by Peter Nealen
He didn’t have an empty pouch in his own chest rig, so he tapped Wade on the shoulder, and when the big former Ranger looked over at him, he handed him one of the frags. He kept the other one.
“Here’s the plan,” he said. “We’ll move down to the next landing, staying out of the line of fire from that belt fed. Cook the grenades for a three-count, then toss ‘em down, and follow up as soon as they go off. Make sure you throw it hard, and hook it off the wall; I don’t want them tossing either one back.”
“No worries,” Wade said, taking the grenade as he stepped back, leaving Burgess momentarily covering the steps by himself. “I might have freaked a few people out playing that game before.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Santelli muttered.
“All right. Wade and I will take point; then Burgess and Santelli. Herc, keep an eye on that vault door and bring Hancock with you as soon as you can, but take care of that wound.”
“Fuck that,” Hancock snarled. “I’m coming.”
“Didn’t say you weren’t,” Brannigan replied calmly. “But you’ve got a hole in you, and I don’t give a damn how pissed off you are, you’re going to be a liability. Stay with Herc, and try not to make that wound worse.”
Hancock clearly wasn’t happy about it, but when he tried to heave himself to his feet, he froze and his face turned gray. Obviously trying to hold back the grimace of agony, he nodded grudgingly. “You got it, John.”
Brannigan nodded back and turned to the stairs. “On me.” Wade was closer, but Brannigan had held to a personal ethos of “leadership” more than “command” since he’d been an NCO, and he’d be damned if he changed that now. Especially when his men were in a crack because his decision-making had put them there. Either he was going to get them out, or he was going to go down in the process.
He got about halfway down the steps when the entire mountain seemed to shudder and the lights went out.
***
Flanagan and Gomez were in front, moving as quickly down the corridor as they could, all while still taking care to keep each door they passed covered. They wouldn’t do Brannigan and the rest any favors by getting ambushed from a suddenly-opened door as they passed it.
The gunfire ahead had paused, but somehow Flanagan suspected that the fight wasn’t over. Especially when he didn’t see any of the other Blackhearts appear in the opening onto the stairs at the far end of the corridor.
He passed the last door before the elevator and the stairs, keeping his weapon trained on it until Gomez came alongside him and took over. It wasn’t as close a cover as it might have been; the door was closed. But they still didn’t ignore it. A danger area was a danger area.
They were about ten feet from the stairway when a distant boom reverberated through the passageways, and the floor beneath their feet rocked. Complete blackness descended on the corridor as the lights died, then a dim, yellowish glow replaced it, coming from battery-powered emergency lights near the ceiling.
All of them froze for a second. Whatever had just happened, that was a big boom. Which meant something big had just blown up. And as far as Flanagan knew, they hadn’t set any charges.
“Let’s move,” he said. He had a bad feeling that the underground bunker complex had just become a far less healthy place to stick around in than it had been a moment before.
He and Gomez moved fast, driving toward the stairs. He paused ever so slightly at the landing, checking that he wasn’t about to come face-to-face with another group coming up before he stepped through the door and to his right, his rifle pointed up toward the next landing above.
It was empty for the moment, but he thought he heard movement and low voices coming from above. With Gomez covering the flight down and Jenkins and Bianco on his heels, he started up, keeping his rifle pointed high, rotating to cover each new slice of the angle around the corner of the landing as he ascended the stairs.
Had the floor just moved under his feet? He suddenly thought of the fact that all the floors appeared to be concrete, and wondered just how much structural damage that explosion below them had done. A new sense of urgency made him want to run up the stairs, but he knew that he could just end up getting himself and the others killed if he took this too fast. Stairs were a nightmare in close quarters combat, even more dangerous than open hallways.
He reached the landing and finished his step around to the next flight. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of two men in gray, just before a pair of heavy, metallic thunks echoed down the stairs.
Even before his conscious mind had registered what the sound meant, he was already throwing himself backward, colliding with Bianco and shoving the big man back against the far wall of the stairwell. A split-second later, the two grenades detonated with a concussion that filled the stairwell and slammed them both against the wall with a hammer blow.
***
Black smoke and frag boiled up out of the stairwell, and Brannigan plunged downward into it as the last of the frag pattered to a standstill.
The first body was crumpled unnaturally against the wall at the landing, drenched in blood and half folded around a faintly-smoking HK 21, the receiver scarred by fragmentation. Another bloody boot was visible next to the first, the body draped down the next flight of stairs.
He felt another faint quake under his boots as he descended. Was that a secondary explosion?
Or is the complex getting ready to cave in?
He stepped over the bodies as a sudden burst of gunfire rattled and thundered from just below. His ACE 52 came up, just in time to catch another man in gray staggering back from the next landing down. The man spotted Brannigan out of the corner of his eye, and started to bring his AUG around, but he was far too slow.
Brannigan splashed his brains against the far wall with a single shot through his temple.
He hesitated before moving farther down. Who had the dead man sprawled on the landing below him had been fleeing from? The claustrophobic close quarters, the darkness, and the fact that the mountain was blocking their radio comms with the rest of the team made things that much more uncertain. Before, anyone not one of them was a bad guy; but there was somebody down there trading shots with the bad guys.
“Kodiak?” Flanagan’s voice drifted up, sounding hoarse.
“Damn it, Woodsrunner, what the hell are you doing in here?” Brannigan asked as he started down, lifting his muzzle. He rounded the corner to find Flanagan and Bianco with Gomez and Jenkins on the stairs below them.
“Things got a little sporty outside,” Flanagan said. “We had to relocate and then retake that team room. Then all hell started breaking loose.”
The words had barely left his lips when another shudder went through the stairs under their feet. Dust started sifting down from the ceiling overhead, and a muted crash sounded through the open door off the next landing down.
“Uh, guys?” Jenkins said, moving to the doorway and peering through. “I think the floor behind us just caved in.”
“That boom,” Flanagan said, looking up at Brannigan.
“Somebody’s bringing the mountain down,” Brannigan said, trying suddenly not to think too much about how many hundreds of thousands of tons of rock were overhead.
“And that hole’s between us and our escape route,” Bianco said, unable to keep the dread out of his voice. The big man’s eyes were a little wider than usual, and even in the dim emergency lighting on the stairway, he looked pale.
Brannigan fought to keep his expression even, as despair tugged at him. To have done so much, only to lead his men into a deathtrap…
Then a hammering fusillade of gunfire echoed down the stairwell from up above.
***
Roger Hancock was pissed. He hadn’t been this mad in a long time.
He knew that he’d been carrying around the bitterness and feeling of betrayal from Tammy’s leaving since before they’d left. He’d been trying to keep it compartmentalized, but he’d be lying if he tried to say he hadn’t taken
his fury out on a few of the bad guys.
It wasn’t as if they didn’t deserve it, after all.
But now the agony throbbing through his side, along with the certainty that he was going to die there, in that hole in the ground, without even having a chance to take Jason Bevan with him, was fueling his rage to a volcanic intensity that he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt before.
It was a good thing, too. He could feel the wound sapping his strength, despite Javakhishvili’s expert care. The chest seals had gone on quickly, though he was pretty sure the hole was too low to worry about a sucking chest wound. Perforated intestines, though, scared the hell out of him, and the burning pain in his guts heralded much worse to come. He’d seen a man gut-shot before, and he hadn’t died quickly or easily.
So, his anger was acting as something of a mental anesthetic, keeping him from succumbing entirely to the horror of his own impending, slow, painful death.
It also meant that he was clenching his rifle as if it were a life preserver when the vault door at the end of the corridor cracked open.
While a stab of pure, molten agony lanced through his guts, he wrenched his rifle up in time to catch the first man in gray flat-footed. He wasn’t steady enough to get a headshot right away; he was aiming across his body, and the waves of pain were making his muzzle waver wildly.
His first round missed altogether, smacking chips of rock off the wall. The second and third clipped the man’s side and punched into his chest plate.
The fourth slammed into his shoulder, spinning him partway around and making him blunder into the second man behind him with a yell of pain.
Javakhishvili had stepped away from Hancock by then, bringing his own rifle to bear. It barked painfully in the narrow corridor, spitting flame as their Georgian medic hammered multiple shots into anyone moving and carrying a gun.
He dropped the first two quickly, finishing the one Hancock had shot with a single round to the dome before shifting to the man he’d staggered into. Javakhishvili wasn’t the most precise shooter, but as he drove forward, he dumped half a magazine into the two men. The volume of fire made up for his lack of accuracy; the second man took two rounds in the face, one ripping off half his jaw and the second punching through his nose.
Screaming had erupted at the first shots, and someone was trying to pull the vault door shut, but it was stuck open because of the two corpses lying across the threshold. Javakhishvili stepped to the open side, leveling his rifle through the opening.
He was shouting, but he was yelling in Georgian before he remembered to switch to English. “Down on the floor! Put your hands on your head!”
Hancock wanted to crawl toward the door, but he hurt too badly, and he had to hold on the stairwell, just in case. “Talk to me, Herc!” he tried to yell, almost blacking out from the pain as he filled his lungs to shout.
“I have two dead shooters and a dozen men and women in shirtsleeves, without gear,” Javakhishvili replied. “You want me to shoot them?”
“Not until we know that Bevan’s not one of them,” Hancock replied, cradling his midsection as the waves of pain wracked his body. He tried to shout down the stairs, where the gunfire and explosions had subsided, but he couldn’t catch his breath against the agony. His head lolled against the wall as he gritted his teeth and tried to just focus on staying conscious.
The pain subsided, just a little, and he opened his eyes. Which was when he noticed that there was a dull rumble building in the wall and the floor, and that dust was starting to fall from the ceiling.
At almost the same moment, Wade and Burgess came out of the stairway, their weapons up and hunting for trouble. They scanned the hallway quickly, taking in Javakhishvili’s position at the door, covering the opening, and quickly moved to join him as Brannigan and Santelli came up after them.
Brannigan stood over Hancock as the others swept into the room beyond the vault door to clear it. “Vinnie, get Roger up,” he said grimly. “We can hope that that room’s better reinforced than the rest of this damned place.”
“Hey, Colonel!” Burgess yelled from the other side of the vault door. “We’ve got Bevan, and I think we’ve got a way out, too! There’s a ceiling hatch with a drop-down ladder in here, and I think it leads outside!”
“Let’s go, Roger,” Bianco grunted as he squatted down and draped Hancock’s arm over his shoulders, hauling them both upright. Hancock’s head swam as another wave of pain lanced through him, but he clenched his teeth and staggered toward the door with Bianco.
The rumble beneath them was getting worse, and visible cracks were starting to form in the walls and the floor. The mountain was collapsing under their feet.
Wade was shoving their civilian prisoners, mostly middle-aged men and women in cargo pants and blue polo shirts with a strange logo embroidered on the breast, up the ladder. Burgess and Javakhishvili were nowhere to be seen; they must have led the way up.
The room shook as he and Bianco reached the ladder. He fought through the agony as he put his boot on the ladder, and started up, helped by Bianco from below, Javakhishvili reaching down to haul him up.
He found himself on the roof of a circular bunker, standing only a few feet above the crest of the ridgeline. The prisoners, including the skinny-fat bastard who had to be Bevan, were huddled at one edge, under Burgess’ watchful eye and gun, as Javakhishvili half-carried, half-dragged Hancock away from the hatch. Hancock was fighting through the pain, struggling to keep his feet under him and his legs moving.
The others were scrambling out onto the rooftop, and not wasting any time doing it. Flanagan, Wade, and Brannigan were the last ones, scanning the sky for drones, as the entire bunker shook again. Then the quake got worse, and the roof seemed to tilt suddenly.
“Get off!” Wade bellowed. “Up the ridge, move!”
Bianco paused only long enough to scoop Hancock up, and then they were running. The short drop off the roof as the bunker quaked again was enough of a shock to almost knock Hancock out. Everything went black for a moment, and then he was almost being carried, Bianco hauling him as fast as he could up the ridgeline.
A catastrophic roar sounded behind them. When he looked back, a towering cloud of dust was rising out of the crater below. There was no sign of the bunker they’d just climbed out of.
Chapter 25
Winter watched his handiwork with some satisfaction. Another man might have been awestruck by the destruction he’d unleashed, but Winter was not given to awe.
The quake was faintly discernable where he and his team had set up, across the valley from Site 117. Then it intensified, as dust started to rise from the slope above the villa. A moment later, the cave-in started.
A crack opened in the ridgeline, dust rising like a puff of smoke. Then the sides of the crack started to fall in, and the collapse accelerated, as the entire mountainside slumped, falling in on itself. The lump that was the command center bunker, high on the crest, slipped, tilted, and then fell into the widening void.
The destruction spread; the rest of the mountainside looked for a moment like it was going to stand, leaving the vast chasm down the middle, but then half of it fell in, crumbling into a cascade of earth and stone that crashed down onto the ruin of Site 117 and slid. Half of the villa disappeared in a heap of rubble in an eyeblink.
The dust that rose above the catastrophe drifted down the valley, mostly above the ruin of the villa. It was thinner than Winter had expected; he realized he’d been half anticipating something more like a volcanic ash cloud. But the thorium reactor had been specifically designed not to go hypercritical, and a landslide or cave-in wasn’t a volcanic eruption.
“Now what?” Marsden asked. He was clearly uncomfortable and already exhausted and miserable. It was apparent that the “human performance specialist” hadn’t spent a great deal of time on his own cardiovascular performance. “Why are we still sitting here?”
Winter didn’t answer him at first, but keyed his radio. “Gamma, Alpha,” he
sent. “Do you see anything?”
“Nobody could have gotten out of that,” Marsden insisted as Winter waited for Gamma’s reply. “We should go.”
Winter finally looked at him coldly. “You need to understand something, Dr. Marsden,” he said. “I have my orders, and I am carrying them out. You are a package. You have no place in my chain of command, and have no say over what my team and I do. I elected to engage the kill option regarding Bevan, and the compromised facility. I am not finished ensuring that no one got out alive. And if you had more experience in the real world, instead of a laboratory, you would not be so quick to believe that no one could have gotten out. Now, you are going to shut your mouth and do exactly what you are told without question or hesitation until this is over.”
Marsden’s arrogant façade slipped, just a little, as he listened to Winter. Maybe the term, “kill option,” in reference not just to Bevan, but to the entire Site once it had been compromised, got him wondering if he was the next on the chopping block. After all, a clean sweep meant a clean sweep.
Winter wasn’t inclined to kill Marsden in cold blood, not so long as they had control of him. If it looked like he was going to fall into the invaders’ hands, then he would. But as matters stood, it was unnecessary. And Marsden might still be useful to the Organization, as much as Winter believed that the entire Type N project was a fool’s errand.
Not that he would tell Marsden that. Winter knew he was generally a cold fish, but he still took some enjoyment out of making the man sweat.
“I might have movement up the draw to the west of the facility,” Gamma reported. “It is hard to see, thanks to the dust, but there appears to be at least one still alive, near the upper western defensive position.”