by Mark Parragh
It was best to leave. She would slip away as her men retook the ski lodge, make her way to the caches at the far end of the lake, walk away from this life and into some other one. This one had taken her as far as it could.
“Contact!” Bako said suddenly. “Two targets, three hundred meters out. On foot.”
It was them. It had to be. She took the binoculars from Bako and swept the slope until she found them—one man she didn’t recognize and another who had to be John Crane. They were making their way toward the tree line at the lower side of the slope. If they got there, they could vanish into the woods and come out almost anywhere on the valley floor.
“Cut them off!” she shouted. “Suppressive fire!”
The crawlers lurched forward, and gunfire opened up all around her. They were too far away for effective fire with these weapons, but it would keep their heads down, slow them.
Abera decided she didn’t want them to make the trees. She’d spent her whole life working for a career she was never going to have now. She’d wanted it, and they’d somehow taken it from her. They’d taken Paul. They’d taken everything that mattered to her. Before she stepped out of this life forever, she had time left to make them pay.
Chapter 40
Crane and Josh ran. The stillness of the night was shattered by the growl of engines and the crackle of gunfire. The crawlers’ bright lights pierced the night, glaring off the patchy snow and sweeping across the slope to pin them down. The crawlers were lit by tongues of flame from the guns. Crane heard bullets whistle through the air around them.
Josh slipped on a patch of slick grass and tumbled to the muddy ground with a grunt. Crane whirled, grabbed his arm, and half lifted, half dragged him to his feet.
“They’re shooting at us!” Josh shouted.
“They’re too far out!” Crane answered. “They can’t target at this range with those guns! They’re just trying to rattle us.”
“Yeah? It’s working!”
They stumbled toward the trees in the distance, keeping as low as they could while still moving. The guns Crane had seen so far weren’t accurate at this range, but some of them might have other weapons, and even an MP7 could still take one of them down with a lucky shot.
And that range was shrinking with every second as the crawlers raced toward them at top speed. Their engines roared in protest, and the tracks ripped up the damp ground and sprayed mud and turf across the slope. They were closing in fast. Crane gauged the distance to the tree line.
They weren’t going to make it.
He scanned the slope for cover, for some kind of defensible position they could reach before they were overrun. A bit upslope to his left was a low earthwork and a stack of railroad ties. The hotel was using the off season to reshape some of the contours on the slope. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. He veered toward it, and Josh followed.
Get to cover. That was the first step. Crane tried to focus on that, and not worry about what would happen next. It wasn’t working very well. They would be trapped a good fifty yards or more from the tree line. It might as well be a mile. There was no way they’d be able to cover that distance in the open once the mercenaries got to a more effective range. Then there would be the two of them, with one MP7 and a pistol, facing dozens of trained soldiers with automatic weapons.
Crane let his training take over, narrowed his focus. Right now, the big picture could only paralyze him with fear. Live for the moment. Just like they’d taught him in the Hurricane Group. If you’re alive, there’s no future. There’s just now. You’re not dead now, so you can do something, however small. Immediate next actions. If you’re alive, just keep doing the next logical thing until you aren’t anymore. And then you can rest.
Crane dove forward, planted a hand on the top tie, and vaulted over them. He hit the ground hard, spun, and reached out to catch Josh’s arms and haul him over the pile. A well-aimed burst slammed into the heavy wood where they’d been a moment before, and splinters rained on them.
“Shit!” Josh yelled. “Now what?”
Crane could hear more bullets impacting the ties. He unslung his MP7 and checked the weapon again out of habit. He’d picked up a couple spare magazines at the lodge. It wasn’t going to be enough. There were too many of them.
Immediate next actions.
“Stay down,” he told Josh, and then popped up to locate the enemy. The crawlers had fanned out, one veering to cut off any possible escape to the tree line, another moving the other direction to flank them.
He ducked back down as bullets chewed at the ties. He planned his first series of attacks. He wanted them close enough to make every one of his bullets count, but not so close they could overwhelm him. He listened to the crawler engines through the gunfire, gauging their distance. Not yet. Not yet.
Now!
Crane popped up over the ties and began to fire in short, controlled bursts.
Shani Abera grabbed her HK33 with one hand and leaped down from the crawler bed. Her men followed like a wave over the side, fanning out and taking their positions. Some laid down suppressive fire from the cover of the crawlers. But she was leading the others toward the improvised bunker of railroad ties. She wanted to see the people who had upended everything she’d worked for. She wanted them to see her before she killed them.
And, she admitted to herself, she wanted this for herself one more time. One more firefight. One more rush of adrenaline. One more roll of the dice with her life on the line. She’d missed this in the last year of dealing with drunk tourists and lost cell phones.
A burst cut down the man to her right, and she felt a rush of anger and joy colliding at the same moment. She’d been a warrior once, a leader of soldiers. If she could never be that again, then she wanted to be part of her last fight here, not just moving pieces on a board and giving orders from safety.
“Grenades!” she shouted back at the men firing from the crawlers. A moment later, she heard the launchers go off behind her. Two grenades arced through the air and slammed against the ties. They exploded and blew a shower of shrapnel and jagged wood splinters off the barricade. That should keep them down.
She caught motion in the corner of her eye and looked up. The dark shape of an aircraft descended toward her from the mountaintop, barely more than a shadow against the night sky.
Were her drones still in the fight? The pilots and their controls were in the lodge. Had the enemy abandoned the place? Had her pilots managed to regain control somehow?
It didn’t matter, she decided. She was here now, in the middle of battle, and it was calling to her.
“Move up!” she shouted. “Flank them!” Then she charged forward, roaring with elation as she fired bursts from her HK33. It was beautiful. It was just like it used to be.
Crane dropped two more of the soldiers rushing toward him and then fell back behind the ties. Only two this time. Again, the shouting voice of his Hurricane Group combat instructor came back to him. “Shoot, cover, shoot, cover. You’re going to want to fall into a rhythm, and you’ll get your goddamn head blown off! Mix it up! Don’t give the bastards a pattern.”
“Yes, sir,” Crane muttered. Then he popped up and shot another one. As he dropped back, he processed the scene on the other side of the ties. Too many. There were just too many of them. He ejected the magazine and slammed another one home.
At Crane’s side, Josh had his pistol out. He was clutching it nervously, his eyes wide. He was having trouble focusing. Crane had seen it in untrained people before. He was dumping adrenaline like crazy, but he didn’t know what to do with it because he was getting too much stimulation to process.
Crane popped up to fire a quick burst and pushed Josh down to the muddy ground. “Stay down!” he shouted. “I’ve got this,” he added, knowing he didn’t.
He saw the grenade an instant before it impacted on the other side of the ties. It exploded, and the whole barricade lurched as if kicked by a giant. He felt splinters sting his skin. Then a boot
-sized chunk of wood came pinwheeling at him. It glanced off his skull, and Crane spun around, dazed. The MP7 flew from his grasp, and he saw something that looked like an airplane coming in overhead before he tumbled face down into the wet snow.
Crane rolled over. Weapon. He needed a weapon. The noise was strangely muted, and he smelled blood and creosote. One of the ties was on fire. He looked up and saw Josh standing up, a grimace of concentration on his face as he fired Hank David’s pistol over and over again.
Crane rolled into a crouch, threw himself at Josh’s legs, and tackled him. They fell together, and then a loud whine cut through the sounds of battle, and the ground on the other side of the ties simply exploded.
This is all right, Shani Abera thought in those last instants as the minigun fire swept toward her like a tsunami of metal, annihilating everything in its path. She’d never expected an easy end. People like her weren’t meant to grow old and weak. There was supposed to be one great final battle, the one she lost.
Maybe it was better this way, after all. Better than a lifetime running, always looking over her shoulder, wondering when Turnstone’s anger would finally catch up with her. This wasn’t a bad end for a warrior. It could have been so mu—
Chapter 41
When it was over, when the awful whining of the gun had ceased and the debris had settled, the drone came back around in a slow, lazy turn. It waggled its wings at them as it passed overhead, and then climbed back up into the night and headed out over the valley.
Josh looked out across the field where dozens of people had been just a moment ago. Nothing moved beyond the smoldering pile of ties. The land itself seemed torn to pieces. One of the crawlers had caught fire and cast a shifting orange light across the slopes. What had to be the remains of bodies lay scattered everywhere. Josh was grateful that he couldn’t really make them out.
Hell could look like this.
Crane sat up. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but was apparently all right. “You okay?” he asked.
Josh realized he was still holding the now empty pistol Hank David had given him, and he thrust it into his jacket pocket. He remembered the explosion, Crane going down. He’d thought Crane was dead. He remembered firing into the mass of soldiers until the gun clicked empty.
“I’m all right,” he said. “You?”
Crane nodded.
Had he actually hit anything, killed someone? Would he ever know for sure?
Could anyone have survived out there? If anyone was alive after that, dying, bleeding out in the snow…
“We can’t leave them out there,” he said.
Crane just shook his head. There wouldn’t be anyone. But Crane went out there, anyway, walking through the killing ground, searching. He came back a couple minutes later with an assault rifle and a pair of night-vision binoculars and set off toward the trees without a word. Josh followed, and they made their way down through the woods and back toward the hotel.
Crane was silent as he scanned the ground ahead with the night-vision binoculars and concentrated on whatever they might be walking into. Josh simply had nothing to say. Even his inner voice seemed…not silent, but uncontrolled and random. It seemed to Josh that he’d finally found his limit, the point beyond which he simply couldn’t process anymore. There were so many thoughts rushing in all directions that they became chaos, like everyone talking at once in a crowded room.
We’d both be dead now. Swift saved us.
Whatever else she’d done, she’d saved their lives.
Or had that entered into it at all? Had she just been killing her enemies? Crane had said she always had at least two reasons for anything she did.
Maybe both. Two birds, one drone. What will Crane think? Kilo falling apart. If she got her message out…what happens then?
He took a deep breath and held it. He tried to concentrate on his beating heart, on the ground around them. He watched Crane with his rifle in one hand and binoculars in the other, stopping from time to time to sweep the terrain.
Take your time. Sort the rest of it out step by step.
It was easier said than done. Swift and Redpoll kept coming back to the forefront of his thoughts. Despite all they’d done, he couldn’t just think of them as cartoon villains anymore. Redpoll was a man who deeply loved his adopted daughter, even as he pushed her beyond her limits and turned her into something unpredictable and deadly. Swift killed brutally and without remorse, but she’d saved their lives. Trying to pigeonhole her as friend or enemy was useless. It defined her in relationship to him, and that was doomed to fail. She followed her own agenda. He’d just have to take each moment as it came.
“There’s nobody there,” Crane said.
“Where?”
Crane handed him the binoculars and pointed him toward the funicular terminal. The cement glowed an eerie green in the phosphor screen. Nothing moved.
“They’d have to put a team down there to hold the station,” Crane said. “Can’t see the glacier from here, but I can’t see any activity down here at all. I think they’re done.”
Josh gave back the binoculars. Was this over at last? He looked up to the mountains and saw the first red light of dawn starting to spread across the peaks. It was still night down here, but that wouldn’t last.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
Crane was about to answer when he stopped. The sound of an engine drifted across the valley, and the deep beating of helicopter blades. Then Josh saw flashing red and green lights coming out of the mountains. It was one of the helicopters. He could just make out the dark shape of it, tilted slightly forward as it left the glacier behind and started to climb.
“There,” said Crane.
He followed Crane’s line of sight and saw two more shapes. The drones. They were circling together over the hotel. Now one of them peeled off, and Josh heard its engine race as it dove toward the helicopter.
“Shit,” said Crane. “She’s going to…”
The drone didn’t fire its gun. If this was the one that had taken out the soldiers, it had probably used all its ammunition. Instead, it dove, picking up speed, and slammed into the helicopter with a sickening crunch. The dark shape fell away to one side, and he could hear the rotors tearing themselves apart, a sound of metal ripping.
The helicopter slammed into the mountainside and blew apart like an egg. It burst into flame, and pieces tumbled down the steep, rocky slope like an avalanche of fire.
Swift was taking her vengeance. She was making sure none of them got away. There was still a second drone, waiting.
“Come on,” Crane said, and he started running. Josh followed. After a moment, he realized Crane was leading them toward the lake and the Summer Pavilion.
Then a wave of fear washed over him as he realized what was happening. The Summer Pavilion was where they’d been taking the civilians from the Protected List. Some of the mercenaries might still be there, along with the allies of Turnstone collected from the conference.
He knew what would happen even before he saw the second drone roll over and fall out of the sky like a dive-bombing Stuka from some World War Two documentary. This time, he heard the whine of the minigun spinning up to speed. Crane pulled up and put out an arm to stop him. They were too late.
They watched from a hundred yards away as the drone dove across the centerline of the pavilion and the minigun unleashed hell. The pavilion disintegrated in a cloud of shattered glass and steel. It was as if the whole building had been fed into a wood chipper. The lights went out, and only sparking cables were left to flash in the darkness as the drone pulled sharply up. It climbed, slowing until it stalled. Then it fell back over and dove directly into the center of the wreckage. It slammed into the ruins of the Summer Pavilion and exploded. Josh flinched. He didn’t know how many people had been in there, or what they’d done to get in Turnstone’s good graces. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been worth it in the end.
Just in case you were feeling all warm and fuzzy beca
use she saved your life.
“She’s out of drones now, right?” he said.
Crane didn’t answer. He just turned and started walking, this time toward the trail that led around the lake to the funicular. Josh got only a brief look at his face. It was an expression he’d never seen on Crane before, a mix of anger, sorrow, and…
Loss. Like someone he loved just died. Whatever happens, he’s not coming out of this unmarked.
“Hey,” he said. “John?” Crane didn’t reply. Josh hurried to catch up.
Lights suddenly came alive in the funicular station, and soon, Josh heard the faint whir of the car coming down. Crane stopped, and Josh fell in beside him. They were near the tip of the lake, beside a flat stretch of ground where their stolen helicopter was meant to land back when that was an issue several crises ago. Crane stood in silence, but Josh could see the nervous energy burning in him. He was almost shaking with it.
Swift had a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other as she came out of the station. She hurried up the trail toward them, and when she saw them, she ran to Crane and embraced him.
“You scared the hell out of me,” she said. “Don’t get yourself pinned down like that, okay?”
Crane pushed her back by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “What did you do?” he said in an angry tone. “Why did you kill all those people? How could you do that?”
She looked at him in disbelief. “Okay, a, it’s apparently okay for you to rain fire down from the heavens, but I have to keep the kid gloves on? And, b, they were trying to kill you at the time. I was saving your damn life!”
“Not the soldiers! They knew what they were doing. The pavilion! There were dozens of civilians in there. Civilians. Innocent people!”
Her voice went cold. “They weren’t innocent. I’m sorry if it bothers you, John, but this is war. It’s a bad time to be Turnstone’s friend.”