by S L Shelton
I looked around and saw the end of the rappel rope at the corner. Duck walking around the turn in the roof, I pulled a long length from its coil and tugged at it until several yards had been freed through the snap links. On my return trip with the rope, I spotted a rifle.
“Heads up, Majesty,” I said as I tossed the rope over the edge.
“Got it.”
“And your SIG is up here waiting for you,” I added, dropping his empty pistol before scooping up the rifle.
As I turned and fired the rifle into the courtyard, I spotted a flash of curly golden locks peek out from a hole in the wall below me. My heart jumped.
“Majesty, was Gretel in that chopper?” I asked.
“Affirmative,” he replied, grunting as he threw a leg over the wall.
No, Nick! Damn it! Why did you bring her here?
I looked up to see Harbinger, a several feet below me now, turning his handheld artillery piece toward Kathrin’s safe place behind the chopper. I raised my rifle and fired six rounds before the bolt locked back. If any of my shots had hit Harbinger, he wasn’t showing it.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, I recited in my head.
Before I had a chance to talk myself out of it, I launched off the roof, the barrel of my empty rifle leading the way, as if it were a midair bayonet charge—but without the benefit of the bayonet.
“Come here, you walking freak show,” I yelled to distract him as the ground, and Harbinger, rushed to greet me.
He looked up and deflected my barrel with his arm as I landed on him. A startled flash swept across the giant’s face along with a ripple of instant anger.
He must keep that on tap, I observed.
I rode him down to the ground like a snowboard and then rolled backward behind him as soon as he was off his feet.
“Holy shit!” I heard someone exclaim in my ear. “Cover fire for Monkey Wrench!”
Despite the horrific impact, Harbinger had managed to hold onto his big weapon. With incredible speed, he turned that drum-fed frag machine toward me while still on his back.
I launched toward him before he could finish his turn. Without a break in rhythm, I stepped onto his chest, threw my leg over his weapon, and grabbed the front. Pain flashed through my hand as I clamped down on the still-hot barrel of his weapon. Fighting the reflex to release my grip, I held tight as I threw my body into a spin. His grip on the weapon was incredible, but I was determined to separate him from it.
“Let go!” I yelled into his face as I rotated my entire body against the weapon. He reached up with his other hand and grabbed me around the thigh, digging his massive thumb into the wound there.
My scream was as much angry determination as it was about pain. I let all of my weight fall forward, twisting with my leverage against the stock of the combat shotgun as I went.
How much torque can he possibly take?
I felt his shoulder pop.
Ah! I thought with satisfaction. That much.
As he bellowed in pain-filled rage, I suddenly realized I had pinned his arm to the weapon when I’d straddled it. He’d had no choice…he couldn’t release.
My victory smile was short-lived as he rose from the ground, lifting and throwing me several feet—but I held tight to his AA12 assault shotgun.
“It’s mine now,” I muttered as I hit the slushy courtyard stone with my back and slid roughly several feet. Struggling to rise, Harbinger seemed dazed, searching the ground for his weapon, I assumed. After shaking his head, he turned toward me just as I lifted his own weapon and pointed it at him. He lurched sideways toward the corpse of one of his fallen men. As I squeezed the trigger, sending an explosive round toward his chest, he lifted the dead mercenary in front of him, blocking my shot.
The tiny explosion sent him backward, but like some sort of armored robot, all it did was turn him away from me. He slung the dead man over his shoulder like an oversized backpack as I continued to squeeze the trigger. He stumbled, each round propelling him away from me until he smashed through a door and into the fortress.
“Monkey Wrench! Behind you!” Seifert yelled into my ear.
I rolled sideways and saw three mercenaries rising from their protective position, firing at me and coming to Harbinger’s aid. As bullets smacked and splintered stone chips all around me, I turned the big assault shotgun in their direction. I emptied the last eight rounds into the center of the onslaught, peppering them with fragmentation rounds. A bloody spray erupted as two of them dropped to the ground. The third dove back to cover, wounded.
“Eleven,” I muttered with a satisfied sneer.
I dropped the now-empty AA12 shotgun before rolling to my feet and limping through the door Harbinger had fallen through—he was nowhere in sight. I stumbled into the protected anteroom from the courtyard and nearly collapsed. The pain in my leg where Harbinger had dug his thumb was now more excruciating that it had been in my cell. My hand was soaked in fresh blood just from touching it.
It’s only pain. I repeated my mantra. The pain won’t kill you, but giving into the pain will.
I looked around for a weapon but found none. If I was going to chase after Harbinger, I needed something.
Where would he go? I wondered. Then I remembered why I needed to come back into the fort. The radio room!
I had to stop Harbinger from taking out Director Burgess’s jet…and the other person.
What had Nick called her? Rose Garden? Then it dawned on me. The Secretary of State!
I ran through the anteroom, but as I came around the corner, I nearly ran into a bandaged and bloody-nosed Bellos. He swung his rifle butt up before I could set my feet solidly to avoid it, cracking me solidly in the forehead. My neck rocked back with the hit, and I slammed against the doorway.
I was vaguely aware that he was turning the rifle on me when I kicked out to push the barrel away. Before he could counter, my fingers flew knife-like to his throat.
“I should have just shot you before,” I said as I followed him backward.
I easily yanked the rifle from his grip as he had one hand pressed against his gasping throat. In an impressive display of his ability to stay on task, he kicked out and smashed my fingers. The rifle dropped to the ground.
Though still gasping from my strike to his windpipe, he launched into me with feet and elbows flying. A punch to my leg sent me down to my knee in agony before he brought his elbow down hard across my shoulder, followed by a brutal—and unsportsmanlike—stomp to my wounded thigh.
“I should have done this in Basel,” he said in a ragged hiss as he withdrew a knife from behind him.
“Not in Wiesbaden?” I asked through gritted teeth as I jumped up.
A confused ripple creased his brow.
“Yeah,” I said as I grabbed his knife hand. “That was me.”
Realization flashed across his face as I turned his wrist, the knife still pressed into his hand by my fingers. I shoved him backward, locking my foot behind his ankle.
As we fell to the floor, I smiled. “By the way,” Thud. “It was your phone that gave you away in Antwerp.”
I pressed forward, shoving the blade into his chest. Angry defeat flickered in his eyes as I withdrew the blade.
“Ten,” I said as I thrust it through the side of his neck. “And that’s for Tex.”
I left the knife in him before rolling away as blood pooled in and then spilled from his mouth. Stumbling sideways, I grabbed the rifle before climbing unsteadily to my feet and running—actually more like limping rapidly—down the hall toward the radio room. I was halfway there when I heard the unmistakable bass of Harbinger’s voice.
“Run, little rabbit,” he yelled from behind me.
I turned and fired my rifle, but Harbinger’s arm flew up to shield his face—he had stripped the armor from his man’s corpse and was holding it like a knight’s shield. Five shots bounced from his shield and body armor before he started to charge toward me.
I took one calm b
reath before sighting the gap between his chest and armored arm before squeezing the trigger once more. The bullet opened a gash in his neck just one stride away from me. When he hit me I went flying through the air, the wind leaving my lungs as if a car had struck me.
Harbinger fell nearby, his hand quickly reaching up to his new neck wound.
“You are surprising,” he said as I reached for the rifle on the ground. He lashed out with his foot, kicking me and sending me crashing against the wall.
I shook the cobwebs from my head as he struggled to rise, still suffering from a dislocated, if not broken, shoulder.
I pushed myself backward and found my footing before rising in front of him. As his massive frame rose to its full height in front of me, panic struck me. I was weaponless, wounded, nearly frostbitten, and close to collapse—and I was about to fight the biggest man I had ever laid eyes on.
“I’m very impressed,” Harbinger said.
Instead of rushing me, he began pulling his body armor off. He shook his arm trying to remove the dead man’s armor and I took the opportunity to strike. I kicked, aiming for the wound on his neck.
Sadly, I misjudged the man’s speed. His good hand whipped forward, stopping my foot in mid-flight before shoving me backward. I just barely maintained my balance.
“Patience, Mr. Wolfe,” he said patronizingly. “You’ll have ample opportunity to display your skills in a moment.”
He continued to shed his body armor, unclasping the Velcro with his good arm before stepping toward me.
“You know, Scott—may I call you Scott?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I have great admiration for you. I think we would have been great friends under other circumstances,” he said as he dropped the massive bulletproof vest to the ground.
“Really? I’m ready to give that a shot now, if you’re game,” I said sarcastically, backing away from him.
He laughed. “You remind me of someone from a life long gone. A brother.”
“What was his name?” I asked, trying to sound sincerely curious as I backed toward the radio room.
Harbinger paused briefly, examining my face before he continued moving toward me. He reached up and massaged the shoulder of his dangling arm.
“His name was Jonathan,” he replied with a creased brow. “He and I lived with our brothers under the watchful eye of Father—a very powerful man.” He stopped and thought for a beat. “A relative term, that. ‘Powerful’.”
I continued to back down the corridor as he probed his damaged shoulder with his fingers. When I made a move for the radio room door, he pulled the Desert Eagle from his hip and shot the wall next to me.
“I’m not done with my story,” he said calmly.
“Sorry,” I replied, hands up.
“Father was cruel. Prone to violent outbursts,” he continued.
Like father like son, I thought.
“He would beat us sometimes for looking at him the wrong way,” he said. I noted that the blood flecks in his eyes were appearing faster, covering more and more of his whites. “But mostly, he just beat us to sculpt us into the men he wanted us to be.”
“Sounds like a real asshole,” I replied.
A grunt that may have been some sort of chuckle escaped from his throat.
“Then along came little Jonathan. A delicate boy, relatively speaking,” he said. “He was almost a hundred and forty pounds at the age of twelve, but he was still smaller than the rest of us at the same age.”
Why is he telling me this? I wondered
“I tried to teach him how to defend himself,” Harbinger said, continuing his story. “But even though he tried, he was just a soft, polite boy who needed a protective arm to shield him from the dragons of the world. I was that shield.”
He’s stalling! I suddenly realized. But for what?
“Then, one day, Mother realized Jonathan was in danger—because he was so much weaker than the rest of us. She decided she needed to protect him from Father,” he continued. The way he had emphasized the word “Mother” made me think this wasn’t a typical family story I was hearing.
“That seems like the smart thing to do,” I said as I continued to inch toward the radio room. I glanced over and saw no one was in there.
“It would have been,” he said. “But when Father found out, he arranged for Mother to have an accident and then put young Jonathan in harm’s way. By the time I found out, Jonathan had already been torn limb to limb… His life, bled out in the dog pit.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Harbinger shrugged. “Then I did what any big brother would do. I slew my father.”
“That’s a very sad story,” I replied, trying to sound as sincere as possible.
He stopped his forward movement and turned to face the wall.
What the hell are you doing?
With a sudden vocal outburst, like a roar, he lurched toward the wall, slamming his shoulder into the concrete. He screamed as the dislocated shoulder popped back into place.
I am so screwed.
He took two fast, long steps toward me.
“Wait,” I said, raising my hands as I stumbled backward. “I have a story too. I was doing this thing a few months ago.”
He stopped his forward movement. In my ear, I heard a crackle of static, and then Nick’s voice. “Monkey Wrench, the SATCOM was in the chopper. We’ve got no COM outside of this place,” he said.
“We were trying to clean up a mess made by someone else,” I continued, trying to create an opening to get into the radio room. “I was just tech support, but I ended up having to go into the field to make a repair.”
Harbinger cocked his head to the side as if he were trying to figure something out.
“Monkey Wrench, we are still pinned down,” Nick said into my ear. “If you can disable that radar pick up and RETRANS, then Papa and Rose Garden might have a chance with onboard countermeasures.”
“Anyway, the mess got cleaned up, but there was this guy…big as you,” I said. “So this guy gets it in his head that I was responsible for his failure. And instead of using his brain to figure out how to correct his problem…”
A flash of recognition flitted across Harbinger’s face.
“…he chased me across the desert in a temper tantrum, proving that he was unsuitable for command.”
“Monkey Wrench,” I heard Nick say in my ear. “That was a really stupid thing to do.”
Harbinger flew through the air at me, emitting a battle howl that would have made Vikings shit their pants. The whites of his eyes seemed to be pulsing in ever-growing dots of blood—that’s what I had counted on.
Come on, big boy, I thought as he barreled toward me.
He was big. He was strong and he was fast—but I was faster, even with my wounds. He sailed past me as I dodged to the side, grabbing his weakened right arm and throwing my foot out to send him to the ground. Before I released him, I clamped down hard on his wrist and pulled it around the doorjamb of the radio room. Through his wrist, I felt the vibration of his shoulder being torn back out of its socket again. He roared in agony.
“Monkey Wrench!” Nick called as I dashed into the radio room.
“Working on it,” I said as I began pulling wires and cables from the racks all the devices were mounted to. A slow and deliberate examination would show me what wires went to what devices—but I had no time for slow and deliberate. I had to pull them all.
“Spartan this is Arrow,” I heard Marsh call Nick. “Be advised that cable car is on its way up on the west side of the facility and it looks like there are lots of Tangos aboard.”
“Monkey Wrench, shut down that transmitter now,” Nick yelled over the sound of small arms fire.
I lifted the lid on the RETRANS device, preparing to do just that—but my heart seized in my chest when I saw the case was empty.
Where is it?!
The computer was relaying remote information from somewhere else in the fortress. My eye went to the clum
p of cables that led from the terminal out the door along the floor. As I reached down and grabbed the cables, preparing to follow them to the source, Harbinger burst into the room.
“You are dead!” he bellowed.
Still holding the clump of network wires in my hand, I ran toward him, aiming for his damaged shoulder. As I smashed into him, I stepped up on his thigh and wrapped the tangled coil of wires around his neck and arm. I rolled over his shoulder, dragging the wires with me. When they tightened, I yanked hard, pulling Harbinger—bad shoulder first—into the stone wall.
He screamed out as he fell backward. I felt satisfied that would delay him enough, but before I could flee down the hall, he grabbed my sweatshirt, ending my escape. I turned and bent at the waist before backing out of my sweatshirt, leaving him holding the empty garment in his hand.
He howled at me in anger.
“I’m going to rip your limbs from your body and throw you off this mountain,” he yelled at my back. I could hear the equipment being dragged behind him as he tried to pursue me while still tangled in the cables.
I fled down the hallway, my radio bouncing up and down against my chest, as it no longer had my sweatshirt to hold it tight to my body. I followed the cables that led from the radio room around the corner and toward the gondola shed on the backside of the facility.
Behind me, I could still hear equipment clattering down the hallway, like a bell on a cat, warning the birds to flee. Unfortunately, I was the bird in this scenario.
“Monkey Wrench?” Marsh called into my ear.
“I’m trying,” I yelled as I continued to follow the wires.
I spotted the transmitter on a stack of equipment cases across from the gondola door.
“Monkey Wrench,” Marsh said. “That gondola is going to hit your position in seven, six, five—”
I kicked at the microwave-sized device twice, but quickly realized that it was hardened military equipment…it would take a sledgehammer to break it.
The power cord! I thought just as Harbinger burst into the landing area, the wires and equipment still in tow. “Three, two, one,” I heard in my ear.
I picked up the transmitter and yanked it, but the power cord held tight.
