Chapter 4
They bundled Danny off to the basement, with stern orders to not step out of the safe room until one of them came to get him. They didn't mention what he ought to do if none of them returned. They didn't want him to worry more than he already was, sensitive as he was to the danger of the situation, despite his youth.
They did, however, make sure to hit the button that would send Q an encrypted message that the Drake home was under attack. At least then Q would know to get Danny out of the safe room if the three men failed.
Damien climbed up the basement stairs and shut the door, the sight of his son's frightened eyes burned into his vision. He paused to steady his nerves, disguising it by checking the security on the door, but Stuart saw through his ruse immediately.
He put a hand on Damien's shoulder. "It'll be fine. Be like old times again, eh? Hope you're not too rusty." Stuart's hand tightened and he met Damien's eyes. "He'll be okay," he said softly.
Damien's lips twisted. "Am I doing the right thing? Did I make the right decision, drawing them here?"
Stuart cocked a brow at him. "Not like you to second-guess yourself, Damien."
"It's only ever been myself to think about, Stuart." Damien sighed. "Not anymore."
"What's the alternative?" Stuart asked. "You said it yourself: they would have come for you sooner or later anyway, anywhere you could have gone, and this way you're on familiar ground. They won't be taking you by surprise, either. We'll prove that even if you're out of the game, you've still got friends. We kick their arses, and the rest of them'll leave you alone. They'll know not to mess with you and Danny."
Damien nodded and reached up to pat Stuart's shoulder in thanks. "You're right, of course."
"I'm always right."
"I can point out at least a hundred instances when you were wrong," Damien shot back dryly, making his friend laugh.
He led the way up to his bedroom, where Sam was keeping an eye on the road leading to the house with a sniper rifle. Due to his leg wound, he was tasked with picking off as many enemy attackers as possible before they got to the house.
"No sign of them yet," Sam reported.
Just then, a car drove up, followed by a line of black vans.
"Spoke too soon?" Stuart quipped.
Damien cocked his rifle. The set of his shoulders was predatory, his grin sharklike.
"It's showtime, boys."
. . . . .
Downstairs, Danny scrambled up onto the chair in front of the surveillance station. His godfather had explained how everything was set up, and he wanted to test it out. He wanted to...see.
He eagerly flicked the switches up and turned on the computers, setting the machinery humming. The monitors flickered on, showing different angles of the area in and around the house.
He could see his father and the two other men at their stations, waiting patiently for the attack, tense and alert, like the large jungle cats and wolves he had seen before on documentaries. They looked like...predators.
Men in dark clothes poured out of the black vans. Danny bit his lip. Three men were going to fight against all those people?
His father had told Danny about fabulous battles he had fought before, and so had his father's friends, but he knew that the stories were all very much edited for the sake of his young ears.
He had no idea if three double-oh agents - with one lame and another now a civilian - would be able to take down what looked like a hundred men who seemed, at least to his unseasoned eye, to be well-trained and definitely well-armed.
Suddenly, a shot rang out and one of the dark figures on the black and white screen stumbled back and fell. Then another. And another.
Danny stared, horrified - mesmerized - unable to take his eyes off of the screen. He waited for the men to get up, but in vain. Dark stains - blood, his mind told him - spread out around the...the still bodies.
More and more men fell, one after another, taken down by the sniper shots and the hidden mines and the corrosive acid traps, and there were more men running around shooting at the windows and throwing grenades at the house.
The windows, bulletproof as they were, were not grenade-proof, and they shattered. Men poured into the house like ants.
It was impossible to hear it all from the basement, with all of the protection around it, but Danny knew that the little cottage would be shaking and shuddering from the force of the explosions.
It was odd, seeing the blasts and the men screaming on the small screens of the surveillance station, but not hearing any of it.
Sound.
Wait a minute…
Danny's father and his friends were wearing comm units so they could communicate with each other. That meant that...yes...there.
Danny scrambled onto his knees to reach and punched a few buttons on the console, squinting in concentration. The speakers fizzled to life with a buzz of static.
"Having fun, Damien?"
On one of the screens, Uncle Stuart grinned wolfishly, and his teeth glinted white.
Danny saw his father shoot an assailant, then elbow another coming up from behind him in the face before shooting him in the chest without even looking.
"God, yes."
Danny noted that his father looked livelier than he had ever seen him before.
Stuart laughed, not pausing in his fight against a large, brawny man even bigger than him. "Missed this, did you?"
He gutted his opponent with a large knife and pulled it out, then turned the body to swipe the blade across the thick throat. Dark blood spurted out. The man stumbled forward and fell.
"A bit." Damien shot two men in quick succession and dropped his empty gun before the bodies had even hit the ground. "Not too much."
He ducked and snapped his assailant's neck in one fluid motion. "It doesn't even begin to compare with bedtime snuggles and sticky kisses. Wouldn't give that up for the world."
The violence on the screens contrasted profoundly with the casual conversation, and Danny wondered how the men could even think of words to say while fighting like that. It was like a movie, only he knew that it was happening now, and that it wasn't fiction.
It was real.
The machine guns on the roof began running. Danny glanced at another screen to see Sam with the control box in his hand, expertly mowing down rows of men and demolishing the vehicles they had come in.
Then he snapped his attention back to his father and Uncle Stuart.
"What if you could have both?"
"Can't. Won't. He gets all of me. I promised him that."
Danny didn't recall such a promise ever having been made to him, but then again, his memory didn't extend into his pre-verbal days.
He felt a surge of warmth for his father, who had obviously loved this action-packed, adventurous line of work, but who had dropped it all the moment Danny had been born. For him. Because he loved him that much.
Danny bit his lip.
There were so many men. Even with the number of corpses piling up, more and more men continued to swarm in.
He felt so helpless here in this securely-locked safe room.
He wanted to help. Couldn't he?
Well, why couldn't he help? It was his house, too. And he loved his father as much as he loved Danny, didn't he? And Uncle Stuart and Sam, too. Sam was nice and had offered to beat up the mean kids in the village for him, even though he had only just met Danny.
Daddy was protecting them in the best way he knew how, and Danny could help in his own way, too.
The logic was perfectly sound.
He scampered down from the chair and headed for the locked door between the safe room and the rest of the house.
. . . . .
It seemed that the less-experienced men had been sent in first, like cannon fodder.
Smart.
It was getting more difficult now to take down their opponents. These men were well-trained, experienced mercenaries, and it seemed that they had been waiting for their prey to tire and weaken before stepping in.
Damien took another hit to the face from a Czech merc with a gap between his front teeth and stumbled to the floor, dazed and winded.
The man stepped forward, grinning his gap-toothed garlicky smile, knife in hand, and to his right, another man (probably former Russian army, his mind automatically provided) laughed.
"So this is the great Damien Drake," he sniggered, proving Damien's mental assessment correct by his accent. "007. Not so great now, hey?" He spat.
Damien, never one to stay down, struggled unsteadily back onto his feet, panting, with the blood streaming down his face.
Stuart was fighting his own opponent in the other room, and the machine guns were still going upstairs, telling him that Sam was otherwise occupied. He was on his own.
Well, he had faced worse odds. He was terribly out of practice, though he was not too badly out of shape. Chasing after an active toddler day in and day out did wonders as a cardio routine, especially when said toddler liked to climb bookshelves and dangle from upper-floor windows out of mere curiosity while testing the veracity of Newton's law of gravitation.
The thought of his son gave him the energy for another round. For Danny.
He smirked at his two opponents and wiped the blood from his lips.
"Maybe not," he conceded in response, looking casually down at his fingers as though examining the blood, then added, "But I am nowhere as bad as you. Really," he chided, "you should know better than to leave your backs open to attack."
As predicted, the numbskulls looked behind them, only for Damien to lunge forward towards the Russian with the knife he had palmed earlier. He plunged it into the man's gut, twisted, then shoved him backwards.
The other man whirled around in surprise (and terror), his own knife outstretched, only to suddenly find a dying Russian skewered on the end of it.
"Thanks for the help," Damien quipped, pushing the Russian's body into his partner. Then, when the Czech mercenary stumbled to his knees, he grabbed his shoulder and turned him. The blood-stained blade slashed across the shocked man's throat, and he died with a wet gurgle.
"Still got it, old man," Stuart said from the doorway. He had evidently finished his own battles, and had found no other attackers to take down.
Damien panted, eyes flickering around the room for signs of danger, and seeing only carnage. "Oh, do shut up, Thomas," he growled. "Clear down here?"
"Yep."
"Upstairs, then."
He staggered out to the hall, where he and Stuart met Sam limping down the stairs.
"All clear upstairs," Sam reported. He had blood trickling down from his hairline, and a slice had been cut into the side of his borrowed shirt.
Damien raised his eyebrows. The machine guns were still going.
"Oh, of course," Sam said, and reached for the remote control box at his hip with a wince. "Sorry about that."
Stuart snorted. "He loves wanton destruction as much as you did, Damien," he said. "Drives Q and M bonkers."
"He's only keeping up the good 007 name," Damien laughed, relieved. They had done it.
The gunfire stopped, leaving sudden silence. The abrupt absence of sound rang in their ears.
Then, the phone rang: Aircraft approaching.
The three men looked at each other and groaned.
They rearmed themselves in Damien's office and took care of their wounds, wrapping and taping what they could— enough to hold them over until they could sit down and get actual treatment.
Sam was tying off a sluggishly-bleeding cut on Stuart's arm when suddenly, they heard a shrill scream from outside.
"Daddy!"
Damien's heart froze in his chest.
"Danny."
. . . . .
They rushed outside, forgetting their exhaustion and pain in their desperation to get to the little boy.
A man was limping towards the car that Sam and Stuart had arrived in, which was parked in front of the house and had somehow managed to avoid complete destruction.
In his arms, he held a desperately squirming toddler.
When he heard the three men burst out of the house, he turned towards them, using Danny as a shield.
"Let me go or I kill him!" he shouted, holding a knife to the pale, delicate throat.
Danny whimpered with fear.
Damien, Stuart, and Sam slid to a stop, their guns aimed at the man, but unable - no, unwilling - to shoot.
A deep, thrumming sound filled the air, getting louder with each progressive moment.
Helicopters.
"Put the guns down!" the man shouted over the sound of the approaching aircraft, sensing that he had the upper hand. "Throw the guns to the side and get down! On the ground! Hands up!"
What choice did they have, but to comply?
Danny's scared little face was wet with tears. "Daddy," he sobbed.
"It's alright, Danny," Damien said calmly, feeling his heart hammering in his chest, "It's alright. He's not going to hurt you." He locked eyes with the kidnapper. "He's not going to hurt you."
The man's lips curled into a victorious smile. He backed up towards the car, holding Danny in front of him with the knife against the soft little throat.
Above them, the helicopters came into view: black SIS aircraft. They circled the small cottage, large and looming.
Damien felt a momentary sense of relief at the sight, then remembered Stuart's warning about the mole in MI6 and his heart plummeted.
Suddenly the man swore.
"The little shit pissed on me!" he cried, then gave a surprised, enraged shout - With the knife safely off of his neck, Danny had sunk his sharp little teeth into the man's hand, making him fling the toddler away.
Damien dove for his gun and pulled the trigger. Beside him, he felt his companions do the same.
At the same time, a sniper shot down at them from one of the helicopters.
. . . . .
Note:
Cliffie! Mwahaha! I was going to stop at the point where Danny screamed for his dad, though, so in comparison, isn't this better?
