Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  No more targets on the airstrip, but there had to be more. Five mechs hadn’t taken down the whole base. I was sure there was infantry coming in somewhere, probably up the front approaches. A few running steps and a stomp on the throttle and the Hellfire was back in the sky, rising on columns of superheated air. I rose through the clouds of dark smoke billowing over the hangar, cruising at thirty meters up over the boring, warehouse-basic roof of the complex.

  Out beyond the airstrip and the parking lots, I could see the high desert, bleeding red with the sunrise, and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. They seemed clean and untouched and I envied them. Back on the ground, things were a lot dirtier. Smaller columns of smoke were adding their output to the dark smudge rising over the base and…

  What was the name of the place? Why the hell couldn’t I remember the name?

  There they were. Infantry in armored personnel carriers, some of the vehicles already burning, skidded aside from the main gate under fire from the guard posts. The turrets at the gate were silent now, contributors to the smoke. The men and women who’d been stationed out there might have fallen back to cover inside the buildings. Maybe they got away. I told myself that, hoping they were taking off across the desert, getting out of this alive.

  Heads went up among the troopers streaming through the front gate, brown camouflage doing its best to blend in with the background but not quite making it. They’d seen me and they were firing their rifles, 6.5mm anti-personnel rounds at two hundred meters. Even if they hit me, the bullets were spitballs against the Hellfire’s armor. Still, best not to encourage bad behavior.

  I switched the 40mm cannons to anti-personnel rounds and fired a spread into the middle of the troops. The recoil pushed the Hellfire back in its hover and I had to open the throttle a bit more to compensate, but the results were worth the effort. Black blossoms of smoke marked detonations, a line of them springing up across the front parking lot, running from the back bumper of a beat-up Toyota to the front windshield of one of the busses they used to ferry people in from the park-and-ride. Enemy troops littered the space between, tossed to the ground by the blasts, some writhing in agony, some not moving at all.

  I brought the Hellfire down in the middle of the access road running from the front entrance out to the airstrip, breaking into a long, loping run, the footpads of the Hellfire cracking the pavement where they struck. I could do this. If this was everything they’d brought, I could take enough of them out that they’d have to retreat. Then I’d call in support and we could secure the place until…

  Until what? What support? Who the hell ran this place?

  I had a sudden urge to just take off, fly toward those mountains until my fuel ran out, then abandon the Hellfire and just walk. No one would know. I could go find Cecelia and…

  Find her where? Where was I?

  Infantry interrupted the questions, rushing forward around the corner of the building, rifles firing like ineffectual mosquitoes. The 20mm would have been a waste, so I used the coaxial machine guns, raking them with a few hundred rounds of 6.5mm and sending them scurrying away.

  Damned crunchies.

  I didn’t notice the MANPAD until it was too late. One of those annoying flashes I could almost ignore, and the whining tone of a laser designator being detected and I was looking everywhere for another mech or a chopper or one of the APCs until I saw the missile team right at the corner of the facility where the road curved. I was clutching the trigger of the machine guns when they fired. There was only a couple hundred meters separating us and the missile arrived before I could even think of deploying countermeasures and I did the only thing I could think of and jammed my heels down on the pedals and jumped the Hellfire into the air.

  I don’t know how high I was when the missile hit, but it was high enough to eject. I didn’t make the choice myself, Hellfire’s fail-safes did it for me in far less time than a human could have. I don’t know if the massive concussive blast was from the missile striking the turbines or the ejection rockets carrying the cockpit pod clear of the main body of the mech, but it hurt like a son of a bitch either way.

  I saw nothing but light and fire, heard nothing but thunder, felt nothing but pain. I was falling, and I was burning…and then everything was darkness.

  One

  Nate Stout sucked in a lungful of cancer and reflected, not for the first time, that Norfolk was a shithole.

  It wasn’t just the crumbling remains of the Naval base, or the acres of charred ruins left from the terrorist nuke that had taken out the downtown area five years ago. It was a literal shithole. Chesapeake Bay smelled of human refuse, dumped with impunity by the remnant population, unchecked by government oversight because there was no government left. The water was brown and green and just about every color but blue, and after all this time, dead fish and sea birds still floated, rotting, adding their stench to the general miasma.

  Wonder how many diseases I’m exposing myself to just breathing this shit? Nate mused.

  Enough he didn’t even care about the lack of filters in the black-market Russian cigarettes. He let his lungs burn with the smoke for three full seconds before he let it waft out his nostrils with a pleasant burning sensation.

  “Aren’t you worried about cancer?” Roach asked him.

  He tossed the glowing butt at the rusted hulk of what had once been a destroyer and turned away from bad memories, some of which weren’t even his own. Rachel Mata, “Roach,” was young and looked it, unlike him. She stood watching him, flight suit unzipped and pulled down to her waist, baring her sleeveless T-shirt to the miserable afternoon heat. Her hands were on her hips and she had the sort of look of affectionate disapproval you’d expect from a younger sister. If he’d had a younger sister.

  Maybe I did. Who the fuck knows?

  He only had the memories Bob Franklin had deemed useful.

  “No,” Nate answered her. “I’m worried about the mission. Is Dix ready?”

  “He sent me to get you. He said, and I quote, ‘tell our distinguished commander to get his ass into a mech unless he wants me to lead the damned op.’”

  “Oh, I’m so tempted to take him up on that.” He winced at the persistent ache in his knees as he followed her back up the pier and into the old military warehouse.

  Faded sheet metal, scarred by fire and defaced by generations of graffiti, baked in the sun, and Broken Arrow Mercenary Force simmered inside. He’d winced when Dix had suggested the name, winced even harder when Roach had insisted they all get matching tattoos. She wore hers proudly, on her left forearm, while his was concealed on his right shoulder, invisible usually, though at the moment he had his flight suit unzipped and his T-shirt sleeves rolled up against the summer heat and the red arrow with BAMF superimposed across it was on display.

  Suns out, guns out, they’d used to say. Back then, they meant something different.

  Nate’s fingers brushed the barrel shrouds of his Hellfire’s 20mm Vulcan rotary cannon as he passed beneath the machine, threading his way through the underbrush of ammo cans, generators and fire extinguishers and into the midst of the rest of his team.

  “Officer on deck!” Brian Richardson barked, coming to attention in front of his own mech, a Hellfire identical to Nate’s except for slightly different armament.

  Dix had the face to match the tone, hard and lined and marked by experience and responsibility, eyes as blue as a mountain stream off a glacier and just as cold. He couldn’t hold it though, and his stiff, serious expression broke down into a snort of amusement. The others laughed outright, younger and impressionable.

  “Sorry, Cap,” Dix said, punching him lightly on the arm. “I know you were Army, so you don’t know what a ‘deck’ is. Or soap, or a toothbrush…”

  “Hey Ramirez,” Nate said, nodding to the baby of the group. At twenty-one, he was younger even than Roach, and he hung over every word of “real” veterans like Dix or Nate. “You know how the Navy separates the men from the boys?”
<
br />   “No, sir,” Ramirez shook his head. He wore a buzz cut because he thought it made him look more military, but he’d let a cheesy mustache creep across his lip the last two weeks.

  “With a crowbar.”

  Snorts and chuckles at the old punchline, but more at the tradition of it. BAMF didn’t run an op without Army-Navy jokes. He missed the Air Force. Air Force jokes had been the easiest, but fighter jets were fucking expensive and worse than useless in the war they were fighting, and the Chair Force had gone the way of the dodo.

  “You got those damned u-mechs working, finally, Dix?” he asked, turning serious. He motioned at the line of remotely-piloted Cobras against the far wall. Theoretically, they could be slaved to the controls of the Hellfire pi-mechs to mirror their targeting and maneuvering, but in practice…

  “Finally, boss,” Dix hissed out a sigh, facing the beaten and battered machines with a look of utter disgust. “The damned things are older than you and getting their control systems to synch up with the new hardware on our Hellfires has been a royal pain in the ass. I think they’ll work now, though.”

  “You think?” Patterson repeated, eyes wide as he stepped out of their makeshift bathroom, separated from the rest of the warehouse by a shower curtain. “Jesus, Dix!” His voice got louder the closer he approached them, wiping his hands dry on his T-shirt. “We’re about to wave our happy asses in the wind, I’d kind of like it if you knew!”

  Nate cocked an eyebrow at the big man. Patty was what everyone called him after a dare in Tijuana involving a dress and a bad-tempered chihuahua, but Nate always found Geoff Patterson something of a cipher whatever you called him, more difficult to read than Dix or the two youngsters. Patty was tall and gangly, with blond hair so far past regulation that he tied it into a pony tail, and he had a Kentucky accent thick enough to cut with a fork. How the hell he’d wound up here was a question he’d never been willing to answer except with the obvious response: “for the money.” He was just this side of thirty, but what he’d done with his youth he wouldn’t say, either.

  “If Dix says they’re working,” he told Patty, putting a bit of a reproving edge into his voice, “then they’re working. Unless you’ve suddenly become a better mechanic than I remember, in which case, I will be happy to put you to work.”

  “Naw, man,” Patty said, raising a hand in surrender. “If you’re happy with it, it’s cool. Just life or death, you know? Nothing serious.”

  “All right, this is standard procedure,” Nate said, slipping out of pre-mission banter and into his professional, business face. “We’re going out in teams of two, each slaved to a U-mech. Patty, you’re going to hang back at a central point between our patrol areas and act as our reserve. Any of us gets into shit too deep to wade through, you come roaring to the rescue like the cavalry, got it?”

  “What’s the objective?” Roach asked. “What are the Russians after, and why here?”

  “The spooks don’t know,” Nate admitted, leaning heavily against the leg of his Hellfire. His knees were killing him, but he forced his face into careful neutrality. You could bullshit with the troops, but you couldn’t show them weakness. “They don’t know much…”

  “What else is new?” Patty murmured, arms crossed over his chest.

  “At ease with that shit,” Dix growled. “Use your ears, not your mouth.”

  The younger man glowered at him, but said nothing, and Nate went on.

  “All the Intell geeks could say was that the Russians have a military presence here at the port and the best guess is, they’re trying to smuggle something in past the coastal blockades. A weapon, most likely. Maybe nuclear, maybe biological.”

  “Who’d notice another nuke in this dump?” Patty again, said so softly Nate barely made it out, but it still earned a dirty look from Dix.

  “It wouldn’t be used here,” Nate explained anyway, not showing the impatience he felt. “They’d probably be trying to take it overland to one of the remaining East Coast enclaves, trying to destabilize the remaining government centers.”

  “If you don’t want your Goddamned kids growing up speaking Russian,” Dix said in a quarterdeck bellow he’d picked up from a CAG somewhere back when he’d been a pilot, “then maybe you should take this shit seriously.” He waved at the map someone had taped to the wall to cover a cluster of bullet holes. It was an older map of the US, without the depressing additions and subtractions of the last ten years. “If you ever want America to look like that again, we need to do our fucking jobs!”

  “Ooh-rah, Lt. Richardson,” Patty offered half-heartedly. “Point me at a Marine recruiter.” The tall man chuckled. “Oh, right, there ain’t none anymore. Now it’s the ‘Combined Coastal Defense,’ or some shit like that. We ain’t got an Air Force, we ain’t got a Navy, we ain’t got the Marines and the Army just throws money at guys like us to do their work for them. You seriously think that…” He shot a bird at the map. “…is ever coming back?”

  “Something bothering you, Patterson?” Nate asked him instead of kicking his ass and spitting on the remains, which was what he sorely wanted to do.

  “No, boss,” he answered too quickly, waving it off. “I’m up for it, I guess I’m just not in a rah-rah mood today.” He jerked a thumb at his Hellfire. “Is there anything more to the briefing or can I start firing up Matilda?”

  “Naw, go ahead. We move out in five mikes. Everyone gear up, get strapped in and check the slave circuits for the U-mechs.”

  As the others moved off, Nate bent down, leaning his butt against the right leg of his Hellfire to support him as he fastened the straps of his combat boots. His legs and back let him know exactly what they thought of the maneuver and he sucked in a breath as he straightened up.

  Wonder if I have time to pop some ibuprofen before I strap in?

  “Why do you let him get away with that shit, boss?” Roach asked, still standing beside him, glaring after Patty as he paced over to the rolling steps and began dragging them back to his mech to boost himself up into the cockpit. She cracked the knuckles of her right hand and made a fist. “You say the word, I’ll take him outside and give him a little kinetic counseling. Maybe then he’ll control that damn mouth of his.”

  “We don’t have the luxury of riding his ass too hard, Roach,” Nate said, shrugging. “It’s not as if I have volunteers lining up around the block to take his job. Until we can get back to one of the enclaves, maybe pick up a couple more pilots, this is all we got and it has to get the job done.”

  “My Uncle Steve was a Gunny in the USMC, back when it was still around, and he wouldn’t have put up with a shithead like him in the Corps,” Roach said with a dissatisfied grunt. She pulled on the sleeves of her flight suit and zipped it up. “He’d have had Patty mopping the damn warehouse floor until his hands bled.”

  Nate glanced down at the dirt and muck visible through the cracked cement of the floor and barked a laugh.

  “What about your dad?” he asked her, remembering her father had been in Army Special Forces. “What would he have done?”

  The corner of Roach Mata’s mouth curled upward, a humorless snarl.

  “Dad wouldn’t have bothered. He knew when to cut deadweight.”

  She moved over to her machine, shoulders square and back straight and he felt an involuntary shudder. Roach was a military brat from way back, and sometimes her happy-to-be-here eagerness made him forget just how damned scary she could be.

  At least she’s on our side.

  He stared up at the looming metal and carbon fiber and honeycomb boron of the Hellfire mech and wondered what “our side” meant at this point. Did he even believe that shit about restoring the United States that Dix was pushing? Or was he in it for the money like Patty? There were days he thought he knew, but Norfolk brought out the cynic in him. Just what had the United States ever done for him, other than chew him up and spit him out, over and over, one life after another?

  Oh well, whether he did it for the good old US of A,
or for their money, or just for the men and one woman of Broken Arrow Mercenary Force, the job had to be done. He pulled the canopy open and grabbed the handholds, pulling himself up. It was a matter of pride not using the steps, even though the strain did nasty things to his shoulder joints.

  Getting too old for this shit, he thought, settling into the control chair and strapping in.

  I’ll be seven next month.

  Two

  It had once been the oldest shipyard in Virginia, maybe in the whole United States. He couldn’t remember, if he’d ever known. If the original Nate Stout had ever known. It had sat bestriding the Elizabeth River, a monument to industry and America’s commitment to world leadership. Now, the few ships left were rusted hulks, capsized or resting on the river bottom, and little was left of the buildings except chunks of concrete and strips of aluminum sheeting waving in the breeze. Like so much of the old port, it had been razed by the nuclear weapon terrorists had smuggled onto a cargo ship and detonated just off the coast. Here and there, a towering crane still rose in defiance of physics and global politics, and the Jordan River bridge still spanned the green and brown and occasionally blue flow, looking as new as when thousands of cars crossed it every day, but all else was devastation.

  And it looks worse from the air.

  “We’re going down, Dix,” he transmitted. “Leave the U-mechs in a patrol pattern.”

  Nate throttled back his jets and the Hellfire descended from one hundred meters to touch down near the defiant remains of a gantry crane, long faded from its original jaunty, royal blue to something more depressing. Ancient concrete cracked beneath the weight of the machine’s footpads and Nate felt the sudden, irrational fear that the whole place would collapse from underneath him. He shifted the Hellfire’s weight, running a 360-degree scan of the area as Dix brought his mech down a dozen meters away, closer to the river bank.