BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “That shit’ll kill me.”

  A laugh burst unwillingly past lips pressed together to suppress backwash and then turned into a helpless cough. Pain racked his body, overcoming the combined efforts of tequila and hydrocodone and he tried not to let himself cry. He felt like a child when he cried.

  He doubled down with an even longer drink, hoping at some point it would do its job and numb the pain, erase the memories. The pain died down, but the memories refused to leave him and he reluctantly pulled his phone out of a pocket. He’d known he was going to wind up looking at the pictures eventually. It seemed as if he couldn’t go a day without staring at them.

  I’ve become the sort of maudlin bastard I swore I wouldn’t turn into.

  The picture had been taken just before Camilla had left and taken Victoria back with her to Kentucky, and he fancied he could already see the discontent in his ex-wife’s eyes. It turned her expression severe, made her face seem harsh beneath the dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore practical clothes, jeans and a T-shirt, but little Victoria had been dressed in a something pink and frilly. She hadn’t even been two years old and yet there still seemed to be a shadow hanging over her, as if she knew…

  “What the hell are you doing out here, Nate?

  He didn’t start at the voice. He’d heard the footsteps crunching on the dry soil and he knew someone would eventually have noticed him missing from the base.

  “Hey Bob,” he said, saluting the man with the bottle. “Want a drink?”

  “Of that nasty shit you’ve been smuggling in over the border?” Robert Franklin asked, a look of distaste passing across his lined, serious face.

  His hair was wild, his beard patchy and his coveralls stained with grease. An outsider seeing him for the first time would have assumed he was a mechanic, and in one sense, he was that. He was also one of the most talented inventors and mechanical and electrical engineers in the world, with doctorates in three different disciplines. He’d been a millionaire before he’d turned forty and probably would have been a billionaire if the war hadn’t interrupted his business plan.

  “It isn’t like I’ve got a lot of choice,” Nathan pointed out, still holding out the bottle as if it were a peace offering. “Hard to get liquor deliveries out here, particularly when the Russians or the Chinese might wind up shooting them down.”

  “I’ll have a drink just to be sociable,” Bob allowed, taking the Mezcal and knocking down a shot before handing it back. He made a face, shaking his head. “Damn, I don’t know how you can stand that shit.”

  “You can get used to almost anything.”

  Nathan hadn’t meant the words to come out quite so bitter. He grimaced and hid it behind another drink.

  “Have you heard anything from them?” Bob asked.

  Nathan didn’t have to wonder who he meant. He knew the man could see the picture on his phone screen from over his shoulder.

  “Not directly. Not since they left.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, but when he opened them again, the picture was still there. “The doctors at Ft. Campbell called me, though. They needed my consent for the treatment.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be able to…,” Bob began, but Nathan cut him off in mid-sentence.

  “No. They can give her another few years, but eventually….” He shook his head, unable to finish the sentence. “No.”

  “It’s not your fault, Nate.”

  He squinted at his friend in annoyance more than anger.

  “Of course it’s my fucking fault, Bob. I may not have three doctorates, but I’m pretty sure exposing myself to all that damned radiation didn’t do my genes any good.” A snarl twisted his face into something uglier, darker. “It was bad enough what I did to myself, but that was the choice I made, the risk I took. What I did to her before she was even born…”

  The tequila burned and burned in his throat but it couldn’t burn away the guilt.

  “I wasted my life, and this is God punishing me for it. The cancer wasn’t enough because He knew I didn’t mind dying. He had to take something from me I really cared about to drive the point home.”

  “Come on,” Bob said, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t really believe that. You’ve always told me you didn’t regret joining the Hellfire program…”

  “How the hell could I not regret it when it’s going to kill my fucking daughter?” He snarled the words, throwing down the bottle without thought. It was glass. They still made glass bottles down in Mexico, though no one had in the United States for a decade. It shattered against a rock, soaking the parched ground with the few ounces of tequila left at the bottom.

  He was standing though he didn’t remember getting up, his arms bowed in a defensive stance, and he forced himself to relax.

  “I always believed I was serving my country, doing the right thing,” Nate went on, still emphatic but less strident. “But I was being selfish. I was thinking about what was right for me, what I believed in, but I wasn’t thinking about what it would do to my family. And now this Project Artemis shit, it’s just me being afraid of dying, afraid of a world without Nate Stout in it. All it’s going to do is make sure there’s a bunch more selfish assholes out there, for the next fifty years or however long this fucking war goes on.”

  He stared at the spilled tequila, regret filling his belly in place of the earlier comfortable burn.

  “I should go find them when they wake up and tell them to save themselves the time and pain and just go ahead and kill themselves right now. All the memories you’ve fed them from before the cancer are just a bunch of bullshit I made myself believe.”

  “Yeah, I know all about that,” Bob said.

  Something about his tone made Nathan look at him, and the same icy chill frosted over Bob’s eyes.

  “I got a call from the Artemis techs a few hours ago. They told me you tried to overwrite the memory tapes with new files earlier today.” His lip twisted into a sneer with none of the bonhomie of earlier. “What? You didn’t think we kept backup copies?”

  There was, Nathan realized, a compact pistol in Bob’s hand. He was sure it hadn’t been there before and he figured Bob must have been concealing it in a pocket, but he was surprised he hadn’t noticed the outline of the weapon. It was a 9mm, the Glock whatever, the one with the single-stack magazine, really thin and designed as a hideout.

  What the hell was that model again?

  He’d seen Bob at the base’s range and knew the man wasn’t any sort of crack shot, but at this range, he didn’t have to be.

  “What’s with the gun, Bob?” His voice didn’t waver, the side-effects of a career spent as a combat helicopter pilot. You could be about to shit your pants but you always kept your voice even and calm because survival sometimes depended on people being able to understand your radio call. “You gonna arrest me? Why not just bring out the MPs?”

  “It’s better this way, Nate,” Bob insisted. “It’s just you and me out here. No one else needs to know what happened. They’ll think you went out as a hero, who couldn’t take the pain of cancer anymore.” The sneer smoothed out into a smile. “Hell, I’m probably doing you a favor. It’s going to get bad soon. Stage four pancreatic cancer isn’t a fun way to go out, pain meds or no.”

  It took a moment for the words to penetrate Nathan Stout’s alcohol haze. When they did, he was surprised to find out that he was afraid. He’d thought he’d made peace with dying, that he wouldn’t be one of those cowards who clung to life when the purpose had been squeezed out of it and there was nothing left but pure existence. Staring into the barrel of the Glock, it became clear to him that he was no different from any other man who’d ever lived, that there were certain impulses beyond conscious control.

  He had the choice of fight or flight. He was drunk and buzzed on hydrocodone and weak from the cancer and he wasn’t running anywhere. He wasn’t going to be putting up much of a fight, either, but he chose that option anyway, because he wanted t
o have some say in how he went out.

  He lunged at Robert Franklin, his motions clumsy, slow, arms outstretched.

  Something flashed bright and thunder cracked in his ears, and he was falling forever.

  Chapter One

  The truck had died ten kilometers from the old Naval Air Station at Patuxent River, Maryland. Its death had been final and irreversible and Anton Varlamov had been reminded of an old drawing he’d seen from the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s, with a saddened soldier covering his eyes as he prepared to put a mercy bullet into the hood of a wrecked jeep.

  The cargo truck didn’t quite date back that far, but its birth had been closer to what the Americans termed World War Two than it was to the present. Yet, it had served them well, somehow navigating the hundred-plus kilometers of flooded and crumbling and bomb-pocked roads between DC and Pax River before the abuse had taken out the drive train.

  “Ten kilometers is nothing,” he’d assured Giorgi Lermontov when they’d climbed down from the cab of the stolen vehicle and into the cloud-cloaked darkness of the early morning.

  “Can’t we wait until the sun comes up?” the younger man had wondered. Anton decided to be generous and attribute the whining tone in his voice to the pain the enlisted soldier was still feeling from his wounded shoulder.

  “You want to spend the next three hours in this giant, immobile target on a road frequented by scavengers and bandits?”

  “Well, sir, when you put it like that…”

  So, they’d walked. They both had night vision goggles, but the damned things robbed them of any sort of depth perception, so they’d stuck to the edge of the road, following it with dogged determination through cloying humidity and buzzing swarms of summer mosquitoes.

  Now the sun was just peeking out above the horizon, below the grey shroud of overcast dogging their every step from Virginia to DC and on into Maryland. A hint of color in a black and white world, it almost made the front gates of the long-abandoned United States Navy base seem less foreboding. They loomed in the dawn light, the lettering on the signs faded with age and weathering, a distraction from the sturdy and well-maintained padlocks securing the chains around the gate posts. They hadn’t been there before the war, he remembered. There’d been a town and a museum, and everything had been open and civilized. And then nuclear weapons had started going off in US cities and nothing was civilized anymore.

  “Halt.”

  Anton hadn’t seen the guards, though he’d known they’d be there. Even when the two men emerged from behind the overgrown brush to the side of the gate, he couldn’t be sure of where exactly they’d been hiding, so well had their ghillie suits blended in with their backgrounds. Out in the open, the loose bits of green and brown cloth made them look like cut-rate clowns at a children’s party, but there was nothing childish in the yawning muzzles of their suppressed carbines. Hard, steel-blue eyes stared out at Anton through a face smeared black and green with greasepaint.

  “Major Anton Varlamov, Spetsnaz,” he said, offering his bared left wrist to the guards.

  While one kept them covered with his weapon, the other pulled a small reader from his belt and passed it over the RFID chip implanted in Anton’s forearm, eyeing the readout suspiciously, as if he suspected someone had ripped out the real Anton’s chip and buried it into their own flesh in an attempt at espionage. Then his expression seemed to relax and Anton thought he must have received the confirmation on the device of a facial-recognition match.

  He gestured to the second guard and the man lowered his weapon, nodding to them in greeting, finally.

  “Wait one,” the guard said, raising a palm and keying a mic built into his helmet. “Tell the Colonel that Major Varlamov is here.”

  There was a pause, longer than Anton would have liked, but perhaps, he mused, Vasyli was busy. Or still asleep.

  The frown that descended on the guard’s face told him those were not the most likely reasons. The man twisted a key into the padlock and pulled the gate open, motioning with a curt, chopping gesture.

  “Follow me.”

  “My sergeant here is wounded,” Anton said, waving back at Giorgi as the two of them shuffled along behind the guard.

  “They’ll see to him at the main building. No more talking, please.”

  Shit. He’d known he might be in trouble. Now he was certain.

  The road into the base was overgrown by untended trees and overgrown vines, coating everything in a haze of green, tinting the sunlight floating down through the canopy, lending its verdant credence to the fiction of the place as yet another abandoned pre-war facility. Lichen coated the road in places, making the going slippery, and Anton was sure he saw a bear lumbering through the deep woods at a curve in the path.

  Where buildings had once been, now only blackened ruins remained, covered in foliage, and the first intact structure he saw had once been a museum, but that had closed down decades ago. The odd, artistic shape remained, a stylized airplane hangar to his eyes, but the walls had been repainted a dull green and the front windows boarded up. The US Navy had used it as a storage facility, he recalled, but now it had been cleaned out and repurposed yet again, by the ones who’d driven them out.

  The exterior still seemed run down, faded and cracked, but it was maskirovka, camouflage for anyone bothering to point a satellite camera at it, which wasn’t likely to begin with. There were too many abandoned bases and ruined buildings east of the Mississippi for what was left of the US government to try to keep eyes on them all. Still, it was good to keep in practice, and even the soldiers standing guard at the front entrance to the building stayed under cover of the overhangs, hugging the shadows.

  Down the cracked and broken road were the remains of a hotel, closed and crumbling long before the base had been abandoned, and beyond it a few office buildings still standing and still in use. Desks and filing cabinets had been tossed out the back doors, left to rot in drainage ditches, and the offices had been fitted with fans, cots and generators, barracks for a few dozen of the 300 Spetsnaz and support troops stationed here.

  No air conditioning, no civilian women for dozens of kilometers and little to do but watch twenty-year-old movies or get drunk and fight. Typical for a Russian base overseas, which was why Anton tried to stay in the field as often as he could.

  The guards at the front entrance of the old museum glared at him as if he’d stolen their girls and run over their dogs, but said nothing as he walked through the open doorway. The light inside the building was unnaturally bright, a harsh contrast to the gentle glow of dawn outside, and Anton squinted at it, wincing from an incipient headache. The inside of the old museum was a stark contrast to the exterior, the floors kept meticulously clean, the walls scrubbed down to the original paint and hung with what the Americans had called “motivational posters.”

  “You come with me,” the guard told Giorgi, motioning off to the right. “The medics are down here.” He nodded to Anton and pointed straight down what had once been an open exhibition space full of old US Navy aircraft. It had been partitioned off into separate rooms with a drop ceiling back during the early days of the war, turned into something generic and practical, like slapping a fresh coat on an impressionist painting and using it as a road sign. “You go straight. Colonel Bakunin is waiting for you in his office.”

  The man, who wasn’t wearing rank insignia but couldn’t have been higher than a sergeant, spoked the words with the same tone as Anton’s mother had used when she’d warned him that his father would see to him when he returned home from work.

  Anton sniffed in return, then regretted it when he caught a whiff of how bad he smelled. He hadn’t noticed it during the drive, but a tug at his collar and a second intake of air confirmed he hadn’t bathed in three days. He shrugged and kept walking. If Bakunin had wanted him presentable, he would have given him time to shower and change.

  There was a clerk outside the Colonel’s office, a corporal who undoubtedly doubled as the man’s driver. He
was young and blond and yet still probably a graduate of Spetsnaz training because Bakunin didn’t allow anyone to be stationed with him who wasn’t. The boy’s nose wrinkled at Anton’s approach and he was about two seconds from pressing his rank into the youngster’s too-handsome face before the corporal stood and saluted.

  “Major Varlamov,” the enlisted man said crisply. “The Colonel will see you now.”

  Anton returned the salute a bit grudgingly, a disappointed he hadn’t had the chance to chew someone out after the way the gate guards had treated him. The door to Vasyli Bakunin’s office was cheap and flimsy, a relic of the early war when this place was something thrown together by an impoverished and desperate US Navy. It echoed hollow beneath his knock and he thought if he had applied just a bit more force, he might have left a dent.

  “Come in.”

  Vasyli’s tone was brusque, businesslike and not the least bit friendly. Anton sucked in a breath and stepped through.

  The office was as cut-rate and cheap as the door and the particle-board walls, the only decoration an old, plastic-coated map of the area pinned to the back wall. Anton couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a physical map and this one appeared to date from sometime in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. It was appropriate, since Vasyli Bakunin looked as if he dated back even further, back to the days of the Soviet Union. He was a grizzled bear of a man, his grey-shot beard and curly hair constantly threatening to run well past regulation, but his uniform pressed and neat for all that.

  Vasily very deliberately did not rise from his chair at his entrance, as he might have done at an earlier, friendlier time, and Anton felt it prudent to stiffen to attention and salute.

  “Major Varlamov reporting as ordered, sir.”

  Vasyli let him stay braced and sweating for nearly ten seconds before he returned the salute and motioned toward the chair on the other side of the cheap, pressed-metal desk. Anton sat down but maintained his posture of attention. If this was how Vasyli was going to play it, he’d give him what he wanted.