BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  Denials of course, dithering, wasting his time.

  “Divya,” he interrupted again, “let me get straight to the point. You owe me. Unless you want the results you fudged from those radiation resistance drug trials released to the military, you’re going to do exactly what I say.”

  More dithering, desperate this time. They always got desperate.

  “What do I want? It’s simple, Divya.” He grinned. “I want a little insurance.”

  Chapter One

  Somewhere, water dripped. He’d tried to shut it out, tried to let his thoughts travel away from the incessant drip-drip-drip. It had a curious echo to it, an effect of the acoustics in the old building. He could tell it was old, pre-war. The cement floor was smooth and damp and coated with the detritus of decades, collected dust and mold and rat shit and pollen all gathered into an indescribable veneer, shining silvery when a stray, singular strand of sunlight pierced the cracks in the ancient, block walls.

  The light revealed other things. Faded green paint on the walls, the pitted, cracked stainless steel of a toilet. He knew he’d used it, but he couldn’t remember flushing it. Did it flush? The outlines of a door, heavy and metal, its hinges and lock on the opposite side. No windows other than a narrow slit in the bottom of the door. Protein bars and bottled water had been passed through it while he slept. Had it been three times? Four? It was hard to remember. He’d thought, at first, to keep the bottles and wrappers as a sort of calendar, but when he’d slept again, they were gone.

  He didn’t use to be able to fall asleep this easily and he was fairly certain he was being kept drugged. Something to make him weak and hazy, maybe in the water. He could refuse to drink it, but sleep was his only refuge from the sounds. The drip-drip-drip echo, the water condensing off a pipe and falling one drop at a time, never-ending, wearing at his nerves as it wore into the concrete. How long had the water dripped? A hundred years? More? How long had he been there? How many days and nights had passed? Had it been a week yet? More? His flight suit smelled rank and so did he, but what was the difference in stink from two days to four? Four to six?

  Someone screamed, an inhuman shriek of pure, unfiltered agony. Someone having their skin removed a centimeter at a time with a dull knife, cauterized by a blow torch. Again, warbling, desperate, completely alone. He waited, knowing what was coming. It was another ten seconds, but the third scream was always the same as the first. It was a recording. He didn’t know why they bothered except to make wakefulness so miserable he’d willingly choose sleep. There was one other sound, one he heard so rarely and faintly he thought he might be imagining it, but there was no mistaking the roar of distant jets. He was near an airbase. He’d almost thought it could be an airport, but there were no airports anymore. No one flew but the government or corporate contractors working for the government.

  Or the Russians. The Russians flew, but they came off ships docked well off-shore, not risking an open airbase. Were the Russians holding him near an American airbase.

  The Russians. Is it the Russians? I remember something, something right after I was taken. There was a Russian woman there, the woman who was running Patty. But there was someone else. Who was it?

  There was one other break in the door, a recessed window that could be slid open from the other side. It hadn’t been opened since he’d been there. It slid aside now with a heavy, authoritative thump. Darkness lay beyond it, as unenlightened as the rest of his existence.

  “Hello, Nathan.”

  The voice. He remembered the voice. He remembered it from another life, from another version of himself, someone who’d shared his genes and some of his memories with Nate. He could put a face with it, smiling and vibrant and always thinking, eyes alive with a creativity and intelligence that had drawn him to the man, had gone along well with his pragmatism and efficiency. They’d been friends for years before…

  Before what? Before he died? Did he remember Robert Franklin dying? Or did he just remember being told he was dead?

  “Bob,” he said. His own voice was harsh, raspy, alien to him. Everything about this life is alien to me. “Is it really you?”

  “I suppose the question is, Nathan, is if it really is either one of us.”

  Nate pushed himself to his feet, feeling unsteady, dizzy, balanced himself against the wall with an outstretched palm. He underestimated the distance and nearly fell over.

  “Have you ever heard of the riddle of the ship of Theseus, Nathan?”

  “The ship of who?” Maybe it was just that his head felt like a five-kilo bale of cotton, but he couldn’t seem to figure out what the other man was saying.

  “Metaphysics, my old friend. It’s a question of identity. Let us suppose that the ship of the Greek hero Theseus was preserved in the harbor as a museum piece. As time passes, some of the wooden pieces begin to rot and are replaced by identical pieces. After a century or so, every piece has been replaced by a new one. Is it still the same ship? Is it a new ship? Does it retain its identity despite every part being replaced?”

  Nate blinked, trying to focus his eyes. There was a shape through the darkness beyond the window, a familiar shape.

  “Before you answer,” the man who sounded like Robert Franklin cautioned him, “you should remember that every cell in your body is replaced every seven years via mitosis. Does that make you a different man every seven years?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a pilot, not a biologist.”

  “You’re so much more than a pilot, Nate. You’re the answer to the question I’ve been asking for a long time. We were friends once, each of us in the progression from one ship of Theseus to another. I would like to think you still consider me a friend, despite everything.”

  “Bob Franklin was Nathan Stout’s best friend,” Nate said with all the conviction he could muster. “But they’re both dead.”

  “They don’t have to be. And believe me when I tell you, what I want more than anything in the world is to give you a full life, the life Nathan Stout deserved.”

  “Why are you keeping me in here, then?” Nate demanded.

  “I’m keeping you in the dark to remind you of where you came from. Of where we both came from.” A pause and the slight hint of white teeth in the darkness, a smile. “When the time comes that you’re ready for the light, I’ll be the one to take you there.”

  The window shut suddenly and irrevocably. Footsteps echoed on the concrete, walking away. Nate leaned his shoulder up against the wall and tried to concentrate. Bob Franklin was dead. He was as sure of that as he was of anything.

  But how sure am I of anything?

  Chapter Two

  The drawer was locked. Why the hell would the drawer be locked? Had Nate thought some random cat burglar was going to sneak into the old Norfolk Coast Guard base and rifle through his things?

  Or did he just not trust us? Did he not trust me?

  Rachel Mata looked at the screwdriver in her hand, ready to be wedged into the drawer to pry it open and wondered if she’d meant to be ironic or if it had happened by accident. Shrugging, she wrenched Nate’s desk drawer open with a single, powerful jerk.

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you still do PT even when all you do is pilot a mech.

  There was no paper in the desk, no printouts, nothing but his work tablet. She frowned in disapproval. It seemed so un-military to have no paper records. She powered up the tablet, then cursed when it asked for a thumbprint ID. There was a way around it, but it was labor intensive. She set the tablet aside and ran her hands over the inside of the drawer, making sure she didn’t miss anything. Nothing but rust and something mushy.

  “Shit.” She pulled her hand out and saw a smear of what might have been grease. She hoped it was grease. She wiped her fingers on the underside of the desk chair, then on the pant leg of her flight suit, still cursing under her breath.

  With the center drawer open, the rest were unlocked as well and she yanked each of them open, bending over in the chair and checkin
g them with a small flashlight she pulled off her belt. The overhead lights hadn’t worked for decades and the sunlight streaming in from the open window didn’t quite reach.

  There was an ancient bottle of Jack Daniels and two shot glasses in the big drawer on the lower right side of the desk. Well, at least the bottle was ancient. The whiskey might have been pre-war, but given how much that would cost, it was more likely the bottle had been recycled by a local moonshiner. She set the bottle and the glasses on the desktop next to the screwdriver and kept looking.

  The last drawer had nothing but a few desiccated spider exoskeletons. She made a face and wiped her hand again, then slammed it against the desktop so hard the whiskey bottle nearly toppled over and she had to catch it.

  “Yo, Roach, you didn’t tell me we were having a party.”

  She looked up sharply, her hand reaching for the pistol she’d taken to carrying at her hip, but relaxed when she saw it was Hector Ramirez peaking his head through the door of the office. He had a baby face, even though he was only a couple years younger than her. She’d always thought he looked like a kid playing war.

  “You find anything with Patty’s stuff?” she asked him, ignoring his attempt at humor.

  “Not a damn thing,” he admitted, stepping inside and falling into the seat opposite her.

  He squinted as the sun coming in through the window went into his eyes. The high-impact glass had somehow made it intact through nuclear terrorism, rioting and invasion, perhaps because the Coast Guard base had been abandoned early and no one had ever bothered to attack it. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the parking lot, still littered with the rusting corpses of ancient cars. Their pickup was still out there, the one they’d found in a garage, still preserved, and repaired. They’d rigged it to run on alcohol, which was distilled locally and you could buy in town. Patty had driven it here that last night…

  “You need any help in here?” Ramirez asked her.

  Something about the tone of his voice made him realize she’d been staring out at the pickup for too long and she shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut at the afterimages from the sun’s glare.

  “If you can find any meaning or sanity in this fucking desk,” she responded with more bitterness than she’d intended, “you can be my guest. Or any idea why Nate took off,” she added. “Why the hell would he abandon us?” The words came out as something near to a sob and she felt a jolt of shock that she was letting it affect her so much. “Was it Patty? Did Patty betraying us make him leave?”

  She sounded like a kid, like more of a kid than Ramirez. She thought she saw embarrassment for her in his eyes and she hated him and herself for it. She gripped the edge of the desk tightly and forced herself back to reason.

  “I don’t know,” Ramirez admitted. “I know Dix getting killed hit Nate pretty hard. I can’t believe he’d just leave us in a lurch like this. I mean…” He shrugged helplessly. “Without him, we can’t keep Broken Arrow going, right? Not with just the two of us. Where the hell are we going to go?”

  “Did you get the data recorder from Patty’s Hellfire downloaded to the system?” she asked, her tone steadier now, more professional.

  The question seemed to shock Ramirez out of his self-pity and he nodded, pulling a flash drive from his chest pocket, passing it over to her. She weighed it in her hand, considering the weight of the memories held in an ounce of plastic and metal.

  “There was a video file in there,” Ramirez told her. “Big. Don’t know when it ended, maybe when we depowered the mech to ship it here, maybe earlier.” He gestured toward it. “If we want to find out where Nate went, maybe we should watch it. It might be the only clue we have.”

  She rubbed a hand over her eyes, suddenly feeling very tired.

  “It might,” she admitted. “But I’m not sure I want to see what’s on it, Hector. It was bad enough finding Patty’s body the day after.”

  She tried to keep the image out of her mind, of Patty’s face pale and lifeless and covered in blood. He’d been shot right through the forehead, a pistol round, like the 9mm Glock Nate had been carrying. She hadn’t found the cartridge casing on the ground, but then, she hadn’t really been looking for it. She wasn’t a cop and wasn’t interested in investigating the death. She knew what had happened to him. Nate had done exactly what she’d expected him to do. Patty had been a traitor and he’d deserved a bullet to the head. She didn’t blame Nate for doing it, but she had never thought he would actually go through with it.

  For all that Nate was a soldier who’d killed over a dozen Russians in battle just in the time she’d been with Broken Arrow Mercenary Force, she’d never thought he had it in him to execute a man in cold blood. It made her wonder if she’d ever really known him at all.

  “If we want to find him,” Ramirez argued, “we gotta have a place to start. His phone is dead, his tracker is deactivated. That footage is all we got.” He held out a hand. “If you want, I could go watch it by myself and tell you if I see anything important.”

  She debated it for a few seconds, but she’d always wanted to be a leader. Leaders didn’t push tasks on their subordinates just because they were afraid to do it themselves.

  “No,” she decided. “We’ll watch it together.” She pushed up from the chair and headed for the door, but paused midway there and gestured back towards the desk. “Bring the whiskey.”

  She didn’t know what she’d see on the video, but she was fairly certain she’d need a drink.

  The Lincoln Bedroom had seen better days. Robert Franklin remembered the first time he’d seen it, during a private tour of the White House…Was that fifty years ago now? More?

  It had looked so grand, so ornate, so full of uninterrupted history. Now…now, they’d had to run a few squatters out at gunpoint and it had taken weeks for the crew to scrub away the smells of shit and piss. But he’d insisted. The White House made sense as a place to set up their base for this operation. It was structurally reinforced enough to keep them safe from most air strikes, and defensible from 360 degrees. And he’d always wanted to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  Well, some version of me always wanted to sleep here. God alone knows whether that’s still me or not.

  He pulled a cigar out of the nightstand. He’d brought it along with him from Cuba. Nothing stored here had lasted long once the capital had been abandoned. The Russians had occupied it briefly, mostly as a boast of their “great victory” driving out the American forces, but the fact was, no one really wanted it. Washington DC was a swamp, quite literally. Without constant maintenance, it was trying very hard to go back to being a swamp. The mosquitoes were horrid at night.

  Not even any politicians left here and it’s still full of blood-sucking parasites. Amazing.

  He thought about lighting up right there, but as much as he enjoyed a good cigar, he hated the idea of stinking the room up with smoke so soon after getting it livable again. Instead, he walked outside to the nearest balcony. There was a chair there, waiting for him. An old wheelchair one of his men had brought up from storage somewhere. The poor bastard had insisted it was FDR’s wheelchair, but Bob could tell it was no older than the 1980s or 90s. He hadn’t said anything. There was no use disillusioning the man.

  He made sure the wheels were locked and sat down, looking out at what was left of the Washington Monument, cracked and broken in the red light of dusk, just like the country it had represented once. The Reflecting Pool was overgrown with weeds now, the water long drained, and the lower third of the monument was defaced by graffiti in four different languages. Including Russian, of course. The troops who’d rolled in here so briefly had made sure to leave their mark. There was more of it on the face of the White House, on any surface left standing, as if all of the capital was a giant canvas for disaffected youth to proclaim their despair and rage.

  He realized he’d been sitting with the unlit cigar in his mouth for several minutes and shook himself free of his thoughts long enough to pull out a lig
hter. He puffed the cigar to life and held the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds, feeling the slight light-headed dizziness he got from real Cubans. The exhalation was a white cloud, hazing over this nightmare version of America.

  “Those things will kill you,” Svetlana told him.

  He hadn’t heard her approach, but then, she was a spy.

  “You know enough to know why I’m not worried about it.” He took another puff, not inhaling as deeply this time. More than one long hit on the Cuban would make him nauseous. You had to know when to say when.

  “We have the power back on. You might actually set off a smoke detector with that cloud of burning Cuban agriculture.” She snorted cynical amusement. “And you’d definitely offend the puritanical ghosts who haunt this damned mausoleum for the Nanny State you used to love so much.”

  “Our countries weren’t so different, once upon a time,” he argued, mostly out of reflex. He didn’t actually disagree with her.

  “Says the man who never lived in Russia,” she reminded him. She talked back more now that he’d let her into his confidence, and he liked it. It was refreshing. He’d grown tired of having nothing but toadies and yes-men around these last few years. “You hired me, you must have known my background.”

  “I know of your work in the FSB. Your record is exemplary.” It was a half-truth. He knew everything about her, but he wanted to see how much of it she’d share voluntarily.

  “My mother,” Svetlana Grigoryeva related, leaning carefully against the porch railing, “lived on the streets of St. Petersburg, supporting herself by selling drugs, selling guns, selling her body when she had to.” Her perfect lips curled in a sneer. “Which was how I came to be. She found a shelter to take us in, at first, sponsored by a businessman who felt guilty for his success and tried to assuage his conscience by helping the downtrodden.”