BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  “Sounds good to me, Roach.” The man chuckled. “Nothing like a target-rich environment.”

  Roach saw another of Conrad Barron’s mechs tumble out of the sky, shrinking their huddled laager smaller still and cursed. Target-rich environments worked both ways.

  Nathan Stout Number Forty-Seven was confused and angry. Things were supposed to be simple, supposed to be easy. The troops at Cheyenne Mountain hadn’t been expecting their infiltration, hadn’t suspected a thing, and they’d reached the Hellfires with no problem. The two squadrons had gone to accompany Nathan Alpha and Robert Franklin to the Air Force Academy, while the rest of them had worked their way inward, intent on wiping out any Army personnel they could find before dismounting and taking down what remained of the civilian leadership.

  And then everything had gone to hell. Alarm klaxons had begun sounding and troops were flooding into the mech storage areas behind them before they could get turned back around to deal with them and something seemed to be happening outside the base. Now, the lot of them were standing in the forward area of the mech storage chamber, staring through their cockpits at identical copies of themselves. With our thumbs up our ass.

  “What do we do?” he asked Number One, feeling like a damned idiot doing it since they were as close to being the same person as to make no difference. Was just a couple of days with Number One in charge enough to make them separate identities, he wondered, or was the need to let someone else make the decision universal?

  “The leadership will be battening down in their shelters after that alarm,” Number One decided, sounding confident in a way Forty-Seven knew was faked. “I tied into the emergency net through the comms in this mech and we’re under attack by a whole wing of Tagans. Guess the fucking Russians decided to beat Mr. Franklin to the punch, the crafty bastards. Everyone have the modified IFF signatures loaded into their mechs?”

  A chorus of “Yes, sir,” responded. Though why we should call him “sir” I don’t fucking know.

  “Good. Then let’s go join the fun.” Again with the false bravado. Who does he think he’s fooling? “Anyone who’s not us…kill them.”

  Well hell, I could have told them that.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Robert Franklin studiously ignored the glares of the Spetsnaz special operations soldiers watching him and Nathan, ignored the levelled muzzles of their 5.45mm assault rifles, even ignored the incongruous sight of the Russian tiltrotor transports, and kept his eyes on the Air Force Academy chapel and its seventeen angular spires, still glowing white in the mid-morning sun despite the weathering and the years of neglect.

  Twelve for the twelve apostles of Jesus, five for the five Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “You know, Nathan,” he said in a casual, conversational tone as they drew further and further from the car they’d driven to the meeting, “when they built this place, it was like a temple dedicated to the future. The future of the Air Force, the US military, hell, of the whole country. It was like a bastion built to tomorrow.” He shook his head. “Now look at it.”

  “The future isn’t what it used to be,” Nathan said with a shrug. “Maybe it never was.”

  “Don’t you get all philosophical on me,” Franklin warned him. “It’s my job to the depressing, nostalgic old bastard.”

  “Oh, I’m not nostalgic,” Nathan assured him, snorting a humorless laugh. “I want the whole fucking thing to burn.”

  The exterior entrance to the chapel was surprisingly intact, the glass doors unbroken, though they were spider-webbed with cracks and chips. One of the Spetsnaz soldiers opened the door to let them in and Franklin put a self-satisfied smile on his face before he walked through.

  General Sergei Antonov hadn’t changed much since the last time Franklin had run into him, fifteen years ago in Moscow. Still the same carved wooden plank of a face, still the same bulbous red nose and unpleasant expression. If anything, the intervening years had only solidified his looks into a warning sign for all who dealt with him. How it was possible for a face that dour to achieve an even darker expression was hard to fathom, yet it did when Robert Franklin walked up the aisle towards the conference tables they’d set up. Antonov jumped up, his dress uniform rattling with enough medals to start his own military surplus store, fists clenched.

  “Franklin!” he exclaimed, his Russian accent strong even in the pronunciation of the American’s name. “What in the hell are you doing here? Where is President Madsen?”

  “Nice to see you again, too, Sergei,” Franklin said, bowing his head slightly in respect that somehow seemed mocking as well. “As for President Madsen, I’m afraid our dear Harriet was born with a genetic defect to her great heart. She passed away a couple days ago and President Burnside is unable to attend, so I was elected to be here to negotiate in their place.”

  “And whose brilliant idea was it to send you?” Antonov sneered.

  “The acting commander in chief was General Point. He made the decision.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?” Antonov’s eyes narrowed, his gaze flickering over to the Spetsnaz guards. They’d moved into the building once Franklin and Nathan had entered, and they were spreading out behind them, as if they thought the two men had anti-armor weapons concealed under their suit jackets.

  “Oh, General Point sends his regrets,” Franklin assured him. “But he wanted me to assure you that anything I say or do in this meeting will be binding for the US government.” He grinned a challenge at Antonov. “How about you, Sergei? Can you say the same thing, or are you just here because you flexed your muscles with Prime Minister Popov?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask us to sit down?” Nathan wondered. Franklin suppressed a laugh. This version of Nathan had balls, something he couldn’t say about some of the previous iterations of the man. He’d made the right choice with the memories he’d selected.

  “No, I don’t believe I am,” Antonov said. Now it was the Russian’s turn to try out his favorite evil smile, but Franklin wasn’t that impressed. “Since it’s only you, there’s no need for this whole charade. In fact, I’m gratified to see you again, because it saves me the trouble of hunting you down and pulling you out of whatever hole you’d crawled into.”

  “Sergei,” Franklin said, a stricken look on his face, his fingers going to his chest, “I’m hurt.”

  “Not yet,” Antonov ground between clenched teeth. “But you will be. Colonel Deynekin!” He glanced aside at the closest of the Spetsnaz troops. “Take these men into custody. No need to get blood on these beautifully preserved floors.”

  The Spetsnaz officer began to step forward, but Franklin ignored him.

  “I wouldn’t worry about the floors, Sergei,” he said. “If I were you, I’d be more concerned with the walls.”

  Something huge and metal and man-shaped burst through the chapel walls thirty meters behind them, just beyond the entrance hall, collapsing them in a pipe-organ clanging of iron and a spray of glass and concrete. Nathan grabbed Franklin and pulled him down below the century-old wooden pews beside the opposite wall, but Franklin pulled free of his grasp, eager to watch what happened next.

  Dust and debris billowed through the chapel, as if they tried to hide the death and destruction from sensitive eyes, but there was no disguising the ear-splitting stutter of the machine gun turrets sweeping back and forth across the Spetsnaz team. The screams and moans of the wounded rose high above even the thunderous echo of the guns, and blood ran down the marble floor in a river. Two of the special operations troops tried to run, breaking for the rear entrance, but a second Hellfire busted through the shattered remains of the wall and sprayed 6.5mm slugs after them. The bullets chewed up the pristine marble, walking a path of destruction up to the Russian soldiers before cutting them both down in a spray of red.

  Sergei Antonov was low-crawling towards them, belly pressed against the floor, one hand covering his head, the other pulling him forward. His ridiculously over decorated dress uniform soaked up the blood of his
troops and his senior officers as he snaked across the floor, but he ignored them, the look on his graven image of a face determined and fatalistic. If he was going to die, he was damned sure going to take Franklin with him.

  “Nathan,” Franklin yelled into his aid’s ear as the machine gun fire began to trail off. “Rid me of this troublesome man.”

  The dupe’s lips skinned away from his teeth in what might have passed for a smile on a wolf stalking an elk. He reached under his right pant leg and pulled out a knife from the sheath strapped to his calf. The blade was black and double-edged, and Franklin was fairly certain no version of Nathan Stout had ever killed anyone with a knife, but he was willing to give him the chance.

  Antonov saw Nathan coming and scrambled to his feet, figuring the Hellfires wouldn’t shoot with one of their own in the way. The front of the Russian’s uniform was covered in blood, though none of it was his own, drops of it splattering to the floor off the dangling ends of his medals.

  There has to be some sort of metaphor there if I think about it hard enough.

  The general, for all his legendary grit and determination, was old. This Nathan Stout was young and vigorous and swept the Russian officer to the floor with an arm bar across the throat. Antonov’s back slapped into the blood-covered marble with wet smack, sending droplets splashing in every direction. The breath went out of the heavy-set Russian in a whoosh of air, yet he still struggled with Nathan, clutching at his wrist, fighting with silent, desperate strength.

  It wasn’t enough. Nathan pressed a knee into the general’s sternum, throwing his whole weight forward against Antonov’s arms, and they gradually collapsed beneath the force of the younger man. The general said nothing as the knife entered his chest, not even managing a cry of pain. Nathan gripped the handle of the weapon with both hands and pushed it down into Antonov’s heart until the hilt came up against bone.

  Franklin knew blood had to be pumping out of the wound, but it was invisible against all the arterial red already covering both of them. The smell of it was strong and Franklin’s stomach roiled with it, bile rising in his throat. Antonov’s struggles became weaker with each second until his head tipped backwards and his hands fell to his side. Nathan waited another few seconds, his shoulders heaving as he caught his breath. The expression on his face was nearly euphoric, and Franklin wondered if the psycho killer lurked inside every version of Nathan Stout or if they’d engineered it into this one with the memories they’d chosen.

  Nathan tugged at the hilt of the knife, but it was stuck fast and he gave up on it, rising from the body, his own dress suit stained red from chest to knees. Franklin pushed himself to his feet, grabbing hold of the pew and pulling his hand away immediately as it came down on yet more of the blood spatter. He looked around for some place to wipe the mess away, then settled for shaking it off.

  The two Hellfires still stood waiting, watching over them like the sentinels of a lost civilization, while the Spetsnaz team lay at their feet, riddled with bullets. One of them moaned incoherently, tried to pull himself away by his arms, dragging useless legs behind him, and one of the Hellfires stepped forward, stamping the man into the floor beneath tons of metal. Franklin looked away, grateful he’d skipped breakfast.

  “We’ve made quite the mess of this place, haven’t we?” he said. “Almost a shame. It was beautiful, once.”

  “They had their chance and they fucked it up,” Nathan said, pulling off his dress jacket and tossing it aside, revealing the handgun holstered at his side. “Let it all burn.”

  “Sir!” the Nathan dupe inside one of the Hellfires blared at him through the mech’s external public address speakers. “We’re detecting incoming…”

  A chain of explosions shattered every intact window in the building and flame gushed through the gaps in the wall, the concussion wave knocking Franklin off his feet, bouncing his shoulder off the side of a pew with a flash of pain.

  “We’re under attack!”

  “Down!” Nate snapped, letting off the throttle of his Hellfire’s thrusters, his stomach coming up into his throat as the mech fell out of the sky.

  Pilot’s instincts, built over multiple lives and compiled with each set of memories, operated his body like a puppet, his feet tapping the control pedals for the thrusters automatically to arrest the fall only meters from the ground, fingers gently nudging the targeting reticle from a burning hulk of metal to an intact Hellfire. Two of the enemy mechs were out of the fight, and he’d been impressed by Svetlana’s competence at the controls, but he wasn’t about to let her get into an aerial dogfight with the six remaining Hellfires in Franklin’s escort. They had to get to the ground and use the available cover.

  And there was, thank God, a lot of available cover. The Russians had come to the conference in a pair of stealth tiltrotor transports, the dull brown and green of their camouflage blending in perfectly with the dead and dying grass of the lawn.

  “Get behind the planes,” he told Svetlana, touching the trigger on his steering yoke and launching another Mark-Ex before following her into the lee of one of the transports, not waiting to see whether the missile hit.

  20mm Vulcans spat streams of tracers at them, hunting through the fuselage of the transports, but these were long-range flyers, powered by the same isotope reactors used by the mechs, and the reactors put out a lot of heat even behind shielding, enough to keep the two of them from showing up on thermal sensors, enough to stop the rounds from penetrating through to the other side of the engine compartments. Enough to give him a second to think, even if the rounds ripping through the fuselage only meters away was an annoying distraction.

  “I’m going over the top to draw their fire,” Nate said. “You go around the nose of the plane and light ‘em up.”

  The plane’s nose gear collapsed as if on cue, and the front of the tiltrotor slumped forward into the dirt, cracking the frame just aft of the passenger compartment.

  “There’s six of them at least,” she said tightly. “They’ll rip you apart before I can get clear of the transport.”

  “This is my job, Svet,” he reminded her. “You wanna get out and walk, we’ll do it your way.”

  He stamped the thruster pedals and his Hellfire shot out from behind the smoking wreckage of the tiltrotor, giving him the same feeling his Prime had experienced during the first, big drop on a roller coaster. The input from the sensors crashed against him like the breakers at the beach, but decades of experience translated the raw data into knowledge.

  There were six mechs still standing, three of them down, wrecked and burning fiercely from the Mark-Ex missiles they’d launched and another buried under wreckage in the entranceway to the chapel, not destroyed but trapped and helpless. Three were still standing their ground outside the building, but the other half of their forces was already moving, trying to circle around the tail of the plane. Vulcans were still aimed at the transport, firing controlled bursts of ten rounds at a time at the plane, but he knew they’d be noticing him, knew their tactical displays would be screeching at them the way his were now.

  Instincts prioritized targets without thought, identifying the three immobile Hellfires as the biggest threat to Svetlana’s run around the nose of the plane, knowing he had to draw their fire. Targeting a missile would take too long and his Vulcan was already aimed downward. He squeezed the trigger.

  The 20mm rotary cannon screamed like a buzz saw as he walked the tracers left to right, knowing it was less effective than focusing the weapon on one target at a time but needing to distract them almost as much as destroy them. Sparks flared off metal as depleted uranium tore through armor at chest level, and the Hellfires shuddered in sympathetic response to the movements of their pilots. Before they had a chance to realign their aim upward, he was over their heads, coming down nearly on top of the mech trapped in the rubble.

  For just a moment, half a heartbeat, he could see the face of the dupe through the canopy, and then his Hellfire’s articulated left claw punche
d through the cockpit and erased the face forever.

  Was that suicide? Fratricide?

  The thought nagged at him as he turned, knowing he was safe from the three mechs heading around the tail of the plane, sure they wouldn’t fire at their own comrades to get to him, but also knowing the three machines in front of him were turning already and he wasn’t going to be able to take all three of them before one nailed him. The three of them were strung out twenty meters apart, at a slight angle outward toward the wrecked tiltrotor, too close to launch a missile and something was building up in his gut, maybe panic, maybe inspiration.

  “Into the chapel!” he yelled at Svetlana, then let his mech fall backwards before slamming his heels down into the thruster controls.

  The Hellfire blasted back through the remains of the front wall of the chapel on searing hot jets of air, flying nearly horizontal for a good thirty meters on its back before crashing into a row of wooden pews, crushing them to splinters as it scraped across the marble. He let off the jets and the Hellfire rocked to a halt just as Svetlana’s mech crashed through the wall to his left, bringing down a section of ceiling. Metal beams showered on top of her Hellfire and the mech staggered beneath the impact, and Nate felt each of the blows as if they’d rained down on his head rather than her armor.

  And then two figures moving through the clouds of dust caught his eye through the canopy of his mech, man sized but seeming tiny against the backdrop of the chapel and Svetlana’s stumbling Hellfire. He thought for a moment it was members of the Russian delegation trying to run for safety…until a gust of wind through the holes in the wall cleared the smoke long enough for him to recognize two very familiar faces.

  One was his own.

  The other was Robert Franklin.

  Nate thrashed sideways, trying to strike out at the man, but his Hellfire creaked and rocked, trapped on its back like a turtle, and by the time he kicked the mech’s legs to give it some leverage to turn over, the two men had disappeared into the smoke, heading for the back of the chapel. He wanted to scream, wanted to plow through the building after them, but Svetlana was still stumbling through the rubble, off balance and trailing sparks from where the left arm of her mech had nearly been torn off by the collapsing roof. And six enemy Hellfires waited outside, only holding their fire because their master, Robert Franklin was inside, and that wouldn’t last for long once the man got clear.