by Drew Avera
Ramirez brought his Hellfire around in a tight, spiraling turn and descended behind the Tagan, cutting power to the jets almost two meters up. His teeth clacked together and the Hellfire bent into a crouch to absorb the impact, but his main gun was trained right in the center of the Tagan’s back. He bared his teeth and squeezed the trigger.
The vibration traveled up the mech’s arm and into his back, as if he were holding the gun in his own hand instead of extending it at the end of the Hellfire’s arm. The flash of the tracers was a flickering strobe in some disco in the Fry and the dance he did with the Tagan pilot was the oldest there was. Smoke and short-lived flames poured from the Tagan’s fractured reactor and the machine slumped forward, powerless.
Something feral and remorseless in Hector Ramirez’s gut urged him to finish the pilot off, to put a burst through the Tagan’s cockpit, but the impulse scared him and he forced himself to move on to the next target. He didn’t have the time, anyway…that’s what he told himself.
It was as if disabling the first of the Tagans was like toppling over a domino. The Tagan pilot who’d been engaging Fuller’s Hellfire panicked and tried to run, hitting the jets and burning upward. Fuller might have let him go, or he might not have. The question became moot when the Tagan’s jets critically overheated. At least, that was Ramirez’s best guess. He’d never seen it happen before live and up close, just watched videos of uncrewed test mechs being run to failure in some reinforced lab somewhere out west.
This looked like what had happened in those videos. The Tagan had been in the air for way too long. Ramirez had noticed it even if he hadn’t put too much consideration into it. The exhaust from the Tagan’s thrusters went from a pale, glowing column to a fiery blowtorch in the space of a second, the flames engulfing the mech’s torso. The actual explosion wasn’t incredibly violent, not like a missile detonation or even an isotope reactor fracturing. It reminded Ramirez of the party poppers he’d played with as a kid, the puff of hot gas and the spray of metal confetti, the shattered remains of the turbine blades blowing through their housings and ripping the jets apart with them.
The Tagan plummeted twenty meters, twisting in midair like a cat trying to land on its feet, but not quite making it. Ramirez winced in involuntary sympathy at the thunderous, metallic crunch of impact, wondering if the pilot could survive the fall.
The last Russian mech stood stock still for a full second, mirroring the momentary hesitation of the pilot, and Ramirez swung around his Vulcan. Something held his finger away from the trigger, maybe the knowledge that these Russians were attacking the same guy they’d come to fight, maybe the idea that he’d want some enemy to give him a chance to run away and live someday.
Fuller had no such compunctions. The older man fired off a long burst from his Vulcan cannon and the Tagan’s cockpit disintegrated in a debris cloud of plastic and metal. Something bright red splattered against the inside of the canopy and the Russian mech collapsed sideways, off balance and out of control.
Ramirez clenched his jaw shut, trying to keep the bile inside his throat.
“This is war, kid,” Fuller told him, as if he could see the younger man’s stricken expression through his cockpit. “You freeze like that, you’re going to get yourself killed.”
Ramirez stared through the Tagan’s ruined cockpit at the thing that had once been a man and wondered if he’d ever be as hard as James Fuller…or if he’d wind up like the Russian pilot first.
He wasn’t sure which was worse.
Anton crouched in the shadows beside the south exit of the White House and stared at what was left of the Tagans…at what was left of his team. His own mech still stood undamaged off to the side, cold and inactive, but the two Hellfires patrolled the lawn around it, vigilant enough he doubted he could reach the intact machine and get the jets fired up before they saw him. He’d seen a few small cargo trucks parked on the north side of the building. His best bet was to steal one and drive out of here.
And what will I tell Vasyli? How will I explain to him the men and machines I’ve lost?
He nearly shot Giorgi when the man eeled his way out of the thick brush beside the steps up into the White House. Anton sighed and straightened his right forefinger, taking it off the trigger of his carbine. Giorgi looked the worse for wear, blood running down his face from a cut over his right eye and scorch marks charring the right shoulder of his fatigues, the burns making their way to the skin beneath. There was pain in the man’s eyes, but he had his sidearm drawn and he was alive.
“Where are Mischa and Kolya?” Giorgi asked, breathless, panting from whatever sprint through the dark had led him to Anton.
“Dead.” The word was flat and emotionless because he wouldn’t let himself feel anything else until he was gone from this place. He nodded toward the wreckage laid out under the glare of the floodlights. “Is anyone else…?”
“No.” Giorgi was trying to imitate his commander’s dispassionate response, but not pulling it off. There was pain in the man’s eyes, pain not adequately explained by his minor burns. “What do we do now, Anton?”
The tone was pleading, as if he desperately needed someone to take him by the hand and lead him away from here. Anton knew the feeling, but that was the problem with being a leader: there was no one to take your hand and make you feel better, no one to look to for guidance.
“We wait until these…” He motioned toward the Hellfires, towering sentinels clomping across the dirt, ever-vigilant. “…leave. Then we make our way home.”
“Home to Russia?”
Anton glanced sharply at Giorgi, thinking for a moment that the younger man had cracked, had fallen into delusion. But no, he could see in Giorgi’s twisted grin that it was simply dark humor, a defensive response to what he had seen this night.
“Home to our base,” he answered, playing the straight man to Giorgi’s fool because it was expected of him. He reached out a hand and patted the younger man’s uninjured shoulder, smiling grimly. “We live, we survive, we keep fighting.”
“When is this fucking war going to be over?” Giorgi murmured, the sarcastic grin slipping, revealing a bit of the horror behind it.
“For men like you and me, Giorgi,” Anton assured him, “the war will never end.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Drop the gun, sweetheart,” the tall, broad-shouldered woman ordered, the yawning muzzle of her shotgun pointed between Svetlana Grigoryeva’s eyes, “if you’ve grown fond of your head and you wanna keep it attached to your shoulders.”
Nathan Stout stared down the shotgun barrel, feeling Svetlana’s iron grip around his throat and the cold metal of her handgun pressed against his temple. Cold sweat trickled down his back, and he was confident it wasn’t from the humid swamp outside.
Things had happened way too fast for him to follow. First there’d been the mech attack outside, then Svetlana had come to retrieve him from his cell and killed her own troops to save him. Then those other guys had shot at them. Svetlana had told him they were Spetsnaz, which made sense, he supposed, if Bob was double-crossing the Russians as well as the US. She’d shot one of them down from ambush, cold as ice, but the other one was still coming after them and might have got them. The Spetsnaz operator had the benefit of knowing there were no friendlies left ahead of him and he’d used that information to spray gunfire through the walls at them. It had been a good tactic and it might have worked.
But then this big, loud woman with the big, loud shotgun had shown up…and Roach had been with her. Nate had been about to yell a greeting, to run up and pull Roach into a hug, but both of them had swung their guns towards Svetlana and she’d grabbed him as a shield and reality had caught up to him like a speeding train.
“Put the gun down and step away from him,” Roach said, her tone a good deal more subdued and professional than the big woman with the shotgun but the intensity in her eyes just as scary.
“Put your guns away and we can talk about this,” Svetlana insisted, h
er Makarov not wavering from its position at his head. “No one needs to get hurt.” Her voice was smooth and yet, still dangerous, like a well-sharpened razor.
How did I wind up surrounded by scary-looking women pointing guns at me? At what point in my life did that become an inevitability?
“Roach,” he said, but the words came out choked and breathless. Hesitantly, he reached up a hand and pulled Svetlana’s fingers slightly away from his throat so he could get enough air to speak. She didn’t shoot him, which he’d been afraid had been a possibility, and she didn’t resist, merely letting her hand rest on his shoulder blade.
“Roach,” he tried again, “I’ve really gotten used to the idea I might survive all this, so is there any way we can all point our guns some other direction?”
Rachel Mata looked at him long and hard, as if she was trying to decide if he were under duress or out of his mind. Both could be argued to be true, he conceded. Finally, she let out a breath and let the barrel of her pistol drift downward.
“Jenny,” she said, speaking to the other woman, the one with the shotgun, “muzzle down, please.”
Jenny, whoever the hell she was, was slow to obey, giving Roach a look like she thought the younger woman was out of her mind.
“Please,” Roach reiterated. “Just trust me.”
“I don’t know you well enough to trust you,” Jenny muttered.
But slowly, reluctantly, the big woman lowered the barrel of her drum-fed shotgun, letting it point at the floor, though she kept both hands on it, ready to swing it back up toward Svetlana if she needed to.
“Your turn, lady,” Roach said pointedly to Svetlana.
Don’t prove me wrong about you. It was almost a prayer, though to whom, Nate wasn’t sure.
Cold metal gradually, slowly pulled away from his head, a millimeter at a time, and Nate sensed more than saw the pistol dropping away from him, held loosely at her side. He hissed out the breath he’d been holding and tried to step away, but her hand, resting so deceptively casual on his shoulder, tightened. She still didn’t want Roach and Jenny to have a clear shot.
“How the hell did you guys find me here?” he asked, knowing there was so much he had to explain, but unable to hold the question in any longer. “Is Ramirez here?” He frowned at the one Roach had called Jenny. “And who are you, again?”
“I’m someone these jokers shanghaied along on this goat rope despite my better judgement,” Jenny said, lip curling into a snarl. “To save your scrawny ass, I might add, so you’re welcome.”
“Ramirez is outside, Nate,” Roach said, taking a step toward him. Svetlana tensed up, but didn’t pull away. “Everything is clear right now, but I’d rather not spend more time here than we have to. Can we table all this…” She waved at him and Svetlana with a negligent, dismissive gesture. “…until we get out of here?” She pointed back north, behind the two of them. “We came in Hellfires, but I saw on the way in, there are a couple of trucks parked out there.” She looked Svetlana up and down. “You were with these people. Can you get one of the vehicles started?”
Svetlana seemed to relax just slightly, her hand finally coming off Nate’s shoulder. She turned, as if looking through the wall at the trucks.
“I think I know where they keep the…”
She didn’t get to finish the sentence. Nate had been keeping his eyes on her, still worried she might get spooked by Roach and Jenny and the whole thing would end in a gunfight, so when he saw Svetlana stiffen and seize up, his first thought was she’d been wounded in the earlier exchange of gunfire with the Spetsnaz operator. Then he saw the wires extending back to the stun gun held at hip level in Roach’s left hand and finally understood.
He wanted to reach out and help Svetlana, but he pulled his hand away. The only thing touching her right now would get him was his share of 50,000 volts, so he watched helplessly as the FSB agent collapsed to the ground, eyes rolling up into her head. Roach let off the trigger and stepped over to pry the Makarov out of the unconscious Russian’s hand.
Nate gaped at her, disbelieving.
“She killed Patty,” Roach reminded him, rolling the insensate woman over and slipping flex-cuffs over her wrists, tightening them before moving down and doing the same to Svetlana’s ankles. “She kidnapped you and held you prisoner.”
Svetlana was blinking now, coming slowly back to awareness and as she did, the stunned blankness across her face began to slowly transform to anger.
“I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt,” Roach told Nate, jabbing a finger at him, “and not assume you’ve been drugged or brainwashed or some such shit, and that you have some good reason for not wanting this bitch dead. But if you think there’s any way she’s leaving this place except trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, you are not the commander I remember.”
Nate tried to object but couldn’t. She was absolutely right, given the facts as she knew them, and he wouldn’t be able to convince her otherwise here.
“All right,” he acceded. “Do you want me to go try to start one of the trucks?”
“No. You get out there and get on board one of the empty Hellfires.” Roach nodded to Jenny. “Captain Armstrong, would you mind escorting our guest back to Virginia in one of those trucks?”
“Mind?” Jenny repeated, snorting a humorless laugh. “Hell yes, I mind. But since it involves being gone from here, I guess I’ll do it anyway.” She gave Nate a look of skeptical assessment. “Boy, I sure as hell hope you were worth the effort.”
Jenny scooped up Svetlana as if the woman weighed nothing, throwing her over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Svetlana said nothing but her eyes promised death and Nate swallowed hard.
“At some point,” Roach said, holstering the stun gun and her sidearm, “you’re going to have to explain to me just what the hell has been going on here. But for right now…”
She grabbed Nate and pulled him into a hug.
He was shocked at first, but after a moment, he returned it, squeezing her fiercely.
“Thank you for coming for me,” he said quietly, reveling in her warmth and solidity. “I thought you guys had given up on me.”
“We’re Broken Arrow Mercenary Force,” she said, her voice muffled slightly against his shoulder. He thought he might have heard a sob breaking it, but he couldn’t have sworn to it. “We don’t leave people behind.”
Chapter Nineteen
“We should just put a bullet in her and be done with it,” Hector Ramirez growled, pacing back and forth across the floor of their makeshift mech bay, his round face hardened into something much less pleasant.
It was nearly midnight and they’d spent nearly a full day travelling back from DC, pinballing from one intact stretch of road to another. They were all exhausted, but Ramirez still seemed full of restless energy and most of it was focused on Svetlana Grigoryeva. She sat in the ancient office chair, still secured hand and foot by flex cuffs, her expression still sharp enough to slice through metal despite—or, perhaps, because of—so many hours in the back of an old cargo truck in the hot, summer sun.
Ramirez pinned Rachel Mata with a glare.
“You saw the video the same as I did,” he said, his tone accusatory, as if she’d lied about it. “She’s a cold-blooded killer. She blew Patty’s head off without a second thought.”
“And if we put a bullet in her,” Roach countered with calm reason, “what does that make us?” She had been sitting on an upturned storage box, legs stretched out in front of her, but now she stood, stepping over to Ramirez, hands going to his shoulders. “Hector, calm down. I know it’s been a hard day and we’re all stretched thin, but you have to relax.”
“I didn’t just see the video,” Nate reminded Ramirez. “I was there. I saw Patty die.”
They’d hauled an old, ratty couch into the mech bay for Nate to sit on so he could put his leg up. It was healing up well, but hours in a cockpit hadn’t done him any favors. He was strung out, exhausted mentally and physically, an
d he could smell his own sweat where it had stained through his flight suit. He wanted to stand up, wanted to pace like Ramirez, but he hadn’t the energy for it. He barely had the strength to talk.
“Patty was a traitor,” he declared. “He had his reasons, had family in trouble, but he was willing to sacrifice us to help them and himself. When you step into that world, you’re accepting the risks. I feel bad about what happened to him, but when you betray your friends and then try to double-cross the Russians you betrayed them to…” He shrugged.
“So maybe he was asking for it,” Ramirez admitted, gesticulating toward Svetlana. “Does that mean she’s off the hook for pulling the trigger?”
“You ask me,” Jenny Armstrong put in from where she leaned against the wall, arms crossed, “which nobody has by the way, and you should turn her over to the DoD. They’ll take care of her, squeeze everything useful out of her then dump what’s left in a shallow grave. Done and done, no need to get our hands dirty.”
Nate wasn’t sure what to think of Jenny. He’d run into her type before, former military, former merc, currently in some grey, shadowy area in between, a contractor who did dirty jobs for the Department of Defense and the CIA and God alone knew who else. Generally, they were unpleasantly cold-blooded, anonymous types who could blend into a crowd unnoticed. Not Jenny. She was colorful in a job where being memorable could get you killed, yet she’d obviously been at it for many years and was still kicking.
James Fuller, their other new addition, was another anomaly, an old man in a profession where most died young. He’d been quiet on the trip back and now he seemed as if he were half asleep, slumped forward in the chair he’d carried into the room for this impromptu trial/strategy meeting/therapy session. His eyes were hooded and Nate couldn’t have sworn he was even paying attention.
“What about you, Mr. Fuller?” Nate asked him.
“Ain’t nobody calls me Mr. Fuller,” the old man rumbled immediately, as if demonstrating he was still awake. “My friends call me Catfish, my ex-wife…” He nodded toward Jenny. “…calls me James just to get on my nerves. And these two young whelps insist on calling me FOG, for Fucking Old Guy. I’ll let you decide which you prefer, Captain Stout.”