Cold War (2001)

by Tom - Power Plays 05 Clancy

  He knelt in position behind the slid-open starboard door panel of the Bell, wind screaming into the passenger/cargo compartment around him, his goggles off so he could keep his eye against the aperture of his scope mount.

  The men below him on the ridge-back had opened up on the bird with their Sturmgewehr assault weapons as Smith wove evasively in the air above the notch, trying to avoid their fire and lower his skids. Rice rocked and swayed on one knee. He estimated there were five, possibly six opponents. They had traded their white winter cammo garb for something closer to desert dun. Some of them were sheltered behind boulders and rock projections. Others were in full view. All were firing at the unarmored bottom of the UpLink chopper's fuselage--the ding of metal on metal audible over the roar of wind and props as some of the rounds made contact.

  Rice knew he had to take them out fast.

  He inhaled, exhaled, squinting down the barrel. Then he triggered a shot at the center of a parka the color of coppery sand.

  A shower of red and the parka tumbled away down the steep hillside.

  Rice shifted his gun barrel. With that first trigger pull he had grooved into instinctive action. Later he would think of torn flesh and spilled blood. Later his gorge would rise at the waste and death. But right now these were no longer men down there, no longer even living creatures. These were targets. Simply targets.

  He sighted between the crosshairs again, but momentarily lost his alignment as the chopper swung sideways to avoid an upward stream of bullets. Then he regained the mark, and fired.

  There was more spraying blood and his target folded backward. Rice shifted to yet another, this one moving, breaking for cover, looking up at the chopper, shooting up at the chopper, making a target of Rice himself as it dashed toward a protective shield of rock. Rice released a breath, released a round, and got the target in mid-run.

  Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, heard a raised voice behind his ear. Nimec.

  "Hang on, Rice!" he said. "We're bringing her down!"

  Langern volleyed continuous fire at the helicopter as it landed precariously on the windswept crest of the notch's southern slope and men came leaping from its passenger hold beneath the still-rotating blades.

  Crouched behind a large boulder, Langern had seen three of his fellows die before its skids touched down, one of them bouncing down the slope like a rag doll.

  The man in the cabin door had a falcon's eye, but now it would be his turn to be raked with death's talons.

  Langern stopped shooting long enough to push a fresh magazine stack into his weapon, sprang up on the balls of his feet, and pushed himself from behind the boulder, his finger locked over his trigger, aiming directly for the sniper as he jumped from inside the helo.

  Nimec did not pause to think. Could not afford to think. He saw one of the men on the hilltop bound from the protection of a boulder and make an outright charge for Rice, his weapon spitting bullets. He saw Rice standing with his eyes momentarily turned elsewhere, hunting out another source of fire. And he reacted.

  Nimec's baby VVRS swept up from his side and rattled in his hand. The man went down onto the hard stone ridge, falling on his bullet-riddled chest, then rolling over onto his back, his lips moving faintly, his eyes staring skyward behind his snow goggles in the instant or two before life flickered out of them.

  In the agitated heavens above Langern, the whorling auroral lights seemed to briefly assume the shape of a terrible multihued iris.

  "Der Gott des Krieges," he muttered, gazing upward as he hitched his final breath.

  Then the cold, chaotic eye drew closer and blinked shut around him.

  Still exchanging light gunfire with the men hunkered behind the rocks, Nimec's team had gotten pitons and lines out of their rucksacks and were driving the metal anchors into the cliff head. Nimec didn't know how many of the ridge's defenders were left. Probably no more than two or three to judge from their fitful salvos.

  Amid the clang of hammers and continued smatters of fire, he swept his eyes in a semicircle, seeking the tunnel entrance Granger had offered up information about.

  Then, abruptly, he spotted it.

  He called to Waylon over his headset, heard static crackle in return, didn't pause to consider the odds of his brief message having been communicated.

  Grabbing Rice's shoulder, waving another two men over to them, he whirled toward the tunnel, turned on the high-powered tactical flashlight mounted under the barrel of his baby VVRS, and led the way inside.

  Nimec's voice cut through the white noise in Waylon's earpiece like an isolated sun ray penetrating dense overcast.

  "I'm headed into the tunnel, rappel team's on its way down," Nimec said. "Keep pushing forward, they're going to need cover."

  "Got you, sir." Waylon heard a hack of static in his ear, and wondered whether his own response had slipped through the parted wave of electromagnetic interference. "Can see the notch in front of me."

  And he could. It was an ugly, angular gash that looked like it had been hastily carved from the wall of the pass with a gigantic serrated butcher knife.

  Waylon could also hear something of equivalent nastiness--the growl of a muscular engine at his rear, rising above the buzz of the two other Sword ATVs speeding along with him.

  Something was coming on. And closing.

  He tossed a glance over his shoulder at the man in his aft gunner's seat.

  "What kind of problem have we got?" he shouted over the blasting wind.

  The gunner turned to look, spotted the Light Attack Vehicle in pursuit.

  "Bad one," he said.

  Waylon eased off his accelerator and radioed out an urgent message to Sam Cruz.

  Cruz didn't pick up Waylon's signal, but fortunately that wasn't imperative.

  He knew the plan.

  In the lead slot of the three-ATV incursion team that had met Chinstrap Two in McKelvey--dropped there so they would enter Bull Pass behind Waylon's men and guard their backsides--Cruz had spotted the Light Strike Vehicle up ahead moments after it launched from the pass's crumbled west wall.

  As he sped forward at maximum horsepower, pushing within range of the opposition's militarized dune buggy, Cruz waved his accompanying vehicles into attack formation and hollered for his gunner to open fire.

  The Light Strike Vehicle's driver had been outwitted and he knew it.

  The motor-pack of ATVs that had appeared from McKelvey were gaining behind him like angry hornets. Reymann swerved to elude their firing guns, his own rear gunner turned toward them in his elevated weapons station, swinging his .50-caliber in wide arcs, disgorging a torrent of ammunition from its link feed-belt.

  The hornet vehicles continued to close distance nonetheless, two of them splitting to his left and right while the third stayed at his rear and dodged the lashing machine gun volleys. There was no room for his larger vehicle to maneuver in the tight-walled pass. No time to use his grenade launcher as the hornets nimbly hopped alongside his flanks, trapping him between them. Nowhere for him to go but straight ahead toward the leading trio of ATVs that had now molted speed before him, their tail guns pouring ammunition in his direction.

  Boxed-in, caught in a vicious four-way cross fire, Reymann was cursing under his breath with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief when a sleet of bullets knocked him back in his seat, turning his head and most of his body into a crimson mire.

  One of Pete Nimec's biggest unanswered questions was resolved minutes after he entered the tunnel, Rice and the others following him down a metal stairwell into the darkness.

  They had descended three long flights in a hurry when the beam of his tac light chanced on a kind of niche in the stone wall to his right--and then held there as he paused briefly on a landing.

  The recess was filled with sealed steel drums.

  Large fifty-five-gallon drums, stacked two and three high and going several rows deep into the surrounding rock.

  Their warning labels were printed in various different lang
uages, but it was easy enough to see they all said the same thing.

  Nimec glanced over them.

  De rebut Radioactif.

  Radioaktiver Mull.

  Reciduous radioactivos.

  Scorrie radioative.

  "Goddamn," Rice said. He stood slightly behind Nimec on the riveted metal landing, his own flash trained on one of the English drum labels. "Radioactive waste. They're storing rad waste."

  Nimec grunted. He doubted that was all they were doing there. Before entering the tunnel, he'd looked down from atop the ridge-back and noticed heavy equipment at the bottom of the notch. Earth-hauling trucks. They were stashing this stuff, true. Hoarding it deep in the ground. But he had a feeling their operation would prove to be a two-way street. That they were pulling something out of the ground too.

  He moved his eyes further down the stairs, angling his tac light in that direction to illuminate the way.

  "Come on," he said. "We'll worry about this later."

  Burkhart waited in the dimness near the foot of the stairway, flattened against a rough stone wall on its right, his Sturmgewehr angled toward its upper levels. One of his men stood beside him, his back also to the cold stone. Three more men were hugging the opposite wall. All wore night-vision goggles.

  They could hear the enemy sprinting downward.

  Burkhart had counted three sets of footfalls. And while he could not be certain of it, he would have wagered the first of those sets belonged to the UpLink security chief . . . Peter Nimec.

  Burkhart had never met him, of course. But he believed he understood him. The man had come from a world away with only a single purpose, a single mission, and that was to locate and rescue the vanished members of his organization. Nimec would care little at this stage for anything besides, something Granger would have quickly realized if he were captured--as the UpLink strike verified had happened.

  To what else could its timing and accuracy be attributed? Burkhart thought. He saw a flicker of light from above now, pulled further back against the wall. There was a great deal of information Granger had obviously divulged. Enough to bring Nimec and his men here to Bull Pass. To the notch. But his greatest bargaining chip would have been the knowledge he possessed about the whereabouts of the UpLink field team. And if he had told Nimec about the tunnel--a fact made evident by the helicopter's landing on the ridge-back--then he would have surely told him its descending stairs were the fastest route to the cage in which the woman scientist was being held.

  This man Peter Nimec . . .

  A man who led on the ground, risked his life along with those who followed him . . .

  Burkhart knew he would not delegate the actual rescue to others.

  It would be Nimec leading the way down the stairs, just as Burkhart himself had chosen to meet him.

  Nimec suddenly halted on the stairs and raised his hand, stalling up the three men behind him. He wasn't sure why. Or at least he couldn't have stated why. It might have been simple caution. Or that he'd noticed a trace of movement below, heard something below, a subtle forewarning that someone might be down there--except he wasn't even positive about that. But he told himself that they had better proceed very slowly until he knew.

  "Hang back," he said, and glanced over his shoulder at Rice. "I want to check things ou--"

  The first outpouring of fire from below silenced him mid-sentence.

  Nimec ducked sideways as the gunfire split the darkness, throwing himself against the stairway's handrail, motioning for the others to do the same. He twisted his tac light to its flood setting, saw the figure of a man launch off the wall to the right of the bottom stair, and triggered a burst of return fire from his VVRS. The man slipped out of sight, into the shadows, but then Nimec saw another man swing his gun up at him. He released a tight hail of bullets, saw the man drop to the floor, or ground, or whatever the hell was waiting for him down there at the base of the stairs.

  There was a second volley from the bottom, this time coming out of the darkness at his left. Rice had his gun up, his own tactical light set on "spot," beaming a concentrated circle of brightness onto the center of the shooter's chest.

  He squeezed out a rapid burst and the man crumpled.

  "Okay, move it!" Nimec shouted, bounding down the stairs, leading his men down the stairs, thinking there was no sense in them making stationary targets of themselves here on these goddamned stairs at this point.

  More movement as he reached the bottom landing--a third gunner. Nimec raked the gloom with fire, heard an agonized cry, saw a body fall straight from the knees, a fine mist of blood glittering in the throw of his flash. At the same moment one of the Sword ops racing down the stairway behind him--Rice?--he wasn't sure in the confusion--loosed a sustained barrage and took out another of the waiting shooters.

  Silence then. Absolute silence.

  Nimec took a quick glance back at his men, all of them down on the lower landing with him now.

  "Everybody okay?"

  Three nods.

  Nimec stood warily, moved his gun from side to side, sweeping the area in front of the stairs with his tac light. Four men lay dead below them, NVGs over their eyes. He wondered if there had been any more waiting, thought of the one who'd opened fire and slipped clear of his initial return burst. Was he among those sprawled on the ground?

  He had no sooner asked himself that question than the answer was violently delivered.

  Burkhart sprang from where he'd concealed himself to the right of the bottom landing, raised the barrel of his weapon, released a crisp stream of fire. Bullets studded the risers beneath Nimec, throwing up a bright shower of sparks.

  Nimec gestured his men back, his finger continuously squeezing the trigger of his VVRS as he leaped down the stairs and attempted to track the source of the volley with its flash attachment.

  Darting clear of his shots, Burkhart brought up his gun for another staccato burst, heard a single sharp tak! as one of his own bullets ricocheted off the handrail . . . and then felt a slap on the upper left side of his chest, followed immediately by a hot needle of heat in the same region.

  His finger still looped around his rifle's trigger, Burkhart looked down at himself. Blood seeping through the front of his parka where the rebounded bullet had struck his heart, the strength seeping from his hand as shots continued to spurt from the Sturmgewehr's barrel in loose, wildly straying patterns, he looked down at himself.

  He could have almost smiled at the sublime jest as he fell.

  Nimec crouched beside the dying man, heard him struggling to say something to him, couldn't make out what it was.

  He leaned closer, removed the man's night-sight goggles, pulled the balaclava from his face, and for a moment focused on an odd crescent-moon scar on the man's right cheek.

  "Die Ironie des Lebens," Burkhart said in German.

  Nimec shook his head, unable to understand.

  Burkhart realized his mistake. He pushed his head off the stone ground, coughed up blood.

  "The irony of life," he managed to say in English.

  Or thought he did in his fading confusion.

  In fact, the words never left his mouth.

  EPILOGUE

  "THE SISTER TOOK THE CHILD," SAID NAN AS GORRIE sat down at the table.

  "What sister?"

  "The Mackay infant. The sister will take him. Seems to be a fine family. The husband is an engineer."

  "Good for him then," said Gorrie. A fresh loaf of bread sat wrapped in a napkin on a plate at the center of the table. "You baked this bread?" he asked, taking off the cloth and finding it warm.

  "I did."

  Gorrie broke out a thick piece and began buttering it. "Got home early from school?"

  "No earlier than normal," said his wife.

  "I was worried about the child," admitted Gorrie. "I was worried what he would think growing up."

  "They wouldn't have told him."

  "Not a thing to keep a secret," he told his wife. "Sort of thing can't b
e held inside. At least now he'll know the truth. Hard thing, but better than what he might have thought."

  Nan busied herself at the stove. She'd made a roast and mashed potatoes--elaborate fixings for a weekday. She carved a few slices and presented a plate as properly as if they had been in a fine restaurant.

  "What's all this, Nan?"

  "We call it dinner," she said.

  "Aye." He swirled a bit of gravy into the potatoes. She'd used an extra helping of butter in them, exactly as he liked them despite the doctor's warnings about cholesterol. "The runny tap in the loo?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "You're buttering me up for something, sweets. Out with it."

  Instead of the laugh he expected, Nan sat down at her place with her elbows on the table, propping her chin in her hands. "Frank, now be honest--were you worried about the child?"

  "As I told you."

  "Did it make you--have you thought--do you feel as if . . ."

  They would not have to have been married for so long for him to know exactly what she was thinking, but having been married for so long--twenty-six years that fall--they found it difficult to speak of certain subjects. The fact that in their case the number of these subjects was limited did not ease the difficulty.

  "Very old rocks," Gorrie said softly.

  "It is."

  "To be honest, I hadn't given it a thought, not in that way. Just doing my job, as it had to be done."

  She picked up a forkful of potatoes and ate slowly. When her mouth was empty, she said, "You would have made a lovely father. You still might."

  Gorrie laughed. Then he looked into her face. She was no centerfold nudie girl, but Scotland was not the place for one. She was made of harder stuff--more beautiful in her way than any centerfold, he thought.

  "Do you want a child, Nan?" he asked.

  "Sometimes I think of it. But--" Her eyes glided from his and scanned the kitchen before returning. "I think I'm content, if that's the word."