by Rick Partlow
The screen lit up. It was horse face.
“If you do not stop making that noise,” he said, “I am going to kill one of the hostages.”
He stepped out of the way of the camera on the comm panel, one he hadn’t thought to destroy, revealing the other seven members of the engineering crew, still strapped into their chairs, except now their arms were tucked under the straps and they were tightened enough they couldn’t move. Barnett was white as a sheet, face twisted into a grimace, perhaps from rage or perhaps from terror. The others were a range from one to the other, though one young woman, a Tech Sergeant, seemed to be hiding whatever she was feeling behind an emotionless mask, as if she didn’t want to give her captors the satisfaction of knowing they’d affected her at all.
“You’re going to kill all of them,” I reminded him. “And all of us. And yourselves. This ship is driftwood. The Tevynians are going to blow us to atoms in a few minutes.”
“Perhaps,” he said, shrugging. “Perhaps not. They would not mind capturing this ship intact, I think.”
“Shut up,” the other one said from across the room, and I finally got a look at him. He was taller than his compatriot, and skinnier too, his face angular and almost gaunt, and he didn’t look amused.
“What difference does it make, Grigory?” Horse face demanded. “Do you think our cover is still good? Do you think they won’t figure out we’re not actually members of their crew?”
Fuck. I was right.
“You’re both Chernobog,” I said. “How in the hell did you get on board this ship?”
“Getting on the ship was the play of a child,” Horse face said, laughing sharply. “Your security is a farce. The only hard part was gaining access to your base to sneak onto your cargo shuttle.”
“I said, shut up, Anatoly,” Grigory snapped, moving forward as if he were going to switch the screen off himself.
“Or what?” Anatoly demanded, stepping into his way. “Do you think you can pull rank on me now? At the last? Either we will die or the Tevynians will take us, and they may believe we are who we say we are or they may not, and perhaps we will die anyway. As long as we have revenge for what the Americans have done to us, what difference does it make?”
“You’re here because of Lermontov?” I asked him. “Because of the assault on your compound?”
“Well, that is why I am here,” Anatoly said, laughing humorlessly. “The mission had already been planned, since before we helped the Chinese steal your ship.” He shrugged. “We did not think you would get it back so quickly. That was smooth work,” he admitted. “But you could not be allowed to get away with your disrespect of the Colonel.”
“I’m the one who captured him,” I said. It was a gamble. He might have hung up on me immediately, outraged, but I had the feeling this guy wanted to talk. “I’m Andy Clanton. Major Andrew Clanton, United States Marine Corps.”
“Yes, I know who you are,” Anatoly said sharply. “I should have expected it would be you that they sent after him. You do their dirty work for them, you and your Delta Force.” This time there was amusement in his laugh. “I would have thought after they pinned that medal on your chest, they would pull you off the battlefield and send you to talk to children in your schools or some such nonsense.”
He was good. Not even a hint of an accent, though I could tell from his inflection he wasn’t a native English speaker, or at least not someone who’d been born in the United States.
“Me, in a school?” I chuckled. “I’d wind up swearing and telling the kids stories about shooting people. But I tell you what, Anatoly. If you’re looking for revenge for the Colonel, I’m the one you want. Why don’t you take me and let those engineering geeks go? I’ll take off my armor, leave all my weapons behind.”
I didn’t have much hope that Anatoly would go for it, and I was sure Pops would shit a brick, but it was the offer I had to make to keep this conversation going, to keep his interest and attention on me.
“You think I am an idiot or something?” Anatoly scoffed. “I open this door, your Rangers or Delta Force team rushes in and kills us.”
“How about this?” I asked, the gears in my brain grinding. “You can open the door like two feet maybe…” I tried to do math in my head. “Maybe half a meter or so. Just enough for me to crawl through, not enough to let a suit of armor through. You get me in, get a gun on me to guard against anyone else coming through, and then let the others crawl out under the door. How’s that sound?”
“Why?” Anatoly demanded, sounding almost offended by the offer. “You said yourself, we probably all die anyway. What difference does it make if they die in here with us or out there with your people?”
“Because it’s my job,” I said. I’ve found that when you’re lying to someone, it’s a damned good idea to include as much of the truth as possible. “I do my job no matter what else happens, even if it only keeps my crew alive one more second than they’d live anyway.”
“I can respect that,” Anatoly told me. He turned to Grigory. “What do you think, sourpuss? Should we swap out these useless fucks for a Medal of Honor winner? I wouldn’t mind the chance to put a bullet into his gut and watch him die slow.”
“I think he is fucking with you,” Grigory replied, arms folded across his chest, the picture of passive-aggressiveness. “He is wasting your time. We have a mission.”
“We have accomplished our fucking mission. We gave up everything to accomplish this mission.”
“What the fuck did you give up?” Grigory asked, reverting to Russian. I’d learned a lot of Russian in the last year, but the translation program did the heavy lifting. “You have no wife, no children! So, your parents will miss you? Who the fuck cares? Everyone’s parents miss them! They’ll get your Goddamned insurance!”
“You might have children, you old goat,” Anatoly shot back, also in Russian, “but you’ve got no wife, unless you count all your ex-wives! Do you think your children will miss you? Hell, you’ve never visited them once the whole time I’ve known you! You spend every leave and all your money on hookers and blow!”
“Fuck you, you sister-fucking son of a whore!”
I thought about letting them go at it, hoping they might kill each other and save us the trouble, but that would have also meant taking the chance they might shoot one of the hostages in the process.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” I interrupted, clearing my throat. “But could we get back to the proposed exchange? I feel like I have a limited time to get this done. We got a deal or not?”
“Fuck, yes!” Anatoly said, motioning with his pistol. It wasn’t one of our SIG’s, so I didn’t have to add lack of security in the armory to my list of failings. It looked funky and futuristic and I knew it was an integrally suppressed 9mm, though I couldn’t remember the brand name off the top of my head. “You get your ass in here, nothing but the clothes on your back, and we’ll let these bitches go. But be quick about it, because I do not believe you have that long before our new allies turn you into hot gas.”
I hit the mute button on the screen and began stripping off my armor.
“You’re not seriously going to do this, are you?” Brooks asked me. Her visor was up and I could see her disbelief. “They’ll kill you and not give up a single one of the hostages! And there won’t be a damned thing we can do to stop them!”
“Yeah, that could happen,” I admitted, handing my helmet off to Pops. I grabbed the ear bud off my comm unit and stuck it in place, touching the control to call Quinn. “You in position yet?” I asked him.
“Nope.” His reply was curt, lacking the usual respect he afforded officers and I decided he had to be pretty stressed. “And I don’t know where I am or how far I have to go, either. I haven’t gotten stuck too bad. Yet.”
“How’s the heat?”
“Hot. Few minor burns on my hands and knees, but nothing serious. Yet. Hard to breathe, even with the internal air supply. I’ll let you know when I reach the end.”
; He’d told me everything he could so I stopped bothering him and concentrated on getting off my armor.
“No choice,” I said to Brooks. “He isn’t in position yet and if we try to open this door the whole way before he gets into position, the mercs will kill everyone, sure as hell. This way, the door will be partially open already.”
I squinted at Pops, who’d been uncharacteristically silent.
“What? You’re not going to try to talk me out of it?”
“Andy,” he told me, shaking his head, “I learned from raising my kids that there’s some times you can’t say anything. You just gotta step back and let them fuck up all on their own and hope they don’t get hurt too badly.”
“You are not that much older than me,” I reminded him, pulling off my ammo vest and handing it to one of the Rangers whose name I didn’t remember.
“Chronologically, no,” he agreed. “Emotionally? That’s another story.”
“You believe this guy?” I asked Brooks. “Just because he’s been in the Army for like twenty-five years and in CAG for the last ten or whatever, he thinks he can talk back to a major.” She opened her mouth to say something that I’m sure would have been emotionally supportive, but I held a finger up and touched a control on my comm unit. “Bridge, I’m gonna need you to do me a favor and get ready to override the blast shield and take it up the whole way the second you see the infiltrators start to raise it.”
“I’ve been following this whole thing, Andy,” Olivera said. “Are you fucking nuts?”
“Jury’s still out, sir. Can you detect when they raise the shield from up on the bridge, though?”
“Yes, Andy,” he sighed, sounding as if he’d given up. “You’d best make it quick. The Truthseeker has been taking a lot of hits.”
“Aye, sir,” I bit off, not allowing myself to snap back about how reminding me of how little time we had wasn’t going to help one bit, because one, he was a general and I was not, and two, he had just as much stress on him as I did and much less he could actually do about it.
I stared at my Glock 17 in its chest holster and wondered if I should try to tuck it into the small of my back under my fatigue jacket, but decided against it. The first thing they’d do was frisk me, and I wasn’t going to be doing any quick draw from Mexican carry while I was crawling under the door. I touched the control to un-mute the speaker.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
“I’m raising the shield,” Anatoly said. “Tell your people if I see more than one person coming under that door, I shoot them and Grigory shoots the hostages. Make sure they know this, because maybe they think they can overwhelm us, sacrifice the hostages to take control of this compartment. But we do not have to keep you out forever, just for long enough. And we have enough ammo to stack your bodies tall enough to block the door.”
“Nobody’s coming through but me,” I assured him. “Unless you go back on your word to let the hostages go.”
I kept hitting the point, but I didn’t expect him to do it and didn’t give a shit. Because they’d be dead right alongside us if we didn’t get control of that room. Anatoly said nothing, but the blast shield began to rise with a chest-deep rumble. I wasn’t sure if it was the vibration I felt in my stomach or the fear. Because I was afraid and I wasn’t hesitant at all to admit it. I was afraid for myself, afraid for the hostages, afraid for the Helta, afraid for the crew, afraid for Julie and afraid of fucking up, not necessarily in that order. You’d think by this point in my life, I’d have gotten used to being scared, but it still twisted my guts—every time the first time, like true love.
“Quinn,” I said, my words covered by the motors, the grinding of the metal. “I’m heading inside. I won’t be able to talk to you, but if I say the word ‘ptarmigan,’ that means I need you to come through.”
“If you say the word what?” He sounded very much like he’d been trying to squeeze through something impossibly small when he’d heard something so absolutely stupid, he had to comment on it.
“Ptarmigan. It’s like a chicken. Just listen for it.”
I didn’t have time to explain I wanted a word that wouldn’t come up in conversation because the door was up about a foot, far enough that I needed to try to squeeze under it. I had to trust there’d be time to do something, that they’d let me live long enough. The deck was cold beneath my hands and crawling under the blast shield reminded me of a scene from an old mummy movie where some bad guy was trying to escape from an ancient tomb that was sealing up for eternity. Except in this case, the door was going up and I wasn’t heading for an eternity alone.
And the mummies were Russian.
Hands grabbed me before I was halfway through, yanking me up before I could see anything but the deck plating. The cold metal of a gun barrel pressed against my neck and the stale breath of a habitual smoker was hot on the side of my face.
“Don’t move, war hero. Keep your fucking hands to your sides and don’t move a fucking muscle.”
Anatoly patted me down, jerking at the edges of my clothing, reaching into my waistband.
“Whoa there, hoss,” I objected as he worked his way to the front of my pants. “Bad touch! I like you, but not in that sort of way. Can we just be friends?”
“You think you’re very funny,” Anatoly growled. He smacked me in the back of the head with the barrel of his gun, not hard enough to concuss me but enough to hurt. “You won’t think it is so funny when I put a round into your kneecaps. The Colonel was a great man. You aren’t worthy to kill someone like him.”
“Something is wrong,” Grigory pronounced from the control panel. He was stabbing at a button over and over. “The door, it will not stop opening!”
This was the part where I was going to get killed. The only thing that kept me from dying immediately was that Anatoly, for all that he was a trained killer Chernobog mercenary, had never been trained on how to properly secure a prisoner while holding a handgun. If he had, he would have known that it’s never okay to jam your gun barrel into someone’s back or neck. It might make you feel like a badass from an action movie, but all it really accomplishes is to give the person you’re trying to subdue an index of where the gun is in relation to their body.
And give them a target.
There is an art to deflecting a gun being held to your back, and I had, thankfully, learned it from the best. I stepped out to the left and spun on the ball of my foot, sweeping my left arm around, ducking my shoulder and locking Anatoly’s gun arm at the elbow. Jambo had taught me the move on board the Truthseeker after I’d been cornered by FSB agents in Oregon, and he’d made me practice it over and over.
He’d also told me that it would probably get me shot and I should only try it if it was a question of likely death or certain death, and I thought this qualified. My fingers were digging into Anatoly’s triceps muscle and his wrist, trying to control his hand. He yanked back against me, stepping back, but I sidestepped and kept him from throwing all the weight of his body against my hold.
“Ptarmigan!” I screamed in his face like a battle cry, like the “kiai” I’d learned to shout in taekwondo as a kid to focus my energy. “Ptarmigan, for fuck’s sake!”
If Anatoly was curious about what I meant, he didn’t bother to ask, his teeth clenched as if he would have bitten me if he could. He wanted to hit me with his off hand, I could tell by the way he kept shifting his weight, but I was shuffling across the deck, forcing him off-balance with every step and he couldn’t get into a position to put any weight behind the punch. He tried anyway, and I ducked, my chin against my chest. His knuckles glanced off the crown of my head, which hurt a little but probably hurt him more than it did me.
“Move, Anatoly!” Grigory yelled and he fired. The reports were suppressed, but suppressors aren’t silencers, and shooting a suppressed firearm doesn’t produce a quiet little snap like in the movies. Instead, it was the sound of a two-by-four smacking into a concrete floor and it was loud enough that I flinched instinctively at the
discharge, expecting the pain of a bullet tearing through my chest.
I felt nothing and I wasn’t sure if it was because I hadn’t been hit or because of the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I couldn’t stop to look. I had to take Anatoly down now before Grigory got a clean shot at me. He wasn’t a small man and I had to thank God and the Helta for advanced medical tech, because there was no way I could have kept up with him if I was still feeling every one of my natural years, not with over four decades of repetitive-use wear and tear on my shoulders and elbows and knees. Hell, I was in better shape now than I had been since I was twenty-five and I could still barely keep control of that fucking gun.
Anatoly’s face was screwed up with rage and determination, lips peeled back over his teeth, like the illustration of a war face in an online article. Then his face disappeared and something hot and liquid and red sprayed into my face, blinding me, and I was sure I’d been shot in the head but I didn’t let go of Anatoly’s arm, trying to make sure if I died, that I still kept him from shooting anyone until the others got inside.
But he was sinking to the floor and I dropped to a knee to stay with him. His arm had gone limp, his struggles ceasing and I wiped an arm across my face, desperate to see. Anatoly was dead, his forehead a loose flap of skin, his skull shattered, and the bullet that had gone through his head must have just missed mine.
Grigory was alive and firing his weapon at a pair of bulky figures in Svalinn armor ducking beneath the half-open blast shield, his slugs ricocheting off their armor and then the bulkhead before dying as spinning dreidels on the deck. And behind him, another armored soldier loomed, this one slightly less bulky, the excess stripped away from his suit, the surface covered with charred, black patches where he’d leaned against surfaces too hot to touch.
Quinn fired his SIG and this report wasn’t suppressed, wasn’t drowned out by the adrenaline buzzing in my head. Pain speared through my ears and into my head from the discharge of the 9mm in the enclosed space of the engineering compartment, but it hurt Grigory even more. Three rounds punched into his back and he stiffened and twisted but didn’t go down, propped up by his own frenzied determination and sheer inertia. He would have died in another few seconds, was practically dead on his feet, but the Delta troops coming through the door weren’t taking any chances with the Russian mercenary. Half a dozen KE gun slugs, sintered metal, ignited to plasma at the muzzle, tore through Grigory, ripping him to smoking, bloody shreds.