Paradise Burns

by J. P. Sumner

  I had to do something. But what? I was trapped underground fifteen miles away with no means of communication. I was desperate, and hated myself for resorting to begging, but was out of options.

  ‘Please, just call off the missiles!’ I implored. ‘If you’re pissed at me, take it out on me. But don’t kill innocent people just to prove a point!’

  I’d never wanted anything more in my life right then than I wanted those missiles to explode, sparing the pilots of those F-22s. But as I stared at the screen, horrified and angry at my own uselessness, both objects collided. Then, with one last blip, they disappeared completely.

  Silence descended on the large room momentarily, before the Salikovs cheered loudly and touched foreheads in celebration. Ketranovich smiled at Clara, who looked both relieved and satisfied with what had just happened.

  I was desperately trying to find a way to get out of here and warn Josh, but I had nothing.

  I looked back at the large screen, as if staring at it would bring back the aircraft blips. I looked over at Ketranovich. He was smiling. Then he pulled a gun from his back, took a step back from the men at the computers and put a bullet in the back of their heads.

  ‘What the hell?!’ I exclaimed. ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘They had served their purpose, Adrian Hell,’ he said, nodding at Clara behind me. ‘As have you.’

  Before I had time to react, Clara smashed the back of my head with the butt of her gun, and the lights went out.

  FIFTY-NINE

  I woke up in a dark room, sat on the floor and covered in sweat. I blinked myopically to try and focus, but it was too dark to make anything out clearly. I didn’t know where I was, but it felt like I was sat in an oven.

  I tried to move, but my arms were bound behind my back. My legs were free, but I didn’t want to move around too much in the dark without first knowing where I was and who was nearby.

  As I regained more of my senses, I realized there was an awful stench in this room. I also realized there was an eerie, orange glow coming from something in front of me. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out a large shape just ahead of me. It was huge – must have been about three meters across, leaving a gap of about two meters at either side to walk around. I figured that meant the room itself was a good eight by eight square meters.

  I got to my feet and staggered around to my left. The further round I got, the hotter it became. The room was a large square, with a smaller square in the middle which was giving off the heat. As I got to the right turn at the end, I noticed there was a door on the left wall as I looked at it. I also realized that the three by three meter square in the center of the room was an enormous furnace.

  Christ! That explains the heat. It was almost unbearable to be this close.

  I heard keys in the lock outside, so I backed away a little round the corner and sat against the wall. The door opened, and Natalia Salikov walked in with another soldier dressed in black, dragging with them the bodies of the two men Ketranovich shot in the control room. They dropped the bodies, then picked one up at a time together and threw them in furnace.

  Natalia turned to face me, her face lit from the right hand side by the hellish blaze of the fire, making her evil smile all the more supernatural. She winked at me, then in the blink of an eye, turned, drew a gun from the holster on her right thigh and shot the man who she’d walked in with.

  ‘Jesus!’ I yelled. ‘What is it with you people killing each other?’

  She said something in Russian that I assumed was derogatory, judging by the tone of her voice, then walked out and locked the door behind her.

  What the hell was going on here? It seems everyone who works for Dark Rain is expendable. The airstrike had failed dramatically, which I can only assume would lead GlobaTech to bring forward their ground assault. I admit, I was completely surprised by Dark Rain’s counter-measures for the airstrike, but I can’t see how they could survive a ground attack - they keep killing their own troops for God’s sake! What’s their next move?

  Just then, the door unlocked again and opened. This time, Clara walked in. She pointed a gun at me.

  ‘Get up,’ she said.

  I did, never taking my eyes off her or saying a word. She moved her gun, signaling for me to walk out of the room in front of her. Again, I did without comment.

  I stepped outside and immediately felt the welcoming cool breeze of an air conditioning unit. I was in a small, circular room with a metal grid floor and old brick walls. Ahead of me was a long corridor, leading into another room at the end. To my left and right were two more doors on either side, similar to the one I’d just walked through. Presumably containing the same massive furnaces as my room did. There were no windows, just the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.

  The doors at the end of the corridor opened and Ketranovich walked through and headed down toward me.

  ‘Your guest quarters suck,’ I said as he approached.

  ‘Typically, our guests do not stay long, Adrian Hell,’ he replied. ‘The quality of where they stay does not concern me.’

  ‘Fair enough. So when are you gonna tell me what the hell’s going on?’

  He stopped just in front of me. Clara was behind me to my left. My hands were still tied behind me.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Where are your nukes?’

  He looked at Clara, then back at me, seemingly confused. Then he laughed out loud and patted my shoulder like we were old friends sharing a joke.

  ‘Okay, what have I missed?’ I asked.

  ‘There are no nukes,’ he said, still smiling.

  ‘But GlobaTech have detected a massive underground heat signature that they said was...’

  I trailed off, realizing that Josh had been drastically misinformed. I looked all around me. Five rooms, five humungous, three meter square furnaces on full blast. That’s what the heat signature was.

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said, starting to piece things together. ‘You’ve laid a trap for GlobaTech and they’re going to send their troops to walk right into it.’

  ‘Finally, he starts to use his brain,’ said Clara behind me.

  ‘But I don’t understand what you’re going to do to them when you’ve lured them all here. There’s, like, four of you. GlobaTech are going to roll up to your front door with a few hundred heavily armed soldiers from their own private army.’

  Ketranovich walked past me, turned and gestured for me to follow him back into the room I woke up in.

  ‘This entire compound is a network of underground chambers,’ he began. ‘Think of this place as a wheel. The control room back there is the center, and each spoke that leads off it bring you to its own little hub, like this one. We’re pretty much directly under the main yard of the compound right now. There are five mega furnaces here, originally used to dispose of chemical weapons in the fifties and sixties, that your government said didn’t exist, that were used for trials and tests that your government said never took place.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not responsible for what the government did or didn’t do fifty years ago,’ I said. ‘Don’t take your little temper tantrum out on me.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he continued. ‘The point is, when GlobaTech turned its back on us after your intervention, and our access to the uranium was taken away from of us, we had to quickly change our plan of attack.’

  We were all stood just inside the door of the furnace room now, being blasted by the heat in front of us.

  ‘Instead of launching an attack on America, we had to start off slightly smaller.’

  He pointed to the ceiling. I looked up, struggling to make out what he was looking at in the gloom. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but I eventually saw it.

  Stuck to almost every inch of the ceiling was enough C4 explosive to blast the world out of its own orbit. . .

  SIXTY

  ‘Fuck me!’ I said, struggling to get my head around that much explosive.

  There must�
��ve been close to a hundred bricks of C4, all with detonators stuck into them, attached to the ceiling. If this furnace hub was directly under the main courtyard, then the explosion this would cause could simply make the entire compound implode and sink into itself.

  Then something worrying came to mind. I looked over my shoulder at the other doors, then back at Ketranovich. He smiled, seemingly knowing what I was thinking.

  ‘Yes, Adrian Hell,’ he said. ‘All the furnace rooms are equipped exactly the same.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ I gasped. I knew what they were going to do. They were going to lure all the GlobaTech soldiers into the compound and then blow this entire area. The explosion would be catastrophic. This entire area for miles would become a crater. Taking out a very large chunk of both GlobaTech’s and the U.S. military’s forces in the process.

  ‘You’re insane,’ I said.

  ‘Sanity is simply a matter of opinion,’ he said.

  I turned and walked out of the furnace room and back into the cooler central hub. I looked at Clara.

  ‘So where do you fit in then?’ I asked. ‘You were being shot at just as much as me.’

  ‘No-one in our organization knew about my role in this except the Colonel,’ she said. ‘I told you that he only tells people what they need to know. Trust has been an issue in the past for us, which is why we like to keep our numbers small.’

  ‘I thought there were thousands of you?’

  ‘And who told you that?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Ted Jackson, and then you,’ I said, trailing off as I instantly realized I’d been lied to from the start about something else, too.

  ‘We told GlobaTech what they needed to hear in order to secure the deal for the uranium. A little bit of clever marketing goes a long way.’

  ‘Unbelievable. So Jackson had no idea you were playing him?’

  ‘Of course not. He was an idiot who was blinded by his own greed. He’d have believed anything if he thought he could get rich from it.’

  ‘I still don’t get why you were being shot at by Natalia.’

  ‘I saw you tailing us days ago. I recognized you and knowing about the Pellaggio deal that Jackson had recently cancelled, I put two and two together and figured you were in town to take out Jackson. When you knocked on our hotel room door, I just let you and Jackson form your own conclusions and leapt on the opportunity to play the victim. I spoke to the Colonel, who agreed we’d play it out in secret, to keep up appearances with you. It was difficult fighting against Natalia, but necessary.’

  ‘You guys are ruthless bastards, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Once GlobaTech turned their backs on us and you gave up the deeds to the uranium mine, we had to change our plans and simply go after the people who had screwed with us. It was easy cleaning up after our original plan was abandoned. I was able to take out the soldiers we no longer needed when Natalia found us in the bar. I got you to take out Marcus Jones, and I was just about able to get rid of Webster before you found him.’

  ‘Wait, you killed Webster?’

  ‘Yes. The men at the safe house had been torturing him for fun once they’d learned he was no longer necessary. I went there to clean up, which you helped me with. I was just about able to shoot him before you walked in, assuming I was the victim as always.’

  I began pacing up and down, trying to process the fact that everything I’d gone through in the past few days had been a lie. I stopped and turned to face Clara and Ketranovich, who had moved to stand next to her.

  ‘So you’ve been using me to clear up your mess and position everything to execute your revenge on GlobaTech?’

  ‘And you played your part beautifully,’ said Ketranovich. ‘Once everything was in order, we tried to kill you, but you somehow managed to survive the blast.’

  ‘The car bomb,’ I said. ‘That was you?’

  I remembered when I was face to face with Pellaggio. Right before I killed him, he began to say something. It didn’t register until now, but he must have been trying to say he didn’t know anything about the car bomb.

  ‘Yes, but you assumed it was the mafia man, Pellaggio, so we let you run with that idea and it led to you wiping out his entire empire!’

  He paused to laugh.

  ‘Very impressive, by the way. I’ve said since the first time we met, we could use a man like you in our cause.’

  I stared at him. I could feel the anger and hatred boiling to the surface.

  ‘That was nothing compared to what I’m gonna do to you,’ I said, before turning to Clara. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t have chance to try, Adrian Hell. The next phase of our plan is beginning now, and soon you will be nothing but a stain on the graveyard that will replace Nevada.’

  I had one last card to play to buy me some time. And it was a long shot.

  ‘And what did Natalia think of this master plan?’ I asked Clara. ‘I’m assuming she was kept in the dark as much as the rest of us?’

  ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I’m the only one who knew what the big picture was. Our Colonel keeps his plans to himself, remember?’

  ‘Are you sure she’s okay with not being the number one girl around here?’

  Ketranovich moved over to Clara. He stood in front of her and brushed a piece of hair from her face before kissing her on both cheeks. He turned to me.

  ‘Natalia is one of my finest soldiers,’ he said. ‘But who else could I trust with such a delicate plan, if not my own daughter?’

  Back

  Thunderstruck

  SIXTY-ONE

  I wasn’t even remotely surprised.

  I obviously had no idea Clara was Ketranovich’s daughter, but at this point, nothing else could shock me.

  ‘Your daughter,’ I said. ‘Of course she is.’

  Ketranovich smiled and then turned back to Clara.

  ‘We must begin the next phase of the plan,’ he said to her. ‘See that our friend here is comfortable then join me in the control room.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied.

  He gave me one last look before walking off, back down the long corridor.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said to her in a funny voice, mockingly. ‘You make me sick.’

  ‘And very soon I’ll make you dead,’ she replied, looking past me toward the long corridor.

  I turned to follow her gaze and saw Natalia Salikov walking toward us. She had a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other. And she looked massively pissed off.

  This wasn’t going to end well.

  Clara signalled to the furnace room with her gun as Natalia approached.

  ‘Get in,’ she said.

  I walked in and turned to the right, the heat hitting me instantly. She followed me inside.

  I suspected this was the moment where she aimed the gun at the back of my head and pulled the trigger. Game over. Well, I’m not going out like that. I never leave a job unfinished.

  I turned to face her. The gloom of the furnace room closed in around us. The orange glow from the fire behind her gave her a demonic aura that made her look all the more monstrous.

  Natalia Salikov walked in and stood next to her. She turned to Clara and said something in Russian. Clara responded, then turned to me.

  ‘Have fun, you two,’ she said with a mischievous smile.

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ I replied. ‘She’s got to be more entertaining than you were.’

  Clara rolled her eyes at my apparently wasted attempt at a hateful remark and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  I watched her go, then turned to Natalia.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  Like lightning, the gun was raised and aiming directly between my eyes.

  Shit.

  Small talk clearly wasn’t going to help. Time for plan B.

  ‘Okay. Do you speak any English?’ I asked.

  No response.

  ‘You strike me as someone who has some unaddressed anger issues
. Would that be a fair assessment?’

  Lowering the gun slightly, she swung a left hook from her hip and connected with the right hand side of my face.

  Goddammit, that hurt. But at least I know she can understand me.

  ‘I’m gonna take that as a yes,’ I continued. ‘Ketranovich was very complimentary of your abilities as a soldier. A person could be forgiven for thinking you were his favorite, the way he was talking.’

  She was thinking about what I was saying, which made her hesitate slightly before she threw the next left hook and hit me again.

  I didn’t really think this through before I started. Oh well, too late now.

  ‘I only mention it, because as a fellow soldier, I thought it strange he would choose Clara for the mission involving me instead of you.’

  She went to hit me a third time, but I backed away slightly, causing her to hold back and look at me quizzically.

  ‘I’m just saying. I mean, I was very close to her all this time. She didn’t strike me as very capable in the field. She was almost weak, when it came down to it. Whereas you, Natalia, are a stone-cold professional. No hesitation, no doubt – you just carry out your orders with efficiency. If I was Ketranovich, there’s no way I’d have cut you out of my plans like they did.’

  I thought she was going to swing for me again, but instead she stepped in closer, lowering her gun slightly. She was no more than a foot away from me. In the poor light of the furnace room, this was the first time I’d been able to properly see her eyes. They burned brighter than any furnace could ever hope to. The anger that lay just beneath the surface was palpable. I keep my demons locked behind a big door. I think little Natalia here keeps hers stored in a wet paper bag.

  In a broken, heavily Russian accent, she finally spoke to me.

  ‘I am twice the woman she is,’ she spat. ‘I would never have let you get away with what you have.’

  For a moment, I saw a flash of that anger surface and it genuinely worried me. Given my hands were still tied behind my back, I believed right then that she was capable of killing me.