After shouting a warning for King and Knight to get out of his field of fire, Rook had swept the front line of the advance with a storm of lead, knocking the wild pigs down like bowling pins. But unlike human combatants who know better than to run headlong into the muzzle flash of a machine gun, the boars just kept coming. Rook began concentrating his fire on specific targets, felling one after another with short bursts, but it was plainly evident that some of them were going to make it through.
“There’re too many of them. Fall back.”
Rook nodded and kept firing while she went for the door post. The bottom of the door was out of reach, but she managed to leap high enough to snare the cord that hung down from it, and as her feet touched down, she pulled with all her might. Rook jumped back out of the way as the metal door slid down.
There was a squeal as the metal barrier crunched down into the skull of the fastest boar, slamming it to the floor. The creature’s crushed skull prevented the door from closing completely, leaving a gap that was at least six-inches wide. Queen stepped onto the metal lip at the bottom of the door, trying to force it lower, but the barrier shuddered as more of the beasts arrived, bulldozing mindlessly into the obstacle. Then black snouts and gleaming tusks started appearing in the gap, and Queen felt the door lurch up as their combined efforts began wedging the door open again.
Rook darted forward and delivered a field-goal kick that knocked the dead boar back, then added his weight to the door, forcing it down. There were more tortured shrieks as the enraged animals pulled back, leaving bloody smears on the concrete, and then the door met the floor with a loud bang.
Rook leaned against the door, which continued to shudder with repeated impacts, as he panted to catch his breath. “Who…in the fuck…has a ‘turn the hell-pigs loose’ button?”
“That guy.” Queen nodded in the direction of the motionless figure of Beltran. She took a few quick breaths of her own, then said, “King, we stopped those things.”
“Yeah, I see that.” King sounded uncharacteristically irritated. “They’re headed our way now.”
Rook winced. “Oopsie.”
“We’re in some kind of tunnel,” Queen said, ignoring the remark. “I’m pretty sure it leads back to the surface. And we got Mano. If you can get clear, we can meet you at the extraction point.”
“Do it,” was the terse reply. “We’re bugging—”
Bishop’s voice cut in. “I have problem here.”
Queen did not have to wait for an explanation. In the head’s up display of her glasses, she saw several red dots moving toward the front door of the hacienda, where Bishop stood guard. The red button might not have been an alarm, but the battle with the boars had alerted everyone in the compound to their presence.
“Well, shit.” King was silent for a millisecond, then continued. “Get Beltran to the extraction point. He’s our priority.”
“Screw that,” Rook said. “I’ll clear a path through the hell pigs with the 240 and we can all leave together.”
“Negative. You wouldn’t be able to shoot them without shooting us. We’re going out the front door.”
Queen counted the red dots, eight of them in all. She didn’t doubt that her teammates could handle those odds, but those were just the bad guys they knew about. There was no telling how many cartel gunmen were waking up and grabbing their Uzis.
She glanced around quickly, searching for inspiration or a better answer…and she found it. “King, stay where you are. I’ve got an idea.”
6
Bishop.
I am Bishop.
Rook wasn’t the only one having trouble getting used to that change. Although she had been using the designation exclusively for months now, training for hours on end to truly integrate with the team, now that she was in the field, now that the bullets were real, Asya felt a gnawing inadequacy.
I am not Bishop.
She watched the red dots moving through the compound, drawing relentlessly closer. Her weapon was trained on the nearest man, the aiming dot in the virtual environment showing the cone of probability where the bullet would strike. In a moment, she would have to pull the trigger, take a human life.
She wasn’t squeamish about killing, especially not men such as these. She had been a soldier for much of her adult life and had killed before. She knew what it felt like. That wasn’t the problem. Except in a backwards sort of way, it was. She was a soldier, she had been part of the Russian Army, but there was a world of difference between being a rifleman in a front-line unit, and being part of the most elite special operations group on the planet. She had learned that the hard way several months earlier when, as Pawn—the designation reserved for personnel working with the team on a temporary basis—she had taken a bullet and nearly bled out in the subsequent firefight and escape from rebel forces in the Congo. Instead of giving her a nice safe job guarding the outer perimeter of Endgame headquarters, her brother and Thomas—Deep Blue, she thought, I must remember to think of him as Deep Blue—had promoted her to fill the vacancy left when the former Bishop, Erik Somers, had been killed in action.
‘You are Bishop now.’
Once she had gotten over the emotional shock, she had quickly demurred. “I cannot do this,” she had told them. “I cannot replace Bishop.”
“No,” King had told her. “You can’t. No one can replace him, and we don’t expect you to try, so get that idea out of your head.”
Months of intensive training had almost convinced her that she could do exactly that, but now, once more facing a life or death situation, she felt like a pretender. It was as if the ghost of the real Bishop was watching her, judging her, waiting for her to fail, just as she had failed in Africa.
I am not Bishop. I am just Asya.
Bishop—Erik Somers, the real Bishop—had been a fierce giant, a force of nature. He had been the team’s heavy weapons specialist, carrying machine guns around like they were feather-light and battling fearsome monsters, with his bare hands if necessary. In the end, he had given his life to save millions. How was she supposed to live up to expectations like that?
The answer was easy. She couldn’t.
Asya tightened her finger on the trigger—At least I can do this—and squeezed.
The approaching gunman went rigid and then dropped, as three sound-suppressed rounds from her MP5 punched into his chest. She swiveled the gun to the next target, only a few feet away from the first and evidently unaware of the fate that had befallen his comrade.
A yellow dot appeared at the edge of her field of view. Her glasses, which saw the entire landscape in front of her even where she was not looking, had just marked the presence of another person emerging from one of the smaller buildings in the compound. A moment later, the yellow dot turned red as the facial recognition software put a name to the face—a minor street criminal with known cartel affiliations.
Another yellow dot popped up right behind him. Then another showed up on the other side of the compound. In the space of five seconds, the number of targets doubled.
Reinforcements were arriving.
“Chyort vozmi,” she muttered in her native Russian, then switched to English for the benefit of the rest of the team. “Now I have a real problem.”
Behind her, the animal noises—squeals and the weird chattering sound of tusks rubbing together—had reached a fever pitch, but King’s voice cut through the din. “Hold them off a few more seconds. And prep the door. We’re leaving by a different route.”
A different route?
With a twinge of guilt, she realized that she had not been paying attention to the exchange between King and Queen. They had come up with a plan but she didn’t know what it was.
No matter. She had her orders.
Instead of trying to pick off the isolated targets, she directed her fire wherever there were two or three gunmen clustered together. The effect was immediate and exactly what she had hoped for. Shouts went up all across the compound, as men dove for cover.
>
With their advance slowed almost to a crawl, she set the gun down and took a fragmentation grenade from her gear pouch. This, at least, was something she could do well.
“Thom—I mean Deep Blue, you will let me know if any of those guys get too close.”
There was a trace of amusement in the reply. “Affirmative, Bishop. I’ll be the eyes in the back of your head.”
Asya shook her head over the strange American idiom for a moment as she quickly taped the grenade to the doorpost and then ran a length of fine wire across the threshold at ankle level. She tied one end to the ring on the grenade’s safety pin, carefully working the pin out of its hole until only a fraction of an inch of metal kept the device from arming.
“Bishop, heads up.”
She grimaced at the timing. One slip and her trap would blow up in her face. She slipped the pin back in place and grabbed the MP5, firing blindly through the doorway. The burst ripped into a man who was just ten feet away, but as he staggered back, he loosed a barrage of unsuppressed gunfire that scorched the air above her head. Red and yellow dots scattered again, but only for a moment. If there had been any doubt about the nature of the disturbance and where it was focused, the unintentional discharge had removed it completely. Wary of sniper fire, the gunmen were heading for the corners of the big empty house, clearly intent on flanking her position.
There was a sudden eruption of noise behind her as Rook opened up with the machine gun. She glanced back quickly and saw a bright spot moving across the vast open floor. As the glasses adjusted to the changing light level, the image resolved into a pickup truck tearing across the concrete floor with Queen at the wheel and Rook standing in the bed, blasting the swarm of boars that were now converging on the vehicle.
“Bishop,” King yelled. “Move it. Our ride’s here.”
Ah, so that’s the plan.
Asya turned back and finished preparing the grenade, then emptied her machine-pistol in the direction of a nearby group of gunmen. Without waiting to assess the results, she headed for the steps, slotting in a fresh magazine as she ran.
The situation below was almost surreal. There were still a dozen boars moving about. Many of them were wounded, leaving a trail of bloody hoofprints as they zigzagged in an effort to home in on the moving truck, but either their ferocity had inured them to pain or their tough hides were stopping the bullets with only superficial damage. The pigs seemed unimpressed by the moving vehicle, and as she watched, she saw one of them crash into the rear wheel.
There was a noise as loud as a gunshot, but when the boar tumbled away to lie in a bloody misshapen lump, she realized that the sound had been something else. The animal had ripped into the tire with its tusk, and although the resulting blowout had nearly taken its head off, the tire was now coming apart in an eruption of rubber chunks. Before the truck could go another twenty yards, the naked rim hit the concrete floor in a spray of sparks and with a shriek so piercingly loud that Asya had to fight the impulse to clap her hands over her ears.
Queen just revved the engine higher and kept going.
At the bottom of the steps, Asya found King and Knight, walking side by side, blasting every boar that stood between them and the truck. The relentless barrage of 9mm rounds from King’s MP5 was taking its toll, but every time Knight pulled the trigger, letting a .408 caliber round fly, a pig came apart like an overripe melon.
The truck skidded around a hundred and eighty degrees, so that the bed was pointed toward the three, and Rook began waving frantically for them to climb aboard. King and Knight did so without hesitation, but Asya faltered as a squealing boar emerged from a blind spot at the front end of the pickup. The beast slashed its head back and forth, flinging gobs of bloody drool from the ends of its tusks. She had a vision of the razor-sharp teeth slicing her legs to the bone and almost started back for the stairs, but then the boar’s head came apart to the sound of a burst from Rook’s machine gun.
“Move it, Bish!” he shouted, sweeping the area for another target.
Asya sprinted for the bed of the truck and reached for King’s outstretched hand.
“And watch your step,” Rook added.
Asya thought the warning unnecessary, but as she vaulted into the open cargo tray, she almost faltered a second time. The entire bed of the truck was covered with corpses.
Naked human bodies.
A thunderous eruption filled the air, and a wave of pure force pummeled Asya’s gut. She ducked reflexively, as did everyone else, as a spray of molten metal fragments flew through the air overhead.
“Looks like someone won the door prize,” Rook shouted.
Door prize? Her English was good, but sometimes she had trouble making sense of what her teammates were saying, especially Rook. This time, however, the meaning was clear enough: someone had tripped the grenade booby trap she had set. The blast would probably make the rest of the gunmen take a healthy pause, but they would eventually brave the door again. This time, there would be nothing to slow them down.
The mystery of the truck’s grisly payload would have to wait. Living bodies were her concern now.
Queen floored the gas pedal, and the pickup lurched ahead with another torturous wail of metal. Despite the fact that she was redlining the engine, the truck dragged itself forward. Asya felt King’s hand grip her arm to keep her from spilling out the back, and for a fleeting moment, she felt gratitude toward her older brother. Then she realized what the gesture meant. He does not think I can do this. And why should he? I do not believe it myself.
Despite the blown out tire, the truck finally reached the far end of the room with the tunnel that had been initially blocked by the roll-up door, but there were still half a dozen boars pursuing them, easily keeping pace with the damaged pickup. Queen tried to thread the truck into the narrow gap, but the missing wheel played havoc with the steering. The rear end fishtailed at the last instant, scraping against the doorposts and knocking everyone in the bed off balance. The truck ground to a halt for a moment, and even with King’s restraining grip, Asya was thrown backward into the pile of bodies.
A grunting boar leaped onto the back of the truck, its grotesque tusked head whipping back and forth like the blade of a scythe. Asya fumbled for her weapon as the creature got its forelegs over the tailgate, but before she could fire, King lashed out with a foot and connected solidly with its snout and sent it tumbling backward. At almost the same instant, the truck broke free of the snag and entered the claustrophobic confines of the passage.
Asya righted herself and crawled to the rear, thrusting the MP5 over the tailgate and firing into the rest of the pack. She felt King and Knight on either side of her, doing the same.
“Eyes front,” Queen called out. “We’re not the only ones that know about this tunnel.”
Even before she had finished saying it, the air was filled with staccato reports. Asya whipped her head around and saw a veritable forest of red and yellow dots directly in front of the truck, standing between them and whatever lay at the end of the passage. Queen kept steady pressure on the accelerator, but the truck was barely moving at a running pace, not nearly fast enough to blow through the enemy lines.
The back window of the cab fractured as a round passed through, and Asya felt something slice across her upper arm. Rook, braving the incoming fire, heaved his machine gun onto the roof and swept it across their path, but the weapon fell silent almost immediately. Without looking back, he heaved the empty gun off the roof, letting it drop unceremoniously into the pile of bodies. Then he drew his Desert Eagles. The pistols boomed like cannons, first one then the other, in a perfectly synchronized rhythm of death.
Asya saw King and Knight both rise up to either side of Rook, adding their firepower to the desperate charge through the gauntlet. The three men were like a solid wall in front her, blocking her field of fire. She felt completely useless. The others had known exactly what to do, working together seamlessly to meet the threat, while she just sat there trying to kee
p up.
Her gaze fell on the discarded machine gun. Maybe there was something she could do, after all. She grabbed a spare drum magazine from her gear pouch—they each carried one to offset some of Rook’s burden—and deftly loaded the linked rounds into the feed tray. Then, she hefted the barrel onto the side of the truck and started looking for something to shoot.
The tunnel abruptly sloped upward and then they were out in the open, emerging into the compound through a garage door in one of the buildings near the east wall. As the pickup slipped through the doors, Asya alone was in a position to see the gunmen lined up on either side of the building, and as they started to fire at the exposed rear end of the truck, she slid the machine gun around and pulled the trigger.
Hot brass and spent links started piling up under the weapon as a torrent of 7.62-mm rounds raked the building and the open tunnel mouth. Only a few of her shots found their mark, but the barrage broke the ambush before it could happen. She let off the trigger just long enough to start discriminating targets, and then she resumed firing short but lethal bursts.
The next thirty seconds were absolute mayhem, with the machine gun and Rook’s pistols thundering in the night, interspersed with short bursts from the cartel gunmen, but then the attack seemed to fizzle out. By the time Queen crashed through the south gate, through which they had initially made their covert entry into the compound, the targeting dots behind them started blinking as the gunmen were lost from direct line of sight.
The break did not last long. When they had gone only a hundred yards or so down the dirt road leading away from the compound, two sets of headlights appeared on the road behind them.
“We’re going to need an extraction,” King said. “Now, if not sooner. Our wheels are about to fall off.”
“Understood,” Deep Blue said. “There’s a clearing about two clicks ahead. Your ride will be waiting.”
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