by Drew Avera
“Where the hell are we, anyway, Nathan?” Barron demanded. “I mean, aside from the coordinates on a map you gave us, what did this place…” He waved a hand around demonstratively. “…used to be?”
“Are we even in Virginia anymore?” Carla wondered, staring around with her hands on her hips, the M37 carbine in her hands as if she didn’t want to leave her mech without some different way to kill people quickly and efficiently.
“We’re in North Carolina, if you were paying attention to the mapping program in your mech.”
The voice had come from off to Nate’s left and he turned at the interruption, knowing who it belonged to before he did. Everything about Catalina Loughlin was distinctive, from her silky-smooth voice to the fire-engine red of her unit’s uniform flight suit to the red-devil patch on its shoulder, to the fact that she was almost a head taller than Nate. Westbridge Private Military Contractors was one of the most respected of the mercenary units and it was mostly because of the work she’d done with it in the last three years, since she’d taken over for her late husband, Marcus.
Marcus Westbridge had been a good soldier, but a lousy recruiter, and the fifty-something-year-old former Army vets he’d kept around as his pilots had jumped ship when he’d died, leaving Catalina to clean up the mess. She’d managed to attract a new generation of younger professionals with a fresh, businesslike approach, sinking her savings into the latest in maintenance gear, first class mechanics and a guarantee of regular pay. Her squadron wasn’t quite as big as Barron’s LV-426, but they were better trained and had a much cleaner reputation.
Which was why he hadn’t expected her to show.
“Catalina,” Nate said, nodding to her. “I’m glad you came.”
“It was against my better judgement, Nathan,” she admitted. “I have severe doubts there’s a payday at the end of this. But I believe you’re telling the truth and, if this Robert Franklin manages to succeed, we can kiss our line of work goodbye and there’ll never be another payday again.” She sniffed, skepticism evident in her expression. “I still don’t know how you think we’re going to make it through the military checkpoints between here and Colorado with all these mechs.”
“Wild Bill has that covered, ma’am,” James Fuller assured her as he stepped up behind Nate’s left shoulder. He motioned to Barron, Catalina and Bubba Brooks, who’d been passing around a burning roach with his pilots while they waited. “If y’all wanna follow me, I’ll let Bill give you the ten-dollar tour.”
“I honestly doubt there’s anything on that train worth that much,” Barron muttered as he fell into step with the others.
The sun was hanging low over the trees just ahead of them, forcing Nate to squint and shade his eyes as they walked up to the tracks, even with one of the tall-sided, open-topped freight cars. Six of them stretched along the length of the train behind double engines. The train could have been diesel or alcohol fueled, but that would have required more of an infrastructure than an operation like Wild Bill’s could provide, so Nate guessed one of the cars up front held a fairly large isotope reactor, or else several smaller ones slaved together.
The man James Fuller had referred to as Wild Bill waited for them beside one of the cars, the side doors slid open to reveal an interior bare except for a slight shimmering, as if someone had stretched plastic across the walls. Bill seemed a bit resentful of the intrusion, but he nodded to them in greeting even so, arms crossed over his chest.
“I don’t know how the hell I did it, Catfish,” he growled to Fuller, “but she’s ready to go and it ain’t even dusk yet.”
“You always do it, Bill,” Fuller assured him in what sounded like a practiced lie. “You’re the best and everyone knows it.”
If it was a lie, it was one Bill was ready to believe, because his beard expanded with a smile.
“All right, all right, I guess Catfish wants me to show you my parlor trick.” Bill had a control sleeve wrapped around his left wrist and he tapped a sequence into it with practiced swiftness. Something shimmered inside the car for just a moment and then it was empty again.
Nate frowned.
“Sorry,” he said, “was something supposed to happen?”
“Just watch, son,” Bill said, grinning as he pulled himself into the car…and disappeared.
“Holy shit,” Barron murmured.
Bubba Brooks blinked, staring down at the roach still smoking in his hand.
“Okay,” Catalina admitted, “that’s pretty damned impressive.”
“Isn’t it?” Bill stepped back out to the front of the car, hanging off the handle built into the door, as casual as if he hadn’t just popped out of thin air. “I gotta admit, I wish I’d invented this shit myself, but I did at least come up with a brand-new use for it.”
“What about from the top?” Barron wondered, gesturing at the open roof of the car. “I know it’s gotta be open to fit our mechs in, but what if the checkpoint looks in from the top of the car?”
“Feel free to take a look,” Bill invited him, motioning to the ladder beside the open door of the car.
He stepped back through the door, fading into nothingness again, nothing visible but the bare interior of the car, not even a shadow. Barron shook his head in disbelief and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder, pulling himself up the side of the railroad car. Curiosity burned in Nate’s gut and he scrambled up behind Barron, throwing a knee up on the edge of the cut-away roof, the rough, rusty metal of the old car grinding into his skin through the fabric of his flight suit.
The soles of his combat boots scraped against the centimeters of thin metal lining the open roof and he looked down…and saw nothing but the stained and dirt-strewn floor.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Barron said.
“Most likely,” Catalina commented dryly from below them. “I assume that means it works from up there, too?”
Nate bent down, steadying himself with one hand on the ledge of the opening, then reached into the emptiness as far in as he could without pitching over the side. A dozen or so centimeters in, he thought he caught a slight shimmering in the air around his hand, but it was something that would have been hard to spot in bright sunlight, and he could still see his own hand.
“If someone poked into the car with a long stick,” he ventured, “it might cause a problem, but if it’s purely a visual inspection, I think we’ll be fine. And if the mechs are powered down, they won’t show up much on thermal.”
“Remember, though,” Bill’s voice came up through the illusion, eerie and spectral and disembodied, “this is a parlor trick, nothing more. Unless you want to wind up dead, or in a military prison, you gotta keep the guys at the checkpoints from sticking their noses into the cars with your mechs.” He stepped out, shimmering into existence. “And that means bribes, so I hope you guys either brought money, or gold or something good for greasing palms.”
Nate cringed, realizing that not only had he not thought to bring money, he didn’t even have anything worth enough to bribe anyone, not counting his Hellfires.
“Don’t y’all worry none,” Bubba assured them, waving the concern away. “Die Valkyrie has y’all covered.”
“Why?” Barron wondered, eyes narrowing with what Nate suspected was avarice. “What’d you bring?”
Shit, if anyone should have enough contraband laying around for a good bribe, it should be you, Conrad.
Bubba Brooks smiled broadly, holding up the stubby roach.
“Why, ten kilos of the best ganga east of the Mississippi! Unless we run into some Mormons, I think we gonna give those boys at the checkpoints the best party they’ve had in years!”
“Oh, good,” Catalina said, cocking an eyebrow at the shaggy, blond-bearded commander of Die Valkyrie. “For a second, I was worried it might be something legal.”
“It’s a bribe, darlin’,” Bubba said, winking at her. “If it was legal before you bribed someone with it, well, it sure as hell ain’t afterward.”
Nate
climbed down the ladder, taking care to touch down gently, without jumping. Now wasn’t the time to sprain a knee, not as fragile as his joints were. Barron leapt adroitly to the ground from halfway up the ladder as if showing off.
“Nathan,” Svetlana said, walking up to him, the keys to the truck dangling from her hand, “where should I pull the truck for you to unload it?”
“Hey, isn’t that the FSB spy I talked to before?” Barron demanded. “What’s she doing here?”
“You brought a fucking Russian agent here?” Bill shouted, jumping out of the car and pulling an ancient 1911-style .45 from his belt and pointing it between Svetlana’s eyes. “I knew this was a fucking setup!”
“Calm down, Bill,” James Fuller said, coming up from behind them. “Think, man. I already told you about her, how she’s on our side. She’s a defector, remember?”
“The damned Russians pull that shit all the time, claiming to be defectors!” Bill insisted, not lowering the gun. “It’s a trick just to get someone on the inside! How do we know she ain’t a double-agent?”
“Because she was supposed to kill me,” Nate said, trying to keep his voice calm. His instinct was to step in front of the man, between Svetlana and the gun, but he sensed that would be a mistake, that it would only drive this Wild Bill character into firing quicker. “Instead, she helped me to escape, even though her own Spetsnaz operators were trying to kill us. She’s on our side, Bill. You have my word.”
Bill’s nose wrinkled up in distaste, as if he’d smelled something rotten, but he let the gun roll back into his hand, then shoved it back in his belt negligently.
“All right, boy, but if she betrays us, I’ll put a bullet in you before they kill me.”
Nate sighed, running a hand through his hair.
“You’ll have to take a fucking number.”
Chapter Fifteen
Robert Franklin didn’t look up from his computer screen when the knock came on the door. He knew who it was, and he knew what the man had to say. If the news had been bad, it wouldn’t have been one man knocking, it would have been a military police SWAT team breaching the door of the guest quarters.
“Get that, will you, Nathan?” he murmured, absorbed in the CAD design for the new mech he’d been working on for the past few weeks.
This machine would be revolutionary, he was convinced, with a larger, more powerful reactor and twin MagnetoHydroDynamic turbines. It was a monster, fifteen meters tall and massing twenty-five metric tons, a good portion of that the new boron honeycomb armor he’d developed together with a specialist he’d contacted in Prague. But the crown jewel of the new mech was the laser weapon. He’d experimented with lasers on his earlier designs, first as anti-missile defense systems, but the problem had always been the fragile optics, and that area of research had been outside his own specialties, so he’d simply side-stepped the problem and gone with more conventional munitions.
The contacts he’d established in the Russian research community during his years on their payroll had paid off, though. The improved focusing crystals the Russians had developed made the weapon practical, if expensive.
Money won’t be an issue, soon.
It had too often been a problem in the past, which was but one reason why this plan had taken so long to come to fruition. The sort of work he’d done for the Russians and, later, for various crime families before finally going back to the US government, had been lucrative. But lucrative for an independent businessman and lucrative for a national government were two different scales. The laser was going to be expensive on a government scale, but if this visitor was here to tell him what he expected…
“It’s General Point, sir,” Nathan told him, stepping back into the main room of the suite, with the uniformed, middle-aged man trailing him, hat in hand.
Appropriately.
“It’s done,” Point said, somber as a judge passing down a sentence. “She died in seconds.”
“I know it’s done,” Franklin said, impatient with the stuffy, boring Army officer. “After all, it was my man that pulled the trigger.”
Nathan snorted an appreciative laugh, going back to the sofa, where he had his dart gun disassembled for cleaning. He was still wearing the black fatigues he’d used to sneak out into the garden, though he had washed off the greasepaint.
“The important question,” Franklin went on, spearing Sam Point with a glare, “is did they buy it?”
The poison should have been untraceable, but the best laid plans and all that…
“The medical staff confirmed it was a heart attack,” Point assured him. “I was giving her CPR when they found us, just to make it look good.” He shrugged, still frowning with that hang-dog look. “Her family had a history of heart trouble. Genetic defects. I know the medical examiner, he won’t report anything different.”
“What about the Vice President?” Franklin demanded. Burnside was more flexible morally than Madsen, but cultivating that relationship to its fullest would take time they didn’t have. “Is he safely out of the way?”
“Can I have a drink?” Point asked. His head was down, face sagging.
Oh, good God, is he going to cry?
“Nathan, if you wouldn’t mind,” Franklin said, gesturing to the small bar in the corner of the room. He hadn’t touched it until now. He’d lost interest in alcohol, preferring the intoxication of power…and revenge.
Nathan scowled at being interrupted again, but took the time to cover the disassembled air gun with a towel before leaving it and pouring the general a large glass of what looked like scotch.
“Ice?” Nathan asked, raising an eyebrow.
Point nodded and the dupe sighed, pulling three cubes from the small, chilled bucket beside the bottles of liquor. Nathan handed him the glass with a shaking hand and downed half of it before he could speak again.
“I loved her, you know,” he said.
Franklin fought back a sigh of annoyance, knowing he still needed the man. It would have been so gratifying to simply have Nathan kill him.
“I appreciate the depth of your commitment to the cause, General Point,” he said, instead. “I know how hard this was for you, but sacrifices had to be made and you, yourself said you wouldn’t be able to convince President Madsen to work with us.”
“It had to be done,” Point agreed, taking a smaller, slower sip of scotch. “I know that. There’s more at stake here than one life.”
Nathan was behind the man and Franklin could see the dupe rolling his eyes. Perhaps, he thought, he’d had the technicians put a bit too much of the cynic into the new Nathan’s memories. He still needed this new crop of dupes to have personal loyalty to him, which required some degree of sentimentality.
“There is, indeed,” he agreed with Point. “Now, as I was asking, General, what about the Vice President?”
“Larry Burnside has been contacted and sworn in as President,” Point said, shrugging. “But he’s still in Oklahoma City, overseeing the construction of the new weapons production facility. The conference is in three days and there’s no way he can get here in time with any sort of security. He’s handed responsibility for the negotiations over to me, given me full authority to make the deal we agreed on, or to shut it down if they balk.”
“Which they will,” Franklin guaranteed him. “This whole thing has been a sham from the beginning, but between you and me, we’ll smoke these Russian bastards out.”
He offered Point a hand, shaking warmly before he ushered him to the door, slapping him on the shoulder. When the door closed behind the man, he let out a sigh of relief.
“Thank God he’s gone,” Nathan said. “The man has no spine.”
“But he was useful.” The admission was difficult. Accepting the failings of others had always been the most difficult thing for Franklin, but he’d learned it was necessary in order to build the alliances he needed for his plan. “Enough about him, he’s served his purpose.”
Franklin reluctantly saved his file and shut d
own the design program, standing and putting a hand on Nathan’s arm to get his attention.
“We have three days and everyone here will be reeling from Madsen’s death so we should have a free hand. Let’s not waste the time. I want you to go check on the duplication facility. I’m starting to get an itch between my shoulder blades and I want an update on the production schedule. They should all be waking up by tomorrow morning so we have time to get them acclimated before the operation. I want you to make sure their keeping with the timetable we set. Get back here by morning and give me a report.”
“Yes, sir, no problem.” Nathan’s lip twisted in a derisive smile. “For a bunker meant to keep the center of the US government secure, this place is as leaky as a sieve.”
“Let’s be fair, Nathan. They’re guarding against a nuclear attack by the Russians or an overland invasion by the Chinese, not an infiltration by a couple of God-fearing Americans such as ourselves.”
The laugh wouldn’t be contained, bursting out of Nathan like a cough.
“The only god you’ve ever feared is death, Bob, and you know it.”
“Perhaps,” Franklin admitted. “Yet now, I no longer even have to fear that now. What about you, Nathan, what god do you fear?”
“There’s only one thing I’ve ever been afraid of, Bob.” Nathan smiled thinly. “And that’s failure.”
Perhaps that was true of all the versions of Nathan Stout, Franklin reflected. Perhaps that was why the Prime had become so unreliable near the end, why he’d had to dispose of the man before his time was up. He’d experienced the failure he’d feared so badly and he couldn’t handle it.
Oh, well. That’s a memory no other version of Nathan Stout ever needs to share. Better for them all to think their Prime had died a hero.
Chapter Sixteen
Nate Stout pressed the heels of his hands against his temples and tried to rub away the headache, but the endless click-clack of the tracks beneath the railroad car’s wheels together with the jarring and unpredictable bumps of irregularities in the rails were unrelenting and the mid-day humidity merciless.