Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  “Chatterbox, this is Hillbilly,” I answered, getting strange looks from the handful of guys who weren’t covered down on a window or the hatch. “Who are you?”

  “We are your backup air cover, Hillbilly,” she answered. “We are three H155s with two 240 door guns apiece. The Broker sends his regards.”

  Bates had been busy. Not that I was complaining. “How far out are you?” I asked.

  “We have eyes on the target ship now,” she confirmed. “We will be within engagement range in thirty seconds.”

  I risked a glance out the windows, still staying low in case the machinegunners in the holds were looking to blow my head off. I couldn’t see far, but after a second, squinting against the blowing rain, I thought I could make out three specks to the north. That storm was no joke; whoever this chick was, she had balls to be flying in it.

  “We are hardpointed in the superstructure, Chatterbox,” I sent. “Anyone out on the deck or in the open holds is a target.” I no longer gave a single fuck about taking any of the Russians alive. We had the one guy we’d grabbed on the bridge; he’d do if we had to kill all the rest of them. “Be advised, there are at least two belt-feds in the aft hold, possibly more.”

  “Good copy, Hillbilly,” she said cheerfully. “We’ll clear some of that up for you. And we’ll make sure we keep our fire away from the superstructure. Wouldn’t want any of you boys to get hurt.”

  I kept bitter words behind my teeth. It’s too late for that, sister, I thought.

  Seconds later, the helos, bigger than the 407s we’d flown in on, roared overhead, turning tight circles over the ship, fire spitting from their sides as the gunners hosed down the deck and the holds with long bursts.

  “Let’s go,” I said, hastily tac-reloading to top my SBR off. “They’re going to be off balance for a couple minutes. If we can clear the superstructure, then we can deal with any left in the holds.” I keyed my radio. “Monster, Hillbilly.”

  “Go,” Larry replied.

  “Hold what you’ve got; we’re going to clear, top-down.”

  “Roger, holding,” was all that he said. It was all that was necessary.

  I bumped Todd and he flowed out, his gun still up, his sights barely more than an inch from his line of sight. This was going to be a bitch, but it had to be done. We were all dead, otherwise.

  Footing was a bastard in the corridor; we had to pick our way through the heaps of dead bodies. The guy I’d shot in the eye was lying head-down on the ladderwell. The other one had retreated; there was no sign of him.

  Todd moved down the ladder just far enough to get his eyes and muzzle on the next landing down, then halted, holding security while I bounded down past him, rotating around to cover the newly revealed space with my own rifle, my finger just inside the trigger guard. With the Russians’ illustrated tendency to substitute fully automatic fire for marksmanship, and at such close ranges, I was going to have to engage very, very quickly.

  I could still hear the snarl of the helos outside, even through the metal of the hull, and the continued hammering of machinegun fire. I figured we were pretty well covered from reinforcements; we just had to worry about the Russian shooters already inside.

  As I moved around the outside of the ladderwell, I suddenly came muzzle to muzzle with one of them.

  He’d been waiting, but I still shot first; I’d been moving carefully, rolling my feet on the steps of the ladderwell, making as little noise as possible, so I took him by surprise, at least by a split second. Which was all I needed. As tired and worn down as I was, certain things were still hardwired from decades of training and combat experience, and my reaction time was slightly faster than his.

  I blew his brains all over the inside of his helmet, then twitched my muzzle a few inches to the left to shoot his buddy. The second Russian was trying to get a shot at me while simultaneously trying to barricade himself on the hatchway, but my first round skipped off his AEK-971’s receiver. He flinched, hard, and I shot him through the cheek. Blood and bits of bone and teeth were blasted out the side of his face, and he fell back against the bulkhead. Two more rounds finished him off and the rifle clattered to the deck as he slid down the metal wall to slump on top of the first corpse.

  I barricaded on that hatchway, while Nick slid past behind me to cover down on the ladderwell leading down. We weren’t going to leave a single danger area uncovered.

  I got bumped from behind. Not a passing nudge, but a hard signal. With you. I pushed out into the passageway, hooking hard right to cover that way, while whoever had bumped me went left. Another bump, and I moved to the nearest hatch.

  Leapfrogging by pairs, we cleared the deck, compartment by compartment. Aside from the two we’d killed on the ladderwell, and a handful of crew huddled under their bunks, the third deck was clear. We headed down to the second.

  There weren’t any Russians holding security on the second deck landing, and the deck was similarly clear of shooters. We found more of the crew, zip-tied them securely, and left them. They’d be interrogated thoroughly once this was over.

  We found the first deck similarly unsecured. I wasn’t relaxing, though; if anything, I was getting wound even tighter. There was no way that was it. There was a nasty surprise waiting somewhere. I knew it.

  We found more of the crew, locked in their compartments. Most of them responded quickly enough to warning bangs on the hatches; they didn’t want to endure an explosive breach. The one who didn’t, hadn’t dogged the hatch, so when it got abruptly slammed open he just got body-slammed on the deck instead of shot.

  I had a hunch when we finally reached the galley at the stern, and signaled for a flashbang, while keeping my muzzle pointed at the seam of the hatch. There was some shuffling behind me, then a hand reached over my shoulder where I could see it, holding what had to be one of our last bangs.

  Alek had ended up on the far side of the hatch, his hand on the handle, his eyes on me. I nodded, he pulled, whoever was behind me tossed the bang, and Alek slammed the hatch to for the second and a half it took the bang to detonate, before hauling the hatch wide open to let me through.

  I plunged through the smoke, gun up and searching for targets.

  There were half a dozen men, still in their green fatigues and chest rigs, down on the floor with their hands on their heads. Their rifles and pistols were unloaded and on the deck in front of them.

  We fanned out around the room, forming a tight L-shape to cover them, alert for any suspicious movement or what might be hidden explosives or grenades. They didn’t move, didn’t say anything, except for one, who said in accented English, “Do not shoot. We give up.”

  My finger touched the trigger, my red dot on his head. After all this, now they were going to surrender? After Eddie, Herman, and Eric had died, and so many of their own had caught a bullet as well? I was suddenly furious, ready to murder all of them right then and there.

  But I stopped, took my finger off the trigger, and lowered my weapon with a long, shuddering breath. I knew where that led. I’d killed Baumgartner for less.

  One by one, under the watchful eyes and gun muzzles of the rest of us, Nick and Todd started checking and securing each of the Russian shooters, carefully rolling them over first to make sure they weren’t hiding grenades under their bodies. Finally, the last of them was zip-tied to a galley chair, and we could move out to link up with Larry.

  The main deck was a bloodbath.

  There hadn’t been many out in the open when the helos had started their gun runs, but with the hatch covers on the holds open, they’d had little overhead cover, and the gunners had been thorough. There were only a few Russians still gasping what was left of their lives out amidst the wreckage down there, and they were so far gone that there was nothing we could do for them.

  Chatterbox was running out of loiter time, but assured that we had the ship secured, she relayed that Sam was on his way back out, and the three H155s pulled off and headed back toward land. The storm was abatin
g a little, though looking to the northeast, I didn’t think the slight clearing was going to last.

  Whatever these Russian sons of bitches had had in mind, it wasn’t going to happen for a while. We’d stopped this attack, at least, however much it had cost.

  Chapter 35

  The storm didn’t clear up, though; it intensified. Sam had to turn back. So, under our watchful eyes and gun muzzles, the crew of the Narva turned the freighter north, toward the Maine coast. It was a long haul, especially since some repairs had to be made to the controls after the bridge had been shot to hell. But eventually, the ship was anchored just off one of the tiny islands east of Portland, and the engines were shut down.

  The storm got worse, and we had to stay aboard until it died down, late that night. It wasn’t a pleasant interlude. We’d made the Russian prisoners dispose of the bodies, except for Eddie’s, Herman’s, and Eric’s, which we’d secured in the ship’s deep freezer. They’d also had to set about cleaning up the blood and offal from the fight. Even with the bloodstains scrubbed away, though, the ship still felt stained by the violence that had just gone down inside her hull.

  Fortunately, we didn’t have too long to sit aboard before the weather cleared up enough for Sam to bring the helos in and take us off, ferrying the team back to the same strip that we’d staged out of. Tom had made sure that enough gear had been shipped out that we could rearm and reset, while the crew and the surviving Spetsnaz were carefully secured, sequestered, and interrogated.

  We got cleaned up, made sure that the bodies were ready to be taken back to Wyoming for burial, reloaded magazines and prepped ammo belts, and then had nothing to do.

  A few of the team found a couch or a clear spot on the floor and went to sleep. It had been an exhausting few days, on top of an exhausting few months.

  Some of us either couldn’t sleep, or didn’t want to face the nightmares that were probably going to come close on the heels of passing out. We just kind of sat around the makeshift team room, silent, staring off into space, tired clear down to our bones and lost in our own thoughts. A TV was on the wall, with some flashy cable news program on, but somebody had shut the sound off in disgust a while before.

  Finally, Shawn looked up and around at the rest of us who were still awake. “So, is that it?” he asked quietly. “Did we win?”

  “Win?” Alek rumbled. “I doubt it. Too much has happened; taking out one Spetsnaz company isn’t going to be the decisive victory to bring this all to a halt. Maybe it would have been two thousand years ago, but not in this day and age.”

  He glanced toward the TV. “We might have bought some breathing room, though,” he mused. “It seems like some of this is starting to burn itself out; several of the cities have started to calm down a little. Maybe, if the factions have been hurt enough to stop stoking the flames, and with the Russian campaign on its back foot, cooler heads might have a chance to prevail.”

  “What do you think, Jeff?” Shawn asked, turning to me.

  I didn’t answer for a moment. Finally, I looked up at him and said, “I don’t know. I’ve seen enough over the last few years that I’m not optimistic. I hope Alek’s right. I really do. But you can’t have mobs of people at each other’s throats for months and then just have things go back to normal. I think that, best case, we’ve got years of low-level violence ahead as the dust settles.”

  “And worst case?” Todd asked.

  “Worst case, the Russians had redundancies worked into their plans, and we only caught one of them,” I said. “Worst case, there could be a fucking battalion of those bastards already moving into position across the country.”

  “And that,” Alek said into the sudden silence, “is why we call him the Voice of Doom.”

  There was a sort of half-chuckle that went around the room. It was a much-needed moment of levity. A lot of the wisecracking had died down over the last month or so; we were just getting too tired, too strung out. Something had to give, sooner or later.

  My phone buzzed, and I dragged it out of my pocket. It was Mia. I turned away from the rest and answered it. “Hey.”

  “Hi,” she said in a quiet voice. “I was worried about you.” She paused. “How bad was it?”

  “We lost Eddie, Herman, and Eric,” I said. My voice was low and flat, even in my own ears. I started to wonder if there was a point where the human mind simply became overloaded with the grief of losing friends, and sort of tuned the grief out. I thought I should be feeling a lot worse about it, but I just felt sort of empty.

  “Dammit,” she said, her voice a little choked. There was a pause, then I heard her sniffle a little. “I wish this was all over,” she said. “I’m tired of losing people. I’m tired of worrying myself sick about you while you’re out there. I wish I could be there with you right now, instead of across the country, talking on the phone.”

  I wished I had something comforting to say to her, but I couldn’t think of much. Honestly, at that point I couldn’t think too far past whatever had just happened and what we might be called upon to do next. But I couldn’t tell her to give up hope.

  “They’re interrogating the Russians we captured now,” I said. “Even if they don’t get anything out of them, maybe showing the rest of the country that an entire company of Russian SOF tried to infiltrate and blow a bunch of stuff up will be enough of a wakeup call.”

  “And if it is?” she asked. There was a rather pointed tone to the question, and I thought I could tell where it was leading. “Then what?”

  Meaning am I going to keep doing this? I thought. She hadn’t mentioned how much she worried about me casually. Damn, this is getting serious, isn’t it?

  “I don’t know yet,” I told her, kind of trying to dodge the question while still being honest with her. “We’re just going to have to see.”

  I tried not to wince at the silence over the phone. That hadn’t been the answer she’d been hoping for, but I wasn’t in any shape to take that step, not at the moment. She seemed to get that, though, because there wasn’t any disappointment or anger in her voice when she spoke again.

  “It is awfully early to be making long-term plans, isn’t it?” she said. “We don’t even know the extent of Sokolov’s operation yet.” I breathed a little bit easier, back on somewhat firmer ground. We were going to have to have the other conversation eventually, but right then wasn’t quite the right time.

  So, when is? that traitorous voice in the back of my mind asked. She’s asking the question because you’ve been at war the entire time she’s known you, and time might be a damned sight shorter than you think.

  “I’ll be on my way out to help the intelligence cell in the next day or two,” she continued. “I’ll see you then. Get some rest. You sound like you need it.”

  I could feel eyes on me as I hung up the phone. I really didn’t feel like talking further at that point. I got up and went looking for the intel guys. I needed to know something about what might be coming.

  While the Russians maintained their stubborn silence, and the Estonian crew insisted vociferously that they didn’t know shit, we did manage to glean some information about what they’d been up to. They’d taken a crack at destroying their planning materials, but they hadn’t completed it before Chatterbox and her wingmen had laid waste to the holds from the air.

  “What a fucking nightmare.” Tyler was one of our intel cell, though he looked like he could have been a shooter. Six foot five and built like a powerlifter, which he was, he had always insisted he’d gone intel because he was too big a target to be a shooter. He’d just get shot. The comment took on a certain poignancy that it hadn’t before, now that Little Bob was gone. The big former Ranger had had an amazing tendency to be a bullet- and frag-magnet.

  Tyler was also one of our few fluent Russian speakers in the company, which made him intensely valuable at the moment. He was sitting in the back room of the warehouse, poring over the burned and torn fragments of the Russians’ plans.

  “That
bad?” I asked. “There was only a company of ‘em.”

  “But a company of specially trained and prepared saboteurs and raiders, from what I can make out,” Tyler replied, running both plate-sized hands over his face and ZZ-Top beard. He waved at his notes and the half-destroyed, Cyrillic-marked map in front of him. “I’m having to piece this together from fragments and vague allusions to stuff that they probably had memorized to keep it out of hard copy, but it looks like once they got into the country, they were going to split up into elements of four or five, and spread out across the Eastern seaboard to hit their targets.”

  “Have you got a target list?” I asked, sitting in a folding chair next to him. Holy hell, I was tired.

  “Only a partial one,” he said. “But that’s bad enough. Power substations, reservoirs, oil and gas pipelines, telecom hubs, bridges…this wasn’t going to be terrorism. This was going to be an all-out strategic strike on vital infrastructure. From what you guys found on the ship, I think they were already prepped for the first wave of targets, and then they were going to locally acquire the materials for follow-on strikes.”

  “And with the chaos already going on over the last six months,” I put in, “nobody would be in a position to react in time.”

  He nodded tiredly. “And the more infrastructure they hit, the more tangled up any response would get. The entire East coast would be crippled, right when everybody’s at each other’s throats.”

  “With the endgame of the US on its knees, if not shattered outright, and the Russians the new geopolitical top dog,” I sighed. “Which I am beginning to suspect was the goal all along.”

  “No argument from me,” Tyler replied. “Russia’s endgame has always been Russian security through ascendancy. No more, no less. At least we stopped this in time. We should have some breathing room.”

  But, unbeknownst to either of us right at that moment, while we might have stopped the knockout punch, the death of a thousand cuts was continuing apace.