Retaliation

by Paul C. Middleton

  “Cossack Alpha and Cossack Zeta move to cut the ends of the roads NOW. Nova troops are moving to escape the Bear trap.”

  Confirmations filtered back from all six in command of the companies and platoons so designated and Danislav saw soldiers swarming to cut off the ends of the ambush site.

  “Valkyrie Alpha One, break half a squad from your group off and send it to bunker Bear and see what happened. Re-establish communications if possible.”

  Confirmation came across. They were too far away for Danislav to see any movement but the Valkyrie groups were made up of a mix of mercenaries with medic training and those doctors and nurses who chose to stay. If anything could be done, they would do it.

  As new knots of resistance formed Danislav redirected fire at them. The occasional shot from the Carl Gustavs could be heard being fired into the NVG holdouts now as covering fire kept the heads of those in the ditches down.

  Danislav prayed that whatever had hit had just knocked out the radios in the command bunker. He certainly did not want to inherit control of the entire operation. He would do it, but it was definitely not something he wanted. Boris had raised him from a pup when he found Danislav in one of the orphanages in the north. He did not want to be mourning the only real father he had known. But, if it came to that, he would carry on his goals and mission, though.

  A familiar voice cracked over the radio. Dan’s. “Wolf One, this is Skyhawk. Do you request air support? Four armed pods are available and less than a minute out.” Boris had discussed this with him in detail. Under no circumstances was he to call in air support unless the ambush failed. It hadn’t.

  “Negative Skyhawk. Negative. Ambush is stable. Air support is not required. Keep Ace out at this time.”

  “It would reduce casualties Wolf One.”

  “Using it as this juncture may increase all future casualties Skyhawk. Do not engage Skyhawk. Please clear the line.”

  Danislav sweated profusely after he said that. He hoped he hadn’t pissed Bethany Anne’s team off. There was no way that he wanted to do that. However, he also needed to stick to that part of the plan. He hoped they understood ‘man on-site’ situations. Dan had obviously wanted to get the air support down there. What a proklyatyy klastera yebat he thought.

  Taking a deep breath, he turned back to commanding the battle. The last thing he wanted was to give them a bigger excuse to be angry. He was sure he wouldn’t like it if he made her team angry.

  ******************************************************

  Janna returned to consciousness with the sting of long cuts up and down her arms, as well as many nicks and light wounds with plastic shrapnel in them. They were all surface wounds, though. She slowly and carefully looked around. The entire setup was trashed. There was no way that they could command from here so she turned to the exit. It was blocked, with the framing timbers fallen into haphazard piles.

  “Boris, if you’re gonna command the rest of this, you need to get out of here.”

  There was silence.

  Janna looked around and saw Paul on the ground, but apparently breathing. He was probably unconscious. As she turned further, she saw Boris. He was still in his chair but didn’t seem to be moving. As her vision cleared more, she realized that he looked as if he were pinned to the seat by a three-foot splinter of wood that went through his chest. It was the only way he and the chair could still be together.

  Her basic training kicked in. He was the priority casualty if still alive. She moved over to him and checked his pulse. It was weak and thready, but still present. Turning him and the chair so that he was on his side, she found that her initial guess was correct. There was a piece of wood penetrating the back of the seat. She quickly looked around the bunker for the first aid kit, but could not see the familiar red cross of its cover. The kit was probably somewhere under chunks of wood or beneath some of the dirt that had rolled in. She didn’t have time to look for it, let alone dig it out.

  She swore. Then she thought about the situation. She had to get the damned splinter off the seat and out of Boris. She was surprised how small the pool of blood was under and around him. The splinter must be sealing the wound.

  She started by twisting the chair back and forth around the splinter. It had gone in low on Boris’s chest. It had missed the heart and, despite the fact that it was beating steadily, she couldn’t see any signs of consciousness nor breathing. She twisted the chair back and forth trying to loosen it. She heard the wood whine as she applied gentle pressure. Finally, it broke free. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of the splinter through Boris’s back came free as well, and his blood started pumping out quickly. She swore in dismay and ripped off her BDU shirt to help put pressure on the wound.

  Pressing the shirt tightly against the gushing wound, she now had his blood covering much of her body, trickling into many of her own injuries. Something in the back of her mind tickled at her. She tried to place it. Then it clicked. Bethany Anne had mentioned that she had healed a large bullet wound all the way through her body some time ago. She had said that it had taken a lot of energy but that she had been ‘weaker’ back then. Standard first aid practice was to leave an object like this in the wound, but Boris was far older than Bethany Anne. Surely his body had access to whatever energy Bethany Anne had referred to after all that time.

  She knew the legends all referred to how fast werewolves healed and the wolves were somewhat scared of Boris. That meant he probably recovered at a similar rate or a group of them would have taken him out. She had a minute or so of indecision and checked his pulse. It was getting weaker. If the splinter was left in, she felt he would die. Taking it out, with his presumably faster healing, might be his best chance., It was then she noticed that her shirt wasn’t soaked through yet. It should have been with the amount of blood that had been coming out. That clinched it for her.

  She quickly moved him from the chair and rolled him onto his back. Bracing one foot on his chest next to the splinter and the other on the floor beside his body, she grabbed it just above where the blood was on the splinter. She pulled hard, trying to keep it coming out as straight as possible. As she was pulling it out, Janna could feel her feet slipping. She fell forward when it came out more easily than she had expected. Her face intersected with the small geyser of blood spraying from his chest wound.

  Startled, she gasped as she landed, swallowing a fair amount of blood in the process. Rolling away from the wound, she grabbed the BDU top again to put pressure back on the injury. She felt somewhat queasy at having swallowed human (well, Werebear) blood but continued to keep the pressure on for a minute or so. When she pulled the fabric away, there was a thick scab over the area so she checked his pulse again. It was stronger than the last time she had checked.

  But he still wasn’t breathing.

  She switched to rescue breathing, alternating with light compressions to his chest. As she was taking a breath in over his mouth, he coughed a wet fountain of blood into her face. By reflex, she swallowed more of the blood, not even spluttering as she had earlier. He was now breathing well on his own. She let out a relieved sigh.

  The sounds of combat had died down outside, either while she was unconscious or while she had been treating Boris. She looked down at her body. She was covered from head to toe in blood, mostly his. Her vision began to blur as she looked back up at Boris’s face. He was actually quite handsome, she thought vaguely. Then it occurred to her that shock must be kicking in. Why else would she think that about her commanding officer? She looked up at his eyes, saw them opening, and murmured “Such wonderful eyes, my beautiful…” as she collapsed over him.

  ***************************************************************

  As Boris regained consciousness, he looked down his body at the person who had, from the look of the blood on their face, been giving him first aid. He heard a ragged feminine voice say “Such wonderful eyes, my beautiful…” and felt her collapse on him. He couldn’t recognize her by looks, as covered
in blood as she was. Her odor was also masked. He could definitely tell it was a ‘she’ when the person collapsed on him. He checked her pulse. It was strong and steady. He shook his head to clear it and realized three things.

  The bunker was wrecked and all the equipment in it was a write-off.

  From the sounds of things, the battle was over. As he doubted he had been out for long, he felt the most likely reason was that they had one convincing victory.

  And finally, the bunker was partially collapsed in on itself. There was currently no exit. The woman who had collapsed on him had to be Janna. His mind fought to think clearly, Janna had called him ‘My beautiful…’?

  Boris spent several moments as he tried to get his mind wrapped around her comment.

  Had they both been hiding their attraction from the other? Was it just shock that had caused her to say that? How could he deny his own attraction to her now? How could they work together now? These were amongst the questions that rocketed through his mind. It wasn’t like he could answer them right now so he shook himself and refocused on the problems that he could address.

  While his mind kept whirling, he moved the only two tables left intact into a shelter for Paul and Janna. The blood on the floor, the disarray of the room in general and the position of the chair in which he had been sitting told him what the extent of his injuries must have been.

  He saw the massive splinter of wood and winced internally. With him unconscious and the splinter through his body, Janna may have saved his life by her actions. Impaling was one of the few things that Weres couldn’t necessarily deal with for more than a couple of hours. When the body couldn’t expel the object, healing the damage was blocked.

  She was either incredibly smart and willing to take risks, or foolhardy. He didn’t really believe the reckless option. That opinion was further validated when he found her blood-soaked BDU top. Rather than waste time digging out the first aid kit from a shattered section of the bunker she had chosen to use materials at hand to put pressure on his wound.

  He carefully moved Paul and Janna’s unconscious bodies to a protected position under the tables, then looked for the best exit strategy. Shifting the timbers away from the door seemed to be a bad idea. He couldn’t be sure that moving debris out of the jumble would not cause more of the bunker to collapse, so he looked for the area that had the most blast damage.

  He undressed, and put his clothes under Janna’s head as a cushion, trying very hard not to examine his caring action. He changed to his bear form and started to dig a way out. The combination of his strength and the sharp claws of his bear meant that it didn’t take him long. The timbers in that area had been shattered, and the bunker hadn’t been thoroughly dug in to start. Instead, they’d covered the upper section in dirt and covered it in turf to camouflage it as a small hillock.

  He dug carefully, compressing the sides and roof of the tunnel with his body as he moved forward. When the excavation broke through to the surface (well, into the crater that had to be the cause of the problem at least), he found a small group of four had unpacked their collapsible shovels and were beginning to dig to meet him. Three backboards were lying on the edge of the crater with one of the Valkyrie nurse’s and one of the merc medics organizing supplies. Those who had been manning the shovels took a quick step back.

  Boris quickly moved over to the backboards and touched two of them. He then pointed to the rope on one of the soldiers webbing and indicated they should tie the backboards to him. When the nurse objected, the merc medic overruled her. Dragging the backboards behind him, secured to his waist, Boris lumbered back down the tunnel. He stopped every few steps to compress the sides and top again, trying to ensure that their escape route would remain safe. Once all the way back, Boris changed back to his human form. Moving over to his unconscious subordinates, he checked their status. Both had strong pulses and were breathing well. He decided to get dressed before he carefully strapped Paul and Janna to the backboards.

  He tied Paul’s backboard to the rope at his waist. Crouching down to avoid the tunnel ceiling, he pulled Paul along with the waist rope and dragged Janna’s backboard behind that. As soon as his chain of backboards and bodies cleared the tunnel, he passed Janna off to the medics and then helped the four waiting soldiers pull Paul up the tunnel on the backboard sled.

  He decided it was best not to dwell on their injuries. The medic and the nurse declared them both stable, and he had troops to organize. They had to leave in the next six hours for their deployment areas. As it stood, no one would be able to actually pinpoint the time this battle had taken place, and he wanted to maintain the secrecy as long as possible. The sooner his teams could start gathering information, the sooner he would have more targets to strike.

  The first step to retaliation was complete.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Unknown location in Russia.

  Shen was terrified of the vampire that had captured him.

  What had been a profitable deal for the family’s export business had gone well. His personal arrangement had gone horribly wrong.

  The person with whom he was dealing had turned out to be a vampire. Too late, he’d smelt the rotting blood odor as he entered the meeting. He had tried to flee, but the vampire had covered all the exits with his own men. Not wanting to risk exposure by changing in the middle of a city, bringing worse on himself, had seemed the best strategy. Even if it led to him being captured.

  He’d been wrong. Any death, no matter how painful would have been better than the last two? Or was it three, months of captivity, of being used as a blood source for the monster to try to improve his human lieutenants. Most of them had wasted away within a week, their corpses used to supplement his food. One, the volunteer of two subjects ago, Andrev he had been called, had changed.

  Shen’s family wouldn’t even be looking for him yet. They would assume he was working on more of his private deals. They’d never approved of his black market dealings.

  He’d been trapped by the rumor of some experimental processors that never really existed. In exchange, he would provide the location of a hidden weapons dump from the fall of the Soviet Union he had discovered. His curiosity had led him to that arms dump as surely as it had into this trap.

  Now he was in a cage, a blood bank for this madman’s experiments. He knew his family was unusual. The previous werecat attempts to change others were rarely successful. Before the successful turn of the Russian, Andrev, he would have rated them as rumor alone.

  He prayed that he would soon be allowed to die. He didn’t think it likely, though. The vampire still had a use for him. Or at least his blood.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Command Container, Wilderness, Siberia.

  Boris was agitated. It had been three days since the battle. Janna had remained unconscious. Due to the necessity of destroying the equipment that couldn’t be salvaged from the bunker, it had been a full day before they’d been able to meet up with the container. She still remained unconscious. This limbo, especially after what she had said, was worse than his headaches. Each day had dragged like a year of headaches.

  The special phone rang, the ID indicating Frank. He hit the button and answered gruffly, “Boris”

  “Hey it’s Frank, Boris. Lance and Dan were concerned that the strike on your bunker might indicate that someone had figured a way to trace our communications so we went back over the first half of the battle. We had footage from three angles of the shot that hit the bunker. The vehicle was the lead, and the turret had been knocked askew by the initial strike. It looks like they already had a round up the spout and it cooked off.”

  There was a frown in his voice for the next discussion. “The crater and damage were not consistent with the standard HE round, though. Looks like the Russians, or at least the NVG, have cooked up something new. Something more powerful. Be careful. There may be some other Weres or even vampires on their side, too. I’m getting rumblings that the head of this NVG group is different. Diff
erent enough that none of my contacts were willing or able to sell information to European or American foreign intel about the group. The only reason I got anything was that I already knew their name. Even then it cost me a favor. One I need your help with.”