Enemy One (Epic Book 5)

by Lee Stephen

  Screaming in pain, William pulled himself up and into the transport as the Irishman scrambled up beside him, then helped the injured demolitionist in. The Pariah rocketed before the rear door could even be lifted, as all three men—Scott, Becan, and William—grabbed hold of the support rails as momentum threatened to blast them through the air. Reaching out frantically, Scott slapped around the bay door mechanism, finally hitting it just as the transport shot upward. Against the force of a rapidly-increasing wind, the door began to lift.

  “Bollocks!” Becan said, tearing off his helmet and collapsing before shooting a desperate look back to William. “Will! Are yeh okay?”

  The Southerner was bleeding badly—Scott could see it pouring out of his armor. “Will, get out of that armor!” he yelled. “Becan, patch him up.”

  Becan’s eyes shot wide open. “Yeh want me to patch him up?”

  “Last I checked, Sveta wasn’t in the ship—patch him up!”

  Growling loudly, Becan stumbled William’s way as the demolitionist tore off his sentry armor.

  Fighting against speed and sharp turns in mid-air, Scott made his way against all odds back into the cockpit. Slamming into the copilot’s chair and strapping in, he looked at the pilot’s radar. “What we got?” In tune with Scott’s question, streaks of orange flew past the Pariah’s cockpit. The stinging sounds of bullets hitting the hull reverberated as Travis desperately turned the stick to the side.

  What could they do? What could they possibly do? They were not going to outrun or outgun these three V2s. The only way they were going to get out of this would be to have an ace up their sleeve—but what?

  It came to Scott in that instant. “Travis, loop around and buzz the battlefield!”

  Behind his flight helmet, the pilot blinked. “What?”

  “Buzz the battlefield!” The whole while they talked, bullets flew past, some striking the hull even as Travis brought it rapidly around. “Buzz the satellites as closely as you can, on William’s side!” Looking back into the troop bay, Scott cried out, “Get ready with that detonator!”

  Travis seemed to get the plan, quickly snapping the stick back in the other direction and weaving the Pariah around in a tight loop, the three V2s hot on their tail. As more bullets struck the ship, several of the Pariah’s console indicators flashed. “What’s that?”

  “Damage!”

  I knew that, you idiot!

  Slamming the throttle forward as the battlefield came into view, Travis sent the Pariah screaming ahead at maximum speed. It wasn’t enough to lose the approaching Vultures, but losing them wasn’t the plan. The Pariah would take some damage, but in the end, if it could just stay in one piece, they could strike back in the only way they could: fire and fury. Looking back again, Scott yelled to Becan, “Do you have that detonator?”

  “Wha?” Becan answered. “I’m patchin’ up Will!”

  “Take care of Will later, get that detonator ready now!”

  Becan was exasperated. “Bleedin’ hell!” Scrambling for the detonator, he snatched it up with a single hand. “Got the detonator!”

  “Get ready!” The Pariah was passing by the first set of satellites. The Vultures were behind them and gaining fast. They don’t know what we’re doing here—they don’t know we’re going to blow the place to smithereens. They’ll never know this is coming. His plan was simple: lead them into the blast radius, then light the three V2s up, all at once. It was their only hope. As the transport was about to zip past the final row of satellites on the near side, Scott yelled, “Detonate, now!” He looked at Travis. “Make a beeline for Tom!”

  The Pariah soared past the satellites. The Vultures fired behind them.

  Becan pressed the button.

  The rows of satellites exploded like mini nukes, each one erupting in rapid sequence with so much force, they could feel it in the Pariah even as they left the satellites behind. Behind them, the three Vultures were engulfed. “Tom, now!” Scott said.

  “On it!” Travis replied. The Pariah hit the brakes as the EDEN soldiers on the battlefield scattered, some knocked backward by the explosions, some in sheer panic. Descending near the satellite by Tom and Donald’s body, Scott once again left the copilot’s seat to scramble to the back.

  * * *

  ON THE BATTLEFIELD below, Logan, Chiumbo, and Marty were blindsided by the blasts. Even with some distance to the satellites that detonated, the three men were blown backward by the shock waves, their weapons flying from their hands as they landed backward in the dirt, meters away. Groaning in pain, Logan rolled onto his stomach. Through the roar of continuous eruptions from the satellite dishes, he heard Minh shout over their Vulture’s comm.

  “I am going down! Repeat, I am going down!”

  Turning their collective heads up, Logan, Marty, and Chiumbo watched as the three Vultures that’d been caught in the blast streaked overhead, each one heading for fiery crash landings. From the Vulture at point—Minh’s—the explosive plume of an ejection from the cockpit could be seen. Minh’s seat and harness rocketed skyward as the V2 flew toward a crash landing.

  “What in da hell was dat?” Marty asked, looking wide-eyed at Chiumbo, who was dirt-covered and coughing.

  Logan’s focus shifted to the Pariah, which was coming down by another dish on their side of the battlefield. The Australian’s face was struck by dread. “Whatever it was, I think it’s about to happen again!”

  The two Vectors behind him followed his gaze, catching sight of the Pariah picking up the lone operative and dead body from behind the satellite.

  “Run!” said Logan, scrambling to his feet and taking off in the other direction, Chiumbo and Marty right there behind him.

  * * *

  “UP! UP!” SAID SCOTT, slamming the rear bay door button as soon as Donald’s body was dragged on board. Without a moment’s hesitation, Travis brought the nose of the Pariah up again. Scott looked at Tom, who didn’t need to be told a thing—the soldier’s finger was already on the detonator’s trigger. With rapid acceleration, the Pariah cleared the row of satellites.

  * * *

  LOGAN’S FEET WERE moving as quickly as his legs could make them, moving away from both the satellites and the facility. He wasn’t even concerned with the direction he was heading or if it made tactical sense. All that mattered right now was sheer distance.

  “Hey!” Marty hollered from behind him. “If we’re gonna run, we need to run toward da—”

  The Cajun never had time to finish the statement. Just as had taken place on the other side of the battlefield, the row of satellite dishes exploded, the force of the blast once again sending the three soldiers—and every EDEN operative around them—soaring through the air as the shockwave slammed into them. As they crashed onto the ground a second time, the men groaned in aching pain.

  Dust and debris were falling everywhere, some smaller pieces hitting the dirt around them while larger pieces that could have killed them crashed into the ground near the burning dishes. Hami Station could no longer be seen through the smoke and dust. Coughing as he staggered to his feet, Chiumbo called out to the interior team through his comm. “Pablo, Sasha, come in!”

  * * *

  The inside of Hami Station was chaos. The firefight between the two Vectors, who’d entered from the rear of the building, and the outlaws in the intersection slammed to a halt with the first round of explosives, which shook the very foundation of the facility. Both men had heard Minh’s comm call, though neither had seen the Vector pilot eject. By the time the second explosion registered, they were backtracking rapidly out of the building, their pursuit of the outlaws halted by the urgent drive to survive. The way Hami Station was groaning, it sounded like the entire building was on the verge of collapse.

  “What is going on out there?” asked Sasha as he and Pablo dashed out of the rear door and looked around. Debris littered the ground in every direction as waves of billowing smoke rolled past them, darkening the sky as if a violent storm was on the ho
rizon.

  Chiumbo’s voice wheezed over the comm, “The satellites have been detonated.”

  “We are seeing that now,” said Sasha, coughing alongside Pablo as they ducked back to the door frame of the building simply to get out of the smoke. “This entire building may come down.”

  “Do you have the outlaws?”

  Frowning, the Russian scout answered, “Negative, lieutenant. They are inside the facility.”

  * * *

  Crawling to their feet, Chiumbo, Logan, and Marty peered through the fog of war for their weapons, the surviving EDEN soldiers doing the same. Each man withdrew his handgun. Spitting sand out of his mouth, Chiumbo said to Sasha through the comm, “They cannot be allowed to escape! There are only two ways into this building. Stand post at the rear and we will press forward toward the—” The Mwera lieutenant’s words were cut off by the sudden thrust of Vulture engines. Looking skyward through the dust, the three men beheld a lone transport lowering at the front of the building, its nose—barely discernable through the smoke—pointed in their direction. The burst of vertical landing thrusters resounded. “They are landing at the front of the building!” Chiumbo hollered as he, Logan, Marty, and the soldiers around them scampered to their feet to move forward. In the next second that followed, the spinning sound of a nose-mounted cannon emerged.

  “Everyone move!” shouted Logan. As the remnant of the frontal assault team sprinted out of the line of fire, the Pariah’s front cannon erupted with firepower.

  * * *

  “GET ’EM ON BOARD!” Scott shouted at the top of his lungs, waving on his comrades as they ran up the hallway of Hami Station and toward the waiting Pariah, its rear bay door open against the open front door of the facility. Ahead through the smoke and sprinklers, the shapes of the interior team could be seen desperately making their way forward.

  Yelling through the cabin speaker, Travis said, “I don’t have infinite ammo up here, get them in fast!”

  Many from the ground team were heavily injured, namely David, Boris, and Lilan, all of whom were screaming in pain as they were being assisted by their comrades toward the Pariah. It was impossible to make out the extent of their injuries, but blood was everywhere. Scott had never seen Nightman armor torn through like that before. Whatever weaponry had struck them was well beyond the capability of standard E-35 assault rifles. This was something new.

  Grabbing David by the shoulder as Valentin led him in, Scott assisted his friend to a seat. The former NYPD officer’s thigh was a mess—the bullets that had hit it had torn through his leg guards like a hot knife through soft butter. What were these weapons?

  There was no time to truly wonder. The instant the last of the interior team was inside, Scott yelled to the young slayer, Pyotr, who was standing closest to the rear bay door button. “Raise the door!” As the slayer complied, Scott shouted for Travis to take the Pariah up. “Dust off, now!”

  “With pleasure,” Travis said, engaging the vertical thrusters again as the cursed transport lifted from the ground.

  Moving awkwardly through the troop bay, Scott cried out to everyone present. “Strap in and get ready to take off! Travis, what’s the status of Tiffany?”

  Through the console comm, Travis called for the Superwolf pilot. “Tiff, where are you?”

  * * *

  TIFFANY WAS IN THE middle of a dogfight when Travis’s comm call came through. “I cannot talk!” the blonde screamed, yanking the stick and kicking back the throttle in a desperate attempt to yet again shake a hot-on-her-heels aggressor.

  The Valley-Girl-turned-Superwolf-ace had spent the past ten minutes in the midst of an aerial melee, dodging javelin missiles, trident missiles, and the incessant spraying of cannon fire from her adversaries.

  At the onset of this particular sky battle, the blonde had been outnumbered six-to-one, facing the additional four Superwolves and two Vindicators from Hong Kong. Against every odd, she’d managed to take out half of her opponents, downing a pair of Superwolves and one Vindicator, leaving her with the same number of both aircraft left to deal with. The battle, however, was not without blemish. Not only had she depleted her missile supply, but her Superwolf had taken its fair share of cannon fire. Though it wasn’t enough to knock out any critical systems, it was a brutal reminder that despite her abilities, she was not immune to being hit.

  Just the same, for the first time in the entire battle, she felt like she was on the verge of having the upper hand. She’d used the dunes of the Gobi Desert below to out-maneuver the missiles that’d been fired at her, and despite the difficulty she was having shaking this one particular Superwolf from her tail, she’d slowly but surely been gaining momentum in the fight. Eventually, though, one of their shots would ring true, and the commandeered Superwolf would find itself spiraling out of control much like the ones she’d shot down herself.

  As she went vertical yet again in an effort to lose the Superwolf behind her, Travis’s voice crackled through once more. “We’ve picked up the ground team! We’re on our way back to base now.”

  “Roger that!” Tiffany shouted, yanking back on the stick and turning it to barrel roll and level off. Weaving left and right, she finally managed to shake the fighter at her tail. “Finally!” Switching to the enemy pilot’s frequency as she maneuvered herself to tail him, she screamed with rage, “You are totally dead!” Pulling the trigger, she peppered the Superwolf’s fuselage with bullet holes before it, too, weaved out of her sights.

  * * *

  “ALL RIGHT.” TRAVIS swung the Pariah’s nose to the north. “Hold on, everyone, we’re about to fly!”

  Thank God. As he held on tightly to a guard rail, Scott’s mind raced to grasp their situation. Donald Bell was dead. Lilan, David, Boris, and William were all seriously injured. But Hami Station was destroyed and they had the access codes for EDEN’s satellite network. That was the mission. That was what would keep their hopes alive. This had been a bloodbath—but it was about to be over. Considering what they’d just done and who’d they’d been up against, they were almost getting away easy.

  Soon, they’d be home free.

  * * *

  LISA TIFFIN HAD SEEN everything unfold. The explosions of the satellite dishes, the engulfing of the three V2s, the catastrophic unraveling of a mission that, for Vector Squad, should have been easy. Despite her relatively new status as a Vector, she had never seen the elite fighting unit as caught off guard and flummoxed as this. Had she not been desperately trying to find a shot through the smoky haze below, she might have even found time to be embarrassed. But there was no time for that. Vector had been sucker-punched—but this fight was far from over.

  The sniper had seen the Fourteenth’s Vulture dip down into the fog. She knew they were picking up their ground team. She knew the transport would rise again. Her sniper rifle was ready.

  Lisa’s eyes were glued to where the Vulture had descended—looking for any sign that the transport was lifting off the ground: a landing light, the movement of smoke, the sound of a vertical thruster engaging. Anything that could be picked up from her distant perch. At long last, that sign came.

  Emerging nose-up above the smoke, the Fourteenth’s transport rose like a phoenix, its vertical thrusters blasting fire beneath it as it came to a hovering standstill some forty meters off the ground. Just enough to let the ship’s pilot see through the fog. Just enough for a Vulture that was flying blind to get its bearings.

  The Pariah pivoted in her direction, its shimmering cockpit glass reflecting what little sunlight could penetrate the smoke and dust. In mere seconds, it would blast off straight ahead, leaving Hami Station behind to burn as the outlaws slipped through Vector’s fingers. In mere seconds.

  She’d have to be quicker.

  Raising her sniper rifle, Lisa free-handed it from her perch on the tower. Her aiming eye peered through the scope, a second to spare to find its most vulnerable point. The one weakness that every Vulture possessed. The one thing that, if taken out, would
slam the brakes on the outlaws’ escape.

  As her crosshairs found her target, Lisa held her breath and squeezed the trigger.

  21

  Tuesday, March 20th, 0012 NE

  1619 hours

  Hami, China

  “JAY, SECURE THAT hacking kit!” Scott yelled, pointing back into the troop bay from his seat next to Travis. “If that thing breaks, we just did all this for—”

  Crack!

  Scott jumped as the sound rang out. Small pieces of some kind of debris tattered against his faceplate and body armor. Withdrawing his hand and whipping his head back around, he searched frantically for the source of what sounded like a very bad sound. It took but a half-second to find it. It was the windshield. Square in the center of the pilot’s side of the cockpit glass was a small, circular hole, cracks spindling out from its center. “What the hell is that?” he shouted. “Travis,” he looked at the pilot, “did someone just—”

  The words shoot us never came out, for the moment Scott looked at Travis Navarro, he went rigid. Travis’s head was slumped over, the faceplate of his helmet shattered inward. Behind him, staining the entire back of the pilot’s seat, was blood and brain matter. Time stood still.

  That blood is Travis’s. Travis just got shot in the head. Oh my God…

  …Travis is dead.

  The gravity of the moment lasted barely a moment before realization and emotion gave way to a horrible reality. Travis was dead. Their pilot was dead. No one was flying the Pariah!