BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  “Shit,” Ramirez muttered.

  “Helicopters can kinda’ glide, can’t they?” Roach asked him, trying to imagine being inside one with no power.

  “They autorotate,” he corrected her. “Badly. Enough to let you land alive if you’re not too far up and if you have a nice, flat place to touch down. In a mountain pass, in winter…” He closed his eyes, teeth grinding just a bit with the memory. “I got lucky. Found a ledge in just the right place, high enough for me to crash onto it without dying.” He shrugged. “Without me dying. My gunner broke his neck. I managed to crack three vertebrae and snap my right ankle. I had to cut my straps off and climb down off that mountain on one leg. Lost two toes to frostbite.”

  Roach shivered involuntarily. She didn’t like the cold, and the thought of being trapped inside the cockpit of a helicopter with a dead man sounded like ten different versions of hell.

  “Mother Mary,” Ramirez said, crossing himself. “How many…”

  “Twenty-four birds,” Fuller answered the question before the younger man could finish it. “Forty-eight men and women.” He hooked a thumb back at his own chest. “One survivor, Catfish.”

  “Catfish?” Roach asked, eyes narrowing. “What’s a catfish got to do with it?”

  “That was my old call sign,” Fuller explained, grinning again, as if the story had wafted away on the wind, taking the bad memories with it. “My maintenance NCO took one look at me and said my mustache looked exactly like the whiskers on a catfish.” He laughed, a wheezing, rasping noise that made it sound as if he were about to die. “I argued against that callsign till I about ran out of breath, but I was stuck with it. Even thought about shaving my mustache, if I’d have believed that would have made a difference, but I decided naw, the stach is who I am.”

  “We give our own callsigns here,” Roach told him. She sniffed a quiet laugh. “You think I chose to be called ‘Roach?’ That shit happens to you.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t want to be called the Mule,” Ramirez said, his tone sour. Roach thought he was probably realizing without a Nate or Dix around to change it, he’d be stuck with the moniker forever.

  Fuller spread his hands invitingly, as if telling them to do their worst.

  “So, what’s the verdict?” he asked. “If I’m not Catfish, what am I?”

  “I’m thinking F-O-G,” Ramirez said.

  “Fog?”

  “No.” Ramirez rolled his eyes. “F-O-G, for Fucking Old Guy.”

  “I guess I should have expected that sort of lack of imagination from someone your age,” Fuller said archly, looking down his nose at the younger man. He looked at Roach with pleading in his eyes. “Tell me you’re not going along with this shit, missy.”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” she allowed, “but you keep calling me ‘missy,’ so the hell with it. Fucking Old Guy sounds good to me.”

  “I may be old,” he said, drawing himself up as if rallying whatever dignity he had left, “but at least I’m still on this side of the ground.” He shrugged philosophically. “Could be worse.”

  The pain in his leg woke him up. Nate tried to ignore it, tried to bury himself under fuzzy layers of drugged bliss, not wanting to open his eyes to the grim dankness of his cell, but it was a toothache pain that just wouldn’t go away and he finally had to give in to it.

  But it wasn’t dank and it wasn’t all that grim anymore. As cells went, it actually wasn’t too bad. He was in a hospital bed, the sort his Prime remembered from decades ago, with metal siderails raised up to keep him inside. His left wrist was handcuffed to one of them, which didn’t surprise him, but otherwise, he was unrestrained. The sheets were soft, the pillow fluffy and the room was well lit and painted a faded yellow he supposed had once been cheerful.

  It would have all been perfect except for the bone-deep pan inside his heavily-bandaged thigh. What the hell had they done to him? Was he some sort of experiment? He’d read about Jews during the Holocaust being used as guinea pigs for experiments and he wondered if their fate was to be his, shot or gassed or starved to death and thrown into some unmarked grave. True, this didn’t seem like the sort of dungeon where the bad guys would stick a guinea pig they were bent on tossing aside…

  He rested his head back against the pillow, totally confused. Svetlana had said they were extracting…something. What had it been? Everything from just before she’d given him the sedative was a blur, but he thought she’d said stem cells. They were extracting stem cells. For what? The only thing he knew you could do with stem cells was make genetic duplicates.

  But why the hell would Bob Franklin want to duplicate him?

  He was thirsty and the dry, sandpaper feeling in his throat was making it hard to think. He looked around, wondering if they might have left…they had. A foam cup sat on a metal stand beside the bed. He had to reach across to get it with his free hand, which hurt like hell, but he forgot the pain the instant the water touched his lips. It seemed to wash some of the fog away from his thoughts on the way down.

  Why would Bob want to dupe a dupe? The genetic degradation would ensure the copies he made from Nate wouldn’t last more than another five years, tops.

  Unless that’s enough for what he has in mind. But why me? He knew me, or his Prime knew my Prime. Is that the whole reason? Did he pick me just because he knew me? Because we used to be friends?

  He tried to remember everything the technicians had passed down to him from his Prime about Robert Franklin, but there wasn’t much there, not much they’d deemed important. He’d been the man who’d developed the Hellfire mech, along with a dozen other innovations that had made it possible, and he knew from memories of feelings he’d had during lectures and demonstrations of the technology to his Prime that the two of them had been close friends. Nothing concrete, no memory of how they’d met or what had made them hit it off.

  It was frustrating. He knew he had trusted the man, had valued his friendship, but he couldn’t remember why. There were flashes, images of the two of them drinking together, watching old movies and making fun of them to the chagrin of others in the base rec room, laughing at Franklin striking out with women at local bars. The closest he could come with the vague, frayed fragments was that Robert Franklin had been a rich, eccentric genius but had acted like a regular guy.

  What had happened to that regular guy? How had he turned into this megalomaniacal crime boss? Was he working for the Russians or, as he claimed, working against both sides? He didn’t know if the man was manipulating him or simply telling him truths he didn’t want to hear?

  Nate closed his eyes and tried to use the relaxation techniques he’d learned from the doctors after waking the first time, when they’d explained to him the trouble he would have sleeping. They were supposed to suppress pain as well and this was as good of a test as he’d had for them. But the pain he was feeling wasn’t all in his leg, and his thoughts refused to settle. Because one question that wouldn’t be answered was, what would this version of Bob Franklin do to him once he got what he wanted?

  Anton Varlamov snugged the stock of the sniper rifle into his shoulder and watched the sentries pass through the crosshairs. The thermal sight turned armored men into abstract yellow and red figures in the stygian darkness, pacing around and between the cargo trucks parked outside. But the most interesting thing it revealed was what was beyond the walls, through the partially-collapsed front wall of the building. Mechs.

  And even more interesting and perplexing, not Tagans. Hellfires, American made. They were immobile, visible only because of their never-resting isotope reactors and the characteristic thermal signature they showed. They were arrayed in rows, probably in maintenance racks, though he was sure some were kept at ready to deal with threats.

  Threats like us.

  “What do you see, sir?” Giorgi asked from beside him.

  The man had infrared night vision goggles, but they couldn’t show anything except for the occasional guard stepping through open space, and not many details o
f that at this range. They were set up a good kilometer and a half away, too distant for him to hope to make a shot even with the sniper rifle.

  “I see enough to know we aren’t simply strolling in there and killing Franklin,” he said, keeping his voice quiet and low-pitched.

  He pulled the rifle down and set it behind the cover of the remains of the garden wall, settling out of sight. He took a moment to check the positions of his team, making sure they were sufficiently covered and concealed. They were all professionals, but they’d been away from Russia, fighting mercenaries and guerillas for too long, and he was afraid they’d gotten sloppy. A few weeks of combat was good for keeping troops on the ball, but after too long with too much adrenalin and stress hormones, even the best wore down, a knife sharpened too much, too often.

  “They have mechs in there, and heavy security,” he added, having come to subscribe to the American notion of disseminating as much information as possible to his subordinates so they could accomplish the mission if things went wrong. It was very much against the Russian tradition, but if you didn’t learn from your enemies, well…there weren’t any friends out here on the eastern seaboard, so you just weren’t going to learn at all. “Whatever is being done with the duplication gear, it’s important enough for him to bring in the big guns. Which means it’s important enough we should make it our business to find out some more about it.”

  “You just said we can’t make it through their security,” Giorgi said, forehead scrunching up in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  Anton sighed. Of course, the weakness of the American concept of dissemination of information was that some people were just too stupid to make any sense of it.

  “There’s a weapons depot not too far from here,” he explained patiently. “Near Annapolis. It was planted a few years ago by an FSB infiltration team coming off a cargo ship.” He cocked an eyebrow at Giorgi. “You’re checked out on the Tagan mech, are you not?”

  “We all are, but it has been a while.” The man’s face brightened. “We will get to pilot mechs again. I always enjoyed fighting in a mech.”

  “Well, good news then, you will get your chance.” He nodded back toward the rally point he’d designated for the recon, a stand of trees in Lafayette Square. “Come on, we need to get out of here before we’re detected. And when we come back, it will be with enough force to take down this treacherous dog for good.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Well, this is just fucking impossible,” James Fuller murmured.

  “Problem with the connection to the DoD network?” Roach asked, hearing his grumble from where she worked on her Hellfire, performing the weekly maintenance on the mech. They might be desperate and hopeless, but PCMS wouldn’t wait for the end of the world.

  Fuller was sprawled out in an appropriated office chair, one leg propped on the folding table where they’d set up the data terminal. Cables ran from the mainframe over to a window they’d propped open, with a satellite uplink antenna clamped to the window sill.

  “It can get spotty when the weather’s bad,” she added, then scowled at the scattered raindrops on the floor under the open window. “And it’s usually bad here.”

  “No, it’s working fine,” Fuller assured her. “The problem is what it’s telling me.”

  Roach set down the wire brush she’d been working into the mech’s knee joint and stepped over behind him.

  “You still trying to figure out who our John Doe is?” she asked him. “I thought you had given up.”

  “I’ll give up when I’m dead, missy,” he said with a disdainful sniff. “I started running through some random history files, trying to jog my memory.” He tilted his head in a self-deprecating motion. “Nowadays, it’s more like a slow walk.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not at first. I figured he was no older than fifty, from his looks, so I went back thirty years, just to be safe. Figured maybe I came across the man early in my career, when he was younger. But nothing. Then I got bored…”

  “You get bored, I got some work you could do,” she offered, cocking an eyebrow at the older man.

  He smirked at her with the sort of look only an old soldier could get away with.

  “I got bored,” he went on, emphasizing the words as he repeated them, “so I went back a little longer. Fifty years, before the war, before the terrorist attacks, before the pullout from the east coast, right to the beginning.”

  “And…” she prompted.

  “That’s the part that’s fucking impossible. I found him, all right.”

  He gestured at the screen and she moved around behind him to look. It was the same man, though if he’d told her it was his son or his younger brother, she would have believed it. He had the same face, but it was slightly plumper, slightly softer, the hair long and loose and black instead of slicked back and greying. Rather than a tailored suit, he wore stained work coveralls and a tool belt and other than the looks it could have been a totally different person. The eyes, especially, struck her as kinder, more full of life than the man in the video.

  “Yeah, I guess. Who the hell is he?”

  Fuller scowled at her.

  “You told me your daddy was a Marine and you drive a mech for a living, and you don’t know who this is, girl?”

  He put a finger on the screen and scrolled down to the caption, and her eyes widened as she read it.

  “That’s fucking impossible,” she echoed his words with more gusto and conviction.

  “It is, but the pictures don’t lie. I saw this man in the history books when I was learning how to pilot one of these big metal suits. This here gentleman is Robert C. Franklin, the inventor of the Hellfire mech system. And may he rest in peace,” Fuller added, hand raised to the heavens, “because the poor motherfucker was killed in an attack on a military base in Nevada fifty-one years ago.”

  He grinned crookedly, with the sort of humor only a veteran of decades of war could muster in the face of mind-twisting reality.

  “You wanted to know who your enemy is, missy. Well, this is him. We’re fighting a ghost.”

  “Talk to me, Kovalev,” Robert Franklin ordered, pushing through the door into what had become the computer room.

  It had once been the White House kitchens, but the stoves had been looted decades ago. Victor Kovalev had been bent over a workstation, comparing the readout on his tablet to a screen built into the case of the mainframe. The frail, balding little man straightened at Franklin’s approach, sucking in a startled breath.

  “I am not sure we have what we need,” Dr. Kovalev admitted, fingers tapping compulsively on the display of his tablet.

  “Elaborate.”

  Kovalev’s jaw worked and he licked his lips, showing fear of a reputation Franklin wasn’t certain he’d earned, but had certainly cultivated. Franklin was tired and he felt like leaning against the bank of quantum computers, but weariness was weakness, and he couldn’t afford to show either in front of his subordinates. Too many of them would like as not kill him if they thought he might fail them.

  “The DNA extraction has gone perfectly,” Kovalev qualified his statement. “It’s not that. It’s the memory transfer.”

  Franklin allowed himself a sigh. The memory transfer equipment had always been the most problematic part of the duplication process, the technology nowhere near as mature as the biological end of the equation.

  “Are we going to have to do another deep scan?” he asked, the weariness starting to drag at his shoulders. The scans took hours, and required not just sedatives but a deep hypnosis state, absolute quiet and a soundproof isolation tank. It was a huge pain in the ass.

  “I’m not sure it would help,” Kovalev told him. “The problem isn’t the quality of the scans, it’s the content.”

  Weariness was chased away by a twisting in his gut, a cold pit opening up as his worst fears began to coalesce in reality.

  “I am loath to repeat myself, Dr. Kovalev.”

  “We’ve run eve
ry possible memory recombination,” the man said, his voice tripping over itself in its haste, “and the probability is upwards of seventy percent the matrix will not result in an optimal outcome.”

  “My specialty is mechanical engineering, Doctor. Be unambiguous.”

  “The dupes will not be loyal to you. At least there’s a very good chance of it. You need to adjust the operational….” Kovalev stopped himself and chewed his lip, visibly forcing himself to dumb the explanation down. “You have to make sure the man Stout has more positive, loyal feelings about you and your cause. I would suggest you spend more time with him, try to convince him of the rightness of your position, your cause. Maybe…” He trailed off, as if he were screwing up his courage to say the words. “Maybe that you are the same man he remembers.”

  His first instinct was to bite the doctor’s head off and warn him to mind his own damned business, but he clamped down on it. You wanted subordinates who weren’t afraid to tell you ideas they thought might piss you off. And the fact was, the man was probably right.

  “I have spent my efforts trying to break down his loyalty to the idea of the United States,” he conceded. “I may have counted too heavily on the Prime’s memories of me being included in his programming. There may not have been enough left.”

  “How will you do it, sir?” Kovalev seemed emboldened by the fact Franklin hadn’t slapped him down, but there was that image to maintain.

  “Just get things ready to re-scan, doctor,” he instructed with frosty disdain. “Leave the rest to me.”

  The hospital might be a cell in the middle of the old White House, but there was one universal truth neither time nor place could alter: hospital food sucked. He shoveled the instant mashed potatoes and cardboard meatloaf down mechanically, knowing he needed the calories, but the food was just a delivery vehicle for salt and ketchup. At least it was hot. Well, warm at least.