Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  Yet nothing interrupted, no one burst in to stop them, no brutal punishment awaited; and, when the inevitable end occurred, Svetlana collapsed atop him, crushed against his chest, her breath quick and yet somehow still controlled. She smiled at him, kissing at the side of his mouth teasingly.

  “This is how I feel, Nathan,” she told him, her breath a puff against his cheek. “This is me being honest with myself. I want you to be part of what we’re doing, not because it serves Robert’s purpose, but because I want you to stay with me.”

  “What if I do?” he wondered. “You know me, maybe better than anyone. Can I live with what Bob is doing?”

  She rested her cheek on his chest, fingers pulling gently at his hair, silent. Was she considering her answer or simply considering how to phrase it? Or just pausing for effect to make the reply more believable?

  “I know how much you love the idea of the United States, of what it was,” she finally said. “It may hurt you to have to fight the government that considers itself a continuation of the United States, but if you can understand, as I have, how corrupted the governments of your country and mine have become, you will come to understand the need to overthrow them.”

  “Overthrowing the government always sounds like an easy solution,” he said softly. “But if there’s anything I remember from the history the Prime studied, it’s how badly things can go when you topple a government without having a plan to replace it.”

  “Maybe the problem is everyone keeps trying to replace one government with another,” she suggested, “rather than simply letting people live their lives.”

  “Someone always tries to take control if there’s a power vacuum. That never changes.”

  It seemed a strange conversation to be having lying naked beside a beautiful woman, still with a sheen of sweat from lovemaking, yet what else would they talk about?

  “What if there was a force to keep anyone else from taking control? A force in control of one man who has no wish to rule, himself, but merely to prevent others from trying? A force of duplicates loyal to him, their lives too short for any of them to be interested in trying to seize power?”

  And suddenly, it all fell into place. Not simply why he was here, but why she had come to him. He sat up, eyes going wide.

  “That’s why he’s taking the stem cells from me. Because he wants dupes with shorter lives. And he wants my memories to be positive, so they’ll associate him with all the good things left after they excise the bad.” He shook his head, withdrawing from her, feeling the chill of the room’s air conditioning again as the warmth left him. “You’d really do this just for him? Just to make his plan work?”

  He expected her to gloat, hoped against hope she might show shame or regret. Instead, she simply met his eyes and smiled with perhaps a little sadness.

  “There was a time when I would have done anything Robert Franklin asked me,” she told him. “I owed him everything. But now I do what I do for myself, for what I believe in. Robert Franklin is a man, and sometimes not a particularly good man. He has told you he means to share his secrets with you, to extend your life along with his own. He’s lied to you. He doesn’t trust you, the you this version of Nathan Stout has become.”

  She climbed out of the bed with the agility of a gymnast, retrieving her dress and pulling it over her head. He watched with fascination, as if the clothes going on were as fascinating as they’d been coming off.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked, scooting across the bed, pulling the sheet over himself, more for warmth than from any sense of modesty. “Why now?”

  “Because I think you’re worth saving. I think I can convince him to give you more life, but only if you’re with us, only if you’ve proven yourself loyal.”

  She leaned over and caressed his cheek with her hand, then kissed him. He didn’t pull away. The kiss, he thought, felt honest. She grabbed the handcuff off the chair and tapped a code into the door lock, pulling it open a few centimeters but pausing before she exited.

  “Think about it, Nathan. But do not take too long. We are leaving here soon, and if you don’t come with us…well, Robert Franklin is not a man who leaves loose ends.”

  13

  “I am so very fucking certain I did not agree to this!” Jenny’s plaintive whine was a static-filled blast in Roach’s helmet headphones, competing with the roar of her Hellfire’s turbines for dominance.

  Below the four Hellfires, what was left of Interstate 64 passed by, baking in the mid-day sun, the pavement cracking and overrun by vegetation. Green had crept in from the roadside, oak and pine and kudzu growing over the corpses of abandoned cars. Cargo shipments still wound their way over the roads, but only the daring would risk the interstates, with its collapsed overpasses and roving bands of looters. It worked fine for a flight of mechs, though, walking only as far as they needed to in order to cool down their jets.

  “As I recall, darlin’,” Fuller said with a tone of tolerant amusement, “you all but threatened to shoot me if we didn’t let you come along.”

  “Do you two always talk so much during a tactical movement to contact?” Ramirez wondered.

  “Oh, look at Junior using big military words like he understands them,” Jenny cracked.

  Roach grinned involuntarily. US Army Captain Jennifer Armstrong, the woman she’d come to know as Jenny, had a sense of humor she could appreciate. And the truth of the argument was somewhere in between. By the time they’d all arrived back at the old Coast Guard base, Jenny had finally resigned herself to the idea she was going to be a target until and unless they took out the people who’d come after them. When she’d seen the Hellfires, she’d practically demanded to be allowed to pilot the spare and Roach had acquiesced after Fuller had assured her the woman was well qualified to do so.

  When she’d found out they were leaving in the morning for an all-day flight/walk to DC to confront Robert Franklin or Prizrak or whoever he was, and all the mercenaries and hired thugs he had in his pay, she hadn’t been quite as enthusiastic. But here she was, anyway, joining in on what was surely the stupidest decision Rachel Mata had made in her short tenure as acting commander of Broken Arrow Mercenary Force. They were heading for the old capital, a place overrun by crime and anarchy, to fight a force of unknown size led by some criminal mastermind, while they were armed with just the load of weapons and ammo they could carry in their mechs, with no backup and no extraction plan.

  It was absurd, crazy, but she was driven on by one undeniable fact.

  Nate would do it for me.

  “You given any thought to what we’re going to do when we get there, boss-lady?” Fuller asked her. She checked the readout and saw he’d transmitted on a private channel between them, probably not wanting to alarm Ramirez or give Jenny another reason to complain.

  “We’ll arrive after nightfall,” she told him, talking it through as much to get it straight in her own head as to explain it to him. “I figure we’ll hold up as close as we can and still find cover, do a bit of scouting on foot to decide on the best avenue of approach, then hit them sometime in the early morning, 0200, maybe 0300. There’ll still be people on watch, but it’ll take their backup longer to get there, maybe give us an edge.”

  “And don’t sleep beyond dawn,” Fuller commented in a dry tone. “Dawn’s when the French and Indians attack.”

  “What?” she asked, looking over at his Hellfire and frowning, as if he could see her. “The French and the who?”

  “Sorry, it’s an old Army thing. Really old, like back to the French and Indian Wars old. Your plan seems a bit on the basic side, was my point.”

  “Nate always said the simplest plans were the best,” she said, hoping the defensiveness she felt at the comment didn’t make it all the way through to her tone. “Without getting some more intelligence data on this base at the White House, this is the best I can do.”

  “I understand.” His drawl seemed to stretch the word out into something like “ahh unnerstan.” H
e paused and she thought he was done, but when he spoke again, there was a concern in his voice she hadn’t heard since she’d told her father she was volunteering for the DoD’s contractor program. “Are you in love with this Nate fella, Rachel?”

  “No!” she snapped, feeling an irritation she couldn’t quite decipher. She wasn’t sure if it was the idea she was some stupid little girl who’d risk other people’s lives because of a crush, or the idea she was some stupid little girl who’d fall in love with her commanding officer, but either way, she felt insulted. “He’s our commander and he’s my friend. Maybe you have so many friends you can afford to let a few die, but I’m running short.”

  “Take it easy,” Fuller said quickly. “I wasn’t making an accusation or nothin’, but I had to make sure. I’ve walked into too many ugly situations that come about because two people who should have known better wound up dippin’ their pens in the company inkwell.”

  “Is this all you and Jenny do all day?” Roach wondered, squinting in confusion. “Spout old-timey figures of speech no one else can figure out? What the hell is an inkwell?”

  “It don’t matter. Let’s just say there’s a reason Jenny and I wound up getting divorced, and it had to do with us trying to be in the same command while we were married. So I’m a bit sensitive to shit like that.”

  “Noted. And it’s not a problem. The only personal feelings I have for Nate are as a friend.”

  I think. I’m pretty sure.

  “All right, Broken Arrow,” she said, switching the transmission to the general frequency, “time to head down and cool off. FOG, you take point while we walk.”

  “What’s an F-O-G?” Jenny asked.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Fuller said with half a moan as they descended to the broken surface of the interstate, “that’s a long story.”

  “The latest memory upload was excellent,” Robert Franklin said, his tone enthusiastic, but his eyes flat, as if the excitement didn’t quite reach that far. He barely looked up from folding a dress shirt carefully into the compact, metal suitcase.

  Why had he even bothered to unpack in the first place?

  “Dr. Kovalev says there’s a ninety percent chance of a nominal outcome from implant,” he went on, closing the case and fastening the latch. “You outdid yourself this time, Svetlana.” The corner of his mouth turned up slightly, somewhere between a smirk and a sneer. “Well, you outdid someone, anyway.”

  “I did what I thought you wanted me to do, Robert.” She stood across the Lincoln bedroom from the man, leaning against the faded paint of the far wall, watching him carefully choose what he was going to bring with him. And I am not one of those choices. “Isn’t that why you brought me into this endeavor, because I accomplish the mission whatever the cost?” Her lips peeled away from clenched teeth. “When did that stop being valuable to you?”

  “I am not abandoning you, Svetlana,” he insisted, not for the first time that morning. “I simply need you here more than I would need you in Colorado.”

  “What good will I be here?” She waved a hand at the room. “What will be left at this place once you go? A few mechs, some soldiers, Nathan Stout…and me. You’re taking everything important to you along.”

  “It’s important you have deniability with the Russian government. They need to think they can trust you.”

  “When you are finished in Colorado, what will be left of the Russian government, Robert? Let’s stop pretending. You’re not taking me along because you no longer trust me.”

  “You are not untrustworthy,” he corrected her. “You are simply unpredictable. I like predictable things, predictable people. You can count on them to respond in similar ways to similar stimulation.”

  “Is that why you’re angry?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Because you never had the chance to ‘stimulate’ me?”

  “My dear, please.” He sniffed, yanking his suitcase off the bed. “We have an old saying in this country: don’t shit where you eat. I can find my entertainment from those I don’t depend on for my life and my purpose.”

  He headed for the door, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. He stared at it as if it were something alien to him.

  “Then why are you upset?” she wanted to know. “Why do you care if I seduced him?”

  She could see his nostrils flare just slightly, the only hint he gave of the anger she suspected he was feeling.

  “Because you enjoyed it.” He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t snarl, but the tension vibrated through the words like the whine of turbines. “You care about this man when you have no reason to. I worry you’re doing this simply to get to me, to try to provoke a reaction.”

  “What reaction do you think I’m trying to get?” She shook her head, mystified at the answer. “Why would I give a damn what you thought?”

  “Because I am the closest thing you’ve ever had to a father.”

  She let her hand fall away from his arm, feeling as if she’d been slapped in the face. He ignored her reaction and stalked toward the door, pausing halfway through to toss one final thought back over his shoulder.

  “If you want me to trust you again,” he said, “Stout will be dead by the time I return.”

  14

  It had been far too long since Anton Varlamov piloted a mech. The machine had felt unresponsive in the air, as if it resented his unpracticed hands on the controls, and each step across the ground had felt as if he were going to topple over. He had only been able to console himself with the thought that some of his team were even worse at it than he was. Not Giorgi though. It had been the right decision to bring him along. The man was a natural in a mech, moving with a smooth expertise Anton envied. The others plodded, weaving through the air as if they would collide with each other at any second.

  But the journey from Annapolis to DC had been a long and grueling one, with plenty of opportunity to practice, and by the time night fell on their day-long trip, Anton was sure even the worst of them could operate a mech with enough competence to pull off the raid.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t do a scouting run first?” Mischa asked. Anton thought the old radios had picked up some corrosion because the words were staticky and distant.

  “It would be too big of a risk,” he told his second in command. “If they have anti-aircraft weapons, it would give them extra seconds to home in on us. Better we catch them unprepared.”

  Anton was already feeling an itching between his shoulder blades, the morose certainty there was a bullet or a missile down in the ruined city with his name on it. They were doing the best they could to avoid detection, flying below the level of the buildings when they could—when there were buildings tall enough left over amidst the rubble to make it possible. Washington was worse than Norfolk, with less of an effort to reoccupy it, probably because it was worthless. It had been worthless before the war and was doubly so now.

  It was dead black through most of the city at this time of night, the only lights coming from those powerful enough not to fear advertising what they had and daring others to take it. The White House was lit up like a Christmas tree, a boast, a challenge, so perfectly in character for Robert Franklin. He was a man who made no attempt to hide what he was, simply counting on his indispensability to keep him alive.

  He pissed off the wrong man this time. Maybe the Prime Minister eats out of Franklin’s hand, but not the Chief of the General Staff. General Antonov holds a grudge.

  And if the idea of the head of the Russian military pulling covert operations in a war zone without the knowledge or approval of the Prime Minister bothered Anton, it didn’t bother him nearly as much as the thought of the American traitor having so much influence in the Russian government.

  But whatever he thought of Robert Franklin, he knew better than to underestimate the man.

  “Missile launch!” he snapped, catching the flare of the propellant in the thermal sensors even before the mech’s automated warning system began buzzing for his attention. “Everyone down and
hug a building!”

  Damn it, I thought it would take them longer to spot us.

  Anton felt a sense of relief when his Tagan’s feet touched down on the cracked and splintered pavement, though he knew it was premature. The missiles were heat-seekers and simply getting out of the air wouldn’t stop them.

  “Countermeasures!” he ordered. Hopefully it was redundant—the team should know the drill, should have been triggering their mechs’ flare launchers before they even began their descent—but they were all rusty.

  His own flares punched away from the launchers on the shoulders of his Tagan with a jolt that made its way through the armor and into his pilot’s chair, shaking him like a car going over a pothole. He ran away from the launch, the Tagan’s feet hammering at the street with a fearsome anger at the works of this county, as if the machine were sentient and knew its own purpose. Anton’s own feelings toward their American foes were a bit more ambivalent after all these years, but he had no such qualms about Robert Franklin. The man needed to die.

  I just have to live long enough to pull it off.

  He’d made it nearly fifty meters when the missiles hit. The Tagan was a cushion, a wall of metal and padding between him and the explosions, but the heat still baked him through the armor and the insulation, and the gyros barely kept the mech upright against the concussion.

  “Sound off!” he yelled into his throat mic. “Bravo one up and functional!” He didn’t stop for the head-check, kept running forward as fast as the Tagan would go, knowing another flight of missiles could be on its way at any second.

  “Bravo two up and functional,” Mischa reported.

  “Bravo three up and functional.” Giorgi Lermontov.

  “Bravo four up and mostly functional,” Sgt. Namestnikov reported dolorously. “I have a damage indicator in my left knee actuator, but I think it will hold together.”