by Rick Partlow
She hesitated, a muscle quivering in her cheek. “Ayrock is willing to let you send in one assault shuttle, unopposed, as long as it heads straight for the Cosmodrome and doesn’t deviate from that course. That’s it. No guarantees after that, whether you succeed or fail.” She looked as if she were about to say something else, but the recording ended abruptly. McKay guessed that Ayrock had simply edited out everything else as extraneous.
There was a long silence in the room, as if everyone were afraid to be the first to speak.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” Minishimi said quietly, catching his eye. He knew why, without her having to elaborate. Once Shannon had outlived her usefulness, Ayrock would likely have her killed…and once they had taken out Yuri, she would likely have outlived her usefulness.
“What the hell are we going to do now?” Pirelli asked bluntly, shock in her expression.
“It really doesn’t change things that much, overall,” Lee pointed out thoughtfully. She glanced apologetically at McKay. “Sorry, sir, I mean, it’s a very bad thing that Colonel Stark was arrested; but what I meant was, it doesn’t change much that we’re dealing with Ayrock instead of President Jameson.”
“President Jameson might have negotiated if we threatened civil war, ma’am” Captain Muniz objected. “We don’t know what Ayrock will do.”
“Whoever was in charge,” Vinnie said in a voice hardened by what McKay recognized as simmering rage, “is responsible for murdering thousands of innocent people in order to gain power and money. Do you really think Jameson would have stepped down if it had been him?”
He glared out at each one of the officers present except for McKay and Minishimi.
“Let me spell this out for you, if you haven’t figured it out already: we are not getting out of this clean, ladies and gentlemen. Before it’s over, we are going to have blood on our hands.” He snorted. “The ones of us who aren’t dead.”
“Who’s going, sir?” Jock asked, uncharacteristically quiet. His eyes were normally bright with humor and mischief, but right now they held a dark melancholy.
“You’re actually going to do it, sir?” Lee asked, surprised. “It has to be a trap.”
“It’s a trap all right,” McKay agreed. “But it’s one Ayrock knows we have to walk into.” He shook his head in reluctant admiration. “That prick is a lot smarter than he pretended to be…he knows exactly who we are. Yuri will kill a hell of a lot of civilians if no one stops him. And why else are we doing what we’re doing if not to protect people?”
“So,” Jock repeated, “who are we takin’?”
“Two of your teams, Vinnie,” McKay said, nodding to the Colonel, “and a platoon of your Marines, Captain Muniz. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who commands it.”
“Obviously, I’ll command it,” Muniz said with a hint of indignation that almost made McKay grin. The man was a Marine to the core…and the Corps.
“Jason,” Minishimi said softly, concern in her tone and in her eyes, “tell me you’re not leading this mission personally…”
“I’m afraid so, Joyce,” he told her.
“But that’s what he wants,” she sounded as if she wanted to scream at him and was barely restraining herself. “He’s hoping you’ll be there, so he can get rid of you after you get rid of Yuri.”
“That’s why I have to go,” he explained gently. She was a good friend. He smiled thinly. “Don’t worry, Joyce…Ayrock’s smarter than we thought, but he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Of the two, Yuri’s more dangerous, anyway.”
“Why’s that?” Vinnie wanted to know.
“Everything Ayrock’s done has been for personal power,” McKay explained. “He’s not a believer, he’s not a zealot; he’s just an amoral narcissist.” His eyes grew cold. “He’s willing to kill to win…but he’s not willing to die. Yuri is.”
* * *
The walls of the tunnel were bare concrete decorated only by a few faded patches of the colored tile that had once covered them, forgotten in decades of dark anonymity and looking forlorn in the glow from Drew Frank’s weapon-mounted flashlight. The sound of dripping water was as ever-present as the layer of condensation that coated every surface, counter-pointed by the gentle splashes as they walked through centimeters-deep puddles that gathered on either side of the old, rusted rails. Franks was grateful they’d had time to gear up before clearing out of the Intelligence offices in Capital City, both for the waterproof boots that were keeping his feet dry and the carbine that filled his hands.
“Why’s everything so damn wet down here?” Abshay Patel asked quietly, eyes darting back and forth, hands clenching reflexively at the grip of his own weapon.
“Rain,” Franks answered, still scanning the path ahead, his carbine barrel following his eyes. “They used to use pumps to keep the tunnels dry, but those haven’t been operational for almost two hundred years, since the Old City was abandoned. When there’s a bad storm, almost the whole subway system gets flooded.”
“Great place for a safe-house, I guess,” the younger agent grunted. “Besides whoever set it up, I doubt anyone’s been down here since the Sino-Russian War.”
“You’d be surprised at what lives in the Old City,” Franks cautioned him.
“Are you two going to be jabbering like a couple of old ladies at the community fab center this whole time?” Tanya Manning muttered, coming up behind Franks, brown water sloshing around her ankles as she walked. “I already feel like I’m painting a target on my back using visible lights and no night vision.”
Franks fought back a smile. Not that there was anything to smile about in their current situation, but he couldn’t help it: Manning was tactical down to the bone.
“I know this goes against the grain for you,” he said to her, not looking back---he didn’t want to get an eyeful of her flashlight beam, “but ambient light night vision gear wouldn’t work down here, because there’s not a single bit of ambient light. And if we’re shining around infrared flashlights, well…you might as well be shining around visible light.” Now he did smile, just a bit. “Not to mention the fact that you can’t see the identifier for the safe-house with anything but visible light.”
“You might have said that earlier,” she grumbled.
“Sorry, we were a bit rushed,” he reminded her.
Actually, it had been a mad scramble from the minute Colonel Stark had given them the signal to get out. Besides the three of them and Manning’s operations team, there had been only one Intelligence clerk in the offices. Franks had been deliberately unhurried and calm as he told the young woman to go grab herself an early lunch, then they’d all stuffed themselves into light armor, grabbed what weapons they could from the armory and made a run for the on-call flitters.
That was another reason Manning was so irritable at the moment. They’d been jogging to the rooftop landing pads when Franks had caught up with Sgt. Miller and grabbed his shoulder to stop him.
“Sir?” the whipcord-thin, tough as leather NCO had frowned at him, obviously eager to get out. Miller had a shaved head and Franks had reflected wryly that they probably looked like bookends since his hair had yet to grow back beyond a fine, fair stubble.
“Sgt. Miller,” he’d said to the man, speaking quickly and forcefully, “I’m taking Sgt. Manning and Lt. Patel with me along with two more of your team for security. They’re going to be on the hunt for me and Manning in particular, so I don’t want all our eggs in one basket.” He’d thought for a heartbeat, trying to remember which safe-houses the Special Operations E6 was cleared for, then continued. “Go to Location Delta, but don’t get comfortable. Drop your ‘links here on the roof and get clean ones at the safe-house. Arrange for surveillance avoidance and start trying to contact---safely---as many of your people as are onplanet. If you can think of any other assets we can trust, get a hold of them. I don’t know if there are any other Intelligence field agents onplanet right now, but Captain Riley is supposed to be back from Rhiannon in the next few days;
so if he shows up, try to get him.”
“Gotcha sir,” Miller had nodded, always the good soldier.
“Don’t get caught,” he’d told the man, clapping him on the shoulder.
Manning hadn’t been happy about him sending most of her team off without consulting her, but they’d been pressed for time and she would have to deal with it. The three of them, along with Corporal Perez and Sgt. Krieger from her ops team, had taken one of the flitters into the Old City with Patel flying it in on manual and running a spoof program on the registration to try to throw off anyone tracking them.
Franks had kept busy the whole flight, barely noticing the depressing emptiness of the Old City with its crumbling buildings, overgrown streets and collapsed freeways as he’d downloaded everything he could about Philip Ayrock from every source he could access. He hadn’t had time to read it, but he’d saved it all to his ‘link…and then he’d pulled the device’s wireless card and snapped it into three pieces. The others had already disposed of theirs.
They had hidden the flitter on the second floor of a mostly intact parking garage, then hugged the shadow of still-standing buildings until they came to the correct subway entrance, somewhere in a place that had once been called Brooklyn. They’d been slogging through the water-logged tunnels for nearly two hours and, if nothing else, Franks was confident no one would be able to follow them.
“Shit!” Patel hissed, hopping sideways. Franks spun around and saw a large, black rat swim across their path before scampering into a drain hole.
Manning glared at Patel in the way only a master sergeant or higher could glare at a junior officer and the young man seemed to shrink beneath it.
“Sorry,” he said, shining his weapons light towards where the animal had disappeared. “This place makes me a bit jumpy.”
“I think we’re all a bit jumpy,” Franks soothed. Then he noticed a marking on the wall, visible in the glow from Patel’s light. He shone his own light higher, revealing a diagonal red slash on the wall about ten centimeters long. “But the good news is, we’re here.”
Franks pulled himself up on the narrow ledge that lined the tunnel on both sides, slinging his carbine across his back as he felt the concrete wall just above the center of the slash of paint. He couldn’t remember how many centimeters the instructions had specified when Colonel Stark had allowed him access to the file just yesterday---she hadn’t allowed him to copy it. But there it was, a square in the concrete just slightly different in texture. He stripped off his glove and pressed his hand against the square, feeling the hard, smooth polymer heat up slightly at the touch of his skin.
There was a click as part of the wall beside him separated, then a barely-audible hum of servos as it withdrew back a couple centimeters and slid aside. A light flickered on within and threw long shadows out into the tunnel and Franks had to narrow his eyes to keep from being blinded. He kept his carbine out in front of him as he stepped through the doorway and into an unadorned anteroom, its bare walls and floor lined with smooth, white buildfoam.
A sturdy-looking metal door was set just to the right of the entrance, with an ID plate set into the wall next to it. Franks ignored it for the moment and delved deeper into the chamber, through the entrance hallway and into a much larger room furnished with an ugly grey couch, a cheap looking plastic table and four chairs, plus a communications console with an entertainment center. He stepped quickly past that and into a small, rudimentary kitchen with a pantry full of preserved rations and then pushed open a narrow door there to reveal a small bathroom. He checked another door as he came out of the kitchen and found a bedroom with four cots laid out side by side and the door to another bathroom, Not seeing any threats, he waved the others forward and went back to make sure he closed the door behind them.
“All right,” he said with a relieved sigh, revealing a bit of the tension he’d been hiding from the others till now. “Let’s see what goodies the Logistics team left behind for us.”
He detached his carbine from his tactical vest and leaned it against the wall next to the metal door, then placed his hand on the door ID plate. It took a moment before the door swung open, revealing a storage room with a rack of standard-issue carbines fitted with grenade launchers, several cases of loaded magazines and grenades and, most importantly, a drawer filled with clean, anonymized datalinks.
“Here,” he said, scooping up the ‘links and tossing one to each of them. “Careful how you use these when we get back to the surface…even though they can’t be traced to us in particular, if you call the wrong person or try to access the wrong data, they’ll know it’s someone they’re interested in and they can hunt you down.” He grinned. “Of course, they can’t track anything through all this,” he reminded them, nodding upwards towards the layers of concrete, rebar and dirt above their heads. “So if we really need to make a dangerous call, we should do it far away from here and then get back underground quick.”
“So,” Manning asked him, looking around the small safe-house, “are we just setting up housekeeping or do we have a plan?”
“What we have, Tanya, are objectives.” He brought up a closed hand and extended one finger at a time. “One: we need to find out what Colonel Stark was talking about in her bug-out message. She said the President showed signs of chemical conditioning and then said that Ayrock was behind it. I downloaded all the data I could about Ayrock and you and I and Abshay are going to go over it with a fine-tooth comb until we find out how that’s possible.
“Two: we have to do what we can to find Yuri. That threat hasn’t gone away.
“Three: we have to try to contact General McKay and find out what support he needs from us or what support he can give us. I’m going to record a message and have you two,” he nodded at Perez and Krieger, “take the necessary equipment out as far from here as is practical and send it sometime tonight.
“Four: we have to find out where Colonel Stark is being held and come up with a plan to free her.” He looked around at the others, who were all nodding. “Any additions? Suggestions?”
Manning shook her head, looking mollified for the first time in several hours. The two NCOs from her team seemed at ease, as if this sort of thing happened to them every day. Patel still looked as nervous as a priest at an orgy, but at least now he had a direction.
Patel surprised Franks by gesturing that he had something to say.
“Senator O’Keefe,” Patel suggested. “We should try to find a way to contact her…maybe meet her in person even. She probably has sources in the Executive Offices.”
“Good thought, Abshay.” Franks smiled encouragement to the younger man. “I’ll mention that in my message to the General…maybe he has an idea of how to do it without getting the Senator in the shit.” He clapped his hands like a quarterback breaking the huddle. “All right then, folks…let’s get to work.” His mouth twisted in a wry grin. “After all, the world’s not going to save itself.”
Chapter Thirty Seven
A warm wind tugged at the shemagh wrapped around Yuri’s face and the particles of sand it carried whipped into his protective glasses as the open groundcar bounced across the desert steppe. It was well into autumn, but the daytime temperatures in this part of Kazakhstan were still as hot as a summer in the Alaskan interior and the back of his shirt was stained with salt from dried sweat. Despite the alien terrain, Yuri still found the place homelike in many ways, as if this was where he was always meant to be.
“It’s been so long,” Antonov said from beside him, having to shout to be heard over the roar of the gasoline-powered engine and the rush of the wind in their ears. Yuri turned to look at him. The duplicate---the facsimile would be a better term, he realized---of Sergei Antonov was smiling against the blasting wind and sand, his eyes protected by tinted goggles but the rest of his face open to the elements. “So long since I left from Baikonur,” Antonov went on, rambling at the top of his lungs. “It is not quite home, but it is as close as I will be allowed… I am like Mo
ses, who could see the Promised Land but never enter.”
The Antonov copy was still quite mad, but at least he had become more compliant as they grew nearer to Mother Russia. Yuri wasn’t quite sure why he’d brought the man along…perhaps it was simply for the company. None of the other men and women he’d had shipped here over the last few months would understand how he was feeling or what he was contemplating. That only the poorly made copy of a mad dictator could understand him was something he supposed he should have found troubling, but somehow it seemed fitting.
He checked the time on his ‘link, thinking that they’d been driving for quite a while…but then, the silo had been built kilometers away from the main control building for a reason. There had been numerous accidents back in the 1960s and 70s with these old chemical rockets, and after dozens of technicians had died in one of them, they’d moved the silos further away. It was a damned lucky thing for him that the place hadn’t been on the receiving end of a Chinese nuclear missile.
Finally the ancient rattletrap of a vehicle crested a hill and he could see the cupola of the underground silo, along with the more recent addition of a massive concrete blockhouse, covered with buildfoam to reduce its thermal signature and painted brown to blend in with the desert. Two other vehicles were parked in the shade of a canvas overhang on the side of the blockhouse: like his, they were hand-assembled from fab’ed parts, based on designs from well over a century ago and fueled by gasoline that was refined in cobbled-together plants after being drilled in some field well over into the radioactive wastes. They were anachronisms, just like Antonov…just like him.
He pulled the groundcar in next to the others, then shut down the engine and opened his door.
“This is the place, then?” Antonov asked eagerly, snarling a grin. “This is where it will be launched?”