Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “And Senator Carlsen is a known buddy of Van Damme’s.”

  “Got it in one, dude,” he said. “It’s not a smoking gun, but under the circumstances, I think it’s worth checking out.”

  “Boston’s going to be a bitch to get into,” I said. Not only was Taxachusetts generally considered non-permissive territory anyway, given that in the wake of recent violence the state’s law enforcement had decided to crack down even harder on gun owners, with absolutely no resulting reduction in the rampant crime and rioting, but there had just been another flare up in Boston itself. A pair of police officers had been murdered in their car, and when a young black man had thrown a rock at another cruiser, the cops, already on the warpath, had ended up killing him. Graphic video of the killing had appeared so fast that it was suspected that it had been set up, though at that point, things were already so tangled that nobody knew for sure. As a result, half of Boston was once again on fire, and the conflagration was spreading, in the name of “solidarity.” It was only a repeat of what had been going on for months. I had to wonder if it hadn’t been timed specifically to cover for that incoming freighter, presuming that that was, in fact, our target.

  “They’re still fourteen hours out from the harbor,” he said. “There’s still time to get up to Maine and launch from there, taking the freighter while it’s still at sea. I’m sending you the full data dump.”

  The phone buzzed against my ear as the file came across. I thanked him and hung up. “Grab your shit,” I said. “We’ve got a few hours to get across the country, plan a VBSS, and take down a freighter. Hopefully it’s the right freighter.”

  I didn’t have to say it twice. In seconds, gear was getting jammed into gear bags, and I was already calling Phil to tell him to get the DC-3 spooled up, and get the helos heading east. We had no time to lose. We’d plan in the air.

  Chapter 33

  It turned out not to be practical to get the Little Birds across the country on the timetable we had. So, Stahl made some calls and called in some favors, and there were six Bell 407s waiting for us when we landed, rotors already turning.

  We’d gone over the data dump on the Narva in flight, and hammered out a hasty plan. It had taken eight and a half hours to get from Washington to Maine, including stopping in Minneapolis for fuel; the DC-3 didn’t have the legs to go all the way non-stop. Considering that most of us had trained on the Maritime Special Purpose Force planning cycle, which allows six hours from Warning Order to launch, that was plenty of time. We were already in our kit—plate carriers, helmets, and weapons, with “horse collar” inflatable vests over the plate carriers—as we got off the bird and trotted toward the helos.

  There wasn’t a lot of room on the birds. Somebody had been busy; there were fast-ropes coiled just inside the doors. They were hooked up to what appeared to be a sort of swinging armature that had been hastily welded together and bolted inside the fuselage, presumably to make sure the ropes were clear of the skids. The 407 had not been designed with fast-roping in mind.

  Sam was waiting next to the lead bird, already in his own kit, ready to fly. Since Phil had needed to fly the DC-3, Sam had taken lead for the helos, and he and his crews had gotten out by jet, provided by the Group, so they’d gotten to Maine a few hours ahead of us. I jogged up to him. “At last report, they’re eighty-nine nautical miles due south,” he shouted over the noise of the rotors, “doing nine knots west-southwest. It’s getting a little bumpy out there, and they might have to slow down some more. I can have you on-station in about forty-five minutes, give-or-take, but we won’t be able to loiter long. Weather’s getting bad; it’s not going to be a comfortable flight.”

  “Just get us there, Sam,” I told him. “If you’ve got to drop us and come back, refuel, and re-attack, do it.”

  He nodded and clapped me on the shoulder before turning and climbing back into the helo’s cockpit.

  I looked to my left and right, making sure the teams were getting evenly spread out among the helicopters, then climbed in behind Sam and plugged my Peltors into the bird’s intercom. “Head count, all birds,” I sent over the radio.

  One by one, I got counts from each helicopter, checking them off in my head. When we were good, I reached forward and tapped Sam on the shoulder, giving him a thumbs-up. He returned it without looking, then pulled back on the collective. With a wobble in the increasingly stiff wind off the Atlantic, the bird rose into the air, and we were on the way.

  Sam hadn’t been kidding; it was not a comfortable ride. It was spring, but the North Atlantic still had plenty of storms waiting to throw plenty of wind and rain around, and one of them was blowing down the coast of Nova Scotia. The sky was a leaden gray, and looking down, I could see the whitecaps on the ocean below. The bird was bouncing and rocking as we went, as if it was getting slapped around as it struggled through the turbulent air. We didn’t dare get too high, either, or we might miss the ship.

  “Eyes on,” Sam told me over the intercom. I craned my neck over his shoulder to peer through the windscreen. It was hard to see; the storm was getting darker, and rain was starting to pelt the plexiglass, turning the outside world into a blur of grays. But when he pointed, I spotted it; a small speck of red, blue, yellow, and white. “Five minutes,” he added.

  “Five minutes!” I acknowledged, and passed it along the radio circuit, making sure I got acknowledgements from each bird. This was going to be dicey as it was; the more everyone was on the same page, the better.

  Larry pulled back the side door and got behind the M240L that had been mounted on a scissor-mount bolted to the forward fuselage. Somebody had worked fast to get these birds fitted out for combat in less than eight hours. Pulling back the charging handle, he got ready to suppress any opposition on the deck. Without the belt-feds, any fast-ropers were potentially sitting ducks as soon as the boarding started.

  The ship was wallowing a bit in the chop, but it was big enough and apparently heavy enough that it wasn’t rolling too badly. I’d seen worse. Spray was starting to blow over the gunwales, and the rain was getting heavier. This was well and truly going to suck, even if there wasn’t anyone shooting at us.

  Sam led the way down, banking in a tight, slow pass around the ship, giving Larry a good long time to scan for any threats and light them up if they presented themselves. The 240 stayed quiet. Looking over Larry’s shoulder, I could see that the deck beneath the towering, yellow-painted cranes was deserted.

  That just meant that if they were down there, we were going to have to go in and root them out the hard way.

  The cranes stood between the five covered cargo bays that formed most of the hold. They presented a serious obstacle to the birds, and reduced our options for boarding. Get too close, and between the gusts of wind and the slight, but still noticeable, rocking of the ship, we could have a devastating crash, either into one of the cranes, or into the superstructure at the stern. That pretty much left the hatch cover over the bow hold as our DZ.

  The circuit completed, Sam flared the helo and brought it down toward the bow, careful to leave as close to a full rotor disc as he could between the bird and the forward crane. The way the wind was hammering the helo, I was glad to see him keeping as much distance as he could afford.

  Larry stayed on the 240 while I swung the armature out, locked it, and heaved the fast-rope out the door. It was already wet from the rain blowing in, and would have been heavy as shit even dry. It took a hell of a heave to make sure it cleared the skid, and I almost didn’t make it. Only the helo tipping to the side in a particularly heavy gust of wind actually kept the rope from tangling on the skid, though it almost threw me out into space, fifty feet above the deck, in the process.

  Fortunately, I grabbed the edge of the door and the armature at the same time that Alek grabbed the drag handle on the back of my plate carrier. For a second, I dangled above the sickening drop, then Sam got the bird level again, and I staggered back into the cabin and
got my equilibrium again. That had been too close.

  If I’d had more time, I might have gotten the shakes, thinking about how close I’d just come to turning into a red smear on the deck below, before ever taking a shot at a Russian. But with Sam wrestling to keep the 407 on station, and the instinctive knowledge, come from many fights and many jumps, that to hesitate was to die, I grabbed the rope and started down.

  It was a bit of a faster descent than usual; the rope was slick with moisture and even with fast-rope mitts on over my shooting gloves, it was sliding through my hands and my boots like greased lightning. I clenched hard, and felt the heat building up in my palms and the insides of my feet as I went down. I still hit hard, my knees buckling under the impact, and went sprawling on the slick, wet metal of the hold’s overhead covering.

  I rolled painfully away, aided by the roll of the ship, to avoid getting smashed by Alek’s rapidly descending weight. I started sliding on the wet steel, only arresting myself with difficulty and struggling upright, finally getting a knee under myself and getting the Compressor SBR that I’d killed Baumgartner with up and into play.

  The other three, Nick, Eric, and Larry, hit the deck quickly with heavy thuds that reverberated through the metal beneath me. I wasn’t the only one taken by surprise by how slick the rope was; Eric didn’t get clear of the rope in time, and Larry plowed into him. Fortunately, Alek and I were already up and away, holding security, so they could get untangled. That had to have hurt; Eric wasn’t a small guy, but Larry was fucking heavy.

  As soon as they got clear, Sam’s copilot cut the fast-rope loose and it slithered down to the deck. Then the bird was pulling away and back into a holding pattern overhead, while the next one swooped in. I was already leading the way toward the starboard side. The wet steel was slicker than snot under my boots, but I managed to keep my footing, despite the roll of the ship.

  My rifle was up in my shoulder, the red dot only inches from my eye, but so far there had been no reaction to our boarding. Some of it might have been because the weather was going to make it a bitch to engage anyone past about fifty yards. More likely, the Russkis were digging in and getting ready to make us pay for every bulkhead we passed.

  There was a steep, steel-mesh ladderway leading down from the top of the hold to the decking that ran along the gunwale. Fortunately, it was only a few steps; the hold didn’t rise too far above the deck. If I straightened up, I could actually look across the top of the cargo bay. Naturally, I didn’t. While I wasn’t exactly crouched, I glided forward on slightly bent knees, leaning forward into my weapon as I went.

  I was moving fast; not only did I want to get the fuck off that exposed deck as quickly as possible, but I didn’t want the rest of the assault teams getting bunched up on top of that cargo bay. If by chance there were Russians with, say, a PKP, up in the superstructure, and they got a good enough look through the rain and spray at what was happening, all it would take would be one long burst.

  I resisted the temptation to sprint that last few meters to the hatch leading into the superstructure. If someone had popped out of the hatch as I was approaching, I stood a better chance if I could engage him before he shot me, than if I just closed the distance quickly.

  Once I reached the hatch, I let the Compressor dangle and pulled a flashbang out of its pouch. It was a bit of a struggle; we were all soaked to the bone, and that made pulling anything out of the soggy Cordura a bit more of a hassle. Meanwhile, the rest of the starboard team stacked up behind me, even as Alek grabbed the dogging handles and got ready to pull the hatch open.

  The hatch groaned open, I lobbed the bang in, and it was game on.

  The bang went off with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a gong, reverberating through the steel of the hull even over the roar of the wind and rain. I caught a bit of the blast through the open hatch, though I had my head down and my eyes averted. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I went in while the smoke was still swirling in the entryway.

  The wraparound passageway was empty ahead as I pushed aft, only slowing to cover the next passageway that opened to my right. Another muzzle dropped down next to my shoulder to cover it as I moved across the opening, and I swiveled aft again, pushing toward the corner. There were going to be at least twenty compartments on just this deck that we’d have to clear, but unless we encountered resistance beforehand, we were going to seize the bridge and the engine room first. Once the ship was halted, there would be nowhere for the enemy to go, and we could carefully and thoroughly clear the entire ship.

  The stack stayed intact behind me, with Larry, who had covered down that side passageway, turning and taking up the rear as soon as the last man passed him. We might have split the stack to clear more quickly, but the geometry of the inside of the ship would make it risky, at best. Sooner or later, somebody was going to end up in friendly sights if we did it that way.

  Coming to the end of the corridor, I turned the corner and found myself up against a dead end.

  The plans we had of the Narva suggested that there should be a narrow passage behind the galley, but it wasn’t there. We might have read the plans wrong, or we’d gotten an old version from before the ship had been fitted out. Or refitted. Either way, we had to roll with the punches, so I just hooked another right and headed back forward, passing the six closed hatches of the lower-deck staterooms as I went.

  As I glided forward, still having to adjust my weight to the movement of the deck beneath my feet, I kept my rifle up and watched every hatch carefully until I was passing it, and it was under another man’s gun. That passageway gave me the heebie-jeebies; it would be all too easy for an enemy to suddenly pop one of those hatches open and toss a frag out into the corridor.

  But they stayed shut, and after a brief pause, cheating to one side as far as possible to check the starboard side passage, leading back toward the hatch we’d just entered, I hooked around the corner and made for the hatch leading onto the ladderwell that would lead up to the bridge and down toward the machinery spaces.

  I pushed past it, covering down on the port side corner, leaving just enough room for Eric to get in position on the hatch. He jostled me a little as he pulled the hatch open, I heard the bang go off, and then boots were clattering on the steel deck as the next man back went through the hatch.

  I shouldn’t have been able to hear it, but the sound of something heavy and metal hitting the ladderwell was different enough that it cut through any other noises. I heard Eddie yell something. There was a brief scuffling sound and a body hit the forward bulkhead, then the hatch closed with a bang.

  The grenade detonation made the bangs sound like firecrackers. The overpressure hammered the hatch like a giant’s fist. It felt like the entire ship shuddered.

  If there had been any doubt remaining that our targets were aboard the Narva, there wasn’t anymore. Unfortunately, the ship only had the one ladderwell, which meant that they presently had the only route to the bridge bottled up. Even if there had been another one, I found that I doubted if our flanking maneuver we’d used in Verdant Mount Lodge would have worked again.

  That meant hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle.

  I didn’t have to say anything; we all knew the score, and we’d all been doing this long enough that nobody needed to talk about it in the passageway. I heard two safety levers hit the deck, Alek counted, “One, two, three!” and Eric pulled the hatch open.

  Both frags were thrown into the ladderwell; I heard at least one bounce off a bulkhead with a ringing impact, just before they blew with overlapping thunderclaps that reverberated up and down the ladderwell, some of the blast pouring through the gap still in the open hatch, though Eric had pushed the hatch most of the way closed, just long enough to shield us from most of the explosions. Then he was dragging it open again, and boots were rattling up the steps.

  I could hear the claps of suppressed gunshots above, then Eric was hitting me on the shoulder and shouting, “Last man!”

  I
turned and followed him into the ladderwell. That was when I got to see what had happened with the first grenade.

  Eddie hadn’t made it out of the ladderwell. He’d pushed the number two man back into the passageway and hauled the door shut, closing himself in with the frag. His bloody, mangled corpse was slumped on the landing, pushed against the bulkhead by the force of the explosion.

  He’d saved the whole stack, at the cost of his own life. The self-styled “borderline sociopath” had died a hero in the end.

  I took it in at a glance, then I was heading up, following the sound of gunshots and pounding boots. My combat detachment had been rattled, but was still intact. It had to be.

  We passed the second deck, and the third. Pairs of shooters were set at the landings on each deck, covering the hatches. We had to get to the bridge and take control of the ship, but we didn’t dare leave our six-o’clock uncovered.

  Finally, we hit the top deck. Nick and Herman were the first ones on the hatch leading into the bridge, Herman with his hand already on the latch, Nick holding a bang in his fist. I pushed forward, held up my own fist so they both could see it, put up two fingers, then pulled my last bang out of its pouch. I wanted maximum advantage going into this. So, we’d try the one-two punch that had worked so well against the security guarding Van Damme’s conference room.

  I pulled the pin and nodded to Herman. He dragged the hatch open, Nick lobbed his bang in, and even as it detonated, I tossed my own in after it.

  Then we were pouring through the hatch, flooding the tiny, instrument- and control-crammed space with big, angry men with guns.

  There were four men on the bridge. Three were obviously crew, dressed in orange coveralls with Narva stitched over the chest pockets. The fourth man was dressed in simple green fatigues and a pistol belt.