He was destroying a lot of precious government property, but for the moment, she was safe. She crawled to the other side and searched for Fitz. Rounds whistled all around her, coming in sporadic bursts. Lynch would open fire, then pause, then continue firing at a target she couldn’t see.
In the respite, she heard Apollo howling. She turned to look for him, but saw something else that caught her eye. The sight of the black blades made her grin.
Fitz ran like a mad man from chopper to chopper. He was yelling, waving, and moving as fast as a Variant on his new legs. But all he seemed to be accomplishing was drawing Lynch’s fire.
Davis had to do something.
She winced as she squirmed out from under the chopper; her right thigh was screaming from the pain. Pushing herself to her feet, she scanned the airfield for something to use. There were few options. With the radio still not working, she could risk waving some more, or she could find a way to signal Lynch. Both seemed like suicide.
Her eyes flitted to the cockpit of the chopper on her right. Without further thought, she opened the door and jumped inside. Lynch continued to fire at Fitz, rounds clipping the ground around him as he ran in zigzags. He was fast, but it was only a matter of time before one of them hit their mark.
And it would take only one shot.
Davis reached for the controls.
Shit. I should know how to do this.
The panel looked way more complicated than she remembered. But once she turned the bird on, all she needed was to find the damn lights.
It took her a full minute to fire the bird up. As the rotors made their first pass, she leaned down and searched for the lights. She found them and flipped them on, but nothing happened. When she glanced up, the bird was coming in for a second pass. Fitz was on the western edge of the airfield now, Apollo right behind him. They hid behind one of the Chinooks. Lynch held his fire and raked the gun back in Davis’s direction.
Her heart flipped as she stared at the red hot muzzle of the smoking gun.
Come on, Lynch, open your fucking eyes.
She flipped the lights a second and then a third time. Beams suddenly fired from the aircraft. Now if she could just remember the Morse Code she learned years ago.
Spartan 2 banked hard to the left. Lynch roved the big gun in her direction again. His green-lit helmet in the open doorway looked inhuman. It was hard to remember this man was her friend.
She continued flashing the lights while waving with her other hand. The bulky black chopper raced toward her. She closed her eyes at the last second, waiting to be torn apart. Instead of rounds slamming the windshield, a gust of cold wind rushed through the gaping holes and cracks in the glass as Spartan 2 passed overhead. The frigid air took her breath away.
Had Lynch finally spotted her?
Davis wasn’t about to take any more chances. She continued flashing the light and followed Spartan 2 as it circled for another pass.
Friendly. Friendly. Friendly.
The Blackhawk swooped back in, but this time it pulled away from her position. A fiery flash bloomed from the M240 as Lynch fired again, rounds spitting toward the east. Fitz was on the move with Apollo.
“Come on!” Davis shouted. She continued flipping the beams at Spartan 2. Fitz was running toward her now. Apollo was right by his side, his coat covered in icy, matted blood.
“Please,” Davis whispered.
Fitz didn’t bother waving. He tucked his helmet down and ran, his blades kicking up a snowy exhaust behind him. He moved like a running back, sliding to the left and then the right.
For a second Davis thought he might actually make it to her. He passed another abandoned chopper when Lynch finally got lucky.
The stream of 7.62 mm rounds tore into the troop hold of the Blackhawk, peppering the metal with melon sized holes. They punched into the engine and cockpit with fiery impacts. Her eyes widened as Fitz and Apollo vanished in the explosion.
“NO!” Davis shouted.
She slid down into the chair, beaten and broken. Lynch continued emptying the M240 before it finally rolled away. The rotors whipped up the smoke from the raging fire below.
“You stupid son of a bitch, Lynch,” Davis hissed. The Marine had followed orders blindly, unable to think for himself. But could she really blame him? When so much was at risk, what would she have done in his shoes? Davis bowed her head, her finger still flashing the lights haphazardly. She could bail from the chopper and run, but that would only delay the inevitable. She wasn’t going to make it far on her leg.
As the Blackhawk closed in, she remained in her seat, staring defiantly at her comrade. Part of her wanted to close her eyes, but instead she narrowed them at Lynch. The muzzle of the massive gun was pointing right at her.
“Do it,” Davis whispered. “Fucking get it over with.”
But instead of firing, the pilots descended onto the airfield. Grit and ice swirled through the broken windshield and slammed into Davis’s armor. She continued flashing the beams, repeating the same message.
Friendly, friendly.
The pilots put the bird down a couple hundred feet away. Davis watched, still waiting for the rounds that would shred her. She cautiously took her hand off the lights and shut the bird off. Then she opened the door of the chopper and jumped into the snow. A swirling cloud of smoke surrounded the chopper like a halo. She shielded her helmet from the gust the rotors were kicking up.
“Davis!” shouted a voice stifled by the whoosh of helicopter blades.
Marines hopped out of the Blackhawk, but this voice was coming from the east. Davis ignored Lynch and his men. They were yelling now too. She heard apologies and some other shit she didn’t want to deal with at the moment.
She turned toward the wreckage of the helicopter where she had last seen Fitz. A curtain of smoke drifted across the airfield. Tendrils of orange flickered out of gaping bullet holes in the engine hood, licking the barbecued metal.
“Help!” someone shouted.
Davis limped toward the sound.
The words came again, but this time they were strangled by pain.
A blur of dark fur made Davis stop mid-stride. She gasped when she saw it was Apollo and not a Variant. The dog was dragging Fitz by his right arm, tugging with all of his might as he pulled his handler from the smoke.
“Lynch! We need help!” Davis shouted. Despite her wounded thigh, she started running again the moment she saw Fitz.
Apollo continued dragging him clear. Fitz coughed as the dog yanked on his arm. He was trying to say something, but Davis couldn’t make it out. He’d taken in a lot of smoke.
When Fitz saw Lynch and the other Marines, the words became a lot clearer and louder.
“You assholes almost killed my dog!” There was anger in his voice, but not nearly as much as Davis would have expected. The man was a gentleman, even when people were trying to murder him.
Davis grabbed Fitz’s other arm and pulled him away from the burning wreckage. As he emerged from the smoke, she saw his smoldering blades. They were toast, burned and mangled.
“Are you hurt?” Davis asked, her eyes flitting to the rest of his body.
Fitz flipped up his mouth guard, hacking and coughing. He struggled to draw in fresh air as he slowly shook his head. “Just…my…blades.”
“Holy shit, LT!” Lynch yelled as he approached. His Marines crowded around. Sergeant Adair was there too, shoulders sagging, clearly embarrassed.
“We thought you were collaborators—” Lynch began to say.
“Save it,” Davis interrupted. “All that matters now is deploying the weapon. Take your men and Kryptonite and get inside the facility ASAP. I’ll meet you in there.”
Davis dropped to her knees, overwhelmed with emotion. Apollo nudged up beside Fitz, then sat down, still protecting his handler.
“Good boy,” Fitz said, reaching up to pet the dog.
“Don’t worry,” Davis said. She pointed to his blades. “I’ll get you another pair.”
>
Fitz grinned. “This is becoming a habit, LT.”
She patted him on the shoulder and exhaled. Then she glared at Lynch, who was still hovering over them.
“What the hell are you waiting for Marine? We have a mission to complete!” she shouted.
Garcia repeated the Lord ’s Prayer for the tenth time. He couldn’t save them.
They were all dead.
And he couldn’t do a damn thing.
The bodies of the other strike teams were everywhere. On the ceiling, the floor, on the walls. Plastered by the same glue that had bound Stevo to the sewer wall in Atlanta.
Garcia hunched down and put his hands on his head. Closing his eyes, he pressed as hard as he could on his temples. The pain felt good. It made him feel alive.
But what kind of life did he have left?
He wanted to scream, but he forced himself to snap his eyes open and respect those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
Terrified faces, frozen at the moment they were killed, stared back at him. He clenched his fists and continued slopping through the blood. The Variants hadn’t spared a single person. They had killed everyone before the attack on Spartan team.
That had given Garcia and his friends time to hold back the beasts. It was hard to stomach the loss of so many dead Marines, but Garcia would not let them die in vain.
“Rico,” he shouted. “Is Davis back yet?”
“Not yet.”
He turned back to the open doorway. The three missing cases of Kryptonite were stacked neatly outside. They were six feet long and three feet wide, but far heavier than they looked. It had taken Garcia and Rico ten minutes to drag them across the room.
Rico stood guard over the precious treasure trove, her shotgun draped across her chest armor. They had located the cases with ease. All Garcia had had to do was replay the video footage. He’d also discovered exactly what had happened in the twenty minutes before Spartan team landed.
The collaborators had waited for Wolverine Team to enter the building. It was an impressive and coordinated attack. As soon as the Marines were inside the command room, they were ambushed and their comms disabled.
Outside, the other collaborators shot a pilot in the head, then forced everyone else from Saber and Lightning to surrender. According to the video feeds, not a single Variant had been involved in the battle. Not even the Alpha. The collaborators had done all of the dirty work. But they had failed to take out Spartan team. Arriving last had probably saved them; by the time the collaborators saw them approaching the building, it was too late. The bastards never accounted for Fitz’s MK11 or Apollo. The collaborators had panicked and unleashed the Variants.
He wanted to spit on the leader's corpse, but after Fitz had shot him in the face, there wasn’t much left to spit on.
“Garcia, the LT is back!” Rico said.
Garcia said a final prayer for the fallen men and women. They deserved better than this—they should have graves in Arlington National Cemetery. Not in some classified government facility with the rotting corpses of a bunch of goddamn monsters.
But that was the grim reality of the world he lived in now.
Making the sign of the cross over his chest, Garcia returned to the chamber. Black clad armor clanked down the stairwell as Davis led a group of Marines into the room.
Lynch, Adair, and three other men carried Plum Island’s batch of Kryptonite. The crate contained enough diluted Kryptonite to cover a three hundred mile radius.
“We found the other cases, LT,” Garcia said, pointing. “What the hell took you guys so long. And where’s Fitz and Apollo?”
Davis flipped up her face guard and snorted. “Friendly fucking fire. Fitz is getting patched up as we speak.”
Garcia’s heart thumped. “Is he okay?”
“He’ll be fine,” Davis said. “Fortunately.”
Lynch looked toward the floor and whispered something Garcia couldn’t hear. It wasn’t hard to put the puzzle together. The comms were still down, and Lynch had accidentally ordered his men to fire on Davis, Fitz, and Apollo.
Garcia released his anger with a sigh. There was no time for it. They needed to finish what they started.
“Adair, Lynch, get the Kryptonite loaded into the missiles,” Davis ordered. “Garcia, Rico, follow me.”
“You got it, LT,” Adair said.
The other Marines fanned out across the room. They sidestepped around the corpses of mangled Variants, leaving bloody tracks as they continued toward the tunnels. Garcia couldn’t believe they had fought off so many of the beasts without taking a casualty. Even harder to believe was that friendly fire had nearly made it all a waste.
The fuck is happening to us? Garcia thought, watching the guys who'd almost turned Fitz and Apollo into hamburgers. They couldn't have known, though. Could they?
Lynch and Adair quickly vanished into the dark passages with the others. Garcia considered warning them about what they would see, but he held his tongue. A warning wouldn’t make it any better.
Davis stepped over the collaborator’s body draped across the platform.
“Sergeant Garcia,” she said. “C'mon up here and help me.”
He sped his walk to a run and loped up the ramp. Together they dragged the man’s body away from the computer monitors. Garcia could no longer hold back the anger he felt, and spat on the corpse.
Davis didn’t seem to notice. She continued to one of the keyboards and brought up an encryption screen. Then she typed in a series of codes. Data fired onto the monitor, numbers scrolling across. She punched in another command.
Rico leaned close to Garcia. “How many Marines we got topside? What if the Variants come back?” She was fiercely chewing her gum, and her questions were starting to annoy Garcia.
“A dozen, and Spartan 2 is back in the air,” Davis answered. She twisted slightly away from the monitor and flashed a grin toward Rico. “Don’t worry, we’re good. More reinforcements are on the way.”
Words flashed across the screen: Welcome to Earthfall. The future of modified weather warfare.
Davis’s grin widened. “We’re in.”
Garcia slung his M4 over his shoulder and stepped closer. Blueprints of the facility emerged on screen. Twenty missiles came online, the one-dimensional shapes blinking red.
“How’s it coming in there?” Davis shouted.
“Loading almost complete!” Adair yelled back.
One by one the missiles flashed blue. Ten minutes later and they were all ready to fly.
Davis brought up a second screen and punched in another code. Garcia watched, feeling oddly calm. It was hard to fathom they were about to launch a weapon that would kill all the adult Variants. He’d never thought this day would come. It made all of the losses seem like they counted for something.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, Garcia felt a smile spreading across his bruised face. He could hardly recall what smiling felt like.
“Alright,” Davis said. “This should do it.” Her finger hovered over the Enter key. Garcia watched it with wide eyes.
She looked from Rico and then to Garcia. “Congratulations, Spartans. We did it.”
Davis brought her finger down on the button. A countdown began on the wall-mounted monitors.
100
99
98….
Captain Humphrey had narrowed his eyes at Kate when she pitched her idea of equipping every soldier heading into the field with R49 grenades. She had expected that, but she never expected him to agree so quickly to the idea.
“I’ve heard of military units in Africa using something similar to the R49 with some success,” Humphrey had said. “If it works on Variants over there, it ought to work here, too.”
Now, two hours later, Kate was standing in the CIC feeling like she’d finally come up with an idea to help Beckham and his men when they returned to the field. The R49 was extremely potent. The gas could put an elephant to sleep in less than a minute.
All she could do now was watch and wait. Another weapon, one she had designed, was about to launch into the sky.
Captain Humphrey’s team was tracking the twenty missiles carrying Kryptonite as they traveled over North America. The missiles would fall apart as soon as they reached twenty thousand feet over their target zones. The diluted Kryptonite would then mix with Earthfall, the modified weather agent designed to cause massive rainfall. Rural and urban areas alike would be painted with Kryptonite as it showered to the ground.
She was so focused on the monitors that she almost jumped as a strong hand grabbed hers. She recognized the calluses and turned to face Beckham.
“Fitz and Apollo are okay,” Beckham said.
Kate kissed him on the cheek. “Thank God”
“You ready for this?”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation.
Kate massaged his rough hands with her thumb. All around them in the cramped CIC, dozens of men and women waited as Davis and her team completed their mission.
“We have a freaking countdown!” Nagle shouted. The young man stood and flashed a pearly white grin. He was so caught up in the excitement that he forgot all about military decorum.
The feed from Spartan 2 was displayed on the largest monitor at the front of the room. Everyone squeezed closer to see. The Blackhawk was hovering on the west side of a mountain. Below, an airfield with the smoking wreckage of destroyed helicopters dotted the terrain. It looked like a warzone.
“29, 28, 27,” Nagle counted from his station.
Kate clenched Beckham’s hand. The Blackhawk hovered closer as Marines exited the building. A dozen soldiers ran through the drifting smoke in the glow of moonlight. In the lead was Lieutenant Davis, and she was limping. It didn’t seem to be slowing her down much.
“19, 18, 17,” Nagle continued.
I can’t believe this is finally happening.
Kate thought she would feel something. Excitement, guilt, fear. But all she could feel was the presence of the man standing by her side. She was content with him in a way she had never felt before. With Beckham's hand on hers, Kate felt at peace.
Extinction End (Extinction Cycle Book 5) Page 29