DEAD GAMES

FADE IN:

1EXT. TOWN, NORTHERN SYRIA - NIGHT (GREEN)

SUPER: "NORTHERN SYRIA. TWO YEARS AGO."

Night vision. Green static. Flat roofs, water tanks and a minaret with no light in it.

Nothing moves. No dogs, either. ELI DRAKE has done three rotations in this country, and there's always a dog barking somewhere on a Syrian street at night.

Tonight the dogs are elsewhere.

SOUND: Heartbeat. Boot grinding gravel. Jaw chewing gum.

2EXT. COMPOUND WALL - NIGHT (GREEN)

Seven shapes flat against the plaster, spaced so one burst can't take two of them. Lime dust gets in their teeth.

ELI DRAKE (42), master sergeant, ALPHA lead. Big hands, and he's careful with them. He has a face that hides nothing, and tonight he's trying to make it hide something.

SIMON CROSS (40), 22 SAS, on loan from London. Lean, with a long calm face. He reads a room before he walks into it, and he's already read this one.

ZOE TURNER (31), sniper, scoping the roofline with one thumb riding the dial. She doesn't look down at it. Cold and exact, and the last one on the team to talk.

MYLES JACKSON (34), USMC, the only Marine on the team. Det charges across his chest in a bandolier he sewed himself. He's the loudest man in the unit, and he handles those charges gently.

DANNY GALLOWAY (24) works a stick of Big Red on the left side of his jaw. Everybody's kid brother.

BISHOP (38), Welsh, knuckles taped. He quit boxing ten years ago and still tapes his hands before anything that matters.

REEVES (29), radio cord taped down his arm. He trusts whatever voice is in his ear.

Myles pats the charge with two fingers.

FLASH CUT: ERBIL MOCKUP, A WHITEBOARD. Two arrows in Eli's marker. ALPHA to BRAVO. Under them: GALLOWAY, REEVES. Eli drew the split.

A flat COUGH. The wall PEELS OPEN.

MONTAGE - THE LONGEST MINUTE

AUDIO DESIGN: Heartbeat is the metronome. The net piles up under the picture, half-heard. SPEED RAMPS: slow on every hit, fast on every run. A clock in the corner.

SUPER: "00:00:00"

FAST. We go up the stairs with Alpha, three at a time. FAST. Bravo clears four rooms. A chair with gouges where the straps went. A steel ring bolted to the floor. A car battery wired up through the ceiling. A pallet that still holds the shape of whoever slept on it.

SLOW. Galloway lays his palm flat on the blankets. Nobody says what these rooms were for.

SLOW. Reeves at a window with no glass in it. The minaret, three hundred meters out. Something glints up in the gallery, and his eye goes right to it.

Simon gives it one second. He weighs the feed against what's in the window, and he lets Overwatch win. His first hold, and the wrong call.

SUPER: "00:00:31"

A steel door with the deadbolt on the OUTSIDE. Myles KICKS it, SLOW, and it tears off the frame. It's COLD in here. Six empty server racks. On the far desk, a work light swings to face the doorway and Eli's night vision WHITES OUT.

Why lock an empty room from the outside? Because somebody wanted them in it. The room is bait.

SUPER: "00:00:42"

SMASH. PKM fire from three positions, every window at once. Glass hangs in the air, SLOW, lit up by tracer. Galloway goes down. His thigh OPENS, and both hands clamp it, blood pushing dark between his fingers.

Simon's hands go over his and crank a tourniquet tight. He writes the time on the strap with a Sharpie, because a surgeon will need it, because there will be a surgeon.

Eli takes the north doorway. Simon stays down on the floor with Galloway.

Galloway grins through it, still working the gum.

SUPER: "00:01:05"

FAST. The north door BLOWS, and Eli runs with his breath loud in the mic, Zoe and Myles right behind him. FREEZE. The gate. A burned-out truck fills it post to post. Yesterday's drone stills showed it clear.

There's a cut in the wall beside the gate, and an engine ticking on the other side of it.

Eli looks back. Sixty meters to the lane. When Bravo comes out, they'll come out across the gun's field of fire, and somebody has to cover them. He knows who. SIMON'S MIND. The lane, and Eli turning with his rifle on the gate roof. REWIND. Same. REWIND. Same.

SUPER: "00:01:34"

A POP and a hiss. An RPG off the gate roof. The wall bursts WHITE, and then it isn't there. SLOW. Concrete comes off in lit slabs. One of them lands on Zoe.

AUDIO: ALL SOUND DROPS OUT. A high ring.

SLOW. Eli gets his fingers under the edge. Myles gets a shoulder under it, and something in that shoulder GIVES. The slab moves. Zoe's leg ends below the knee.

SOUND SNAPS BACK.

She drags her rifle to her chest by the sling. A thread of blood runs out of Myles's right ear and into his collar. He doesn't know it's there yet.

THE CHOICE, four held frames:

The gate roof and its muzzle flash. The lane, with Simon in its mouth, waiting on a rifle that isn't coming. Zoe's hand closing on Eli's strap. Eli's hands, under her.

SMASH.

FAST. Eli carries Zoe toward the cut, away from Simon. Myles walks backward behind them with his rifle up.

Behind them the gate gun OPENS UP, aimed bursts with a pause between. Eli knows that sound. He doesn't turn around.

SUPER: "00:02:11"

SLOW. Simon in the lane with Galloway between him and Bishop, Reeves behind, all four of them running. Concrete chips open Simon's cheek. He's listening for Drake's rifle on the gate roof.

Nobody is shooting at the gate roof.

No answer.

On Eli's end, static in the earpiece, with Simon's call breaking up inside it. Both arms full of Zoe. SLOW. A burst from the minaret. One round goes in under Galloway's plate, where the carrier rode up.

AUDIO: TOTAL SILENCE.

Simon's hands on a chest, arms locked. Each compression PULSES the picture. His count comes up through the silence.

Galloway's jaw is still chewing. Then it isn't. Bishop puts a hand on Simon's shoulder and leaves it there. Simon looks at his own hands, blood to the wrist. He lifts the chain over Galloway's head. Two tags, still warm. His fist closes around them.

SLOW. Simon hoists Reeves across his shoulders and steps out into the slot the minaret can see. Six paces. We count every one with him. Nothing hits him. He doesn't look back at the man he's leaving on the ground.

SUPER: "00:03:40"

FAST. The cut. The Land Cruiser sits dark. Eli lays Zoe on the back seat with her rifle on her chest. Somebody walks out of the dust. It's Simon, blood on his hands and face, carrying Reeves, with Bishop walking backward behind.

Bravo went in four. Three come out.

Simon's right hand is a closed fist. Eli's knuckles go white on the door frame, and he has to make them let go. In the side mirror, a van turns toward the cut. Pale and boxy, no lights, its driver sure of where he's going. A door opens on its far side.

The Land Cruiser pulls out. A wall slides across the mirror, and the van is gone from it.

3EXT. LANDING ZONE, FIELD NORTH OF TOWN - NIGHT

A helicopter sits in a flat field with its rotors turning and its nav lights pulsing through the dust. Eli carries Zoe up the ramp. Simon stands at the edge of the rotor wash with the chain between his fingers. The tags go in his chest pocket, and he buttons the flap.

Eli comes back down the ramp. Ten feet of dust between them. The instruments light Simon's face, blood and dust drying on it. Eli is backlit, a shape with no face and empty hands. There's nothing either of them could say that would help.

Eli turns and walks back up the ramp. Simon stays where he is and watches it close.

SMASH TO BLACK. The heartbeat STOPS.

MAIN TITLE: DEAD GAMES

4INT. BODY SHOP OFFICE, VAN NUYS - DAY

SUPER: "VAN NUYS. TWO YEARS LATER."

Bondo dust and burnt coffee. RAYMOND OCHOA (50s), forearms the size of fence posts, reads a Summit Racing catalog.

Eli walks in wearing a charcoal Men's Wearhouse suit that was wrong at the shoulders in the store. He bought it for a memorial. He puts a manila envelope on the counter.

Raymond's right hand closes. The shoulder dips and the weight rocks back. Thirty years of body-shop haymaker.

He takes it.

CRACK. His lip splits. He turns back, slow.

5INT. SIMON'S FLAT, BERMONDSEY - DAWN

Paper and dust. SIMON CROSS, still in his running kit, uncaps a pen over a black notebook. Two years of entries in his own cipher, and one blank line he has no cipher for.

One voicemail.

He plays it twice. DR. AMA MENSAH, A&E consultant at St Thomas'. She closed the cut on his cheek. By the sound of it, she's run out of patience with the rest of him.

A text, no name: VAUXHALL. NOW IF CONVENIENT.

The notebook goes into his Barbour, next to a chain with two flat scraps of metal on it. He doesn't look at them.

INTERCUT - THE TWO BRIEFINGS

6INT. BLACKRIDGE SOLUTIONS, VAUXHALL - DAY

The room smells of nothing. CROWLEY, late fifties, squares his papers to the table edge, then squares them again.

7INT. ELI'S APARTMENT, VAN NUYS - NIGHT

SUPER: "VAN NUYS. THAT NIGHT."

One bulb. Fry oil comes through the wall from the Del Taco next door. One chair. Eli holds a dish towel full of melting ice against his lip. A photograph lies face down on the table, and he turns it over.

Five faces on a flight line in Jordan. Zoe on two legs. Galloway on the end with gum in his cheek and his mouth shut for once. Eli hasn't called a single one of them. He's ashamed of that.

Eli lays it face down.

KNOCK KNOCK.

Nobody knocks here.

A man in a gray Jos. A. Bank jacket, with a shaving nick on his jaw and a fleck of tissue still stuck to it.

Blackridge, over a satellite photograph of an island shaped like a boot:

The apartment. Brandon takes the one chair and sets a ruggedized tablet down next to the photograph. Its case is stenciled KR-7741-HX.

Simon goes to the window.

His reflection lies over the river. Under it he sees a side mirror, exact. A pale van turning toward a cut with its lights off. A door opening on the far side.

He has never told anyone about the van. He's never written it down, not even in cipher. It shakes him, and he keeps his back to Crowley.

Simon takes out his phone.

8INT. ELI'S APARTMENT, VAN NUYS - NIGHT

SUPER: "VAN NUYS. THE NEXT NIGHT."

Simon opens the door without knocking. There's a thin white scar on his cheekbone that wasn't there two years ago. His eyes go to the face-down photograph and stay on it.

Simon's hand goes inside the Barbour, high on the left, and stays there, closed on something. The answer is one. Reeves, across Simon's shoulders, out of the dust. Not Danny.

The cold gets to Eli's skin before it gets to his head. Empty racks.

Brandon drops a folder. On top, still in its shrink-wrap, is a cheap drugstore ANDROID, the kind CVS sells next to the reading glasses.

Simon pauses at the door.

He goes, and Brandon follows. The door CLICKS shut, considerately. Eli goes down to the Corolla in his T-shirt and comes back up with a flip phone, calls only. He opens Contacts. At the bottom, untouched for two years: ZOE. There's a worn ridge under his thumb.

He's scared of this call, so he dials before he can think about it. CALL.

MONTAGE - FOUR DOORS, ONE CALL

Company phone on speaker. One flat Midwestern voice reads the dossiers.

INSERT - FLIP PHONE

Ringing.

Eli hangs up on the beep.

9INT. JASON'S APARTMENT, WEST HOLLYWOOD - NIGHT

A ring light on an empty chair. The place smells of Jameson and a vanilla candle that cost more than the Jameson.

JASON MATTHEWS (29), adventure influencer, pours a shot for nobody, then turns on the smile for the lens.

KNOCK KNOCK.

Jason has a GoPro clipped to his chest rig before Eli finishes his first sentence. Eli takes the empty chair.

10EXT. CAMP PENDLETON, OBSTACLE COURSE - DAY

Hemp CREAKS under forty recruits.

We find MYLES JACKSON slapping the rope above a hanging kid's hands, left-handed. His right arm hangs dead at his side. A beige HEARING AID sits behind his ear.

His daughter texts. His thumb hovers over the reply, and then he pockets the phone without answering and keeps walking. A suit crosses the grinder. Eli comes up on Myles's right. Mid-sentence, Myles pivots, and now Eli is on his left side.

11EXT. APARTMENT COMPLEX, COLORADO SPRINGS - DAY

A blackout curtain shifts. A face. It falls shut.

KATY PARK (27), systems, comes down the stairs with one hand on the rail and her sleeves pulled over her fingers. She stops ten feet from Eli. She's scared to death out here, and she stays.

Upstairs, the DEADBOLT. Then the chain.

12INT. BLACKRIDGE WAREHOUSE, VAUXHALL - NIGHT

SUPER: "VAUXHALL. THE NEXT NIGHT."

Work lights HUM over the tarps. BISHOP sits on an ammo crate taping his hands. Next to his bergen is a white cake box from a bakery in Merthyr, tied up with string.

NADIA OKONKWO (36), analyst, reads the briefing pack for what isn't in it. A thin gold chain at her collar, with one charm. She never touches it.

TOMMY (41), fixer, tightens a wobbly table leg with the Leatherman that's always open in his hand. He thumbs up the lid of the cake box. Pink icing, a 7 and a 0.

Bishop picks up the registration list. His finger stops dead on KONGA, the Nigerian entry. One name.

He looks up through the glass wall at Nadia. She learned that wrist lock in Lagos, and she has never said another word about Lagos.

13EXT. RANGE ROAD, NORTHERN VIRGINIA - DAWN

Mist on the berms. PING. A steel target, far down the line. PING. A shooter sits at the last bench. Eli knows that back at two hundred meters.

We get a look at her left leg. Below the knee it's carbon and titanium. At the ankle there's a sliver of bright metal between the pylon and the foot.

A machinist's shim.

There's a notebook on her bench with three names in it. Eli walks up behind her.

He steps aside. She fires. Works the bolt. Fires.

She safes the rifle and turns around on the bench. She's older. Every soft edge is gone from her face.

His eyes drop to the shim.

She turns to pack the case and stops on his shoulders.

She reaches up and thumbs the shoulder seam flat, the one that never sat right. It's as close to a hug as these two ever get.

The case LATCHES. SNAP.

Four doors. Four yeses.

14INT. KING AIR, IN FLIGHT - DAY

SUPER: "SERENIQUE. DAY ONE."

The vinyl seats are cooked from the sun, and the coffee maker's dead. ELI sits with his eyes shut and his hands flat on his knees.

Jason films the window instead.

In the last row, alone, ZOE holds her rifle case across her lap with both hands on the latches. OUT THE WINDOW: the floodlit compound in the north. To the west, a bare plateau.

Eli watches the plateau until the WING takes it. We'll see it again.

15EXT. AIRSTRIP, SERENIQUE - DAY

Ninety-two degrees. Hot rubber and avgas. Sentinel tumbles down the stairs. Zoe comes last, and the carbon leg finds every tread without hunting for it.

Eli reads the apron before both boots are down. A camera every sixty meters on the fence. A service road climbs to the north.

A gray GULFSTREAM taxis in. Simon steps off last, already reading the other teams.

Past the terminal, cargo pallets bake next to a yellow forklift. Behind them, chocked, sits a DASH 8. White. No lettering, no crest. Who flies a plane with no name on it?

Between the pallets, OMAR HASSAN (50s), neat gray beard, counts crates against a tablet. He checks his gold Rolex more often than the crates.

At his shoulder stands a sunburned slab of a man in a Games security polo, a commando dagger tattooed down one forearm. The lanyard says BREYTENBACH.

A boy reads crate numbers off a manifest. FOUAD HADDAD.

THUD. A long black case drops to the tarmac with green tape on the handle. Zoe's spare. Eli starts for it and stops.

He's already walked past the last pallet. A steel box the size of a chest freezer, with a compressor bolted to its side and FROST on every corner in ninety-two degrees.

Inside the box, something KNOCKS. One knock. Soft, heavy, low. The compressor HUMS. Compressors clunk.

Eli stands there a second too long. Hassan looks up. So does Breytenbach, with a flat stare at Eli's hands.

Forty feet off, Simon has stopped too. He crosses straight through Sentinel, and they part for him. His eyes flick to the hearing aid, then away. Then to Zoe. The leg. Her face.

Simon slows one step at the end of the pallets. The forklift sets the frost box on an unmarked flatbed in the shade of the terminal. He watches it settle.

16INT. HANGAR TWO - DAY

Cold oil and kerosene. By the door, a red emergency cabinet. Behind the glass, fat flare tubes with lead collars, labeled SEARCH & RECOVERY MARKERS. FUEL JETTY. BURNS UNDER WATER. Eli's eyes stay on it a step too long. You might want to remember that cabinet.

A stubby refueler sits in the shade of the doors with JET A-1 stenciled on its tank. Keys in the ignition.

A laminated card is bolted up by the fire extinguisher. DHC-8-400 GROUND HANDLING. A line drawing of the aircraft over columns of dense small print.

Simon reads it top to bottom with his hands behind his back. Then he goes back to the top. Nobody reads those cards. Simon reads this one twice.

AT THE ARMORER'S BENCH: CLACK. The factory bolts come out of Sentinel's rifles, and blue ones go in, each with a hard collar machined into the face.

The factory bolts drop into foam crates stenciled by team. A handler stacks them on a pallet of green ammo cans, GAMES SECURITY 5.56 BALL, and wheels it out the side door.

Eli watches the cans go. He doesn't like it.

Zoe's rifle comes last. The armorer cracks a box of FAT GRAY ROUNDS, each slug seated in a plastic sabot.

17EXT. THE BOWL - SUNSET

A grass amphitheater cut into the south lawn, clipped turf in tiers down to a stage with the sea behind it. Two thousand buyers in linen and Panamas. Cut grass and Hendrick's on ice.

A hangar-door screen. A JIB camera swings over the crowd. A DRUMLINE, sixteen snares on one pulse. Eight teams come down the center aisle.

The drums CUT. The jib sweeps the lines, and every face it catches goes up on the screen under a TRACKFIRE lower-third.

A barrel chest, hands that shrink his rifle, a telnyashka at the throat. He finds Eli across the grass and stares.

SUPER: "SERGEI VOLKOV / VOLK GROUP /
TEAM LEAD / ENTRY 3.9 M/S"

A compact woman. Knuckles white with scar tissue, set shoulder-width apart. She doesn't blink.

SUPER: "LIN WEI / JADE DRAGON /
TEAM LEAD / SHOT TO HIT 0.29 S"

All women, hair scraped back to the skull. One SILVER HAMMER hangs on a chain at one throat.

SUPER: "ASTRID HAUGEN / VALKYRIE / TEAM LEAD / HEART RATE ON TRIGGER 61"

Reyes gives the jib a two-finger salute and a grin. He's having a great time.

SUPER: "ALEJANDRO REYES / SIERRA MADRE / TEAM LEAD / RELOAD 1.6 S"

Three fine scars on each cheek. Palms open.

SUPER: "EMEKA OBI / KONGA /
TEAM LEAD / ROUNDS PER CONFIRM 1.1"

On Blackridge's patch of grass, Nadia sees him. Her hand rises toward the charm at her collar, gets halfway and drops. The jib moves on.

Eli, squinting into the low sun, gray at the temples. Forty feet tall on the screen, he looks all of forty-four.

SUPER: "ELI DRAKE / SENTINEL /
TEAM LEAD / FIRST SHOT 0.8 S AVG"

LIGHTS DOWN.

Out past the reef, three hundred points of light lift off an unlit barge and draw the island's boot in the sky. The crowd finds itself on the map and CHEERS. Then the lights MOVE, and out of the pour comes the TRACKFIRE CROSSHAIR. A ring, four ticks and a burning point.

It slides up the coast and SETTLES. West, over empty dark, dead on the plateau from where Eli stands. It blinks out. The Bowl ROARS. Eli doesn't.

Stage lights, hot and white. MAXIM VOLKOV-CHEN (40s) jogs out in a faded DOOM II shirt under an Italian blazer, with a headset mic taped flesh-colored along his cheekbone.

Front row. Hassan lifts two fingers off his tablet. Eli's eyes run the list. The green tape. The white Dash 8. The flatbed. All of it is Hassan's.

In the back of Sentinel, Katy watches a packet capture scroll on her phone.

The logo flips to a beast with three heads. Eli's head comes up. Across the grass, so does Simon's.

Neither one says the name.

The screen flips to the bracket. SENTINEL and BLACKRIDGE land on the same side of the draw. Somebody up there has a sense of humor.

Nadia hasn't looked at the bracket. She's watching the stage, where Max signs Hassan's tablet with a fingertip, still talking, his eyes off the screen.

Top tier. Eli turns. Below him, the apron under floodlights, and Zoe's spare case sitting alone on the tarmac.

Green tape on the handle.

HEADLIGHTS behind the terminal. The flatbed, with the steel box ratcheted down and the compressor's red light blinking. It climbs the service road and takes the first junction.

West. Toward where the crosshair went out.

18INT. VILLAS - NIGHT

CROSS-CUT. One voice runs through three rooms, tinny, off a tablet propped against a fruit bowl.

19INT. SENTINEL VILLA, LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

Brandon's face on the tablet. Eli on the sofa, elbows on his knees. Simon leans against the wall, on principle.

The tablet goes DARK.

20INT. BLACKRIDGE VILLA, LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

Tommy lies flat on the floor under the coffee table with the Leatherman in one fist.

Simon fills the doorway.

Tommy opens his palm. A black PUCK, coin-sized, trailing two hair-thin wires.

In the kitchen doorway, Bishop tapes his hands for a fight nobody scheduled.

Bishop TEARS the tape with his teeth.

21INT. SENTINEL VILLA, TEAM ROOM - NIGHT

Katy's Toughbook sits on a hard case, cabled to black boxes with green LEDs. Beside it, a box of Cap'n Crunch she carried through two airports. She eats it dry. Zoe feeds a pipe cleaner through her bolt by feel. Gun oil and hot plastic. Myles fills the doorway to the balcony.

Eli leaves Syria out of it. If he tells them, every one of them hits the field hunting Galloway's killers instead of watching a sector. Zoe knows, from the range. Nobody else.

Zoe's pipe cleaner stops. She watches him hold it back, and she lets it ride. The pipe cleaner starts again.

Zoe's hand freezes on the bolt handle.

22EXT. WEST PLATEAU, TREELINE - NIGHT

The insects are deafening. Hot dust and crushed sage.

Two hundred meters of scrub. Then low buildings behind chain-link. The long one has no windows and a loading bay at the north end. Under the bay light sits the unmarked flatbed. The bed's empty.

Simon lies prone behind a spotting scope with Bishop beside him. He walks the scope down the long building's west wall. It's WET. A ten-meter strip is beading and running where the corrugated panel meets the block.

Dry night, wet wall. What makes a wall sweat in this heat?

A white LAND CRUISER rolls along the inside of the wire, its spotlight raking the scrub. Simon thumbs the stopwatch on his Casio. The beam swings toward the trees. Simon lays two fingers on Bishop's wrist. Slow. Even. Sixty a minute. The light lifts over their heads and swings away.

Ninety minutes a lap. Simon nods once.

23INT. BLACKRIDGE VILLA - NIGHT

The lights are off. Tommy's asleep on the sofa with the Leatherman rising and falling on his chest.

Simon steeps a Yorkshire Gold bag in a mug that says SERENIQUE. At the table he writes one line in cipher. In plain English:

DAY 1. W PLATEAU. COLD BUILDING. 90 MIN.

24EXT. SENTINEL VILLA, BALCONY - NIGHT

The teak is still warm from the day. Chlorine drifts up from the empty pool, lit turquoise. Eli stands at the rail with his Steiner binoculars up, reading the island.

North, up the slope, the compound sits floodlit. White fuel tanks stand on a pad at its east edge. A row of barred windows marks the armory. Behind the bars are a foam crate stenciled SENTINEL and a pallet of green cans. Sentinel's factory bolts, parked next to the live ammunition.

West is dark. Two figures leave the resort on foot, one slim, one square through the shoulders. They head out for the plateau.

Eli slides the photograph out of his jacket and holds it face up in the pool light. Five faces. Galloway on the end with gum in his cheek, for once not talking. Eli misses him. He holds the picture there for ten seconds and doesn't turn it over.

It's past one. The pool light CLICKS off.

Headlights on the plateau road. The flatbed is coming back the way it went. At a junction, a sodium lamp shows him its bed. It's empty, the ratchet straps coiled behind the cab.

He pockets the photograph. We go with him down the stairs to the south road.

25INT. SERVICE TUNNEL, UNDER THE COMPOUND - NIGHT

SUPER: "0152."

Bleach over wet concrete. On the far pillar is a fire-hose cabinet, the dead drop. A chalk mark on its hinge means I have something.

SIMON moves along the wall with a red torch dark in his fist. The southern camera grid dies at 0157 for four minutes. Both men mean to use it.

He told no one about the tunnel. The hatch wears a new MASTER LOCK with the price sticker still on the shackle.

Simon stops. Holds.

Thirty meters short of the cabinet: BREATHING, fast and shallow, from a recess on his left. He thumbs the torch on. RED light.

ALMÁNZAR sits on the floor with his face pressed flat to a steel door, cheek on the cold metal. Eyes open, pupils blown wide. His shirt is black with sweat.

Nothing.

Simon crouches. Two fingers to the throat. The skin is BURNING. The pulse is too fast to count. Almánzar's hand SNAPS up and locks on his wrist. Wet. Hot.

Strong past anything a sick man owns.

Simon doesn't pull.

Almánzar turns his face off the steel and studies the hand. He's confused, and then he's ashamed. The fingers open.

Simon stands. He puts the torch on the hinge. Bare metal. No chalk. No contact. Behind the pillar, someone else breathes, slow and careful.

Eli steps out of the dark.

They crouch in the same two feet of dark. Coconut sun cream. Down the tunnel, Almánzar rasps.

Simon has the true answer ready. A sick man. The contact. A hand on my wrist.

Eli listens a beat longer and lets it go.

Neither moves.

26EXT. SERVICE ROAD - NIGHT

They surface inside the camera gap, into the warm dark.

It lands under Simon's ribs. It's Galloway's word, in the dead man's cadence.

It comes out tired.

They split into the dark in two directions.

27EXT. OLEANDERS ABOVE THE TUNNEL MOUTH - NIGHT

SUPER: "0240."

Oleander sap, bitter and green. Simon is ten meters up the bank with his phone to his ear.

SUPER: "0258."

A white VAN rolls down the road with its lights off and backs up to the tunnel door. A refrigeration unit HUMS on the cab. Two men in logistics polos carry Almánzar out. The rear doors swing wide. Cold rolls out.

Someone's already inside.

A woman lies strapped along the left wall on a foil blanket. She wears a pale blue housekeeper's smock with room keys coiled at her waist. Her face is to the wall.

One hand has worked loose of the strap and hooked over the rail. It's gray to the wrist. Simon has carried enough dead men to know that gray. He has never seen one hold on.

Almánzar lifts his face into the chill, grateful for it. The men boost him in. He sits beside her with his cheek on the rail, a breath from her gray fingers.

Nobody takes his pulse. Nobody looks at her. The doors THUMP. The van takes the left fork. Simon asked for a doctor. They sent a van.

28EXT. ZONE ALPHA - DAY

SUPER: "DAY TWO."

Two mock towns sit side by side, ignoring each other, six structures a side. A red flag is clipped on a pole at the far end. Between them runs a wall of plywood three inches thick. You can't see through it. Hearing is fine.

Above the far end stands a glass GALLERY on steel legs. Two thousand seats of linen, with drinks in hand at ten a.m. The OPFOR spread across the pad, ex-military from a dozen armies, in scoring vests with SF-7 loads. They fire back.

Sentinel waits at the start line. Myles flexes his hands in front of a standard-width door. Zoe is already reading a balcony, and Jason tilts his chest GoPro two degrees.

Through the plywood, Welsh and quiet:

HORN.

MONTAGE - THE SCOREBOARD

AUDIO DESIGN: A drumline pulse under everything. One CHIME each time the TRACKFIRE board refreshes; every cut lands on one. SPEED RAMPS: slow on every hit, fast on every sprint. Split screen: Sentinel on the left, Blackridge on the right.

FAST. LEFT. Eli puts his shoulder into a steel door. BANG. Orange dye SLAPS the wall by his head. Two rounds into the first man, and his vest goes white. CONFIRMED, says a flat synthetic voice.

SLOW. RIGHT. Simon stands in a doorway with his carbine shouldered. He isn't firing. Eight meters off, an OPFOR kneels behind a hostage dummy strapped to a chair. A round in the dummy turns the scoring mat red.

FAST. LEFT. Zoe goes up a drainpipe. The good leg pushes. The carbon foot finds a seam in the blockwork and braces. Push, brace, pull. At a window in structure four, an OPFOR watches her climb with his rifle hanging. His rifle stays low the whole climb.

FAST. LEFT. Jason goes sideways through a seventeen-inch gap touching neither wall. SLOW. A waiting OPFOR tags his thigh.

Amber on the vest: WOUNDED. The Combat Skin cinches and keeps squeezing.

CHIME.

SUPER: "0:10." "0:20." "0:30."

RIGHT. Simon hasn't moved. The OPFOR's muzzle dips an inch. A rifle held on a doorway gets heavy at thirty seconds. Simon used to teach that in a classroom at Hereford.

SUPER: "0:40."

The OPFOR leans two inches to check that the door is still full. His shoulder clears the canvas. One shot, collarbone. White. The mat stays green.

A ROAR comes down through the glass.

CHIME.

AUDIO: THE DRUMLINE CUTS. A high thermal hum.

LEFT. Eli breaches structure four. Two rounds, first man. White. Down. The second man is slow, his rifle rising by inches. His face is slick and his collar is soaked black. Glassy eyes. We recognize him. He's the man from the window.

Two rounds, center chest. White. CONFIRMED.

He doesn't fall.

SLOW. SF-7 hurts. Eli has watched bigger men fold up yowling. This one glares at Eli, vest lit, then sits down. Eli passes him on the way out, and his right palm brushes the man's shoulder. Heat comes through the shirt.

AUDIO: THE DRUMLINE SLAMS BACK IN.

FAST. The Square is sixty meters of open flagstone. Eli sprints and dives behind a planter. There's a sniper behind a vent housing on the far roof.

SLOW. Her first shot paints an orange flower six inches from his head. He rolls, and her second goes through where his chest was. There are three ways off that housing, and she sees all three. He picks the wrong one. SLAP. White.

FAST. Both gates. Myles hits the steel gate with his whole body, and it SLAMS open. Through the wall, Blackridge's gate opens in one smooth swing. Same result, none of the force.

CHIME.

SLOW. A door on each side of the plywood. Eli hits his, and Simon hits theirs. BANG, BANG, three-tenths of a second apart. Eli comes out on a hot concrete roof with the island spread below him. Three inches of plywood away, Simon has the same view.

At the far end, the flagpole.

Myles sprints, six-four and two-forty, faster than anyone that size should move. On the other side, Bishop runs on quick, light feet. Myles rips the flag off its clip, and the pole SINGS.

Half a second later, Bishop's clip clicks open on the other side. Clean.

29INT. GALLERY - CONTINUOUS

The boards populate. SENTINEL: 41 ROUNDS, 20 NEUTRALIZED, 2 CASUALTY. BLACKRIDGE: 11 ROUNDS, 11 NEUTRALIZED, 0 CASUALTY.

The replay runs both roofs side by side. Myles tears his flag off, and the pole whips. Half a second behind, a compact man lifts his clear with one taped hand. Beneath it, one number.

SYNC DIFFERENTIAL 0.3 SEC.

30EXT. GRAVEL LOT BEHIND THE GALLERY - DAY

An unmarked white Transit sits at a loading dock with a refrigeration unit humming on the cab roof. Its rear windows are fogged from the inside. The van rocks.

THUMP. Low on the rear doors, heavy and soft. THUMP. One a second. Is somebody trying to get out? A man would shout. This is too even.

Ten feet off, a logistics guy on a cable drum peels an orange. Citrus and diesel. He keeps his eyes on his thumbs.

Eli eases toward the doors, and the knocking quickens. He steps two paces left, out of its line, and it slows back to the count.

A palm presses the left window, and the fog clears around it. The fingers spread. The hand drags down the glass, and the fog creeps back over the smear.

The logistics guy wipes his fingers, leans into the cab and cranks a dial. The unit drops a note.

The blows slow.

He drives off and takes the left fork, west. Eli remembers the steel box on the tarmac. One knock, and the second where he let it be the compressor.

MONTAGE - DAYS TWO AND THREE

AUDIO DESIGN: One CHIME, the TRACKFIRE board refreshing. Every cut lands on it.

31INT. DEBRIEF SUITE - NIGHT

SLOW. A wall of screens, set to arctic. On the replay, Eli's hand brushes the slow man's shoulder and lifts away. Six frames. The fingers open and close, once.

Simon watches with a glass of water. Bishop sits beside him with a milk. Reyes holds a Modelo out to Myles. Myles shifts so Reyes is on his left.

CHIME. Obi stops at the Blackridge corner. Nadia's hand goes to the charm at her collar and stops halfway.

He nods and moves on. CHIME. Tommy and Jason shake hands for the camera.

The leaderboard. Angola Tactical drops two places beside a small red word: PROCEDURAL. Beside it, a paper sheet: OPFOR 11, 14, 22. RELIEVED (MEDICAL). Eli looks at the right palm that brushed the slow man's shoulder.

At the bar, Hassan slides Max a tablet. Max signs with a fingertip and doesn't read it. That's twice.

Simon crosses to the terrace doors and passes Eli without breaking stride.

32EXT. DEBRIEF TERRACE - NIGHT

Nadia sets a plate by Simon's notebook.

33EXT. ZONE DELTA, THE CORRIDOR - DAY

FAST. A steel corridor in white light, five gates over sixty meters. At the third gate, Jason, still favoring the leg the Skin crushed, catches his boot on the threshold. Half an inch. A flat POP, and Jason FOLDS.

Jason slides down the wall, a dead man in a live corridor, his GoPro panning up the catwalks. The board reads white on red: ELIMINATION. ANGOLA TACTICAL.

34EXT. AIRSTRIP - AFTERNOON

FAST. Hot tar. The white Dash 8 spools up. Eight men cross the apron with kit bags. Their leader stops at the stairs and takes one long look at the ridge. Then he climbs. The plane lifts, banks west toward open water, and is gone.

35EXT. BEACH VOLLEYBALL COURT - DUSK

The pole lights buzz on. Sierra Madre against Sentinel. SMACK. Sand sprays.

Eli plays badly and scouts. Hassan sits at the court's edge in a folding chair with a beer he lifts and never drinks.

Behind the chain-link sits a white van with MEDICAL SCREENING on a magnetic sign. Twenty-one OPFOR stand in a chow line with their sleeves rolled. One after another, each bends his left arm and presses two fingers into the crook of the elbow.

Jason's GoPro, on its tripod at the far end, drifts toward them. Eli keeps his mouth shut.

LATER.

We stay on Hassan's chair. It's empty. Beside one leg stands the bottle he held all evening, full to the neck. Reyes picks up the volleyball and turns it in his hands.

36INT. COMPETITOR SUITE - MORNING

SUPER: "DAY FOUR."

Two phones lie on a glass table. Simon sets his mug on the glass, squarely.

Eli's eyes drop to the glass between them.

Eli pulls a resort Bic from his shirt pocket, Serenique crest on the barrel, and lays it square on the glass.

Two sheets go down. Simon's photo of the compound fire plan, with the service runs in red and blue. Eli's bar napkin, with the plateau road, distances in meters and a substation.

A buried conduit runs from the compound toward the plateau. Side by side, the halves FIT.

Under Simon's cuff, four small dark ovals sit in a row on the wrist, where Almánzar's fingers were. They haven't faded. He gave Eli the table. Almánzar and the woman on the van floor wait for a diagnosis. Simon's uneasy about that. The Bic stays where Eli put it.

37INT. KILL HOUSE, COMMERCIAL BLOCK - DAY

MONTAGE - THE SCOREBOARD, DAY FOUR

AUDIO DESIGN: The drumline again. Every cut on the CHIME.

Three buildings. The first muzzle on the other team's cardiac box wins. Sentinel starts south and Volk starts north. SERGEI VOLKOV waits at the far end with his hands loose. Behind him, three men nod.

Eli stacks on the first doorway. Left side. With Eli it's always the left side, and Volk has it on tape. Myles eases up on his right.

HORN.

FAST. Cubicle walls. Two Russians go down in six seconds. SLOW. The residential corridor, and Eli stops dead at its mouth. It's the Syria stairwell, rebuilt in plywood.

A PKM opens up. Only Eli can hear it.

Eli knocks the studs. Hollow. He goes through it.

FREEZE FRAME on his back, mid-leap. CRUNCH. The near sheet bursts and the far sheet holds. Eli hangs in the wall to the waist, and we stay on his boots, kicking at the air.

CHIME. Across the pad, Sergei watches Eli's boots.

38EXT. RESORT TERRACE - DAY

SUPER: "DAY FIVE."

The terrace smells of truffle oil. A waiter sets down one poached egg in a puddle of FOAM.

He eats it in one bite and is still hungry.

Lin Wei crosses the terrace past Simon's table.

She doesn't look at him. Five days, five good mornings, no answer. She sits down with Eli for ten minutes of Mandarin. At the next table, Simon lowers his FINANCIAL TIMES.

39EXT. WEST PLATEAU, SUBSTATION - NIGHT

SUPER: "NIGHT FIVE."

The transformers HUM. The air smells of ozone.

We find TOMMY in a hi-vis vest with a clipboard he lifted from a supply closet. His phone sits on the monitor bank, looping twelve cameras on their own last seven seconds.

On Katy's screen the tiles go dead one at a time. On tile four a moth crosses a lamp. Then the same moth crosses the same lamp.

A contractor walks in behind Tommy, who doesn't turn around.

The contractor nods at the back of Tommy's head and goes.

At the treeline, Simon has the patrol on his radio. One white vehicle on a ninety-minute circuit.

Eli told his four that Blackridge is lending the radio watch, the camera loop and the scope, a favor between teams. That's the lie he promised Simon. He hated telling it. Tonight he can't look at Katy.

From across the plateau, a CLANG. One heavy blow, steel on steel, and it rings. A long wait. Then another, weaker. Eli's head turns. No third. Katy says it's a generator.

40EXT. LONG BUILDING, LOADING DOOR - NIGHT

Diesel haze. A retinal scanner sits over a card reader. Tommy cloned the card off a maintenance man's lanyard in the breakfast line.

Eli's weight shifts toward the hinges. He stops himself.

41INT. SERVER ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Fan roar and blinking green lights. Jason reads a trunk label off the cable.

A TELEMETRY folder. The OPFOR channels have been climbing since Day Three. Seven Angola channels sit frozen at forty, stale since Day Three. An eighth is sliding down to 4.2.

And one more channel, Subject One. It sits flat at 2.4, as far back as the file runs.

Headlights SWEEP the window.

42EXT. PLATEAU - CONTINUOUS

An ALARM goes off in the wrong building. One truck peels off toward it. The other truck's beam finds Katy. She drops flat with twenty-one kilos on her back.

A Games guard steps down, rifle in hand. Katy looks for a blue bolt. The bolt is bare steel. Terrified, she keeps her face in the dirt.

The safety comes off. The muzzle sweeps the scrub, because something moved. Something small and many-legged crosses the back of Eli's hand. He doesn't flinch. He thumbs the radio.

The truck swings away toward the alarm. Eli stays put. A runner in a headlight is the one thing every driver sees.

Katy's chin is bleeding. Her hands are steady.

Six years of SCIFs, and nobody ever said that to her. She doesn't know what to do with it, so she gives him a number:

She lifts her head. Eli is already gone along the treeline. Jason puts a finger to his lips.

43INT. THE LONG BUILDING, COLD ROOM - NIGHT

There's no padlock on the hasp. Cold air spills out of the gap, and it smells of bleach.

An epoxy floor, coved for hosing. A steel lab stool by the door. A black container with 3.0 C on its display and two tamper seals across the lid.

Eli knows this kind of box from a course at Fort Detrick, where a bored civilian tapped the lid and explained what travels inside. He cracks the seals. There's paper on top.

Buyer docs, page nine: CASE 01. COUNTER-AGENT. HOLD 2 TO 8. BEFORE ONSET ONLY. REPEAT AT SIX HOURS. TWENTY MINUTES OUT OF BAND, DISCARD.

If there's a counter-agent, where's the agent? On the floor in front of him, in the black box. CASE 01, the cure, isn't in the room.

Every page is stamped in the margin: BUYER DOCS, RECORDS 2/4. The Records room is across the corridor. Steel door, keypad, one red light.

He has twenty-two minutes. In the back wall there's a wider door, solid steel, no window, C-07 at head height. Frost under it. Another keypad. No minutes for a keypad.

The other door has a window of fogged glass. Eli wipes it with a glove. Behind it, a man is strapped upright to a steel frame. Frost in his eyebrows. An ANGOLA TACTICAL patch on his sleeve.

It's the team leader who looked back at the ridge before he climbed the airstair.

The door seal hasn't caught, and the room has had an hour to warm. Eli builds a story that fits. Heat. A heart attack.

He looks at the straps.

He pulls the door, and the seal PEELS. It's colder inside. His boots on the epoxy are the only sound. No hum, no drip. Eli stops close.

Eyes shut. Lips blue. The right wrist strap is chewed through, the nylon pulled out to rust-brown threads. The free hand hangs with its fingertips torn.

Eli puts two fingers to the carotid.

Ice.

Eli counts.

Five.

Eight.

Ten. Nothing.

Dead.

The throat SWALLOWS.

The eyes OPEN.

There's nothing behind them. They find Eli and stay on him. The free hand SNAPS onto his collar. Eli RIPS back, and the grip doesn't give. The frame BUCKLES. The man comes off it, his whole weight, all at once.

Eli drives a fist into the face. CRUNCH, cartilage. The head doesn't turn. He hits it again. Same. Then TEETH, through his sleeve, grinding. Eli goes down on the frosted epoxy. A chest buckle skitters across the floor.

A seam in the wall swings open. It's SIMON, with a SureFire in one fist. One look takes it all in: the frame, the man, Eli on the floor, the buckle still sliding.

He grabs the steel stool by its legs, takes two strides and RAMS it into the man's chest. The man folds off Eli.

Eli has nothing left to buckle. Simon whips his own belt out of its loops, wraps the wrist and cinches it to the frame. The man pulls. The belt holds.

Simon backs out with the stool in one hand. He sets it in the doorway, thinks better of it, picks it up again and shoulders the door. The seal DRAGS.

THUNK.

Through the glass, the man winds down, each pull on the belt slower than the last. Eli stays on the floor with his back against the frost and his breath ragged and loud. His hands won't stop shaking. He's afraid.

On his forearm, a purple crescent. The skin is unbroken.

Nobody speaks. Behind the glass, the fingers curl once. Then they stop.

Simon's phone lights up. A consignee line: HASSAN, O.

Eli reaches for it. Simon puts the phone in his pocket.

Simon leaves through the seam in the wall. Eli doesn't follow. He checks his watch: eight minutes on Tommy's loop.

The Records room is across the corridor.

44INT. THE LONG BUILDING, RECORDS ROOM - NIGHT

Katy's ghost user opens the mag-lock. THUNK. THUNK. THUNK. One HISSES instead. Down the corridor a door breathes out and settles. Eli has no time to look.

He goes straight to the back pages, the ones nobody photographs unless they know what to hunt for. The END USER line reads KR-7741-HX. It's the same code stenciled on Brandon's tablet case.

His hands are steady now. Click.

45INT. THE COLD BARN - CONTINUOUS

Back to C-07. Katy opens the keypad. He eases the door onto the back two-thirds of the long building. COLD. Wet concrete and bleach. A fan somewhere, steady.

A hangar-long corridor under blue light, the floor coved for hosing. Numbered steel doors run down both sides, each with a fogged window and a frost line under it.

He walks. Boots on wet concrete. Each step answers itself. Behind the first window there's an upright shape on a frame. He wipes the glass with a knuckle.

ANGOLA TACTICAL. The next door, the next man, frost in his eyebrows. Eli counts them without moving his lips. Seven. Eight, with the one on Simon's belt.

Then OPFOR in white vests. Men in resort polos. A thin man with a mustache: ALMÁNZAR.

Near the far end, a woman's face hangs close to the glass. Gray. Eyes half open. The frost has melted off in a ragged oval where her breath used to be.

He doesn't look long enough to see what she's wearing.

At the end, gowned men are strapping new arrivals to frames, two to a frame. There aren't enough frames.

The fan CUTS. Dark. It's so quiet he can hear the frost. The generators kick back over, and the lights come up blue. Behind him, one seal lets go. SHHHHK.

Eli stops.

An amber lamp turns over a door, with a two-note TONE. Fog crawls out along the floor, an inch deep. He turns his head and nothing else. Behind the glass, the frame hangs open, straps loose, with a transfer tag wired to the upright.

Empty.

Above it, a vent grille dangles on a dropped damper and feeds the room the lab's warm air. Somebody unbuckled her for the morning transfer and left her standing there.

He eases one step, then another. A small bright CHIME. Another. It has the rhythm of a step.

Another.

Out of the fog come bare feet. A paper gown tied at the nape with two white ties, over a pale blue smock. A ring of room keys swings on her hip. CHIME. CHIME.

She's a woman in a work smock. He brought no knife, because he came for paper. He will not put a hand on her. Running is the worst thing he can do.

CHIME. CHIME.

He hits the push bar at a dead run.

46EXT. PLATEAU, SOUTH DOOR / YARD - CONTINUOUS

BANG. The south door, the night, and a hundred meters of open gravel under floodlights. SIRENS. Every light on the slope swings onto him. Behind him the keys go chime, chime, chime. Faster.

The keys stop chiming and start to RATTLE, a fist shaking them. Under the rattle, bare feet on gravel, fast. His run did that. Every stride he took gave her something to chase.

At the south door, BREYTENBACH steps out with a Vektor R4 low off his left hip. Steel magazine. No blue bolt anywhere. Eli could take him three ways. Any of them is an incident, and an incident blows the job.

The swing starts low off the left hip. He could slip it.

Slipping is fighting.

He turns his face with it, cheekbone to the fist, temple clear. The Van Nuys punch, paid in full. CRACK. His earpiece TEARS out. His left eye starts to close. Breytenbach backs into the doorway with the rifle on him.

Eli takes the second hit on purpose and goes down, face in the gravel, the hottest thing on the slope. The keys rattle close. A hand closes on his belt. Breath on his collar.

Breytenbach just watches. Eli waits for the breath.

Bucks.

Rolls.

STAMPS the base of the skull. The keys don't make another sound. On the ridge, a KONGA rifle watches and doesn't fire.

Breytenbach goes through Eli's pockets one-handed. He keeps the phone, drops the earpiece and puts a boot on it. CRUNCH. He doesn't look at the woman. Eli looks once.

Two gowned men cross the yard from the loading dock with a catch pole and a folded sheet. They're in no hurry, and their lights swing as they walk. They've done this before.

47INT. THE LONG BUILDING, LAB - CONTINUOUS

Eli is marched back through the lab. The black container sits on its dolly against the west wall, its gauge reading 3.0. A steel door is stenciled SUBJECT 01, with a frost line under it. Behind its fogged glass stands one upright shape, apart from the others.

He keeps his eyes on it as long as he can turn his head.

48INT. HASSAN'S OFFICE, NORTH COMPOUND - 0230

A bare room. A desk, and nothing on the walls. Cold cardamom coffee in a thimble cup. On the desk: a manifest, Eli's phone and a gold watch.

Eli sits, uncuffed. His left eye has swollen to a slot. Breytenbach stands on the door, his dagger tattoo aimed at the floor. Hassan comes in wearing linen. It's half past two in the morning, and Hassan's beard is freshly combed.

He lifts the phone and wakes it with one thumb. He doesn't need to scroll.

The phone slides into Hassan's pocket with Brandon's prefix on it, the END USER line, Eli's only proof off that plateau.

He circles the desk and studies the swollen eye with professional interest.

His gaze drops to Eli's boots. There's gravel packed in one heel, dark with something. Hassan looks at it and moves on. He never asks about the woman.

Eli doesn't move. Hassan glances at the door, and Breytenbach steps off it. He takes the wrist and rolls the sleeve to the elbow, almost gently. The dagger tattoo sits an inch from the bruise.

A crescent of tooth marks. Purple. Fresh. Hassan bends close and doesn't touch.

Breytenbach lets go. Eli tugs the sleeve down, and his hand shakes doing it. Hassan watches it shake.

Eli's good eye locks on the gold watch. He saw that belt half an hour ago, still buckled, the tail tucked and the knot pulled flat and tight.

Hassan just told him he knows which patient Simon touched.

He takes Eli in once more. The eye. The arm.

He leaves.

49EXT. ACCESS ROAD, NORTH COMPOUND - NIGHT

Wet gravel under the floods. Breytenbach walks Eli to the gate, a pace back, hands off. Eli keeps his eyes front and sees the yard anyway. The keys. Bare feet on gravel. A face lowering toward his collar.

He has put men down before, in rooms and on rooftops, and afterward he always knew who. This one he knows by a smock and a ring of keys. Somebody on this island handed her those keys every single morning.

Below, at the south door, the floods are still on and the sirens are dead. Two gowned men hose down the gravel. The water runs pink, then clear.

The gate CLANGS shut with Breytenbach on the inside. Eli walks on alone down the access road, into the dark. Simon is standing square in the road.

His eyes go straight to the swollen face.

Simon steps in with his hands rising toward the cheekbone. The same hands that pumped Galloway's chest in the alley.

The hands drop.

Eli keeps the plane to himself. That makes two secrets now.

They walk. Simon takes the left side, the side with the shut eye. Eli can't see him without turning his whole head, and he doesn't turn it.

Leather soles on asphalt, even and unhurried. Eli hadn't meant to say any more. He carried it off the plateau with his phone gone and his eye closing, and he meant to carry it to bed.

On his blind side, Simon's footsteps stop. Eli walks on. He doesn't know why they stopped. We stay with Eli, and Simon's face stays in the dark.

50INT. ELI'S VILLA, REPORT ROOM - 0400

Laptop glow. Cold coffee. A fan ticking on a bad bearing. The cursor sits after "containing a member of the Angola Tactical team, who." He's tried four times. No word he's ever put in a report covers what follows who.

He's too tired to dress it up. He writes what happened. Nothing about the Records room. Nothing about the barn.

INSERT - SCREEN

"Right wrist strap chewed through. No carotid pulse in ten seconds. Subject then swallowed, opened his eyes and attacked. Teeth through my sleeve. Restrained with Cross's belt and left in place. Container located in the west compound. Contents unconfirmed. Consignee of record on Cross's documents: HASSAN, O. Cross withheld a second name.

Cross assesses a hypothermic patient. I assess a dead man who moved. Request instructions."

SEND.

Seconds later:

Far off, somebody tests a pole speaker for the morning. Tinny and cheerful, one number on a loop.

51EXT. CRUCIBLE START LINE - DAWN

SUPER: "DAY SIX."

Wet asphalt. Seven teams in full kit, every carrier with a Games medevac pouch: dressing, frequency card, two flares.

It's ninety-four degrees, and Eli is in long sleeves. His left eye is puffed to a slot.

He gave his team the cold room and the barn, the woman with the keys and the base of the skull. He kept Brandon and the teeth to himself.

Sentinel's knives ride chest-high now, handle down. Zoe's black Gerber was there already. Simon's knife is on his hip. His belt is Bishop's, two holes too big.

Silence. Simon touches two fingers to his chest.

Blackridge moves their knives without asking why. Bishop, Nadia, Tommy. Simon goes last, and he does it looking anywhere but at Eli.

Jason clips the GoPro to his chest rig and patches his radio into its audio port: the open field channel, which every team can hear. The Games allow streaming off the island's uplink. Max likes numbers.

52EXT. JUNGLE RUN / THE RIDGE / RUBBLE FIELD - DAY

MONTAGE - EACH CUT A NEW SUN

AUDIO DESIGN: Boots. Breath. Wet roots, then dry rock. Jason's footage plays at quarter speed under every cut. A clock runs in the corner.

SUPER: "HOUR 1"

FAST. A green tunnel. Slick bark. Jason runs ahead, GoPro on his chest, calling the route off footage he shot yesterday.

Haugen passes Myles at a run, red braids flying, Norwegian pacing calls coming up behind her.

SUPER: "HOUR 5"

SLOW. The ridge climb. Myles's right shoulder DROPS on every pull, and his left arm is doing seventy percent of the work.

Eli watches the slope.

SUPER: "HOUR 9"

At the ridge top, Eli marks the Crucible fence and its three gates. Below is rubble, and one thing with four floors: a gutted concrete tower with Jade Dragon's flag on the roof.

OBJECTIVE TOWER, says the scoreboard.

In Zoe's scope, at two hundred thirty meters, a man stands on a slab with his rifle at his feet. His collar is soaked black. It's the slow man from structure four.

SUPER: "HOUR 11"

We go across the rubble to a three-walled hide, where Simon has his glass up on the same man. The man closes his fists in the sun. Opens them. Closes them. On Simon's wrist, the four marks burn.

53EXT. RUBBLE FIELD / THE BOWL BAR - HOUR TWELVE

SUPER: "HOUR 12"

The sun touches the sea. The man on the slab goes from standing to a flat-out RUN, arms out, mouth open, rifle left behind. Jason puts in a textbook pair. CONFIRMED.

The man keeps coming. In Eli's scope, two hundred meters becomes twenty-five. He HITS Jason, and his teeth go to work on the plate carrier and the GoPro.

Jason gets a boot into the man's stomach and throws him back two meters. He's up again with no hands, rising straight off the ground. Jason empties a magazine into him from three meters. The vest flashes white. White.

White.

Zoe's round takes the side of his helmet. It turns his head, and that's all it does.

54INT. THE BOWL BAR - SUNSET

The hangar-door screen. Guests in linen stand three deep at the rail.

White. White. White.

The bar CHEERS.

A corner of the screen plays Jason's stream. Sky. Concrete. A doorframe sliding sideways. Teeth on the lens, fogging it.

In his box, Max laughs along, his flute of Krug raised high.

55EXT. RUBBLE FIELD - CONTINUOUS

INTERCUT WITH THE BOWL BAR

In Zoe's scope, at three hundred sixty meters, with no sound: a Sierra Madre boy with a radio handset on his strap throws up a bare forearm, and an OPFOR in a white vest sinks his teeth into it. A medic swings a red bag into the back of the OPFOR's helmet. The helmet shrugs it off.

FIELD. Twenty meters off, two of Reyes's men break cover and sprint for the tall building. The OPFOR drops the boy's arm. His head jerks up, and he charges after them, snarling.

The boy's mic OPENS, his bitten hand on the key, blood running down the cord. Every radio on the field hears it.

THE BOWL. Half a minute late, the stream catches up, and the scream comes out of the bar speakers. A guest toasts it. MAX has stopped laughing. His thumbs are moving on a phone.

Thumbs again. One word:

THE BOOTH. Haddad lifts his hand off the switch. The stream's corner of the screen goes white type on black.

STREAM UNAVAILABLE.

FIELD. Katy reads her dots.

Eli checks the BLUE bolt in his rifle. SF-7 only. The chamber won't take a live round.

Myles TEARS a meter and a half of iron out of a slab, left-handed, his right arm dead at his side. The runner comes up the slope. Zoe takes his left knee at fifty meters.

Myles stands in wrong, a right-hander swinging left. The man ducks into the swing. The bar CRACKS across his back and RINGS off the plate.

He doesn't register it.

He takes Myles down at the legs. Eli slides down the loose dirt on his back, puts both boots into the man's ribs and drags him off by the carrier. A hot hand CLAMPS on the crescent under his sleeve. The pain goes white, and his grip opens on its own.

He heaves on the shoulder strap. The man rolls ten meters.

On the radio, a SCREAM from the Sierra Madre side. Is anybody coming for any of them? Not for a full day. The extraction gate opens at hour thirty-six. Every rifle on the field fires plastic.

At the foot of the slope there's a generator housing, and two white vests are coming around it. Katy's boot SNAGS on dead cable. She goes down on one knee, clutching the Toughbook. Fingers sink into her ruck webbing and TWIST.

Myles wades in on the blind side with the bar in his left hand, all shoulder and no aim. The iron RINGS off the steel corner of the housing. His left hand goes numb to the elbow. For now he has no good arms.

Eli grabs the drag handle on her carrier and throws his weight back. The hot fingers hold.

The stitching RIPS.

The strap TEARS free. Katy flies back into Eli's chest. The man sits down hard, the strap still in his fist.

He gets up.

They pile in under a tilted slab. A Sierra Madre shooter opens up nearby and pulls the two vests away.

They break from under the slab into the dusk. Behind them, the man Zoe dropped three times gets up a fourth time, slower, and follows.

56EXT. BLACKRIDGE HIDE, SOUTH RUBBLE - DUSK

Three concrete walls and no roof. Hot dust and rebar rust. Simon has his notebook open on his knee, one word underlined: patient. It's for the man lying on a slab seventy meters out. 1812. The man RUNS. His rifle stays on the concrete where he left it.

Simon watches the word die on the page. 1813. Through Tommy's gap, two hundred meters off, a Volk warehouse door. Sergei is on his back. A white vest is on top of him. Its jaw works his forearm side to side. WET CRUNCH.

Two Volk men haul it off by the drag handle. Sergei's rifle stock hammers the helmet. Three times. Nothing. Then the SCREAM hits the open channel.

White vests SPRINT past the hide. Tommy's scared. He talks low and fast.

A vest passes ten meters out. Its head doesn't turn.

Tommy's fingers work a tie bar back and forth in its socket. Six hours now.

Across the rubble, two of Reyes's people lie flat on a slab. One is the bitten volleyball boy, his forearm wrapped to the elbow. The other is his medic.

Simon held once before, with a boy in a lane. This time he calls out across the rubble.

BOOTS in the rubble. A lot of them. Fast.

57EXT. THE RIDGE ROAD, SOUTH - CONTINUOUS

Sentinel comes off the ridge at a dead run. Jason, Katy, Myles and Zoe, with the pack behind them. They go straight through Blackridge's hide and out the far side.

Simon, in the hide, gets on the open channel:

Then Nadia, low:

Jason drops to one knee between a vest and Katy. His hands are empty. The GoPro swings on its strap, forgotten. That's a first. Katy's hand finds his shoulder.

Forty meters on, Nadia's line lands in Eli mid-stride. He changes his mind.

A vest crouches over Zoe's outstretched carbon foot. Its face slides up toward the warm back of her knee. Myles flicks a fist-sized chunk of slab off his wrist, with nothing above the elbow moving. It ARCS. The head follows.

At the hide, Tommy steps one pace out of the shade to watch them go. The last vest turns.

RIBS CRACK. A white vest drives Tommy back into the slab. Bishop rips the tie bar out of its socket in a spray of grit. He RINGS it off the helmet.

Simon reads the gap:

Tommy hooks the harness and hauls the head into his arm. He's hugging the man he wants dead. A strip of neck opens under the rim.

Bishop brings the rebar down at the base of the skull. CRACK. The man stops all at once. Simon writes it down. He's rattled. His hand shakes on the pen.

Tommy holds his ribs. His breath whistles.

Bishop presses the Leatherman into Tommy's hand.

We find the dead man's arm. In the crook of the elbow, there's a round white plaster with a cotton ball under it.

Forty meters off, twenty minutes after the scream, the Sierra Madre boy rises. He runs past his own medic without turning his head.

1833. Simon writes the number in the notebook. Under it: Knives: Drake. Two pages back, Night Five still says patient. He doesn't cross it out. He keys the open channel. His voice is level, and his face isn't:

58EXT. THE GORGE STREAM - HOUR SIXTEEN

Wet granite and cold mineral air. Both teams are strung out on the rocks above the water. They've been awake since 0612. They look it.

Upstream, past the boulder, three helmets sit chin-deep in the pool. Four figures in plates perch on the rocks around it. Still. One has a red braid down her back.

Eli fills canteens.

SERGEI picks his way down the bank alone. His telnyashka is black with sweat. His left forearm is wrapped from wrist to elbow in a dressing that was white once.

He plunges the arm in. His face goes slack with relief.

His eyes come up to Eli. The face. The long sleeve. The left hand on the canteen.

Sergei's eyes stay on the sleeve for a long moment.

Eli screws the cap on.

He carries the arm upstream against his chest. At the boulder, without turning:

Eli briefs the ledge. Volkov's bitten. Left forearm. He's selling a name to Hassan for two million. Zoe climbs down off her ledge and sits. She takes the canteen out of Eli's hand without asking. Drinks.

She caps it and stands.

59INT./EXT. THE TOWER - HOUR EIGHTEEN TO HOUR TWENTY-TWO

SUPER: "DAY SEVEN."

Past midnight. A gutted four-story tower in the rubble, with one stairwell and four walls. Three teams climb it. Jade Dragon holds the roof.

We climb with them. The stair flights are precast, each slab seated on a nib of concrete at both ends. On the second landing, one has dropped an inch off its ledge. At the third, a floor slab has fallen against the north wall and left a crawl space, chest-high. These stairs are a lawsuit.

A red headlamp waits at the foot of the stair. PENG (19), Jade Dragon, counts under his breath in Mandarin. At the gap, he holds a hand out to Zoe.

Peng pins the beam where her foot lands.

Boots on the flights below. A file of women climbs out of the dark with their helmets in hand, wet to the plates. VALKYRIE. HAUGEN is in front, red braid down her back.

Two of her women were bitten five hours ago. They've stood chin-deep under the gorge fall ever since.

She names them as they climb: Ingrid, Sol, Marte, Kari, Tone and Liv. Simon writes all six, and her name last. Lin Wei refuses them in Mandarin. Eli answers her in Mandarin.

SUBTITLE: "When it's one of yours,
where will you want them?"

Eli drops his voice.

The stairwell hears it. Nobody moves.

Simon holds still.

Katy cables the Toughbook to the scoring panel bolted up by the third-floor door. Beside it, a resupply locker hangs open. Zoe takes both magazines of fat gray long loads.

60EXT. THE ROOF - NIGHT

We go with Zoe's thermal scope. The hiders show dim gray. The infected show WHITE, streaking at anything that moves.

A recorded voice comes off a pole.

Jason reads his frozen chat. @maxvolkovchen: two laughing faces. Then @maxvolkovchen: wait. It shakes him. He lays the phone face down on the concrete. He says nothing until the board. Myles reads a text from his daughter.

INSERT - PHONE

DAD. I GOT IN. I SHIP TO PARRIS ISLAND IN THREE WEEKS. I'M NOT ASKING.

Myles starts a reply. Deletes it. Starts again. The window shuts on it, unsent. His head has left his sector.

Zoe covers him with one word.

Two walkers, a hundred and eighty meters out. Twelve rounds. Eight left on her. Two knees each. Legs, all night.

Then the rubble cools. The tower doesn't.

BISHOP crawls to Zoe with water. In her scope, the rest of Bishop goes into the roof. He's a living man on his knees six meters off, and she can't tell him from the concrete. She takes her eye off the glass to make sure he's there.

The west wall and the floor slabs baked for fourteen hours. Now they give it back, a brighter band at every floor. Where did the living on the roof go? Into the concrete. On the scope, they're gone.

Every white shape on the field turns toward the tower.

61EXT. TOWER FACADE - CONTINUOUS

They come up the stairwell. They come up the outside wherever there's a hold. Three on the west wall, two on the south. FINGERS in rebar. Boots in empty window frames. Helmets KNOCKING on slabs. They're men in kit, climbing by the book. Good form, too.

On the roof, Zoe counts her rounds out loud and shoots hands off the rebar.

CRACK. SLOW, the climber: his fingers open, one by one. The body peels off the wall. FAST, the fall: THUD in the rubble.

A fall makes a crawler. The crawler keeps climbing.

A CRAWLER comes over the south parapet at Myles's knees. It's one of the two walkers Zoe dropped at a hundred and eighty meters. The one she couldn't finish.

Zoe has no angle on her own kill. Myles waits.

Eli drops off the coping and puts his knife into the base of the skull. Then he's back up on the coping.

62INT. TOWER STAIRWELL, THIRD-FLOOR LANDING - CONTINUOUS

Bishop and Myles hold the landing with rebar. Simon calls it from one step up.

A helmet lifts, three steps short.

Myles hooks the bar's bent end through the helmet's harness. Hauls the head down.

Bishop's bar finishes it. Eli's watching. He sees where the bar goes in. Simon watches him watch. A second helmet comes up. Bishop's split tape lets the bar TURN in his grip. A hand closes on Myles's boot.

She pulls her collar aside. There's a crescent on the back of her neck, above the plate carrier and below the helmet line. She's hidden it since the gorge.

Haugen sets her helmet on the concrete, upside down. Two fingers up, then forward. Her team turns toward her.

She's Haugen.

Marte, Kari, Tone and Liv wrap their arms round the three turning women. They hold on. Teeth find them anyway. Four bites in four seconds. Marte looks at her forearm and nods once. The fever takes them in minutes, faster than the boy. Marte's eyes go flat in the middle of a word.

LAMPS ON. White beams ricochet off the stairwell walls. Outside, fingers ring on rebar. The rescue puts eight hands where the teeth are.

Myles drives a rebar into the pile at the north wall. Peng steps in. A Valkyrie's outside reap takes him on the lip of the flight. He goes down. The concrete takes the sound. His red lamp rolls across the slab and stops against Lin Wei's boot. She says one word in Mandarin. His name.

Ingrid breaks from the pile and hits Simon into a column. CRACK. Two fingers on his braced left hand bend backward. Her lamp beam crawls over his face. On the floor, he pops the fingers back in himself.

A Valkyrie's boot heel GRINDS Eli's right hand into the slab. Knuckles go. He keeps the knife. Myles backhands the rebar. THUNK.

Under the collapsed slab, the ceiling is chest height. Bishop can't swing. Nadia rolls away, fast and on purpose. It's the most movement in the dark. Ingrid goes for it. Bishop drags her back by the ankle. The low slab tips her helmet. The bar finishes it.

Tommy's hands shake on the concrete. He keeps them there. Haugen rises, swaying, and crawls for Lin Wei's back.

Simon steps into her beam. He finds the Norwegian side-release buckle he learned in Rena one winter and tears the helmet off. A length of rebar, one swing. She drops. As she rolls into him, the little silver hammer's chain SNAPS on his wrist.

Bishop tapes Simon's two fingers without being asked. Lin Wei closes a poncho over Peng's face. Four corners. She takes one, and her three men take the rest. Simon lifts the little silver hammer off the concrete beside Haugen's face. It goes into his inside left pocket, with Galloway's tags.

In the doorway, Eli sees which pocket.

63EXT. THE ROOF - NIGHT

The east parapet. Simon studies the next ruin, eight meters across the gap. In Zoe's scope, there's one black bar in all that heat. A plank off the far roof, leaning across the gap.

Eli looks at the stairwell. Then at his people.

It's the first call of Simon's that Drake has taken in two years. Simon's glad. He keeps it off his face.

Myles and Bishop lever a door-long lintel off the fourth-floor landing. It drops one story onto the head of the flight below. The flight JOLTS and kicks off its crumbled nib. It hangs.

Then it goes down the shaft with two climbers on it.

64EXT. THE ROOF, THE PLANK - NIGHT

A precast plank, a meter and a quarter wide and ten meters long. Fifteen degrees of tilt. Four stories of nothing on both sides.

Simon crouches at the near end with a penlight cupped through two knuckles. A crumbled ledge. A rebar stub hooked over the plank's end.

SLOW MOTION.

ZOE walks it upright, blade clicking. Jade Dragon's bearers slide Peng's poncho across on their bellies. Four corners, one slow inch at a time.

Tommy's ribs won't let him hold on. Eli straps him to his back with a rifle sling.

Eli steps out. Four steps. Five. Halfway. CRRRUMBLE. The ledge gives. The plank DROPS two inches under both men.

Stops.

The rebar SCREAMS against concrete. It holds.

Eli slides one boot forward, his weight over the hook. He slides the next. Far end. Hands grab his vest and haul. SPEED RAMPS UP. Simon, alone on the near roof, counts heads.

The poncho counts.

He steps onto the plank last.

Rain comes off the sea in one gray wall. In Zoe's thermal, the white shapes on the roof go gray. They slow. Then they stop. They drift under the parapets, faces in, and stand.

Simon walks it upright, in no hurry. A meter short, his left boot SKATES. Eli's hand shoots out and takes his wrist, right over the four bruises Almánzar's grip left. He hauls.

Simon comes over the parapet on his knees.

65EXT. FAR ROOF - CONTINUOUS

The two of them under a poncho, with rain on both faces.

Eli's mouth twitches. Simon feels the same start in his own, and kills it.

Nobody looks at Jason for his theory. He offers none.

Zoe watches the hand. She reaches over and tugs his cuff down over the knuckle.

66EXT. THE RUBBLE - DAWN

The rain stops. Steam lifts off the slabs. Under every one of them, gray shapes begin to glow. Ten hours in the shade of the slabs. Nobody moves in the open sun.

67EXT. RUBBLE FIELD TO THE EXTRACTION FENCE - AFTERNOON, HOUR THIRTY-FOUR

A kilometer of rubble to the fence. Three teams walk it. Jade Dragon carries Peng in a poncho: seventy kilos, four corners, four bearers. At every stop Bishop pivots a quarter turn and puts his back to the field. Tommy's ribs heave in his shadow.

A vest drifts toward the four warm bearers. The nearest one's arms start to TREMBLE.

Her people sink into a horse stance. The poncho goes still. The vest bends over it, finds nothing and drifts away. Then the HORN. Whole field, mid-hold.

These people have spent careers moving when a horn says move. Katy's shoulders jump. Nobody's feet do.

At the fence, there are rifles on the towers.

Inside the wire runs a drainage ditch, five meters off the fence and two hundred to the gate. The lip sits at a walking man's collarbone.

Below the eye line of anything on open ground.

At the gate, ten-meter platforms stand on steel legs. Two rifles each on T2 and T3. They fire side-on across the field at whatever charges the wire.

CRACK.

A runner on the open field folds at the nape. It's the first live round in six days.

Into the ditch. Single file, a body length apart, Zoe last. Simon counts out loud behind Eli.

Eighty meters up the same ditch, Sierra Madre. Their last man is a kid (23) with a red bandanna knotted at his throat. He's scared. He keeps glancing back. He's lagging.

A runner lands on him. The file BREAKS.

A warning round THWACKS into the silt. Reyes walks back down his own file at a stroll. Hand between the kid's shoulder blades. He pushes him to his knees, out of the runner's reach. The tower's second shot takes the runner. The kid stays down, one forearm wrapped in his own sleeve.

Floodlights SLAM on down the wire. Generators kick in. The fence is the brightest, busiest thing on the field. Behind it, KONGA men move. Engines turn over.

Thirty white shapes break from the rubble at a dead run. They don't go around the file. They go through it. Bodies drop into the ditch and out again at arm's length. FAL rounds SNAP overhead. The file keeps walking.

A hot palm clamps Eli's left forearm, sleeve and all, right over the crescent. The heat burns through the cloth. Hands out. Eyes front. He keeps walking.

One vaults the ditch lip into the gap between Eli and Simon. The count behind Eli doesn't skip.

The runners hit the wire and climb into the barbed overhang. They hang there, caught by vests, sleeves and forearm skin. Heads tip forward. Napes go bare in the floods.

The towers take them side-on, under the helmet. Only napes drop anyone. Most of what hangs in the wire keeps moving.

Lin Wei's bearers hold Peng's poncho level through it all.

One runner in the pack is bareheaded. Twenty minutes of slow have cost Tommy more than a sprint would. His body LURCHES on a caught breath.

The bareheaded runner overruns them. It skids two meters past in the silt. Turns back. A bead of sweat runs from Tommy's hairline into his eye. He holds still. Then the breath tears loose. His ribs bend around it.

Bishop's taped right fist comes down on the runner's nape. A rabbit punch, a DQ in every ring he ever fought in. Down the whole lit ditch, everyone holds dead still. Only Bishop's fist moves. A Konga sight settles over the body. At the gate, Obi says one word.

Every rifle swings back to the field. Nadia, passing him:

He quits counting.

Zoe comes through last, carbon foot clicking, with the plastic bolt gun on her back. Obi reads the bolt. Then the shim in her ankle.

He unslings his FAL and holds it out, stock first, with two steel magazines.

Before the screening tables, she strips the rifle down into her drag bag. Fourteen came out of the Crucible. Thirteen walked. Peng was carried. One of the thirteen is armed.

68EXT. EXTRACTION ZONE - DUSK

SUPER: "HOUR THIRTY-SIX."

Medics in face shields. Chlorine and diesel. A generator hammering away.

An incident card blames a "heat-related medical emergency, aggravated by contamination of the OPFOR barracks water supply." When did somebody write that? The printer's date says the week before Day One.

A GAMES OFFICER (40s), lanyard and clipboard. Eyes down. He'd rather be anywhere else.

At screening, a white van takes anyone a medic doesn't nod through. The kid with the red bandanna goes in quietly. We linger on Reyes at the water table. He's gutted. He holds a bottle he isn't drinking.

One shot, two tables.

At the first, an official's fingers rest on the zip pull of Zoe's drag bag while she lies to a medic.

The fingers come off the zip. At the next table, Simon, with Tommy beside him.

Sergei went through these tables ahead of them, with Hassan's aide at the medic's elbow.

Nobody asked him to roll up a sleeve.

On the board: VOLK GROUP, HIGHEST RAW SCORE. Then, in red: UNAUTHORIZED SURVEILLANCE EQUIPMENT CONFIRMED IN VOLK GROUP KIT. TEAM DISQUALIFIED.

VALKYRIE and KONGA: ELIMINATED ON POINTS.

Hassan stands at the results table. Haddad hands the referee a printed report.

Konga's men are still on the fence, on the payroll. On a tower landing, seven women's vests are still blinking. Sergei crosses the dirt with a bag of ice taped to his arm. He stops in front of Eli.

His eyes go to Eli's long sleeve.

Two gowned men fall in at his shoulders. They walk him to the MEDICAL SCREENING van. It pulls out toward the airstrip. At the water table, Zoe.

Her hand rests on his sleeve, over the bruise, one second longer than it has to. She walks away.

69EXT. EXTRACTION ZONE, EDGE OF THE LIGHTS - DUSK

The floodlights buzz, and moths tick against the glass. Simon walks out of the zone at Eli's elbow, talking low.

70INT. BLACKRIDGE VILLA - NIGHT

Tape squeals off the roll. Bishop wraps his right hand first. It's been split since the hide. Then the left, skinned when he dragged Ingrid across the tower landing. His hands have had a long week.

A drip lands in the sink.

71INT. TERMINAL, LOGISTICS DESK - 2130

Fluorescent tubes and floor wax. Eli comes through the door with a pink freight slip. He's chasing Zoe's spare at the customs cage. Simon is hunched over the duty officer's ThinkPad. Every line reads HELD TO CLOSE OF CEREMONY. Except one. ELIMINATED PERSONNEL. VOLK GROUP. D8 1200.

The pink slip creases in Eli's fist. He lays it on the desk, squared to the edge.

He's gone before Simon answers. We stay with Simon.

Simon once belted the first passengers on that routing to a steel frame.

The cursor sits on D8 1200. Simon closes the laptop on it.

72EXT. AIRSTRIP FENCE - NOON

SUPER: "DAY EIGHT."

Hot chain-link. Jet exhaust. SERGEI, gray, stands at the top of the airstair of Hassan's white Dash 8. He finds Eli on the fence. Holds his eyes. The plane taxis west, no markings, Volk's men aboard. It never lifts.

On the apron, the supply flight. A Twin Otter with a belly pod, down since eleven.

CROWLEY (50s) stands at the foot of its steps in a navy suit, buttoned, with a raincoat over one arm in ninety-one degrees. Behind him, MACKIE (40s), a big, quiet Scot. Bag in his left hand, right hand empty. His eyes go to the terminal roof first.

Mackie gives Simon one nod. Simon doesn't give one back. A boy in a polo meets them on the tarmac. HADDAD.

Forty feet of fence between them.

73INT. COMPETITOR SUITE - 0330

SUPER: "DAY NINE."

The loneliest room on the island. The screens are dark, and the carpet's been vacuumed in stripes. The only light is the coffee machine's green glow.

Simon stands at the coffee station with a cup in his hand. He pressed the button a little after three. He's still holding it. Beside him, a white bar towel folded round a handful of ice. He set it down before he lifted the cup.

The door opens. He knows the step, and he doesn't turn.

Eli reaches the counter. His left eye is swollen shut, the lid purple-black and shining. His mouth is dragged crooked.

Eli looks at the cup in Simon's hand and takes it. Simon lets him. Eli's palm goes against the side.

Cold.

He sets it back on the counter.

Eli hits the button. GRIND. HISS. A fresh cup. He stands beside Simon.

He drinks.

The towel sits between them. Simon set it there for Eli. He slides nothing down the counter. Says nothing. Eli doesn't touch it either. He's seen it, and Simon knows he has.

The ice sweats. A thread of water runs onto the counter.

Simon turns the cup a quarter turn and opens his mouth. The van in the alley is right there. His mouth closes. A bead of water gathers at the counter's edge. It DROPS.

Far across the resort, the island's PA CRACKLES. A tired technician stands too close to the mic.

Eli's good eye turns toward the sound.

At a quarter to four, Eli pushes off the counter and leaves. The ice is water. Simon stays, alone. Then he wrings the wet towel out over the sink, folds it, sets it back on the bar.

74INT. CORRIDOR BEHIND THE GALLERY - 0410

SUPER: "DAY NINE. 0410."

A resort ballpoint with a palm tree on the barrel. Eli, down to one eye, writes a code on the back of a TRACKFIRE score sheet. His right hand won't close past halfway.

He makes three passes. The check digit MATCHES. Every time.

Simon reads the three strings and takes the sheet. He trades first. The consignee line from Night Five: Hassan's freight rides on Blackridge's own contractor.

Eli trades his.

Simon takes a small silver hammer from his inside pocket and holds it out.

Eli takes it.

Simon's hand drifts toward his inside pocket. It stops.

Simon's jaw works.

This time the hand keeps going. A chain comes out of the Barbour. Two TAGS, one side worn smooth by a thumb.

He slides the tags into Eli's front pocket, next to the silver hammer.

Eli's hand covers the pocket. Metal on metal, a small CLINK.

75INT. NORTH COMPOUND, SECURITY ARMORY CORRIDOR - 0440

Two men walk a concrete corridor with a steel door at the end. Tommy's in Simon's earpiece from the sofa, ribs taped.

Simon thumbs the fire-code release. CLICK. Eli puts his shoulder into the cage gate. The hasp SNAPS. Inside, the foam crates from the hangar, stenciled by team. SENTINEL. BLACKRIDGE. JADE DRAGON. SIERRA MADRE.

Cans of live 5.56 are stacked to the ceiling. A TORCH BEAM swings into the corridor mouth. Cheap deodorant rolls under the door ahead of it. Tommy wins his bet. Eli and Simon freeze in place.

Does the guard come in? He tries the steel door. SHUT. He moves on.

Two crates and four cans of live 5.56 are gone. Simon re-seats the hasp so the cage reads closed. Katy's ghost user wipes the door log.

76EXT. NORTH COMPOUND, OUTSIDE THE ARMORY - CONTINUOUS

Eli turns a factory bolt over in his palm.

Sentinel's five bolts go into Eli's ruck, one per rifle. Simon's own bolt goes into his breast pocket.

77EXT. VILLA ROW - DAWN

Sentinel loads a Games golf cart and a Hilux on the move. Eli carries the photograph face up in his hand. Myles takes the ruck off him and keeps it.

Eli briefs them while they load. He keeps it flat and in order, with his sleeve shoved up past the crescent.

Katy's hurt. She hands him a spare earpiece. She doesn't look up.

Katy shares an earbud with Jason. Hassan's satellite line, caught since Night Five, starts to play. We go with it to the north compound, waking under the floodlights.

On the Blackridge terrace, Nadia talks low to Simon.

Simon crosses the road to the cart.

Katy sends the recording to Simon's phone.

Jason is thumbing the GoPro onto its chest mount. Eli turns to him.

The cart pulls out. On the back bench, Jason and Katy thumb live rounds into magazines. Katy loads. She won't carry one.

Simon passes Bishop three Blackridge bolts in a sock. Blackridge works the container on plastic. The sock stays knotted unless the fence falls.

Myles stands up in the cart bed.

At the edge of the villa row, Reyes steps into the cart's path with a Modelo in his hand.

Reyes presses a second Modelo into Myles's hand. It's warm.

78EXT. NORTH COMPOUND YARD - 1808

SUPER: "DAY NINE. 1808."

A floodlit yard. A badge gate and three loading-bay doors. White fuel tanks sit on a concrete pad with a platform twelve feet up. Konga rifles line the treeline.

INTERCUT with the loading bay and the operations center.

Katy has bought them a four-minute blackout. A generator HAMMERS, and the air is thick with diesel. Myles works the fence, tripping sensor alarms one by one. He lobs a rock at a high one. CLANG.

Zoe is up on the fuel platform with the SF-7L raised for every camera. Obi's FAL hangs behind the rail, out of any lens. He lent it at the fence. It's live, for the one shot the yard can't see. The only live rifle in the yard.

Her finger stays outside the guard. One shot from her and every Konga barrel swings onto Eli. At gate three, Jason strolls through and waves at the lens.

Eli walks to the middle of the yard and plants his boots.

A vest scrambles at Myles's fence. One CRACK from the treeline, eighty meters out. A nape shot. The vest folds.

The floods DIE. Black. In the dark, three voices say it: "Ghost. Good work." Tommy, Myles, Bishop, one after another. On Katy's screen, her fake account, the one that kills lights and wipes logs, reads one word. GHOST.

The floods SLAM back on. SPEED RAMP: slow. Eli, then Zoe on the pad. A vest with a shot knee drags himself out of a drainage culvert, his helmet jammed down over his eyes.

A hot hand locks on Eli's ankle. Eli lets the leg go dead. Myles drives a rifle butt up under the helmet rim. CRUNCH.

Outside the wire, a Konga gunman walks the perimeter. BRRRT. He puts a burst into the fuel tank under Zoe.

The next round CRACKS her ankle adapter. The shim she cut herself spins out and goes end over end through the floodlight. Zoe hugs the rifle and falls twelve feet. THUD. She hits gravel.

SPEED RAMP: full speed. Eli. Every part of him wants to go to her. He holds. His heel grinds into the gravel, and his eyes stay front.

A Konga muzzle finds her. Nadia cuts in on their channel.

On the treeline, Obi.

The shooter lowers his rifle and steps back into the trees. At gate three, Breytenbach's pickup crew comes in with real Vektors. They take Jason.

A hand RIPS the radio off his collar. His GoPro lands lens-up in the gravel, and it's still recording.

A shot brings the treeline down on Eli. On the treeline, the first Konga man has the pad in his sights. Obi lays one hand flat on the barrel and holds it down.

Brandon crosses the yard from the badge gate, hands loose, in no hurry.

She dials. In Brandon's pocket, a phone glows BLUE. That line rings only through Hassan's contractor. Eli leaves his mic open.

Brandon's hand comes out of his pocket with a compact PISTOL. He jams it into Eli's ribs on the blind side. It's a handler's habit. He's never aimed a gun at anyone from farther than this.

Eli's boots stay planted. His half-closed right hand traps the wrist against his chest. His left strips the gun. The magazine drops.

The rear sight hooks his belt buckle. One-handed, he racks the chambered round out against it.

He hands the empty pistol back, butt first. Brandon takes it, embarrassed. There's nothing else to do with his hands.

Myles leans on the wall between Brandon and every gate, and lets him breathe.

79INT. WEST PLATEAU, LOADING BAY - CONTINUOUS

Hot oil on cold concrete. Bishop stands over three of Hassan's crew. His left hand is broken. A ratchet hook did that. At the back, a fourth crewman raises a ratchet bar.

The container sweats on its cart beside him. CLANG. The bar rings off the steel an inch above the container's left seal. The bay goes silent.

Bishop has been walked onto a cable, and it runs to the container. It goes TAUT. On the panel, a light FLICKERS.

SEAL 2 / LINKED / MANUAL, says the panel.

Blackridge's cart crew wheel it out of the bay and up the service ramp to the plateau cold room, plastic rifles slung.

80INT. OPERATIONS CENTER - CONTINUOUS

Terminals, and a wall of screens with the yard on every one. A kettle ticks on a filing cabinet. MACKIE is on the door. He's big.

Quiet.

Mackie holds.

Simon moves first.

A chair into the shins. A monitor arm TORN off its clamp. A phone cord twice around a wrist. Mackie's elbow finds Simon's ribs. Twice. CRACK.

Those ribs go the whole night with him. Mackie waits for the counter. It doesn't come. He goes down across a desk. Two cable ties.

Simon pulls the tie one more click.

At a terminal, CROWLEY, pleasant, is reaching for his phone.

Simon holds up his phone. Katy's recording. Crowley's own voice fills the room.

Crowley goes still.

Eli, on the radio.

Hassan's trunk line, recorded, goes out to four ministries.

Simon dials the Porton Down incident desk. He gives a duty scientist everything in plain English. Then he asks for a hospital ship.

He holds the receiver across the desk. Crowley takes it.

Simon holds his palm out. Crowley lays a satellite phone in it, still warm from his chest.

81EXT. NORTH COMPOUND YARD - CONTINUOUS

Brandon, to Eli's open mic:

Across the compound, a room away:

We linger on Eli, holding the middle of the yard. Twenty meters off, his sniper lies in the gravel. A muscle jumps in his jaw.

82INT. LAB ACCESS CORRIDOR - 1836

There are steel doors at both ends. Eli and Simon arrive in the same second from opposite sides. They trade halves.

A MAG-LOCK holds a steel door. Its red LED burns steady.

Simon's fingers find the maintenance release blind.

83INT. LAB ACCESS, OBSERVATION GLASS - CONTINUOUS

A white room that smells of bleach. HASSAN stands in it, his linen dark with sweat, his thumb white on a hardwired grip switch. Past him is a door marked 01 with wired glass in it.

GALLOWAY. Upright. He's in two-year-old American kit, the NVG mount empty, the chinstrap fastened.

There's frost in his stubble. His jaw works at nothing.

There are no tags at his throat. His carrier is laced shut with cable ties where Simon cut it open in the alley. Under the ties, a chest seal has gone curled and yellow.

Simon's hands know him. Thirty compressions on that chest.

Eli turns his head.

84INT. THE WHITE ROOM - 1840

Simon takes the junction. Eli takes Hassan.

The door CLOSES. Eli's hand finds the tags.

Hassan goes for the bruise.

The compressor behind the glass STOPS. At the container, Nadia and Bishop:

The frost on the little window clears from the middle out. Hassan's thumb starts to shake. That's twenty minutes on a spring built for five.

Eli crosses the room. His half-closed right hand covers Hassan's and presses the thumb down through the pain.

The status light DIES. Eli lifts both hands off the switch. Nothing happens. Simon steps through the service door.

Behind the wired glass of 01, the frost is gone. Galloway's eyes open. Filmed gray. They find three warm men.

85INT. THE WHITE ROOM / ROOM 01 - 1845

The thigh strap SNAPS. Then the chest strap. Galloway hits door 01, and it swings out a hand's width. Fog. A gray hand. A helmet brim. Eli's shoulder SLAMS it shut. The bent latch won't seat.

Behind them, CLICK. Hassan slips out through a flush panel in the wall. His voice drifts back.

Eli's weight tips toward the panel. Toward the seller, and the plane.

Eli stays on the door.

Simon stops.

The door BOOMS. Eli's boots slide on the wet floor. Simon RUNS, and we go with him. Forty meters, fast-forward, the white wall a blur, and then he's there.

A fire cabinet. His elbow goes through the GLASS. An AXE comes off the bracket. The fire code puts one in every corridor of this class.

He's back at the door, skidding. It's the first real weapon he's held on the island, gripped in two taped fingers. GRAY FINGERS jam through the gap past Simon's ear.

CRUNCH. The fingers go.

BOOM. Silence. Two full seconds.

Eli opens it a foot. Simon slides through. Eli SLAMS it and throws his back into the steel. OUTSIDE: Eli holds, his boots skidding on the wet floor.

INSIDE: three meters by four, warming by the second. Simon's breath shows white. The air over Galloway's working jaw stays clear.

Galloway's head chases Simon's breath. The first swing misses. The second sticks in the nylon loop of the drag handle. The plate is untouched. Galloway drives Simon into the door. The brim SPLITS his eyebrow. Blood runs down into his left eye.

SLOW MOTION on Galloway's thigh. The tourniquet is still on it. The four numbers Simon wrote on the strap have gone brown. Two years without blood below it.

Simon's boot skates on the drain grate. The axe bites the plate and sticks. Both men go down. Simon gets his palms flat to the helmet. It's the hold for a broken neck, the one he used in the alley. He drives a knee into the tourniquet. The dead leg folds. He rolls free and wrenches the axe out.

Galloway turns from him. Squares up on the shut door. Tucks his head and stacks. A doorway is a doorway. The drill outranks the man behind him.

Eli cracks the door a foot. Galloway drives into the gap. Eli SLAMS the steel into his shoulder and pins him in the frame, hard. Pinned, the head tips forward. The brim drops and the collar sags. The gap opens.

SLOW MOTION on Simon. He draws what's left of the cold. Two years of reading that name. GALLOWAY DANIEL J.

The axe rises. We stay on Simon's face, and on the jaw.

THUNK.

The jaw goes still.

Simon knows.

He checks for a pulse that won't be there. He closes the eyes and straightens the arm.

A hand comes through the gap with a chain. Simon loops it over Galloway's head, under the chinstrap. He settles the tags on the plate carrier, where they hung in a photograph.

He opens the door all the way.

It's the only time on the island Simon says it to his face. Eli's face is wet. His hand lands on Simon's shoulder, where Bishop's came down in the alley.

86EXT. WEST PLATEAU, COMPOUND - 1850

Tommy works the Leatherman outside the container's room. Pliers first, then the blade.

Across the yard, Hassan's crew throw an annex party. BASS thumps through the tent wall. A catering girl (16) crosses with a tray of tumblers and a bucket of ice.

HADDAD (20s, tablet under his arm) strolls from the party to the logistics office. He taps the terminal. Every cold room on the plateau unlatches at once.

Down the corridor, the doors CLACK open.

Fog rolls up the corridor at ankle height. A man walks out of it with Simon's old British Army belt still buckled on his wrist. He was the Angola Tactical team leader. Bishop knows the belt.

87INT. PLATEAU CORRIDOR - CONTINUOUS

The corridor is two meters wide. Bishop has Tommy's rebar in taped fists. The backswing CLANGS off an open door. Every finish goes in at the base of the skull.

Then a Sierra Madre kid in a red bandanna, fingertips torn raw from his straps. CHUY. Bishop swings anyway.

Down his one sightline, the catering girl stands in the open. A lab tech in a white jacket is going for her throat.

Tommy, who can't run, gets there first.

Tommy shoves his left arm into the mouth that wanted her. TEETH go through the sleeve. His cracked ribs GRIND. The Leatherman's long blade snaps open, goes in at the base of the skull, and TWISTS.

The last two from the cell block sway in the fog. The open rooms breathe cold.

Nadia empties a CO2 extinguisher into the fog. A SCREAMING white cloud. She swings the empty cylinder. It CRACKS the helmet. Bishop's broken hand loses the bar. Nadia hauls the fire door shut on the head, Bishop slams it from his side, and BONE gives.

Tommy holds out the arm. The bite went deep, right through the sleeve.

We stay on Bishop while he shuts thirty-one doors, counting under his breath. He leaves the empty one open.

Bishop strips a turn of tape off his own hand and tapes his transmit key open. Every radio on the net will hear this room now.

88EXT. SOUTH LAWN, BEHIND THE STAGE - 1854

The Bowl is full for the closing ceremony, two thousand guests in linen. Big screen, jib, drones on a barge. Breytenbach's crew have Jason zip-tied in a pickup.

A white Thermo King reefer is parked behind the stage. Off the jib's junction box, a dish sits on a tripod. Its amber light goes green. The roller door RATTLES up on its own.

Volk Group drops off the tailgate in plates and helmets. SERGEI comes first, blue and white stripes at the collar. A waiter with a tray of flutes walks right into them. Sergei takes him up onto the lip of the stage, into the lights.

Overhead, three hundred drones draw the crosshair from Day One again. Two thousand faces laugh up at the screen. Why wouldn't they? For nine days this has all been the show.

A man in a Panama hat raises a toast to it. Jason knows that hat from the Hour Twelve chat. The laughter stops, and the Bowl stands.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. A guard fires three real rounds at five meters. They spark off a plate. The guard goes down. Max's live mic carries over every speaker.

STATIC.

A Volk man bends the jib operator back over the counterweight cage.

Jason saws his zip-tie on a broken champagne flute. He's in a hurry, and he cuts to the bone of his forefinger. Over the speakers, the reel starts again from the top of the show.

Jason runs for the service road. Beside him runs a woman of sixty in green silk, with her Louboutins in her hand.

89EXT. PLATEAU ROAD / GATE THREE - 1905

Nadia on the net:

Simon stops and looks back at the plateau.

He hates the call, and he turns his back on the plateau.

Obi raises one palm, and his two men walk up into the trees. Konga's contract ran out at 1850. Obi held them a quarter hour over.

The treeline empties.

Gate Three. Myles has the ruck. Myles zip-ties Brandon to the steering wheel of an empty pickup, the tail of the tie in his teeth. PULL.

Myles gets Zoe upright on his good side.

Two pickups SLEW through the gate. It's Breytenbach's crew, with real rifles. Ours are still on plastic.

Headlights and gravel. A foot from the brawl, Brandon sits behind starred glass, hands in his lap. Eli and Simon run the pin and the gap on living men. Never the kill blow.

It works on the first man. On the second, Simon is a half-beat early. An elbow finds the ribs Mackie cracked. Simon DROPS.

Zoe sits propped against the pickup's front tire. Her ankle adapter is cracked, and the shim is gone. Obi's live FAL lies across her lap. Myles dropped her plastic SF-7L beside her. She won't kill these men, so she picks up the plastic.

Knees, at three meters. PFFT. PFFT. The armorer did say it breaks bone.

Myles swings the ruck one-armed.

From the Toughbook, Katy kills both diesels.

DARK.

MONTAGE - BOLTS IN THE DARK

SUPER: "00:00"

BLACK. Breathing. Boots on gravel. A plastic POP. A man cursing in Afrikaans.

Then Myles, left hand only, with the rifle pinned under his dead arm. Rear pin. The blue carrier comes out. The factory bolt goes in by touch. CLICK.

SUPER: "00:15"

Simon. Bench-learned fingers. His own Blackridge bolt comes out of the breast pocket. CLICK.

SUPER: "00:30"

Eli. Big hands, slow and exact. CLICK.

SUPER: "00:45"

Three clicks, then magazines seating. SLAP. SLAP. SLAP. Fifteen seconds a rifle.

The floods come up. The first live CLICK is Zoe's FAL, up on Breytenbach's crew. Their weapons CLATTER onto the gravel.

Breytenbach reverses the second pickup toward the airstrip. Behind the starred glass of the gate pickup, Brandon still hasn't moved.

Myles picks Jason's GoPro out of the gravel and pockets it. Eli hands Jason a crew Vektor.

90EXT. AIRSTRIP, RUNWAY, FUEL JETTY - 1914

SUPER: "EVERYTHING LEAVES."

The Dash 8 sits on the apron with its props turning. Kerosene stink. Hassan stands in the door in linen and the gold watch. The boarding stair is rolled up to him.

Up the stair goes a long black rifle case. Green tape on the handle. A vaccine compressor is zip-tied to it. The little display reads 4.6.

The ceremony crowd runs for the planes. Among them, faster, run the white shapes. The woman in green silk is bitten at the gate. She sits up, puzzled.

Up the road come SERGEI'S FIVE, helmets in file. The big man at the corner stops and stacks left. SERGEI. Somebody drilled these men well.

Hangar two's wall. A refueler truck sits against it with JET A-1 stenciled on the tank.

Eli's boot BREAKS the glass on the red cabinet by the hangar door. Inside, two bundles of fat tubes. He takes one. Simon reaches past his shoulder, slides a single flare from the other bundle and buttons it inside his jacket.

Eli doesn't ask.

91EXT. RUNWAY, CENTERLINE - CONTINUOUS

SUPER: "1920."

Eli stands on the centerline with a burning flare in each fist and ten more down his shirt. HISS. Phosphorus stink. The RUNWAY PACK, thirty strong, is on his heels. Blue edge lights run away down both sides.

From the terminal roof, Zoe fires Obi's FAL. It's her second live round in two years. CRACK.

CRACK.

At the terminal door, Jason holds with the Vektor. Katy, who still won't carry one, runs the grid.

Burning stubs mark the centerline, one per light. The nearest runners stop on each one. Only a shot to the base of the skull drops anyone.

A SPONSOR in a blazer catches Eli's wrist. He bites down on the flare casing. Eli lets him have it. The man holds the flare out in both hands and stares. The pack knots on him.

Slag from the casing SIZZLES across Eli's left knuckles. Crater in the palm. It hurts. He jams a fresh flare into that hand anyway, teeth bared.

92INT. TERMINAL LOUNGE - CONTINUOUS

Sixty civilians. Frozen. The TERMINAL PACK is at the glass, palms smearing the pane. Jason won't fire. A round through a waiter goes on into the window, and then the faces outside come in. Vektor down.

The waiter from the lawn walks down the lounge, stepping over the people on the floor.

TEETH go through Jason's sleeve. Katy swings the Toughbook down corner first, all hundred and fifteen pounds of her behind it. Base of the skull. CRUNCH.

Her hand lands flat on Jason's chest. Stays.

93EXT. RUNWAY, THE TAKEOFF RUN - 1930

SUPER: "T MINUS FOURTEEN LIGHTS."

Hassan won't wait.

The plane sits at the south threshold, nose north. Eli is ahead of it, running for hangar two.

The stair rolls clear. The door SEALS flush. The white plane swings onto the runway behind the pack. Brakes locked. Props wound to full power. A WHINE climbs up through the concrete.

From the hangar door, Simon sees what Hassan sees. Drake is clearing the man's runway for him. Landing lights ON. Eli's shadow stretches forty meters up the centerline, with the pack's beside it.

Eli can't leave the line. If he breaks off, the pack breaks with him, across the only lane the bowser can use. SLOW. Eli's breath. The flare hiss is swallowed whole.

The brakes come off.

94INT. HANGAR TWO - CONTINUOUS

Simon counts the blue edge lights from the hangar door. Key in his fist. Too early, and the pack ditches Drake for the bigger, hotter truck.

Too late, and the transport is rolling.

Light thirteen: Eli passes the hangar door with the halfway mark under his boots. At fourteen, he's clear.

Simon turns the key.

95EXT. PARALLEL TAXIWAY, THEN THE RUNWAY - CONTINUOUS

The bowser ROARS out of the hangar. Down the taxiway, racing the plane. Hard over, square across the runway at the halfway mark.

Simon flips up the red guard and throws the TANK VALVE toggle. Fuel POURS out behind him.

SMASH CUT:

A gray arm comes in through the open window. Fingers in Simon's collar. A barman's waistcoat, and a wedding ring.

Simon winds the glass up on the forearm, two taped fingers screaming on the crank. He drags the man along at twenty with the arm snapped tight. BRAKES.

In the side mirror, the wet stripe stops a wing short of the far edge. Behind it, the plane's lights. Coming. Two years ago he watched something in a side mirror and drove on.

He puts her in reverse. The stripe closes edge to edge.

96EXT. RUNWAY, THE FUEL POOL - CONTINUOUS

Simon drops out of the cab into the fuel pooled under the dump outlet, ankle deep. He strikes the flare he kept and holds it down in the pool.

SUPER: "ONE."

The hairs on the back of his hand curl and go.

SUPER: "THREE."

A groundsman in a polo shirt, three meters off and coming.

SUPER: "FIVE."

Pull the flare now and the count starts over. He has no other flare. For all his fear, he holds it where it is.

SUPER: "SIX."

Blue flicker. Yellow. Then a low WHUMP behind him.

The runway burns.

Simon lets the flare go and runs upwind with the fire at his heels. Cuffs wet. Nothing on him lights.

Fire walks the wet stripe out from under the tank, edge to edge. Black smoke rolls over the top. At the grille, the runway pack turns from the radiator's warmth to the flame. They lean toward the heat. The smoke takes them.

Down the runway, the plane's lights stop rushing. The pilot has seen a truck on his runway. The props go to full reverse. HOWL.

She stops six hundred meters short, landing lights shining into the smoke. Nothing comes out the other side. Eli never looks back.

At the terminal, every head in the TERMINAL PACK turns from the glass to the fire. They flood across the apron toward it, away from sixty civilians.

Eli runs between them and the burn with two fresh flares. At hangar two he turns for the fence gap, with the fast ones strung out behind him.

97INT. EMPTY COLD ROOM, WEST PLATEAU - CONTINUOUS

We go back up to the plateau. Tommy sits on the floor, knees up, Leatherman in hand. Outside the latched door, Bishop sits on the floor with his radio key taped open.

98EXT. FUEL JETTY - CONTINUOUS

Sixty meters of tarred planks. Hot creosote. No rail. A lifebuoy and a boat hook hang on a post halfway out, and there's eight meters of water at the end.

At the fence gap, Eli throws one flare into the gap's mouth. Rifle up. He fires into the crouch at four meters until the bolt LOCKS back.

He drops the empty rifle and rips the boat hook off the lifebuoy post. A catering jacket hits him. Planks. Eli rolls with it and pins the man face down with the boat hook across his back.

Simon comes round the fire upwind at a run, behind the pack. He reverses his rifle. The butt drives into the gap at the base of the skull. No break in stride.

Sergei reaches the gap. He stacks on the fence post, waiting for a file that isn't there. The habit buys Eli two seconds to get up.

The file stacks on Sergei. Sergei breaches fast, low and left, on the blind side. Double-leg. Eli goes limp under the plates. The flare in his fist still burns.

Two flares arc out into the harbor. Every helmet on the jetty turns to follow them. Eli drops off the side. SPLASH. Sergei's fist goes in with him.

Simon takes one step toward the edge. Stops.

He holds.

UNDER THE JETTY. Three flares burn on the sand. Red light, and rising bubbles.

Eli hooks a forearm through Sergei's elbow, sets his boots on the chest plate and drives. Three times, until the fist finally slides open.

Sergei sinks into the light, arms floating over his helmet. The pack settles on the flares. Reaching. Slower. Stopped.

Fifteen seconds of air. Eli climbs a piling furred with weed, and the barnacles open up the burned palm.

ABOVE. Simon counts at the edge. At twenty, one knee down. At thirty, he sets the rifle aside. At forty, nothing has surfaced. Then a hand comes over the lip of the ladder.

Simon, black against the burning bowser, hauls him up the last rungs by the drag handle.

They walk back between the blue edge lights, one wet and one dry, toward a runway on fire.

99EXT. RUNWAY, THE TRANSPORT - 1944

Breytenbach's pickup sits on the grass off the wingtip.

A baggage TUG crawls up the runway with Katy at the wheel. Hitched on behind is the boarding stair Hassan rolled clear. Jason rides the second cart, packed in bar ice to the chin.

The transport sits nose to the fire. They roll the stair to the forward door. Third window aft, a lit oval of glass shows red numbers: 4.6.

The door swings out on its arm. Hassan stands at the top. Linen. Gold watch. He holds up Eli's phone.

He drops the phone down the stair. The screen's cracked, and the END USER page is still lit. The door shuts flush with the skin. CLUNK. The props feather and stop.

Under the tail, a small unit keeps WHINING. It's the plane's own fridge. Every socket aboard runs off it, and one of them feeds a vaccine compressor.

100EXT. UNDER THE TAIL - CONTINUOUS

Simon ducks under the tailcone for the panel. BREYTENBACH steps out from behind the main gear, where the pickup's driver went. A shoulder SLAMS into Simon's ribs.

Simon lands hard on the concrete. Eli vaults the baggage cart. Two on one under the belly.

SPEED RAMP, slow. Breytenbach breaks Simon's pin. Eli's swollen eye is shut, and the big man lives on the dark side. FAST. Breytenbach HURLS Eli face first at the gear strut.

WHITE FLASH in the shut eye. Blood in his teeth. The strut RINGS, long and loud. SLOW. Breytenbach's left hip drops. His rifle stock swings back around, and it comes in on Eli's RIGHT. The seeing side.

Van Nuys, the south door: both came from the dark. Eli stood still for both. This one he watches all the way in. He steps inside the swing. Wood CRACKS against his back.

The right hand, half-closing since the tower, slams shut on the big man's jaw. Something in it GOES. HARD CUT. Breytenbach lies flat on the apron, out cold.

Two cable ties go on the wrists. Eli tucks the hand against his ribs and keeps it there. Simon kneels at a palm-sized panel under the tail. He read the ground-handling card in the hangar because it was there.

He flips the guard and pulls the T. The whine DIES. Every cabin window goes dark. Only an amber strip along the floor stays lit.

Katy keys the airband handheld: the first prop that turns gets a round through the windscreen from Turner. In the cabin window, the red number climbs. Hassan turns the display to the glass. He's still selling.

101EXT. APRON, BESIDE THE STAIR - CONTINUOUS

From the dark side of the infield comes the woman in green silk, one shoe in her hand. She brushes Eli's sleeve. Wet, hot. He stands still and lets her pass.

She presses her palms and face to Hassan's window. Hassan is afraid of her. His handkerchief stops. Jerks. Resumes.

Simon RAPS on the door. Her head turns to follow the sound. Four seconds. She turns back.

At 7.1 the latch CLICKS. Haddad stands in the doorway in a soaked polo, hands showing. The woman peels off the hull and goes for the stair, past Eli. Simon is at the top, with nowhere to go but in. Myles on the handheld:

CRACK.

She folds at the foot of the stair, mid-stride. The crack reaches them after she's down. Her shoe drops.

Eli climbs the stair past her shoe.

102INT. THE TRANSPORT, CABIN - CONTINUOUS

Hassan has his fingers on the case latches.

Hassan dials a satellite phone. In Simon's jacket, Crowley's phone rings. Simon turns the screen around, and Hassan reads his own number.

Hassan studies Eli's swollen eye, his held-in hand, Simon's taped fingers.

Ice goes around the case, and the lid shuts. Two cable ties go to each armrest, pulled tight with Eli's teeth alone.

At the door, Hassan:

Eli carries the iced case down the stair. Hassan lets him.

103EXT. APRON, BAGGAGE CART - CONTINUOUS

Jason, still packed in bar ice.

A laminated card in four languages. Two milliliters, outer thigh. Repeat at six hours. Before onset only. Useless on the dead.

Katy works fast because she's scared for him. She cracks the case seal on the cart. One vial comes out, and the lid shuts before the cold escapes. The needle goes in through his trouser leg.

104INT. EMPTY COLD ROOM, WEST PLATEAU - NIGHT

Steel door. Bishop is up against it, pushing up off the floor. It takes two tries. The rebar never drops. Behind him, Nadia's back is still on the fire door. She hasn't moved. Simon drove up alone with the case in a bar cooler on the seat.

Simon holds it up.

He opens the lid. Bishop studies the vials. Then he lifts the latch with his own hand.

Tommy is against the far wall. Has he turned? The Leatherman opens, shuts, opens. He hasn't.

SNAP. The Leatherman shuts.

The needle. Tommy looks past it at Bishop. Bishop is relieved. His hand shakes once on the rebar, and he leans the bar on the wall.

105EXT. AIRSTRIP, QUARANTINE LINE - DAY

SUPER: "DAY TEN."

The boarding stair. A woman's shoe sits on the bottom step. A white suit cuffs Hassan on the top step. He comes down between two rifles and steps over the shoe.

At the jetty planks, zip-tied men sit in a row. Breytenbach is one of them. Mackie gives Simon one nod and gets one back. Eli thumbs the cracked phone open to the records-room page. He hands it to the woman who runs the line.

Myles passes over Jason's GoPro. Katy hands up a printout folded in quarters.

Katy's laptop kept every word of Eli's open mic. That's Mr. Cole, in his own voice. Brandon steps into the boat beside Crowley. Neither one looks at the other.

Simon enjoys this. He puts Crowley's satellite phone in a man's palm himself, and he takes his time about it.

Myles knocks the cap off Reyes's second Modelo on a bollard. The first swallow goes onto the planks, for Chuy. Reyes lifts two fingers in answer.

106EXT. JETTY - DAY

Zoe, on crutches, hands Obi's FAL back to him butt first. He slings it and stops in front of Nadia.

She unclasps the gold chain and holds it out. He folds her fingers back over the charm. Obi smiles. We've waited ten days to see that.

Bishop, after:

Bishop fastens the chain at the back of her neck. Splint and all, he takes it slow.

Jade Dragon files down the planks to the boat, Lin Wei last. She stops beside Simon.

She steps down into the boat. Ten days. Simon looks like a man who just won a bet.

107EXT. HESPERUS, STARBOARD LADDER - DAY

A boat comes through the reef pass. A white bag lies on a stretcher with the tags on top, where anyone can read them. Eli takes the head. Simon takes the feet. The ladder SWAYS. They lift Galloway up it together, rung by rung.

108INT. RFA HESPERUS, COLD WARD - DAY

Antiseptic and diesel. Monitors BEEP in two rhythms. Eli, left eye swollen shut, right hand splinted to the wrist. Simon, ribs taped, three stitches in the brow. Bishop, a splinted hand and a buckle cut on the cheek. Zoe lies flat with her prosthetic in a Ziploc. Katy's asleep on a bunk, the box of Cap'n Crunch from the team room under one arm.

Jason and Tommy lie under silver blankets packed with ice. Jason's forearm is bandaged, with one forefinger stitched. Simon drinks real tea.

On Bishop's blanket sits a cake topper, a seven and a nought. Mam's seventieth is a fortnight Sunday. Bishop will make it.

Eli leans from his bed and puts Haugen's silver hammer in Zoe's hand.

He starts to look away.

He stays.

The monitors flip over. 37.7. 37.4.

109EXT. HESPERUS, STERN RAIL - DAY

We join Myles at the stern rail on a satellite phone. A gym squeaks behind his daughter's voice. Myles turns the bad ear into the wind and doesn't ask her to say it twice.

He holds the phone out. Simon takes it and dials a London number he's known by heart for two years. Four rings.

Silence on the line. A long one.

Across the deck, Eli doesn't turn around.

110EXT. HESPERUS, HELIDECK - DAY

ROTOR WASH. A helicopter sits on the deck, ramp down.

Simon waits at the foot of the ramp. Eli stops ten feet back with his face in shadow. It's the same distance as the landing zone two years ago, and the same dust.

This time he waits.

Simon climbs in. Eli boards last.

The ramp closes on all of them.

111INT. HELICOPTER, IN FLIGHT - DAY

Simon opens two years of cipher to a clean page. He writes one line in plain English, without a pause. A van, an alley, a time, a name.

He closes the notebook.

Simon, to Eli:

CUT TO BLACK.

THE END