The deck of the ship rushed up at him as he slid down the zip line, shooting arrows into the dock and herding the criminals who had yet to board the ship. Close enough, he released his grip and dropped. Right onto the back of a thug who had his rifle aimed at Black Canary.
He hit solidly, all his weight and momentum driving through the bottom of his boots, transferring it into the thug like a wrecking ball. The machine gun chattered out, bullets flying up into the night sky. The man didn’t stand up as the Green Arrow rolled away and onto his feet.
Spinning, he dismissed that one, then drew and notched an arrow. He located another target, a figure moving quickly across the deck, and fired. The arrow streaked across. He already had another arrow notched and ready when it struck down its target.
He fired four more, clearing the area in front of him.
Into the comms he said, “Green Arrow in position, converge.”
Moving over to the rail, he glanced down. The gangplank below was a twist of scorched metal courtesy of the explosive arrow he’d fired at it before zip-lining down from his perch. The one on the other end had been drawn up by Black Canary and hung folded at the top of the ship’s hull.
The ship was cut off. All the henchmen on the docks had been removed from the equation. The rest of his team were moving steadily toward him. Now all they had to do was clear the lower decks. As they gathered around him, he spoke into the comms.
“Overwatch, any idea how many we could be dealing with down below?”
“The ship hull is too dense to get any type of satellite imaging, except that a lot of heat is being generated in the cargo hold,” Felicity said. “Judging from the schematic, you can get to it just two decks down.”
He nodded, even though Felicity couldn’t see it from the Bunker, then spoke to Team Arrow as he began moving toward the hatch.
“Alex Faust is priority number one,” he growled. “We find him and take him down, no matter what. Teams of two.”
They all nodded, falling into step after him as Felicity began giving directions over the comms. Abruptly the ship’s motors revved, the deck vibrating under their feet.
“Is that the engine?” Mister Terrific asked.
They stopped moving, boots and shins absorbing the oscillation caused by the boat’s motor. The vessel lurched sideways, and slowly began chugging away from the dock.
“I think someone is on to us,” White Canary said.
“What do you think their first clue was?” Wild Dog replied sarcastically.
Green Arrow spoke, voice stern. “Doesn’t matter. Faust is the objective. If he’s expecting us it means he’ll probably be easier to find.” He began moving toward the below-decks hatch, Team Arrow on his heels.
* * *
“You should be coming up on the cargo bay hatch.”
“We see it, Overwatch,” Green Arrow answered. The hatch was shut, a lever lock in place. He stopped, raising his hand to signal the rest of the team to stop as well. There was no window in the door, just a welded metal slab. They’d made their way to this point unhindered, not encountering any resistance.
The trap was obvious.
For the briefest moment he considered turning around, just leaving. Ordering the team to evacuate, walking away to confront his target another time when it was on his terms, not Faust’s.
To be smarter.
Or luckier.
To avoid another Lian Yu.
Adrian Chase had put Faust on his trail. Chase knew his identity, knew about William. If he had told Faust… the ramifications could be fatal to his son, and to those he cared for most.
He would protect William, at whatever cost.
“Be ready for anything.” His murmur carried to everyone through the comms. He put his hand on the lever and opened the door.
* * *
“Well, it certainly took you long enough.”
The voice came from a dark so thick it felt like pressure against their skins. A dim light entered through the open hatch, but it could only diffuse, not disperse, the inky blackness. It was too weak, not enough. The team fanned out behind him, covering his back. He pulled an arrow from his quiver, notching it into the bow in his hand.
“Faust!” he bellowed, voice amplified by the distorter. “I know you’re here. Show yourself!”
“Oh, I’ll show myself.” The voice thrummed off the metal walls, warping into a psychotic melody. “After all, we are nothing more than what we choose to reveal.”
“He’s quoting Sylvia Plath?” Wild Dog muttered.
“You know Sylvia Plath?” Black Canary asked.
“I’ve got the soul of a poet.”
Before Green Arrow could tell them to be focused there was a buzz and a click, and light flooded the room they were in. Klieg lights had been strung along the top of the cargo hold and now they blazed down like the eyes of some sun god. He squinted up into their glare, then turned his eyes down before his vision could go spotty. Even with the top half of the cargo hold lost to shadow, the room loomed around them. Its walls rose twenty feet up, braced with steel beams. They had been scrubbed and scraped by whatever things had been transported in this hold, and now they were more rust than paint. A steel catwalk surrounded the room midway up the wall, connecting additional hatches like the one through which they’d entered. A dozen or more ropes hung to the floor, scattered through the cargo hold.
On the other side of the vast space stood a man.
Middling height and awkwardly thin, he seemed to be loosely knitted together in the mud-colored suit that hung off him. Frizzy hair spilled over one side of his clean-shaven face. Even this far away his smile could be seen. He leaned casually against a rough wooden table, and there was a suitcase-sized mechanical device on it. Beside him stood a stack of orange plastic bricks piled to the same height as the table. Behind him was a wall of similar bricks that stood ten foot high and stretched nearly across the width of the hold.
“As you can see,” Alex Faust said, indicating the plastic bricks, “it would be best if you hooligans refrain from shooting any bullets, or even arrows, in this direction.”
“Semtex,” Spartan said. “It’s stable. Bullets and arrows don’t set it off.”
“You are correct about Semtex,” the man replied, “but do you think I’d be here if I used plain old, boring Semtex? Certainly not without doing a little doctoring of my own.” He giggled and the sound rippled along the steel walls. “Does that seem like the kind of person Prometheus would leave in charge?”
Exchanging glances, Spartan and Wild Dog lowered their guns.
As they looked to him for guidance, Oliver’s hands itched to draw his bow and put an arrow feathers-deep in Faust. But he couldn’t stop picturing Chase, pulling the trigger of the gun he held to his own temple, and then hearing the first of a chain of explosions that might mean everyone he cared about was dead.
Everyone but the son he held in his arms.
He hesitated.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Faust cocked his head, looking at him. “And you’re right. I might have a dead man switch. It wouldn’t be out of character.” He sighed, swinging his arms around dramatically. “But you don’t really know my character, now do you?”
“We know the character of the man who put you up to this.”
“Does that make you more or less certain of how I’ll act?”
“Screw this,” Wild Dog growled. “What’s to stop us from just going over there and delivering a beat down to this psycho?”
Faust pointed toward the darkness above the lights. “They are.” As one the hanging ropes began shaking as men in black tactical gear rappeled to the floor, filling the space between them and Faust. Green Arrow did a quick head count.
They were outnumbered three to one.
“Have fun!” Faust called. “I’d stay and watch, but I really need to go.” He patted the device on the table. “Don’t get so caught up in dancing that you forget about Betsy here.” He flipped a switch, causing a red light to begin blinking. Then he turned and slipped around the end of the wall of doctored Semtex.
Oliver slung the bow over his back, speaking over the comms so everyone heard him. “They don’t have guns, so Faust must be telling the truth. No shooting, not even away from the explosives. If there was just one ricochet…” He didn’t need to finish the thought.
Spartan and Wild Dog looked at each other.
“Ah, hell,” Spartan said, holstering his pistol.
* * *
Dinah stepped forward, twisting outside the man’s attempt to grab her. As she passed him, she fired a punch to his temple. He stumbled. She drove the end of her bõ staff into the back of his knee and leaned, her body weight making the joint crumple and fold. He went down to all fours with a cry of pain that she silenced with a quick strike to his neck.
Something heavy struck her back, just to the left of her spine and above her kidney. It knocked her forward and left her gasping for air as her diaphragm spasmed. She hopped to keep from tripping on the henchman she’d just knocked out, spinning around to see who had struck her.
Another opponent had his fists raised, poised like a boxer, coming toward her with short, crab-like steps. He was thick, cables of muscle laid under the skin of his forearms, a square plug of violence. His left eye pulled up at the corner, lifted by a wad of scar tissue where his eyebrow should’ve ended. He was a boxer, at least a brawler, so he would know how to use the power in his physique for maximum damage.
She was grateful for her new suit. If she’d been wearing just her old jacket, he would have hospitalized her with that blow. As it was she straightened, facing him.
“Ah, girlie,” the boxer said, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the fighting that rose around them. “I came straight over here when I spotted you.”
She swallowed down her canary cry, forcing herself to hold it in. She didn’t know how stable the explosives in the room might be, and couldn’t take the chance of setting them off, no matter how much she wanted to blast the lewd grin off the man’s face. At the thought, though, she smiled as he stepped closer to her.
She’d just have to knock off that grin the old-fashioned way.
“You glad to see me, girlie? I’m glad to—”
Dinah slid the bõ staff through her lead hand, driving with her hips to put as much torque behind it as she could. The staff flew straight out, moving faster than could be seen, and crashed into the boxer’s mouth, knocking teeth out in a spray of blood. He cried out and crashed to his knees as if his feet had been cut out from beneath him. Overknuckled hands clasped his mouth, blood running off their bottom edge to drip on his chest.
Black Canary stepped forward. “You glad to see me, girlie?”
Her boot caught him in the stomach, just under the breastbone. He went pale and fell to the ground.
She was already moving to the next target.
* * *
Spartan jerked up, applying pressure on the throat of the henchman he had in a headlock. The man’s hands scrabbled at Diggle’s jacket, but he was relentless and within a few seconds the man went limp.
There was a satisfying thud as he let him drop.
Another henchman, a tall lanky specimen, swung an ax at him. He turned into the swing, reaching out and grabbing the henchman’s shirt. His fingers rolled into the ripstop cloth, pain shooting along the tendons due to the pressure. Using the hold as leverage, he fired a flurry of elbow strikes at the man’s head. Ax-man jerked away and the strikes barely grazed him, mostly landing on his shoulders. The henchman lashed out with the ax, striking Diggle with the flat of it. It wasn’t a solid blow, but still it made a hard throb of pain across his side. He let go, taking two steps back. Ax-man shifted the ax in his hands, raising the blade as if to begin chopping Spartan down to size.
Diggle watched the ax rise, struggling to draw breath. That ax head was going to split his skull, and he couldn’t get enough oxygen to move.
Goodbye, Lyla and little John. I love you.
With the ax raised up over his head, the ax-man jerked three times, then went stiff. His hands opened and the ax slipped around through his claw-like fingers, to strike his own face. His eyes rolled up and he fell forward, crashing on top of his weapon.
White Canary was there.
She stepped forward, helping him up. Spartan glanced at the fallen henchman and saw three shuriken jutting from the man’s back.
“Black lotus gum,” Sara said. “Knocks out the biggest and the baddest in under a minute.”
Spartan grunted, “Good trick.”
“League of Assassins, baby,” she grinned.
“Thanks for the assist,” he said. “Sorry I needed it.”
“You got hit with an ax—it could happen to any of us.”
She ducked left, another henchman’s ax whistling past where her head had been. Spartan stepped forward and put an uppercut into the man’s jaw, sending with it every bit of anger he held. The henchman fell like a tree in a hurricane wind.
Now his hand throbbed with pain to the elbow.
“Not all of us,” he said.
She gave him a quick push. “So we’re even—stop being grumpy.” She turned away and began to fight again. Diggle shook his hand out and did the same.
* * *
“Oliver.”
He knew the voice on the comms was for his ears only, since Felicity used his name. He drove a palm strike into the chest of the henchman who was charging him, hand tensed to make it like a thing of iron. The henchman stopped short as the shock of the blow jolted through his body, disrupting the functions of his nervous system. Raising his fist over his head, Oliver dropped a devastating back-fist to the suprascapular nerve cluster between the man’s neck and shoulder. The flechettes stored along the back of his gauntlet added weight and rigidity to the strike.
The henchman fell face forward.
“Go,” he said, tracking another target.
“We have a problem.”
“I don’t have time to play twenty questions, so tell me.” He moved toward a henchman coming up behind Wild Dog.
“The boat you’re on is changing course, and is heading toward Cape Dixon.”
He remembered Cape Dixon, a small outcropping into the water, not truly large enough for the term “cape,” and nearly all of it was wide sandy beaches. This time of night it should be deserted.
The henchman reached him, swinging knuckles covered in brass. He slipped the punch, driving his knuckle into the ulna nerve in the man’s inner bicep.
“What’s the problem?”
“Rangerettes Midnight Jamboree,” Felicity said. “There are three hundred girls camping on that beach.”
Damn. He landed a back-fist but it just skimmed off the henchman’s shoulder.
“How long—” He grunted, swinging again. “—till we get there?”
“Thirteen minutes.”
The henchman caught him a stiff shot to the cheek that made his eyes water. Training turned into instinct and he latched onto the man’s wrist with iron fingers and yanked, pulling his assailant off balance. He grabbed him around the waist and spun him into the air, driving him to the floor. Then he turned to look for Curtis, and found him a few feet away.
* * *
Mister Terrific dropped low and did a sweeping kick, knocking the legs out from under an opponent built like a cement mixer. The man crashed to the floor on his back, the breath forced out of him. Curtis scrambled over, putting his knee on the henchman’s neck, pressing against the carotid artery. He kept the pressure on until the man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he went still.
Suddenly Green Arrow was next to him, flipping a henchman up and slamming him down so hard Curtis felt the steel floor under him vibrate. He stood as Oliver stepped over and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Overwatch and Mister Terrific.” Green Arrow’s voice echoed through the comms. “Disarm that device.” Oliver gave him a push toward the table and simultaneously pulled a flechette from the back of his glove and flung it at an advancing henchman.
“On it,” Felicity said.
Mister Terrific nodded, even though Green Arrow had turned away.
“Wild Dog, watch Mister Terrific’s back. If he can’t stop that bomb, we’re all dead.”
“On my way, Hoss,” Wild Dog said.
Green Arrow spun, driving his heel deep in the stomach of an attacker, folding the man in half.
“Spartan, go after Faust, Black Canary assist. Be careful of booby traps.”
Spartan and Black Canary didn’t respond, simply following orders by moving toward the gap through which Faust had slipped. As they did, White Canary swung on one of the dangling ropes, wrapping her legs around a henchman’s head. She flung herself forward, snapping him around and off his feet, driving him to the steel floor.
She stood. He didn’t.
Sara moved next to Arrow. “I guess you and I are mopping clean-up.”
“I know how much you like housekeeping.” He clenched his fists, watching henchmen gather themselves to attack. Many were moaning on the floor, out of the fight, but there were enough to be a problem. He’d divided the team to their strengths. He and Sara were the best hand-to-hand fighters, and Wild Dog held position as runner-up due to his sheer ferocity. Curtis was without a doubt the best chance they had for defusing the bomb, especially backed by Felicity in the Bunker. Diggle’s marksmanship made him best suited to run down Faust.
* * *
Felicity clicked her mouse furiously. Her voice went over the comms to Curtis and Rene.
“Guys, let me know when you’re in position.”
It drove her crazy to only have access to voice, but there were no cameras on site, and no way for any satellite to pick them up through the hull of a moving freighter. Though blind, she’d have to make it work.
She took another swig of coffee that had gone cold, oily, and bitter. Her face twisted but she kept staring at the screens in front of her, fervently wishing she could just see what was happening.
Mister Terrific loped across the cargo hold, using his long legs to eat the distance. A henchman lunged at him and he twisted away, causing the man to stumble past him. He glanced back to find Wild Dog already on the assailant.
Wild Dog slammed into the man, using his momentum to drive his hockey mask into the guy’s nose. Blood gushed, sluicing off the hard plastic of the mask to run onto the jersey in spatters of crimson. Rene looked down at it, shaking his head.
“Oh, hell no, you done it now.” He launched in, driving fists into his target’s torso. The henchman gasped, turning the blood sheeting his mouth into a weird bubble between his lips. Wild Dog reached back, knuckles just inches from the floor, and launched his fist like a rocket sled on rails, torquing at the hips to drive his fist with every ounce of power he could summon into the soft spot he’d created.
The man crumpled under that last blow.
Wild Dog turned, facing outward, and backed his way toward Mister Terrific, fists raised in front of his bloodstained jersey. “Stop that bomb,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve got you covered. I can’t go out dirty like this.”
Another man plowed into him and he went down swinging elbows and fists. Mister Terrific hesitated, but moved on, trusting Wild Dog’s ability to fight.