass cracked, its jambs splintered. Of the monitor-room she could only see Moore at first, picking himself up off the floor and reaching out to correct some of the skewed-up screens. Others had been jarred from their moorings, coming off the wall and breaking as they landed. Kinimaka now rose with a screen falling from his shoulders, glass and plastic stuck in his hair. Two other agents in the room were pulling themselves together.

“What were we hit with?” Moore raced out of the room, spying Hayden.

“Where the hell is Ramses?” she yelled. “Didn’t you see him?”

Moore gaped. “He’s supposed to be in the cell block.”

Kinimaka brushed glass and other rubble from his shoulders. “I was watching . . . then all hell broke loose.”

Hayden cursed out loud, spying the stairs to her left and then the balcony ahead that overlooked the precinct’s main office area. There was no way out of the building other than to cross it. She ran toward the rail, grabbed hold, and studied the room below. The staff had been thinned out, as the terrorists had planned, but some workstations were occupied along the ground floor. Both men and women were picking their belongings up, but most were headed toward the main entrance with guns drawn as if expecting an assault. No way was Ramses among them.

Where then?

Waiting. Watching. This wasn’t . . .

“It’s not over!” she yelled. “Come away from the windows!”

Too late. The blitz began with a colossal explosion; the front windows imploded and part of the wall collapsed. Hayden’s entire viewpoint shifted, the roofline falling down. Rubble blasted across the station as the cops fell. Some climbed to their knees or crawled away. Others were hurt or discovered they were trapped. An RPG sizzled through the broken façade and impacted with the station desk, sending gouts of flame, smoke and wreckage fragments through the nearby area. Next, Hayden saw running legs as many masked men appeared, all with guns strapped to their shoulders. Ranging around they took aim at anything that moved and then, after careful contemplation, opened fire. Hayden, Kinimaka and Moore instantly fired back.

Bullets crisscrossed the demolished station. Hayden counted eleven men below before the wooden balcony that protected her began to get ripped to shreds. Rounds were passing through. Splinters and shards were fragmenting off, becoming dangerous slivers. Hayden fell back onto her behind and then rolled. Her vest caught two minor impacts, not bullets, and an intense pain in her lower calf told her that a wooden spike had struck unprotected flesh. Kinimaka also gasped and Moore rose to shrug off his jacket and remove shavings from his shoulder.

Hayden crawled back to the balcony. Through gaps she watched the assault team advance and heard guttural grunts as they called out for their leader. Ramses ran like a hunting lion, passing beyond Hayden’s field of vision in less than a second. She squeezed a shot off but already knew the bullet wouldn’t come close.

“Fuck!”

Hayden rose, glared at Kinimaka and started the sprint for the staircase. They couldn’t let the terrorist prince escape. On his word, the bomb would be detonated. Hayden had a feeling he wouldn’t wait long.

“Go, go!” she howled at Mano. “We have to get Ramses back now!”

The intersection right outside the precinct was normally bustling with people, the crossing crammed with pedestrians and the roads rumbling to the constant cadence of passing cars. Tall, many-windowed buildings usually rebounded the sounds of honking horns and laughter between them, an upsurge of human interaction, but the scene was very different today.

Smoke swirled across the road and billowed toward the sky. Window fragments littered the sidewalks. Hushed voices whispered around the hub as the shell-shocked and the injured picked themselves up or emerged from hiding. In the near-distance, sirens shrieked. The side of their building that fronted 3
rd
Avenue looked like a giant mouse had mistaken it for a lump of gray cheese and taken enormous nibbles out of it.

Hayden registered little of this, jogging out of the station and then slowing as she cast around for the escapees. Dead ahead, loping down 51
st
, they were the only people running—eleven men clad in black and the unmistakable Ramses—towering above the rest. Hayden raced across the rubble-strewn intersection, amazed at the stillness that surrounded her, the clamor of quiet, and the swelling clouds of dust that sought to blind her. Above, in patches between the roofs of the office buildings—the straight columns of concrete marking a perpendicular path like lines on a grid—the morning sunlight struggled to compete. The sun rarely hit the streets before midday, it would reflect off the windows for a while early on and burnish only the cross-streets, until it rose overhead and could find a path down between buildings.

Kinimaka, the faithful old dog, hurried along at her side. “That’s twelve of them,” he said. “Moore is following our position. We follow them until we get backup, agreed?”

“Ramses,” she said. “Is our priority. We get him back at all costs.”

“Hayden,” Kinimaka barely missed colliding with a parked van. “You’re not thinking this through. Ramses planned everything. And even if he didn’t—even if his whereabouts was somehow leaked to the fifth cell—it doesn’t matter now. It’s the bomb we have to find.”

“Another reason to nab Ramses.”

“He will never tell us,” Kinimaka said. “But maybe one of his disciples will.”

“The longer we can keep Ramses off-balance,” Hayden said. “The better chance this city has of making it through all this.”

They raced along the sidewalk, keeping to the few shadows offered by the high-rises, and trying to stay quiet. Ramses was at the center of his pack, issuing orders, and Hayden remembered now that, back at the bazaar, he used to call these men his “legionnaires”. Every single one was lethal and true to the cause, many steps above the regular mercs. At first, the twelve men hurried without much thought, gaining a little distance between themselves and the precinct, but after a minute they started to slow and two cast around to check for pursuers.

Hayden opened fire, the Glock barking angrily. One man fell and the others spun, shooting back. The two ex-CIA agents ducked behind a concrete planter, staying low. Hayden peered around its circular edge, unwilling to lose sight of her enemy. Ramses was down low, shielded by his men. Robert Price, she now saw, was being left to fend for himself and barely able to keep up, but still doing well for a battered, aging man. Her concentration switched back to Ramses.

“He’s right there, Mano. Let’s finish this. You think they’ll still detonate if he’s dead?”

“Shit, I dunno. Taking him alive would work better. Maybe we could ransom him.”

“Yeah, well, we gotta get close enough first.”

The cell took off again, this time covering their escape. Hayden ducked from planter to planter, chasing them along the street. Bullets whizzed between the two groups, shattering windows and impacting against parked vehicles. A series of strewn yellow cabs offered Hayden better cover, and a chance to get closer, and she didn’t hesitate to take it.

“C’mon!”

She made the first cab, slipped around the side and used another that had been abandoned side-on, to cover herself as she ran to the next. Windows exploded all around her as the cell sought to pick them off, but the cover meant Ramses’ new legionnaires never quite knew where they were. Four cabs later and they were forcing the runners to take cover, slowing them down.

Kinimaka’s earpiece crackled. “Help is five minutes away.”

But even that was uncertain.

Again, the cell ran as a compact group. Hayden gave chase, unable to safely close the gap now and also having to conserve ammo. It became obvious that the cell was also starting to worry about the possibility of backup arriving as their movements became more frantic, less careful. Hayden lined one of the rearguards up in her sights and missed only because he passed by a sculpted tree as she fired.

Pure bad luck.

“Mano,” she said suddenly. “Did we lose one of them somewhere?”

“Count again.”

She could only count ten figures!

He came out of nowhere, rolling stylishly out from under a parked car. His first kick was to the back of Kinimaka’s knee, making the big man buckle. As he kicked out, his right hand brought a small PPK around, the size making it no less deadly. Hayden smashed Kinimaka aside, her comparatively small frame as powerful and energized as any world-class athletes, but even that could only move the big man a little.

The bullet passed between them, stunning, breath-taking, the briefest moment of sheer hell, and then the legionnaire was shifting again. Another kick connected with Hayden’s knee and Mano continued his fall, slamming his chest into the same parked car their enemy had used for concealment. A grunt escaped him as he caught himself, now trying desperately to spin on his knees.

Hayden felt a stab of pain around her knee and, more importantly, a sudden lack of balance. She was more aware of the escaping Ramses and the nightmarish smorgasbord that entailed than the fighting legionnaire, and wanted with every ounce of her being to end this quickly. But the man was a fighter, a real scrapper, and clearly wanted to survive.

He fired the gun once more. Hayden was now glad she’d overbalanced because she wasn’t where he’d anticipated she would be. The bullet nevertheless grazed her shoulder. Kinimaka launched himself at the gun arm, burying it beneath a mountain of brawn.

The legionnaire relinquished it instantly, seeing the futility of struggling with the Hawaiian. He then withdrew a terrifying eight inch blade and swooped at Hayden. Awkwardly, she twisted, gaining a fraction of space to avert the deadly cutting edge. Kinimaka came up with the gun but the legionnaire anticipated it and swung far faster, the knife slashing hard across the Hawaiian’s chest, rendered trivial by the man’s vest, but still knocking him back onto his haunches.

The exchange gave Hayden the chance she needed. Removing her gun she guessed what the legionnaire would do—spin back and throw the knife underhand—so she sidestepped as she squeezed the trigger.

Three bullets took the man’s chest apart as the knife bounced off a car door and clattered harmlessly to the floor.

“Grab his Walther,” Hayden told Kinimaka. “We’re gonna need every bullet.”

Rising up, she saw the unmistakable group of armed men hustling along the street, several hundred yards distant. It was getting harder now—knots of people had emerged and were wandering along, heading home or checking out the damage or even standing exposed and flicking at their android devices—but the sight of Ramses’ head popping up every few feet was instantly recognizable.

“Now move,” she said, forcing aching, bruised limbs to work beyond their limits.

The cell vanished.

“What the—”

Kinimaka skirted a car as she vaulted over the hood.

“A large sports store,” the Hawaiian panted. “They ducked inside.”

“End of the line, Prince Ramses,” Hayden spat the last two words with disdain. “Hurry it up, Mano. Like I said—we have to keep the bastard busy and his attention away from that nuke. Every minute, every second, counts.”