Devon Ford - The Fall

She let his bull-rush come, turned her body slightly to divert the force of his attack and rolled him over her hip. As he felt himself losing the control and initiative of his attack, he was stuck once again by feeling useless and incompetent. She had grabbed one of his wrists as he rolled past her, which was now pulled tight as she painfully dragged his arm up straight. Cal’s eyes went wide as he saw her raise her right foot to smash down on his arm and he knew it was going to get horribly broken. He thought about closing his eyes, but couldn’t tear his gaze away from the look of bloodthirsty glee on her face.

A flash and an echoing bang reverberated around the lobby, making his damaged and sensitive ears ring again. At the same time his attacker’s upper body convulsed; her left shoulder pitched backwards with the momentum of the round which had struck her vest. Before she regained her composure and finished him, another flash and bang erupted from a different direction.

Cal blinked and gasped as blood fountained on his face, misty at first but coming thicker quickly. It was hot, and tasted metallic in his mouth. Between blinks of his eyes, he could see her face. Could see it had changed from ruthless anger to unregistered shock, but no pain.

She didn’t waver on her feet or fall to her knees dramatically like in the movies, but was carried forwards by the momentum of the bullet to land face down heavily on Cal like a felled tree. Blood gushed out of the wound on the side of her skull to pulse in great gouts onto Cal’s chest. Scrabbling to get free of the butcher’s scene on top of him, he managed to wriggle out from underneath her body and wipe at his face.

Looking up through a gulp of fresh air, he first saw Jake still holding his weapon aimed at where she had been stood. Glancing to his right, he saw Louise. Her eyes were wide with terror, but the thin trails of smoke lingering and creeping lazily upwards from the barrel of the pistol she held told him the rest. He couldn’t have explained it then, but he knew from his subconscious where the shots had come from. Both had fired shots at the woman about to snap Cal’s arm in half, but being the trained man of the two, Jake had fired first and hit her high in the vest, just left of center-mass. As she spun with the momentum of that first hit, the fateful trajectory of Louise’s shot had resulted in the removal of part of the right side of her skull just above the ear.

Silence reigned in the lobby, as everyone exchanged looks which conveyed any number of questions. None of these questions had the chance to be put into words, as a muted flash and a rolling grumble of thunder vibrated the whole island.

The dull red light inside the command section of the Virginia class fast attack submarine lit the faces of the concerned Navy Commander. His entire crew had been on full alert for over three hours now, as a quick glance at the mission clock running next to him said. Their task, as it had been for weeks, was to patrol the waters and provide advanced warning of vessels moving in unexpected patterns outside of the South American and Caribbean shipping lanes. They were the eyes, or more appropriately the ears, which gave the US Navy and Coastguard forces the much-appreciated heads up.

This elusive radar contact, the one which had disturbed his meal and now made him unable to shake off a sense of dread, had evaded his boat for far too long. His XO, executive officer, tried again to reassure the commander of the sub that it was nothing to worry over.

“Sir, I still believe this was a ghost,” he said for the third time, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice.

“This wasn’t a ghost,” the commander said, meaning that the ping they had detected and been searching for these last hours was not a malfunction in their sensor equipment. The signal he had seen before it disappeared was big, too big to be a pod of whales or some sonar echo to be ignored. He had an impending sense of dread that his crew had accidentally detected something malevolent and dangerous. His mind wandered from the displays to imagine a hidden killer sensing that they had been detected. If he were that imaginary shrouded hunter, he would have slowed to a dead crawl and dropped low to sneak past the American boat above, pinging sonar like a game of Marco Polo played in the pitch-black depths. Eventually he had to accept that his paranoia was putting the crew on edge.

“Stand down,” he called to the command section suddenly, reassuring himself that no submarine in the known world could have avoided their sensor array for that long and only be glimpsed partially once.

A change of shift happened effectively in phases as first the supervision then the operators were replaced in small groups. Only the two people in their anonymous dark suits remained from the collective which had first watched events unfold in New York.

Men in stiff uniforms adorned with medals came and went, shooting cautious glances in the direction of the secretive pair. They had not been summoned or addressed, so the military men left the suits to their own devices.

The woman glanced to her left, seeing the telltale glow of a burning cigarette end showing in the darker shadows. Her gaze lingered for a moment, knowing that the older man would be able to make out her features as she was bathed in dull light from the screens, but was unable to see his. She wanted to ask if it was time, if the tension could be broken and they could unleash the incredible might of the People’s Republic on their western enemies, but to ask would be to show a weakness of character that she had fought for years to hide from everyone. She was every part the stone-cold operator that he was, but she was a generation younger and had plans to rise further than she already had. Not a single woman in the country outranked her. She was at the apex of her gender amongst 1.3 billion people, and still she intended to rise higher. Everywhere she went she could sense, almost taste , the shame of high-ranking officials having to obey her commands. Her country had conscripted female soldiers for generations, for millennia even, but today she felt that female soldiers were a gimmick and weren’t taken seriously. Her dedication and aptitude had smashed those molds, and her recruitment into the Ministry of State Security had been, for her, an inevitability.

She cast her eyes back at the screens, seeing mixed reports of empty streets shown alongside fires and looting.

“Now,” said the voice simply from the shadows next to her.

She said nothing, but straightened and smoothed down the dark skirt of her dark suit. She walked forward to stand on the raised dais behind the ranks of busily working analysts. After buttoning the jacket over her plain blouse, she lit another cigarette, and steadied herself. She was about to give the order, albeit by proxy, for the biggest military decision in modern history.

She took a long drag from her cigarette, held it, then let it out slowly. “Begin the operation,” she announced, adding only slightly more information than the head of State Security had given her. Everyone there knew their role, everyone was read in on the plans—those parts which they were cleared to know at least—but then again if they were in that room then they already knew what China had done to the United States, and more importantly what they were about to do.

Captain Wayne Grant, formerly of the United States Air Force, stood up and smoothed his own expensive suit in a control room thousands of miles away from Beijing. He was five decks below sea level on the newest vessel of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s fleet. The Type 002A carrier, only the second carrier not to have been bought from another country as a hand-me-down, was shiny and new. Although only two thirds the size of the floating cities the US had put to sea which Grant had spent much of his time aboard, this Chinese carrier boasted an efficient crew and a full complement of the J-15 Flying Sharks .