BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  “And by someone,” Barron guessed, “you mean you?”

  “I mean us, Conrad. I mean BAMF and LV-426 and whoever else we can get to come along with us.”

  There was nothing smooth about the way Barron laughed this time. It was a belly laugh, uncontrolled, uncaring, shaking his shoulders and rattling the desk.

  “Are you shitting me, Nate?” he asked when he could talk again, tears streaming down his face. “You seriously expect me to take my mechs and my people all the way across the country to the fucking Rockies on some snipe hunt paranoid fantasy? On nothing but your word?”

  Nate felt his jaw clenching and he tried to relax. Getting into a knock-down, drag-out fight with Barron wasn’t going to accomplish anything. He needed to stay cool.

  “It’s not just my word. We have gun camera video of Robert Franklin abducting me. You can run facial recognition against the historical photos we downloaded and saved, though you won’t find them online anymore. They’ve been scrubbed. Every single photo of Robert Franklin on record is gone in just the last two days. You can check that, too.”

  He hesitated, unsure whether it would be wise to share the next part, but sensing Barron wouldn’t be convinced without it.

  “And we have an FSB agent who we…captured, I guess. She knows what Franklin is up to and she wants to help stop him.”

  Barron stared at him for a minute, saying nothing, eyes narrowed, not yet believing but at least not laughing any longer.

  “I’d have to talk to her,” he said. “I’d want to see the video.”

  “Of course,” Nate said, nodding. “I wouldn’t have expected anything less.”

  Barron raised a finger and shook it at Nate, jaw working as if he had to say something even though it went against his better judgement.

  “Even if—and it’s a big fucking if, Stout—I believe you, and I buy into all this, you’ve yet to answer the most important question of all.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What’s in it for me?”

  “If Franklin brings down the US and the Russian governments,” Nate said, thinking it was so obvious he shouldn’t have to spell it out, “he thinks it’ll mean he can rebuild in his image, make the ideal world he’s always wanted. But it’s more likely to just throw everything into chaos and get people tossing nukes around again.”

  “Maybe,” Barron admitted. “But you’re the patriot, not me. If I think the US and Russia are going to start launching missiles, I’m going to pack up my shit and head south, see if there’s a Central American junta that could use a couple squadrons of mechs.”

  Nate nodded.

  “Fair enough. I can’t say I blame you. But what if we stopped it? What if we managed to keep Franklin from pulling this off? We’d be the heroes of the day. We could write our own ticket.” Nate tried a low, conspiratorial tone, knowing instinctively it didn’t sound sincere coming from him. “I mean, we’re talking the President and the Joint Chiefs. Just think of the bonus we’d get. It would probably be in the millions. And that’s not even talking about the political connections we’d have. You could write your own ticket. If you wanted to be one of the people working the war, this is your chance. Maybe your only one.”

  “Damn.” Barron frowned, as if he was unhappy with Nate for pointing out an upside he couldn’t deny. “Yeah, there is that. If it were anyone but you, Nate, I would laugh your ass out of this building and not think about it again. I’m still tempted to do just that, even though I believe you believe it. Even though I trust you enough that you’re probably telling the truth, I really want to just ignore this. Because if it’s real, it’s the scariest shit I’ve heard of in a life spent doing scary shit.”

  “So, you want to come back to base in my truck or do you have your own ride?”

  “Oh, you fucker,” Barron muttered. “Tell me something, even if I’m stupid enough to go along with this, how the hell do you propose we get from here to Colorado without anyone noticing?”

  “Yeah,” Nate acknowledged. “We’re working on that…”

  Chapter Six

  “This is bullshit. I don’t believe a word of it.”

  Robert Franklin spared General Phillip Rousseau a baleful glare, but didn’t interrupt the man. One of the advantages of over a hundred years of memories was the perspective necessary to deal with disagreeable people. Cutting them off, arguing with them felt satisfying, but would be counterproductive. Best to let the man rant and rage until he talked himself out.

  “General,” President Madsen said, leaning forward on the conference table, hands clasped together, “while I appreciate your objections, perhaps, in the spirit of the decorum of the meeting, you might attempt to word them with a bit more civility?”

  God, that woman is insufferably polite.

  “My apologies, President Madsen,” Rousseau ground out between clenched teeth. “But come on, what Mr. Franklin is saying about the Russians is nonsense. We have our own intelligence sources, and if any of them had detected any indication of this, we wouldn’t have given you the recommendation to go ahead with the conference!” Rousseau’s voice had gone up in volume with each word and he stopped himself, visibly bringing his temper back under control. “I mean, for starters, how the hell did he even get here from the East Coast to give us this information? We didn’t bring him! It’s not as if you can just hop on a commercial airplane from Philadelphia to Denver!”

  “I run a private intelligence gathering cooperative,” Franklin pointed out, “If I weren’t resourceful enough to find transportation across the country, you’d have little reason to trust my word on anything else.”

  “And the question isn’t worth wasting time on,” President Madsen agreed, “when the greater matter before us is of such vital importance. What intelligence did you manage to dig up that gave you the idea that the Russians are intent on sabotaging these peace talks? We’ve been working to set them up for seven months, and I’d think it would have been simpler for them to simply refuse to talk than to try some complicated plan to hamstring us just to make us look bad.”

  “If their aim was simply to embarrass the US government, then you’d be correct, Madam President,” Franklin agreed. “But the chatter we’ve been catching says it’s deeper than that, more ambitious. The Russians tried to grab too much too fast, and it’s been hurting them in Europe. These aren’t the glory days when the Red Army had hundreds of thousands of tanks to flood the Fulda Gap, and tactical nukes aren’t as useful in a continent where everything you wish to occupy is so close together and so likely to be contaminated by a strike on a neighboring city.”

  He took a drink from the open water bottle on the conference table in front of him, a calculated delaying tactic to give everyone a moment to consider his previous words before he moved on.

  “They’re also coming into conflict with the Chinese along the Ussuri River, and while the Chinese are less advanced in military technology than either us or the Russians, they have a shitload of people and they’re not afraid to throw them away. The Russians are afraid to commit to open nuclear warfare with the Chinese since the exchange ten years ago that left much of Yekaterinburg uninhabitable.”

  He motioned to his left, which he knew to be east. “So, they’ve concentrated on trying to gain control of the eastern US, hoping to seize natural resources and seaports here for use in shoring up their defenses in Europe and on the Chinese border. But that hasn’t proven as easy as they’d hoped. Your private military company strategy has left them scrambling to control areas they thought were already pacified, particularly in Virginia, where they thought they had a seaport open and ready to use. But the mercenaries fight for money, and without the US government to back them, they won’t fight at all. Which is why everything points to them using the conference as a cover for a decapitation strike on your administration, Madam President.”

  Franklin saw the shock rock her back in her chair, so palpable she didn’t even attempt to conceal it. But behind the shock was anger, and he was enough of a judge of
people that he thought it was diffuse right now, spread out but looking for a target to focus on, whether that be him or the Russians.

  “And why do you believe this?” she bit the words off. “I want details, Mr. Franklin.”

  “My colleague has been running point on this part of the investigation,” Franklin told her. “Nathan, if you would.”

  There was a qualitative difference between this version of Nathan Stout and the others he’d come to know over the decades, and it wasn’t simply the slick-back hair or the expensive business suit. He was more focused, less distracted by quaint nostalgia such as family or comradery. He exuded confidence and competence as he stood before the assembled politicians and military leaders, touching a control on his phone to change the holographic display projected over the center of the table from a map of the continental US to a more focused, detailed map of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

  There were almost two dozen red circles glowing over locations near the coast, some in commercial ports and others in the vicinity of retired Navy bases.

  “There’ve been several attacks by Russian infiltrators along the coasts, ones we previously thought random, or simply in line with the other short-term harassment and disruption campaigns they’ve run against our mercenary units on the eastern seaboard. But when we ran this through pattern-detection software, what we came up with was a concerted attempt by the Russians to build up mobile armored forces in their special operations bases along the border with the active United States.”

  Nathan touched a fingertip to one of the circles and traced a line across the map to each of the others, creating a crimson spider-web up and down the coast.

  “Our estimates are they could have built up a force of close to a full wing of Tagans, though we can’t be sure how many were Pi-mechs and how many are uncrewed U-mechs. What we couldn’t figure out, at first, was what they intended to use the weapons against. After all, the only forces the US government has out east are the PMC’s, and those are scattered and diffuse, certainly not worth spending a whole armored air wing to take out.”

  He pointed to the old Naval Air Station at Patuxent River. “They seemed to be gathering here, but we couldn’t figure out why they’d bother. Until someone remembered the old rail lines to the Great Lakes.” He traced another line across the map and the computer turned it into railroad tracks. “But we didn’t put it all together until Mr. Franklin received word of the peace summit. Nothing else makes sense. If it were simply for security, they wouldn’t need a full wing of mechs.”

  Rousseau looked as if he were about to blow his lid and he couldn’t restrain himself any longer, interrupting Nathan’s presentation.

  “And we’re supposed to believe that this private intelligence company has somehow managed to find this conspiracy at the heart of the Russian government when our own agents couldn’t, after months of digging?” He shook his head violently, reminding Franklin of a dog trying to shake something out of its ear. “No way. Maybe…maybe…there are some rogue elements in the Russian military who oppose the peace talks, but there’s no way Popov is behind this. He’s been instrumental in organizing this summit. Hell, he’s bent over backward to make this happen!”

  “Has he now?” Franklin asked, cocking an eyebrow toward the officer. “And why do you think that is? Is there anything in Popov’s nature up till now that would indicate he’s a principled pacifist? Do you think he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart? You’re a general, sir. Have you even met a Russian? Do you think the same people who smuggled nuclear weapons into our cities and killed millions of people—tens of millions of people—would be so eager for peace? It’s not as if we have American troops in Russia ready to take out their cities. There’s no reason for him to care whether or not we agree to a peace treaty other than to save himself some money.”

  Franklin sniffed dismissively.

  “Popov is an old-school Communist, raised by a line of them going back nearly a century, a reactionary in a field of kleptocratic mafia stooges. He’d be happy if we all starved to death just to prove once and for all that capitalism is doomed to failure.”

  Rousseau was about to snap back at him, but President Madsen interrupted, raising a hand palm-up in a restraining gesture.

  “All right, that’s enough for now,” she said. “I don’t think this argument is going anywhere productive.”

  Franklin allowed himself a soft chuckle at an old memory. You can’t fight in here. This is the war room.

  “Mr. Franklin,” the President continued, “if you would be so kind as to upload any intelligence data you have to the base systems here for review by my analysts, and then give us the room so I might have a private discussion with my military staff?”

  “Of course, Madam President,” he agreed, his tone easy, reasonable.

  It was always good to be seen as the reasonable party, the one armed with facts and logic. Particularly when you weren’t. He nodded to Nathan and the man—the dupe—synced the files from his phone with the room’s central data systems. It was a large file, but the connection here was blindingly fast and in just seconds, Nathan was shutting down the app and pocketing the device.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Franklin saluted casually with two fingers as he followed Nathan to the door.

  A buzzer signaled the release of its lock and a security agent on the outside opened it and waited, her grey eyes locked on the two of them like laser sights until they were out and the door was sealed behind them. Nathan looked as if he wanted to ask Franklin something, but the older man shook his head just slightly, motioning with his left hand down at hip level to quiet him until they reached the exit out into the main hallway.

  Franklin nodded for Nathan to follow him to the passenger elevator and they waited their turn in line behind a queue of off-duty soldiers and government employees heading up into the civilian areas for the shops and bars and restaurants…or, perhaps, just for companionship. Nathan’s impatience seemed to grow with each second of the ride back up to the surface, yet he remained silent, always the good soldier, eager to please.

  The mid-afternoon sun was dazzling after so long spent indoors, trapped like mole rats in the cave where the US government hid in fear. Franklin shielded his eyes with his hand and incidentally, from the security cameras. Once they were absorbed in the midst of a crowd walking over a footbridge between the entrance to the main Cheyenne Mountain complex and the civilian town, Nathan could restrain himself no longer.

  “Do you think we revealed too much?” he blurted, hissing the words a bit too loudly. He winced and tried to adjust his volume. “If they dig too deep into the data, they might find out those Tagans are all still out on the east coast.”

  “I think,” Franklin replied, clapping the man on the shoulder, “that we dangled the bait and they took it. We should find out fairly soon whether they’re on the hook. Now come on,” he urged, waving forward, “I’m starving, and I hear they serve a mean burger at a little hole in the wall restaurant in town.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Tell me again,” Ramirez said, wiping sweat off his face, “why we have to install this special antenna. What’s wrong with the array we already have?”

  It was brutally hot on the roof of the hangar and every time his bare skin touched the sheet metal it left a second-degree burn behind. Hector Ramirez cursed and pulled his flight suit back up over his shoulders, slipping his arms through the sleeves despite the sweat staining the clothes and him. He hated putting sweaty clothes back on, but it was either that or keep burning his forearms as he tried to steady himself on the ancient, rickety ladder with one hand and keep the antenna mast in place with the other. He didn’t know how Fuller was able to crouch directly on the sheet roofing, steadying himself now and again with a gloved palm. Ramirez couldn’t have stood the reflected heat and sunlight from the sheet metal for more than a minute.

  “Bill ain’t what you’d call a trusting man,” James Fuller said, his voi
ce quiet, distracted by the clockwork motion of his right arm as he twisted the handle of the ratchet drive up and down, tightening the bolt on one side of the clamp.

  The older man’s forearms were corded with muscle from a life spent working with his hands, and marked white with keloids of scar tissue from a half a dozen old wounds. Ramirez saw what had to be the broad, ugly smear of a burn running from elbow to wrist on Fuller’s right arm, centimeters wide, but he was afraid to ask the old pilot where he’d gotten the scar.

  “He don’t talk to people on the normal frequencies,” Fuller went on, louder now that he’d finished tightening the nut. “He says he doesn’t want to take the chance of some spook listening in and him getting an unwelcome visit late in the night from an armed drone or a U-mech.”

  “Is that a real possibility?” Ramirez wondered. He fished a second nut from the tray of spare parts resting at a precarious angle on the side of the roof and handed it over to Fuller. “I mean, is he important enough for someone to try to kill him?”

  “Oh, there’s no end to the people who’d like to kill him,” Fuller assured the younger man. “Including me, about half the time.”

  He threaded the last nut onto the bolt attaching the other side of the antenna mast to the side of the roof, then took the ratchet drive to it again.

  “Bill’s an asshole, y’see,” Fuller went on. “Always has been. Fact is, I’d just as soon punch him in the face as talk to him again.”

  “Jesus, dude, what did he do to you?”

  Fuller looked up from tightening the connection, murder in his eye.

  “Fucker shot me,” he snapped, “in the balls.”

  “What?” Ramirez exclaimed, stunned enough he nearly lost his grip on the ladder.

  “With a taser,” Fuller amended, and Ramirez took a breath, shrugging.

  “Well, that’s cruel, but at least…”

  “On my fucking wedding day!”