My God, this is excruciating to watch. Not just because of how smug these Russian bastards are, but because they’re forcing me to watch innocent soldiers die in someone else’s war.
“Missiles are primed and ready for launch,” says one of the men at the computers. “Targets will be in range in thirty seconds.”
I turn to Clara. “How did you even know about the airstrike?” I ask.
“I spoke to Robert Clark just before he spoke to your annoying British friend and he told me,” she replies with a casual shrug.
I shake my head in disbelief. She managed to get everyone believing she wasn’t a deceptive piece of shit, not just me. That’s a small comfort, I guess.
“Arm the SAMs,” says Ketranovich. “Let the American death machines work their ironic magic!”
The other man taps away on his keyboard for a moment.
“Missiles armed and locking on, sir. Firing in ten seconds,” he confirms.
I instinctively move to take a step toward them, but I feel the barrel of Clara’s gun on the back of my head, and I restrain myself. I raise my hands slightly in frustrated resignation.
I look up as I hear the faint whooshing sound of the first Hawk missile launching, quickly followed by the second and third.
Shit, I’m too late!
On the radar screen, I can see the small red objects on the left gradually approaching the three small green images of aircraft coming over from the right.
“You bastards!” I yell, the anger rising inside me. “Call them off!”
“Don’t you see, Adrian Hell?” replies Ketranovich. “You caused this! Those men will die in flames because of you!”
I stand paralyzed by anger, watching the screen as the missiles creep on toward the F-22s—closer and closer with each blip of the radar.
I have to do something. But what? They’ve got me at gunpoint, trapped underground, fifteen miles away with no means of communication. I’m desperate, and I hate myself for resorting to begging, but I have no other choice.
“Please, just call off the missiles!” I implore. “If you’re pissed at me, take it out on me. But don’t kill innocent people just to prove a point!”
I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than I want those missiles to explode right now, sparing the lives of the pilots of those fighter jets. I stare at the screen, horrified and seething at my own uselessness, as the methodical beeps of the images on the radar sound out in the deathly silence.
Beep…
Beep…
Beep…
The images collide, and the screen is empty one more.
Silence descends on the large room. I hold my breath as I stare at the blank screen, overcome with emotion.
Suddenly, the Salikovs cheer loudly and touch foreheads in celebration. Ketranovich smiles at Clara, who looks both relieved and satisfied with what’s just happened.
I’m desperately trying to find a way to get out of here so I can warn Josh, but I’ve got nothing.
I keep staring at the large screen, willing the blips of the aircraft to re-appear. But they don’t. I look over at Ketranovich, who’s smiling at me, seemingly savoring my torment.
He pulls a gun from his back, takes a step back from the men at the computers and fires twice, putting a bullet in the back of their heads.
“What the hell are you doing?” I exclaim. “Are you insane?”
“They’ve served their purpose, Adrian Hell,” he says matter-of-factly, nodding at Clara behind me. “As have you.”
“What the—”
29.
10:34
AH, SHIT…
I open my eyes, which sends a stabbing pain coursing through the base of my skull. I roll my head slowly round in circles to loosen some of the tension in my head and neck.
I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall in a dark room. The first thing I notice is how hot it is. I’m soaked in sweat. I blink rapidly, trying to adjust to the gloom, but it’s too dark to make anything out clearly. I don’t know where I am, but it feels like I’m sitting in a goddamn oven.
I try to move, but my arms are tied behind my back. My legs are free, but I don’t want to move around too much in the dark without first knowing where I am and who, if anyone, is nearby.
I slowly start to regain my senses. I move my limbs and quickly assess whether I’m injured. Aside from the pre-existing pain in my chest and head, I think I’m intact.
I frown as an eye-watering stench hits my nostrils… What the hell is that? It smells like dead animals.
I can see an eerie, orange glow coming from something in front of me. I squint and I can make out a large shape just ahead of me. It’s huge—easily three meters across, leaving a gap of about two meters at either side to walk around. That means the room itself has to be a good eight by eight square meters.
I struggle to my feet and stagger around to my left. The further round I get, the hotter it becomes, to the point where the heat is making it hard to breathe. The room is a large square, with a smaller square in the middle, which seems to be giving off the heat. I turn right at the end and notice a door on the left wall. I see the orange glow intensify and realize that the three by three meter square in the center of the room is actually an enormous furnace.
Christ!
Well, that explains the heat. It’s almost unbearable standing this close to it.
I hear keys in the lock outside, so I back away around the corner and sit back down against the wall. The door opens and Natalia walks in with another soldier dressed in black, dragging with them the bodies of the two men Ketranovich had shot in the control room. They drop the corpses, working together to pick one up at a time and throw them in the furnace, like they’re disposing of trash in the city dump.
Natalia turns toward me, her face illuminated from the right hand side by the hellish blaze of the fire, giving her evil smile an almost supernatural appearance. She winks at me and, in the blink of an eye, turns as she draws a gun from the holster on her right thigh, shooting the man who she walked in with.
‘Jesus!’ I yell. ‘What is it with you people killing each other?’
She says something in Russian that I assume, judging by the tone of her voice, is derogatory, and then walks out, slamming the door closed and locking it behind her.
What the hell is going on?
It seems that everyone who works for Dark Rain is expendable. The airstrike has failed dramatically, which I can only assume will force GlobaTech to bring forward their ground assault.
I have to admit, Dark Rain’s counter-measures for the aerial assault completely surprised me. They clearly spent their funding wisely, prior to having their allowance cut off. But I can’t see how they’d survive a ground attack—they keep killing their own troops for God’s sake! What’s their next move?
I hear the door unlock again and a moment later, it opens. This time, Clara walks in, immediately pointing a gun at me.
“Get up,” she says.
“What, no foreplay?” I ask.
She takes a step forward, gesturing with her gun. “Give me a reason, Adrian. Please.”
I look at the gun, then at her. Hmmm, maybe right now isn’t the best time to antagonize her…
Without another word, I stand up, never taking my eyes off her. She moves her gun, signaling for me to walk out of the room in front of her. I do so without further comment.
I step outside and immediately feel the welcoming cool breeze of an air conditioning unit. I stand, raising my face to the ceiling and closing my eyes, letting the refreshingly cold air wash over me.
I look around and see I’m in a mid-sized, circular room with a metal grid floor and old brick walls. Ahead of me is a long corridor, leading into another room at the end. To my left and right are two more doors on either side, similar to the one I’ve just walked through and presumably containing the same massive furnace that my room does. There’s nothing else, just the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.
The doors at the end of the corridor slide open, and Ketranovich walks through, striding toward me with an almost arrogant swagger about him.
“Your guest quarters suck,” I say as he approaches.
“Typically, our guests do not remain here long, Adrian Hell,” he replies. “The quality of where they stay does not concern me.”
“Fair enough. So when are you gonna tell me what the hell’s going on?”
He stops just in front of me. Clara’s behind me to my left. My hands are still tied behind me.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
“Where are your nukes?”
He looks at Clara, then back at me, seemingly confused. Then he laughs out loud and pats my shoulder like we’re old friends sharing a joke.
“Okay, what have I missed?” I ask.
“There are no nukes,” he says, still smiling.
“But GlobaTech said they’ve detected a massive underground heat signature that they said was...”
I trail off, frowning as more pieces fall painfully into place for me.
I look all around me. Five rooms, five humongous, three-meter square furnaces on full blast. That’s what the heat signature was!
“Holy shit,” I say out loud, realizing Josh has been massively misinformed. “You’ve laid a trap for GlobaTech, and they’re going to send their troops to walk right into it…”
“Finally, he starts to use his brain,” says Clara behind me.
“But I don’t understand what you’re going to do to them when you’ve lured them all here. There’s, what? Four of you now? GlobaTech are going to roll up to your front door with a few hundred heavily armed soldiers from their own private army.”
Ketranovich walks past me before turning and gesturing for me to follow him back into the room I woke up in.
“This entire compound is a network of underground chambers,” he begins. “Think of this place as a wheel. The control room back there is the center, and each spoke that leads off it brings you to its own little hub, like this one. Right now, we’re directly under the main yard of the compound. There are five mega-furnaces here, originally used to dispose of chemical weapons in the fifties and sixties that your government says never existed, that they used for trials and tests that they say never took place.”
“Hey, I’m not responsible for what the government did or didn’t do fifty years ago,” I say. “Don’t take your little temper tantrum out on me.”
“Whatever,” he continues. “The point is, when GlobaTech turned its back on us after your intervention, and denied us access to the Uranium we had planned on using, we had to quickly change our plans.”
We’re all standing just inside the door of the furnace room, the intense heat blasting out at us.
“Instead of launching an attack on America, we had to start off with something slightly smaller.”
He points to the ceiling. I look up, struggling to make out what he’s looking at in the gloom. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but I eventually see it…
Stuck to almost every inch of the ceiling is enough C4 explosive to blast the world out of its orbit…
“Fuck me…” I mutter to myself as I struggle to get my head around seeing that much explosive in one place.
There has to be close to a hundred bricks of C4, all with detonators in them, attached to the ceiling. If the furnace room is directly under the main courtyard, then the explosion would blast up and through the ground, causing the compound to sink in on itself.
I suddenly see what he’s planning. I look over my shoulder at the other doors, then back at Ketranovich. He smiles, seeing me reach the frightening conclusion.
“Yes, Adrian Hell,” he says. “All the other furnace rooms are exactly the same.”
“Holy shit!” I gasp.
They’re going to lure all the GlobaTech soldiers into the compound and then blow it to hell. The explosion will be catastrophic. The entire area for miles will become a crater. Taking out a very large chunk of both GlobaTech’s and the US military’s forces in the process.
“You’re insane,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief.
“Sanity is simply a matter of opinion,” he shrugs.
I turn and walk out of the furnace room, back into the cooler central hub. I turn to face them both and look at Clara.
“So where do you fit in then?” I ask. “You were being shot at just as much as me.”
“No one in our organization knew about my role in this except the Colonel,” she explains. “I told you that he only tells people what they need to know. Loyalty and trust have been issues for us in the past, which is why we like to keep our numbers small.”
“But I thought there were thousands of you?”
“And who told you that?” she asks, smiling.
“Ted Jackson, and then you…” I say, trailing off as I instantly realize she lied from the very beginning about something else, too.
“We told GlobaTech what they needed to hear to secure the deal for the Uranium. A bit of inventive marketing goes a long way.”
“Unbelievable. So Jackson had no idea you were playing him?”
“Of course not,” she says, almost gloating. “He was an idiot, blinded by his own greed. He’d have believed anything if he thought he could get rich from it.”
“I still don’t get why Natalia was shooting at you...”
“I saw you tailing us days ago. I recognized you and knowing about the Pellaggio deal that Jackson had recently cancelled, I put two and two together and figured you were in town to take him out. When you knocked on our hotel room door, I just let you and Jackson form your own conclusions and leapt on the opportunity to play the victim. I spoke to the Colonel, who agreed we’d play it out in secret, to keep up appearances with you. It was difficult fighting against Natalia, but necessary.”
I shake my head with disbelief. “You guys are ruthless bastards, I’ll give you that.”
“Once GlobaTech turned their backs on us and you gave up the deeds to the Uranium mine, we had to change our plans and simply go after the people who have screwed with us. It was easy cleaning up after we'd abandoned our original plan. I was able to take out the soldiers we no longer needed when Natalia found us in the bar. I got you to take out Marcus Jones, and I was able to get rid of Webster moments before you arrived at the safe house.”
“Wait, you killed Webster?”
“Yes. The men at the safe house had passed the time torturing him once they’d learned he was no longer necessary. I went there to clean up, which you helped me with. I was just about able to shoot him before you walked in, assuming I was the victim, as always.”
I start pacing up and down, trying to process the fact that everything I’ve gone through in the past few days has been a lie. I stop and look at Clara and Ketranovich, who has moved to stand next to her.
“So you’ve been using me to clear up your mess and position everything to exact your revenge on GlobaTech?”
“And you played your part beautifully,” says Ketranovich. “Once everything was in order, we tried to kill you, but you somehow managed to survive the blast.”
“The car bomb…” I say. “That was you?”
I remember when I was face to face with Pellaggio. Right before I killed him, he began to say something. It didn’t register until right now, but he must've been trying to say he didn’t know anything about the car bomb…
“Yes, but you assumed it was the mafia man, so we let you run with that idea and it led to you wiping out his entire empire!” He pauses to laugh. “Very impressive, by the way. I’ve said it since the first time we met—we could use a man like you in our cause.”
I stare at him, feeling the anger and the hatred boiling to the surface.
“That’s nothing compared to what I’m gonna do to you,” I say, before turning to Clara. “Both of you.”
“I’m afraid you won’t have chance to try, Adrian Hell. The next stage of our plan is beginning now, and soon you
will be nothing but a stain on the graveyard that will replace Nevada.”
I have one last card to play to buy me some time. And it’s a long shot.
“And what did Natalia think of this master plan?” I ask Clara. “I’m assuming she was kept in the dark as much as everyone else?”
“Of course,” she replies, shrugging. “I’m the only one who knew what the big picture was. Our Colonel keeps his plans to himself, remember?”
“Are you sure she’s okay with not being the number one girl around here?”
Ketranovich brushes a piece of hair from Clara’s face before kissing her on both cheeks. He turns to me.
“Natalia is one of my finest soldiers,” he says. “But who else could I trust with such a delicate plan, if not my own daughter?”
Ha!
Do you know what? I’m not even remotely surprised…
I obviously had no idea Clara is Ketranovich’s daughter, but at this stage, nothing else can shock me.
“Your daughter,” I say, nodding as I process the information. “Of course she is...”
Ketranovich smiles and turns back to Clara.
“We must begin the next phase of the plan,” he says to her. “See that our friend here is comfortable then join me in the control room.”
“Yes, sir,” she replies.
He gives me one last look before walking off back down the long corridor.
“Yes, sir,” I say to her in a funny voice, mockingly. “You make me sick.”
“And very soon I’ll make you dead,” she replies, looking past me toward the long corridor.
I turn to follow her gaze and see Natalia walking toward us. She has a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other. And she looks massively pissed off.
Well… this isn’t going to end well, is it?
Clara signals to the furnace room with her gun as Natalia approaches. “Get in,” she says to me.
I walk in and turn right as the heat hits me instantly. The two of them follow me inside.
I suppose this would be the moment where she aims her gun at the back of my head and pulls the trigger. Game over.
Well, let me tell you, I have no intention of dying in this furnace.
True Conviction Page 25