Collapse Series (Book 8): State of Fear (

by Lane, Summer

  Uriah takes the primary position and I stay just behind his shoulder. I feel a pang of loneliness, knowing that if Chris was here, I would be staying behind his shoulder. But I remind myself that what we are doing here tonight will bring me back to Chris, and then the flash of sorrow is gone.

  For now.

  Uriah shoves the muzzle of his shotgun into the handle of the door, a forty-five degree angle in, and a forty-five degree angle out. He looks at me – his cover man – and I nod. He shoots. He kicks the door open, and I move inside.

  We’re in.

  ***

  The first thing that I notice about Mendenhall Base is the darkness. The halls barely glow with dim lighting, and as I make my entrance inside, clearing the first corner, the floors are simple and bare, my boots squeaking on the surface.

  My chest constricts and my adrenaline spikes, going straight into the belly of the beast like this. We have been inside enemy bases before…but nothing this big, this obvious. I swallow my fear and keep moving. My team keeps tight and controlled behind me. Father Kareem’s men are silent and stealthy – they keep up with us, perfectly trained. I am grateful for their presence here.

  We are not fighting alone.

  The hallway curves to the left, and I see a row of office doors and beyond that, a simple stairwell leading down to the bottom level. It is eerily silent. I make a note of the quiet and move forward, controlling my breathing.

  What would we do if someone came around the corner right now?

  Simple: you’d shoot them. Duh.

  I don’t see any cameras in the hallway – thank God – and as we ghost past the office doors, I am grateful that every single one is closed. I still don’t see any sign of movement. Apparently this level is closed for now, which is a major plus for my strike team.

  I clear the stairwell and start moving down, Father Kareem and his men covering our advance. Below, I see the glow of white light, and I hear the distant murmur of voices.

  Ah, here we are.

  I move quickly and silently onto the third level. Here, one office door is standing open, leading to a large room full of small cubicles. I press my shoulder against the wall and peer inside. Men and women alike are sitting at small desks, typing away at computers, their eyes glued to the screen. They are all dressed in dark blue uniforms. Many of them are Chinese, although I spot some Russians and Arabs among the group, as well.

  It will be impossible to continue down the hall without one of us being seen. We will have to take the third level, and leave some of our men to take the office workers hostage. I will have to –

  A woman comes around the corner. Her short black hair is pulled into a tight bun. She is grasping a mug of coffee. She sees us – all thirty-five of us – and shrieks. Her mug hits the floor and shatters, and she stumbles back into the office. The workers inside blink out of their electronic daze, startled.

  No choice, then? Okay.

  I enter the room, and my men pour in behind me. The office workers scream and shriek, stumbling away from their desks. One enterprising young Chinese man grabs a handgun from the drawer of his desk. I shoot him before he can pull the trigger. The woman with the tight bun screams again, falling to her knees.

  “All right,” I say into the radio. “Backup will be on the way. Proceed according to plan.”

  “Roger that, Yankee Leader,” Uriah’s voice answers.

  “It will be done,” Father Kareem replies.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Manny sweep into the room, taking a position by the door. Father Kareem and his men move quickly into the office, corralling the office workers into a corner at gunpoint. There is a lot of crying, a lot of begging – a lot of people getting down on their knees and chattering frantically in languages that I do not understand.

  Ten Mad Monks station themselves in the room, hiding behind desks and the corners of the walls. Uriah and I, along with Vera’s platoon, disperse into the hallway. A red light has begun to flash in the corners of the ceilings. I figure this is because somebody activated a panic button at their desk, but it’s not a big deal. This is part of the plan. We can deal with it.

  Vera nods at me and leads her platoon into the top level of the compound, and I take my men and we enter the door on the right of the hallway. This is an empty office room, dark and lifeless. We flash inside, taking positions behind desks and cubicles, allowing the darkness to envelope us as we crouch low, waiting for our cue. It doesn’t take longer than thirty seconds for the Omega response team to show up. They barrel up the stairwell. They’re wearing dark blue uniforms, armed to the teeth and equipped with the advanced technology that I saw them using a couple of weeks ago. I see that they are wearing the same reflective visors that Veronica Klaus’s men were wearing in San Francisco.

  Excellent.

  There are probably twenty men in their small task force, and they make a beeline for the office. As they do, my men and I open fire on them. Our shots tear through the doors and the glass windows, razing the men down like pins at a bowling alley. The sound of gunfire is deafening. I take as many clean shots as I can, then spring from my position as several stragglers drag themselves away from the carnage.

  “I’m covering you!” Uriah yells.

  I move forward and roll into the hall, taking two more shots at the Omega stragglers. The first one goes down instantly, but my second shot hits the guard in the leg. He hits the ground and rolls onto his back, his finger squeezing the trigger of his automatic weapon. A spray of bullets cuts through the ceiling and nearly slices through my neck. I duck aside just in time – then Uriah is there, and he takes the kill shot, and the guard goes limp.

  I look around me, breathing hard, wired. Twenty dead Omega troopers lie in the hall. Easy…almost too easy.

  I grab a visor from one of the dead troopers and slip it over my head. I see a holographic image of the compound’s layout, and radio chatter crackles through a microphone in the headset.

  “Grab a visor!” I instruct. “Put it on and plug in!”

  I touch the visor and swipe the screen to the left, and I stand there, amazed. A comprehensive map of every single thermal signature in the compound appears before me. There are a total of seventy-seven green tinted bodies – and thirty-five of them are red fighters, bodies not plugged into the Omega network – my men. Which leaves us with forty-four active hostiles in the building…and that’s before backup shows up.

  I can see that a group of men are working their way up the stairs from the second level, and that they are leaving behind ten special ops guys in the hallway in case we try to flee down the staircase.

  “This is crazy!” Vera exclaims, slipping on the visor. “We can see it all!”

  What makes the visor so unique is the fact that it does not obscure my vision in real-time. It only complements it. We assemble and crouch at the top of the staircase, waiting for the next round of troops to come up the stairwell. They hesitate for a moment, realizing that the sounds of gunfire have gone dead, and that nobody is responding to their radio call signs.

  “Well, I wish I could speak French,” Vera says.

  “The radio isn’t in French,” I whisper. “It’s Russian.”

  “Same thing.”

  Footsteps. Here comes a group of men moving up the stairwell, tight and fast, whisking forward in formation. There are only five of them, and I realize that they are probably the sacrifice. Too bad for them.

  I take the first one, and Uriah, Vera and Andrew take the rest. We pick our way through their dead bodies, strewn across the stairs, their blood sprayed across the walls. We move to the second level. As the Omega visor indicated, there are bodies here, waiting. But we are ready, and I am anticipating them to take a shot at me from behind the left corner of the hallway.

  We duck aside and arc to the right, shooting around the corner. I hear heavy grunting, followed by return fire. I pop a grenade from my belt and say, “GRENADE!” I pull the pin and fling it down the hallway and my men and I t
ake cover behind the other side of the hall. The grenade detonates and shakes the walls, sending sharp bits of plaster and dust billowing through the hallway. I cough, covered in ghostly white paint particles, my ears ringing.

  The white lights in the hallway flicker on and off, pulsing in rhythm with the red emergency lights in the ceiling. Somewhere, a siren begins to wail. There is no doubt about it – everybody in the entire base knows we’re here now. There’s no turning back.

  “Keep moving, keep moving!” I yell.

  We fight our way through every hallway in the second level, clearing out offices and flattening the Omega forces that barrel toward us, guns blazing. We adapt, improvise and overcome, just like Chris taught us to do so long ago.

  It seems like hours, but we clear out the second level, and I radio Manny.

  “Sundog, Second Level is cleared,” I say. “Stand by.”

  “Roger that.”

  And then I radio the snipers. “Falcon Nest,” I say, “this is Yankee Leader. You have a green light.”

  “Roger that Yankee Leader,” one of them replies, a man with a gruff voice.

  My snipers have been unleashed.

  “One more level,” I say, breathing hard, looking around the empty office. Computers are everywhere. What secrets do they contain?

  “I’m with ya,” Uriah replies, nodding.

  We head to the first and final level. This is the worst level – the hardest. The thermal reader on the Omega visor is telling me that there are twelve men waiting for us here, and they are stationed in different corners of the room, waiting to ambush us from all sides as we come down the stairs. “Another grenade?” Uriah asks.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “Go for it.”

  Uriah tosses a grenade down the stairwell. We hang back and crouch low. It detonates and sends a choking wave of smoke up the stairs. We charge down to the final level, masked by the smoke and the confusion. Gunshots fly past me and ricochet off the metal railing on the stairwell. One of the Omega soldiers springs through the smoke and slams into me. I roll away and manage to get a shot at his head. He collapses, but a soldier follows closely behind him. He shoves my gun against my chest, knocking the wind from my lungs.

  I hit the ground for the second time, scrambling backward. He grabs my ankle and drags me toward him. I twist around and kick him in the face with my free boot. I hear his nose crack as I break the cartilage. He doesn’t break his hold, though. I struggle against him as he jams his knee into my chest, blood dripping from his face.

  “Sie gehen zu sterben, Kommandant,“ he hisses.

  You’re going to die, Commander.

  “Not yet,” I choke, grabbing the knife at my belt. I shove it upward and drive the blade into the soft flesh between his armor-plated vest and his belt. He screams and rears backward. I push him off me, pulling the knife out, staggering away. He holds the wound, seething, and lunges at me once more. But he is too slow. My rifle is already in my arms again, and I pull the trigger, my shot straight and true. He falls – dead.

  I see Vera slip through the smoke and take a couple more shots, and then the rest of the Omega troopers on this level are dead. As the debris clears from the air, I can see that we are standing in the middle of a wide, open room, with a meeting table situated in the center. Maps and projectors are everywhere.

  “Oh, my God!” Andrew exclaims. “This is an Omega strategy room. Incredible.”

  “Focus,” I say. And then, “Sundog and Falcon Nest, Level One is cleared.”

  “Copy that, Yankee Leader,” Falcon Nest replies. “We’re taking heavy fire on the roof, but we’re holding them off.”

  “Hang in there.”

  I cautiously approach the windows and peer outside. There is a large gravel driveway leading up to the compound, and beyond that, a concrete wall. Dead Omega soldiers are lying everywhere in the yard, shot by my snipers on the roof.

  I can hear the rattle and boom of fire and return fire.

  “The compound is ours,” I say quietly.

  “Yeah, baby!” Vera yells.

  “We’re not done yet,” Uriah tells her, frowning. “Air support should be here in…” he checks his analog watch. “T-minus sixty seconds.”

  I close my eyes and pray.

  So far it’s going okay. So far, so far, so far…

  We stay there, silently waiting, counting down the seconds until the Blackhawks will rumble overhead and bring punishment on the rest of the base. We wait and wait, and when the sixty seconds pass, I feel a tight knot of tension in my stomach.

  “Where are they?” Vera asks.

  Father Kareem approaches the window, slowly, his face tight.

  “It could be…” he mutters, trailing off.

  “What?” I ask.

  Another sixty seconds. I radio the snipers on the roof. They see no sign of incoming air support. They’re still taking heavy fire from Omega troopers on the outside of the walls.

  “What is going on?” Vera yells, panic flashing in her expression. “Where is air support? They’re a big part of this mission!”

  “Mauve,” Father Kareem says quietly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “President Mauve Bacardi,” he goes on. “It is possible that she stood down on the Blackhawks.”

  “She doesn’t have the authority to do that,” I reply, jaw clenching. “Only Commander Davis would.”

  He gives me a long look.

  “Commander Davis does take the advice of President Bacardi quite often, Commander Hart,” he replies.

  “You don’t think she would keep the Blackhawks at Yukon, right?” I ask Uriah.

  He exhales, tilting his head.

  “I don’t know, Commander. Mauve is very persuasive and Em Davis is very young.”

  Another sixty seconds. The Blackhawks are not here. They’re either incredibly late or they never left at all.

  “We’re going to have to do this the hard way, aren’t we?” Vera deadpans.

  Andrew rests his arm on his knee.

  “Yeah,” he says. “It looks like it. Time for the backup plan.”

  “There really isn’t a backup plan,” I reply, “but okay.”

  “Enough talking,” Uriah says. “Snipers are positioned on the roof, and they’re taking heavy fire – but they’re also giving it out. Everybody on the other side of that wall is focused on taking the compound back. I say we have the rest of Father Kareem’s men and Elle and Cheng’s detachment come in behind the Omega troops in front of the compound while we work our way out there. We can’t get to them from inside the walls.”

  “What about the hostages upstairs?” I say. “Manny’s platoon can’t babysit them all day – we need those extra men.”

  “Tie them up, lock them in,” Vera suggests. “They’re office workers – barely soldiers. They’re not the threat here.”

  I agree with her logic.

  “Okay, and then what? We rush out the front gate? The Omega troopers outside on-base will take us out in seconds.” I look at Uriah. “Unless the rest of our detachment with Elle and Cheng distracts them, like you said. That might take the pressure off us.”

  “Not to mention the snipers on the roof are doing a damn good job of keeping their forces from rushing us,” Uriah adds.

  Okay, so we have a plan. We can do this.

  This base should be easy to take. We took down the whole building, didn’t we?

  We can tackle the next phase, no problem.

  “Let’s do it,” I say. I check in through the radio, “Shadow One, this is Yankee Leader at the Compound. We want you to draw the enemy’s fire in your direction.”

  “Copy that, Yankee Leader,” Cheng’s voice replies. “But what happened to our air support?”

  “Don’t know,” I reply. “We’re improvising.”

  “Roger that. We’ll light them up for you, Yankee Leader.”

  “Good.”

  I look to Uriah.

  “So we’ll just hole up here until they can draw the o
utside fire in their direction,” I say. “That will help our snipers on the roof, too.”

  Uriah glances at Father Kareem.

  “What about the communication island?” he asks. “And the missiles – the Ship Killers?”

  “The weapons will not be housed here,” Father Kareem replies. “And the communication island is probably on lockdown. If Omega is proceeding according to their past procedures, they are most likely already evacuating the island and getting their people out.”

  “We have to stop them,” I say.

  The Blackhawks were originally supposed to circle the island and stop Omega from evacuating their workers there; we don’t want to bomb or destroy the island. We want to preserve it. There is probably tons upon tons of valuable Omega intel that could help us win the war.

  “Cassidy,” Vera breathes.

  “What?”

  She nods toward the wall, eyes wide.

  I follow her line of sight and feel a rush of recognition hit me:

  There, on the wall, are pictures of Chris’s face…and my face. I see my driver’s license photo, and Chris’s, too. I see sketches of me, black and white mug shots depicting my wild hair and freckles. There are other pictures, too: Vera Wright, Andrew Decker, even snapshots of Manny Costas and Elle Costas.

  “What is all of this?” I breathe.

  I walk to the wall, squinting through the hazy lighting at the rest of the wall. There are notes and papers tacked up, written in Russian and German. Some of it I understand. Some of it goes way over my head. On the far right of the room, there is a mug shot of Uriah. He looks younger, his hair shaved to the scalp in a tight, military-style haircut. He is glaring into the camera, and there is a number printed across the bottom of the photo.

  I look at Uriah, startled.

  “This is you,” I say.

  He stares at the photo, unflinching.

  “Yeah,” he replies.

  “This is a mug shot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were arrested?”

  He says nothing. There are a couple more pictures of Uriah, too; some sketches, some grainy snapshots.

  “They were monitoring us,” Andrew whispers. “All of us.”

  “Out of everybody in the militias…they were monitoring us?”