The Hidden_A Black Force Thriller Read online

  With both guns now on the floor, the light vanished. A thin glow of luminescence filtered along the dirt, but everything more than a few inches above the ground remained shrouded in darkness. Slater could barely make out the silhouette of the second guy bouncing off the half-finished plaster wall, stumbling for balance in the narrow corridor.

  But one glimpse was all he needed.

  He surged forward and let fly with three consecutive punches to the guy’s exposed torso, using his left fist, then his right, then returning to the left. It only took a little over a second to deliver the three blows, and they sapped what little energy the man had right out of him. He doubled over, and Slater sensed his opportunity.

  Slater dropped the point of his elbow into the back of the man’s head, flattening him into the dirt and transporting him to the same realm as his unconscious buddy a few feet away.

  The corridor became still again.

  Slater’s brain went haywire, immediately assessing the aftermath of the conflict.

  By this point he’d been in enough life or death fights to understand the emotions racing through him. Sure, he was technically an elite black operations warrior, but the chemical cocktail that floods your brain in the aftermath of shocking violence can’t be avoided.

  Slater rested one hand against the half-finished wall of the corridor and took a couple of deep breaths in and out, settling his racing heart. The burst of adrenalin racing through his mind, supercharging his limbs with unnatural intensity, threatened to overwhelm him. He had grappled with it before, but it always took sizeable effort to control.

  And those who could control it won the war.

  His instincts told him to charge straight through the construction site and beat down anyone he laid eyes on. It was his body’s natural response to the fight. There were all manner of ways to try and deny the fact that beating adversaries into the dirt wasn’t intoxicating, but Slater had long ago stopped pretending to ignore it.

  If you can embrace that fact, you can work on taming it.

  In truth, it felt damn good to destroy competition so effortlessly. Slater had spent years of his life toiling away without a day off, slaving his mind and body to their physical limits in MMA gyms and, more recently, state-of-the-art training facilities created by Lars Crawford to develop elite soldiers. He was at the pinnacle of athletic achievement, which made it fairly effortless to gain the upper hand on thugs like the two men at his feet.

  And remaining clinical and measured in the face of such power often proved difficult.

  But Slater was getting the hang of it.

  Even though his brain screamed at him to throw caution to the wind and take off into the bowels of the skyscraper, trying to convince himself that he could overcome any adversity he faced, he allowed the silence to settle back over the hallway. The two flashlights on the ground maintained their thin sheen of illumination — Slater stared at them for a moment, then paced over to the bulky torches and stamped down on each of them. Glass shattered and the lights flickered out, plunging the corridor back into total darkness. It would be foolish to heft one of the enormous devices into one hand and stroll aimlessly through the structure, signalling his presence in the most obvious way possible.

  Instead he embraced the blackness and silently retrieved the two automatic rifles from their last known locations on the floor — they were Kalashnikovs of some kind, a staple on the black market, but Slater didn’t have time to fumble around in the darkness and discern their exact model. He deposited the two cumbersome weapons in a gap between the plaster boards, tucking them out of sight in case the two thugs woke up. Then he slid the Glock 17 out of his waistband, automatically disengaging the trigger safety by resting his index finger against it.

  There was no need to employ trigger discipline in this hostile environment.

  He had seen enough action to employ restraint if he spotted an innocent person. He wouldn’t impulsively fire on anything that moved. But at the same time, he wanted to be ready to retaliate to any violence at the drop of a hat.

  His cover had been blown.

  He didn’t need to blend in anymore. He hoped there wasn’t an army of Eastern European gangsters in this construction site. He hadn’t come here for a war.

  He had come here for answers.

  Then a noise burst through the absolute quiet. Slater picked up the soft sound on the edge of his hearing, and he nearly jolted in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting anything like what he’d just heard.

  The pitiful whimper of a child.

  16

  It had come from the ground floor, filtering through the darkness in the kind of eerie manner ordinarily reserved for horror movies. At any moment Slater expected to follow the sound to its bloody conclusion, but instead of being ambushed by a demonic presence he would find himself embroiled in a vicious war with a party of Eastern European thugs.

  What did you get yourself wrapped up in, D’Agostino? he thought.

  But there was no time to dwell on what could be. Possibilities meant nothing in his field. He needed concrete information, data to see and process and react to.

  So he didn’t think twice about heading straight into the unknown.

  Even though it might result in his life being cut awfully short.

  He hurried further into the construction site, keeping as quiet as he was able, leaving the pair of gangsters behind. They would soon regain consciousness — this wasn’t the movies, and people recovered from being stripped of their senses in seconds — but they would find themselves in complete darkness, free of their weapons, clawing their way around and trying to determine what the hell had happened.

  Slater didn’t pay them a second thought — they might shout for help, but that would work in his favour. He embraced confusion and hysteria. He was one man against an unknown number of hostiles, and anything that turned the tide of panic against his adversaries he would happily accept.

  He took his tentative time ghosting down the corridor. Another whimper floated through the darkness, but this time it was harshly cut off mid-cry. The noise itself was barely perceptible, but the rest of the sob had been muffled, as if someone had clamped a hand over the child’s mouth.

  Slater’s guts twisted into a knot. He never liked involving innocents. He would have given anything to be isolated in this construction site with gangsters and mercenaries and street thugs, free to dish out punishment as he saw fit. Bringing someone who didn’t deserve to die into the equation only ever resulted in disaster.

  But that was how the situation was unfolding, and that was what he would have to deal with.

  It was his job to improvise and find solutions.

  He strained his eyes for any sign of the path ahead — worst case scenario, he would use his phone’s flashlight, which was far less noticeable than one of the thug’s enormous torches. But he glimpsed the faintest outline of a darker space in the left-hand side of the wall ahead. The tiniest shred of illumination from the streetlights far behind him was trickling through the minuscule gaps in the construction site’s exterior, allowing him to barely see the way ahead and make sure he wasn’t about to stumble over an enormous drop.

  He saw the doorway.

  He shifted the Glock into a ready position, and crept straight through into the dark space within. He kept his centre of mass low, hunching over and bending at the knees to minimise the target area any potential hostiles had to work with. He froze only a foot inside the doorway, not making a sound, the couple of footfalls he’d taken to step inside the room producing no noise whatsoever. If there were people a few feet in front of him, they wouldn’t have heard him.

  But at the same time, he couldn’t see them either.

  Patience was steadily becoming Slater’s specialty. Even though he’d utilised maximum effort to beat two men into the ground only thirty seconds earlier, now he poised still as a statue inside the doorway, listening for the slightest hint of human presence.

  He found it in seconds.
r />   ‘What do we do?’ the child’s voice breathed, only a couple of feet from Slater’s position. The kid had uttered the words in a tone below a whisper, barely vocalising any noise whatsoever.

  But Slater heard it.

  He remained deathly still.

  The kid had been searching for guidance, expecting answers to his enquiries, wanting someone in a position of authority to lead the way.

  There was someone else here.

  In this room.

  Right next to him.

  ‘Shh,’ another voice breathed in response — this one older, throatier, female.

  A woman.

  The mother?

  Slater didn’t budge an inch.

  ‘Quiet,’ the woman continued, maintaining the same decibel level as the kid, her words almost unnoticeable, even in the absolute silence. ‘I think there’s someone close by.’

  Slater couldn’t stay put any longer. The general atmosphere around him indicated that there were no hostiles. He didn’t think there was another gang of Eastern European thugs in this room — they wouldn’t be able to maintain this kind of silence. Even if they had guns pressed to the child and woman’s heads, they would make noticeable adjustments. They would shift around, or quietly demand the hostages to shut their fucking mouths.

  Slater reached back, moving an inch at a time, and slid the smartphone out of his back pocket.

  He activated the flashlight with the soft tap of a finger.

  Harsh white light speared through the small room and the woman — sitting with her back against the wall right near the doorway — stifled a scream of surprise. To make sure she didn’t follow through with the piercing noise, Slater swung the barrel of the Glock around in a tight arc and jammed it against her forehead, pressing the back of her skull against the wall with just enough force to let her know he meant business.

  In the newly formed light, he bore an icy stare directly into her eyes, silently instructing her to stay completely quiet.

  She obeyed.

  Slater processed what he could see.

  The woman was in her early thirties with high cheekbones and a porcelain-like quality to her skin — probably a mixture of fright and a naturally pale complexion. She was undeniably beautiful, with an athletic frame and long blonde hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. She wore a full body tracksuit and dirty sneakers, and her left wrist hung uselessly a couple of feet off the ground, chained to the wall by a single handcuff and a bolt.

  Alongside her were two kids.

  They were both young — Slater estimated between four and six — and were in similar predicaments, one of their limbs each chained to the wall. The three sat only half a foot apart, lined up just inside the doorway. The rest of the room was threadbare, half-finished before construction on the skyscraper had seemingly shut down, all the developments that had been made on the ground floor already falling into disrepair.

  Slater saw all he needed, and turned the light back off instantly.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ he said under his breath, sporting the same volume as the previous exchanges. ‘I’m here to get you out.’

  17

  The darkness seemed to terrify the woman, who Slater deemed the only one of the three capable of conversing with him. He wasn’t about to interrogate a pair of kids — they had enough problems already. Beyond the barrel of his Glock he sensed her shaking, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to turn colder than usual.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Slater whispered.

  ‘The gun,’ she said, barely able to spit the two syllables out, her voice weak.

  ‘If I take it away, do you promise not to scream?’

  ‘Of course. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I know you’re not. But this is an incredibly stressful situation. People do crazy—’

  ‘Take the fucking gun off my head!’ she hissed under her breath.

  Slater nodded in the darkness, a useless gesture, and lowered the Glock. So far there was no sign of life anywhere else on the ground floor. He hoped the two thugs he’d dealt with a minute earlier were the only kind of resistance he’d face for the foreseeable future.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said, remarkably composed.

  ‘Just a guy who wants to help.’

  ‘Bullshit. I heard all that nonsense out in the corridor. You’re involved somehow. Who’s D’Agostino? Why am I here?’

  Slater paused, allowing the woman to spill all her thoughts before responding. ‘Did you hear a few muffled thumps?’

  ‘Yeah. What was—?’

  ‘Those two guys aren’t much of a problem anymore. Trust me now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, right now I’m the only person capable of getting you out of those cuffs. So I’d trust me if I were you.’

  Slater was about to ask for anything he could use to piece together what was happening in the construction site, and why a woman and two children were chained to a wall on the ground floor, but before he could get another sentence out she threw him off with a single question.

  ‘Where’s the rest of the guys on this floor?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you do with them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She went quiet, simultaneously coming to the same realisation as Slater. As if on cue thudding footsteps exploded into earshot, materialising at the foot of the corridor he’d just come from. Someone cursed viciously in Russian, and there was the sound of a semi-conscious body being hefted off the floor.

  Not good.

  ‘Who the fuck did this?’ a Russian voice snapped.

  ‘Down there,’ one of the men Slater had attacked said, his voice drowsy, barely able to hold it together.

  He must have signalled in the correct direction, because a second later Slater sensed three or four pairs of boots crunching through the loose dirt toward his location. In the darkness the sound amplified, horrifying close, approaching fast. They must have known exactly where the hostages were being kept and made a beeline for the doorway.

  He barely had time to get his feet underneath him. Slater prided himself on a frighteningly quick reaction speed, but even that didn’t help him here. The rapidity with which the hostile bodies poured into the room caught him entirely off-guard, and it took his brain a moment to flip the switch back into primal survival mode.

  But when he entered that state, there was no stopping him.

  His thoughts were consumed by the fact that there were two children in the room. It supercharged him with the kind of vigour he couldn’t tap into often — the sheer, unbridled intensity that came from the knowledge that a pair of kids and what seemed to be their mother would die painfully if he didn’t succeed.

  So when the first man to enter the room ran straight into Slater in the darkness, fumbling with the under-barrel flashlight on his weapon, Slater showed zero restraint.

  He wrapped the back of the guy’s head in a Muay Thai clinch, clasping one hand around the man’s skull, and fired off two consecutive knees into the bridge of the man’s nose. There was a weapon somewhere between them — Slater felt the uncomfortable jab of a bulky assault rifle against his stomach — but the barrel wasn’t pointed in his direction. Everything had unfolded too fast. Slater shattered bones in the guy’s face before he could get a shot off, and the man crumpled.

  Either from the sheer pain of his injuries, or because he’d been stripped of consciousness.

  One down.

  Slater hurled his unresisting body to the side and spotted two more silhouettes appearing instantly in the doorway. Even in the total darkness he spotted the unmistakable outline of automatic weapons, and he didn’t hesitate. He raised the Glock 17 and fired twice at the man on the left. The muzzle flares lit up the room for a half-second, and as the first man crumpled Slater used the brief burst of light to lock up his aim with the guy on the right.

  It only took one more shot.

  Three down.

  Barely able to put a
cohesive thought together because of the jolt of energy to his bones, Slater took off in a running start and hurled himself through the open doorway, anticipating a fourth combatant to come tearing into sight at any moment.

  Not that he could see anything in the carnage, anyway.

  But instead of diving over the threshold and hitting the dirt a second later, he thundered into a body halfway through his spear tackle, meeting some kind of centre mass that sent both parties sprawling to the dirt in a tangle of limbs. Slater bounced off the ground, nerve endings firing across his shoulders and back — he considered himself lucky not to have broken his neck in the reckless assault.

  But it had thrown both of them off-guard, and if there was one thing Slater had confidence in, it was his ability to capitalise on an even playing field.

  Which was exactly what he’d been intending in the first place.

  He maintained momentum as soon as he hit the ground and rolled closer to the last remaining hostile, coming down awkwardly on top of the man in the wide open hallway. The guy’s Kalashnikov became pinned between them, sandwiched between their respective weights.

  The guy underneath him struggled, cursing in Russian, spraying Slater with spit.

  He didn’t care.

  He’d somehow lost the Glock in the chaos, but he simply got his feet underneath him and wrestled the Kalashnikov off the guy with brute force. Instead of spending the valuable time fumbling over the weapon in the blackness, checking whether the safety was off and the reliable rifle was ready to fire, Slater simply treated the gun as a bat and brought it down with a thwack against the guy’s skull.

  Once again — silence.

  Slater walked straight back into the room with the hostages, subconsciously glad that the conflict had taken place in the dark.