Warlord Of The Pit. James Axler
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stared at the Administrative Monolith with wide, shocked eyes. As they watched, it swayed from side to side. Pieces of it fell away. Then the entire tower broke apart and collapsed with an earsplitting roar.
Tons of rock plunged downward, scattering in exploding fragments. A reverberating, extended thunderclap rolled as the tower cascaded down in a contained avalanche. Thick clouds of dust billowed up, roiling and rising, enveloping the interior of the ville like a gigantic ball of filthy cotton.
Then Philboyd coughed and fanned the grit-laden air. “I guess it’s time to call in the three heads of Cerberus.”
Chapter 1
Malaysia, the island of Pandakar
The sky rolled with thunderclaps and flashed with bolts of lightning.
So this is the way it’ll end, Kane thought wearily. With a bang so big you couldn’t even hear a whimper.
Lifting his head, he squinted against the glare of a lightning flash. In the white-blue electric blaze, the night shadows crawling over Pandakar’s waterfront looked like caricatures of black animals prowling for prey. Although the men creeping through the rain weren’t animals, they were most definitely on the prowl for prey. He figured at this point the odds were ten to two.
Wind-driven sheets of rain fell in a torrential downpour. Gusts of wind tore at the distant tree line. Another stroke of lightning split the indigo tapestry of the sky, turning the hulking ships docked at the piers into ghostly apparitions. Their rain-slick hulls glistened as if as they were painted with quicksilver.
Kane crouched beside the gaping rectangular hole that had been a window and a fair-size portion of stone wall before the warhead of an RPG had blown it inward in a hailstorm of rubble.
The rain suddenly increased in volume and tempo, sluicing down the sloping roof and through a hole in it. Kane wiped at the warm fluid seeping down the left side of his face and glanced ruefully at the diluted blood shining on his fingertips. He hadn’t even been aware of the superficial cut, inflicted during the brief but fierce firefight that had raged all along the docks until ten minutes ago.
He wasn’t surprised that the mission had gone sour so quickly, but he raged at the concept that his life and Grant’s might end in such a stinking place for such a foolish cause.
“Shit,” muttered Grant, who knelt on the floor across from him. He glared at the leak in the ceiling, then out through the gaping hole in the wall. “How much longer do you think this storm will last?”
Kane shook his head. “It’s monsoon season in this part of the world. It might last all night or it could stop in five minutes.”
Knee joints popping, Grant heaved himself to his feet and peered out at the rain-buffeted darkness. He could see little of the Pacific island called Pandakar beyond the immediate waterfront area.
Grant loomed six feet four inches tall in his stocking feet. He wore a Kevlar vest over a black T-shirt, tricolor camo pants and thick-soled jump boots, which added almost an inch to his impressive height. The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds.
His short-cropped hair was touched with gray at the temples, but it didn’t show in the gunfighter’s mustache that swept out fiercely around both sides of his tightlipped mouth. Behind his lantern jaw and broken nose lay a mind of keen intelligence that possessed a number of technical skills, from field-stripping and reassembling an SAR 80 blindfolded to expertly piloting every kind of flying craft, from helicopters to the Annunaki-built transatmospheric vehicles known as Mantas.
A Colt Government Model .45 pistol hung from his right hip in a paddle holster, and he held a Copperhead in his right hand. The abbreviated subgun was slightly less than two feet long, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, and the extended magazines held thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bull pup design, allowing for one-handed use.
An optical image intensifier scope and a laser autotargeter were mounted atop the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperhead to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts.
“I don’t know who is who out there,” Grant murmured, “but I don’t care to be caught in a cross fire again.”
“Me either,” Kane agreed. His blue-gray eyes took in the details of the slithering shadows in the rain while his mind kept the raw worry about Brigid Baptiste from preoccupying him.
Dressed similarly to Grant in a black T-shirt, Kevlar vest and camo pants tucked into high-laced combat boots, Kane was a tall man, lean and rangy. He resembled a wolf in the way he carried most of his muscle mass in his upper body. His thick dark hair, showing just enough chestnut highlights to keep it from being a true black, hung in damp strands. A faint hairline scar stretched like a piece of white thread against the sun-bronzed, clean-shaved skin of his left cheek.
A pair of Bren Ten autopistols were snugged in shoulder holsters, and he cradled a Copperhead subgun identical to Grant’s. A canvas rucksack at his feet held spare ammunition clips and other equipment.
Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. Its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder subcutaneously embedded in the bone.
Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, a Commtact would still provide a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.
Touching a tiny stud, he opened the channel to Brigid, but only a crackling hash of static filled his head. Scowling, he reached inside the rucksack and brought out a compact set of night-vision binoculars. Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses, which optimized the low light values, the riverbank seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only black had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green.
Craning his neck, Kane looked toward Captain Saragayn’s treasure ship, the Juabal Hadiah, the Mountain of Wealth. Even at over a mile away, the ship looked monstrous. The vessel was less of a less of a seagoing vehicle than a huge anchored pavilion, sprawling across several acres of harbor water.
The Juabal Hadiah rose to exaggerated heights at stern and bow. The stern was built up in several housed decks, one atop the other. The hull crawled with intricate designs carved everywhere above the waterline, from Asian ideograms to representations of fish and dragons. The prow carried a huge figurehead painted, like the balance of the ship, in gaudy hues of red, yellow and gold. The effigy was of a naked red-haired woman, at least fifteen feet long, with an eighty-eight-inch bust.
Cupping his hands around the lenses of the binoculars to shield them from the rain, Kane tried to find movement on the decks. He saw nothing, whether due to the distance or the rain, he wasn’t sure. However, he could make out the huge flag emblazoned with the image of a blazing skull superimposed over a crossed sword and a rifle.
“Pirates,” he muttered.
“What?” Grant asked, raising his voice a trifle to be heard over the drumming of the rain.
“Pirates of the goddamn South China Sea,” Kane said loudly. “Who would have figured?”
A gust of wind blew streamers of water into his face. Swallowing a curse, Kane rose and went to stand beside the big man.
“We should’ve figured,” Grant commented sourly. “Who better?”
Kane assumed the query was rhetorical and so didn’t respond. In the world he and Grant shared, the impossible happened