Prime

by Jeremy Robinson

  “You have to let me go back,” she managed to say. “My computer.”

  “I’ll get you a new one.” Rainer didn’t slow. He reached the second-story landing and burst through the door into a hallway that was nearly identical to the one below. He pulled her to the second door on the right and threw it open. Sasha couldn’t see past him, but she heard him say: “Richard! Company’s here.”

  “Who?”

  Sasha recognized the voice of Rainer’s employer.

  “Does it matter? We need to get out of here.” Rainer dragged Sasha to another door and barked commands to his two co-conspirators, ordering them to join him. Then he hastened back into the stairwell, hauling her up the next flight, with the other men close behind.

  “Where are we going?” Richard demanded.

  Rainer answered without looking back. “The helicopter. They’ll probably be covering it with snipers, but they won’t do anything to jeopardize her.” Then he added, “I hope.”

  Sasha’s eyes found Richard’s. “I have to go back,” she pleaded. “My computer is down there.”

  The man just shook his head.

  “You don’t understand. The answers are on that computer. I’ve almost figured it out.”

  The man’s face registered dismay, but only for a second. “Nothing we can do about that now. We can start over when we’re safely away from here.”

  Rainer finally seemed to acknowledge her concerns. He paused at the top of the stairs. “There might be information on that computer that they can use against us.”

  Richard shrugged. “It won’t matter. They’re not getting out of here alive.”

  He took a phone from his pocket, and after dialing, he held it to his ear. “We’re being attacked,” he said, without preamble. “Turn them loose.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  King watched Rainer disappear through the doorway with a cold knot of rage in his gut, but his anger wasn’t directed at the escaping traitor; he was mad at himself.

  A litany of his failures ticked off in his head. We moved too soon… Should have gotten more intel… Should’ve planned better.

  None of those measures would have really made a difference, and waiting would only have given Rainer a chance to slip away completely. No, this wasn’t a failure of planning or leadership; it was just plain bad luck, but that didn’t lessen the sting.

  I should’ve just taken the shot, consequences be damned.

  Glowering, he shouldered his weapon and started forward, moving toward the door through which his quarry had vanished.

  “Jack?” an anxious voice called from behind him. It was Tremblay. “Talk to us, boss. What’s the plan?”

  King ignored him and kept moving. Rainer had to be stopped, no matter what.

  “Jack? Sigler? King!”

  That stopped him.

  King.

  He wasn’t just Jack Sigler, pissed-off Delta shooter. He was King; he was their leader.

  He pivoted on his heel. He saw, as if for the first time, Zelda leaning against the wall, struggling to breathe. “Legend, are you hit?”

  Zelda winced, but there was fire in her eyes. “The vest stopped it. I’ve been hit harder than that.” She managed a grin and added, “Not by you.”

  “Then on your feet, soldier. Eastwood, you and Legend head back and bring the van up. Juggernaut, Bob…you’re with me. We’re gonna get what we came for.”

  A flicker of disappointment crossed Zelda’s pained visage—she probably thought he was benching her and blamed herself for not having taken out Rainer when she’d had the chance—but she grabbed Somers’s shoulder and pulled herself erect.

  Tremblay likewise seemed heartened by King’s decisiveness. He and Silent Bob quickly caught up to their team leader and cautiously followed him through the doorway.

  King swept the muzzle of his MP5 up the stairwell and checked for blind spots before heading up the steps. At the second floor landing, he waited for the other two operators to line up behind him before throwing the door open and moving through. His finger was tight against the trigger, ready to shoot, no matter who was on the receiving end or what the ultimate consequences were, but the hallway was vacant.

  “Shit.”

  He knew Rainer was too smart to retreat to a dead end, but he also knew that the turncoat Delta officer had not come here alone; were his co-conspirators waiting behind one of the closed doors, waiting to ambush them?

  Only one way to find out.

  Before he could approach the first door, a voice sounded from his radio receiver. “This is Nighteyes. We’ve got activity at Building—”

  The transmission broke off in mid sentence, and for a moment, King feared that somehow the sniper had been discovered, but then Shin’s voice came back. “I don’t even know how to describe this. You guys need to get out of there right now.”

  King heard the urgency in the man’s voice, but turning back wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider. The mission came first, and the mission was to take down Kevin Rainer and the other traitors; his own survival was a secondary priority.

  He advanced to the first door, and as soon as Tremblay and Silent Bob were in place, he threw the door open and moved in. As before, he was poised to fire at the first target of opportunity, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw in that room.

  Unlike the ramshackle interiors they had encountered in every other corner of the compound, this space had been scrupulously maintained. The walls and ceiling, and even the floor, were a brilliant, almost sterile, white. The effect was intensified by the bright overhead lights that blazed down with sun-like intensity. The place looked clean enough to be a surgical operating room.

  Which was exactly what it was.

  There were four people in the room. Two wore blue surgical scrubs, complete with caps and face masks that hid all clues to their identity. The other two were laid out on gurneys. One of the latter was barely visible; just pale white arms and legs protruding from a tent of blue fabric, transfixed in the glare of the lights; he was the focus of the surgeons’ attention.

  The last person in the room was male, a dark-skinned Burmese man in his early twenties or perhaps younger. He lay naked on a stretcher, which had been pushed to one side of the room. He was unmoving, as if unconscious, but it was plainly evident that he wasn’t simply sleeping. His upper torso had been opened like the petals of a rose. King caught only a momentary glimpse into the man’s chest cavity, but it was enough to see that there was a dark bloody void where his heart and lungs ought to have been.

  King had seen terrible things in his life—children blown apart by IEDs and American serviceman horribly burned in fuel explosions—but those raw savage experiences were nothing alongside the sanitized, precise and utterly inhuman evil he now beheld.

  He brought his gaze back to the surgeon who stood above the patient—the recipient of the organs that had been taken from the body of the unwilling donor. The doctor’s eyes were fixed on King’s gun, but after a moment they flickered up to meet his gaze. He raised his hands in a supplicating gesture, his latex gloves painted with blood.

  “I don’t know what you want,” the man said in a voice that was unnaturally calm. “But you have to leave, now.”

  “Or what?” The question came from Tremblay, but it had none of his customary humor. He was as shocked as King.

  “Or my patient will die,” was the haughty answer.

  King took a menacing step forward, close enough to see inside the chest cavity of the patient; the stolen body parts lay flaccid and seemingly lifeless within. Only now was King aware of the complex web of tubes that sprouted from the supine form, connecting the man to IV drips and bypass machines—devices that were keeping the man’s blood oxygenated and flowing while the surgeons methodically spliced in the hijacked organs.

  The patient’s face was hidden beneath a shroud of blue cloth, but King didn’t need to make a positive identification to know what sort of person lay on the operating table: a tru
e human predator, someone who bought the organs of another living human to sustain his own miserable life, as casually as someone might order a cheeseburger.

  “And why the fuck should I care about him?” King asked.

  Parker’s voice abruptly sounded in King’s ear. “Movement on the roof. They’re going for the helo… It’s Sasha! I have eyes on Sasha.”

  There seemed to be an unasked question there, but it took King a moment to disengage from the horror unfolding right in front of him. Roof? Helo? Then the picture came into focus; Rainer was about to slip through his fingers again.

  For the briefest instant, he considered telling Parker to take out the helicopter. A burst of some 7.62 millimeter rounds into its turbine engines would probably disable it and leave their foe trapped on the roof.

  Trapped… Backed into a corner… There was no telling what Rainer might do if that happened.

  King keyed his mic. “Deep Blue, this is King. Will you be able to track that helicopter?”

  There was a brief delay before the mystery figure answered, with no small measure of urgency: “Affirmative, King. You’ve done all you can there. Abort the mission and exfil immediately.”

  Done all you can… Abort… King felt his earlier self-directed rage rising again, but he fought it back. “Roger. Irish, hold your fire. Let them go.”

  On the other side of the operating table, the surgeon relaxed visibly, as if sensing that King’s radio transmission signaled the end of the incursion. “What we’re doing has nothing to do with whatever it is you want. Please, just go, so I can get back to saving this man.”

  King adjusted his aim ever so slightly, and squeezed off a single shot. The only noise from the suppressed MP5 was a faint metallic click as the internal mechanism ejected the spent brass casing and ratcheted another round into the firing chamber. The sound of the surgeon, screaming in pain and disbelief, as the nine-millimeter bullet punched through the palm of his right hand, was much more satisfying.

  King threw a mock salute with the smoking muzzle of the weapon. “Good luck with that.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ever since leaving his Ranger unit behind to join with King’s Delta team, Erik Somers had felt like the odd man out.

  A change of assignment always brought with it a period of adjustment—it took a while to get used to new teammates and procedures—but the whirlwind of activity that had engulfed him in the last twenty-four hours was unsettling, especially for someone like himself, who kept a tight rein on his emotions. The private rage that defined him was always simmering just below the surface, but the rigors and routines of military life provided a purposeful way for him use that anger.

  That was missing for him now. He had gone from being a Ranger with a clearly defined set of responsibilities and objectives, to being…what exactly? Even Zelda, a woman in a profession dominated by men, seemed to have staked out a niche for herself, but he was still waiting to see how he would fit in. From the moment he’d joined King’s team on the plane to Myanmar, Somers had the feeling that he was just a warm body filling an empty seat, and that uncertainty about his place in the scheme of things was eating at his self-control. He felt an almost overpowering urge to destroy something…anything.

  He swallowed the bubble of rage down and turned to Zelda. “Can you walk?”

  “Been walking most of my life, big guy,” she said, but the words came out in short bursts, as if she lacked the breath to utter a complete sentence.

  He acknowledged with a nod and headed for the door, but she forestalled him. Moving stiffly at first, she hastened back into the room where they had confronted Rainer, and emerged a moment later, shoving the abandoned laptop computer into her backpack. “Might be something useful on this.”

  “Good thinking.” It seemed like the right thing to say. Without further comment, he headed for the exit, only peripherally aware of Zelda a few steps behind.

  He immediately sensed that something was different about the exterior of the compound. A low indistinct noise, like the hum of conversation in a crowded room, pervaded the still night. Before he could identify the source, he heard Nighteyes’s anxious voice warning of activity in the compound, and he knew that his ears had not deceived him.

  As he and Zelda moved from the building, he saw a torrent of human figures pouring out of Building Four, less than a hundred yards away. Most of them looked like refugees, slack-jawed and dull-eyed, wearing clothes that were little more than rags, but there were a few men who stood out from the crowd, partly because of their garish attire and partly because of the AK-47s they held at the ready. The gunmen seemed to be herding the others, but their eyes were sweeping the compound, as if searching for targets. One of the gunmen looked directly at Zelda and Somers, and with a shout to the others, raised his rifle.

  Somers started to bring his MP5 around, but before he could put the red dot on his chosen target, the man’s head snapped back in a spray of red. Someone was looking out for them.

  Another of the armed men was downed by a quiet but deadly shot from the distant sniper. Yet even as the shepherds were felled, some of the herd revealed their true nature. Their eyes were no longer dull, but focused on the fleeing Delta operators like laser beams, and with a noise that sounded almost like the braying of coyotes, a dozen of them lurched forward.

  Somers grabbed Zelda by the arm and propelled her ahead of him, even as he broke into a run. “Go!”

  She seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation. After a few faltering steps, she sprinted ahead, racing for the gap in the gate and the perceived safety that lay beyond. She easily outpaced Somers, but it wasn’t because she was lighter or more athletic; he was intentionally hanging back, just in case the pursuing horde caught up to them. Without even looking, he crooked his arm backward and triggered a long burst from the MP5 into the oncoming mass of bodies.

  Zelda slipped through the fence and resumed her dash up the road. In the moment it took for Somers to thread himself into the gap, she vanished completely into the darkness. A spur of metal snagged his shoulder, raking his skin through the fabric of his shirt, but he wrestled free and ran after her.

  Behind him, there was a metallic rattle of bodies hitting the fence, and he risked a look back. Some of the pursuers were squirming through the hole, but several more were scaling the fence, as nimble as squirrels on a tree trunk. Somers fired out the magazine, but the rounds from his silenced submachine gun seemed to produce about as much effect as a swarm of gnats.

  There was no time to reload. He kept his grip on the weapon as he bolted up the hill, but the seconds he had spent getting through the fence had cost him his scant lead. Before he’d gone twenty steps, they were on him.

  He felt it first as a weight crashing against him, and then something wrapped around his legs. The impact wasn’t enough to knock him down—he was too big and too powerful to be taken down by a hit from just about anyone but an NFL linebacker, but the grip that tightened around his legs was fierce enough to break his stride. He swiped at the clutching arms, using the MP5 like a club, but even as his assailant fell away, another body crashed into him, and then another. Then he was buried under a deluge of human flesh.

  They swarmed over him like warrior ants guided by a common mind, attempting to immobilize his limbs and render him defenseless. Against almost anyone else, this tactic would have achieved its intended purpose, but he was not just anyone else. The ferocity of the attack catalyzed him, burning through his practiced self-restraint, releasing his fury in a titanic eruption.

  The next thing he knew, he was free of their grasping hands, kneeling in the center of a circle of broken bodies. His ability to think rationally returned by degrees…

  I was supposed to be doing something… The van…

  He stood, aware that some of the bodies that lay around him were moving, stirring from the stunning violence he had inflicted on them. Despite the darkness, he could distinctly make out that the attackers were small-bodied—some of them looked lik
e very young teenagers—but their arms and legs were thick with muscle, almost grotesquely so. Clothes had been torn away in the struggle, revealing torsos that ballooned with the kind of unnatural tissue growth that was a side-effect of steroid abuse.

  But that was the only the tip of the iceberg.

  Enormous scars mapped their bodies, white and purple marks with crisscrossing patterns like the laces of a football. The coarse black hair that covered their scalps was patchy in places, revealing where incisions had been made. Some of the wounds were not completely healed, but oozed fluid; plastic tubes sprouted from some, external veins that ran around their bodies and disappeared again somewhere else. In some distant corner of his mind, he registered the fact that these weren’t merely child soldiers. They were living science experiments, enhanced with chemicals and probably lobotomized, stitched together like something from Frankenstein’s laboratory. Whatever had made them human once, was now gone completely.

  Somers felt a different kind of fury welling up inside him.

  What the hell is this place?

  He wanted to turn back, storm the compound and tear it down to its foundations. He wanted to find the monsters responsible for such atrocities and rip them limb from limb…but that wasn’t why he was here.

  He was vaguely aware that he had lost his weapon in the battle. His radio set had also been torn away, leaving him deaf to the needs of the rest of the team. More of the… What should he even call them? ‘Frankensteins’ was the first thing that came to his mind… They were rushing up the road from the compound, but the majority of them were massing at the entrance to Building Two, where King and the others were pinned down.