Chapter 19.
CHASING 'MAYHEM'
The Syndicate forces found themselves retreating. Concentrated efforts by the attacking soldiers and agents from the Special Missions Force forced the hostiles to let go of the blockade they put up at the front of the hotel, driving them back towards the eastern wing where they re-grouped and took up new positions, trying to hold back the opposition.
Supported by the vehicles from the Special Missions Force, UN soldiers begun to charge the inner perimeter of the Syndicates defensive line, some on foot, other in jeeps. The hostiles did their best to hold them back with their remaining vehicles, but the enemy was too many. Two missile launchers and a tank was taken out by missiles from the armoured vehicles, and behind them, yet more Syndicate soldiers dropped with grunts as they fell prey to bullets from snipers.
None of this was lost on Jaime Francisco Carrasco who looked out of the front entrance door of the hotel. He moved back to the reception desk were Cesar Bonica stood, playing a game on his phone.
"The enemy is starting to break through." He told. "Shouldn't we start threatening with killing the hostages or something?"
Cesar barely looked up.
"The Colonels orders were strict. We are not going to do anything to the hostages until the Special Missions Force are right upon us. They must force our hands."
An exploding grenade splintered the glass door. Jaime instinctively shielded his face with his arms.
"I think our hands have been forced enough! It's time to act!"
"Yes. I think he's right." Cesar agreed. "The Colonels orders could come any moment."
They headed back toward the meeting room.
The group consisting of Jacques LaFleur, Paul Knight and Gloria Baker hurried through the corridors of the hotel. Their pace quickened as they rushed in the direction of the Executive Meeting Room. There, ten meters dead ahead, two Syndicate soldiers stood flanking an elevator, their Grenade launchers already lifting to track toward the newcomers.
Jacques dove for the deck, firing towards them as he fell. One of the soldiers toppled back as a bullet penetrated his leather jacket. From a doorway farther down the corridor, more rifles opened up, adding their voice to the first, and the three agents were now forced to retreat, pinned down behind a corner.
The elevator doors flew open and Matt and Brad joined them, but there were more troopers positioned here than up in the luxury suites where Wolf had located his stab.
They stood their ground and kept up a steady fire against the assault of the black and brown uniformed troopers. From an adjacent corridor, Cesar Bonica and Jaime Francisco Carrasco arrived accompanied by a handful of troopers who immediately raised their own weapons. Bullets sparked and ricocheted off the walls, causing concrete and dust to rain down over the agents of the Special Missions Force.
"I had safer jobs than this!" muttered Paul as he instinctively waved off some dust that obscured his vision even though all masks were designed to give them clear sight even under such circumstances.
Jacques smiled at him.
"Come on, Paul," he said, trying to be heard over the report of weapons being discharged. "It is at moments like this that you really feel alive. Isn't it exhilarating?"
"Yeah, I'm loving every moment of it." Paul quipped without sounding very convincing.
He looked over at Gloria to see how she was doing. She was working on connecting her power-harness to the mask.
"Keep them busy for a few seconds while I power up." She said as she activated the transmitters built into her mask Polaris.
The mask was finally ready. The power core in her power-harness utilized a diamagnetic torus that by agitating atoms produced an opposing current in the magnetic fields, creating an electromagnetic propulsion, the same type of superconductor electromagnetism used to levitate bullet trains from Tokyo to Osaka.
It had an immediate effect on the bullets: Like a swarm of obedient bees, they slowed down, hanged suspended for a moment in the air, before being propelled in the opposite direction.
Disbelieving the Syndicate troopers dove for cover. Others, not as fortunate was pounded to the wall by the bullets.
Cesar Bonica and Jaime Francisco Carrasco eyed each other for a moment. Then as one they turned tail and ran for the nearest stair way.
In the meantime, Brad, Paul and Jacques had rushed up at the troopers and now held them at gunpoint. They surrendered.
With this welcome break, Matt called Alex via the com-net to get an update.
"Any news on Colonel Wolf?" He asked. "Could you stop him from escaping?"
"Sorry, Matt. He gave us the slip. I'm using satellite tracking to follow him." Alex explained. "He took off and are now on the 110 heading north. If he gets too big lead he will be out of our grasp."
"Do you have any idea where he might be heading?"
Alex checked the maps.
"If he remains on the 110, he will end up in Huntington Bay. Perhaps he's attempting to escape by boat."
"Instruct Claire to go after him."
"No can do." Alex said, almost apologizing. "She took some hits and were forced to return to base."
Matt thought desperately for a few moments.
"None of our cars are quick enough to catch up with him with his head start." He pondered, more to himself then to Alex. "Any bright ideas coming to mind?"
Alex linked up to the security network and checked different camera-angles to see if there were anything useful for going after the refuge. Parked in the grass on the farther flank of the hotel he saw that a Talon chopper stood parked.
"There is a Talon parked outside the west wing. You might be able to use it to follow Wolf!"
Not wasting any time, Matt turned to the others.
"Gloria, secure the hostages." He ordered. "Make sure they're all right. Paul, Brad and Jacques, you guard the prisoners."
"What are you going to do?" Brad asked.
"I'm going to force the Colonel to go into early retirement!"
He sprinted through the hotel towards the west wing to reach the terrace where Alex had said that the Talon stood parked. He put Spectrum onto motion detection to make certain that there were no more sentries in the hotel, and it was fortunate that he did so. Before rounding a corner, the visor picked up a soldier. Coming around the corner, they almost ran into each other, but while Matt was prepared, he was not. Matts fist flew out like a piston and hit the man in the area that boxers use to describe as solar plexus. He bent over in pain, gasping for air. In the next moment he was hit square on the jaw by his other fist and fell backwards. He did not move.
Outside on the terrace stood the Talon parked. Up close it was larger than expected, but he had no time to think about it. He got inside of the aft cabin, strapped himself in and took a quick look at the control panel to familiarise himself with the cockpit. He found that the controls were not so different than those of an Apache.
He ran a quick pre-flight check, and then the helicopters six blades of the intermeshing-rotor configuration begun to rotate, and the machine lifted into the air. The muted engine sounded strange, but it didn't affect the helicopters performance, so he soon ignored it.
He climbed to a height of fifteen hundred feet and fed the computer with the latest GPS information and followed the 110 as he searched for Wolf's car. It wasn't easy, because the traffic was quite heavy despite the late hour. He flew over the Long Island Expressway and its entrance ramps, then continued over the Melville business district. Soon the scenery changed and now there were a labyrinth of residential quarters and gardens underneath. If the Colonel had decided to hide, there would be many places for him to choose. Still Matt was relentless in his quest.
"Alex?" He asked in the headset in Spectrum. "Do you still have him in sight?"
The other man's voice came back immediately.
"Confirmed. He's still on the 110, New York Avenue… Just made a hard-left turn and are now on the Mill Dam Road!"
"I see him!" Matt said as he watched a car at high-speed racing up towards a marina. Using the image enhancer, he could see how Wolf's car stopped just a few hundred feet up the road. The Colonel got out of the car and moved towards a pier. He moved slowly, apparently in pain after taking the blast from Backlash earlier. He got into a boat and cast of. The water spraying as the dual propellers begun to push the boat forward. Picking up speed the boat skimmed across the water, zigzagging past different obstacles, and formed high waves in his wake.
Suddenly other screens in the helicopter came to life as proximity sensors detected an approaching aircraft and alerted him about a missile-lock. Matt immediately punched up the missile suppression system before he put the Talon in a barrel roll and went into a steep dive. He looked around for his attacker and recognised the purple-finned Raptor moving up behind him. He realised that the pilot of the craft had to be Vanessa Warfield.
Vanessa expertly turned inside that of the Talon and managed to get a clear angle to let loose a burst from her guns towards the cockpit. Fortunately, it was enforced with titanium steel Armor, and protected the pilot.
"This is going to be tricky." Matt thought to himself. "The Ice Queen is a skilled pilot and I'm seated in a slower craft that I'm not familiar with."
Trying to outmanoeuvre his opponent, Matt made a split s, a manoeuvre that traded altitude for speed. Thinking fast, Vanessa did a wingover and a split s, giving short bursts with her guns, the Talon took several hits and Matt was forced into a steep left turn. He banked hard left and tried to pull through the fighters' flight path. Seeing his tormentor close in fast, Matt centred and hauled back on the stick, tightening his turn considerably and jamming his body down in the seat.
The Ice Queen shot across Matts line of flight barely twenty meters behind the Talon. Vanessa banked sharply and fell away towards her prey, she banked at the crest of her ascent then dropped off to into a fusillade fall.
"Man, can that woman fly!" Matt gasped to himself.
Vanessa pulled hard on the stick and her fighter banked hard on its starboard wing, the turn made her sail back behind her target. Matt looked behind him and realized that she had him just where she wanted.
She fired a missile from the left glove pylon. It pulled lead, then did a ninety-degree reversal and hit the Talon in the tail. As fragments of the fuselage was torn of, Matt did the only sensible thing he could: he ejected. The intermeshing blades was blown off by explosive charges in the rotor disc and the canopy was jettisoned. The rockets under the chair launched him clear of the doomed craft, the G-forces pushed him back to the seat. But in the next moment the seat fell away under him and the chute deployed, opened, and fluttered over his head.
Vanessa circled him once, checking that he had a good chute. The Ice Queen obviously wasn't so callous that she wanted to see a man plunge to his death once he had been taken out of the fight. She gave him a wave, then steered of toward a second Talon that was just leaving the far side of the bay. On the beach head he saw the mangled remains of the boat Wolf had used to escape. The Syndicate had picked up their headman.
With Vanessa as its escort, the Talon disappeared over the horisont.
Matt went into the sea. He deployed a raft that was part of the ejection system, and all he could do was to wait for someone to pick him up.
He had not been waiting for long before a craft appeared, skimming the waves. It turned out it was Raven. Obviously, Alex had seen him going down and sent his coordinates.
"Hello old timer." Calhoun jested as he manoeuvred up to him. "Taking a dip in the drink?"
"I'm just relieved that I could eject." Matt confessed. "Vanessa was on to me like a cat on a mouse, just playing."
Calhoun nodded. He hadn't seen how she flew, but if Matt said she was skilled, he believed him.
"It's a pity that someone so pretty has to work for the enemy." Calhoun thought.
"Don't trust what you see. Even salt looks like sugar."
Calhoun sneered.
"You've been hanging around Bruce for too long."
"I don't understand the problem everyone has with his Satoisms", Matt laughed as he found his way into the passenger seat of Raven, dropping water on the seat and floor. "I find them very amusing and sometimes even illuminating."
Raven fired up its engines and headed back towards land.
Forty minutes later, Raven drove up to the Hilton Huntington Hotel. The surrounding area around the hotel was now being cleared and the traffic reopened, but the hotel itself and its immediate surroundings were still behind barricades. Personnel transporters were on hand to transfer the prisoners to federal prison.
"Good evening, Matt." greeted the low gravelly voice of Bishop. "Safe and sound?"
"I'll survive." Matt replied. "Wolf escaped. But I don't think that the Syndicate will be all that pleased with him. So how are we doing?"
"The good guys won." Bishop said as Dr. Claire Peters stepped forward to check out Matt for serious injuries. "None of the hostages had been harmed, and the MPs have arrested a lot of the Syndicate's troopers. Unfortunately, the VENOM agents managed to escape. They used the weapon system in their vehicles to break through the police barricades."
"Any injuries on our part?" Matt asked as he tried to persuade Claire to pester someone else.
"Only light injuries. Buddie got a groove in his chin courtesy of some splinter and Hondo suffered a dislocated collarbone after he tried to stop Jaime Francisco Carrasco from escaping."
"I think we can thank your brothers' masks for today's success." Mused Bruce who sat on the steps on Rhino. "Without them it would have been impossible to free the hostages from the VENOM."
Both Matt and Bishop nodded in agreement.
"That's one secret that we need to guard." Matt pointed out. "'Mayhem' has managed to steal some of Andy's most amazing inventions, we can't want to let him steal this one as well."
"So how will we avoid that with all the insiders?" Hondo asked. "We can't even trust the men in the engineering section anymore."
"I intend to persuade Alex to jump ship from Young Enterprises and work with us. He knows how Andy works and understand his gadgets. Right now, I trust him more than any guy from the World Unification Alliance."
"Does that mean that we should sever our ties to H.H. and the others?" Morten asked.
"We can never be truly independent." Matt said. "But we need to keep our information more to ourselves in the future."
The others approved.
In silence Matt and his crew watched how technical experts from the Pentagon arrived, and some of VENOM's equipment was carried away and loaded upon trucks. Matt looked over at Hondo who had his right arm in a sling.
"How good are your left hand, Lieutenant?" He asked.
"At one hundred percent Matt." Replied Hondo confused. "Why?"
"We have to return to the World Consultation Building and write some reports. A boring job, but it must be done. You, my friend, will have to write with your left hand. A dislocated collarbone is not reason enough to let you pass."
"I have no trouble with that." Hondo smiled. "But I feel sorry for the poor sole who has to decipher what I've been writing."