DEVIL’S KEEP

by PHILLIP FINCH

  “You are tonight.”

  So now they sat at the open cabin door, rifles in their laps, waiting for permission to leave. The control panel was powered up, and the volume on the radio was cranked to the maximum. They wanted to hear that time-to-go notice when it came.

  They expected it at any time. The night seemed completely normal.

  Then the medic said, “I smell jet fuel.”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “Did you have a spill?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I smell fuel,” the medic insisted. “Don’t you?”

  “You’re crazy,” the pilot said. But he drew in a deep breath through his nose.

  He said, “Maybe.”

  He breathed in again and said, “I’d better check.”

  He put the rifle aside and reached into a pocket of his cargo shorts for a small flashlight. He turned on the light and hopped down to the ground.

  The pilot started around to the front of the chopper. The bright spot of the flashlight beam bounced on the ground in front of him as he walked, and then he turned along the chopper’s nose and disappeared from sight.

  The medic sniffed the air. Jet fuel? Suddenly he wasn’t sure. An intermittent breeze was blowing from over the water, and when it picked up—as it did now—it was in his face, and he could smell only the ocean’s salty dampness.

  The flashlight reappeared where the medic had last seen it, then moved around the nose of the helicopter, not pointed down at the ground now but held higher, angled so that the beam caught the medic full in the eyes.

  The light was very bright in the darkness, and the medic turned his face away and said, “What did you find?”

  He got no answer. The light kept coming, not bouncing anymore but fixed on his face, blinding him. The medic said, “Hey, asshole—” and put up his left hand to block the glare.

  The light went off, and in the next instant the medic took a hard blow to the head that knocked him back. His left arm flew back, and in that instant another hard blow came under it, slamming against his chest. It was not like any punch he had ever felt—it punched into his chest—and as the life drained out of him, he thought, No, not that …

  Favor walked quickly around the nose of the chopper, back to where the body lay on the packed dirt of the helipad. He hooked his arms under the shoulders, dragged it to the open door of the helicopter, lifted it in. He dragged it to the back of the cabin where the second body lay, blood pooling.

  He went out and got the Dragunov where he had left it. He crouched near the nose of the chopper and looked through the scope, up the hill toward the clump of buildings. The nearest one was within two hundred yards. It seemed dark and quiet.

  He shifted his attention to the second building up the hillside. He could make out the outline of incandescent lights behind three shuttered windows, and the rifle’s scope picked out the figures of three men near the building, one of them standing in a doorway.

  Favor didn’t think that he could reach the building without being seen. The hillside was mostly open, broken only by a thin scattering of palms. And to his left, still looking out over the water, was the sentry near the dock. He, too, would be hard to approach: between the helipad and the dock, there was virtually no cover.

  A voice came over the radio in the cockpit. It was Russian, spoken too quickly for Favor to understand. Seconds later, the same phrases, the same voice, only this time more insistent. Up on the hillside, the light went off behind one of the shuttered windows and the shutter opened. A man was standing at the window. He held a rifle. At the top of the rifle receiver, where a telescopic sight would be, Favor could make out a blocky shape that looked a lot like the thermal imaging sight on the Dragunov.

  As the rifle swung toward him, Favor scuttled up into the cabin.

  He would be invisible there. The Plexiglas window would block his body heat.

  In a pocket beside the pilot’s seat was a loose-leaf binder of aeronautic charts. Favor took the book and ripped out several pages.

  On the wall of the helicopter’s cabin was a slim steel cylinder with a valve and a pressure gauge. A clear plastic breathing tube ran off the valve. Oxygen.

  The cylinder was held in place by locking metal straps that came open when Favor released them. He grasped the neck of the cylinder and pulled it free.

  He was ready to announce himself.

  The cataclysm erupted when Andropov wanted another roll call, a security check. He had the radio operator start with the helicopter, which was on a different frequency from the radio net.

  Vladimir Raznar was the radio operator. He called down to the chopper for a status report. No response.

  He called again. No response.

  Andropov said, “Put a scope on them.”

  Vladimir turned off the lights in the room and picked up the Dragunov. He pushed open one of the shutters, just enough to give a clear view of the chopper.

  He said, “I don’t see them.” He kept looking through the scope for several seconds, then said, “Something’s funny with the ground around the chopper.”

  “You’re picking up a heat signature?”

  “No. The opposite. It’s cool down there.”

  “What do you see in the chopper?”

  “I don’t. But I’m telling you, something is really funny down there under the bird.”

  Andropov got on the radio and spoke to the guard at the dock.

  “Sergei, what do you see at the chopper?”

  The guard turned and looked back up the hill to the helipad. He was using his night-vision binoculars.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nobody, nothing.”

  “Go up there and take a look.”

  Vladimir kept looking at the dark blotch below the helicopter. It seemed to be spreading.

  He said, “I think I know.…”

  In the helicopter, Favor squatted behind the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the cabin. He tore the breathing tube away from the valve on the oxygen cylinder and turned the valve all the way open. Pure medical grade O2 began to hiss out.

  He tossed the cylinder out the door, onto the ground below. It made a muffled clank as it hit.

  Down by the dock, the sentry named Sergei had just turned to walk toward the chopper. The soft clank got his attention. He stopped and brought the binoculars to his eyes once again.

  He saw Ray Favor raising the Dragunov, bringing it level so that the barrel seemed to disappear. There was only the front glass of the scope and the black dot of the rifle’s muzzle, and they were both pointed directly at Sergei.

  Favor fired, and the sentry went down.

  The crack of the gunshot ripped through the night. The muzzle flash briefly lit the cabin’s interior. Andropov, standing behind Vladimir, saw it blaze, strobe-like. Vladimir, looking through the thermal scope, perceived it as a white fog on the Plexiglas window.

  In the chopper, Favor slung the Dragunov and jumped to the ground. He landed in a puddle of jet fuel. A few feet away, the steel cylinder was still expelling oxygen.

  The fuel was flowing from a drain valve in the tank beside the helipad. The flow was hard enough that the hardpan earth, already wet from rain, didn’t absorb it all. The fuel was pooling, and the pool was spreading.

  Favor bent down low with the torn map pages in one hand and swiped the paper through the fluid. He was quick, but not in a hurry. He knew that the helicopter’s fuselage blocked the view from the hill.

  He began to move away from the pool in a crouch, trying to stay behind the chopper’s shield for as long as possible. Five, six steps to the edge of the helipad.

  He jumped into a drainage ditch that ran beside the pad.

  He stayed low and crawled a few yards along the ditch. There was no fuel in the ditch: he checked the ground to make sure.

  He pulled the rifle in close and removed the thermal scope. It was mounted with a quick-release mechanism, designed so that it could be swapped with an ordinary telescop
ic sight in daytime. He pulled a small lever on the side of the mount, and the scope popped free. He put it aside. He was done with it. In a few seconds it would be useless.

  Then he balled the fuel-soaked paper, wadding it tight in his hands.

  He took the lighter from his pocket and lit the wad. It caught right away. He tossed the flaming ball out of the ditch, toward the helicopter and the pool of fuel beneath it.

  The fiery wad of paper flew up into the dark sky, then started back to earth.

  And now Favor was up and running like hell.

  Up in the window, Vladimir almost got off a shot in that instant when the scuttling man emerged from behind the chopper. But the move surprised him, and the pale white figure disappeared into the ditch an instant before Vladimir could get the crosshairs on him.

  But before the interloper vanished, Vladimir did get a look at the rifle slung behind him: a Dragunov. He knew it was probably Yuri’s weapon and that it was supposed to be with him up at the top of the hill, but he didn’t waste time thinking about how it had gotten down here.

  He just thought: Ah, a sniper duel. This should be fun.

  Then the flaming wad of paper flew out of the ditch, hot white in his scope.

  Fucked, he thought.

  The wad of paper never reached the ground. It ignited the fumes that hung over the helipad, and was instantly consumed in the fireball it had created.

  The helicopter had a jet turbine engine and burned Jet A fuel, more stable than gasoline. It is a kerosene-like fluid, and in open air it usually burns like kerosene on a wick, sooty and not very hot.

  But the oxygen that spewed from the tank changed all that. It created a volatile mixture that burned hot and bright as a blowtorch, feeding off the fuel that had soaked into the ground and off the fluid that continued to gush from the tank.

  The sudden inferno lit up the entire island, and it overwhelmed the heat sensor on Vladimir’s thermal scope. He was slow to pull back from the eyepiece, and for an instant the screen was as bright as if he were staring straight into the sun.

  Favor was about fifty feet away when the fuel ignited. The concussion nearly knocked him to the ground as he ran, and it came with a tsunami of heat that felt as hot as a candle’s flame held to the palm. He continued to run, not away from the fire but around it, skirting the edge of the helipad, swinging around until he was clear of it, with a view of the hillside again. Then he dropped to the ground, into the classic prone position of the marksman.

  The hillside was lit almost as bright as day, and Favor quickly spotted each of the four targets he had seen through the thermal scope.

  He sighted along the barrel.

  The Dragunov was a weapon of the old Red Army, intended for hard use in primitive conditions. To keep it useful even without the delicate optics of a sniper scope, its designers had given it basic iron sights.

  As Favor sighted along the barrel, his eye found the blade and notch from the first rifle he had shot when he was a boy.

  He knew what to do now.

  He sighted first on the window with the half-open shutter. Someone inside reached for the shutter, closing it. Favor put a shot into the shutter at the spot where the head had appeared an instant earlier.

  He swung over to the first of the three men standing around the building as if dazzled by the fireball.

  Favor notched the blade on the guard’s chest, going for center mass. He fired, and the target dropped.

  Favor swung fluidly, and the front sight came to rest on the second guard, center mass. He fired and the target went down.

  The third man reacted. He ducked and disappeared into the doorway where he had been standing.

  Favor had no more targets—none that he could see. He wondered how many were left. He knew where he could find more: the second building up on the hill seemed to be the center of activity. That was where he wanted to be.

  He reloaded, stood, and ran back the way he had come, behind the burning helipad, keeping the flames between him and the hill. He ran toward the dock, to the body of the guard he had just shot there. He crouched at the body, looking up at the hill—still no movement—and took the AK-47 and spare clips of ammunition.

  Favor ran to the dock and put down the Dragunov and the ammo that he had been carrying. He thought that Mendonza would know what to do with it.

  The noise from the fire grew suddenly louder. Favor glanced over and saw that fuel was gushing from the helicopter’s tanks. He threw himself down on the dock, and an instant later the chopper exploded, flinging body panels and mechanical pieces in every direction.

  A fireball rose into the night sky. Favor waited for pieces of the helicopter to stop falling around him, then picked up the AK and started up the hill.

  Banshee at that moment was four miles from Devil’s Keep and closing fast.

  When Favor left the boat, Mendonza had dropped back and circled to the south until he was about six miles southeast of the island, looking toward its low front side. He wanted to stay out of sight but close enough that he could catch whatever signal Favor might send. He figured that Favor would start a bonfire or maybe get his hands on a flashlight. Ray will figure out something, he thought, but he didn’t expect anything like the bloom of flame that erupted to the northwest, illuminating the island against the dark horizon.

  “That’s our boy,” he said. Stickney and Arielle scrambled for seats. Mendonza looked back just long enough to see that they were fastening their harnesses. Then he turned the engines over and shoved the throttles all the way forward.

  Anatoly Markov was the target who ducked inside the doorway of the main building. Markov heard shots and saw one of the guards fall—hit—before he dropped and crawled inside, an instant before Favor could line up his sights for another shot.

  Markov found the hallway empty. He opened the door of the ops room on his right and found Andropov and the radioman Vladimir Raznar both down on the floor. The rear wall was splattered with gouts of blood and brain tissue, and Markov knew that it must have come from the ex-sniper; the back of Vladimir’s head was gone. Andropov was beneath Vladimir, and when Markov pulled the body away he saw that Andropov was in bad shape. The side of his cheek had been ripped open, exposing the shattered hinge of his jaw.

  Markov saw a hole in one of the window shutters, now half open, and realized that a single shot must have done all this: passed through the shutter and in and out of Vladimir’s head, striking Andropov in the cheek.

  The slug had lost energy, otherwise Andropov would have been dead, but it still had kept enough punch to screw him up good. Andropov’s eyes looked uncomprehending as Markov pulled away Vladimir’s body. Andropov tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t move, and his right arm made flailing motions, but his left side looked strangely inert.

  Markov dragged Andropov out of the room and into the hallway, where he could lay him out. The big orderly, Boris Godina, appeared at the door of the operating room and said, “Dr. Lazovic wants to know what the hell is happening here.”

  “Tell Lazovic I don’t know what the hell is happening. Get Sasha Batkin and come here. We have to organize a defense.”

  Godina hurried out, and Markov began calling names on the radio net, trying to get information.

  He got no responses. He believed that there was a problem with the system. Surely not everyone is down, he thought.

  The two orderlies, Godina and Batkin, came to the door.

  To Batkin, Markov said, “Get an AK and go fetch the girl. Bring her here. Then secure the south door of the building.”

  To Godina, Markov said, “See what you can do with Andropov, then secure the north door. I’ll guard this hallway.”

  Markov tried the radio again.

  He said, “Malkin. Malkin. Are you there, Malkin?”

  No response.

  “Gorsky? Report your situation, Gorsky.”

  Only silence.

  Surely not everyone … Markov thought.

  He tried one last name,
almost as an afterthought. By now he was sure that the system must be screwed up.

  “Karlamov, this is base,” he said. “Come in Karlamov.”

  The quick response in his earpiece startled Markov.

  “Karlamov here.”

  Of the seven men who had been sent out to sentry posts that night, only Viktor Karlamov was still alive.

  He had been sent to the far south end of the island. This post was more than three hundred yards from the dock, and when the fire exploded on the helipad, Karlamov saw it through the trees as vertical slivers of brilliant orange. He heard the barking of the sniper rifle that followed the explosion, and got down low behind some cover, but no shots came his way. Karlamov couldn’t see what was happening, and he couldn’t be seen.

  Remain at your post until ordered to leave was a soldier’s fundamental. So was Maintain radio discipline. Karlamov knew that the island was under attack. He wanted a better idea of what was happening, and he was eager to join the fight, but his years of military training kept him rooted to his post and kept him silent as he listened to Markov calling to the other guards.

  Then Karlamov heard his name called.

  “Karlamov here,” he said at once.

  “Karlamov! What is your status?”

  “I’m at my post. Nothing to report. Ready for orders.”

  “Nothing in your area?”

  “Nothing,” Karlamov said, then he paused and added, “No. Wait a minute. I hear something.”

  A hammering drone was drifting in from the ocean southeast of his position. It was faint at first but quickly getting louder. He moved to one side until he had a clear view out across the water.

  Then he saw it.

  He said, “It’s a boat. A fast one. Real fast. It’s headed for the dock.”

  “Jesus, reinforcements,” Markov said. “You have to stop them.”

  Karlamov considered the speed of the boat, the distance from his position to the dock, and the ground that he would have to cover.

  “I won’t make it to the dock in time.”

  “Then stop them where you can. But stop them. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Karlamov said.

  He set off down the long slope toward the dock. Karlamov soon had a choice of two routes. To his right was a shallow gully that entered a grove of coconuts, long untended, choked with undergrowth. Karlamov knew that the gully led down to the dock: in fact, it was a more direct route, though slower, because of the tangled brush and fallen logs in the grove.