Page 150 of King’s Ransom

—just as I kicked open one of the doors and fired a flare gun right into it.

The incandescent flare slammed into the drone’s nose, spitting white-hot sparks.

A flare isn’t a bullet.

It’s a cartridge containing a plasticine-like slug of pyrotechnic material—usually a composite of magnesium, Teflon and Viton called MTV—that is designed to soar into the sky and blaze with phosphorescent light.

When you fire it into something at close range, that same goopy pyrotechnic material can adhere to a target.

Which is what it did now.

The flare slammed into the drone’s nose and, as the flare blazed with sparks, it stuck to the drone, scrambling the aerial vehicle’s visual sensors, causing the drone to reel back in the air and glitch . . .

. . . giving Murph and me our chance.

‘Let’s go!’ I slung Murph over my shoulder and, gripping his Glock in my spare hand, hauled him out the door onto the sand.

My shoes sank deep into the soft sand.

Our goal: the huge derelict concrete gun battery twenty yards behind our helicopter.

It was a squat solid structure, its crumbling grey walls shot through with cracks and weeds.

As soon as we started running toward it, however, Murph fell heavily.

‘I can’t!’ he cried, his eyes squeezed in pain.

‘I’m not leaving you!’ I called.

And so I heaved him onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry and—slipping and sliding in the shifting sand—carried him toward the gun battery.

Behind me, the drone yawed and bucked, trying to dislodge the blazing flare stuck to its nose.

I staggered toward the battery with Murph on my shoulders, trudging forward, one deep step after another, breathing hard.

We came to the battery—

—just as the drone dislodged the flare, righted itself, spun, and unleashed a devastating burst of gunfire at the now-empty chopper.

The chopper exploded in a gigantic fireball.

Twisted panels and pieces of the rotors were flung every which way, some of them clanging into the gun battery’s concrete walls near me.

Then the drone—it seemed almost angry now—spun again and found me in its sights.

It fired.

I dived forward, tripping over a thick chain that spanned a sunken trench leading into the concrete structure, a small metal ‘keep out’ sign dangling from it.

Murph and I tumbled clumsily over the chain and into the trench as the volley of bullets slammed into the concrete above us, chewing a line of chunks that rained down on my head like hailstones.

I rolled onto my butt.

Took in my new surroundings.

The original function of the gun battery had dictated its form: mighty cannons had once sat atop the battery’s huge concrete base, while tight tunnels, passageways and open-to-the-sky trenches and stairways connected those cannons to a reinforced arsenal below ground, where dangerous ordnance had once been kept.

A sharp-cornered maze of narrow passageways—like the one we were now in—curved and bent throughout the structure; designed to stop any explosion from spreading too far.