“Ubit’ vsekh.”
Kill them all.
“Well, boys,” murmured Pete to himself, “you called this play.”
He took a fragmentation grenade from a pouch on his belt, pulled the pin, counted, and threw. He had done this a thousand times playing Call of Duty. He’d done this in training countless times—M69 practice grenades in nonlethal drills; live ones on a throwing range. He’d tossed stun grenades on the job working SWAT in North Carolina.
This was the first time he had ever thrown a real grenade at real people.
He twisted down and back behind the vehicle. There was a thump. Two men shouted warnings at once. Too late. And then the blast. His grenade landed in the middle of the tight knot of soldiers. The man most distant from it was no more than six feet away. From the time the spoon was released there were five seconds before it exploded. The men tried to scatter.
The injury radius of the M67 is forty-nine feet. The fatality radius is sixteen feet. All of the men were too close for any chance at all. They were blown apart, lifted, scattered, flash-burned. Ruined.
When Smith leaned out and looked through the smoke, what he saw did not resemble anything that had ever been human. It was the first time in his life he had killed. He knew—even as he moved out of cover and ran for the door—that he had just been marked. He knew he had crossed a line for which there was no going back, no do-overs, no absolution. He was now, and always would be, a killer.
He could feel his heart shift inside his chest as he ran.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he ran through blood and stepped over torn legs and shredded skin. “I’m sorry.”
The blast had punched the door inward, half tearing it from the hinges. Smith raised his leg and kicked. Once, twice, three times, and then the hinges snapped and it canted in and then fell with a monstrous clang.
Smith paused for one moment, and almost looked down at the blood on the ground and at the parts around him. He almost made that mistake. He did not, though. That marked him, too; but in a different way.
* * *
Steve Duffy had a perfect elevated shooting position, from which he could see most of the parking lot and nearly all of the arriving hostiles. Nine of them lay still on the ground and the rest had scattered. Duffy’s rifle had a flash suppressor and a high-tech silencer to make tracking him difficult. And he could control the pigeon drones to emit flashes and digital recordings of gunshots from various points in the area. It was easy enough to time them so they flashed and banged as he pulled his trigger. That made the bad guys keep looking in the wrong direction. Duffy had suggested this to Doc Holliday and was delighted when she made it happen and implemented it for all field team snipers. There were rabbit drones that could do the same thing. In order to accommodate a speaker with enough fidelity for a loud bang, the drone had to be at least that big. Horseflies were too small.
All he had to do to trigger a distraction was tap a sensor with the little finger of his left hand, leaving the other fingers to steady his rifle and keeping his right hand completely free. Easy as pie.
Duffy believed himself to be a good man. Even-tempered, easy to get along with, generally happy. He held very little animosity in his soul, and did not even particularly hate the men who were pouring in to try and kill his colleagues. They were a problem to be solved. Angle and elevation, tactics and strategy, cause and effect. He was not a philosopher and tended not to brood. As he saw it, these guys put on targets when they put on their uniforms, and they made those targets glow in the dark when they rolled in here. Sucked to be them.
The newcomers had stayed outside since arriving, but now they raced for the doors, opening them and pouring inside.
“Oh, crap,” murmured Duffy. He triggered another drone and fired at just the right time. His bullet punched through the chest of one man in black and blew a hole the size of an apple out of his back. The shot had been placed slightly off center so as to spin the target. Duffy triggered another flash and bang at once but did not fire, letting the noise and light turn every eye that way. The men in black opened up on a patch of empty darkness.
Duffy called in to Echo Team to tell them that there were new hostiles in the building. “I don’t think they’re affected by that green crystal shit, guys. Heads up. I’ll see if I can thin the herd.”
Duffy killed another of them. And another. He triggered four drones at once and the men scattered, thinking there was a kill team in the bushes on the wrong side of the parking lot.
In his head the Queen song “Another One Bites the Dust” played over and over again on a continuous loop.
* * *
The Toybox had a cute name, but it was a monster.
Bunny and Tate shifted around to watch what happened. Hardened as Bunny was, what he saw chilled him to the bone.
Two of the soldiers in black—the ones Duffy warned them about—charged into the room, yelling in Russian for everyone to stand down and throw down their weapons. One of the wild scientists rushed at them with a knife in his raised fist, but the soldiers cut him down without hesitation. Then they opened fire on everyone else. More of the soldiers came into the room, guns ready. The room was dark and they never saw the fishing line strung across the passage between a row of desks and a file cabinet. It broke easily and there was a flash of tiny silver flechettes whipping through the air and then three soldiers went down, their faces slashed to red ruin. They landed hard and their screams stopped all at once. The flechettes were smeared with Botulinum toxin type H, the deadliest neurotoxin available. You do not get clumsy-fingered around that stuff. The soldiers were probably dead before they landed.
One Russian who’d seen them fall waved off a second man and they backpedaled and cut to their right to skirt the area … and ran straight into a spiderweb—an ultrathin filament that is nearly invisible even in good light. It wrapped around their torsos and the explosive chemicals in the woven strands combined and detonated, blowing one man in half and setting the other one’s clothes on fire. The modified thermite burned into his chest and groin and thighs, and what was left of him collapsed in a fiery heap, arteries exploding in geysers of red. It was ugly, but it was fast.
Five men in three seconds.
Bunny and Tate crabbed sideways to the end of a row of cabinets, then broke for the door. The soldiers spun toward their movement, but Tate twisted as he ran and hurled what looked like a string of popcorn behind him. The kernels exploded with a white light so intense that the soldiers screamed and staggered and blundered through more of the trip wires. Bunny grabbed Tate and shoved him through the door as fire and screams filled the room.
Then someone came out of nowhere and tried to take Bunny with a burst of automatic gunfire, but the big young man had been ready. He jagged right and opened up with his heavy MPS AA-12 drum-fed combat shotgun loaded with explosive pellets. The first round hit the attacker center mass and blew him apart, Kevlar notwithstanding.
Bunny spun as three more of the Russians swarmed him from close range. They hadn’t fired because their man had been between them and Bunny, but as that guy fell, the first Russian slammed shoulder-first into Bunny. The attacker was a brute who looked like he could bench-press a grizzly, but Bunny twisted and sloughed the impact off, and used the chunky stock of his shotgun to crush the back of the Russian’s head. Bunny whirled as the other two brought their rifles up, but suddenly Pete Smith was there. He carried guns, but he preferred knives for close work, and had a matched set of marine KA-BARs in his gloved fists. The seven-inch blades whipped across arms and faces and throats and Smith walked between the falling bodies to check on Bunny and Tate.
“Lead the way, brother,” said Tate, relieved to see his friend.
“Can’t,” said Smith, moving off to the left, “I got outlaws on my back-trail. We need to find Alpha Team and get out through the loading bay.”
“This is going south on us fast,” Tate grumbled.
“Welcome to Echo Team,” said Bunny, and fell in behin
d the others, walking backward fast, his shotgun ready. There was the sound of running feet from the direction Smith had come, and he did not think it was the cavalry. “Go, go, go!”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
I paused at the entrance to the stairwell and watched the drama play out on my wrist computer. All of my team were fighting for their lives. I felt pride for the way they handled themselves; for their efficiency and skill and courage. I felt fear in an equal measure.
Alpha and Bravo Squads both needed my help, but Bravo had the Toybox and Alpha did not. So, I ran for the loading bay.
Ghost barked a warning that was immediately drowned out as a huge chunk of the ceiling in the stairwell dropped down with a murderous thud. Then I heard and felt the grumble of protesting timbers and the cough of shattering concrete as another tremor—heavier than the others—punched and kicked its way through the building. It rose up from beneath me and tried to pull the whole building down.
The tremor ended but there was a tension buzzing in the air and I did not for a minute believe this was over.
I tapped to the command channel. “Bug, kill the lights. Sergeant Rock, I’m on my way. Be there ASAP. Watch for me on your six.”
A second later the whole place went absolutely dark.
I slipped on a pair of the Google Tactical Military Scout glasses that had been designed by one of Mr. Church’s “friends in the industry” expressly for covert special ops use. I set the controls to night vision, and then Ghost and I went hunting in the dark.
The shadows were filled with wild gunfire, but the bad guys didn’t know where to look or who was in there with them. Top and Cole immediately shifted position per our training patterns. They would have their night vision on, too.
I saw them moving from behind cover. Security lights flashed on, but Cole punched them out with three fast, precise shots. It seemed like there was an army of killers between me, Top, and Cole, and the door. We could see in the dark, though. They could not.
Bunny, Tate, and Smith came in from a side door, and then it was all of Echo Team against five times our number.
Long story short, we killed them all.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
Duffy stared through the scope and tried to understand what he was seeing.
The sky was growing intensely dark, as it often did right before dawn, but there were stars up there.
Except the stars were moving.
They weren’t shooting stars, either. They moved with an eerie grace just above the horizon. Three of them in a perfect geometric formation. A triangle.
“No,” breathed Duffy as he realized what he was seeing.
There had been training videos and photos in DMS case files, but he had never actually seen a T-craft before. He didn’t want to see one now.
It came closer, lower.
It was wrong, somehow. It was too big, for one thing. The machines Howard Shelton had built were only a little larger than F-16s. This one was five times as big.
And the three lights, one on each wingtip, which he had mistaken for the last stars of a fading night, were no longer white. No, they cycled through white to yellow and now they burned with a brilliant, luminous green.
The T-craft moved toward the building in a dreadful silence. That twisted Duffy’s brain, because it seemed impossible for something so large to be so quiet. It was like something in a dream.
Or a nightmare.
The green lights pulsed once, twice … and then every car in the parking lot seemed to judder and dance as if they were somehow coming alive. They were not. Duffy knew that because he, too, was trembling.
It was the ground.
It was another earthquake, and Duffy knew with absolute clarity that it wasn’t the God Machine Captain Ledger saw in the basement causing this destruction.
It was the T-craft.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
“Spartan to Cowboy,” Duffy yelled in a voice that had risen past alarm to actual panic, “you need to get out of there right fucking now. Half the damn building’s coming down.”
He was wrong about that.
It was the whole damn building.
The rumble swelled to thunder and suddenly the walls seemed to shiver, shedding pieces of masonry and plaster like a dog shaking water off its coat. I heard a sharp sound within that roar and saw a massive chunk of the ceiling tear loose.
“Top!” I screamed, but Cole was already in motion, hurling herself at Top with a flying tackle that caught the older man around the waist and drove him backward. They fell together and rolled, bumping the ground with elbows and knees as ten tons of wood, steel, and debris whumped down exactly where Top had been. I saw Tate push Bunny and Smith away as a stack of wooden crates toppled and fell. The crates exploded on impact and pieces of God Machines went skittering across the floor.
“Out, out!” I yelled, but everyone was already running for the loading bay door as more cracks snapped their way across the ceiling. Behind me, Ghost gave a sharp bark of alarm and warning, and I spun to see him leap forward as the floor gaped like the mouth of some hungry monster. Gas and dust belched upward and for a moment I couldn’t tell whether Ghost got clear or was swallowed whole. Panic flared in my chest, but then a white bulk sprang through the veil of dust and landed beside me, nails skittering on the broken floor.
“Cowboy,” bellowed Top, “side door.”
I spun to see him and Cole at the exit. She was fighting the lock. “There’s something wrong with the lock,” she said. “Give me a second.…”
Top pushed her aside, tensed, and gave the door a savage kick. Top is as experienced a martial artist as I am, and he put every ounce of his considerable muscular mass and power, along with a metric ton of fear, into that kick. The door, however, barely budged. As I ran toward them I saw Top assess the frame, and I could see what he saw. The earthquake had twisted the frame out of true and the metal security door was wedged there. He turned and looked at the other exits, but debris was raining down in front of them. And there was no time for a blaster plaster. It was kick the door or get buried alive.
“Well fuck you and your mama, too,” he roared as he gave the door a second kick. A third. Then I was there and we kicked it together. Once, twice, three times. On the fourth kick the door did not open, instead the whole wall simply cracked apart and collapsed backward away from us in huge chunks.
“Jesus Christ,” said Cole. “You boys sure know how to impress a lady.”
Top and I exchanged a wild grin. We knew we hadn’t done it. The building was dying. But it was funny in the way things are funny to soldiers in the heat of battle. Cole ran past us, with Ghost at her heels. Top and I leaped after her, and not a moment too soon, because the rest of the ceiling came down with such a tremendous clap of thunder that the force picked us all up and hurled us into the parking lot. I tucked and rolled as I landed, but there was so much impetus that I rolled three times before I could get to my feet, and even then I pitched into a stumbling run. Ghost flew like an overgrown Underdog past me, yelped on impact, but did not fall. When I turned to see how Top and Cole were, they ran past me and skidded to a stop. We stared in horror as Pushkin Dynamics collapsed amid clouds of dust that was peppered with debris. I looked around but could not see anyone else.
Bunny and Tate came staggering and coughing out of the smoke to our left. Smith came running around from the right, his weapon up and ready. Then other figures emerged. Five of the Russians who had been inside the building. Two of them raised weapons. Smith put one down and a bullet from Duffy exploded the other one’s head. The three remaining Russians bolted and ran. One of them looked up in the sky and screamed.
We looked up, too.
/> I heard Cole and Tate cry out. Smith hissed like he’d been burned and Ghost began barking wildly. Top, Bunny, and I merely stared.
There, hovering in ghastly silence above the building, was the largest T-craft I’d ever seen. It was massive, and the three glowing lights on its wings pulsed with that awful, familiar green. In the first hint of dawn I could see a faint shimmer in the air beneath the craft. At first I thought it was the antigravity drive, but then I understood.
“Run!” I yelled.
We ran.
We ran likes maniacs.
The deepest, loudest rumble yet made me turn back just in time to see what was left of Pushkin Dynamics crumble and fall into a massive sinkhole that kicked up a towering whirlwind of dust. Huge chunks of the parking lot snapped off and dropped down, too, and as I turned to run I caught the faintest hint of a glow from deep inside the cloud. Not the red or orange of fire and not the blue of burning gas. No, this was that same eerie green glow. It was there and then it was gone, totally obscured by the dust clouds.
We ran so hard and so fast, but the ground seemed intent on devouring us.
SUVs tilted and rolled down. Trees snapped off and fell. The air was filled with thunder and dust and death. A great geyser of water shot up from a ruptured main and hammered down on us.
There was a different kind of roar and I saw one of the SUVs—the one Echo Team had arrived in—racing toward us. It spun into a skidding, screeching turn and stopped and I could see a wild-eyed Duffy behind the wheel. We piled in and Duffy was moving before the doors were closed, his foot welding the gas pedal to the floor. We blew past the other Russian SUVs and Tate whipped an arm out of the window to deliver some going-away presents. As our car sped away I craned my neck to see a ball of black-veined orange lift the cars and hurl them at the trees, which immediately burst into flame.
The earthquake tried to kill us.
It tried.
Deep Silence Page 40
