Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 049

The ringing in Duke Calloway's ears was shrill and relentless, drilling through the fog in his skull like something alive.

He opened his eyes slowly. The parking garage swam into focus around him, lit by the erratic pulse of car alarms and the dying flicker of emergency lights. For a moment he simply lay there, staring up at the concrete ceiling, unable to immediately account for where he was or why everything hurt.

Then it came back. The elevator door. The cord. The fragmentation grenade dropping from the frame.

He shoved the weight off his chest and sat up.

The guard who had covered him was lying face-down across his legs, the man's entire back a ruin of shrapnel wounds, uniform shredded, blood pooled dark and wide beneath him. Duke looked at him for a long moment. Without that split-second decision, he would be the one lying there.

He pushed himself to his feet, legs unsteady, and patted himself down with shaking hands. Some surface cuts. A ringing head. Nothing that would kill him. He was, improbably, intact.

The rest of the team had not fared as well. Bodies were scattered across the garage floor in the radius of the blast, some still, some groaning. Several cars nearby had been punched through with shrapnel, their alarms cycling in overlapping wails that filled the enclosed space with noise.

Duke pulled out his phone and tried Panther. It rang out. He tried again. Nothing.

He stood very still for a moment, processing what that silence meant, then put the phone away and called up to the security team on the floors above. He wasn't moving from this spot. Not without knowing what was waiting between him and the exit. The thought of stepping around another corner and finding another improvised device made his hands shake all over again.

He told himself it was the concussion from the blast.

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In the fire stairwell, boots hammered concrete in rapid succession as more than a dozen security guards pushed upward toward the penthouse. They had reached the eighteenth floor and were still climbing hard, six of them out front with Uzi submachine guns held across their chests, taking the steps three at a time.

Duke had been clear with them before sending them up: two armed intruders, somewhere near the top of the building, with Julian Voss as the target. The implications didn't need spelling out. If the Young Master ended up dead on their watch, the best outcome any of them could hope for was unemployment. The worst was considerably more permanent.

Nobody was taking this casually.

________________________________________

On the twentieth floor, Cody crouched beside the fire door with his MP5 submachine g*n raised, one eye pressed to the narrow gap between the door and the frame. He could hear them coming, the rhythm of footsteps building from below, growing louder with each flight.

He waited.

The first guard passed the door at a run, then the second, then a steady stream of them moving upward in a column, focused entirely on the floors above. Cody counted quietly, watching the numbers thin as the tail of the group came into view. His finger rested against the trigger guard.

Ten. Nine. Three. Two. One.

He pulled the door open hard and stepped out into the gap.

The MP5 submachine g*n came up and he fired into the rear of the column, sweeping across the last four guards before any of them could process what was happening behind them. Even with the suppressor fitted, the full-auto burst in the enclosed stairwell was brutally loud, the sound bouncing off concrete walls and steel handrails in every direction.

Four guards went down in the span of two seconds.

"Contact behind!" The shout came from somewhere above, and the remaining guards scrambled for cover, pressing against the walls and firing back blindly toward the twentieth-floor landing. Cody was already gone, pulling back through the fire door and letting it swing shut between him and the return fire. He moved fast down the corridor and found a doorway to press into, letting the noise settle.

The guards above regrouped quickly. They began working back down toward the twentieth floor in a covering formation, moving carefully now, no longer running.

They never looked up.

On the twenty-third floor, Soren Ashcroft leaned out over the stairwell railing and looked straight down through the open shaft. The guards were directly below him, stacked on the stairs between floors twenty and twenty-two, their attention fixed downward.

He opened fire.

The MCX Rattler worked through the column from above, and Soren's accuracy at this angle, firing down through a tight vertical space, was something different from Cody's suppressing burst. Each shot was placed. Six guards dropped in under two seconds, the others scattering in sudden, total confusion as fire came from both above and below simultaneously.

Caught in a cross-fire with no clear direction to return it, the remaining five guards made the only decision available to them. They hit the twenty-first floor fire door and pushed through into the hotel corridor beyond, letting it slam shut behind them.

Soren was already moving. He came down the stairs at speed, pausing on the twenty-second floor landing only long enough to put a finishing shot into each of the downed guards and confirm they were out of the fight. Then he reloaded, pressing his back against the wall beside the fire door.

"Preparing to push the twenty-first floor corridor," he said into his earpiece.

Cody's response came immediately. Footsteps in the corridor below, then on the stairs, and Cody came up through the twentieth-floor door and took the steps two at a time until he was standing across from Soren on the twenty-first floor landing.

Soren had already switched weapons. The Remington M1100 was off his back and in his hands, the tube loaded with buckshot. He pressed himself flat against the hinge side of the fire door, stock pulled in tight against his shoulder, and looked at Cody.

Cody grabbed the door handle and pulled it open in one clean motion.

Soren went through low and fast, the Remington M1100's muzzle driving forward like a thrust as he crossed the threshold, stock snapping back to his shoulder in the same motion. The corridor stretched out ahead of him, long and dark, two guards visible at the far end still in motion.

He fired twice.

The first slug took the nearer guard through the chest and dropped him where he stood. The second caught the other guard just as he was turning, the impact driving him hard into the wall before he slid down it and went still.

Cody came in behind Soren and put two controlled shots into each downed guard as they advanced past them.

They moved up the corridor together, clearing the distance quickly. As they passed an open room door, Soren heard it before he saw it: the tight, controlled breathing of someone pressed against the wall just inside, trying not to make a sound.

He didn't slow down. He angled his body slightly, keeping his profile narrow, and fired through the open doorway without looking in.

The Remington M1100 had been running slugs since the penthouse. What was left in the tube now was buckshot, and buckshot in a hotel room at close range was not a precise instrument. The spread caught the guard behind the door across the upper chest and shoulder, spinning him off the wall and onto the floor. A second guard further inside the room brought his weapon up, and Soren stepped through the doorway and put the next round into his ballistic vest at near-contact distance. The force of it threw him straight back into the wall behind him, the impact knocking the air from his lungs and the g*n from his hands.

Soren stepped over the first guard, put a round into each of them, and walked back out into the corridor.

The Remington M1100 was empty. He slung it back across his shoulder, drew the MCX Rattler, and did a quick scan of the corridor in both directions.

One unaccounted for.

Cody answered the question from the doorway, three quick shots, and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

Soren looked back. The last one standing was down in the corridor just outside the room, a pistol still in his hand, unfired.

"Good work," Soren said.

Cody gave a small, slightly self-conscious nod, the kind of reaction that didn't quite fit the moment but was entirely genuine.

The corridor was quiet. The fight was over.

Then a phone rang.

It was coming from one of the guards on the floor inside the room. Soren walked over, crouched, and pulled the phone from the man's jacket pocket. The screen was lit up with an incoming call.

The name displayed was Duke.