by Jack Murphy
“Incoming! Anyone?”
Nothing but static came over the net. That was when Fedorchenko realized that they were being jammed. That was also when he realized that green tracer rounds from machine gun fire were zipping right over his shoulder.
* * *
Nikita’s eyes were like saucers; he was still in disbelief at what he had just witnessed. His boss and a half dozen of their men had just been condemned to Davy Jones's Locker as they impacted the icy water. What he had thought was another partially submerged decaying submarine was now a sleek, jet-black speed boat racing straight at the Carrickfergus. It must have been a few hundred feet in length and looked like a giant spear heading right at them. Up on the deck, Nikita set down his HK417 rifle and reached for a Mk14 grenade launcher.
Looking like a giant snub-nosed .38 revolver, the Mk14 featured a cylinder that held six 40mm grenades. He knew he wasn’t going to sink it with a couple of high-explosive grenades; they probably wouldn’t even penetrate the hull, but it was what he had. Leaning over the railing, Nikita fired as fast as he could pull the trigger, walking his shots across the black ship as it bore down on him. Muffled explosions popped off across the ship to no visible effect.
The enemy vessel was only a few hundred meters away. He plopped out the empty HE canisters and dropped in a tracking round. Closing the cylinder, he looked up as he tucked the stock of the Mk14 into his shoulder.
Nikita’s stomach fell out from under him. The ship was about to ram the Carrickfergus and take them all to watery graves at the bottom of the ocean. Nonetheless, his finger tightened around the trigger as the ship came in to ram them.
Then it was gone.
The black ship dropped down under the water, chunks of ice sloshing into the space the ship had just occupied. With the crash of waves, the ship surfaced on the other side of the Carrickfergus. The wake created by the surfacing ship rocked him as he stood on the deck, forcing Nikita to grab onto a railing to support himself.
Taking off at high speed, the demon ship disappeared as quickly as it had revealed itself.
* * *
Fedorchenko watched in horror as the coxswain below tried to navigate the waters between the submarines and rescue his drowning teammates, only to see him driven away by machine gun fire. They traced geysers of water back and forth in front of the Zodiac, the guns trying to triangulate in on him. The coxswain was forced to veer away and take cover behind one of the submarines.
Meanwhile, the Kazakh mercenary sergeant had taken a knee behind the old crane as staccato bursts from the machine guns filled the air. The shots were coming from behind the docks. The mercenary sergeant cursed. The enemy had left a stay-behind force to ambush their pursuers.
Then, an automatic grenade launcher started firing. White flashes ripped across the dock as the grenades exploded around Fedorchenko’s position.
“One o’clock, fifty meters,” someone yelled above the gunfire.
Finally, one of the mercs had announced the enemy position. It sounded like Nate, the former MARSOC Marine who they had just hired. Fedorchenko peeked out from behind the crane and his head was nearly taken off as the machine gunner vectored in on him instantly. Sure enough, not 50 meters away, he could see the muzzle flashes coming from inside an old fishing shack or storage shed. A frontal assault would be suicide.
“Nate, lay down a base of fire!”
The former Marine quickly got their element’s PKM gunner on target, walking a 7.62mm autofire onto the abandoned structure.
“Flank left. Follow me!” Fedorchenko dashed from behind cover and leapt off the dock as more tracer fire sought him out. He hit the ground, stumbled, and quickly regained his footing. The Kazakh found himself in the middle of dozens of bright red 55-gallon drums. They were brand new, easily standing out by comparison to everything else in the cove, which was old and decrepit. Their intelligence estimate seemed to be correct; the enemy had set up a fuel depot in the cove.
With the other mercenaries following his lead, Fedorchenko stayed low and flanked around the machine gun position. Nate and his gunner were going cyclic in the meantime, drawing the enemy’s fire. Hopefully they were drawing enough fire to distract the gunners from the twin Zodiacs out on the water behind them. Submerged in the Arctic water, the Samruk men had seconds rather than minutes before they froze to death.
Crawling up behind a pile of rotting railroad ties, the mercenaries formed up. Now within hand grenade range, one of the Kazakhs primed a frag and chucked it through the door. Once the grenade cooked off and detonated, a secondary explosion also blew the aluminum roof off the building. With the booby trap blown, the mercenaries ran toward the structure and through the open door. The smell of sulfate stung their nostrils as they entered and cleared the room.
Two PKM machine guns and one AGS-30 grenade launcher lay on their sides, knocked over by the grenade blast. There wasn’t a person in sight. The three weapons systems had been mounted on tall tripods and oriented out the windows. Fedorchenko bent down to examine the odd configuration in which the crew-served weapons had been set up. On top of each was mounted a green metal square that was about one foot by two feet in size. Wires ran from the square to a control unit for each gun, as well as a battery pack. The charging mechanisms on the weapons were controlled by an automated solenoid.
They were normal Russian infantry weapons that had been fitted with a radar tracking and targeting system. Once again, the enemy had left drones behind to ambush their pursuers. They had also jammed their commo, further disrupting their normal standard operating procedures.
The bad guys got the drop on the mercenaries with superior technology.
Fedorchenko snarled. More than any of that, they had simply been outfoxed, outflanked, and out-planned by an opposing force that absolutely had their shit together.
He turned and ran out of the building as the Zodiacs circled the cove, looking for survivors.
* * *
Tampa, Florida
Will slammed his fists down on the table.
“Son of a bitch. I died again.”
“How much more time are you going to waste playing video games?” Craig asked.
“It’s not just that I’m losing, it’s that they are not interested in me. I've been going head to head with suspected intelligence proxies on the PvP server.”
“PvP?”
“Player vs. player. It’s where the players in the game go to test their characters by dueling with each other.”
“Yeah, great. Whatever.”
“The problem is that they don't have any reason to give a shit about me. They need some….”
“Some what?”
Will was silent for a moment as his jaw hung open.
“They need some bait dangled out in front of them.”
The corners of Will’s mouth were slowly tugged up at the corners.
“You're scaring the squares in this office, Will.”
Chapter 10
“Oh. My. God.”
Nate covered his mouth with his hand.
“It’s a tragedy,” Pat confirmed.
They stood in the doorway of the ship’s communal showers, the steam from hot water billowing above their heads.
“It looks just like a penis,” Rochenoire stated bluntly, “only smaller.”
“Hung like an elevator button,” Nate mumbled.
Deckard looked up at them with fury in his eyes. His lips were still blue even after shivering himself half to death in the scalding hot water for half an hour. Crouched over, he hugged himself hoping that the feeling would return to his body at some point. At any rate, it was clear that he wasn’t going to see undescended testicles for at least a week.
“I h-h-h-hope—”
“Hope what, Deckard?” Pat asked. “Hope that I put you down and spare you the humiliation?”
“H-h-h-hope y-y-you fffffucking die.”
* * *
It was only by some miracle that none of the Samruk mercenaries were kill
ed in the cove, but they were all walking around with their tails between their legs as they paced the deck of the Carrickfergus. Their pirate ship was normally a heterotopia of guns, high explosives, and shitty attitudes. Now they were beaten; men had been shot to pieces and frozen half to death. An organization that was used to taking no shit from anyone was now having to admit that they were simply outclassed by the enemy.
With Frank dead, Pat was next in line to assume command of Samruk International since their CEO was temporarily incapacitated.
“I think we interrupted the enemy. If they had been expecting us, they never would have allowed themselves to be trapped inside the cove like that,” Pat said as Samruk ran a video teleconference with SCOPE in Tampa, Florida. “They were caught by surprise and clearly didn't think we would catch up with them that quickly.”
“Hmm,” Pat saw the old guy with reading glasses rub his chin on the computer monitor.
“But they laid a trap for us, expecting someone to try to follow their trail at some point. You were right about the enemy vessel; I've never seen anything like it, but it was definitely semi-submersible.”
“Forward us eyewitness accounts from your after-action review,” Will said as Pat briefed them. “We can conduct our own analysis.”
“I will. Where are we at with our eye in the sky?”
The JSOC think tank members looked down at the table in front of them. It didn’t take a high-resolution feed to realize that something was wrong.
“Our satellite in polar orbit was blinded on its last pass,” Will informed him.
“Blinded?”
“High-powered ground-based laser. We don’t know where it originated from, exactly. Could have been Russia. Could have been China.”
“So I don’t have any ISR?” Pat said, referring to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms.
“We are working on getting Global Hawk into your AO, but it’s taking time. The Russians are also not cooperating the way they were in the opening hours of this mess,” Will said.
“None of us know for sure how this thing is going to play out,” Craig said. “But we will keep working it.”
“No,” Pat said as he looked out from the bridge to the ocean in front of him, “I’m going to keep working it.”
“What the does that mean?”
“One of my boys put a hole in the enemy ship before it got away. 40mm high-explosive grenade. We’re following a plume of gasoline it’s dribbling out behind it.” Pat smiled, looking at the clearly visible trail of fuel left in the ocean.
“Any idea where the hell they are going?” Will asked.
“Ship's captain says they are probably heading to T6.”
“T6?”
“The T6 ice floe,” Otter shouted from the helm. “A giant piece a floating ice. A Coast Guard aircraft spotted it a month ago and estimated that it was five miles wide. T6 is projected to be right in the path of where that bat-boat is heading. It is going to take us about fourteen hours to get to T6. That semi-submersible can haul ass above water when it wants to. They might be making a beeline for the ice floe for an extract, compromising stealth for speed, instead of staying submersed.”
“A plane equipped with ski wheels would do the trick,” Gary said, speaking up for the first time on the VTC from Tampa.
“If they are leaking fuel, they might be going slow to conserve gas as well,” Craig said as he turned toward Gary.
“Irrelevant,” Will cut in. “Get there as fast as you can. If you see the enemy, wipe them out. In the meantime, we are on the horn with the Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy. Thankfully, we have a submarine of our own that was on a routine patrol under the Arctic that can help cut off access to the Bering Strait. A Coast Guard cutter is also on its way to this choke point. We prefer to keep this problem isolated in the Arctic. Once they make it into the open ocean, there is no telling where they will go. We will have lost them. At least this way, we know they are somewhere between the polar ice cap and the coast of Russia.”
“We’ll track ‘em and assault ‘em,” Pat said.
“And Pat?”
“Yeah?”
“Can Deckard move his fingers enough to type on a keyboard yet?”
* * *
Screams echoed down the cobblestone street. Baskets full of produce were overturned and laundry thrown off the line as the townspeople scattered. Doors and windows were slammed shut. In seconds, the street was empty. A single bucket lay turned on its side in the middle of the road. The water that had been in it now seeped between the stones.
A blade master stepped out of the shadows.
He squinted in the midday light and held a hand out in front of him to shield his eyes from the sun. The blade master wore ornate black leather greaves and a similar cloak under which his abdomen was protected by dwarven dragon-scale armor. His knuckles were likewise protected by Cyridian metal built into his leather gauntlets, forged by a master blacksmith from ore mined from a falling star.
At the end of the street, a wooden cart was flung through the air. It crashed into the side of a house and disintegrated into a thousand pieces. From around the corner, an orc lord lurched into view. Standing nearly 12 feet tall, the orc was clad only in dirty rags, leaving his dark green, muscular body exposed. Spotting the blade master, the orc roared, exposing his white fangs.
The blade master drew his weapons. A katana appeared in one hand and a Akkaidian dagger in the other, the weapons specific to the blade master’s particular style of fighting.
The orc charged the blade master, bum-rushing all the way down the street. The blade master stood his ground, ready for a fight. The orc lord was almost on top of him when he was suddenly yanked back into the alleyway.
“Have you lost your mind?” a voice scolded him.
The blade master was pulled farther down the alley as the orc lord tried to force himself through the narrow passage. A clawed hand swept frantically, scratching against the stone houses on either side as it sought out the blade master.
“You need at least a party of four to take on that bad boy.”
The blade master looked up at his rescuer. His wore a brown hooded shawl, his midnight-colored skin giving him away as a dark elf.
“Let’s go,” the dark elf ordered. “I’m going to take you to a newbie dungeon to show you how it’s done. This is a different world, with different rules.”
“Yeah, I’m finding that,” the blade master said sardonically.
Walking through the labyrinthine back alleys of the city, the pair came to a large, open graveyard. Past the tombstones stood a towering mausoleum constructed with green marble. The dark elf pushed on the heavy iron door and it swung open. A cloud of dust shook off the entrance as they walked inside.
“This way.”
Down the well-worn steps, they came to a balcony. In the dark chamber below, a reanimated human skeleton paced with a short sword in one bony hand. A few burning torches mounted in the walls let off a dim light, casting shadows in every direction.
“Equip your rope dart,” the dark elf instructed.
“Rope dart?”
“Really? The micro-bow mounted to the gauntlet on your wrist.”
“Oh, cool.”
The blade master loaded a dart affixed to a fiber cord into the six-inch bow on his gauntlet.
“Now fire it at that wooden beam on the other side of the chamber.”
The blade master fired and the dart slammed into the wooden beam with an audible thwunk, which made the skeleton look around in confusion.
“Tie the other end of the rope around the balcony railing.”
With the rope pulled taut, the line now wobbled above the skeleton below.
“A blade master fights using indirect methods, which should be right in your wheelhouse. You can also use the environment to your advantage to get the drop on the baddies.”
“I'll give it a try.”
The blade master leapt onto the rope and began balancing his way over
the chamber, putting one foot in front of the other. The skeleton was now on alert, sensing someone else in the chamber. Once he was directly overhead, the blade master drew his katana and dropped down on top of his opponent. The four-foot blade sank right through the skeleton man’s skull as the blade master landed a perfect attack. Bones cracked and scattered across the floor.
“Not bad,” the dark elf said from the balcony.
Just then, a stone slab on the side of the wall began to groan. It receded back into a hidden passage. Inside, the blade master heard the distinctive clacking of bony feet scraping against stone. Metal weapons gave off a ring as they collided with each other.
“Uh oh,” the dark elf said, now seemingly fresh out of sage wisdom for his protégé.
Four animated skeletons burst from the chamber door and rushed the blade master. Turning, he found a way to escape, up a ramp that led to another part of the dungeon. Sprinting up the ramp, the blade master looked back to the see the skeletons following him up. A wooden barrel sat in the corner where the ramp changed directions, wax from a long since burned-out candle decorating the top of it.
The blade master threw the barrel on its side and rolled it toward the ramp. The skeletons would be on top of him in another second. Kicking the barrel down the ramp, the blade master tapped into his magicka, casting a fireball at the barrel as it began to gain momentum. The barrel burst into flames and rolled right over the four skeletons. Their short swords went flying into the air as they crumbled and burst into bone fragments.
“OK,” the dark elf said, somehow materializing back at the blade master’s side. “I think you are getting the hang of this.”
“Now what?”
“Now you go and get their attention.”
“Whose attention?”
“The ones you are chasing halfway across the world, of course.”
Chapter 11
