Left for Dead

by Sean Parnell

  Holy mother of God . . .

  It was nearly impossible to quietly hammer a rock-climbing piton into a cliff face, even with a custom rubber mallet, so he’d jammed a hex nut anchor into a crevice, linked a titanium carabiner to its steel cable, clipped the black rope into the carabiner and had kept on climbing upward. He’d been at it for more than two hours, repeating that process over and over, and had made it past the thousand-foot mark with fewer than another five hundred to go, when he’d put pressure on what looked like—at least on this freezing moonless midnight—a nice strong toehold.

  Negative.

  Now he was swinging in the wind with fifty-four pounds of gear on his back, including an FN P90 submachine gun, two extra fifty-round magazines of 5.7 × 28 mm ammunition, a Sig Sauer P226 MK25 suppressed pistol with three extra fifteen-round mags, two combat knives, a tourniquet, a mini water bladder, a rear plate carrier, black Mammut mountaineering boots, tac gloves, MICH helmet, night-vision goggles, and a hip harness of carabiners, ropes, pitons, hex nuts, rappel guides, and now . . . no freaking radio, or frags.

  He was praying that the hex nut currently holding the rope would last just a bit longer, while the stretched nylon cable thwanged in the wind and yanked his climbing harness so far up into his crotch that he thought he might be a candidate for the Vienna Boys Choir.

  He hung there for a moment, catching his ragged breath, arms drooping while he mentally diffused the kind of pain that came with smacking yourself into a concrete wall at the speed of a motocross bike. He looked down at the gleaming sliver of the Argeș river where it wound through a forested valley far below, then up the other side to the top of a mirroring peak, and the pink granite fortress that was, of all things, Dracula’s Castle.

  That’s right. This was the spot in Romania that those Millennial Crude jokers had chosen for their new hacker hideout and cyber mayhem spree, a nice little bombproof structure still five hundred feet above Steele’s head, with a spectacular view of the former mountaintop citadel of Vlad the Impaler. Made sense to Steele, and gave him all the more reason to kill every last one of them.

  He had many other reasons, of course, beginning with the deaths of three of his Program comrades at the hands of Lila Kalidi, a vicious female assassin who collected the ears of her victims. Kalidi had been contracted by Dmitry “Snipe” Kreesak, the leader of Millennial Crude, who in turn worked for Russia’s Federal Security Bureau. Millennial Crude had also battled with the Program’s own cyber warfare guru, Ralphy Persko, and while both sides had suffered casualties, nobody held a grudge. Steele’s friends were dead, but so was Lila Kalidi. He himself had killed her at close range. So he’d figured “all’s fair in love and war” and was prepared to let it go.

  That is, until Crude really lived up to its name.

  A month ago, the Russian FSB had decided to take out a Russian defector to the United States, Naftali Ostrovsky, who was making too much noise about Vladimir Putin’s sexual peccadilloes to American media outlets in Boston. An FSB agent had slipped into the United States and poisoned Ostrovky’s tea with polonium, which had put him on a ventilator in the ICU at Massachusetts General Hospital. But Ostrovsky wasn’t dying fast enough for the Kremlin.

  Millennial Crude was called in, and from their remote headquarters in the Moscow suburb of Kapotnya, they’d shut down all the electrical power to Mass. General for two full hours, including the backup generators. Aside from Ostrovky, who’d expired in ten minutes, four other innocent patients on ventilators had died, plus three newborn infants in incubators.

  Steele might not even have known about all this if not for Ralphy Persko. The Program had been disbanded by order of President Rockford, but Ralphy had a private obsession with Millennial Crude and had kept on tracking their activities. When he told Steele about their attack on Mass. General, the news about the helpless babies boiled Steele’s blood.

  Steele knew there’d be no Program support or equipment for a hit on Millennial Crude, so he and his currently unemployed keeper, Dalton “Blade” Goodhill, had turned to an old CIA special tactics hand, Thorn McHugh, who happened to be as wealthy as Mark Cuban. The three men had met one night in East Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., and after hearing Steele’s and Goodhill’s pitch, McHugh had simply walked away. The next day a FedEx letter had arrived on Steele’s doorstep at Neville Island, Pennsylvania. It contained a black American Express card in Steele’s name—no limit.

  After the Boston slaughter, the Russians had decided that Millennial Crude should relocate for a while till the whole thing blew over. Romania seemed the perfect spot: lots of remote mountains and less-than-curious villagers. The country had been a Soviet satellite for decades, but even after Gorbachev nothing much had changed. You could buy just about anything with oligarch money in Bucharest, including a modular ceramic tactical operations center shaped like a giant igloo, with double thick tempered glass doors, sidebar living quarters, a Jamie Oliver kitchen, minigymnasium, banks of 8Pack OrionX personal computers and satellite uplinks, and all of it delivered by contracted heavy-lift helos and assembled by FSB engineers. The nine bodyguards were Russian private military contractors from Grupa Vagnera, who slept outside in a trailer and never entered the dome.

  Ralphy Persko knew all this because ever since the Program had stood down, he was incredibly bored and had lots of time on his hands. He hadn’t asked Steele for one penny for the intel. Nevertheless, Steele intended to add a fat tip for Ralphy to the Thorn McHugh budget.

  Steele finally stopped swinging at the end of his rope, reached over and grabbed the main line, and pulled himself back to the vertical wall. The granite was slimy and slippery as hell and he didn’t have crampons on his boots, but he’d file that memo for later—if there was ever going to be a “later.” He spread his black-clad legs wide, found what seemed like two load-bearing toeholds, reached for a couple of fingertip ledges, and started inching his way back up the cliff face like Spider-Man—just much slower, and more cautiously, and extremely bruised.

  It took another hour setting belay hexes, paying out rope, inching upward and sweating in the icy night, and then he was peering over an onyx shelf at that salmon-colored dome, straight ahead on a summit clearing among a copse of Romanian pines. The moon had just popped up from behind a charcoal fur ball of clouds and it was so high and bright in the indigo sky that he wasn’t even going to need the NVGs mounted on top of his helmet. He slithered on his stomach over to the left behind a long coffin-like slab of granite, took one long pull from his hydration bladder, and started quietly shedding gear—the rock-climbing hardware, ropes, harness, and carabiners. He came to his knees, slung the P90 subgun over his back, pulled the P226 from his thigh holster, screwed on the Knights Armament silencer, and press checked the handgun. He wished he still had his radio so he could tell Goodhill he’d made it to the top. And oh yes, the grenades; he wished he still had those too.

  Oh, well, FIDO . . . fuck it, drive on . . .

  He rose and moved forward at a hunched, graceful glide, especially for a large muscular man wearing mountaineering boots. The slab of granite on his left had a twin on the right, forming a roofless corridor, and suddenly at the end of it a figure stepped into view. It was one of the Russian sentries, a tall man wearing a Spetsnaz camouflage smock, black tactical pants, a fur hat, and slinging a Romanian AK-47 with its peculiar folding stock. He was lighting up a smoke and his back was turned to Steele.

  For a moment, as he floated closer, Steele felt a twinge of remorse.

  Dude’s just a gun for hire, probably doesn’t even know what he’s doing here, or who these people are he’s protecting. . . . Maybe he’s got a wife, little kids, a faithful dog. . . . Maybe even a little old mamushka back in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. . . .

  Steele shot him in the back of the skull.

  He stepped over the bleeding corpse and kept on going, and at that moment he crossed the mental bridge over what he internally called his “red river.” You could conduct surveillance of
a target, or any sort of long-range recon mission, and withdraw without reaching that next laser-focused level if you did no harm. But once you’d taken that first life it was like everything collapsed into a very narrow tunnel, at the end of which appeared each of your mortal opponents, and there were only two lives at a time, yours and theirs, and only one would survive. His red river wasn’t a pretty feature, but every true warrior had one, and once you crossed it you had to be totally on your game, or die.

  The dome grew larger. It was late at night but he could see a soft red glow suffusing the interior like the combat bulbs in a warship’s combat information center, and it was no surprise that these Millennial Crude cyber thugs would still be up working because they wreaked havoc all over the world in multiple time zones. Steele headed straight for the entrance, a set of double doors in inch-thick Perspex with vertical brass handles, which he knew wouldn’t be locked because there was no point in having a close protection contingent outside if they had to first get a key or permission to come inside and save your ass.

  Then all at once two more Russians appeared, on the far right and far left of the dome, each hustling, as if the demise of their fallen comrade had triggered some sort of biosensor alarm. Steele, moving with his arms locked out front in an isosceles two-handed grip on the P226, shot the man on the right in the face, then swung left in a weird lunge like a bowler’s pitch, and with only his right hand still gripping the pistol, shot the left man in the right knee. The bullet kicked his legs out from under him, and as his nose smacked the ground Steele put another one in the top of his skull. Both AKs clattered as they fell, but that didn’t matter because he was already at the door, holstering his pistol and swinging the P90 subgun around.

  The Fabrique Nationale P90 is a strange-looking weapon. It is short, lightweight, constructed of polymer, and looks like a backward black hatchet where you tuck the blade under your arm, the bullets spit from the end of the handle, and you grip it by two black donuts welded to the bottom. The magazine sits on the top of the receiver, and the empty shells spray out the bottom like an M240B machine gun. The bullets are nasty-looking things that resemble brass spikes on a leather punk collar.

  When Steele came through the front doors—and locked them from the inside, using a steel carabiner on the interior handles—the hackers who turned from their work stations saw something reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alien nemesis in Predator. There were four of them seated at two separate workstations, right and left, in front of their superspeed OrionX PCs, and because Millennial Crude was ecumenical, the men were Italian, Iranian, Norwegian, and Greek. Between the two stations stood Dmitry Kreesak himself, in skinny black jeans and a billowy pink shirt with his thick hair gelled back above his Hugo Boss glasses. “Snipe” seemed to be enveloped in a cloud of smoke, which made sense, since the atmosphere reeked of cannabis.

  For a moment everyone froze. Then Steele spoke across the room to Snipe, in perfect Russian.

  “Pravda, mudak? Bol’nitza?” Really, asshole? A hospital?

  At that point the jig was up. The hackers might have had beefy Russian sentries as babysitters, but they were short on faith and had Romanian Model 2000 pistols clipped under their desks. The four young men—all with greasy hair and questionable hygiene—tried to deploy the guns but were dead before they could bring them to bear as Steele buzzed each pair with twenty rounds from the P90, shattering their bones and exploding the $30,000 computers behind them. Since the P90 magazine held fifty rounds, that left him with ten for Snipe.

  The young Russian mastermind—who Steele might have pitied for his horrible upbringing by an absent father and prostitute mom, if the kid hadn’t turned into a heartless motherfucker—yelled something incoherent, came up with a Romanian Model 98 fully automatic “Dracula” pistol, and fumbled with it in clumsy panic as Steele advanced on him, switched his selector to single fire, and methodically stitched him from his crotch to the bridge of his glasses until the P90 ran dry. Snipe collapsed in a mist of arterial blood, and at that moment, his professional partner and occasional paramour, Kendo, showed up.

  She was a beautiful Korean young woman, multilingual, brilliant, techno-talented and devoid of a soul. Her moniker reflected her particular talents with the jingum, the long sword similar to the Japanese katana, and she exploded out of some recess in the dome, wearing a red bathrobe, jangling silver bracelets and silver sandals, with her long black hair flying wildly and her jingum whipping at Steele like a scythe.

  He dropped the empty P90, and it swung to his back on its strap. He reached into a left calf scabbard and came up with a Gerber Mark II 6.5-inch combat knife, which made Kendo’s perfect smile gleam because that toothpick was nothing compared to her razor-sharp three-and-a-half-foot blade, which she was raising over her head when Steele unholstered his P226 again and shot her twice in the chest.

  “Just teasin’,” Steele said to her corpse as it bounced on the floor. “Thought I’d give you your moment.”

  At that point the six surviving Russian bodyguards were desperately trying to get in the front door, but Steele’s carabiner was holding firm, and their efforts to shatter the bulletproof glass did nothing more than spider it and cloud their view.

  At the back of the dome, a small young man appeared from one of the sleeping quarters with his hands raised high, shaking like a fawn on an interstate highway. He was babbling in French, which happened to be one of Steele’s languages.

  “Ne tirez pas! Ne tirez pas!” He begged the black-clad killer not to shoot.

  “Mains sur le mur.” Hands on the wall, Steele said, and the young man spun around and slammed his palms to the curving plaster.

  Steele asked him about an emergency rear exit. The French hacker thrust his chin at a restroom door and said it was through there. Steele thanked him and shot him in the back of each hand with the pistol, which made the young man scream as he slid to his knees, leaving bloody handprints and scarlet trails.

  “If you can’t be a good example, at least be a vivid warning,” Steele said to him in French as he left.

  Ralphy had acquired overheads from a buddy at a commercial satellite reconnaissance firm, so Steele knew exactly where to go, and it wasn’t back to the cliff face. The Millennial Crude hackers—now all dead but one, who wouldn’t be keyboarding anytime soon—had been delivered to their perch by helo, while their Russian bodyguards hoofed it up and down a long slim trail through the sloping forests on the north side of the peak. Steele popped his NVGs down over his eyes because the towering firs would obscure the moon, and took off at a dead run downhill.

  It was like playing some ultralevel of Halo 5, with everything bouncing in grainy green, gunfire banging behind him as the furious Russians gave chase, and tracers starting to zip past his head and chunk off pieces of trees. His boots pounded on the slick track and kicked up stones, but he only ran faster, and he holstered the Sig and reloaded the P90 on the move. He was wearing a lightweight square of RMA Armament Level IV body armor in back, because that’s where he always took the most incoming after a job was over, and sure enough an AK-47 round wanged off the plate and vibrated up through his skull. He knew the trail was exactly 1,234 meters of twisting snake path, but he wasn’t counting his strides, and in eight minutes he burst from the trees, slid on his ass down a muddy slope, and started sprinting north along the pebbly bank of the Argeș river.

  Fifteen seconds later the Russians also burst from the forest behind him, but now he was out in the open and an easy target, so he spun on the run and emptied half a magazine of 5.7 × 28 mm at them, which screamed like a buzz saw and sent them slamming onto their faces.

  For a moment as he ran Steele had the fleeting thought, I need more gym time. His heart was hammering, his breaths spewing, and he yanked the balaclava down away from his mouth. Then he had another thought, more urgent and ominous. This is exactly how it happened to Dad. His father, Hank, who Steele had discovered was also an Alpha operator, had ended his career this way, being
chased by Russians in Siberia. In just one more klick Steele would break out on the banks of an enormous lake, the Lacul Vidraru, and either Dalton Goodhill would be there with the boat, or he’d be dead and on fire, just like Hank Steele’s extractor, which was why his son had never seen him again.

  There was one more low-hanging copse of trees up ahead as the Argeș straightened out, a canopy of teasing black arms and fingers, and through that Steele thought he could see the silhouette of Goodhill’s Riva Rivale 52 speedboat. Its black-green hull was rocking on the lake as the wind kicked up whitecaps, and it was slewing around, and Steele thought he heard the twin engines revving, which meant that Goodhill could hear the gunfire and sensed he was about to arrive.

  Steele tore off his MICH helmet and the NVGs with it, and ripped off the balaclava. He couldn’t swim with that stuff on his head, and none of it was government property anyway. He ripped open his Velcro plate carrier and dumped that on the run as well, betting that the Russians couldn’t hit him in the same spot again. But they sure as hell were trying. Bullets snapped in the air overhead and on both flanks and sparked off rocks along the bank, and without turning he tucked the P90 upside down and backward over his left shoulder and gave them another wild burst.

  He tossed the subgun last, hit the ice-cold water like an Olympic swimmer, and started cranking hand over hand and with both boots kicking. The boat was about fifty meters out but it looked like a mile and he’d never swum so hard in his life. The Russians pounded onto the bank and started firing like maniacs just as Steele reached the stern ladder, hauled himself aboard, and crashed facedown on the engine cover pad behind the radar post. He saw Goodhill—now sporting a bristly red beard and a watch cap and looking like Zorba the Greek—as he cranked the throttle, spun the wheel, and the twin MAN diesels roared to life, and Steele almost slid off the boat into the churning water.