by Drew Avera
It had burned once before, he recalled, in what the Americans called the War of 1812, which he thought showed a very un-American lack of imagination. They’d rebuilt it after that, but there’d be no one to rebuild it this time.
The light from the fires fell into shadows when they reached the hallway. It was a T-junction, the corridor to the right going deeper into the underground sections of the White House, while the left led to a staircase heading upward.
Would Franklin be cowering in the basements, hiding from the threat?
No.
Whatever he thought of Franklin, the man had never run from anyone. He’d be controlling the defenses, a puppet master in his lair.
“This way,” he grunted, motioning to the stairs. “Mischa, you’re point. Kolya, stay behind me and watch our six.”
He hated stairs. You wanted a whole damned squad to take a set of stairs, maybe a platoon if you had them. He never had a platoon anymore, not unless they were mercenaries who’d been attached to his team and then you couldn’t really trust them. Three people taking stairs under opposition was suicide, and hoping you could get up them before someone got around to defending them was wishful thinking.
If it were easy, they wouldn’t have sent us.
“Fast, Mischa,” he cautioned the NCO. “There aren’t enough of us for careful, so we have to be fast.”
Mischa grunted his opinion of Anton’s tactics, but did as he was told. Their boots were thunderclaps on the wooden stairs, faded and stained where a carpet had once covered the middle section. It had been ripped away years ago and the walls were cracked and faded with the same neglect that plagued most of this ruined city. The stairwell was black, no lights at all, and Anton’s night-vision glasses struggled to find any light to intensify. He thought about ordering Mischa to use an infrared flashlight, but if the man wasn’t complaining, he’d let him run on feel and avoid the risk. The thing about an infrared flashlight was that if anyone else was using night vision gear, it would stand out just as much as a visible light version. Anton kept a hand on the railing and hoped he wouldn’t miss a step. He’d look like a fool slipping down the stairs, even if no one was shooting at them.
Then there was light ahead, a door left ajar leading out into the ground floor of the White House. They’d start there and work their way up, he decided. A smart man would have his command post on the ground floor so he could evac quickly if he needed to, and Franklin was smart.
But is Franklin here?
He was beginning to worry about that part. If the man himself were set up here, wouldn’t there be more opposition?
Later. Find prisoners and we can find out where he is.
The lights on the ground floor were wrong, somehow, not the ones the place was designed with, but portable stands at the wrong angles, throwing everything into sharp relief, sending malicious shadows crawling over the floor. It wasn’t a place for living things, it was a crime scene, an archaeological dig.
One of the shadows moved. Mischa saw it first from his position at point, and he fired first as well, falling to a knee and expecting Anton and Kolya to know their job well enough to get to cover. There wasn’t much cover to be had in the middle of the bare, unfurnished hall, so Anton crouched, the muzzle of his rifle hunting for what the hell Mischa was shooting at.
He didn’t have to look long. The answer came in a muzzle flash, sun-bright against the shadowy background of the hall, then another just beside it, unsuppressed, ear-splittingly loud in comparison to Mischa’s carbine. There were two…no, make that three of them. They were rushing forward, firing as they came, young men, none of them older than their mid-twenties. They were probably desperate to keep the only work they’d ever known and fearless in the conviction of the young that bad things only happened to other people.
They were inexperienced as well, spraying and praying rather than finding cover and trying for well-aimed shots. It was a common failing among local recruits who hadn’t received training from an actual military. They thought of guns as magic totems you could wave around to scare people and if you pulled the trigger and cast that spell, well, that meant the other guy would just drop over dead.
If only it were that easy.
The red targeting reticle seemed to float in mid-air over the chest of the closest of the three young mercenaries and Anton caressed the trigger of his carbine. The gun barely kicked, the recoil-absorption technology bleeding off the kick of the high-velocity slugs. On his end. They still kicked like hell on the receiving end. The man—boy almost—pitched forward, blood spraying from the exit wounds between his shoulders. His decades-old rifle went clattering across the floor and he tumbled into the stands of one of the portable lights, knocking it to the ground in a shower of sparks and throwing a whole section of the room into blackness.
More muzzle flashes, even brighter and more blinding in the dark, but Anton’s night vision goggles revealed everything. A second of the three gunmen went down as Mischa calmly and precisely sent one three-round burst after another into center mass. The boy soldier collapsed to his knees, rifle slipping from nerveless fingers, blood dark enough in the dim light that it seemed like black ink sputtering out of his mouth before he keeled over face-first.
Kolya let him down. Maybe it was the wound, the blood loss, but he missed with his first two shots. The kid he was targeting was emptying his magazine blindly, and Anton could have sworn his eyes were closed. Maybe he was praying. Whoever he was asking for help only half listened. The prayers didn’t stop the bullets from Anton’s rifle, though maybe the closed eyes kept it from hurting quite as much. It was better when death came as a surprise.
It had certainly come as a surprise to Mischa. One moment the man had been crouched down, carbine at his shoulder, and the next he was on his face in a spreading pool of his own blood. Anton’s breath caught in his throat and he lunged across the two meters to his old friend, grabbing him by the shoulder and rolling him over, yanking the night vision glasses off his face. Mischa’s eyes were wide and white and unseeing, and the left side of his skull was missing.
A stray round, the magic bullet the young mercenaries had believed so fervently in to come true. Kolya Orlova was stricken, pain written across his face as he stared down at Mischa, blaming himself. Anton wanted to blame him, too, wanted to rage at him, but he couldn’t. The mission came first, and Mischa hadn’t been the first friend he’d seen die.
And won’t be the last.
“Kolya,” he snapped at the other man. “Come on. We need to move.”
It took another second for Orlova to look at him, to acknowledge the words with a nod. Even when he did, Anton could see the anguish behind his eyes.
“Watch our backs,” he told the man, putting a hand on his shoulder for just a moment. Orlova nodded and Anton decided that was as good as he was going to get from the man.
He paused to grab Mischa’s carbine, slinging it over his shoulder, then retrieved the man’s sidearm as well, not wanting to leave a loaded gun behind them. It was an American pistol, an antique Colt 1911A1 in .45ACP. He’d given Mischa shit about it over and over, telling him to get something modern, something lighter. Mischa had always smiled and replied that people who got shot by .45 stayed down. He tucked the weapon into his belt. He’d have to hold onto it now. Mischa would want that. He didn’t look back at his friend’s ruined face. He didn’t want to remember him that way.
Anton didn’t know what the hallway was called, which rooms were which in the place. He didn’t know if he’d ever studied the layout and, if he had, it had probably been years out of date. Towards the end of days for the place, when Presidents had become less elected officials and more imperial warlords, the changes had been almost constant. One self-styled emperor after another had tried to remake the place in his or her image until they’d fallen to assassination or military coup.
And then the whole place had been abandoned and time and vandalism and the elements had done more damage until it was almost unrecogni
zable from what had been. All he knew was they’d begun in an open hall where he could see the remains of security checkpoints, and now the walls were getting closer, the corridors narrower and he still saw no one.
No sign of Franklin, no sign of the equipment he’d supposedly had shipped here, not nearly the military force he’d expected to find defending it. Something was wrong, but he didn’t feel as if it were a trap. Not one set for him, anyway.
They were simply too late. He refrained from telling Orlova, and not just out of the sheer, Russian perversity of not sharing information with subordinates. The man was already shaken by Mischa’s death. Telling him their friend had died raiding a dry hole would only make him feel worse. Time for that later, when they had the luxury to talk. For now, he would have to try to gather what intelligence they could so he wouldn’t have to report back totally empty-handed.
Anton was rounding a tight corner when he saw her. He knew her immediately, even in the dim light, even with just a flash of the side of her face going through a door.
It was Svetlana Grigoryeva. Her face was burned into his mind, and not just from the briefings for this mission. She was almost a legend in the FSB, despite her relative youth, and General Antonov’s intelligence sources were fairly certain Franklin had turned her. If he could get her, this whole cluster-fuck would have been worthwhile.
“Come on!” he hissed at Orlova, taking off at a quick jog, ignoring caution in favor of speed.
Svetlana was with someone else, a man he thought, but he hadn’t seen a gun. A scientist perhaps? A technician? All the better. Having a noncombatant along would slow her down. He’d have to try to take both of them alive.
The door they’d gone through hung open and Anton took the risk of simply ducking through it, trying to stay low but not slowing down. It would be too easy to lose them in the half-light of the hallways, the glow from the portable light-stands in the main rooms filtering out poorly and unevenly.
He’d lucked out. They’d passed through, more interested in getting away than laying traps, and the room was empty. It had been, he thought, some sort of conference room when it last seen use. Now, it was a storage closet, with crates labelled in Cyrillic stacked against one wall and the marks on the floor of where dozens more had been piled before they’d been moved…somewhere.
“Freeze-dried meal packs,” he murmured, reading the labels aloud. “Ammunition, 5.6mm. Universal lubricant.”
It made him wonder what Franklin had taken with him. He shrugged it off and hurried out the door at the other end of the room. And into a bullet.
He felt the impact on his chest before he heard the shot. Fire erupted just to the right of his sternum, knocking the breath out of him, and he fell backwards, his carbine slipping out of his hands. Svetlana was standing in the next doorway, a Makarov extended in her right hand, her body turned sideways like an Eighteenth-Century duelist. He tried to move, tried to pat at his waist for the .45, but he wasn’t going to be in time…
Orlova yelled, jumping over Anton, his carbine sputtering in hoarse fury. The man behind Svetlana threw himself flat to the floor, but she moved only a few millimeters, not seeming foolhardy, just supremely confident. Orlova missed again. Svetlana Grigoryeva didn’t. Kolya Orlova flopped onto his face.
Anton didn’t take the time to grieve, knowing he had seconds to live. He rolled onto his fallen carbine, yanking the trigger before he’d even lifted it off the ground. Bullets punched into the wall starting at shin level and traveling upward…and she was gone, scrambling back through the door with the man behind her.
Anton was cursing, Russian first and then into English and Spanish and German, but over and over repeating suka, “bitch.” Every word, every breath cost him pain and he was sure he had a cracked rib from the round impacting his tactical vest, but he ran forward heedless. His hands swapped out magazines automatically and he sprayed another long burst into the wall the direction where the FSB agent had gone, hoping the bullets would penetrate, hoping just the sound of the fire would keep her from turning to shoot.
He left Orlova dying on the floor, knowing the man would understand.
Darkness swallowed up the corridor on the other side of the door and his night vision glasses turned everything to a two-dimensional green but the two of them weren’t in sight. He ran on, not caring anymore if he stumbled into another ambush, just determined to kill the woman, the man, someone.
Another door and he sprayed the carbine back and forth across it, changing magazines again by rote just before he stormed through. Now the light returned and he could see them. They were heading toward the north exit to the White House, sprinting across an open area.
What had it been, once upon a time? A place for the press to gather and ask their inane, prattling questions? A place to entertain foreign dignitaries? It didn’t matter. This night, it was going to be an abattoir. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and was putting the first ounces of pressure on the trigger when the wall beside his head exploded.
He ducked reflexively at the echoing roar, eyes drawn to the muzzle flash and away from the cloud of plaster billowing around him. That hadn’t been a bullet. The impacts were close together, but they were almost certainly buckshot. Three more rounds in a deafening chorus of explosions and he scrambled backwards, finally seeing the woman holding the drum-fed shotgun. She wasn’t alone. Another, shorter figure was beside her, firing a handgun, but the report of the weapon was lost beside the blast of the shotgun.
He wanted to stay, wanted to take them all down, but he was alone.
God damnit. He didn’t have the breath to curse aloud. Every bit of air, every bit of effort was focused on getting out of the line of fire. But he pushed his thoughts out, screaming them inside his head, directing them toward her. I’ll find you again, Svetlana. I swear I will.
Shadows swallowed him up and the enemy didn’t follow.
Chapter Seventeen
“Watch your six, kid!” James Fuller snapped. “You got a Tagan circling around behind us!”
The Fucking Old Guy didn’t sound like the Fucking Old Guy in combat, Hector Ramirez realized. The drawl was gone, along with the easy-going attitude and the “aw-shucks” mannerisms. The old man was all business and since James Fuller had probably forgotten more about piloting mechs than Ramirez would ever know, the younger man kept his ears open.
“Run your U-mech around at your rear and let it play blindside blocker for you!” Fuller urged him.
Running the uncrewed Hellfire and his own at the same time was hard. Regular U-mechs, ones designed for it, had some measure of autonomy. You designated a target and they’d shoot at it until they ran out of ammo, and maybe try to move around enough not to get shot down themselves. It wasn’t much, but it was better than he had now. All he or Fuller could do with Roach and Jenny’s machines was send individual commands, one at a time, running the controls on a small and awkward auxiliary panel he’d never even used before since the abbreviated training course the DoD had put him through.
And it wasn’t easy trying to do that when a Tagan was shooting at you.
“Roger that,” he said anyway, more of a murmur to himself than an actual reply.
He had his Hellfire in the air, spinning the mech in a tight arc over what had once been the South Lawn, just meters ahead of the burst of 25mm slugs chasing him, leaving divots the size of post holes in the dirt behind him. The enemy pilot in the Tagan wasn’t better than him, he could tell that already. But the Russians had the benefit of a third crewed mech, and they were using the threat of it to prevent either he or Fuller from decisively engaging with any one of the Tagans. It was damned hard to wait for a targeting lock for your missiles when someone was waiting to put a chain gun round through you the minute you stopped bobbing and weaving.
And the heat sensors were starting to peg, into the red now for way too long. He was going to have to set down or risk the turbines exploding and taking most of the mech with them. Time to start listening to Fuller
.
Manipulating the auxiliary control panel one-handed while still running the main control sticks with his other hand and elbow, while the angular momentum of his flight was pushing him into one side of his seat was just about as hard as it sounded, but he just had to get Roach’s mech into the air to distract the guy shooting at him. The display screen on the tiny control panel was as small as everything else, but he could see the view in it from the Hellfire’s front cameras and he knew he had it up to about thirty meters, about even elevation with the Tagan he’d been trying to engage.
The Russian mech began to turn and Ramirez jammed down the button to remotely fire Roach’s Vulcan cannon. Barrels spun and tracers ripped through the night sky, not hitting the enemy mech—that would have been too much to ask—but at least forcing his attention away.
The mech pilot who’d been shooting at him didn’t have any choice. He had to deal with the slaved Hellfire and Ramirez couldn’t really fault him for breaking off to engage the thing after it had opened fire. The guy latched with Fuller couldn’t do anything, either. Fuller was good. He piloted his mech like he’d been born to it, and it was all the Russian could do just to keep from getting his ass handed to him. Hell, Fuller was somehow managing to use Jenny’s slaved mech to box the Tagan in, piloting the thing much more precisely than Ramirez could dream of.
It was the third Russian who screwed up. What he should have done, what Ramirez would have done—at least after someone like Roach or Nate had yelled at him a couple times—was to go after Fuller. Fuller was obviously the better pilot and the guy he was fighting needed help. Or, he could have gone after Ramirez, tried to finish him off while he was tangled up with the other pilot.
Instead, the Russian did exactly the wrong thing and tried to take down Roach’s mech. It was wrong tactically because the remotely piloted Hellfire was probably the least of the threats they faced, and it was also wrong because Ramirez knew Roach would kick his ass if he let her mech get blown up.