The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  I returned to find her staring at me, having managed to rip off the bag by running her head on the desert floor. She’d cut the edge of her right eye, had bruises and a nasty gash in her lower lip, and generally looked as she were dying. Which she was. She had pulled her right arm halfway from the restraints and could easily finish the job within seconds. If she had a hidden gun or knife, and she would have something hard to find, she represented a major threat to my life.

  I treated her as such. I leveled the AK-74 at her. Then knelt down in the sand and brush, using a large rock for both cover and a rifle rest as I aimed at her chest. When she continued to struggle I put a single round into her chest. It blew her back a good three meters.

  Then I followed, the rifle always pointed at her. Her right hand flashed to a point near her stomach and I shot her again, this time in the right shoulder where she had thinner body armor. Blood splattered into the sand. It was dark and, while the SUV’s light bathed us, the shadows coated us like loving hands. She wept in agony and still I held the rifle at the ready. She lurched and grabbed for something at her feet. I shot the right arm again and this time the ulna snapped as the bullet blew through upper wrist. Mika French screamed, more in frustration than pain, although I am sure she was in blinding agony.

  “I can do this all night.” I opened the conversation in Russian.

  Mika froze. She rolled onto her back and squinted. “Spetz?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.” I held the rifle steady and did not yield.

  French looked at me for another few seconds and sighed. She knew I’d be on guard and, down both arms and legs, I had the drop on her for sure. I was not encumbered with the kind of sexism that made men hesitate to fight or shoot a woman. In our world, the only genders are combatant and non-combatant. Mika had murdered plenty of men who failed to understand the distinction.

  “You going to kill me?” From her it sounded bored. Utterly detached and clinical.

  “I don’t know. I’d prefer not to.” That got her attention. In The Web I’m known for being good to my word. All that seeding the land with vaults and being honorable meant something to the likes of Mika. Mostly it meant that she and her kind held me in contempt for my apparent weakness. This night it might mean life where she had expected death,

  She lay there and I watched as her limbs shuddered. She might bleed out soon anyway. Without medical attention, I doubted that she’d live through the night. It seemed dishonorable to not offer her water or prop her up as she suffered. She’d once murdered two border guards using just such an advantage so I stood my ground and kept the rifle pointed.

  “This about your family?” Damn right it was.

  “Of course. They were murdered. Did you do it?”

  She nodded. No denying it, no pretending it was someone else. I knew she was being honest. “Arkady was running information to Section Twenty Two.”

  Gods, but it was genius. She meant it with her dying breath. She had killed my family because some bastard had duped her into believing my cousin, a kind and decent man, had joined the Great Game. Mika French had reformed and wanted to do right. She hated Hans and Cassandra almost as much as I did, but for the opposite reasons. She had worked with them for years and the guilt overwhelmed her.

  It took me a minute to compose myself. With much effort I lowered the rifle for fear of murdering her on the spot. “Who told you this?”

  Mika coughed and blood flecked her chest. She noticed and a look of panic crossed her face. She realized she was dying and that I held her life in my hands. In a way it was far better than torture. I had stopped threatening her and she had almost nothing to lose, having already told me she’d killed my family. She spilled her guts.

  Consolidated Security Solutions had been contacted six months ago by The Syndicates’ Mystery Shopper who, after supplying bona fides and delivering them the location of two high profile targets as proof of good faith, had requested sixteen men to help train an American black operations command team, which would be embedded with the DEVGRU team inside the US military. It was good work, well paid, and it brought with it the protection of The Syndicate. At one point, Bernard San Valentin himself confirmed some operational data and approved bonuses for extracting a group of assets in Bolivia. Mika confirmed those assets were all women.

  I’d predicted it with chilling accuracy but hadn’t thought through what devastation this impostor could wreak. Unless it was the real Shopper and San Valentin who had reason to kill my family. It seemed petty considering what I knew of the man and entirely unnecessary given his resources and reach. But not impossible. Conveniently, I’d killed all the men who’d met the Shopper directly, but Mika confirmed it was a man, low voice, likely trained to speak English by South Africans and have a very mild lisp. She’d spoken with him four times and knew several things about him that were salient. He spoke in the third person at all times, he called money lucre, and referred to all payment as packages, he occasionally lied about operational details, his speech became hurried when he was interrupted, indicating to Mika a sense of self-importance and umbrage, he had never opted for capture or interrogation, and he ordered on-site kills with follow up double taps to the head.

  From this, Mika had profiled him as a high functioning sociopath with a mildly delusional sense of self, likely immersed in a fantasy world of power and decadence, hence the reference to lucre. She felt he lacked self-esteem and compensated with small acts of petty control and would be easy to manipulate face to face. She also was certain he was hiding things from his employer as San Valentin had made crucial slip when managing the bonuses; he only knew about half the mission. Afraid, the CSS commandos never corrected him. Groupthink had plunged the world into war. Had anyone spoken to Bernard, among the dozens of operatives engaged, the impostor would have been unmasked and my family still alive. But then Cassandra would be too.

  I watched Mika start to slip away. I didn’t need to kill her. She was going to bleed to death or succumb to shock in minutes. It became clear to me I couldn’t get her to a hospital in time. Nor did I really want to. Instead, I let her ramble as she drifted into delirium. One of the last things she said shocked me into contemplative silence. She was muttering, discussing her sins with some absent person and her probable torment in Jahannam when she whispered, “I always thought the shopper was a woman.” She stopped speaking three minutes later. Less than ten minutes after that, she stopped breathing. Rest in peace, Mika French, you child murdering terrorist.

  I’d never known much about the wet-works portion of The Syndicate. In a world of closely guarded secrets, they were ghosts. But I realized that I might have simply missed an obvious answer to how the Shopper had been bypassed. There was no Shopper. Because Pina Karthago, the present Concierge, had been the Mystery Shopper until promotion. With Roger’s absence, she couldn’t install a new operative and, after his return, neither she nor Bernard dared install one. But the impostor would have free reign, knowing this because he had worked for her, having been a wet-works agent for The Syndicate. Correction, Wickham was still an agent and had operational access to full Syndicate databases, resources, and people.

  It meant he was at large, running the war, and I had openly challenged him by discussing the mole with Pina. Retaliation would be swift and likely massive. Mika had noticed he never captured, only killed. Sooner or later the black ops thugs or their proxies would be on my tail, looking to put me in my grave before I exposed Wickham. Worse, he could use Syndicate resources to get into a position where he could then access his outside people: an army within an army. In time he’d be spotted, but clearly the various players were accelerating the timeline. The whole conflict would be long done by the time anyone could find the man who’d started it. If he won, he’d rewrite the history.

  Why involve me then? I had done nothing but derail plans. In a matter of weeks, I’d manufactured some very ugly public incidents, taken The Web onto the messy world stage, and gone nuclear on my opponents: the governments and mi
litaries of the world had taken notice. Unless someone prevailed soon, the entire Web would face decimation at the hands of regular people. As good as one of the Section 22 monsters was, or his equivalent in a mafiya, black ops cell or rogue operation, none of them were a match for a few platoons of SEALs backed by the Pentagon. Or the Spetsnaz. Or the SAS. Gods help us once the special air services and boat teams started getting embroiled. They’d deplete the ranks of spies and gunsels like a Black Friday liquidation sale at Macys.

  Someone had put Arkady, Olga, and my little Sonia on the chopping block. Not Hans—he’d have simply shot me himself. Although Hans did love to watch people suffer and he had a lot of payback he felt he owed me. Wickham had no need to engage me. In fact, he’d have wanted to keep me out of the game if possible. The black ops people, the rogue Russians, some of the smaller outfits, likely didn’t even know me. Those that did know me, liked me as a rule. I had a lot of cache in The Web. No one on the BBW had the pull or the need and I’d already ruled out my hacker. Who wanted my family dead? Wrong question. Who wanted me to suffer, to hurt?

  Zeus. The second son, the prodigal child of Hans who must have resented my star status, first as the golden child of the Abschnitt, and then as I turned on them, Public Enemy Number One. I could almost hear the grudging admiration in Hans’ and Cassandras’ voices as they discussed my exploits. Before this little war the score had been 381 to zero. Zeus made that 381 to 3. Which meant Wickham and Zeus had a connection, perhaps a collusion of sorts. Protecting one another’s secrets? There was no way to know except by capturing one or both of them.

  I gathered my gear, strapped down a few weapons, and reloaded. I packed some C4 in a backpack and put it on the seat next to me with the remaining detonators. It was habit. I had nowhere to go and the road back to Las Vegas had been empty. Still I went through the motions, stripping out of the comical costume gear and getting myself set for the next fight. It bothered me to watch Mika die although I couldn’t say why. She had died for doing what she thought was the right thing. Was I doing the same, killing my enemy’s targets like a trained bird of prey? Maybe. But that didn’t lessen the necessity. Unless The Syndicate won this, I was more or less in permanent danger.

  I checked the gas tank, did a full visual inspection of my undercarriage and engine, reviewed my stock, checked the loads in every weapon, repacked the C4, and then once again arranged my armor, weapons, gear, and checked to make sure the pack had money, explosives, water, tools, and a first aid kit. None of it made sense. Nothing had changed since I entered the desert and I found neither bombs nor sabotage. Nothing was out of place, nothing missing. Yet it felt right. It’s what you do, my inner voice told me, it’s the system that keeps you alive.

  In my trade, the people who don’t prepare, die. In five hours, or five minutes, someone would be along to kill me. I had made myself as ready as I could to meet their attack.

  I put the Cayenne in gear and started back to the city. It’s uncomfortable to drive with a gun strapped to your back and very uncomfortable to drive in armor, with lots of gear jabbing into your abdomen and legs. But it beats being dead and I opted for cheerful paranoia. Which likely saved my life.

  The helicopter emerged in my rearview mirror as I entered a small series of turns that wound the road through some low rock outcrops. Every helicopter in the world has a specific configuration for its running lights, interior lighting and rotor markings. The chopper coming over the rise was a military model, likely a Hind style gunship from somewhere south of the border. It came in tip down, which meant they were going for missile lock.

  I slowed in the turns and, as the SUV escaped the last S to face a long straight roadway, I dropped out of the Cayenne. Inside, a bungee cord and five pound weight had just put the SUV into full flight, driving over 200 mph directly down the middle of the highway. In the distance I saw what looked like a roadblock of SUVs, perhaps some very dark trucks. I got off the road and under cover as quickly as possible. I had only one Uzi and the small arms, the backpack and a bandolier of grenades that I’d put together from the raid earlier in the day. The gunship roared overhead, speeding towards the escaping SUV, the helicopter dropping down to under ten meters and closing the gap. Someone wanted this be up close and personal. The chain guns chattered.

  I didn’t bother watching. What happened next was going to be very traumatic for anyone with eyes or exposed skin. Instead, I pushed myself as flat as possible under the rocks, fighting a sleeping rattlesnake for space. I won.

  The detonation caused a landslide, which covered me in fifteen centimeters of rock, dust, and brush. It took me over a minute to regain my hearing. I dug myself out very carefully and crept on my belly to spy what was left of my opponents. The Turbo I’d traded my rifles and smuggler’s wagon for had a special package for off-road rails. Which meant that it was basically steel reinforced in the undercarriage and had a massive engine in the front of the SUV. When the chain gun hit the speeding SUV, the subsequent detonation of all my remaining C4 would have transformed the whole vehicle into a two and half metric ton bomb moving at 400 kph maximum speed. The engine block would have been shot forward like an artillery shell the size of a gorilla while the bulk of the explosion would have shot upwards and, thanks to Newton, back towards the gunship.

  What was left of the Cayenne had flipped and tumbled until it struck the roadblock, transforming the lead vehicles into smoldering wrecks. Armed men lay scattered about the crash site like rag dolls while compatriots put out the fire, dragged the injured behind the barricade line, or walked about, dazed. They had been under 500 meters from ground zero. The gunship lay in burning chunks across a swath of the dessert to the immediate left of the SUV, and then for a klick onwards in a broken line of fire, debris, and metal fingers jutting up towards the midnight sky. Everything was on fire. A missile detonated, throwing the soldiers to their knees and decapitating some poor fellow with bad luck to be standing between the rearmost truck and the explosion.

  Likely shrapnel from the initial blast had hit the cabin and the Hind’s pilot had either panicked or been injured enough to drop the gunship. Had it exploded midair, no one would have been alive including me. As it was, the attack force looked done in, and the few men who appeared uninjured staggered around drunkenly. I whispered a silent prayer of thanks to my old instructors—preparation and training had saved me and nothing else.

  I assessed my injuries. Between the drop from the SUV and the blast I felt awful. I found some painkillers and swallowed them with a swig of water, which tasted brackish. I felt my tongue with a clean finger and spotted blood. At some point, I’d bitten my own cheek. It looked manageable, so ignored it. I could walk, I could hear at 80% capacity or better, my eyes were focusing, and I had weapons. My opponents would soon recover, so I started towards the barricade.

  Some tacticians will tell you to stay low and keep out of sight. It was dark, the fires cast tons of shadows and the men were in bad shape. I could easily have moved up to point blank range without being seen. But stealth costs time. Someone had found me in Las Vegas, where I had no reason to be, less than two hours after I’d pulled Mika French from the roof wearing a disguise that hid my biometric markers. The list of organizations capable of that kind of lightning response were few and grim. Assuming Pina hadn’t decided to kill me a third time, this was Section 22, the American black ops team, or one of Wickham’s special teams. Or a joint venture among them. They all wanted me dead.

  I opted to move quickly. I all but sprinted towards them in a kind of gunman’s shuffle, keeping the Uzi ahead of me, sighted at my nearest target. When I was within short range I opened up on the standing soldiers.

  The staggered men dropped. I reloaded and hurdled a burning car. Behind the lines were men in better shape, scrambling for weapons. I shot them all, then reloaded and started hunting for stragglers. Someone on the far end of the defile took some shots at me with a huge cannon of a hand gun. I dropped to the ground and put thirty-two rounds in the
ir direction three cm above the desert floor. A man screamed and the shooting stopped. I swapped sides of the mag and pursued. At the rear furthest from the gunship’s trail of destruction six soldiers huddled, injured and hiding. I cut them down without thinking.

  From behind me came a whistling whisper and I ducked. A knife tumbled into the night. I tried to turn but was kicked against the nearest truck door, driving the Uzi to the ground. Without thinking, I rolled forward, putting distance between me and my attacker. Then turned and saw someone I knew.

  Dieter Graves stood nearly two meters tall, all of it lithe muscle. He could bench over 400 kilos and was known as one of the deadliest hand to hand combatants in the world: Mika French had feared him. He was also the top agent from Generation XV and number three in Section 22, by most accounts. He came at me with a crowbar, using his left arm to fend off my defense. Amateurs tend to swing crowbars lowering their guard in the down swing. Dieter knew his trade and jabbed at me like a sword, hoping to connect with astonishing force and follow up with a killing blow.

  I feinted right, opening his left guard and as the crowbar thrust forward, I rammed my left elbows against his wrist, using the broken truck window as knife and lever to remove his weapon. With my right arm, I sent a strike to his neck, extending my fore knuckle, which threw of his distance by a few centimeters. Dieter caught a tap to his throat and pulled back. I made him yank his right arm free, cutting open the edge of his wrist. I doubt he even felt it.

  He waited for me and I did not oblige. I had a solid object to my left but plenty of room to move behind it, and his left and my right were open for three meters. The element of surprise was gone, so we assessed for a moment. I’d seen what he could do against men stronger and faster than me. We both knew that in a fair fight he’d break me within a minute. I moved half a step back and to my left, forcing him to widen his stance and pursue me around the truck. He split the difference and thrust forward, using the truck as cover from my left hand and tried to grab me his right.