Where they fall, p.31
WHERE THEY FALL, page 31
The man raised his hands, blood stained and quivering. Then a woman appeared, followed by another. Both women looked terrified. They wore grey robes, tied at the waist with cotton sashes of the same colour. Underneath the robes, they appeared to be naked.
No one said anything. Cole and Blake stared down the corridor. The three captives stared right back. The howling alarm continued to screech. Cole studied the man. He had memorised the Facebook profile picture of Lachlan Harvey. The hallway shrank around him. For a moment, as realisation consumed him, the alarm ceased to exist. Cole lowered his weapon and put his palm against the hallway wall for support.
“Harvey? Lachlan Harvey?”
Underneath the frightened façade and beneath the layers of trauma, Lachlan Harvey formed a smile. “Oh, thank God. Please tell me you’re the good guys.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Cole and Blake rushed forward.
They forgot about their fatigue. They forgot about hunger, thirst or the corruption in the force. Nothing else mattered, nothing but the three people standing anxiously before them. They had done it. They had found Lachlan Harvey.
“You’ve been a hard man to find,” Cole said, placing his weapon back in its holster.
Cole approached Lachlan Harvey as Blake approached the girls.
“Annabelle? Jules?” They nodded tentatively, exhausted from their hardship. Blake ignored her discomfort and hugged them both. The human contact, the relief that they were no longer alone, caused the floodgates to open. Annabelle and Jules both cried shattered tears. Overwhelmed by the ordeal, and even more so that they might actually get out alive, they let down what mere fragments they had left of their emotional guard. The cries echoed through the hall.
Cole reached out to Lachlan. “I’m Detective Cameron Cole with the Victoria Police Department. We’re here to get you home.”
Lachlan Harvey smiled. Despite the pain and suffering. Despite the trauma he had inflicted on others, no one could question the authenticity of his grin.
“This is a little bit surreal,” Cole said. “We travelled halfway across the country to find you. There was always a little part niggling in the back of my thoughts that we never would. So forgive me if I seem a little shocked.”
“How did you find us?” Lachlan asked.
“It’s a long story. How about we tell you all about it when we get out of here? Are there others?”
“There are,” Lachlan said. “But you won’t believe where they’ve come from.”
“We already know,” Blake interrupted, still clinging to Jules. “We know all about Project Alpha.”
“How?”
“Let’s just say that loyalty has layers. Anyway,” Blake said as she turned to Annabelle, standing in the hall beside her. “There’s someone in here with us that’s dying to see you.”
Annabelle’s eyes lit up. “Jake? Jake is here? Jake is alive?”
Blake nodded. “He’s one tough bastard. Come on. Let’s go find him.”
Ryan paced the quiet garage, holding onto Watson’s palm sized six shooter revolver. He gripped it tightly in his sweaty hand. Alana leaned beside the Hilux. She placed her elbows on her knees and rested her face in her open palms. She cried fake tears. Her performance had Ryan fooled. He approached her, squatted down, and placed a platonic hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe now. It won’t be long until we’re out of here. It won’t be long until this is all just a twisted memory.”
Alana scoffed. “More like a nightmare.”
Ryan nodded. “Tell me about it. I was just doing my normal route to Marree and back. I’ve seen enough in the past two days to put me off truck driving for the rest of my life.” He paused as he stared indifferently towards the elevator. “I even ran a guy over… on purpose.”
“We all do what we need to do,” Alana said. There was a bitterness that embodied her words. Ryan thought it sounded a little off.
They both turned their heads towards the truck’s tray. A thump. Two thumps. Then a muffled noise came from within.
Alana pounced up and moved away from Hilux. She could have sworn it was a voice. “What in God’s name was that?”
Ryan stalled. He looked around.
“Ryan? What the hell is in the back?”
“We have… we have captives.”
“Captives?”
“It’s a long story, but there are people in high places that are in on this. We kind of acquired some of them?”
“Jesus. There are people in the back? How many?”
“Two. One’s hurt pretty badly, though. He’s a federal cop. The other is some Victorian cop. Someone high up. And we left someone out on the ramp. Some Asian dude called Victor.”
Alana swallowed her surprise. She did her best to mask the rising elation. Opportunity. A chance for redemption. She needed to play this the right way. Alana had always got what she wanted. She couldn’t let this be any different.
“There are cops involved?” Her voice sounded weak. She swayed on unsteady feet and rolled her eyes back, making sure Ryan saw it.
“Apparently. Like I said, I’m just a truck driver caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hey? Are you sure you’re okay?”
Alana winced and dropped to her knees. She placed her hand on her swollen head and forced out a defeated whine. She grimaced and began sobbing.
“Shit,” Ryan stepped forward again, crouching down beside the narcissistic scientist. “What can I do to help?”
He placed his hands on her shoulders to support her; to stop her from passing out and hitting her injured head on the concrete floor. He gripped her by the biceps and tried to lower her into a more comfortable position. Alana utilised the brief moment of Ryan’s vulnerability. He occupied both hands, gripping Alana’s narrow arms. She yanked the six-shooter from the waist of Ryan’s dirty stonewashed jeans and before he even realised she had removed it, she placed it to Ryan’s temple and pulled the trigger.
The garage’s acoustics amplified the gunshot, reverberating off the concrete walls like a cannon blast. The bullet exited Ryan’s temple, taking half his brain with it. He fell sideways, collapsing onto the floor in an unnatural display of sprawled limbs. His wide eyes stared towards the garage ceiling as life left him.
Alana spat on the dead truckie as she lifted herself to her knees. “The wrong place at the wrong time indeed.”
She raced to the back of the Hilux and pulled open the tailgate. It stunk of sweat and piss inside.
“You sorry bunch of bastards,” she said with a cynical laugh. “Looks like you all owe me one.”
FIFTY-NINE
Talbert checked the guard on the control room floor for vitals.
His shallow breathing was steady. The guard on the other side of the glass didn’t take his eyes off the two intruding soldiers. He gripped his M1 pistol and scowled, refusing to let defeat stake its claim.
“Where are the prisoners?” Drysdale asked through the glass.
“We don’t have prisoners here,” Danny replied with a sinister smile.
The round door leading to the garage rolled open with a hydraulic hiss. Talbert spun on his heel with his weapon raised.
“Bloody hell. What happened here?”
Joel Watson and Jake Gibbs entered the control room.
“We found these guys like this, sir. The guy on the floor is breathing, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing,” Watson remarked. “What about the two dead guys in the hall?”
“We did that, sir. You ordered us to strike first.”
Watson turned to the black-clad guard inside the cell. “Who did this?”
“I’m not telling you shit,” Danny snarled. “You guys are not getting out of here alive.”
Jake, seemingly unbothered by the amount of blood pooling at his feet, stepped toward the glass and placed both hands on the barrier. “You’re in no position to make threats you piece of shit. Where are the girls you and your piss-ant friends took from the desert?”
Danny’s expression changed. “That’s what this is about?”
“Where are they?”
“Rot in hell.” He laughed and raised his middle finger. Jake Gibbs slammed his fists against the glass in frustration. He turned to Talbert and Drysdale. “This guy knows where Annie is. We need to do what we need to do to get him to talk.”
Fire burned in Jake’s eyes. Flames of retribution flickered in his stare. The soldiers turned from Jake to their superior officer. Joel Watson opened his mouth to speak when the small door on the far side of the control room rolled opened. The three soldiers dropped to their knees and took aim. They relaxed their positioning as they saw Cameron Cole and Rachael Blake limp into the room.
Jake pulled his fists from the glass. He stared across the control room as he saw Annabelle step in behind Blake. Her matted and sweaty hair clung to the side of her face. She wore a grey dressing gown, her clammy bare feet sticking to the tiled floor with each step. Her eyes locked on his.
Nothing else in that room existed. The blood and death were trivial. The crowd of detectives and soldiers was trivial. Jake leaped over the dying guard on the floor and took Annabelle in his arms. He lifted her from the tiles in a firm embrace as tears poured from his blood-shot eyes. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. They embraced each other with fierce passion. Then, in an act of selfless realisation, of mourning for his fallen friend, Jake grabbed Jules and pulled her into the embrace. He locked his powerful arms around both girls as the three of them sobbed.
“I’m never letting go,” he whispered. “I’m never letting either of you go.”
Cole turned away. This was their moment. They didn’t need five sets of eyes staring at their reunion. Blake felt the same.
“How did you find us?” Annabelle asked, still holding on to Jake with a vice-like grip.
“It’s a long and ugly story, babe. Are you two okay? Did they hurt you?”
“We will live,” Jules said. “Let’s just get out of this fucked up place.”
Lachlan stood idle beside Blake on the other side of the room. The reunion pulled at his heartstrings. He couldn’t wait to get out of his underground prison and reunite with his loved ones. “I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
SIXTY
The alarm still shrieked throughout the facility.
A monitor screen on the other side of the equator, in the small, musty office in Hong Kong, displayed the countdown timer. Eight minutes remained until the failsafe would launch and detonate the explosives built into the walls of the underground facility.
With a sense of jovial victory, the five intruders and three freed prisoners paced along the tiled hall of Area B. They had almost reached the garage.
Drysdale used the fob he had taken from the guard on the control room floor to open the security seal between Area B and the garage cavern. Like the others, he couldn’t part with a warm sense of success. They had lifted the weight from their shoulders. They came into the lab with a goal. Find Lachlan Harvey. Find the girls. They had done that.
Lachlan explained to the others that the facility had gone into lock down several hours prior and many members of staff would still be in their quarters. Cole vowed to blow the lid on the facility and get a full STAR group to evacuate the staff… and then ship them straight to prison.
Drysdale stepped into the garage first. Before anyone noticed the chunks of Ryan’s brain splattered against the side of the Hilux, Jasper Holland raised an AR-15 from his position beside the van and fired. A high calibre hollow point hit Drysdale in the chest, the force of the gunshot lifting him off the ground and slamming him into the concrete wall. The warm sense of success disappeared quicker than footprints in the red desert sand.
Everyone ducked as bullets ricocheted off the wall beside them. Splinters of concrete flicked through the air, the shrapnel itself a weapon. Those at the back of the group retreated into the safety of the hall. Watson and Cole, now exposed at the front of the group, dropped to the ground and pulled their weapons out. Cole wasted no time emptying an entire clip towards the vans. Glass shattered, tyres blew, and shrapnel flew. Holland and Alana ducked behind the van, pinned down by the barrage of bullets. Utilising the opportunity, Watson dashed across the exposed garage and hid behind an overcrowded shelving unit bulging with cardboard boxes and catering supplies.
“What the hell?” Blake said from inside the hall.
“Shit,” Jake said. “It must be the woman. She must be one of them.”
“What woman?” asked Lachlan Harvey.
“We rescued some woman from a cell. English accent. Curly brown hair.”
“Did she have a head injury?”
Jake nodded.
“Jesus Christ!” Lachlan yelled over the alarm. “She’s in charge of this entire operation. She’s a maniac.”
Watson crawled behind the shelving until he had a better vantage point. Cole ejected the empty magazine from his pistol and pulled a spare from his belt. The busy thumping of Cole’s heartbeat drowned out the wailing alarm.
Holland and Alana didn’t need to do the maths. The intruders outnumbered them. They knew that. Survival instinct kicked in. Alana fired the six-shooter at the front tyre of both the vans, making sure they wouldn’t be followed.
“I’ll go for the elevator door,” she forced out through heavy breathing. “You get the truck.”
“You want me to just run past those guys and get in the truck?”
“There’s no other way, Jasper. We can’t flee on foot. We’ll die out there. If we take the truck, then they’ll be left in the desert to die. It’s the only way!”
“This is so fucked,” Holland yelled through clenched teeth. He raised the AR-15 over the bonnet of the van and fired, missing Cole by mere metres and the bullets ripped chunks out of the concrete.
“Get to the truck!” Alana demanded as she took off behind the vans at a sprint. She reached the elevator without incident and used her key card to open the double doors. She leapt inside, protecting herself from both Cole and Watson’s weapons. Her position allowed her to see Holland as he dashed across the concrete and threw himself into the driver’s seat of the Hilux. He slammed his fists against the steering wheel and leaped out of the driver’s seat.
“Shit!”
“Looking for something?” Watson yelled from behind the shelving unit with the truck’s keys nestled in the pocket of his fatigues. Holland cursed and raced towards the elevator. He dived onto the wide steel platform and stopped beside the project’s head scientist.
“What the hell, Jasper?”
“Come on, let’s go,” he spat through heavy breathing.
“We need the truck. We can’t just walk across the desert. We’ll die in a day!”
“Our chopper is four k’s away. Five at the most. We can walk five kilometres, Alana. Come on!”
“What about Jonesy? He’s in the back of the truck?”
“Too bad for him,” Holland said, without considering the fate of his colleague. “It’s time to get the hell to Hong Kong.”
Cole stood up as he watched his superior officer flee. Watson joined him as the others emerged from the hall. Cole watched the elevator door roll closed, concealing both Holland and the English woman inside.
“Dammit!”
He turned to Lachlan. “Is there another way out of here?”
“I don’t know. They treated me like a prisoner.”
“Get the elevator remote from the truck,” Blake suggested.
Watson nodded and raced across the garage towards the driver’s door that Holland had left wide open. It was only then, after the chaos and gunfire, that Watson saw Ryan’s body on the dirty concrete. Jake saw him, too. He rushed over and squatted beside his saviour. He placed his hand on Ryan Bannon’s chest. The man had single-handedly saved Jake’s life. Without intending to, his involvement had saved Cole and Blake from execution. His involvement, his relationship with Joel Watson, had allowed them to get inside the facility and save Lachlan Harvey and the girls. Without Ryan Bannon, none of it would have happened.
“We can’t leave him here,” Jake yelled. A strange sense of déjà vu swept over him. Only two days before, he had felt the same thing as he looked at his best friend in the desert dirt. He relived his trauma as he scooped Ryan’s body up and shoved him into the backseat of the Hilux.
Watson jumped into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. The diesel engine grumbled to life, spitting black smoke from the exhaust. He turned around and headed for the elevator. He pressed the remote control mounted in the foot well.
SIXTY-ONE
The doors rolled open.
Two brief minutes remained until the failsafe countdown came to a fiery end. Alana and Holland took off at a sprint. They made it fifty metres before they stopped again, not yet halfway up the secluded ramp. Victor lay in the shade, bound and moaning. He had soiled his tailored navy-blue suit. Dirt, grime, blood, and piss covered the expensive garments. Hundreds of flies crowded around the wound on his shoulder like desperate animals in the savannah that stumbled across a waterhole. With no free hands, he couldn’t shoo them away. He craned his neck as his colleagues stopped beside him.
“Help me,” he pleaded. “Get these damn zip ties off my wrists!”
Alana grabbed Jasper Holland by the arm. He turned his attention to her and looked into her narrowed eyes. “Come on,” she demanded. “We don’t have time.”
Alana started up the ramp, dragging Inspector Holland with her.
“Wait,” Victor pleaded. “You cannot leave me here. Alana!”
“Remember,” Alana yelled down the ramp. “We’re all expendable!”
Victor roared. He yelled profanities. He yelled threats. None of it mattered out there. When the sun could kill you in a day, what weight did a desperate threat hold? Alana took off with Holland across the depression in the sand, their footprints cracking the crusty saltpan as they ran, abandoning Victor like the cowards they were.
