Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 048

The muffled boom rolled up through the elevator shaft and reached Soren just as he and Cody were passing the private elevator entrance on their way to the fire stairs. He didn't need to wonder what it was.

"Duke moves fast," Soren said, with a short, humorless smile. "Didn't even bother confirming whether Julian was dead first."

Beside him, Cody was watching the signal bars on his phone climb back one by one. He exhaled slowly. "Signal's back."

"Good. Get Mark on the line. Tell him we need the stairwell cleared."

Cody reopened the group channel and spoke. "This is Cody. Soren and I have completed the objective. We're preparing to extract. Old Mark, we need you to cover the fire stairs."

A beat of silence, and then it was Evan's voice that came through instead. "You're finally back online. Mark said he was relocating his firing position a while ago, but he's gone quiet since then. Drone's also dead."

Cody glanced at Soren. "You think something happened to him?"

Soren was already moving toward the stairwell door. "We go down. Evan, keep trying to raise him. Don't worry about us up here."

"Copy."

Soren raised the MCX Rattler and pushed through the fire door. "Move. We fight our way out."

"Yes, sir."

On the thirteenth floor of a building several blocks away, the corridor was dark and still, and two figures were locked together in the kind of violence that had nothing elegant about it.

Two shots had already gone off. Something heavy had hit the floor. And a Glock 17 was spinning across the concrete, coming to rest several meters away near the far wall.

"Son of a—!" Mark Dalton snarled through his teeth, eyes red with fury and effort.

He'd been coming down the stairs when Panther had hit him from a blind angle, fast and without warning, the ambush so clean that Mark's rifle bag had gone tumbling down the stairwell before he could do anything about it. The pistol had lasted about four seconds after that.

Now it was knives.

Mark caught the wrist driving the blade toward his gut, stepped back, twisted from the hips, and threw Panther sideways with a leg sweep, putting him hard on the floor. He followed immediately, driving his knee down to pin the arm, trying to hyperextend the elbow before Panther could recover.

Panther didn't give him the chance. He hit the floor and was already moving, legs kicking out for leverage, wrenching his arm free and slashing twice in rapid succession as he came back upright. The blade was fast, faster than Mark could fully track in the low light, and when he pulled his arm back he found three deep cuts running across his left forearm, blood already running freely down to his wrist.

He barely registered the pain.

His right hand found the hunting knife strapped to his lower leg and drew it, settling into a forward grip, left arm raised, eyes locked on the figure in front of him.

Panther had gone still too. He stood in a loose, relaxed stance, his own blade held in a reverse grip, turning it slowly between his fingers, circling just outside engagement range. He moved like something that had done this many times before and found it neither difficult nor particularly interesting.

They tested each other with short probing cuts, neither committing, reading distance and timing. The knives passed close but didn't connect.

"You're getting old," Panther said in Thai, his tone conversational. "This line of work isn't kind to old men. Look at you, picking up new scars at your age."

Mark answered in the same language, his voice flat. "What kind of half-rate hired knife ambushes someone from behind? If you'd come at me straight, I'd have put you down before you got close."

Panther smiled. "Sure. So where's your g*n?"

Mark's eyes flicked involuntarily toward the Glock 17 lying against the far wall, and toward the stairwell where his rifle bag had disappeared.

That half-second was all Panther needed.

He closed the distance in a single explosive step, blade already moving. The exchange that followed was brief and brutal, arms crossing and redirecting, steel catching steel once with a sharp metallic ring before both men broke apart again.

When the distance opened up, Mark had a fresh cut across the front of his ballistic vest, the blade having found the gap between panels. Panther was unmarked.

Mark's right hand was trembling faintly around the knife handle. His breathing had gone ragged. He could feel it, the gap in conditioning that half a month of training with Soren's group hadn't been enough to close. His body was telling him the truth even as his mind refused to accept it: he was losing ground, and Panther knew it.

Panther resumed his circling, unhurried, the knife dancing between his fingers. He had the look of a man waiting for the inevitable, content to let his opponent exhaust himself before moving in for the finish.

Mark made his decision.

He stopped thinking about the knife entirely. His eyes fixed on Panther's center mass, and he lunged straight at him.

"Wide open," Panther said coldly, already responding, planting his back foot and absorbing the charge, left hand shooting up to clamp across Mark's throat and obstruct his vision while the right drove the blade into Mark's left side, just above the hip.

The knife went in deep.

"You son of a—!" The pain came out as a roar, but Mark's left hand was already clamping down on Panther's knife wrist, locking it in place, and every kilogram of weight he had drove forward, shoving Panther back across the corridor until Panther's balance broke and he went down.

Panther hit the floor with Mark on top of him, genuinely surprised for the first time. He hadn't expected the man to push through a stab wound. He tried to recover but Mark had the high position now, the hunting knife raised above his head, and he brought it straight down toward Panther's face.

Panther had no clean options. He released the blade in his right hand, twisted his head clear, and used the freed arm to lock both hands around Mark's right wrist. His legs came up and crossed over Mark's chest and throat, full body weight pressing down.

An armbar, applied with everything he had.

The snap was audible.

Mark's scream tore through the empty floor.

Panther felt the tension release and let a slow, satisfied breath out through his nose, the particular pleasure of a job completed cleanly crossing his face. He began to shift his weight, ready to finish it.

Then the gunshots came.

Four of them, close together, punching through his chest and abdomen in rapid succession.

The grip on Mark's broken arm vanished instantly.

Mark had done it deliberately. The whole charge, the whole reckless collision, the willingness to take a blade in the side rather than disengage, had been aimed at one specific thing: closing the distance to the Glock 17 lying against the wall. He'd kept track of exactly where it was through every second of the fight. When Panther pinned him, Mark had stretched his left arm across the floor and found it.

Now, left-handed, arm shaking, he pressed the muzzle against Panther's face and kept pulling the trigger until the slide locked back on an empty chamber.

He kept pulling anyway.

When the g*n finally registered as empty, Mark dropped it and drove one last kick into what remained of Panther's midsection, more reflex than intent.

"Damn it," he breathed. "Damn it, damn it."

Then the broken arm and the hole in his side caught up with him all at once, and his legs gave out. He slid down the support pillar behind him and sat on the floor, back against the concrete, chest heaving, forehead already beaded with cold sweat. The blood from his left side was coming steadily, soaking through his shirt and pooling against the floor beneath him.

The floor was very quiet now. The only sound was his own breathing, ragged and wet, and something small and plastic skittering against the concrete a short distance away.

He looked up.

His wireless earpiece had come off somewhere during the fight and was lying a few feet away. He dragged himself toward it with his good arm, every movement sending white light through his side, and got his fingers around it.

Evan's voice was already coming through, tight with alarm. "Old Mark? Old Mark, I heard shots. What's happening over there?"

Mark didn't have the breath for a full explanation. "Thirteenth floor," he managed. "I'm down. Badly hurt. Get someone to me..."

His fingers went slack. The earpiece fell.

He lay back against the floor, one hand pressed hard over the wound in his side, trying to slow what he could feel was a serious bleed. The pressure helped a little. Not enough.

His vision was already beginning to soften at the edges, the harsh outlines of the corridor going gauzy and indistinct.

"Damn it," he said, to no one in particular, his voice barely above a whisper. "Got too cocky this time..."