Chapter 37
Marine master sergeant Nathaniel Hogan stood in the middle of the road. He wore full battle armor. Even the ceramic plates and helmet. He had linked all of his machine gun ammunition together and wound the one long belt around his shoulders. His Colt was on his left hip with two more full magazines. On his right hip was the double-headed war axe. At his feet, two Molotov cocktails. It was the late afternoon of that same day. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
And around the corner came the Belmarsh Boys. Jonathan Naybor rode in sartorial elegance on top of the horse drawn Jaguar. Next to him were his bodyguards on horse. And behind him, ten abreast, were another one hundred and seventy rapists, thieves and murderers. He saw the lone soldier standing in the road and he held his hand up to indicate a halt. Behind him his cohorts lurched to a ragged stop.
‘Who are you?’ Shouted Naybor.
Nathaniel ignored him. Took out his Zippo. Lit his cigarette. Dragged. Exhaled.
‘I asked who you are.’ Shouted Naybor once again.
Nathaniel lent down, picked up the two Molotovs, lit them and threw them overhand, one on each side of the road. The flaming bottles arced high into the sky and then came crashing down into the brush on the sides of the road. At the top of the incline that hemmed the road in. Exactly where Nathaniel and the scholars had spent the afternoon piling up a six-foot high line of dry brush and covering it with diesel and gasoline. The side of the road literally exploded with flame trapping the Belmarsh boys in the depression.
At the same time, Papa Dante and his men opened up from behind the Belmarsh boys, automatic weapons pouring a wall of lead into the criminal gang.
This meant that the horde had only one way to go. And that was forward. Naybor couldn’t believe his luck. He had been ambushed by the world’s worst tactician. A perfect trap except for the fact that the only way to get out of it was through a single man. It was ludicrous.
He raised his hand above his head and brought it chopping down.
‘Charge!’
Nathaniel dropped his cigarette, rose up onto the balls of his feet, and sprinted straight at the enemy. At the same time some of Papa’s men started to kick bundles of the burning brush down into the road. The balls of flaming kindling rolled into the crowd of thugs, exploding on contact, causing tens of them to catch alight as they crashed into one another in an attempt to escape the flames. Burning people dropped to the ground and rolled, screaming in agony as they burned to death. The extra ammunition that they were carrying cooked off in the flames, exploding and adding to the complete chaos and mayhem.
And then Nathaniel opened up, working the SAW machinegun from side to side. Spent brass poured out of the side of the weapon like metal confetti at a wedding. The high velocity full metal jacket rounds tore through the pack of humanity, sometimes exiting one body only to go on and hit a second and sometimes even a third.
Nathaniel’s ammunition lasted for twenty-eight seconds. In that short time he killed over ninety Belmarsh boys. Another ten had succumbed to fire and Papa’s men had taken out a further twenty.
The marine slowed to a walk, dropped the machine gun and pulled out his Colt, firing as he walked. Every shot was a hit. As he fired the last round in his final magazine his luck ran out. Although he had been hit three or four times the body armor had deflected the shots. But this round, fired from a heavy caliber handgun, struck him under the armor, just above his hip. The round smashed his liver and kidneys and stopped against his spine.
Nathaniel ripped the axe from his belt and beheaded the person who had shot him. Another shot hit him in the right thigh and he staggered but pulled himself upright. The surviving fifty of the Belmarsh boys rushed forward to pack around him but Papa Dante and his boys were still firing, picking their shots with deadly accuracy. Half of the pack turned to face Papa Dante and the others continued to bear down on Nathaniel.
Nathaniel looked at them and smiled. He closed his eyes for a second and felt the power rush into him. Heat boiled off him and time slowed down. Milliseconds became seconds; seconds became minutes and minutes stretched out for days into the future. For he was Nathaniel Hogan and he had been gifted.
The axe flew in his hands, its heavy metal blades as light as gossamer and as deadly as sin as he carved his way through the crowd. Body parts leapt from their owners and rib cages shattered and brains spilt. Such carnage had not been seen since Samson slew a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey.
Finally the marine stood in front of Naybor, the commander of the now extinct Belmarsh boys.
‘Who are you?’ Naybor asked for a final time, his voice shaking with fear.
‘I am Marine Master Sergeant Nathaniel Hogan,’ was the answer as the axe swept down from on high and clove the commander in twain.
‘And I am…THE FOREVER MAN!’
Please look for the next book in the series…