Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  Prisoners of War

  Broken Arrow Mercenary Force: Book 2

  Rick Partlow

  Drew Avera

  Copyright © 2019 by Drew Avera and Rick Partlow

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Dedication to James Fuller

  About Rick Partlow

  About Drew Avera

  Prologue

  “I’m not comfortable with this,” Robert Franklin declared.

  He wished he could pace. He felt restless, felt cramped sitting in front of the video pickup, felt as if he wanted to pace, to throw his arms in the air and rage, but that wasn’t the way to impress the Washington DC brass, so he sat dutifully and stared into the camera.

  “You’ve made that clear a number of times, Mr. Franklin,” General Claridge said, his tone beyond condescending and well into patronizing. “I’m not sure what else we have to discuss.”

  Who the hell does he think he’s talking to? He wanted to snap at the man, but forced himself to remain polite, if firm,

  “General, this project is my doing. You wouldn’t have a mech program if I hadn’t brought it to you. If I say I have a concern, I’d think you’d be wise to entertain it. If you give me another six months, I can correct the shielding problem. There is no need for this…” He paused, hunting for the words. “…for this Frankenstein monster bullshit!”

  “I’m afraid the decision has been made.” Claridge’s face was a mask of iron graven by some ancient people in the image of their unchanging god. “We’re going forward with the Hellfire as is. The success of Project Artemis has impressed DARPA enough they want to push the schedule up. We plan to start initial testing in a month.”

  “A month!” His mouth had dropped open and he forced it closed. “General, do you realize the sort of ethical nightmare this is going to be? You’re putting these damned clones of yours…”

  “Genetic duplicates,” Claridge corrected him, didactic as a school teacher. “A clone is simply an identical twin of the original, born a baby, no memories. These will be full grown adults, and we have the capability now to insert selected memories into their brains. If we get the correct volunteers, men and women who’ve already gone through familiarization on your Hellfire weapons system, the dupes won’t even have to be trained.”

  “Dupes,” Franklin repeated, mouth twisting into a sneer. “How appropriate. You’re putting these dupes into a machine that will kill them eventually, inevitably. Cancer, kidney failure, liver failure, immune system disorders…it will happen. There’s no way someone can work constantly around that kind of radiation exposure and not die from it. It may take fifteen or twenty years, but it’s inevitable.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Mr. Franklin,” Claridge told him, smiling broadly. He reminded Franklin of a sadistic little kid pulling the wings off of flies. “Due to genetic degradation, the dupes only have a twelve-year lifespan. The dupes will serve their purpose and, if we choose the right people with the right attitudes, they’ll do it willingly, eagerly.”

  “Just give me the time to fix the shielding, for God’s sake!” Franklin pled with the man, abandoning his pride, slamming a fist down on the desk. The display shook, and Claridge’s image with it. “I know we can figure this out!”

  There was no give in the man. He could see it, and he finally let his anger get the best of him, let his mouth run faster than his brain.

  “I’ll expose it, Claridge,” he snapped. “If you do this without at least giving me another few months to perfect the shielding, I will put this out on the nets for all the media outlets in every country to see. This is not fucking right and you know it.”

  He’d made a mistake. He knew it immediately, saw it in the shift in Claridge’s demeanor from condescending to frosty, cold death.

  “Mr. Franklin, I am going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that. You should get down on your fucking knees and thank God I am going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that, because if you weren’t such a valuable asset to the war effort, I’d have you arrested immediately for threatening espionage against this country. You’d spend the rest of your life in a hole, being fed through a slot in the door.”

  “I’m…sorry,” Franklin dragged the words out of his mouth kicking and screaming. “I was just a bit upset.”

  That seemed to placate Claridge. Or at least, he was willing to let Franklin think it had.

  “Totally understandable. You’re an engineer, getting things done right is your business. But there’s a saying in my business: the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. We’re at war and there’s simply no time for perfection. We’ll take what we can use now, because if I am being brutally frank with you, we may not have a few months to wait.”

  “How can we be sure anyone already trained in the Hellfires will volunteer for this Project Artemis?” Suspicion tickled at the back of his mind. “Or will they not be given the choice?”

  “On the contrary,” Claridge assured him, “it’s vital they do this willingly. We can select which memories we pass down from the Primes to the dupes, but they need to have a memory of volunteering, of being eager and ready to do whatever it takes to defeat the invaders. Otherwise, we’d be putting a weapon as powerful as a fighter jet or an attack helicopter in the hands of a soldier who hated our guts and wanted us all dead.”

  “Very well. I’ll get the team working on the next phase of production. We should be up to quota by the time you’re ready to begin trials.”

  “Excellent.” Claridge’s smile was about as genuine as his anger had been. Franklin was sure the only authentic emotion he’d seen from the man was condescension. “Pretty soon, I hope we’re ready to expand production to the other sites as well. Then the Hellfire project will be complete and you can focus your talents elsewhere.”

  The screen went dark. Claridge had ended the connection, a passive-aggressive reminder he was in charge.

  Franklin sat alone in his office, wondering whether he’d gone too far. It wouldn’t be the first time his mouth had gotten him in trouble, but losing a contract or pissing off a military liaison didn’t quite measure up to threatening to expose a top-secret DARPA project in wartime. That was the sort of fuck-up that could land you in a ditch with a bullet through the back of your head.

  He pulled out his personal phone, encrypted, anonymized, untraceable, and scrolled through a list of names until he found the one he wanted.

  “Dr. Ganesh,” he said when a woman’s voice answered. “This is Robert Franklin.” She began to meander through the usual pleasantries, but he’d never been particularly good at those, so he cut her off. “I understand you’re working on a certain genetics project we probably shouldn’t be discussing on the phone…”

  Denials of course, dithering, wasting his time.

  “Divya,” he interrupted again, “let me get straight to the point. You owe me. Unless you want the results you fudged
from those radiation resistance drug trials released to the military, you’re going to do exactly what I say.”

  More dithering, desperate this time. They always got desperate.

  “What do I want? It’s simple, Divya.” He grinned. “I want a little insurance.”

  1

  Somewhere, water dripped. He’d tried to shut it out, tried to let his thoughts travel away from the incessant drip-drip-drip. It had a curious echo to it, an effect of the acoustics in the old building. He could tell it was old, pre-war. The cement floor was smooth and damp and coated with the detritus of decades, collected dust and mold and rat shit and pollen all gathered into an indescribable veneer, shining silvery when a stray, singular strand of sunlight pierced the cracks in the ancient, block walls.

  The light revealed other things. Faded green paint on the walls, the pitted, cracked stainless steel of a toilet. He knew he’d used it, but he couldn’t remember flushing it. Did it flush? The outlines of a door, heavy and metal, its hinges and lock on the opposite side. No windows other than a narrow slit in the bottom of the door. Protein bars and bottled water had been passed through it while he slept. Had it been three times? Four? It was hard to remember. He’d thought, at first, to keep the bottles and wrappers as a sort of calendar, but when he’d slept again, they were gone.

  He didn’t use to be able to fall asleep this easily and he was fairly certain he was being kept drugged. Something to make him weak and hazy, maybe in the water. He could refuse to drink it, but sleep was his only refuge from the sounds. The drip-drip-drip echo, the water condensing off a pipe and falling one drop at a time, never-ending, wearing at his nerves as it wore into the concrete. How long had the water dripped? A hundred years? More? How long had he been there? How many days and nights had passed? Had it been a week yet? More? His flight suit smelled rank and so did he, but what was the difference in stink from two days to four? Four to six?

  Someone screamed, an inhuman shriek of pure, unfiltered agony. Someone having their skin removed a centimeter at a time with a dull knife, cauterized by a blow torch. Again, warbling, desperate, completely alone. He waited, knowing what was coming. It was another ten seconds, but the third scream was always the same as the first. It was a recording. He didn’t know why they bothered except to make wakefulness so miserable he’d willingly choose sleep. There was one other sound, one he heard so rarely and faintly he thought he might be imagining it, but there was no mistaking the roar of distant jets. He was near an airbase. He’d almost thought it could be an airport, but there were no airports anymore. No one flew but the government or corporate contractors working for the government.

  Or the Russians. The Russians flew, but they came off ships docked well off-shore, not risking an open airbase. Were the Russians holding him near an American airbase.

  The Russians. Is it the Russians? I remember something, something right after I was taken. There was a Russian woman there, the woman who was running Patty. But there was someone else. Who was it?

  There was one other break in the door, a recessed window that could be slid open from the other side. It hadn’t been opened since he’d been there. It slid aside now with a heavy, authoritative thump. Darkness lay beyond it, as unenlightened as the rest of his existence.

  “Hello, Nathan.”

  The voice. He remembered the voice. He remembered it from another life, from another version of himself, someone who’d shared his genes and some of his memories with Nate. He could put a face with it, smiling and vibrant and always thinking, eyes alive with a creativity and intelligence that had drawn him to the man, had gone along well with his pragmatism and efficiency. They’d been friends for years before…

  Before what? Before he died? Did he remember Robert Franklin dying? Or did he just remember being told he was dead?

  “Bob,” he said. His own voice was harsh, raspy, alien to him. Everything about this life is alien to me. “Is it really you?”

  “I suppose the question is, Nathan, is if it really is either one of us.”

  Nate pushed himself to his feet, feeling unsteady, dizzy, balanced himself against the wall with an outstretched palm. He underestimated the distance and nearly fell over.

  “Have you ever heard of the riddle of the ship of Theseus, Nathan?”

  “The ship of who?” Maybe it was just that his head felt like a five-kilo bale of cotton, but he couldn’t seem to figure out what the other man was saying.

  “Metaphysics, my old friend. It’s a question of identity. Let us suppose that the ship of the Greek hero Theseus was preserved in the harbor as a museum piece. As time passes, some of the wooden pieces begin to rot and are replaced by identical pieces. After a century or so, every piece has been replaced by a new one. Is it still the same ship? Is it a new ship? Does it retain its identity despite every part being replaced?”

  Nate blinked, trying to focus his eyes. There was a shape through the darkness beyond the window, a familiar shape.

  “Before you answer,” the man who sounded like Robert Franklin cautioned him, “you should remember that every cell in your body is replaced every seven years via mitosis. Does that make you a different man every seven years?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a pilot, not a biologist.”

  “You’re so much more than a pilot, Nate. You’re the answer to the question I’ve been asking for a long time. We were friends once, each of us in the progression from one ship of Theseus to another. I would like to think you still consider me a friend, despite everything.”

  “Bob Franklin was Nathan Stout’s best friend,” Nate said with all the conviction he could muster. “But they’re both dead.”

  “They don’t have to be. And believe me when I tell you, what I want more than anything in the world is to give you a full life, the life Nathan Stout deserved.”

  “Why are you keeping me in here, then?” Nate demanded.

  “I’m keeping you in the dark to remind you of where you came from. Of where we both came from.” A pause and the slight hint of white teeth in the darkness, a smile. “When the time comes that you’re ready for the light, I’ll be the one to take you there.”

  The window shut suddenly and irrevocably. Footsteps echoed on the concrete, walking away. Nate leaned his shoulder up against the wall and tried to concentrate. Bob Franklin was dead. He was as sure of that as he was of anything.

  But how sure am I of anything?

  2

  The drawer was locked. Why the hell would the drawer be locked? Had Nate thought some random cat burglar was going to sneak into the old Norfolk Coast Guard base and rifle through his things?

  Or did he just not trust us? Did he not trust me?

  Rachel Mata looked at the screwdriver in her hand, ready to be wedged into the drawer to pry it open and wondered if she’d meant to be ironic or if it had happened by accident. Shrugging, she wrenched Nate’s desk drawer open with a single, powerful jerk.

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you still do PT even when all you do is pilot a mech.

  There was no paper in the desk, no printouts, nothing but his work tablet. She frowned in disapproval. It seemed so un-military to have no paper records. She powered up the tablet, then cursed when it asked for a thumbprint ID. There was a way around it, but it was labor intensive. She set the tablet aside and ran her hands over the inside of the drawer, making sure she didn’t miss anything. Nothing but rust and something mushy.

  “Shit.” She pulled her hand out and saw a smear of what might have been grease. She hoped it was grease. She wiped her fingers on the underside of the desk chair, then on the pant leg of her flight suit, still cursing under her breath.

  With the center drawer open, the rest were unlocked as well and she yanked each of them open, bending over in the chair and checking them with a small flashlight she pulled off her belt. The overhead lights hadn’t worked for decades and the sunlight streaming in from the open window didn’t quite reach.

  There was an ancient bottle of Jac
k Daniels and two shot glasses in the big drawer on the lower right side of the desk. Well, at least the bottle was ancient. The whiskey might have been pre-war, but given how much that would cost, it was more likely the bottle had been recycled by a local moonshiner. She set the bottle and the glasses on the desktop next to the screwdriver and kept looking.

  The last drawer had nothing but a few desiccated spider exoskeletons. She made a face and wiped her hand again, then slammed it against the desktop so hard the whiskey bottle nearly toppled over and she had to catch it.

  “Yo, Roach, you didn’t tell me we were having a party.”

  She looked up sharply, her hand reaching for the pistol she’d taken to carrying at her hip, but relaxed when she saw it was Hector Ramirez peaking his head through the door of the office. He had a baby face, even though he was only a couple years younger than her. She’d always thought he looked like a kid playing war.

  “You find anything with Patty’s stuff?” she asked him, ignoring his attempt at humor.

  “Not a damn thing,” he admitted, stepping inside and falling into the seat opposite her.

  He squinted as the sun coming in through the window went into his eyes. The high-impact glass had somehow made it intact through nuclear terrorism, rioting and invasion, perhaps because the Coast Guard base had been abandoned early and no one had ever bothered to attack it. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the parking lot, still littered with the rusting corpses of ancient cars. Their pickup was still out there, the one they’d found in a garage, still preserved, and repaired. They’d rigged it to run on alcohol, which was distilled locally and you could buy in town. Patty had driven it here that last night…