The Sector

by Kari Nichols

  As Gibson neared the entrance to the aisle, he slowed, hugging the edge. A quick glance around the corner showed a body on the ground, its head destroyed. He was wearing the uniform of a Russian soldier. Stepping up to him, Gibson looked around for Braddock.

  “Up on the second level, to your left,” Fargo whispered. Once the submarine had departed, Fargo had returned to his position near the northeast entrance. It afforded him the best view of the south wall area. He had had a perfect line of sight on the soldier attempting to finish Braddock off. Fargo’s bullet had blasted Braddock’s assailant even as the man was raising his gun to kill the wounded soldier.

  Gibson looked up at the clearing in the aisles. Climbing the steel girders, he stepped onto the second story shelf and saw the enormous pool of blood surrounding his man. Pulling his knife from his pack, he cut the straps on the vest and pulled it away from Braddock’s chest. One bullet had cut in through the side, missing the vest and slicing a hole in his abdomen.

  Gibson cut away Braddock’s t-shirt and saw that the gut wound was the only one above the waist. Slicing through his pants legs, he saw that three more bullets had made mincemeat of his upper right thigh.

  “I could use another pair of hands over here,” Gibson called out.

  Emily had just returned to Jimmy’s side. She heard Gibson’s request and offered to keep watch over Natalia and Piggy. Jimmy nodded and sprinted to the far end of the shipping warehouse. Following Fargo’s earlier instructions, Jimmy slipped into the second to last aisle and climbed the riser to the second level.

  Gibson pulled a bottle of saline from his pack. Rinsing away the surface blood, he searched for the leaks. Once Jimmy kneeled down next to Braddock, he handed over the bottle.

  “Shine your flashlight on his upper thigh.” When he’d complied, Gibson examined each of the wounds. None had nicked the artery and for that he was grateful. Braddock would have bled out before they’d reached his side. As it was, Gibson gave the man a fifty-fifty chance of survival. He had lost a lot of blood and Gibson didn’t have any extra on-hand to give him.

  “Rinse this area,” he said, gesturing toward the large hole on Braddock’s inner thigh. Once it was clean, Gibson packed it with surgical foam and wrapped gauze around it. The blood flow decreased. A smaller hole at the back of his thigh, closer to his knee, received the same treatment. When he’d bandaged the last hole in Braddock’s body, he patched into the common channel to speak to Tate.

  “Braddock is bad. Where is that air support?” Gibson demanded. “We have to get him out of here.”

  “Arriving now,” Tate’s lead pilot replied as the first of four helicopters flew inside the cavern. It flew within fifteen feet of the surface of the water, until the pilot grasped the sheer enormity of the shipping port’s size. He radioed to the remaining choppers that there was plenty of room for all of them inside.

  Intending to put down on the road leading from the tunnel, the first pilot caught a radio signal from Tate and changed direction. He flew over the ship in berth #2 and landed on the road between the truck turnaround and the cargo aisles. He had barely touched down before the copilot threw the rear door open and jumped to the ground. A portable stretcher in one hand, he raced over to where Tate was signaling him.

  Gibson had Braddock ready for transport when the copilot arrived with the stretcher. Strapping the wounded soldier to the board, they lowered him down.

  As Gibson and Jimmy were climbing down to the ground, the whole floor shuddered. The blast from the gas stations in the cavern warehouse rumbled through like a small earthquake.

  Tate checked her watch.

  01:00

  “The choppers are here! Let’s move out!” Tate yelled over the radio.

  ***

  Cisco was in rough shape. He’d taken a bullet in his right arm and had another lodged in his hip. He was down to his last few rounds. He set his gun to single shots; he had to conserve his bullets. But he knew that there were more soldiers than he had bullets for. He’d destroyed three crates, hoping for grenades. Instead he was surrounded by dozens of guns with no ammo.

  He tried to keep the crates between him and the line of soldiers that moved ever closer to his position. He was nearing the far north end and soon he would run out of cover. He could hear the civilian workers muttering and crying close by. If provoked, they could overwhelm him by sheer numbers.

  Tank crept behind the line of soldiers as they flowed in between the crates. With their numbers broken up a little, he opened fire on the men nearest him. He dropped three before he ducked behind an immobile forklift. A bullet skated across his arm, burning a line along the outside of his shoulder. Turning, Tank saw one of the truck drivers hunkered down next to his truck, a pistol gripped in both hands. Tank edged around the far side of the forklift. He didn’t have a good line of sight on the trucker.

  Eugene and Samuelson stepped around a fallen pile of crates and came face to face with the civilians. Ignoring them, the soldiers moved on. The line of soldiers they had been firing on had moved too far into the crates. They were about to flush Cisco out into the open. Moving faster, they joined up with Tank.

  The Russians had their backs covered. One man faced south and walked backward, while the other faced north and walked forward. Heavily armed, they lobbed grenades into the crates, heedless of their own people close by. Shrapnel cut through flesh. The mutterings of the civilians was reduced to wailing as several people absorbed the brunt of the grenade explosions.

  The Russian’s body armor protected the trunk of the body, so the men aimed for the legs. Bullets ripped through knees and tore large holes in their thighs. With Warp’s and Druid’s appearance, the Sector men outnumbered the remaining Russian soldiers. Cisco fired from the front, still conserving his bullets. The last Russian fell just as Tate’s words came over their radio.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Tank ordered. He ran over to the trucks, forgetting about the man with the pistol. He saw the movement and dropped straight to the ground.

  Cisco fired, using his last bullet. The bullet slammed through the trucker’s head. Druid stepped up beside him and handed him a fresh clip. “Where were you five minutes ago?” Cisco asked, slamming the clip into his rifle. He winced at the movement of his wounded arm.

  “Got a little too close to that fireball at the gas station,” Druid replied, pointing to the melted patches on the back of his dry suit. Walking was awkward. Each step sent fire racing up his legs.

  “Shit, that’s nothing,” Cisco said. “I’ve got a bullet lodged in my hip. I’ll probably need a damn hip replacement and I’m not even thirty!” He and Druid limped their way toward the north tunnel.

  Tank raced up to the cab of the truck at the front of the line. Pulling the door open, he dragged the body of the driver to the ground and gained the seat. Swinging the truck around in a tight u-turn so that he was facing the entrance to the tunnel, Tank blew the air horn in two short bursts and yelled, “All aboard!”

  Eugene and Samuelson assisted Cisco onto the truck. Druid rolled onto the back of the truck under his own steam. He lay flat on his stomach. Warp was the last to board. He sat near the rear of the flatbed, guarding their back.

  “Go!” Warp called out.

  Tank raced the truck through her gears. He was halfway through the tunnel when the timer on Godin’s bomb reached zero. The explosion ripped through the walls of the cavern as though they were made of paper. Building in strength, the concussive force of the blast destroyed the smaller warehouse. Guns melted from the heat. The roof of the cavern warehouse caved in, bringing the weight of the island with it. The collapse chased Tank’s truck through the tunnel, quickly gaining on them.

  Tank watched the approaching cave in through his rearview mirror. He cleared the far end of the tunnel without slowing for the turn. He felt the island shift and the compressed air from the warehouse exploded out of the tunnel. Tank parked his truck ten feet from the end of one helicopter’s rotors. The men ran fo
r the choppers, boarding in record time. The last of the rescue choppers, it took off once the men were on board.

  Chapter 23

  Tate had climbed aboard the second chopper. Once it had cleared the cavern, she ordered it to turn back to the island. She watched as the last two choppers exited the port area, flying on toward the mainland. Tate was about to tell her pilot to continue on when she saw the island shudder. As she watched, the roof over the shipping port collapsed and crashed into the water.

  A dust cloud rose up from the island. Her pilot moved them a little further away, to avoid getting bogged down in it. The force of the collapse sent a tremendous wave crashing outward, but it petered out soon after it hit the waves rolling in. The sheer volume of earth falling onto the complex crushed it flat. The fires that had raged through the shipping warehouse and the cavern warehouse were snuffed out.

  A channel opened up between the northern and southern ends of the island. The ceiling over the submarine tunnel also collapsed into the water below. The cave-in extended some twenty miles inland, along the tunnel route. It effectively split that section of the island into two separate land masses.

  The submarine wouldn’t have had enough time to clear the distance before the cave-in. At best, Tate figured they would have made six kilometers distance through the tunnel. “We’ll have to make sure they’re dead,” Tate determined. Turning to Emily, she asked about the woman’s crazy headlong dash toward the submarine.

  Emily, who had been moping since the submarine had gotten away, glowered at the floor of the helicopter. “That guy in the sub,” she murmured.

  “Morrison?” Tate asked.

  “I know him by a different name,” Emily admitted.

  Tate thought back to their conversation in Switzerland. “The guy you were dating. The one who tried to turn you into public enemy number one?” she asked.

  Emily nodded.

  “I thought Tank turned him over to the CIA.”

  “So did I,” Emily admitted.

  “The CIA must have cut him a fucking deal!” Tank spit out over the radio from his chopper. He had personally handed Emily’s ex-boyfriend over to his boss and washed his hands of the whole mess. He’d focused on making sure Emily was safe and wouldn’t be prosecuted for her part in their plans.

  “He must have offered them a bigger fish,” Tate said, thinking of Godin. Godin was a much bigger fish than Morrison. “Why wouldn’t he take a job as a code puncher?”

  “He couldn’t tell his ASCII from a hole in the ground,” Emily joked half-heartedly. “He could do the basic shit, but when it really got interesting, his fingers stumbled over the keys and his bots got caught. No one would trust him with anything complex and he wasn’t one to sit quietly in the background.”

  Tate nodded, wondering if his role as a runner had irked him. He had applied to be a Sector Agent, but even with Blackburn in his corner, it had never happened. He had failed the psych, twice. Thinking of Blackburn made her realize that he had never showed up to their little party. He must have gotten the heads up and gone into hiding. Looking at Simon, seated next to her, she knew that he had already made that connection.

  “We’ll have to find Blackburn,” she declared.

  “I have an idea of where to start looking,” Simon replied, but didn’t elaborate.

  ***

  Severny Island, South of the Submarine tunnel

  It took Hancock three hours to locate the wreckage of the submarine. With night falling, they’d been forced to work in the below freezing temperatures with a handful of flashlights. The Russian military would be descending on the area very soon and Tate wanted to be long gone before they arrived. Working back from the edge of the shipping port, they’d flown along the trench for an hour before opting to land and continue the search on foot.

  The area was unstable, with earth shifting and pockets of water spurting up. They expected to see a piece of the sub’s conning tower sticking up out of the earth, but it was a section of the hull that was spotted. The collapse of the tunnel onto the surfaced submarine had caused her to roll over onto her starboard side. The hull was mostly intact. Tate hoped the same could be said about her nuclear reactor.

  Hancock estimated they were near the middle of the submarine. Tate split their team into two, one to head in each direction, looking for a way inside the submarine. She had taken Hancock with her and headed for the bow. Fargo, Samuelson and Eugene, who had volunteered to fill out the rest of her crew, headed for the stern.

  After an hour spent picking their way across the uneven land, it was Fargo who found the escape pod intact. He’d stepped over the hull and searched the top side of the submarine. If anyone had escaped, it wasn’t through the pod. Samuelson found the open torpedo tube ten minutes later. Waiting for the rest of the crew to assemble around him, he wedged his way inside it and shimmied up the tube to the interior of the torpedo room.

  Shining his flashlight into the room, he saw that it was empty. He pulled himself from the tube and gestured the next person through. His weapon ready, he made a quick search of the room and the nearest compartments. Each member of her crew had been equipped with a radio and a radiation monitor. If the core of the sub had been damaged and she was leaking nuclear waste, Tate would order an immediate evacuation. She had no desire to glow in the dark.

  They had no way of knowing how many people had been on board the submarine when she’d set off into the tunnel. Tate guessed there was a minimum compliment of forty submariners on board. Add in the captain, Vlad, Dr. Ho, Finn and Morrison and they had at least forty-five people to account for.

  As they split up and worked their way back through the submarine, Tate saw evidence of some small fires. Blackened metal was coated in residual fire retardant. The smell of the smoke lingered, but the smoke itself had since dissipated. Two submariners had died from the fire and another six appeared to have succumbed to smoke inhalation. There were no signs of fire damage on their bodies.

  “The core is intact, sir,” Fargo called over the radio. She’d sent two men to check on it. Radiation levels were normal near the bow of the sub, but the core was housed in the stern.

  “Roger that,” Tate responded.

  After twenty minutes spent crawling through the sub, they’d tallied thirty-four dead. Aside from the eight that had died due to the fire, all remaining submariners had been killed by gunshot wounds to the head or chest. The captain, Vlad and the rest of his posse had not waited around to be rescued by the Russian military. Tate ordered her team away from the submarine. They couldn’t be found anywhere near it, when the Russian military showed up.

  ***

  The surviving members of TA-4 had done their best to fill in the blanks of their capture. They had never left the plane under their own steam. None of them could remember the plane landing. The pilots were long gone. The plane had been abandoned at the airport in Vietnam. Trace evidence inside the plane led the experts at HQ to believe that TA-4 had been knocked unconscious. The cabin pressure could have been lowered enough to put the men to sleep. Once they were out, it was a simple matter to inject them with a drug to keep them out.

  Warp had remembered waking with a brutal headache. He’d been chained to the wall in the holding cell on Godin’s island by then. It was a dark, dank place. He hadn’t seen any sunlight until he was on board the helicopter that rescued him from Severny.

  “You don’t know who the pilots were that flew you to Vietnam?” Tate asked him.

  “No, they were already on board the plane and gearing up for takeoff when we arrived. We had enough time to stow our gear and pick our seats before we taxied to the runway.”

  “I saw the copilot,” Samuelson admitted. “He left the cockpit to hit the head. I didn’t recognize him, but then I don’t know many of our pilots.”

  “Would you recognize him again if you saw him?” Gibson asked.

  “Oh yes. I’ve had plenty of time to recall his features.” Samuelson and the rest of his team had gone over t
he details of their capture a hundred times while they were being held. When they’d determined that no one could remember leaving the plane, they’d known that the pilots had to be involved. “I’m no artist, but I’m sure I could describe him well enough to get an accurate picture drawn up.”

  Tate made a mental note to get Samuelson to a sketch artist. The records for the pilots had been faked. The pilots who were assigned the duty were then told, verbally, that the duty had been cancelled. When the team had disappeared, they’d tried to explain who had cancelled their mission, but the man they had described didn’t exist within The Sector. Tate figured the pilots had talked to Morrison, in disguise.

  Her team lounged in a three-bedroom safe house that Tommy had set up for them in Murmansk. Braddock and the other wounded soldiers had been transported to a hospital in Moscow. The remaining members of TA-4 wanted to get home, but they refused to leave until their teammates were released. It was a crowded house.

  Turning to Emily, Tate asked what her future plans were, now that people weren’t trying to kill her.

  “I figure I’ll just relax at my house in Maine for a few months to figure out what I want to do,” Emily said.

  “Yeah, about that–” Tate hedged.

  Emily stared at Tate for a minute before the light clicked on. “You destroyed my house?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t my fault. Someone – I suspect Morrison – planted a very big bomb on your front stoop.” Tate shrugged her shoulders.

  “Is there anything left of it?” Emily demanded.

  “Some trees in the back. The bomb pretty much leveled the house,” Tate smiled at the horrified look on Emily’s face.

  “Then I guess I’ll go back to my apartment in– what!” Emily demanded when she saw the look on Tate’s face.

  “Let’s just say it’s a little more perforated than when you left it.”