BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  “He plans long range. Hell, he plans over multiple lifetimes. I doubt he’d commit to this if there were any chance things wouldn’t go his way. I don’t buy for one second that he abruptly stopped trusting you because you got too close to me.”

  Svetlana blinked in surprise, not just at the words or the vehemence behind them, but also from the fact that Nathan was right, and that she’d never suspected it.

  “Jenny is a wise woman,” Svetlana admitted softly. “I have not been thinking with my head.”

  “Sorry?” Nate frowned with confusion.

  “I was trained to be an agent,” Svetlana explained. “Trained to control every situation. But I let Robert play me, manipulate me like a little child. I am ashamed of myself. I promise you this, Nathan, you will not need to worry about my loyalty out there. If I have anything to say about it, when this is all over, Robert Franklin will be dead.”

  She closed her fist around the keys and headed out of the hangar to the parking lot, but paused to look back over her shoulder at Nate.

  “And this time, he’ll stay dead.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Harriet Madsen had never wanted to be President.

  She’d studied history, knew there’d been a time when men and women had fought tooth and nail for the position, spent hundreds of millions of dollars for it, sold their souls for it. She couldn’t imagine those days. Her life was a nightmare of impossible choices, of contradictory demands by powerful people, any one of whom could destroy her if they so chose.

  She’d never asked for this job, had been very satisfied and comfortable with her position as senior Senator from Kansas and had no ambition to be anything more. Then President Chambers had been forced to resign for health reasons and the Senate Appointment Board Chair had come to her along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presented her with an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  She’d tried. She’d told them no about a dozen times, but it had come down to the ultimatum of accepting the Senate appointment or losing her current office in the next election. There might once have been a time when the public vote actually chose Senators, but it certainly wasn’t the case anymore, not since the Reorganization Acts of three decades ago. State senators voted for their federal counterparts, and the best way for a state senator to eventually become a national senator was to do what they were damned well told.

  Eventually, she did as she was damned well told and took the position.

  And there hasn’t been a minute since I haven’t regretted it.

  A portrait of John F Kennedy overlooked her desk, a reminder of more innocent days, and of their end. Harriet wondered who had put it up, whose idea it had been. Chambers? His predecessor? Kennedy wouldn’t have been her first choice as an icon, a role model. He’d managed to avoid a war with Russia, while she was stuck with one.

  She leaned forward in her chair, staring at the screen of her tablet as if there were new revelations to be found in the intelligence file there, as if she could find the answers to her questions if she just kept reading it and rereading it. Her temples were beginning to throb, her eyes gritty and she needed sleep. She didn’t bother to check the time, it would only depress her.

  The knock on her office door was unexpected, which usually meant bad news. If this had been normal hours, she would have waited for her receptionist to call and tell her who was at the door, but she didn’t force the poor man to keep the insane hours she did. She considered checking the security monitor, but the military guards would have never let anyone unauthorized back through to her office in the first place. She turned off the screen of her tablet and touched a concealed button beneath the edge of her desktop to open the door.

  “Come,” she said, sitting back in her chair and trying to seem relaxed. Appearances were everything. It had been one of the first lessons she’d learned in this job.

  Sam Point walked into her office and she felt herself breathe easier. Perhaps it wasn’t bad news after all.

  “You’re up late,” he observed, shutting the door behind him.

  “When am I not?” she asked rhetorically.

  She kept the lights in her office dim at this time of night, trying to rest her eyes, and the shadows from the desk lamp fell across Sam’s face, throwing it into sharp relief. The man looked ragged and wrung out, his uniform sagging and disheveled and the day’s stubble beginning to show on his face. His frown made her reconsider her judgement that this wasn’t a business visit.

  “What is it, Sam?” she wondered, pushing her chair back from her desk and rising to meet him. “Are you as worried about this Russia thing as I am?”

  “I’m worried about lots of things,” he admitted. “But yeah, Russia’s one of them.”

  “Do you believe Franklin?” she asked. It was something she should have asked him sooner, but there hadn’t been an opportunity to speak in private. “Do you really think Popov is playing us?”

  “Popov?” Sam rubbed at the stubble on his chin, eyes clouding over with thought. “Maybe not him. I honestly think he wants this war to be over. But he’s not the only player, and he might not be in control. You know as well as I do how powerful the Russian military is. If Antonov is really coming in Popov’s place, it may be that he’s hijacked the whole mission.”

  “Jesus, Sam,” she moaned, hugging her arms to herself, closing her eyes. “If that’s true, we’re fucked. We need this cease-fire. If this goes on for another ten years, there won’t be anything left of this country.”

  “Hey,” he said, stepping closer, raising her chin with a finger and kissing her softly. “Let’s get out of here, talk a walk outside.”

  “At this hour?” she asked him, her smile dubious. “It has to be past midnight.”

  “It’s past one o’clock,” he corrected her, “and the stars are beautiful. Come on.” He took her hand, urging her toward the door. “Let’s go to the garden. You like sitting at the pond and I know you could use some time away from this Goddamned office.”

  “You’re not wrong about that,” she admitted. “Sometimes I wish I never had to see it again.”

  He let go of her hand as they walked out the door. No point in giving the military guard reason to gossip. The corridors were as dark as her office, the lights kept low mostly for psychological reasons. It was important to vary the lighting for day and night because otherwise, it was impossible to have a sense of time down under the mountain.

  This is the US government now. We rule a third of a country from a fucking cave.

  At least they could still visit the surface. Another round of nuclear attacks, maybe this time from Russian or Chinese subs, and they might not even be able to do that.

  They walked in silence, too mindful of security monitoring to speak freely and unable to come up with the inane small talk they usually engaged in to fill in the gaps. Guards at junctions stiffened to attention at their approach and saluted; Harriet returned the gesture with a nod. When they reached the private elevator bank, the two security agents there shared a look before one pushed the button to open the door while the other spoke up.

  “Ma’am,” the woman said with a bit of hesitation in her voice, “would you like security to accompany you upstairs?”

  The woman was tall and broad-shouldered, her hair short and tightly curled, and there was concern in her dark eyes.

  Well, it’s her job.

  “No, Agent Enriquez,” she assured the woman. “I’m just going to the garden, not leaving the grounds. I’m sure General Point will be enough security to protect me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Enriquez didn’t seem happy about it, but she worked for the President, not the other way around, and she did as she was told.

  The staff elevator was smaller and much better appointed than the cars visitors used, paneled with real wood and decorated with a replica of a Renoir. She couldn’t remember the name of the painting, but it had always seemed restful and calming to her, with a well-dressed woman in a rowboat on a calm lake, just pulling aw
ay from the shore on a sunny summer’s day. She stared at it, wondering if she could find a lake here in Colorado where she could get away with taking out a rowboat on her own, without security or military guards tagging along beside in noisy motorboats and divers swimming beneath her just in case she fell in.

  “Au Bord del Eau,” Sam told her quietly. She frowned at him in confusion and he smiled with a sadness behind it she couldn’t understand. “The name of the painting,” he clarified. “I finally found someone who knew. I’ve been watching you stare at it for two years.”

  She shook her head, laughing softly.

  “Thank you. Odd name, though. Sounds like a whorehouse.”

  Despite his obviously dour mood, Sam laughed.

  “It’s French for ‘at the water’s edge.’ Bordello is different.”

  “At the water’s edge sounds better. Too bad Renoir wasn’t English.” Her tone was playful. Just being with Sam seemed to pull some of the load off of her shoulders.

  The elevator reached the surface with an optimistic chime and the doors opened out onto a courtyard, a concrete semicircle rimmed with a low, block wall and punctuated by marble statuary. They were all wildlife statues, animals native to the west. An elk, a bison, a bear, a wolf, a mule deer, an eagle…

  She idly wondered how the war had affected the wildlife. The radiation and the fires couldn’t have done them any good, but on the plus side, there was less overall pollution and certainly less population pressure. People weren’t building houses out in the woods just to be away from the cities, not anymore. Populations lived as close to each other as they could to conserve resources, out of necessity. Nuclear power plants were built not to reduce global emissions but simply because there was no way to ship coal and oil cross-country anymore.

  Maybe when we’re all gone, the animals can take this continent over again.

  A pair of military guards came to attention at either side of the elevator door, but Sam quickly put them at ease and they left them there with no explanation. Broad, curving steps led down from the courtyard into the garden, lit by subdued, amber-tinted bulbs built into the pavement. The whole thing was part of the new construction begun since the war, since a missile defense command base had been, perforce, turned into a hardened, western version of the old White House.

  Maybe more like the old Camp David. We don’t have anything as public or open as the White House anymore. This is a hideout, a bunker to discourage the Russians or Chinese from thinking they can take out the government with a single nuke.

  The Senate wasn’t here, of course. It would be too great a temptation for an invasion if they were here as well. They were across the border in Kansas, safe in their own secure location, most of them never even travelling back to their home states. Appropriate, since they seemed to lose interest in representing them once they were appointed to the Senate.

  Was I always this cynical?

  Out of the halo of the lit steps, Harriet’s fingers intertwined with Sam’s as they slipped into the shadows. The trees were short, perforce, but they and the topiary bushes had been transported to the top of a hill reinforced with a ten-meter-tall brick retaining wall, looking out over the city. Even the city was dark now, the businesses mostly closing at dusk to save power, but Harriet ignored it, her eyes scanning the stars instead.

  The night sky was frosted with the broad, white swathe of the Milky Way, rising vertical over the mountains, taking her breath away as it always did.

  “We’re part of that,” she said, almost a whisper, pointing to the starscape. “That’s a spiral arm of our galaxy and we’re just a tiny speck in all of that. It puts everything else into perspective, doesn’t it? No matter what we do to each other, no matter what happens at this conference or with this war, no matter if we all kill each other, we’re tiny, insignificant compared to that.”

  “I used to think,” Sam told her, his tone wistfully nostalgic, “that we’d go out there someday. That we’d put all this conflict behind us and get off this planet, do something important.”

  “We still might,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder, feeling as if she had to comfort him. “This won’t last forever.”

  “Nothing does,” he agreed. He smiled, but there was a sadness to it and again, she wondered what was eating at the man. “Do you remember the first time I kissed you, Harriet?”

  “Of course.” She chuckled. “You looked so nervous I thought you were about to throw up.”

  “We both had reason to be nervous,” he reminded her, arching an eyebrow. “You were a newly minted President, I was the holdover Army chief of staff, and we were both married to other people. But in that moment, in the moonlight out here in the garden, none of that seemed to matter.”

  He gazed up at the curtain of stars stretching from one side of the sky to the other.

  “I wish things were still so simple.”

  “We still love each other,” she insisted, grabbing him by his jacket lapel and making him face her. “Spill it, Sam. What’s bothering you?”

  “I don’t like to talk shop out here,” he begged off, wincing as if the question caused him physical pain.

  “Tell me,” she ordered, her tone brooking no argument, what she thought of as her commander-in-chief voice.

  “I think we should take Franklin up on his offer,” Sam admitted. “I think we need those upgraded Hellfires, as many as we can get.”

  “Not you too,” she moaned. “Look, Sam, I know you’re worried about the Russians. Hell, I am too. But this Franklin is a wildcard, and I don’t like wildcards. On top of that, the Senate really doesn’t like wildcards. That bunch of stuffy old fucks think we should still run the country the way it was a hundred years ago. But even if I could sell this to them, I don’t know that I’d try.”

  “Whether you trust Franklin or not,” Sam told her, “we need him. We don’t have to run it by the Senate, he can make the changes on the machinery we already have in place an we can slide the money over from the emergency fund. He doesn’t even care about making a profit on this first run, just wants a proof of concept. Maybe a run of fifty. They could be completed before the Russians even get here.”

  “And who would fly the damned things?” she demanded, beginning to get angry and frustrated. “We don’t have anyone checked out on the new model!”

  “Franklin has some pilots with him.” Sam didn’t seem to want to elaborate, just shutting up mulishly.

  “The answer’s still no. I’m not providing a battalion’s worth of mech and handing it over to some shady asshole no one really knows anything about.”

  She thought for a moment that Sam was going to keep arguing the point, but his shoulders sagged as if the wind was going out of him along with the will to keep fighting.

  “Okay,” he said, shaking his head slightly, staring off into the night. “If that’s the way it has to be.”

  “I’m afraid so.” She’d let go of his hand at some point in the exchange—she was upset enough she didn’t remember when—and she crossed her arms over her chest, feet set apart. “I don’t want to discuss it again.”

  “I understand.” Sam told her. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you, Harriet.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and gently, slowly pulled her to him. She surrendered to the motion a bit reluctantly, but didn’t struggle as he leaned down to kiss her gently on the lips. It was a slow kiss, not really passionate yet still lingering. It felt like a kiss goodbye.

  He disengaged from her slowly, carefully, taking a step back, a muscle in his cheek quivering as if he were about to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Harriet.”

  She shook her head in confusion.

  “For what?”

  She thought she’d been stung by a bee or wasp, which seemed absurd at night, but she brushed her hand across the exposed side of her neck and felt a surge of surprise when she felt something solid there. It was plastic with a thin, metal ridge to it and she pulled it out, gasping at the pain o
f its extraction. She held it out in front of her, trying to catch the faint light filtering from the courtyard above them.

  It was, she thought, some sort of miniature dart, something she would have expected to see fired at an animal to tranquilize it.

  “What the fuck?” she tried to exclaim. But the words wouldn’t come. Nothing would. Not speech nor sound, nor, finally, breath.

  Harriet Madsen staggered, fell forward into Sam Point’s arms and when he caught her, she wanted to pull away from him, but she couldn’t do that either. She was paralyzed. All she could do was look up into his eyes, unable to even gasp for the breath she couldn’t take. Her lungs were burning. And Sam was crying.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he repeated. “I didn’t want it to be like this. But you have to understand, we weren’t going to survive like this. We aren’t strong enough. Franklin is. He’ll save this country, and the world too, in the end.”

  Her heart. It wasn’t beating. It was paralyzed, too…and the darkness was closing in from all sides, a tunnel squeezing her universe tighter and tighter, smaller until nothing was left but Sam’s face, and his final words.

  “Sleep in peace, Harriet.”

  And then she was falling forever, with no one left to catch her…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Anton Varlamov was leading the formation of Tagans down BC93 through what had once been Banff National Park, and he’d decided he wanted to believe this position meant Colonel Sverdlov trusted him, because the alternative was that the man had decided he was the most expendable of his troops.

  The footpads of his Tagan clomped heavily on the cracked and overgrown pavement of the old highway, fallen into disrepair over the decades like nearly everything else, the remains of national park buildings collapsed under the weight of winter snows sitting like piles of firewood at the turnouts.

  The view, at least, was breathtaking. Anton had never made it to this part of Canada before and he found himself wishing he’d had the chance to visit under more pleasant circumstances.