by Peter Nealen
Then, as the echoes died away, Flanagan found himself without any more targets. “Gambler, Woodsrunner,” he called. “Come on up to us; we’ll cover you.”
Then we’ve got to figure out how to get the Colonel out with the package, since we’re not in the same place anymore.
Chapter 22
Winter paused at the vault door with “Main Power” stenciled on the steel, looking back as the remainder of his team ushered Marsden toward the door.
The Organization had clearly been serious when designing the Site. Every major compartment or vital area was secured by the heavy vault doors, locked with the electronic keypads. There was no way to breach any of them without the risk of bringing half the tunnel down on an intruder’s head.
They had encountered less and less resistance as they’d moved downward. Winter didn’t wonder too much at it; the other intruders must be pressing the Site’s security detachment to their limits. Which made his task all the more urgent. They needed to destroy Site 117 before any outsiders were able to get away with any solid data on what the Organization was doing there.
It was bad enough that the Organization was apparently compromised already. Let the true extent of the program become known, and they would have every superpower on the planet looking to ferret them out, no matter how many high-placed individuals were suborned or actively and willingly involved.
“Hurry up,” he snapped at Marsden as he lifted his ARX160’s barrel to point at the ceiling, standing next to the vault door. “We are short on time.”
“There’s plenty of time,” the scientist replied as he bent over the keypad. “Trust me; the Type Ns might not be quite what we set out to create, but they’re still extremely dangerous, and far tougher than almost any operator that the Americans or Russians could send after us. They’ll keep the intruders occupied long enough while we do what we have to.”
Winter brought him up short with a fist in his shirt, twisting Marsden around to look him in the eye. Winter knew he looked somewhat unassuming on the surface; he’d used that fact to his advantage many times. But he also knew when to let the mask slip aside, ever so slightly, and let people see the killer who lurked beneath the façade of a short, mild-mannered, soft-spoken man.
“I do not care how much time you think the Type Ns can buy us,” he said quietly. “They are fighting to save Bevan’s skin, not ours. They are not to be counted on. You are going to get us inside, we are going to set the charges, and we are going to move to blocking positions to make sure that no one escapes from this place alive. We will do this posthaste. Do you understand?”
Marsden looked him in the eyes, probably for the first time. And he looked away very quickly. Winter let him go with a contemptuous gesture toward the keypad.
He knew a little something of what Marsden had seen in his cold, blue eyes. Winter had not ever really counted his kills. He was not like Flint in that respect. In fact, it had been a deliberate choice on his part, precisely to ensure that he wasn’t on Flint’s level.
But despite that effort, he could still recall the mountain of bodies in his past quite vividly. Mostly bodies of people who had seen the cold, dead look in his eyes that Marsden had just seen, just before they died.
Winter did not consider himself a psychopath, or a sociopath, like he thought of Flint. But he had a particular capability to turn off any human feeling when it came to killing. Nor did he need to necessarily justify any killing to himself. In his mind, it was an ultimately nihilistic world. Individuals didn’t matter in the long run. Everyone died eventually, and how and why didn’t matter that much. The Humanity Front’s cause was the only thing he really cared about, and even then, it was in a sort of detached, academic sort of way.
He didn’t take a great deal of pleasure from the violence he perpetrated. It was just what he was good at.
But the very existence of men like him was disturbing to people like Marsden, as much as they were instrumental in creating men like him. He’d use that fear where necessary to accomplish his mission.
Marsden finished punching in the keycode, and the door beeped, showing a green light above the pad. Marsden looked at Winter, and he gestured toward the door handle. He was going to let Marsden open it. He wanted both hands on his rifle for as long as possible.
Marsden swung the vault door open and Winter pushed him through with an elbow, keeping his muzzle high above Marsden’s shoulder. Let Marsden take the first bullet, if it came to that.
The entrance opened on the control center. A couple of decades before, it would have been filled with massive consoles, covered in dials and gauges, manned by half a dozen operators. After all, there was a nuclear power plant down there, on the other side of the windows across from the door.
But that had been before computerization. All of the readouts were now displayed on half a dozen monitors set up on a single long desk that stretched across the room, with two young people watching the displays. On the left was a plump, blond woman and a gangly man with acne scars on his neck and face was sitting in the right-hand seat, apparently deep in worried conversation.
They both turned to look as the door opened, fear written starkly across both their faces. They had to know that something was wrong; alerts had been pinging across the installation’s intercom system for the last hour. But they were deep inside the mountain, behind a solid steel door, and probably hadn’t heard any of the gunfire.
Their eyes widened as they saw Winter in his khakis, tactical gear, and rifle. Even more so as the rest of his team flowed into the room, taking up their points of domination on either side of the door, Gamma and Zeta turning to cover back down the corridor leading from the stairs they’d descended.
“All three of you,” Winter said, shoving Marsden toward the two power operators. “Get on your knees against the wall. Keep your hands on your heads.”
“Wait a minute,” Marsden started to protest, but Winter cut him off.
“Now, Marsden.”
Something of the icy tone in Winter’s voice got through to the specialist, and he glanced at Winter. He might have shuddered a little at the look in Winter’s eyes before quickly complying.
With the three civilians kneeling in place against the wall, Winter motioned for Theta and Iota to cover them. He glanced at the readouts, but he was no nuclear engineer. They meant nothing to him. Even though all the data was computer generated, the displays were just as opaque to him as if they’d been analog needles and dials.
He didn’t expect that the engineers would willingly tell him how to sabotage the system using the controls, and he wasn’t sure that it would do what he needed even if they did. He might not be an engineer, but he knew enough to know that no modern reactor was going to explode like a nuclear warhead.
He glanced out the windows. The cavern below was massive; it was probably fifty meters across and at least as high. The effort to blast it out of the solid rock of the mountain must have been extensive. Steel structural members laced the entire cavity, bracing the ceiling overhead. A glance up at the rock above, lit by actinic lights that bathed the entire, machinery-filled chamber with brilliant white light made him briefly feel the oppressive weight of the mountain over their heads.
The structural members would have to be their primary targets, along with the steam system, which he had picked out of the tangle of equipment and pipes below. His briefing materials had included a brief rundown of the power plant’s layouts in case of just this eventuality, and like every other part of his mission preparation, Winter had studied them extensively.
He pointed toward the door off to the left of the main entrance. “Is that the maintenance access?” he asked.
The acne-scarred man looked around at him, then followed his pointing finger. “Yeah,” he replied, with a British accent. “Why?”
“What kind of protective measures are needed in the main chamber?” Winter asked. “How much radiation is in there?”
The man looked momentarily confused. “None
,” he said. “It’s a pebble-bed reactor. It’s completely encapsulated and shielded.”
“Good,” Winter said. “Iota, Theta, stay here on security. Everyone else, take your satchels and come with me.”
The young man started to twist around at that, but Iota prodded him back against the wall with his muzzle. The plump woman started to cry.
Winter dug his own satchel of Semtex out of his assault pack, slung it over his shoulder, and led the way through the maintenance door.
***
“Is that going to do the trick?” Brannigan asked. From the way that Hancock was eyeing the flex linear charges and the apparently solid steel vault door in front of them, he wasn’t the only one wondering that.
Hancock grimaced, but his reply was cut short as a pair of stunning rifle reports rang through the corridor when Wade took a shot at a gray-clad pursuer who had just stuck his head out from the stairway.
“I don’t think it is,” Hancock bit out as the echoes died down. “Flex linear charges are for blowing residential doors in half. Not for breaching fucking bank vaults.”
Brannigan glared at the door. This was more than just a hard check; it was potentially a mission-ender. All Bevan had to do was squat back there behind that door, and he could outwait them indefinitely.
And they didn’t have the time to try to wait him out. Even if they could hold off the reinforcements that he could hear piling up on the stairs behind them, they still didn’t have the time. Because the Front would have relief forces on the way. Of that, he was certain.
All this way, just to be stymied by a damned locked door.
“How much explosives do we have, total?” he asked.
Santelli looked at him dubiously. “Not much more than that,” he said. “Why? You’re not thinking what I’m afraid you’re thinking, are you?”
“I’m thinking of how much it might take to just blow the whole door and frame into the mountainside, yeah,” Brannigan growled, a moment before Wade hammered another pair of shots down the short way toward the stairs. The echoes of the gunshots almost drowned out the scream of pain that followed.
“Even if we had enough,” Santelli protested, “that’d probably be enough to bring the whole damn tunnel down on our heads, presuming the overpressure doesn’t mash us flat before that. And I don’t think we have enough, anyway.” There was a definite note of relief in his voice as he finished that sentence.
Brannigan wracked his brain, trying to think of a solution. He hated to retreat, leaving the mission unfinished, but the alternative might be to stay where they were until they were overwhelmed. That door wasn’t opening on its own, and they simply didn’t have the means to force it. Bianco might know how to hack his way through a computerized lock, but he was on the outside with a machinegun.
Behind his stony expression, as his mind raced, he was raging. He wanted Bevan. He wanted what Bevan knew. He didn’t want to accept the increasing probability that they might not be able to capture their target. But at the same time, he knew that the longer he waited to try to find a way through that door, the more likely it became that they were going to be cut off and killed.
His responsibility, ultimately, was to the Blackhearts, not to their paymasters. Yes, some had died in combat. It was a risk they knew that they had undertaken when they’d signed on. But there was a difference between dying because your number was up and dying because your commander miscalculated, or worse, blundered out of a misplaced commitment to the mission over all else.
Dying in that corridor wasn’t going to help bring down The Humanity Front. They needed to cut their losses.
But even as he made the decision, he might have already waited too long.
A silvery canister, trailing a stream of white mist, sailed through the doorway leading to the stairs, bounced off the wall, and started to spew a thick white cloud into the tunnel.
Brannigan didn’t need to feel the bite at the back of his throat and the sting in his eyes to know a CS grenade when he saw one. The Front apparently didn’t want to risk a frag in the tunnels, so they were trying to incapacitate the Blackhearts with non-lethals, instead.
He didn’t hesitate. He dashed forward and kicked the grenade back at the stairs. It sailed into the doorway, hitting the massive, black-clad man who was charging out into the tunnel with an MP7 in his hands in the chest.
It didn’t slow the man down. His gas mask notwithstanding, he didn’t even react to the impact.
His eyes streaming, Brannigan snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired as the man finished the turn. He wasn’t sure of his aim, but even so, between him, Wade, and Burgess, they put at least half a dozen rounds into the charging shooter in black.
Only after a moment did he realize just how close he’d come to death. That man had already had that MP7 in his shoulder, his finger tightening on the trigger as he’d hooked around the corner. Only the fact that Wade, through his typical rage-fueled stubbornness, had still been aimed in like a laser beam at the doorway, even as he’d beaten back the cough that was squeezing his throat, had saved them. Wade had fired as soon as he’d had the smallest target, throwing the Front shock trooper’s aim off. Three 4.6mm bullets had smacked into the ceiling, unnoticed in the echoing, painful thunder of the 7.62mm battle rifles.
But even as the man fell, slumping forward as he still struggled to bring his submachinegun to bear, even though he was already dying, another shock trooper appeared, already shooting as he came around the corner.
All six Blackhearts in the hallway dropped flat, shooting back at the same instant. It was getting increasingly hard to see and breathe in the gas-choked hallway, but survival can quickly overcome even the worst discomfort, and none of the six men had ever been the kind to let pain stop them.
Least of all Roger Hancock.
Hancock dropped with the rest as 4.6mm bullets smacked into the rock walls and the vault door over their heads. But as soon as the crash of return fire started to fill the hallway, he was up and moving, his rifle in his shoulder, surging forward as he coughed, fighting through the pain and pumping bullets into the charging behemoth as he went. Fire spat from his muzzle, the shockwaves slapping Brannigan and Wade as he charged.
The second shock trooper had already been getting hit as he’d run around the corner, just like the first. He still managed to put a bullet into Hancock as he crumpled. Brannigan saw Hancock stumble, a red splash bursting from his lower back, just above his belt, but the shorter, bald man just seemed to get angrier at the hit. He surged back to his feet and drove on toward the stairway, forcing the others to join him before he ran to his death.
The CS got thicker as they passed the bodies of the two shock troopers, who had gotten a lot farther from the stairwell than Brannigan had first thought. No more of them were coming, but he looked up and shot a man in gray fatigues and gear who was peeking around the corner with an AUG. Like the men in black, the regular security man was wearing a gas mask, but it looked like it was badly fogged.
His rifle thundered, spitting fire, and the man jerked, spun partway around by the bullet impact, before Javakhishvili shot him. Herc was moving up fast, but only to grab Hancock by the gear and pull him back as Wade, Brannigan, and Burgess forged ahead, all three men trying to stifle coughs as they waded through the CS and neared the corner.
Wade was first, crossing the corridor to come at the corner from the blind side. He had less of an angle himself, but he was covered for longer. He paused just long enough for Brannigan to squeeze his shoulder, and then he was throwing himself around the corner, leading with his rifle barrel.
Brannigan was vaguely aware that Wade was already shooting as he hooked around the big Ranger to bring his own rifle to bear. He just registered three men in gray on the landing below, apparently trying to fall back, as he leveled his sights on the one to the far right, his finger already stroking the trigger. The ACE 52 roared savagely in the tight space, the noise almost as devastating as the impact of the bullet through the
man’s shoulder, shattering his collarbone as it punched through to come up against the inside of his back plate. The man crumpled, sort of folding over the wound, as Brannigan’s fast follow-up shot, almost so quick that he didn’t even think about it, smashed through his temple, just below the lip of his helmet. He dropped, limp, as Wade cleaned up the center man, who was trying to get over the body of the first, heading for the next flight down.
Wade led the way down toward the landing. He hadn’t waited for a prompting from Brannigan; he was just pushing the fight, as Wade was wont to do. But Brannigan couldn’t dispute the wisdom of it; they weren’t getting through that vault door. The best thing they could do at the moment would be to fight their way out and get word about the facility back to Van Zandt’s office, then come back with reinforcements.
But no sooner had Wade hit the landing and started to take the corner than he suddenly reared back, away from the next flight of stairs. Brannigan ran right into him, and the collision threatened to launch Wade back out into the stairway, but Burgess grabbed both of them by the gear and hauled them back, just as a long, chattering burst of machinegun fire raved up the stairs, chewing into the wall at chest level, the impacts showering powdered and shattered concrete over the landing.
“That’s a belt-fed,” Wade announced. “We’re not getting past that without grenades.” Of course, they had none. Frags were a lot harder to get than guns and bullets; even Dalca hadn’t gotten them any.
“Back up,” Brannigan rasped, feeling the creeping dread of imminent defeat gnawing at the back of his mind. He’d miscalculated, and now at least five of his teammates were going to pay the price. “Barricade on the stairwell, cover this landing.” It would at least force the enemy to fight up, making it harder for them to CS the Blackhearts.
But they were trapped. I screwed this up. I should have pulled back as soon as we saw that this place was bigger than the villa. I let my own drive to get Bevan draw us in. I just led us all running to our deaths.