by Rick Partlow
“He is,” she said, pausing at an intersection, a corner leading to the armory where he’d seen their mechs on the way in.
“And he didn’t take you along?”
“May we have this and all other conversations later?” she ground out, checking both ways down the corridor.
“Sorry.”
She waved for him to stay with her and hugged the wall as she took the corner, heading to the left. The sounds of battle were getting closer, and Nate wondered if that was really the direction they wanted to be going, but he didn’t want to start talking again when she’d just told him to shut up, though more politely than that, of course. But he really wanted a gun. Or better yet, a mech. He’d never wanted more badly to be in the cockpit of a mech, not just for the weapons and the armor but also because his leg was screaming at him, and it would have been really nice to let the machine do the walking for him. If any threats came along, he wasn’t going to be running from them.
Almost as if on cue, he heard running footsteps coming up behind them. Svetlana pushed him against the wall and leaned across him, stretching her pistol out in front of her, eyes with all the emotion of a targeting screen in a Hellfire’s HUD. Nate recognized the men’s uniforms immediately despite the dim lighting—they were Franklin’s people, his foot soldiers or guards or whatever he wanted to call them. There were three of them and he thought he might have seen them before during his various movements from one wing to another, but the various drugs he’d been subjected to made him doubt his memory. All three of them were average height and build, dark in hair and complexion with a vaguely Eastern European look to them that said as much about their origin as the Russian rifles they carried.
Svetlana only relaxed a millimeter upon seeing the identities of the men, which surprised him. What did she know that he didn’t?
“Svetlana,” one of them said, his rifle swinging down to low port. “We are being attacked.”
“No shit, Meladze,” she said, eyebrow going up. “Have you also come to tell me that water is wet?”
The man she’d called Meladze—it was Georgian, if Nate wasn’t mistaken—scowled, though it wasn’t clear if it was from her harsh tone or the fact she hadn’t yet lowered her handgun.
“Where are you taking the prisoner?” Meladze asked her, an edge to his tone. “Mr. Franklin was very clear about what was to be done with him.”
He was? And what the hell was he wanting done with me?
“Whoever is attacking us might be here for him,” Svetlana said, an explanation that sounded reasonable to Nate. “I am taking him somewhere more secure.”
“You’re taking him somewhere secure,” Meladze repeated, skepticism obvious in his voice, “and yet he is not restrained and you asked for no assistance.” The barrel of the man’s rifle began to raise, though the other two hadn’t seemed to realize yet what he was implying. “Svetlana Grigoryeva, I am going to need you to put down your…”
He never finished the sentence. The pistol shot was high and spiteful, a punctuation at the end of Svetlana’s conversation. Meladze’s head snapped back and his blood sprayed into the faces of the other two men, shock evident in their faces. One squeeze of the trigger, even unaimed and reflexive, could have cut them both down in the narrow hallway, but neither of them ever got the chance.
Svetlana had moved with the first shot, putting herself out of line with the others, and Nate followed much slower and clumsier but trying to imitate her tactics, knowing what she was doing even if he couldn’t quite match her grace and agility. When she fired again, it wasn’t a surprise to anyone but the bearded man she killed. Another headshot because there wasn’t time for anything less certain. She swept across the front of the last of them and his gun barrel moved to follow her. Nate fell into a crouch rather than chance stepping in front of the rifle…or tried to fall into a crouch and simply collapsed instead, winding up on one knee, leaning against the wall.
Svetlana grabbed the rifle’s fore-stock and tugged the man off balance, landing a hammer-fist between the last guard’s eyes with the butt of her handgun as the striking surface. The man cried out, his grip on the automatic rifle loosening, and she took the opportunity to put her gun barrel against his temple and pull the trigger. Nate felt droplets of blood hit the side of his face and he pressed his lips tightly closed, not wanting to get the man’s blood in his mouth.
The body sank to the floor and Nate scurried backwards away from the spreading pool of red, wanting to hop back to his feet but lacking the strength in his bad leg. Svetlana offered him a hand and pulled him to his feet with strength he wouldn’t have expected from the slim woman. He began to bend down and grab one of the men’s rifles, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Leave it,” she cautioned.
He wanted to argue, but he didn’t. What stopped him was the three dead men on the floor. She could have let them have him, could have turned him over or even killed him herself. She didn’t want him dead. That was what he kept telling himself, trying to talk himself into it.
And of course, there was always the fact that if three trained killers with assault rifles hadn’t been able to take her out, what the hell chance did he have?
He shut his mouth and followed her.
16
Anton Varlamov was happy to have his feet back on the ground and a gun in his hand. It was simpler, more straightforward, something he could wrap his brain around and handle on instincts without having to think too much.
He could tell Mischa felt the same. The big man cradled his rifle like a lover, eyes alight with the intensity of trying to stay alive while other people were trying to kill you. As for Orlova…well, the thin, gangly soldier didn’t seem all too happy about anything right now, but that probably had less to do with their current location and more to do with the field bandage wrapped around his left side under his fatigue shirt. He could see the ragged hole in the shirt, just beneath the edge of Orlova’s armored vest, stained with blood, and he knew the man had to be in pain.
Kolya is tough. He’ll deal with it.
Which didn’t mean he’d like it. But he was alert and carrying his assault rifle at high ready, and that was enough for now.
The three of them had to pick their way past the remains of the last Hellfire. The pilot had thought he’d be safe, hiding inside the cargo entrance, just waiting for one of their mechs to step through. Like too many foot soldiers throughout history, he’d confused concealment with cover. The external walls were thick, but not thick enough to absorb two missiles and a hundred rounds of 25mm chain gun fire. The walls had tumbled and burned, and the Hellfire had tumbled with them.
Anton grimaced at the smoking remains of the pilot, twisted and burned inside the ruptured cockpit, half the ceiling collapsed around him. It was a bad way to go, burning. He’d long since come to terms with the idea he’d die with a bullet in his chest, lungs filling with blood, but he hated the thought of being burned alive. Hopefully, the pilot of the Hellfire had died from the bullets or the missile warhead fragments or the concussion.
A quick death is the most any of us can ask for in this business.
No more Hellfires waited inside for them and, if there were any ground troops, they’d retreated from the explosions. Which was the smart thing to do, he admitted. They wouldn’t have been able to fight against mechs with small arms and they would have no way of knowing what a dumbass plan he’d come up with, abandoning the armored machines for a slog on foot.
The interior lighting in the hangar or storage room or whatever it was had been knocked out in the explosions, but there was plenty of light to be had from the fire, the roaring flames throwing flickering shadows across the room. The smoke was, so far, being mostly sucked out through the hole in the wall, but God knew how long that would last.
Maybe the whole thing will burn down this time.
It had burned once before, he recalled, in what the Americans called the War of 1812, which he thought showed a very un-American
lack of imagination. They’d rebuilt it after that, but there’d be no one to rebuild it this time.
The light from the fires fell into shadows when they reached the hallway. It was a T-junction, the corridor to the right going deeper into the underground sections of the White House, while the left led to a staircase heading upward.
Would Franklin be cowering in the basements, hiding from the threat?
No.
Whatever he thought of Franklin, the man had never run from anyone. He’d be controlling the defenses, a puppet master in his lair.
“This way,” he grunted, motioning to the stairs. “Mischa, you’re point. Kolya, stay behind me and watch our six.”
He hated stairs. You wanted a whole damned squad to take a set of stairs, maybe a platoon if you had them. He never had a platoon anymore, not unless they were mercenaries who’d been attached to his team and then you couldn’t really trust them. Three people taking stairs under opposition was suicide, and hoping you could get up them before someone got around to defending them was wishful thinking.
If it were easy, they wouldn’t have sent us.
“Fast, Mischa,” he cautioned the NCO. “There aren’t enough of us for careful, so we have to be fast.”
Mischa grunted his opinion of Anton’s tactics, but did as he was told. Their boots were thunderclaps on the wooden stairs, faded and stained where a carpet had once covered the middle section. It had been ripped away years ago and the walls were cracked and faded with the same neglect that plagued most of this ruined city. The stairwell was black, no lights at all, and Anton’s night-vision glasses struggled to find any light to intensify. He thought about ordering Mischa to use an infrared flashlight, but if the man wasn’t complaining, he’d let him run on feel and avoid the risk. The thing about an infrared flashlight was that if anyone else was using night vision gear, it would stand out just as much as a visible light version. Anton kept a hand on the railing and hoped he wouldn’t miss a step. He’d look like a fool slipping down the stairs, even if no one was shooting at them.
Then there was light ahead, a door left ajar leading out into the ground floor of the White House. They’d start there and work their way up, he decided. A smart man would have his command post on the ground floor so he could evac quickly if he needed to, and Franklin was smart.
But is Franklin here?
He was beginning to worry about that part. If the man himself were set up here, wouldn’t there be more opposition?
Later. Find prisoners and we can find out where he is.
The lights on the ground floor were wrong, somehow, not the ones the place was designed with, but portable stands at the wrong angles, throwing everything into sharp relief, sending malicious shadows crawling over the floor. It wasn’t a place for living things, it was a crime scene, an archaeological dig.
One of the shadows moved. Mischa saw it first from his position at point, and he fired first as well, falling to a knee and expecting Anton and Kolya to know their job well enough to get to cover. There wasn’t much cover to be had in the middle of the bare, unfurnished hall, so Anton crouched, the muzzle of his rifle hunting for what the hell Mischa was shooting at.
He didn’t have to look long. The answer came in a muzzle flash, sun-bright against the shadowy background of the hall, then another just beside it, unsuppressed, ear-splittingly loud in comparison to Mischa’s carbine. There were two…no, make that three of them. They were rushing forward, firing as they came, young men, none of them older than their mid-twenties. They were probably desperate to keep the only work they’d ever known and fearless in the conviction of the young that bad things only happened to other people.
They were inexperienced as well, spraying and praying rather than finding cover and trying for well-aimed shots. It was a common failing among local recruits who hadn’t received training from an actual military. They thought of guns as magic totems you could wave around to scare people and if you pulled the trigger and cast that spell, well, that meant the other guy would just drop over dead.
If only it were that easy.
The red targeting reticle seemed to float in mid-air over the chest of the closest of the three young mercenaries and Anton caressed the trigger of his carbine. The gun barely kicked, the recoil-absorption technology bleeding off the kick of the high-velocity slugs. On his end. They still kicked like hell on the receiving end. The man—boy almost—pitched forward, blood spraying from the exit wounds between his shoulders. His decades-old rifle went clattering across the floor and he tumbled into the stands of one of the portable lights, knocking it to the ground in a shower of sparks and throwing a whole section of the room into blackness.
More muzzle flashes, even brighter and more blinding in the dark, but Anton’s night vision goggles revealed everything. A second of the three gunmen went down as Mischa calmly and precisely sent one three-round burst after another into center mass. The boy soldier collapsed to his knees, rifle slipping from nerveless fingers, blood dark enough in the dim light that it seemed like black ink sputtering out of his mouth before he keeled over face-first.
Kolya let him down. Maybe it was the wound, the blood loss, but he missed with his first two shots. The kid he was targeting was emptying his magazine blindly, and Anton could have sworn his eyes were closed. Maybe he was praying. Whoever he was asking for help only half listened. The prayers didn’t stop the bullets from Anton’s rifle, though maybe the closed eyes kept it from hurting quite as much. It was better when death came as a surprise.
It had certainly come as a surprise to Mischa. One moment the man had been crouched down, carbine at his shoulder, and the next he was on his face in a spreading pool of his own blood. Anton’s breath caught in his throat and he lunged across the two meters to his old friend, grabbing him by the shoulder and rolling him over, yanking the night vision glasses off his face. Mischa’s eyes were wide and white and unseeing, and the left side of his skull was missing.
A stray round, the magic bullet the young mercenaries had believed so fervently in come true. Kolya Orlova was stricken, pain written across his face as he stared down at Mischa, blaming himself. Anton wanted to blame him, too, wanted to rage at him, but he couldn’t. The mission came first, and Mischa hadn’t been the first friend he’d seen die.
And won’t be the last.
“Kolya,” he snapped at the other man. “Come on. We need to move.”
It took another second for Orlova to look at him, to acknowledge the words with a nod. Even when he did, Anton could see the anguish behind his eyes.
“Watch our backs,” he told the man, putting a hand on his shoulder for just a moment. Orlova nodded and Anton decided that was as good as he was going to get from the man.
He paused to grab Mischa’s carbine, slinging it over his shoulder, then retrieved the man’s sidearm as well, not wanting to leave a loaded gun behind them. It was an American pistol, an antique Colt 1911A1 in .45ACP. He’d given Mischa shit about it over and over, telling him to get something modern, something lighter. Mischa had always smiled and replied that people who got shot by .45 stayed down. He tucked the weapon into his belt. He’d have to hold onto it now. Mischa would want that. He didn’t look back at his friend’s ruined face. He didn’t want to remember him that way.
Anton didn’t know what the hallway was called, which rooms were which in the place. He didn’t know if he’d ever studied the layout and, if he had, it had probably been years out of date. Towards the end of days for the place, when Presidents had become less elected officials and more imperial warlords, the changes had been almost constant. One self-styled emperor after another had tried to remake the place in his or her image until they’d fallen to assassination or military coup.
And then the whole place had been abandoned and time and vandalism and the elements had done more damage until it was almost unrecognizable from what had been. All he knew was they’d begun in an open hall where he could see the remains of security checkpoints, and now the walls were
getting closer, the corridors narrower and he still saw no one.
No sign of Franklin, no sign of the equipment he’d supposedly had shipped here, not nearly the military force he’d expected to find defending it. Something was wrong, but he didn’t feel as if it were a trap. Not one set for him, anyway.
They were simply too late. He refrained from telling Orlova, and not just out of the sheer, Russian perversity of not sharing information with subordinates. The man was already shaken by Mischa’s death. Telling him their friend had died raiding a dry hole would only make him feel worse. Time for that later, when they had the luxury to talk. For now, he would have to try to gather what intelligence they could so he wouldn’t have to report back totally empty-handed.
Anton was rounding a tight corner when he saw her. He knew her immediately, even in the dim light, even with just a flash of the side of her face going through a door.
It was Svetlana Grigoryeva. Her face was burned into his mind, and not just from the briefings for this mission. She was almost a legend in the FSB, despite her relative youth, and General Antonov’s intelligence sources were fairly certain Franklin had turned her. If he could get her, this whole cluster-fuck would have been worthwhile.
“Come on!” he hissed at Orlova, taking off at a quick jog, ignoring caution in favor of speed.
Svetlana was with someone else, a man he thought, but he hadn’t seen a gun. A scientist perhaps? A technician? All the better. Having a noncombatant along would slow her down. He’d have to try to take both of them alive.
The door they’d gone through hung open and Anton took the risk of simply ducking through it, trying to stay low but not slowing down. It would be too easy to lose them in the half-light of the hallways, the glow from the portable light-stands in the main rooms filtering out poorly and unevenly.
He’d lucked out. They’d passed through, more interested in getting away than laying traps, and the room was empty. It had been, he thought, some sort of conference room when it last seen use. Now, it was a storage closet, with crates labelled in Cyrillic stacked against one wall and the marks on the floor of where dozens more had been piled before they’d been moved…somewhere.