Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

What neither Jack nor Brossa realized was that the hazel-eyed man with the crooked nose—Bykov—was very much alive, and only a few feet behind them.

—

“Jack—”

He barely heard Brossa’s voice above the din, but it broke sharply, like a cry. A second later, her hand released, and Jack instinctively grasped it harder, only to feel the sudden weight of her body pulling him backward.

He turned around just as her body hit the pavement, her paralyzed arms unable to cushion her fall as her head thudded like a melon against the sidewalk.

Bykov leaped over her body and lunged at Jack, thrusting a handheld jet injector like a rapier at Jack’s bare throat.

Jack let go of Brossa’s hand as he lunged backward, bumping hard into a shorter, broad-backed Spaniard, built like a stevedore, in a tank top and jeans.

The Spaniard shouted in protest and whipped around, knocking Jack aside just as Bykov thrust the poison-filled injector at Jack’s face. The spring-fired device dumped a massive dose of nerve agent—Novichok—into the Spaniard’s beefy arm. He yelped in painless shock and grabbed his wounded biceps as Jack hammer-fisted Bykov’s extended arm, forcing him to drop the lethal cylinder onto the pavement.

All of this happened in the span of a couple of heartbeats. The Spaniard’s last, it turned out, as the Novichok began its merciless work, killing his nervous system, destroying the connection between his brain and muscle tissues.

In eight more seconds, he’d be dead.

Bykov turned, and pushed his way back into the oncoming crowd, swimming upriver against the flow of bodies now surging around Brossa convulsing on the pavement. A young brunette knelt down next to her, feeling for a pulse.

Jack glanced back at the Spaniard, who was now crumpling to his knees, his watering eyes wide with terror, bowels and bladder loosed, his breathless mouth open in a silent shout, spilling with vomit.

Jack started to reach out for him, but his subconscious told him the Spaniard was beyond help.

He turned and chased after Bykov, pushing past the crowd gathering around Brossa’s body twisted on the pavement, her now lifeless eyes open to the sky. Jack filed away his grief for later.

But not his rage.

—

Powerfully built, the young Russian operative dodged and stutter-stepped around the people he could, and bowled through the ones he couldn’t, even tossing a few down behind him to slow Jack’s pace.

Offended parties reacted to Bykov’s rough treatment but not quickly enough to hurt him, let alone slow him down. In fact, it was Jack who suffered their wrath, as they seemingly blamed him for Bykov’s behavior by reaching out with their hands to grab and slow him down. A few threw kicks and punches but the glancing blows didn’t stop him.

Jack kept saying lo siento! —I’m sorry!—to people as he bulled his way behind Bykov, who somehow was threading the needle like a fullback on a broken tackle run, and pulling away fast.

Jack’s only advantage was his height, and he was able to catch a glimpse of Bykov ducking off Laietana and onto an unmarked side street.

Jack powered through the surging protesters, ignoring the shouts of anger and fear behind him and the sound of a distant siren.

He finally made the turn into the narrow alleyway, but Bykov was gone.

Jack slid to a halt. Shit! Where did he go?

The stone-paved alley bent into a gentle curve, a narrow, shadowed path between four- and five-story buildings, leading to a cross street two hundred feet ahead.

Jack charged forward, eyes scanning recessed doorways and alcoves, racing for the intersection.

A glint of steel swung out of the shadows. Jack turned, raising his forearm, blocking the downward strike of Bykov’s arm.

But Bykov’s momentum drove the two of them stumbling across the narrow alley into a niche crowded with garbage cans overflowing with the wet, fetid refuse of a Chinese restaurant.

The two of them crashed into the cans, bowling them over. Jack and Bykov fell between them, Bykov on top of Jack, his knees buried into Jack’s thighs, pinning him to the filthy pavement.

Bykov raised his combat knife with one hand and grabbed Jack’s shirt in the other as he plunged the serrated blade at Jack’s heart.

But Jack snatched up one of the dented garbage can lids and raised it like a shield. The razor-sharp drop-point blade plunged into the aluminum lid up to the hilt, the knife’s serrated edges catching in the metal.

Jack twisted the lid before Bykov could pull it out, wrenching Bykov’s wrist with the torque and toppling him over in the same direction. Jack thrust his hips up and over, using the leverage to accelerate Bykov’s fall, tossing him onto the greasy stones.

Both men sprang to their feet.

Both eyed the blade still stuck in the lid.

Jack lunged for it but wasn’t fast enough to avoid the kick to his ribs from Bykov’s boot, driving him backward into a wall.

Jack grabbed his rib cage as Bykov dove for the knife.

The Russian stomped a boot on the lid for leverage and ripped the blade out of the dented metal. He whipped around with the knife, going low and planting his rear foot to spring into a lunge at the big American.

As Bykov swept into his turn, Jack’s fist plowed into his lower jaw, cracking his teeth.

The Russian dropped the knife, stunned. It clattered to the pavement. His face darkened with confusion and then disbelief as he grabbed his jaw with his hand.

He glanced up at Jack and flashed a smile at him through gritted teeth.

It was a smile Jack had seen before.

The big Dutchman, van Delden, had flashed the same fuck-you smile.

The hairs stood on the back of Jack’s neck.

Bykov’s eyes rolled into the back of his head as he tumbled to the ground, his strings cut.

Jack knelt down by the corpse, barely hearing the siren screaming into the alley.

51

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE

Another late-night marathon in the lab. Nothing new.

Parsons seriously considered sleeping on the couch in her office for the next two days. Catnaps, anyway. There was a shower in the facility and even a decent selection of organics stocked in the kitchen pantry. Anything to save time, because time was the one thing she didn’t have.

Phase One of TRIBULATION was scheduled to launch in less than thirty-six hours. The timeline was immutable.

So was she.

The project had come along nicely, but in this last final stretch she needed to have her own steady hand on the rudder. They were too close to the end for delegating responsibilities. It was her baby. She was the one who needed to climb into the stirrups and push for all she was worth, no matter the cost. That was a mother’s duty, wasn’t it?

Parsons checked her analog watch again—security protocols that she had implemented prohibited digital devices of any kind on this level. She sat in the conference room waiting for her Phase Two division heads to arrive for her first meeting of the evening.

The Ukrainian Matvienko headed up the Russian software interface, and his counterpart, the Taiwanese programmer Yu, ran the parallel Chinese effort. These were pioneering software geniuses on the cutting edge of a newly emergent branch of human knowledge.

They had made outstanding progress on Phase Two but there was still so much to do in so little time. She needed a progress report from them, and then later, the TRIBULATION systems engineers.

Failure was simply not an option.

She picked up her pen and began scribbling notes for the first meeting in her notebook but stopped, the thought of Dylan Runtso’s body shredded like a plate of pulled pork flooding her mind. It was a sudden, violent death that ended the life of one of the most brilliant men she’d ever known, or fucked.