by Peter Nealen
“I’m good,” Gomez replied, sounding about as hoarse and tired as Flanagan felt.
Together, they got up, still staying halfway hunched over, and forged toward the dirt-piled concrete parapet where Curtis and Bianco were crouched behind their MAG-58s, the machineguns laid over the parapet.
It was meant to be a dash, covering the roughly seventy yards as quickly as possible to get to the cover of the concrete emplacement. But between the thin air and the slope, it turned into more of a shuffle, and they were both panting by the time they reached the parapet. Flanagan forced himself over, almost losing his balance and falling inside.
“Whoa, buddy, take a minute,” Bianco said, catching him. “This air’s no joke.”
“No kidding,” Flanagan replied, gulping air as he leaned back against his pack. Gomez slid down beside him, his rifle cradled against his knees, the muzzle pointed at the sky.
But they couldn’t take too long a break. “How far in are the rest?” Gomez asked.
“Not sure,” Curtis answered. “They went in a few minutes before that fight started.
“With any luck, they’re about to kick in Bevan’s door right now.”
Chapter 19
Brannigan followed Wade up the tunnel, which arrowed straight back into the mountain. More gunfire echoed faintly from up ahead, and he kept his muzzle aimed past Wade’s shoulder, the sights barely an inch below his line of sight. CQB in tunnels was bad enough as it was; with the enemy already alerted and fighting someone else deeper in, they were more likely to shoot first and ask questions later.
In those sorts of cramped quarters, the fastest on the trigger was going to be the one to survive.
The tunnel angled to the left and Wade slowed, easing his way around the slight corner. The angle wasn’t extreme, but it was still enough to cut off visibility past a few yards. While the walls were still the rough texture of blasted rock, without having been finished with concrete, the excavation was still straight and even; the Front had hired people who knew what they were doing when they’d built this place.
Wade reached the corner, keeping his rifle pointed at it, paused, then stepped around, sweeping his muzzle to clear every bit of the angle as he moved. Then he pushed forward, and Brannigan and Kirk followed, with the rest following in trace, most of their muzzles pointed at the floor or the ceiling. There was nothing else to aim at.
Past the corner, the tunnel only stretched another twenty or so yards before terminating in a steel door set into a concrete portal.
A steel door that was already starting to open.
Wade kept moving, closing the distance fast, his rifle up and trained on the door. Brannigan and Kirk hurried to catch up, and the three men—none of them small—advanced almost line abreast across the tunnel as the door swung all the way open, revealing two men dressed entirely in black, carrying short, stubby MP7s.
Both men reacted to the sight of the team closing in on the door with blinding speed, snapping their stubby 4.6mm submachineguns up level, fingers already tightening on their triggers. But the Blackhearts were a heartbeat ahead of them.
Three ACE 52s thundered, the concussions physically painful in the enclosed rock walls, flame spitting and strobing from the shorter barrels. All three men fired Mozambique drills, hammering a pair of shots to the torso before shifting to the head.
The hugely muscled, tanned man on the left took six 147-grain 7.62mm rounds to the chest and face and collapsed, half his skull blasted away. The pale man on the right only took three, but Kirk’s finishing round, barely half a second behind his first pair, blew through the man’s eye and blasted the back of his skull away in a shower of gore. He fell on his face in a welter of blood, spilling blood and brains out of a fist-sized hole in the back of his head.
None of the three hesitated or slowed. They knew they were in a fatal funnel, and anyone behind those two would have an easy shot. They kept driving forward, almost as one. Brannigan made out another target just behind the man on the left that he and Wade had gunned down, and he snapped his sights onto that gray-clad form, noting the bullpup AUG in the man’s hands, already coming level, and shot him through the bridge of the nose as Wade broke the threshold of the door, stepping on the dead body lying on the floor.
Wade had already wasted the man next to Brannigan’s target, and snapped around to the left as Kirk went right. Brannigan followed Wade, moving into the space left as Wade stepped wide out of the doorway, sweeping his rifle across the chamber beyond.
Brannigan had already shifted targets as soon as an only semi-conscious part of his brain had registered a good hit on the gray-clad man that he’d shot.
There were four more men stacked up in the room behind the one he’d shot. Another was already crumpling with two of Wade’s bullets in him.
Brannigan clamped his forward hand down on the rifle’s handguards, hard, and dragged the muzzle across the group, firing as fast as the trigger would reset. Flame strobed and thunder slapped the walls of the room with catastrophic concussions as bullets punched through flesh and bone. He kept his aim high, pointing over the tops of chest plates. They were so close that headshots weren’t all that difficult, even as fast as he and Kirk were firing.
For a brief, nightmarish few seconds, the small room was filled with a storm of fire, noise, flying metal, and spraying blood.
Then the men in gray were falling, limp and lifeless, blood and brains still spattering from shattered skulls and perforated chests, as the Blackhearts continued flowing into the room.
The place looked like a team room or a security ready room, with three doors, one leading the way they’d come, another that probably led to the higher defensive position in the draw above them, and a third facing deeper into the mountain. Cubbies held weapons and gear, surrounding a pair of rough, plywood tables. What looked like a duty roster was posted up on the wall next to the door leading west. Several posters with what were probably supposed to be inspiring slogans about protecting and building the future were pasted up, though several had been scribbled on, and one had been partially covered over by a picture of a voluptuous model in a bikini so small as to be practically nonexistent. The model currently had a pair of bullet holes through her thigh.
“Anybody hit?” Brannigan asked in the sudden, deafening silence. His hearing was deadened; he sounded to his own ears like he was speaking underwater. The ringing would start soon.
“I got trimmed,” Kirk announced through gritted teeth.
Santelli pushed past Kirk to cover the far door. “Herc!” he called.
“On it,” Javakhishvili replied, slinging his rifle and moving to check on Kirk. Jenkins, Hancock, and Burgess joined Wade and Santelli to cover the doors, while Brannigan joined Javakhishvili to check on Kirk.
“Damn, son,” Javakhishvili said. “You got more than trimmed.” He snapped out a razor-sharp folding knife and started to cut away Kirk’s shirtsleeve. “This looks like a through-and-through, fortunately. I don’t think it hit the bone. But you’re going to be missing some meat.”
“Just get it packed and get me back in this shit,” Kirk growled.
Javakhishvili looked up at him with a sour expression and a raised eyebrow. “You’re not going to be working that gun as well as you were,” he said as he started pulling combat gauze and an ace bandage out of Kirk’s first aid kit. “If at all.”
“Just pack it,” Kirk snarled. “I’ve been shot before.”
Javakhishvili shook his head as he started shoving coagulant-impregnated gauze into the bullet hole in Kirk’s bloodied shoulder. “Want me to rub some dirt in it, too?” he asked.
“Couldn’t hurt,” Burgess commented from across the room, his eyes and his muzzle still trained on the door leading to the other tunnel.
Brannigan looked around at the team, then at the doors, thinking fast. They’d gone in expecting to hit a villa inside a walled compound. Not a walk in the park by any means, especially not with the amount of security that Dalca’s people had documented around
it. But this wasn’t just a villa; it was a villa with an underground tunnel complex and hardened defensive positions attached. And they had no idea how large the tunnel complex really was.
But with Kirk wounded in his gun arm…
“Kirk, Jenkins, you’re staying here,” he said.
“Wait a minute!” Kirk started to protest, but Brannigan cut him off.
“You’ve got a hole in you, and it will slow you down,” he said. “It might slow you down enough that it’ll get you and a bunch of the rest of us killed, especially in close quarters like this.” He shook his head. “You’re watching our way out. With you posted up here, we shouldn’t have to re-clear this room on the way back.”
“What if something happens, man?” Jenkins asked, his voice rising. “I don’t think the radios are gonna work down here!”
“Then use your judgement,” Brannigan replied. “If it looks like you’re going to get stormed, fall back and link up with Vinnie and Kevin. If we’re not back in two hours, then get the hell out, because we won’t be coming back.” He knew that he was putting a hard deadline on a very flexible mission, given the fact that they had no idea what the rest of the tunnel complex looked like, but without radio comms, he didn’t want to make things so open-ended that the two men stayed put and died.
“Use Kirk’s judgement,” Hancock put in. Jenkins looked over at him angrily, but had the good judgement to keep his mouth shut. Hancock had been in a foul mood since before the mission had even started, and all of them knew better than to cross Roger Hancock.
“Everybody else up?” Brannigan asked as Javakhishvili finished packing Kirk’s wound and winding the ace wrap around his shoulder. Kirk winced as the bandage got tightened down, and then, grudgingly, switched his rifle to his other hand. Taking the 7.62 recoil in his wounded shoulder would have been agony.
Wade crossed the room quickly, stepping over a body, and joined Hancock at the door. Brannigan moved up to join them, and then Hancock was leading the way through.
The next hallway was short, with an elevator shaft and stairwell at the end. Wade and Hancock moved quickly to the stairs; none of them were going to take chances on an elevator.
Brannigan moved up to Wade’s shoulder, where the two men were cross-covered on the door. Burgess backed Hancock, while Javakhishvili and Santelli held on the elevator, just in case.
Wade and Hancock exchanged a short nod, then Hancock threw the door open and Wade went through, slamming his weight against the door and pinning it to the wall as he went in.
The stairway was narrow and dimly lit by more of the small fluorescents. Wade quickly covered down the stairs in front of him, while Hancock stepped to the right and snapped his rifle up to point up toward the next landing up.
“Up or down, John?” he asked.
Brannigan stepped up next to him, listening. He could faintly hear what might have been gunshots, but right off he couldn’t tell whether they were coming from above or below. The acoustics in the concrete stairway weren’t great.
After a moment, he thought that the noise was coming from below them. He thought quickly, trying to map out where they’d been so far, trying to figure out the lay of the land.
The tunnel they’d entered through had stayed fairly level, so they were probably on roughly the same elevation. And he was fairly certain that the defensive position they’d taken had been considerably higher than the villa itself. Which meant that the bulk of the complex was probably below them.
“Up,” he decided. “We’ll move up to the top, then clear down.” He moved up behind Hancock. “It’s always better to fight down than up, anyway, and if our rivals are raising hell at the bottom, then Bevan’s probably running for the top, anyway.”
He squeezed Hancock’s shoulder, and the two of them started up, leaving Wade to take up the rear, covering down the stairs below them.
***
Winter saw the team of black-clad Type-Ns come blazing around the corner and opened fire immediately. He saw one stagger as the triple 5.56 rounds hammered into his chest, but these men had prepared better, and were wearing body armor. He ducked into the nearest door just as the lead Type-N’s bullets cracked into Delta’s face, just over his shoulder. The rest of the team opened fire, dumping a terrific fusillade down the hallway as they raced to join Winter.
Winter cleared the room hastily; it looked like another storage room, stacked with crates and plastic barrels. Then he was back on the door, as the rest of the team poured through as fast as they could.
The Type-Ns were right on them. No sooner had Zeta cleared the doorway than a massive Asian man in black fatigues plunged through, pumping rounds into Zeta’s back plate and knocking him on his face. Only the fact that Winter had already aimed in gave him a shot at the man’s head before he finished Zeta off. He double-tapped the man, the twin 5.56 rounds hitting within a centimeter of each other, right at the temple.
Even as blood and brains spattered the doorframe, for a brief second, it looked almost as if the man was still going to stand. Then he collapsed, as if every joint had suddenly fallen apart.
The rest of the team had scrambled into the room and dived for cover, and were already pouring 5.56 fire into the doorway, hardly even bothering to aim.
The Type-Ns’ number two man ran right into the storm of bullets. Most of them hit his front plate; those that didn’t, but still struck his torso, probably didn’t do much damage or slow him down.
The half-dozen rounds that chewed into his throat and face, blasting the back of his skull off, dropped him before he could get a shot off.
Then Iota lobbed an HG-85 grenade into the hallway, and the rest of the team desperately scrambled away from the doorway, turning their backs and trying to cover their vitals.
The frag detonated with a bone-jarring thud, the concussion painful even inside the room. Black smoke roiled through the doorway, and fragmentation pattered with deceptive softness against the doorframe. Each bit of notched wire was moving fast enough to flay the flesh off a man’s bones.
Quiet fell in the aftermath of the explosion, though it was only relative; as Winter’s hearing began to recover from the blast, he could make out pained groans coming from the hallway. He stepped out, Iota right behind him to cover his back, and double-tapped each bloodied form lying in the hallway, whether it was moving or not. Gray-clad forms got a single round to the skull. The two men in black, one of which was still trying to rise even thought his eyes were gone in a mask of blood, each got three, just to make sure.
“What did they do?” Iota asked, looking down at the black-clad forms crumpled in the hallway.
Winter didn’t answer, but bent down to retrieve what looked like it might be a working radio from the kit of the last man in the stack, as blood and liquefied brain matter leaked out of the fresh, faintly smoking hole in his skull. Tearing it out of the radio pouch, he lifted it to his ear.
It took a few moments to sort out the frantic communications. There were multiple teams talking, all stepping on each other. It seemed as if the competition was raising havoc elsewhere in the complex, and the security was trying to handle both incursions at once, while the Type-Ns were trampling all over the site security commander.
“Team Seven, I say again, proceed to Corridor A3 and begin clearing. Team Eight, take up a blocking position at Lift Shaft Three and hold for Team Seven!” A burst of stepped-on transmissions interrupted it with beeps of bad keys and stammered, overlapping words. “…extreme caution; they have already eliminated two teams.”
“We need to move fast,” Winter said, looking up at the stenciled “A3” in black paint on the corridor wall. “There should be a lift ahead; they will try to cut us off there.” Without waiting for an acknowledgement, he started moving, his rifle up and pointed down the corridor.
“Are we going up or down?” Iota asked.
“Down,” Winter replied.
“Wouldn’t the target be going up?” Iota inquired. He’d read the briefing papers
, and knew the general layout as well as Winter did.
“He probably is,” Winter replied, as they neared the doors to the lift and the stairwell next to it. “But with another enemy force within the complex, and the security turned against us, we have one option left. Bevan’s misguided drive for self-preservation has gone beyond making him a liability. This facility is now compromised, so we are going to go down to the power level, set charges, and bury him and it at the same time. Hopefully before the intruders can find out exactly what has been going on here.
“If we find another armory between here and there, we need to load up on explosives. What we have should be enough, but it never hurts to be sure.”
Chapter 20
Hancock slowed as they neared what looked like the top of the stairs. They’d come up four flights, and, surprisingly, hadn’t run into resistance yet. Brannigan had to assume that getting hit from two different directions and factions at once had probably thrown the facility’s security for a loop, and they were still trying to catch up.
The Blackhearts needed to move fast to take advantage, because they were clearly outnumbered and on unfamiliar ground.
Hancock stepped up onto the landing, facing another short hallway with a steel door at the end, with a keypad above the door handle. A quick glance at the stairway confirmed that they were at the top. It was that door, or nothing.
And it looked pretty damned solid.
Brannigan stepped to one side, keeping his muzzle trained on the edge of the door, where it would open, while Hancock moved to the other, cramming himself into the corner, and inspected the door handle and keypad. He tried punching a sequence into the pad; some cypher locks had default codes. But nothing happened.
“They’ve got it locked down,” Hancock muttered. “Feels like a vault door.”
“Think that’s their command center?” Brannigan asked.
“Might be,” Hancock said. “It’s our only way in, unless we go down a flight and try another way. Presuming that there even is another way.”