*
Angie Vaughn locked and loaded her assault rifle, holding it as though it were her own newborn—at least, how most people would treat a newborn. Speculation was that if she had spawned, the first baby would be sweet and adorable, especially after Vaughn had turned it into some kind of dessert.
She leaned back against the bulkhead of the airplane and smiled to herself, amused at where they were heading. Senator Kirk had called it his “summer place”; other people would have called it a fortress. Every avenue of entry was an automatic kill zone. The main entrance was a bottleneck. Anderson would face the full and utter devastating power of six different units, all of them eager to be done with their mutual goal—the takeover of the Mercenary's Guild.
Vaughn ground herself slightly against the seat, enjoying the vibrations of the plane. It was good to enjoy one's work. Pity she might not have a chance to kill Mandy personally.
*
Kevin looked around his hotel suite with a last glance. He was checking out...he just hoped it wouldn't be permanently. “Hey, Mandy, got every-thing?”
“Think so,” came her voice from the far end of the suite. “I didn't bring much. Ready?”
“Yeah.” He glanced in the direction of the skylight. “I just need to grab the cla—”
At that point, the skylight crashed in. “Never mind.”
“Lt. Anderson,” an amplified voice boomed through the apartment. “We are Iron Men. You can't escape. Come with us, we'll let you live. Surrender Mandy—”
One of the first things Anderson had done upon getting the hotel room was to make some modifications to the furnishings. The most important modifications were the Claymore mines. The six in the sunroom had been focused on one kill zone, and they all went off at once.
Obviously, they didn't do a sweep of the room before they crashed in. Careless, really.
Kevin swept up his gun and casually checked the chamber, then rounded the corner of his bedroom, making straight for the sunroom, weapon raised … And both armor plated men, in full powered armor, stood there, untouched save for the scorch marks. This could be bad.
They looked down at their submachine guns—ruined by the blast—and tossed them aside. Both of them charged straight at Kevin. One grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall. The other ignored him completely and swept past to the rest of the apartment.
“Find Mandy,” the first one said, holding Kevin.
Kevin glared at the blank armor plate where the face should be. His eyes quickly scanned the entire suit of armor for a weakness. And then he smiled. “You took the brunt of the damage from the Claymores, didn't you?”
“How do you figure?” asked the Merc in the powered armor.
“I suspect some of your systems might be offline.”
The Mercenary didn't even feel his handgun slide out from his hip holster, and didn't know he was in danger until Mandy drove the muzzle into his helmet and fired. A neat little hole appeared in the side of the helmet, and the head snapped to one side. Without the impetus from the Mercenary's hand, the armored fist let go, and Kevin dropped to the ground. Mandy grabbed him by the shirtfront and flung him to one side, leaping after him.
A bright light appeared out of the hole in the armored helmet. An instant later, the entire body exploded into a ball of white-hot fire eight feet wide. It vanished in the blink of an eye, leaving a perfectly symmetrical hole in the floor, the wall and the ceiling.
Kevin looked up. “What was that?”
“Remember those bullets I told you about?” Mandy asked. “That was one. He set the bullets for time delay, since we're in too-close-quarters. Think of it as an anti-personnel, micro-nuclear explosion.”
“Hands up!” came an amplified voice from down the apartment.
Kevin looked up at the other Iron Man, moving towards them with his pistol drawn. Without thinking, he pushed Mandy away from him and he broke into a roll, away from her. The Merc blinked, unsure of which one had his comrade's pistol, and which one wasn't a threat. He fired one bullet midpoint between them, and then leapt to one side, crashing through the wall.
Both drew handguns and fired as one. The depleted uranium round penetrated the wall, following the Mercenary's leap, and exploded a moment later, ripping out the wall, and taking the Mercenary with it.... Only an arm was left behind, the hand clutching a second pistol.
Mandy grunted. “Gotta go. They had to come by helicopter.”
“Don't worry. Let the helicopter follow us into the subway.”
Chapter 15: How many of them can we make die?
April 15th, 2093
The state of Cuba was ninety miles off the coast of Miami, connected by one of the longest bridges in America. Annexed after the April Fool's War of 2090, Cuba had been completely leaderless after the nuclear fallout. The Castro family members in power at the time still had yet to be found. Shortly thereafter, Cubans had decided to skip the entire state building process and petitioned the US to become part of the Union. As they had lost a good deal of real estate in the US, the Congress adopted the orphaned country in a few weeks. Surprisingly, the administration still didn't carry Florida that election year. Due to bureaucratic inertia, the United States Marine base in Guantanamo Bay had still not been dismantled.
On this island, on the other end from the marine base, was the castle of the Castro family, built in the mid-2040s. Now, in 2093, it had become the summer home of Senator Francis Kirk, Intelligence Czar, and nominal leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Inside the castle were all five hundred of Commander Angie Vaughn's Iron Men. Each was armed with anti-personnel weapons that could take on armored cavalry. The surrounding area was rigged with motion, infrared, ultraviolet, and heartbeat sensors, attuned to pick up any human presence. Half the mercenaries were awake at any one time, patrolling the walls of the castle, ready for anything. The other half was in the barracks, artificially put into a deep sleep that prevented them from waking for anything short of an alarm. Once the alarm sounded, they would be instantly awake, grab their weapons from the floor, and rush into their fully secured, preprogrammed positions. If no alarm sounded, they would be automatically awakened for their shift. They could not be caught off guard. Surprise was not possible.
Nothing approaching from land or sea could penetrate their defenses. Mandy could not penetrate these defenses. Kevin could not penetrate them. They could not be dug under—seismic monitors would see to that. And there was no way that anything with a radar signature the size of a dinner plate could get past the sensors.
Which is why, on the night of the new moon, when the sky was overcast and the only illumination was from the castle below, a small figure swooped in. It was swathed in black, all but invisible against the night sky. It could have easily been picked out had someone been looking up with any of visual scanners, but Anderson had no way to pick up an aerial assault vehicle, so why look up?
However, what no one had taken into consideration was a simple, low-tech base-jumping suit. Made for recreation, all the wearer had to do was slide on the jumpsuit with gliding wings. In the case of Anderson, all he had to do was to get one made of the same stealth material from which B1 bombers were made. It turned Kevin into a radar target roughly the size of a pin.
He started from the skyscraper construction site a little over a mile away. Security on the construction site wasn't hard to penetrate, and all he had to do was jump from the top floor. After that, he just needed to hold onto his backpack for the flight. He kept his eyes on the target the entire time—the window to one tower. He knew he would arrive a few minutes after shift change, if Mandy's math were correct. All of the “Iron Men” would be asleep in their beds.
*
The alarms went off five hours into the evening shift, at two in the morning.
Shots had been fired at the main gate. Seven seconds later, every single soldier moved towards battle stations, even those who had been asleep.
When they were all out of their racks,
Kevin Anderson slid out from under one of the beds in the barracks, and then took out his cellular phone.
The Mercenaries moved in an unrelenting wave. Anyone who worked on the premises and got in the way was trampled to death—three servants died in just that fashion.
When they were all along the wall, staring out into the night, muzzle flashes went off left, right and center. A quick thermal scan revealed several portable machine gun turrets. But those weren't energy weapons, so whoever had set them up was operating on a budget.
However, someone had popped his head out from behind the castle walls and received an armor piercing round through the eye—the thinnest part of the powered armor.
This upgraded them from distraction to actual threat.
From her position in the central command booth, standing right next to Francis Kirk, Vaughn's eyes narrowed. “This is intolerable. Everyone, set your weapons for automatic, and saturate the turrets. Then we'll move on to more important things.”
Acknowledgment lights flashed on the main console, and on the inside of each faceplate a digital countdown started. Each of the Iron Men would lock and load their depleted uranium explosive rounds, aim and fire the moment the countdown reached zero.
Back in the control center, Kirk looked at Vaughn. “Why would they bother with turrets? It can't be much of a distraction.”
She shook her head. “If they know the level of force deployed against them, they'd want to throw as much at us in a frontal attack as possible. In fact, I suspect that soon—”
The control room vibrated with the sound of an explosion, muted and muffled by the dense stone walls. “They've targeted the landmines outside, using at least one turret as a sapper.”
“Is it possible that Anderson will try to penetrate from the rear?”
Vaughn looked at him with her jade, reptilian eyes, and gave him a smile that only reached one cheek. “You mean he might come up from the water? No. There are mines, riptides, and automatic fish that home in on anything that remotely resembles a human. Besides, we laced the area with enough chum to attract every shark from here to Miami. We have every avenue covered. And another avenue eliminated in precisely three...two...one...n—”
Outside, the digital clock reached zero. The Iron Men rose from their positions of cover and leveled their weapons at the ridgeline of turrets. The automatic targeting systems guided their hands to the turrets. This would be overkill, with enough firepower to vaporize a line of tanks as long as the ridgeline.
They all pulled the trigger at the same time, firing the electromagnetic field generators within each rifle, creating a field that took the bullet in the chamber and pushed it out, sliding it down the barrel of the gun until it hit something, and then it would explode.
In this case, half the bullets traveled four inches down the barrel before it impacted against an obstruction. A mercury pencil detonator had been shoved down each barrel, anchored into position by composite explosives. Kevin Anderson had slipped these detonators down the barrels of every gun of every mercenary who had been asleep in the barracks.
The mercury detonators triggered the explosives within the bullet, and the force of the bullet exploded outward—out of the barrel, down the barrel, and into the ammunition clip it had come from, triggering off all of the other bullets.
The entire wall was replaced by a great ball of white-hot fire, a flash that burned brightly for an instant; when it faded away, there was nothing left. The explosion had disintegrated the wall, and all the men and women on it.
The resulting explosion cut off Angie Vaughn once more, only this one knocked her onto her armored backside. Kirk hit the ground and rolled in an effort to avoid broken bones.
Vaughn cursed. “Their weapons exploded. Anderson's already inside.” She turned to the desk, grabbed her helmet, sliding it on as she moved towards the door. “Lock the door. He shouldn't be able to get in. I'm leaving you with enough weaponry to take Cuba if you had to. If you can't manage to stay alive before I come back, you're not worth saving.”
Kirk nodded slowly. “And what will you be out doing? Hunting Anderson?”
She shook her head, working the motors in the helmet piece. “Of course not. He'll be after you. You're the bait. My prey is out there—she's the one who set the turrets up.”
*
Kevin waited as the armored woman passed by the room he was hiding in. After waiting a minute, he took out his cell phone and hit redial. “Hi, me again. I just called like three minutes ago. You on the way? ... Didn't you hear that explosion? God in Heaven, you're useless. Fine, but if everyone here's dead when you arrive, don't blame me.”
He slid the phone closed, and casually took aim at the armored door from down the hall. He leveled his stolen assault rifle, collected from the locker room of the Iron Men, and fired one bullet, blowing the door off, and breaking apart a large part of the doorway.
“I gotta get me another one of these,” he said with a smile. He kept the weapon ready, and checked the hallway both ways before moving towards the doorway.
And then the round, metal balls bounced down the hallway.
Kevin could run fast, but he couldn't outrun the shockwave from the two grenades. The assault rifle was wrenched from his hands. The rest of the blast struck his body armor with enough force to knock him off balance. The second blast slammed him back against the wall.
When Kevin managed to clear his eyes, he looked up to see Francis Kirk casually pop fresh shells into the open breach of a double-barreled shotgun. “Hello, Lt. Anderson. I do hope you've enjoyed your little killing spree. It's about to end.”
Kevin smiled, and then coughed a little. “Yes. It is.”
Kirk smiled. “So glad we agree.” He jerked the shotgun up, locking the barrels in place.
*
“Come on out, Mandy,” Vaughn called from the middle of the road. “I know you're out here, wherever could you be?”
She looked off into the woods beyond the road. More of a jungle really, but it was the bloody tropics, after all. Technically, Mandy could have been anywhere, but Angie had tapped her systems into the sensors. She could literally see everything around for miles. The only real problem with the system was...
Vaughn's eyes settled to the discrepancies in the system—all the craters left behind by the explosions, and the mines that had gone off, and the few rounds of ammunition from Iron Men that had discharged an instant before the destruction of the entire corps.
Angie Vaughn swung around, took several long strides to the nearest hole, and pointed her gun straight into it. “Hello, Mandy love, miss me?”
The pale blue eyes stared back at her. “Yes, but my aim's improving.” She looked at the gun. “If you shoot me, you'll just vaporize any evidence against my father.”
Behind her mask, Vaughn smiled. “That's why I'm using regular ammunition, Mandy darling.”
*
“Now,” Kirk began, his shotgun pointed at Kevin's head, “I'm thinking your arms are also covered with this here body armor, so if I shoot high, you'll only just cover your pointy little head with your arms.” The muzzle of the gun dipped down and both barrels fired into Kevin's body at once, sending him sliding across the floor. Even with body armor, it hurt as though he had been worked over with sheet metal. His arms went up, covering his head.
Kirk stepped out into the hallway and breached the shotgun open, calmly sliding in the next two shells. “So, you see, boy, all I need to do until Ms. Vaughn returns is knock you a bit about the hallways, or you get tired enough that I can just finish this. Either way, I think only one of us will be walking out of here, and I'm the one on two feet.”
Kevin Anderson looked down the barrels of the shotgun without fear or worry. He had known from the beginning that as long as he made certain the last member of the committee was dead, his life or death wouldn't matter.
Time to make my sacrifice. Because I'm Winterborn, you son of a bitch.
The shotgun closed with a snap. Kevin's
breath came in ragged gasps. Hell, it hurt to breathe... “If I die, it's gonna be with my teeth in your throat.”
“I don't think you can do that without a skull to fit the teeth into,” Kirk answered conversationally, right before he fired again.
*
Mandy hadn't looked away from Vaughn, or lowered her weapon, or moved. “At least drop the pistol,” Vaughn told her. “You look ridiculous pointing it at dirt. And the only bullets that can penetrate this armor are owned almost exclusively by us.”
At that point, Mandy smiled. “I know.”
She fired one bullet. It went into the dirt of the crater wall and right beneath Angie Vaughn. It took Vaughn only a heartbeat to realize what happened, and she leapt over the crater and beyond, right before the ground erupted in a blaze of fire.
Mandy leapt out of the crater, drawing her other weapon—both confiscated from Iron Men in a hotel room—as she rounded on Vaughn. “How's that for ammunition, darling?”
Vaughn rounded on Mandy, now some sixty feet away. She growled and charged, swinging her rifle into position. The rifle's kick didn't even register against the armored shoulder of Vaughn. She fired one burst at a time as Mandy dove, rolled, sprung from side to side, but always kept coming. Mandy fired one round at a time. A bullet flew past, and would leave a large hole where part of the castle would be, or the ground, or the treeline.
Mandy dove, and then rolled to a stop, leveling both guns at her target. Vaughn automatically leapt sideways, into the air, locking onto Mandy.
Mandy pushed off her feet as Vaughn fired. Mandy bounced away, and watched Vaughn come down in an arc, towards a specific location she couldn't alter. Mandy started firing before the armor-plated Mercenary landed, pouring her remaining bullets into the landing zone. The white-hot ball of fire expanded wider and wider, welcoming Angie Vaughn into its depths as she screamed. Mandy stopped shooting and waited for the ball of fire to die down, holding on to her last two bullets. When the fire died down, the only thing that Mandy could see was a charred, broken open shell of a metal suit, still glowing red from the heat.
Codename: Winterborn (The Last Survivors Book 1) Page 17