by Drew Avera
“I understand.” His drawl seemed to stretch the word out into something like “ahh unnerstan.” He paused and she thought he was done, but when he spoke again, there was a concern in his voice she hadn’t heard since she’d told her father she was volunteering for the DoD’s contractor program. “Are you in love with this Nate fella, Rachel?”
“No!” she snapped, feeling an irritation she couldn’t quite decipher. She wasn’t sure if it was the idea she was some stupid little girl who’d risk other people’s lives because of a crush, or the idea she was some stupid little girl who’d fall in love with her commanding officer, but either way, she felt insulted. “He’s our commander and he’s my friend. Maybe you have so many friends you can afford to let a few die, but I’m running short.”
“Take it easy,” Fuller said quickly. “I wasn’t making an accusation or nothin’, but I had to make sure. I’ve walked into too many ugly situations that come about because two people who should have known better wound up dippin’ their pens in the company inkwell.”
“Is this all you and Jenny do all day?” Roach wondered, squinting in confusion. “Spout old-timey figures of speech no one else can figure out? What the hell is an inkwell?”
“It don’t matter. Let’s just say there’s a reason Jenny and I wound up getting divorced, and it had to do with us trying to be in the same command while we were married. So I’m a bit sensitive to shit like that.”
“Noted. And it’s not a problem. The only personal feelings I have for Nate are as a friend.”
I think. I’m pretty sure.
“All right, Broken Arrow,” she said, switching the transmission to the general frequency, “time to head down and cool off. FOG, you take point while we walk.”
“What’s an F-O-G?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Fuller said with half a moan as they descended to the broken surface of the interstate, “that’s a long story.”
“The latest memory upload was excellent,” Robert Franklin said, his tone enthusiastic, but his eyes flat, as if the excitement didn’t quite reach that far. He barely looked up from folding a dress shirt carefully into the compact, metal suitcase.
Why had he even bothered to unpack in the first place?
“Dr. Kovalev says there’s a ninety percent chance of a nominal outcome from implant,” he went on, closing the case and fastening the latch. “You outdid yourself this time, Svetlana.” The corner of his mouth turned up slightly, somewhere between a smirk and a sneer. “Well, you outdid someone, anyway.”
“I did what I thought you wanted me to do, Robert.” She stood across the Lincoln bedroom from the man, leaning against the faded paint of the far wall, watching him carefully choose what he was going to bring with him. And I am not one of those choices. “Isn’t that why you brought me into this endeavor, because I accomplish the mission whatever the cost?” Her lips peeled away from clenched teeth. “When did that stop being valuable to you?”
“I am not abandoning you, Svetlana,” he insisted, not for the first time that morning. “I simply need you here more than I would need you in Colorado.”
“What good will I be here?” She waved a hand at the room. “What will be left at this place once you go? A few mechs, some soldiers, Nathan Stout…and me. You’re taking everything important to you along.”
“It’s important you have deniability with the Russian government. They need to think they can trust you.”
“When you are finished in Colorado, what will be left of the Russian government, Robert? Let’s stop pretending. You’re not taking me along because you no longer trust me.”
“You are not untrustworthy,” he corrected her. “You are simply unpredictable. I like predictable things, predictable people. You can count on them to respond in similar ways to similar stimulation.”
“Is that why you’re angry?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Because you never had the chance to ‘stimulate’ me?”
“My dear, please.” He sniffed, yanking his suitcase off the bed. “We have an old saying in this country: don’t shit where you eat. I can find my entertainment from those I don’t depend on for my life and my purpose.”
He headed for the door, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. He stared at it as if it were something alien to him.
“Then why are you upset?” she wanted to know. “Why do you care if I seduced him?”
She could see his nostrils flare just slightly, the only hint he gave of the anger she suspected he was feeling.
“Because you enjoyed it.” He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t snarl, but the tension vibrated through the words like the whine of turbines. “You care about this man when you have no reason to. I worry you’re doing this simply to get to me, to try to provoke a reaction.”
“What reaction do you think I’m trying to get?” She shook her head, mystified at the answer. “Why would I give a damn what you thought?”
“Because I am the closest thing you’ve ever had to a father.”
She let her hand fall away from his arm, feeling as if she’d been slapped in the face. He ignored her reaction and stalked toward the door, pausing halfway through to toss one final thought back over his shoulder.
“If you want me to trust you again,” he said, “Stout will be dead by the time I return.”
Chapter Fourteen
It had been far too long since Anton Varlamov piloted a mech. The machine had felt unresponsive in the air, as if it resented his unpracticed hands on the controls, and each step across the ground had felt as if he were going to topple over. He had only been able to console himself with the thought that some of his team were even worse at it than he was. Not Giorgi though. It had been the right decision to bring him along. The man was a natural in a mech, moving with a smooth expertise Anton envied. The others plodded, weaving through the air as if they would collide with each other at any second.
But the journey from Annapolis to DC had been a long and grueling one, with plenty of opportunity to practice, and by the time night fell on their day-long trip, Anton was sure even the worst of them could operate a mech with enough competence to pull off the raid.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t do a scouting run first?” Mischa asked. Anton thought the old radios had picked up some corrosion because the words were staticky and distant.
“It would be too big of a risk,” he told his second in command. “If they have anti-aircraft weapons, it would give them extra seconds to home in on us. Better we catch them unprepared.”
Anton was already feeling an itching between his shoulder blades, the morose certainty there was a bullet or a missile down in the ruined city with his name on it. They were doing the best they could to avoid detection, flying below the level of the buildings when they could—when there were buildings tall enough left over amidst the rubble to make it possible. Washington was worse than Norfolk, with less of an effort to reoccupy it, probably because it was worthless. It had been worthless before the war and was doubly so now.
It was dead black through most of the city at this time of night, the only lights coming from those powerful enough not to fear advertising what they had and daring others to take it. The White House was lit up like a Christmas tree, a boast, a challenge, so perfectly in character for Robert Franklin. He was a man who made no attempt to hide what he was, simply counting on his indispensability to keep him alive.
He pissed off the wrong man this time. Maybe the Prime Minister eats out of Franklin’s hand, but not the Chief of the General Staff. General Antonov holds a grudge.
And if the idea of the head of the Russian military pulling covert operations in a war zone without the knowledge or approval of the Prime Minister bothered Anton, it didn’t bother him nearly as much as the thought of the American traitor having so much influence in the Russian government.
But whatever he thought of Robert Franklin, he knew better than to underestimate the man.
“Missile launch!” he snapped, catching the flare of the
propellant in the thermal sensors even before the mech’s automated warning system began buzzing for his attention. “Everyone down and hug a building!”
Damn it, I thought it would take them longer to spot us.
Anton felt a sense of relief when his Tagan’s feet touched down on the cracked and splintered pavement, though he knew it was premature. The missiles were heat-seekers and simply getting out of the air wouldn’t stop them.
“Countermeasures!” he ordered. Hopefully it was redundant—the team should know the drill, should have been triggering their mechs’ flare launchers before they even began their descent—but they were all rusty.
His own flares punched away from the launchers on the shoulders of his Tagan with a jolt that made its way through the armor and into his pilot’s chair, shaking him like a car going over a pothole. He ran away from the launch, the Tagan’s feet hammering at the street with a fearsome anger at the works of this county, as if the machine were sentient and knew its own purpose. Anton’s own feelings toward their American foes were a bit more ambivalent after all these years, but he had no such qualms about Robert Franklin. The man needed to die.
I just have to live long enough to pull it off.
He’d made it nearly fifty meters when the missiles hit. The Tagan was a cushion, a wall of metal and padding between him and the explosions, but the heat still baked him through the armor and the insulation, and the gyros barely kept the mech upright against the concussion.
“Sound off!” he yelled into his throat mic. “Bravo one up and functional!” He didn’t stop for the head-check, kept running forward as fast as the Tagan would go, knowing another flight of missiles could be on its way at any second.
“Bravo two up and functional,” Mischa reported.
“Bravo three up and functional.” Giorgi Lermontov.
“Bravo four up and mostly functional,” Sgt. Namestnikov reported dolorously. “I have a damage indicator in my left knee actuator, but I think it will hold together.”
“Bravo five up and functional.” Corporal Yusupov. He sounded scared, and why wouldn’t he be?
“Bravo six up,” Sgt. Orlova said with a pained grunt. “But I have major damage to the right arm. I don’t know if my chain gun is functional. I also have a shrapnel wound in the right side, but I do not believe it is too serious.”
Damn.
“Orlova,” he said, “I want you to circle around to the south and draw their fire. Keep moving, don’t engage. If they get too close, jet out and wait for us at rally point three. You copy?”
“I read you, Anton.” He didn’t think he was imagining the relief in Orlova’s voice, though he knew the man would never have admitted it. They all wanted to think they were balls-to-the-wall Spetsnaz operators, scared of nothing and certainly not of death. “Good luck.”
“To you too, Kolya.”
He could see Kolya Orlova’s Tagan curving off to the south while the rest of them continued straight, spreading out across three different streets in their approach. He expected the missiles to fire again, but there was nothing, no more launches, and they were only a kilometer away. Which had to mean…
“Anton!” Orlova called from his position approaching the South Lawn. “Mechs! You have Hellfires coming in from the south!”
He could see them on thermal and lidar, though the spotlights drowned them out on optical. Their jets glared a hot white, the reactors a dull red just above them, six of them for the six Tagans.
Except only five of us can fight.
He loved Kolya Orlova like a brother, but watching the Hellfires split into sections, he prayed fervently to an atheist’s god that one of them would go after the disabled Tagan to give the others a fighting chance. God answered the prayer spitefully, just the way an atheist might expect, and two of the Hellfires went after his friend.
I am sorry, Kolya.
“All Bravo units, attack!” he snapped.
He hit his jets, no longer afraid of the missiles, knowing the emplacements wouldn’t fire while their own squadron was engaging the Tagans. That didn’t mean the Hellfires didn’t have missiles of their own. He spotted the launch immediately, reading the familiar specs of the Mark-Ex missile and knowing just how long he had. Flares and chaff filled the sky and he cut the jets off in mid-air, his stomach staying up at one hundred meters while the rest of him joined the Tagan in a plunge toward the street.
Instincts screamed at him, honed in years of using substandard equipment degraded from exposure and storage in wet and cold and extreme heat. They told him he was trusting his life to old, beat-up Russian gear and he was going to wind up killing himself. He ignored them and waited until he was only twenty meters off the ground before hitting the jets. The sudden boost slammed him into his restraints and it felt as if a mule the size of a battleship had just kicked him in the balls, but it managed to decelerate the Tagan at least to the point where the landing was more of a controlled crash than the out-of-control variety.
The Hellfire pilot hadn’t been expecting the reaction, certainly not the fall, and he hadn’t even tried to evade before Anton launched his own missile, the MJK-38F. It didn’t trip off the tongue the way “Mark-Ex” did, but the Americans had always been so much better at naming their weapons. It worked just fine, though, and the mercenary pilot had no time whatsoever to try to launch countermeasures. The blast hollowed out the Hellfire, blasting the cockpit into shreds and launching the reactor compartment out the back in a ball of radioactive flame.
He took no satisfaction at the enemy pilot’s death. He had no way of knowing if it was a man or a woman, American, Russian or even an expatriate mercenary out of Europe or South America, but he was certain whoever it was had very little choice in the life they’d been handed. It wasn’t the sort of world where you got to choose your fate or what side you were on, not unless you were one of the privileged few. And there seemed to be fewer and fewer of those every year.
There wasn’t time to take in all the data his HUD was trying to feed him. He had to let the wave of information wash over him, take what he could from it and make a decision in the space of a heartbeat. Two of the Hellfires had gone after Orlova, he’d taken down one, and the other three were heading down the main road, New York Avenue, coming after Mischa and Giorgi and Sgt. Namestnikov. Yusupov was still on Pennsylvania Avenue, heading straight west.
“Yusupov, jet over to New York Avenue and back up the others. I’m heading south to help Kolya.”
It was an emotional decision, he decided, but it was a tactical one as well. The others outnumbered the Hellfires coming after them, but Orlova was alone against two mechs in a damaged Tagan. If the Hellfires took him out, they’d be coming straight up their ass while Anton and the others were trying to penetrate the building.
Hellfires and Tagans were exchanging gunfire on New York Avenue, already too close for missiles, and Anton wanted to micromanage the battle, a side-effect of the HUD and command and control hardware the mech afforded, luxuries he didn’t usually have in combat. But he had to trust his people. Anton goosed the jets and swung over what had once been called the South Lawn of the White House.
He’d seen it in pictures, seen the well-manicured grass, as flat as a soccer pitch. It was overgrown now, choked with weeds and even young trees, in those areas where it wasn’t dead and brown or flooded and swampy. Thrown into complex shadows from the glare of the floodlights, it took on a haunted look, the dead center of a dead city. Orlova had led the two Hellfires in a broad circle all the way back to their point of origin, all the way back to the building itself. It was a good strategy, an attempt to keep them from opening up on him with their missiles by using their own base as a backstop, and it seemed to have worked, since he was still in one piece.
The Tagan was hovering less than ten meters off the ground, swinging back and forth in a pendulum pattern across the central columns of the White House, Vulcan rounds blowing bite-size craters out of the face of the building as the Hellfires chased him wi
th bursts of gunfire. Troops were filing out of doorways at the front of the building, firing rifles at the Tagan to little effect, but Orlova didn’t return fire at either the Hellfires or the dismounts. Anton knew Orlova’s chain gun was damaged, but he’d either fired off all his missiles or the launcher was jammed.
Either way, his friend was about to die.
Anton had three missiles left and this seemed as good a time as any to use them. He targeted the Hellfire to his left first, just out of superstition rather than any special tactical advantage, and launched. The Hellfires detected him in the barest of instants between the solid green reticle of missile lock and his finger pressing the trigger and both of them tried to pull away on shimmering columns of superheated air, but there was no outrunning the MJK-38F.
The Americans would give it a nickname. I should give it one. Something poetic and dangerous-sounding, like “Dagger” or “Lancer.”
Whatever the Americans might call it, the missile speared through the heart of the mech on his left and the machine disappeared inside a globe of white fire, sprays of debris shooting out of it like the plumes from a firework blast. What remained of the Hellfire spilled toward the ground in slow motion, seeming to hang in mid-air in an instant of frozen time.
The second mech wasn’t waiting around for the Russian missile with his name on it. Anton had expected him to jet away from the south entrance, try to draw them off toward his fellows, but the pilot did the unexpected and turned away from his, heading straight at Orlova. Anton thought the Hellfire was going to try to use the Tagan as cover, force him to shoot through his friend to get to the enemy, but the American designed mech brushed right by Orlova and touched down just long enough to lumber back through the freight entrance someone had blasted into the side of the wall.
“Clever bastard,” Anton muttered.
The pilot knew they’d be coming inside eventually and probably figured he could do more damage lying in wait in the enclosed spaces beneath the White House, where they couldn’t maneuver.