by Drew Avera
“Nate. Captain Stout was…someone else.”
“We’re gonna get to that,” Roach put in, glaring at him. “We’re gonna talk, later, about why you never told us you were a dupe.”
Nate rolled his eyes and tried to focus.
“What about you, James?” Nate pressed him, not really wanting to be in the camp who got on his nerves, but unwilling to indulge in the adolescent teasing of Fucking Old Guy or to call the man Catfish. “Do you agree with Captain Armstrong?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the woman snapped. “Do you fucking need a written release to call people by their first names? I am Jenny, not captain anything.”
“In principal, I do,” Fuller said, rescuing Nate from the woman’s rant. “Ms. Grigoryeva here is a foreign agent on US soil. It’s pretty cut and dried. However, I am neither the commander of this unit, nor the one whose life she saved, so the decision is not mine to make.”
Roach was staring down into the bare cement of the floor, eyes clouded over in thought. She sat down on the couch beside Nate and glanced between him and Svetlana.
“Tell me again what this Robert Franklin asshole is planning. Because I think the first time around, I was loopy from lack of sleep. He’s heading to Colorado with an army of clones?”
“Dupes,” Nate corrected her automatically. “He took my stem cells to duplicate me, and he took the equipment with him to Cheyenne Mountain.”
“And he thinks they’ll just let him waltz on in with a shitload of dupe tanks?” Jenny asked, disbelief caked on her face like makeup. “He’s a fucking loon.”
“Robert Franklin may be crazy,” Svetlana Grigoryeva spoke for the first time since Roach had stunned her in the White House, and Nate nearly jumped in surprise, “but he is not stupid. He did not share all the details of the operation with me before he left, but consider…” She trailed off, her steel blue eyes peering into Nate’s soul for just a moment before travelling on to meet the gaze of the others.
“Consider,” she began again, as if she’d had to re-collect her thoughts, “a man who was known to US and Russian military intelligence as the very creator of the Hellfire mechanized weapons platform, a man who was considered so dangerous he was killed by factions within his own government and yet was foresightful enough to have himself duplicated, to plan his revenge so intricately before the crime against him was even committed. And once he returned to life, he managed to build himself up as a facilitator for both the US and Russian governments under a false identity despite the fact they both knew who he was.”
She shook her head, settling back into the office chair.
“No, if Robert Franklin sets out to do something, you can believe he has planned it out to the last detail, that he has assured himself not only that it can work, but that it will work.”
“So, why shouldn’t we just do what Jenny said?” Ramirez demanded. He sounded more coherent now, less overwrought, though no less confused. “Why not take this to the Department of Defense, warn everyone what’s going to happen?”
Svetlana closed her eyes for a moment, mouth tightening, and Nate thought she was summoning patience.
“You do not think the man who did the things I just mentioned would not be prepared for this? That he doesn’t have people in the DoD who would ‘disappear’ me and possibly you as well?” She hissed out a breath. “This is not a terrorist attack. It’s not a heist or an assassination. It’s not even a coup. This is nothing less than an overthrow of your government…and, eventually, mine. You don’t plan something like this without people on the inside supporting you.”
“You were on the inside supporting him,” Roach reminded her, anger still lingering somewhere behind her eyes. “As I recall, you executed a man for double-crossing one too many people. Why don’t you deserve the same reward he got?”
“Deserve?” Svetlana spat the word. “Woman, I deserve so much worse than that. I let myself believe in a self-styled Great Man, let myself think this one might be different from all the politicians and bureaucrats and criminals I knew in Russia, the ones who’d promised me the world and delivered only betrayal. I let myself think he might actually have the good of all mankind in his heart. Go ahead and kill me. Or give me to your government and let them do it. At least that way, when Robert Franklin winds up the dictator he always swore he would never be, I won’t have to live with the knowledge I helped to put him there.”
Nate’s gut twisted at the words. He wasn’t sure if he trusted the woman completely, but he believed her pain was real.
“Maybe you won’t have to live with it,” he said. “Maybe none of us will.” Five sets of eyes sought out his, in varying shades of confusion and incomprehension. “We can stop this. We can get transportation out there and stop this ourselves.”
“Boy, you are fucking nuts,” Jenny Armstrong opined.
“I have to admit, Nate,” Fuller said, shaking his head, eyes wide, “that’s a pretty crazy idea. Just the four of us…”
“Five,” Svetlana insisted. “If you mean to fight Robert, I will go with you.” She tugged at her bonds and her mouth twisted. “If you will have me.”
“Even five,” Fuller went on. “What can we do that the US and Russian military can’t?”
“We can be someone Bob can’t buy, or intimidate or con,” Nate said. “We can make a stand for something, for what we believe in. It’s why I founded this company, to do something no one else could do, what no one else was willing to do. But I can’t do it alone. Who’s with me?”
“You seem determined to get me killed,” Roach said, sighing. “But I didn’t sign up for this outfit to sit on my ass and watch shit happen to other people.” She smiled, the expression softening the severe hardness of her face. “You know you can count on me, boss.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Ramirez said immediately. Nate wasn’t surprised. Ramirez would go wherever Roach went.
He looked over to Fuller and the older man rubbed his eyes tiredly.
“Oh, sweet baby Jesus,” Fuller moaned. When he looked back up, there was something forlorn in his face. “You know, I swore I was done with this shit, but the honest truth is, if I ain’t fighting, if I ain’t piloting a mech, then all I’m doing is waiting to die of something else. I’m in.”
“James!” Jenny Armstrong blurted the word like a curse, staring at her ex-husband in disbelief. “You are just as big a fool as the clone boy here!”
“You knew that when you married me, sweetie.”
Jenny pushed away from the wall and stalked back and forth, fingers clenching and unclenching, mouth working through silent curses.
“Goddammit, Catfish!” she finally yelled, the words echoing off the walls. “Fine, you stupid fuck, you know I can’t let you go off and do this shit alone! You bastard!”
“Love you, too, honey,” James said, smiling below his stringy mustache.
Roach blew out a breath, then slowly and reluctantly pulled a lock blade knife out of her pocket, opening it and stepping over to Svetlana.
“I suppose,” the younger woman said, slicing through Svetlana’s flex cuffs, “that I’m going to have to trust you.”
“You can trust me when I tell you this,” Svetlana said, rubbing at the chafing on her wrists, trying to shake feeling back into her hands. “I am going to kill Robert Franklin…and he won’t be coming back from this death.”
Epilogue
Robert Franklin loved Colorado. It was clean and fresh and unspoiled and everything the East Coast was not. Even here at Cheyenne Mountain, where what had once been nothing but an underground NORAD base and yet was now a thriving government center, with a small city carved into the hillsides, it was still a living place.
No nuclear weapons had spoiled the beauty, no oil spills nor fires. The early morning sun shone golden on the mountains, softening their edges, disguising missile defense turrets in deep shadows. The place was beautiful, but even Eden had its serpent. The serpent coiled in the depths of this Eden was the shadowy remnan
t of the US government…and he was heading directly into its lair.
The thrum of the tiltrotor’s engines was muted inside the headphones he’d been given to wear, and interrupted occasionally by the crackle of static and the voice of the pilot and copilot talking to each other, or sometimes to ground control. There was quite a bit of security around Cheyenne Center, as the new city had been unimaginatively named, and clearances had to be checked and rechecked before the airplane was allowed to land.
“We’re cleared, Mr. Franklin,” the crew chief told him, flashing him a thumbs-up.
Franklin smiled back at the young man, his face so fresh and full of idealism, his fatigues clean and neat, his hair cropped closer than regulations required. He was just the sort of person the snakes in the US and Russian governments took advantage of, playing on patriotism left over from their parents and grandparents. There were soldiers who were only in it for three hots and a cot, as the saying went, but not men like this young sergeant.
He won’t thank me for what I have to do, but perhaps his children will.
The tiltrotor descended in a tight spiral, soon passing below the tops of the hills, but in the distance, he could see the highway, see the traffic on it. It was mostly government, since no one else could afford to waste fuel, but still, it seemed like a miracle for there to be an intact road and cars and trucks travelling along it in broad daylight, unafraid.
His trucks were out there, somewhere, heading for a warehouse he’d found for rent not too far from Cheyenne Center, an out of the way place where no one would notice equipment being off-loaded. Worry nagged at the back of his mind, not for his plan but for the people he would have to trust to see it through. He regretted leaving Svetlana behind. She had always been a believer, and you could trust believers to do their job without having to look constantly over their shoulder. People who could be bought were unreliable, even if they were often more competent.
You can pay men and women to kill, but you can’t pay them enough to die.
Who had said that? He thought he remembered reading it, but there were too many memories jammed into his brain, and sometimes it was difficult to fish the right one out when you needed it.
Perhaps I said it. When I write the histories of these days, perhaps I will claim it as my own. After all, there won’t be a government around to contradict me.
The plane landed on an elevator platform set on a flat hilltop, the gear retreating into its shock-absorbent housings a few inches before recoiling back upwards. The rotors were still whining their way down the scale to immobility when the whole platform began to sink into the mountain with a jolt that shook the fuselage and shook him in his seat. He was glad he’d left the safety restraints fastened.
The elevator motors were louder than the plane engines had been and he decided to keep his headphones on. Which was why he caught the exchange between the pilot and copilot.
“Who the hell is this guy, anyway?” one of the two asked. He’d heard them both speak before takeoff, but the distortion of the headset intercom made it impossible to tell one’s voice from the other. “Does he work for those Russians that are supposed to be coming here next week?”
“I think so,” the other one responded. “Gary in transportation told me he flew out here from the East Coast to grease the wheels for the conference.”
“What are they supposed to accomplish anyway?” An amused snort. “I mean, the Russians ain’t getting shit past the Smokies and do we even want the East Coast back? It’s a shithole. I say, let them have it.”
“Yeah, you say that now, but what about when they start smuggling nukes in over the Mississippi?”
“If they could have, they would have. It’s easy putting one on a freighter and sailing it off the coast. Getting it out here, not so much. Ain’t no one gonna get past Cheyenne Mountain.”
“Famous last words, dude.”
Then the pair went silent, perhaps realizing their passenger might be listening in via the intercom system, and darkness swallowed them up as the elevator sank deeper into the mountain.
It took a solid minute for the elevator to come to a halt in the shadowed recesses of the underground hangar, then another before the crew chief received the okay to open the rear ramp. Franklin pushed himself to his feet, yanking off the headset and leaving it laying on the seat as his assistant preceded him down the ramp and toward the waiting team of MPs.
“Mr. Franklin?” their leader, a captain with soft, rounded features asked. But he was speaking to Franklin’s assistant and the man himself stepped quickly up and offered a hand.
“I’m Robert Franklin,” he corrected the man’s mistake.
The MP Captain shook the hand a bit uncertainly, as if he wasn’t sure if he should be touching someone who worked with the Russians lest he become somehow contaminated.
“Oh, great,” the MP said without even feigned enthusiasm. “Well, sir, if you’ll follow my team, we’ve been sent to escort you to your quarters. You’ll have a full suite with two bedrooms and built-in offices for the duration of the conference.”
Their boots clomped a chorus on the cement floor, clearing a lane through the human traffic in the hangar, technicians and pilots and engineers, outbound and incoming soldiers and bureaucrats and the blandly shady intelligence types. They carried their carbines barrels-out at high port, giving the appearance of an honor guard…but those weapons were loaded and ready for combat, and there was nothing ceremonial about the body armor the military police troopers were wearing. Someone wasn’t taking any chances.
They moved to an elevator and took it deeper into the bowels of the facility and no one, he noted, said a word. The MPs glanced at him, at his aid, at their captain, but none spoke. The Captain, whose name tape read Scott, was tight-lipped, barely willing to meet Franklin’s eyes. Franklin’s aid was closer to Scott than he was, and the MP officer kept glancing at him, as if he thought he recognized him.
The elevator pinged as it reached its destination and they stepped out onto what could have been an entirely different facility. Gone was the bare cement flooring and concrete walls slapped with sterile white paint. Down here, at the level where politicians and diplomats and those with real power lived and worked, the walls were polished wood, the floor marble, the paintings well-done copies of masterpieces.
There were no more shuffling maintenance techs and low-ranking enlisted dawdling from one bit of make-work to another. Here, men and women in well-tailored suits walked with confidence and soldiers with officer’s rank stepped carefully among them, looking as though they knew they didn’t belong.
All of them steered clear of the MPs, regarding the intrusion into their world with glances of annoyance and confusion until they saw Franklin. Some knew who he was, he could tell by the expressions on their faces, something of a subdued awe to them, poorly concealed. The others, the ones who didn’t, stared in resentment until the group passed and got on with their duties.
The place reminded him of an ant colony. He remembered visiting his grandfather’s ranch in Texas once, watching the old man pour gasoline into fire ant mounds and setting them alight. It wouldn’t kill all the ants, his father had confided well out of the old man’s earshot, but it was more viscerally satisfying than just spraying insecticide.
“Here’s your rooms, sir,” Captain Scott told him, motioning to a carved mahogany door, its knob antique brass. The security lock panel was somewhat newer and Scott offered up his thumbprint and passcode as a sacrifice to the demonic gatekeeper.
The suite was comparable to the best hotels in Europe, back when that had meant something. The carpets were thick and luxurious, the sheets Egyptian cotton and the offices were actual, separate rooms with their own communications and data terminals. After Scott gave them a brief tour, he backed out of the rooms with the assurance that if they wanted anything, all they had to do was use the comm panel beside the door and call.
Franklin’s aid set down their bags and gave him a look.
&n
bsp; “Think the rooms are monitored?” Nathan Stout asked him.
Well…a Nathan Stout. Not the only one, of course. He couldn’t bring Svetlana, but there was one other person he trusted. One other person but dozens of duplicates of him.
“Of course,” Franklin replied, taking a seat at one of the communications terminals. “But there’s currently a computer simulation showing you and I doing totally innocuous things.” He sniffed a quiet laugh. “I believe you’re going off to take a nap while I grab a shower.”
This version of Nate…Let’s call him Nathan, just to differentiate…smiled thinly and pulled off his suit jacket, tossing it over a chair.
“And what are we really going to be doing?”
Robert Franklin laughed louder this time, remembering a line from a cartoon his father had shown him when he’d been a young boy.
“The same thing we do every night,” he quoted, wondering if Nathan would get it. “Try to take over the world.”
Spoils of War
Broken Arrow Mercenary Force: Book 3
Prologue
The setting sun smoldered in impotent rage, dusk dragging it down below the horizon kicking and screaming, as if it wasn’t satisfied with how ungodly hot the day had been and wanted to give it one more hour. Nathan Stout tipped the bottle of Mezcal back and toasted its disappearance. He could already feel the sandstone cooling through the seat of his flight suit, the Earth itself letting out a relieved sigh at the absence of her brutal master.
Summer in the Nevada desert. Something else I won’t miss.
The tequila burned a path down his throat and through his chest on its way to feeding the fire in his stomach. He already felt dizzy and light-headed and he knew the docs would have been chewing him out for mixing alcohol with painkillers.