BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  “You okay, boss?” Ramirez asked him, frowning with concern.

  The team, along with Svetlana, were all clustered in the center of the car, between the tree-trunk legs of the Hellfires secured in standing positions along the length of the container. They’d brought folding chairs along from the Coast Guard base and Nate was finding those about as uncomfortable as the cots they were notionally sleeping in.

  Fuck it. If riding in old train cars on poorly maintained tracks was fun and easy, everyone would be doing it.

  “Just a headache, Hector,” he told the younger man. Well, not exactly younger. Not if we’re going purely on physical years. Of course, if we’re going by experience, then he’s so much younger he might as well be a baby. “Don’t suppose anyone has some Vitamin I?”

  James Fuller chuckled and pulled a small, plastic bottle out of a jacket pocket, tossing it to him.

  “At my age, I don’t leave home without it.”

  “At your age,” Jenny repeated, punching him lightly on the shoulder. “When were you ever anything but a boy scout, James Lawrence Fuller?”

  Nate shook four of the 200mg Ibuprofen tablets into his hand, then shrugged and tipped out four more. It would be hell on his kidneys, but they wouldn’t be the first organ to fail. He swallowed the pills with a swig from a water bottle and handed the container back to Fuller.

  “Thanks. Now, we were discussing the procedure for the checkpoints?”

  “Well, the procedure for the security is pretty simple,” Fuller said. “They stop the train and ask for a bill of lading to show you’re taking legal goods in or have a contract to haul legal goods out. Then they do an inspection, which can be brief and painless or can involve rubber gloves and body cavity searches if you piss them off or make them suspicious.”

  “And we can’t afford no full body cavity searches,” Jenny observed, “as fun and exciting as the whole thing might sound.”

  “We have the forged papers, thanks to Barron,” Nate observed, “but they’re not backstopped, so we can’t afford to get anyone’s hackles up. That’s why I think Roach should be the one who fronts for us.”

  “Me?” Roach said, eyes narrowing in confusion. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re young and pretty,” Svetlana supplied, offering the younger woman a thin smile. “And the guards will likely be men, given the ratio of males to females in the US Army.”

  Roach eyed the Russian woman skeptically.

  “Why not you, then?” she wondered. “I’m not vain enough to not realize you’re hotter than I’ll ever be, and I assume an agent as skilled as you can hide that sexy Russian accent whenever you want.”

  “You bet your cute little ass I can, girl,” Svetlana assured her, abruptly affecting a quite convincing Southern accent. “But I can’t hide my trashy side. It’s too deeply ingrained. You’re wholesome, the girl next door they used to call it. You seem straight-arrow and by the book. I’d make them suspicious, but you’ll fit right in with a bunch of soldiers, particularly men who’ve been isolated on some security checkpoint in the middle of Bumfuck Egypt for weeks or months.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Jenny Armstrong admitted. “As long as you think you can keep your head and not get all squirrely.”

  “When the fuck have I ever been squirrelly?” Roach demanded.

  “You never have since I’ve known you,” Nate assured her. “Which is why I chose you to be the one to talk to the guards at the checkpoint, because any of the rest of us would either fuck it up or make them suspicious.”

  “Even you?” she said, cocking an eyebrow, her manner challenging.

  She still doesn’t completely trust me after finding out I didn’t tell her I was a dupe.

  “Svet’s right,” he admitted. “It doesn’t hurt that you’re female and cute.” He raised his hands as if warding off an expected attack. “I know, it’s not fair and it’s not right, but that’s just the way it is, and I’d rather pull off the job than be enlightened about it and get our asses kicked.” He grinned. “Unless you’d rather let Catalina do it.”

  “Sweet Jesus no,” James Fuller blurted. “That woman would be trying to drop everyone for pushups. Which might work or might just piss them off.”

  “Besides,” Jenny interjected, “she doesn’t strike me as much of a liar.”

  “And I do?” Roach asked her, frowning.

  Jenny sniffed, but said nothing, and Nate was left wondering if he was missing something.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “if they do get suspicious, we’ve got that crate of T-rations that Conrad scrounged up, or, if that’s not enough….” He shrugged. “I guess we always have Bubba’s grass to offer them.”

  “That’s the checkpoints,” Jenny said, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket. “But what about when the rubber meets the road. What the hell are we going to do once we actually get to Colorado? It’s not like we can just ride up there and tell everyone we’re there to save them.”

  “We’re going to have to send scouts into the town at Cheyenne Mountain,” James suggested. “Dismounts, in civilian clothes. Get a lay of the land.”

  “Sure,” Jenny allowed, “but that doesn’t get us into the Capitol Complex. We ain’t getting under that mountain without some backstopped ID, and I don’t even see your buddy Conrad Barron finding a way to get that for us.”

  “There is a possibility,” Svetlana suggested.

  Nate looked over to her, motioning invitation.

  “Spit it out, sugar,” Jenny encouraged her. “Even if it is the only thing you’ve ever spit out in your life.” The last came in a mumble under her breath and Nate glared at her. Svetlana ignored the barb and pointed at him.

  “You,” she said. “You could get in.”

  “How the hell could I get in?” he asked, shaking his head. “I’ve never set foot in the place, and the last military ID I had belonged to a version of me who died ten years ago.”

  “Robert would not have gone into the heart of his enemy alone,” Svetlana reminded him. “He is not a man who does his own dirty-work. He hasn’t been for some time.”

  “Oh, shit,” Ramirez muttered, eyes going wide. “You mean, he’s going to have Nate clones with him?”

  “I assume just one,” Svetlana said dryly, “unless he wants to explain how his assistants are all identical.”

  “That is an idea,” James said, shaking a finger at her. “It might just work, if we can get him inside.”

  “Look, Franklin has to have a plan to take on the US forces and the Russians,” Nate tried to drag the conversation back to the plan. “He’s not bringing all those copies of me along for nothing. But I still can’t figure out how he plans to get them past the security at Cheyenne Mountain. It’s one thing to slip him and one dupe of me into the underground capitol, but it’s another to get a few squadrons of mechs into it, and I don’t see any other way he could take the Army down.”

  “He may not need to,” Svetlana warned him. “This is Robert Franklin we’re speaking of. He has the soul of a Spanish conquistador or a Roman emperor. He specializes in turning his enemies against each other. I am as sure of this as I am of my mother’s name that he has an inside man at Cheyenne Mountain. Someone who has managed to bring him into the western Capitol, close to your President. God knows what his plan is, or maybe the Devil does, but he has one, and I don’t believe it involves having to fight his way into Cheyenne Mountain. He is already there.”

  “Bob was always an arms dealer at heart,” Nate mused. “He had the best designs, which was the only reason the brass put up with him. I can see him bringing in his own mechs as part of a deal. That would mean he just has to find a way to smuggle in his own pilots.”

  “An army of Nates.” Ramirez chuckled as if he found the idea hilarious. “An army of evil Nates,” he corrected himself, then laughed again, louder.

  “I’m glad you find the whole thing so amusing, Mule,” Nate ground out. “For some reason, I don’t seem to be able to
laugh at it.”

  “I’m sorry, boss,” Ramirez said, shrugging. “But the whole thing is so damned weird. Why not just hire some mercenaries to fly his mechs? Why you?”

  “Because mercenaries fight for money,” Svetlana put in. She raised a hand as Roach bristled and seemed ready to snap at her. “Mercenaries willing to betray their own country fight for money,” she clarified. “And Robert does not trust anyone completely who fights for money alone. If they fight for money, what would they do once theirs is the only military force around?”

  “Turn on him and take over,” Jenny presumed.

  “Exactly. He wants men who fight out of personal loyalty, even if he has to create them from whole cloth. Plus, their lifespan is limited, so no one of them would ever have any reason to want power.”

  “So,” Roach said, drawing the threads together, “you think he’ll bring in his own pilots to use mechs he sold the US, have them take over inside Cheyenne Mountain, then when the Russian delegation arrives, he’ll wipe them out? That’s his plan?”

  “Sounds likely,” James Fuller said, shrugging. “He’ll take out the heads of both governments, then likely have his allies installed in their place.”

  “That wouldn’t work with ours, though, would it?” Ramirez asked. “I mean, don’t we have like a line of succession from the President to the Vice President and on down? Is he gonna take out the VP too?”

  “That chain of succession won’t mean much when he has the production facilities and the time to build his own army of mechs,” Nate pointed out, “along with an army of dupes to run them. Maybe the Army as a whole has more troops than him, but they’re scattered all around the mid-west. And I’d bet he probably has connections at some of the bases. This is an end run around the Senate in Kansas. They’ll be sitting in their bunkers there, wondering what the hell happened while Bob runs the damned country.”

  “Unless we stop him,” Roach pointed out.

  “Unless we stop him,” Nate agreed.

  A high-pitched squealing echoed through the car and Nate’s headache returned with a vengeance just before his chair began to topple backwards and he had to hop out of it and sink into a deep martial arts stance to keep his balance. Ramirez wasn’t as lucky or as graceful, going down in a heap and a pained cry, while Svetlana wound up anding catlike on her feet and the others fell to their knees, looking around in confusion.

  “Speaking of stopping,” Jenny said, almost yelling to be heard over the shrieking of the train’s brakes.

  Nate checked his watch, frowning in confusion.

  “This isn’t a scheduled stop,” he said. “Where the hell are we, anyhow?”

  “I can tell you where we’re not,” James said in a definitive tone. “We’re not at the fucking Mississippi River.”

  “Hey Stout, you there? Over.”

  Nate clawed at his belt for the compact two-way radio Bill had given him at the beginning of the trip.

  “This is Stout,” he replied, remembering to hit the key to transmit. “Why are we stopping? Over.”

  “We got trouble,” Bill told him. “You’d best get up here. And don’t come without some friends. Because this ain’t the kind of trouble we can talk our way past.”

  The Broken Arrow Mercenary Force crew exchanged a glance, worry and fear and even some eagerness reflecting in their faces.

  “Finally,” Jenny sighed. “An excuse to get out of this fucking tin can. Let me at ‘em.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nate blinked in the cloudless wash of afternoon sun, shielding his eyes and trying to see down the tracks. The flags were obvious, standing out in flashes of orange and yellow, probably repurposed road safety vests, but it almost seemed as if they were floating three or four meter over the track ahead at first. Then his eyes adjusted to the brightness and he noticed the flags were at a road crossing. It was hard to tell the difference where they were. The land was flat around the tracks, though he could see some shadowed hills in the distance, and the trees were of a sameness as everywhere else on their trip.

  The dark shape holding up the flags began to resolve itself, slowly at first and then with startling clarity as his brain gained perspective on the optical input. There was a semi-trailer pulled across the tracks at the crossing, a flatbed but not an empty one. The train might well have been able to crash through an empty one without stopping.

  This one was full of stripped logs, each as long as a power pole, stacked high and strapped down. Nate didn’t have to be a train engineer to know that hitting the trailer at full speed would have derailed them quite violently. And what happened after they derailed wouldn’t have been any more pleasant.

  The pickup trucks were the next detail to resolve itself in his sun-bleached vision. Technicals, they were called, pickups with a pintle-mounted heavy machine gun in the back, mobile and cheap and very effective, even in the hands of an untrained militia. They waited at the intersection, not quite a kilometer down the tracks, too far away for Nate to make out faces, but he could see the flags. It had been quite a while since he’d seen a Confederate battle flag.

  No, you’ve never seen one. But someone did, maybe the Prime.

  He wondered if they were actually flying it for some racial or philosophical reason or if the flag had just come with the truck.

  Bill was waiting for him up in the engine, hanging off the railing of the rear platform, his old .45 in his right hand, a scowl twisting his beard.

  “Did I tell you to come up here alone, Stout?” he demanded. “Because I could have sworn the last fucking thing I said was, don’t come up without some friends.”

  “Who are these guys?” Nate asked him, ignoring the complaint. He pulled himself up on the platform, swinging the M37 carbine off his shoulder. “What do they want?”

  “They’re the fucking eastern Kentucky Train Appreciation Society,” Bill said, spitting a stream of tobacco off the side of the locomotive. “Can’t you tell by their ‘Welcome to fucking Eastern Kentucky’ flag?” His scowl deepened. “How the fuck would I know? But they’re blocking the fucking tracks and they got guns. I thought maybe you military types would want to be consulted before I put this fucking train in reverse.”

  “You think they’re going to try to talk to us?” Nate wondered.

  “I’d imagine so, if they’re shaking us down, which they are.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Conrad Barron asked, climbing down from the next car over and jumping across the connection between it and the locomotive.

  He finally looked as sweaty and dirty as the rest of them after so many hours cooped up in a rail car, which offered some satisfaction to Nate. Catalina, somehow, still looked cool and perfect and graceful as she loped over the top of the car just a few seconds behind him. Nate waited and watched behind her for a moment, frowning when he saw nothing.

  “No one coming from Die Valkyrie?” he wondered.

  “From the smell back there,” Catalina gestured backwards with a thumb, “they may be too busy smoking away most of the bribe they brought to care about this little interruption.” Her eyes narrowed as she peered down the track. “Bandits? Hijackers?”

  “They’re not the Welcome Wagon,” Nate said, shrugging.

  Catalina and Barron both frowned at him, uncomprehending.

  “Sorry,” he said, waving it off. “Before your time.”

  “Oh, look,” Catalina said, “they’re sending someone to give us their demands. How civilized of them.”

  Nate squinted against the sun, saw someone heading down the line of an old barbwire fence just to the side of the tracks, clouds of dust billowing around their four-wheeled ATV. They were even wearing a helmet.

  Catalina glanced aside at Barron. “So, Conrad, do you think that log trailer is a one-Hellfire job or two?”

  Barron shrugged.

  “Two, if you want to knock it over and drag it off the tracks. One if you push the semi-tractor from the front, maybe.”

  “Should we use the
mechs?” Nate wondered, frowning.

  “What?” Barron snapped. “You saving them for a special occasion?”

  “Yes, we are,” Catalina reminded him, then turned her attention back to Nate. “You’re worried that word will get out of mechs being on this train.”

  “If the checkpoints know we’re coming, we’re fucked,” Nate agreed.

  “Dead men tell no tales,” Barron suggested, grinning, a dark glint to his eye.

  Nate looked at him askance.

  “Seriously? You just want to murder the lot of them? Hunt down each and every one?”

  “They’re fucking bandits,” Barron said with a snort, waving a hand in a dismissive gesture. “We’d be doing the world a favor.”

  “They’re bandits?” Catalina cocked her head to the side. “And what the hell are you, Conrad?”

  Barron glared at her, squaring off as if ready for a fight.

  “Just because I might misappropriate some government funds now and then doesn’t mean I’m the moral equivalent of a bunch of fucking train robbers, Catalina.”

  “Children,” Bill drawled, pointing out at the approaching ATV using his 1911 with casual negligence that made Nate cringe. “Let’s not be rude, we got a guest.”

  Nate brought his M37 to his shoulder, thumb resting on the safety, while the others held handguns at low ready, but the ATV rider didn’t seem to notice, or else pretended not to. The four-wheeler had seen better days, the pieces of it that weren’t missing outright mismatched and rusted. The engine chugged in an irregular rhythm, shaking and rattling of its own accord before the worn suspension system even came into contact with the uneven ground to add to the vibration.

  “Even if we could agree to kill every single one of them,” Nate growled aside at Barron, “we can’t know they don’t have people in the woods or even drones in the air recording us.”

  “And what’s your solution, Nathan? You want to wade into them with pistols and a couple carbines and have a shootout?”