by Jack Murphy
Mercenaries were throwing on their combat gear, sliding down the stairs, and opening and slamming doors as they made a mad dash to get ready. Deckard snapped his plate carrier on, threw his parka over it, then shrugged into his chest rig, snapping it closed behind his jacket. He finally had a solid fix on the enemy’s location, and he wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to get the drop on them.
The town of Barrow was stretched out across the Alaskan coast, running from east to west. One of the oil rig workers had spent a significant amount of time there and reported that the roads were well made and were kept plowed to clear the snow and ice off during the winter months. Once again, nothing beats some local knowledge. With this in mind, Deckard knew he had the opportunity to launch a two-pronged attack.
Stepping outside into the cold, Deckard slung his AK over his back and climbed down a ladder to the barge platform. The ice crashed around the Carrickfergus’s twin-pontoon hull, smashing its way toward the shore.
The Samruk mercenaries had five of their Iveco assault trucks up and running. All of them had to have their batteries charged up or replaced. It was a good thing they had at least brought extra tires, fluids, batteries, and recovery items to keep the trucks in the semi-shit state they were in.
“One minute out,” Otter reported over the radio.
“One minute!” Deckard yelled.
The mercenaries began undoing the ratchet straps that secured the assault trucks to the deck. Fedorchenko’s platoon was going to hit the ground with Deckard for their amphibious landing. The rest of the men would stay on the ship for the coordinated assault.
“Thirty seconds!”
Otter lowered the barge down to water level. The ramp began to lower and the golden lights of Barrow sparkled like giant diamonds in the night. The mercenaries loaded on the trucks and began racking rounds into their machine guns. Aghassi jumped on the back of Deckard’s truck and nodded to him. He was usually Samruk’s human-intelligence gatherer, but there wasn’t much human intelligence to be had out in the Arctic wasteland.
Their recce section was also useless when their target was constantly on the move and there was no way to infiltrate the six-man team. The mortar section was also in need of a Viagra. They were used as regular infantry because they’d had a hard time pinning down the enemy location. Everything was different up here, even the enemy. Deckard knew they had been up against the ropes this entire time, but tonight he planned on evening the score.
The ramp came down on the shore just 10 meters away from the first road. The assault trucks roared off the ship in four-wheel drive, then crept across the snow and over a hump at the edge of the road. The five vehicles were lining up in their order of movement as the Carrickfergus began backing out, smashing its way through the ice, heading farther down the coastline.
“Update?” Deckard asked.
“Global Hawk sees about a dozen personnel on the ground. They are still refueling the ship.”
“Roger, we’re moving.”
Sitting in the passenger seat, Deckard looked at the Kazakh driver and pointed down the road. The five vehicles started down the street, heading east. The town of Barrow was kind of spooky at night. All of the residents had wisely escaped the cold and remained indoors. The houses were oblong and rectangular, painted yellow, purple, green, and blue, all lifted three feet or so on stilts above the ground to avoid the permafrost. The buildings flashed by as the driver took them down the main road. In seconds they were past the town and were driving by the salt lagoons.
It was warm inside the heated cabin of their truck; everything was quiet outside, but Deckard knew that was about to change.
The idea was to hit the warehouse and ship at the same time, coming at the enemy by land and sea. That would split their attention, making the enemy think for a few seconds as to what direction they wanted to counterattack. That kept Samruk International inside their decision-making cycle, and would give them the precious few seconds they needed to get the drop on them once and for all.
“Contact! Contact!” Otter yelled over the radio.
Through the windshield, Deckard saw yellow flashes blink a few hundred meters to their front.
“Go, go! Step on it!”
The driver floored the accelerator, and in seconds the PKM gunner in the turret above them was blazing away. They were in the middle of a war zone, 10 things happening simultaneously. As the truck slid across the ice to a stop in front of the warehouse, Deckard flung open the door and jumped out.
A long hose stretched out from the warehouse and ran all the way to the coast, to the knife-shaped vessel sitting in the ice. Several figures on top of the ship were firing RPGs at the Carrickfergus as it closed the distance. Muzzle blasts from their ship answered in return.
A handful of black-clad figures were caught out in the open near the warehouse. With the assault trucks pulling in between them and their ship, they were cut off. Deckard’s hood blew off his head as he pulled the stock of his Kalashnikov into his shoulder. One of the enemy soldiers had turned and was running toward the warehouse, hoping to find some cover and concealment. Deckard denied him this, pumping a two-round burst into his back, then walking his rounds up his back, neck, and into the back of his head in a technique called a failure drill. After firing center mass, the shooter walked his rounds up to the head and kept firing until the enemy failed. The grape popped at the top as Deckard walked his rounds up. The black-clad figure spilled across the ice, his Israeli-made bullpup rifle sliding in front of him.
Another of the enemy’s number pivoted, turning around and popping off a few rounds in Deckard’s direction. The PKM gunner on his truck cut him down with a burst that folded him in the middle like an accordion. The other machine gunners on the assault trucks turned their guns on the enemy ship, aggressively firing long bursts from side to side that chopped through the RPG-armed enemy firing on the Carrickfergus.
Turning back toward the warehouse, Deckard saw at least a half dozen more of the enemy disappear inside. He was already running toward the warehouse, smelling blood in the water as the Samruk mercenaries joined in the chase. As they ran toward the door, one, then two of the mercenaries collapsed to the ground. Deckard hadn’t even heard the enemy gunfire.
“No frags!” he yelled. The explosion could set off whatever fuel source they had concealed inside. He was willing to risk a flashbang, though, and nodded to Fedorchenko as he yanked one off his kit and pulled the pin.
Deckard lobbed the nine-banger through the door. It went off again and again, the distraction device serving its purpose. Deckard stepped through the door as the banger was still popping off, his rifle sweeping through the darkness, hungry for targets. As the other mercenaries flowed through behind him, he picked up something in his peripheral vision. Shifting his hips and bending on one knee, he turned toward the threat.
Then something flashed, and Deckard’s entire world went upside down. His vision was spinning inside his brain, his arms and legs feeling detached from his body. Stumbling forward, he thought he heard gunfire but couldn’t tell. His brain had somehow been disengaged from reality, and now all he knew was that the world was coming up to meet him. Fast.
He landed on the hard concrete floor with a thud, barely able to get his arms out in front of him before he fell.
Two rifle shots cracked into his back, and then Deckard was still.
* * *
The SCOPE think tank sat with their mouths ajar as Global Hawk captured the carnage outside Barrow, Alaska. The enemy ship was pulling out of port, tearing away from the hose refilling their fuel tanks, spilling gas across the ice. RPG gunners were still firing at the Carrickfergus as it stormed toward them.
The warehouse was quickly surrounded by the five assault trucks before little figures dashed across the screen and chased some of the enemy inside. Machine gunners on shore and on the Carrickfergus were making quick work of the RPG gunners on the enemy ship, their bodies flopping over the side, into the dark water.
Leaving
both their dead and their living behind, the enemy ship plowed through the ice, making way for the open water beyond. The Carrickfergus was in pursuit, at least until the bad guys steered their ship into a channel previously cut by an icebreaker heading into or out of Barrow. Once inside the channel, the boat lifted up out of the water, moving like a speed boat away from Barrow as quickly as possible.
The think tank listened to the radio chatter as the mercenaries yelled at each other in three or four different languages. At times, the voices were washed out by gunfire.
“Objective secure,” someone finally announced. “Starting sensitive site exploitation.”
Gary leaned over and pressed a button on the comms panel that linked them to the Carrickfergus. “I want full biometrics on the enemy bodies as quickly as possible,” the think tank leader said.
“Right, let me put out the fire on the deck of my ship if you don’t mind,” the Carrickfergus captain guffawed.
A minute later, the biometric readings from the bodies started coming into the SCOPE office. Pictures of faces, iris scans, and fingerprints could all be taken by the Samruk mercenaries with a handheld device manufactured by Crossmatch. The data would then be streamed to the Carrickfergus and uploaded via satellite to JSOC servers.
The four men were tense as the data began loading onto the flatscreen mounted to the wall in front of them. Craig swallowed. Will interlaced his fingers in front of him as he sat forward in his chair.
The first face to show up on the screen was Asian.
“We’re running it through our databases now,” Will said. “We’ll see if we can get a match on ID.”
The second face looked Arab, maybe, but definitely Middle Eastern.
Craig looked over at Will.
The third face was Caucasian.
Will smiled.
The data continued to flow in as the Samruk mercenaries took biometrics of each of the bodies. Two more pictures of Asians came in, then another with a face so caved in by gunshots that it was hard to tell his ethnicity. Then there was another white guy and another Middle Easterner.
Will stood up and walked around the table.
“Chinese,” he said, pointing to the Asians displayed on the screen.
His finger drifted over to the Middle Easterners.
“Iranians.”
“Holy shit,” Craig said as he held his head in his hands.
Will pointed to the Caucasians.
“Russians.”
“You were right,” Gary said, almost under his breath.
“These are the players in the game.”
Craig shot up in his chair.
“What the hell,” he said. “The database got a match on one of them.”
Will turned around, seeing a new picture of a white guy with his eyes closed. The JSOC database did get a hit—he was one of theirs.
“Army? CIA?” Gary said it almost as a curse.
Scrolling down the screen, they saw his name.
“Deckard?”
Chapter 15
“Put that down, you fucking idiot!”
One of the Kazakhs looked up at Kurt Jager as he walked into the room. He was pressing the limp hand of one of the bodies onto the glass fingerprint reader of the Crossmatch scanner.
“He’s one of ours.”
Kurt looked down at the Samruk commander. He was motionless. Everyone else in the room was dead. Four of their men including Deckard had been shot by one of the bad guys before the rest of the mercenaries had burst in and blasted him.
The former GSG-9 commando turned on a Petzl headlamp he wore around his neck and ran his hands over Deckard’s body. He was confused, as he didn’t see any sign of blood or entry or exit wounds. Thinking he felt something, Kurt pulled off one of his gloves and felt around Deckard’s back. His middle finger entered through a hole in Deckard’s parka.
“Ow, shit!”
He snapped his hand back to his body, recoiling away as something burned him. Rolling Deckard on his side and looking at his back with the white light, Kurt realized he had burned himself on a bullet embedded in the plate carrier under Deckard’s jacket.
“Wake him up,” Kurt told the Kazakh. “He is just unconscious.”
The Kazakh pulled a water bottle out of his chest rig and emptied it over Deckard’s head. The wounded man immediately shot up on his elbows, panting as if he had been holding his breath. Deckard’s bloodshot eyes began to open.
* * *
The room had stopped spinning, but Deckard still felt nauseated from the severe vertigo he had experienced. He had gone from balls to the wall combat mode to having his world turned upside down and put on queer street faster than he could blink his eyes. His vision began to come back into focus. He squinted, trying to make out something moving on the other side of the room.
“You’re OK, you’re OK,” Kurt assured him. “You took a round or two in the plate. We killed the shooter before he could finish the job.”
Deckard continued to stare forward, not daring to turn his head and induce the brain-spinning vertigo again. Finally, his sight cleared up, the fidelity of his vision zeroing back in. There was a dead body lying across from him. The movement was the dead mercenary’s foot wiggling back and forth as his nervous system continued to fire on auto, some part of the body still working after everything else had shut down.
“What happened?” Deckard asked.
“The ship escaped again, but we killed about ten of them in the process.”
“Help me sit up.”
Kurt grabbed Deckard under his armpits and helped him sit up. Of the four wounded men who had entered the room, Deckard could see that he had been the only survivor. Something had put them all on their ass and then one of the bad guys had walked up to each and plugged them. Deckard had gotten a couple rounds in his back and the next would have been in his head if the shooter hadn’t been stopped in time.
“OK, I feel a little bit better,” Deckard lied. The vertigo was gone but had been replaced with dread. Some of his men had been killed and, once again, he had skated right past the Reaper.
“Good,” Kurt said. “We’ve been uploading the biometrics on the bodies back to the States, but you don’t need fingerprints and iris scans to know that something doesn't add up here.”
“What do you mean?”
“They are different nationalities. Asian, Middle Eastern, and white guys too.”
“Sounds like a joint coalition task force.”
“Well, that is what we would call it, but I’ve never seen anything like this from the opposition.”
“All the villains in Gotham City.”
“Huh?”
“They’re having a team-up. But what the hell was it that made us all collapse like that? I saw a couple other guys go down outside on the way in.”
“They were blinded,” Nate said as he walked into the room. “With this.”
In front of him he held one of the Tavor assault rifles chambered for the 5.56mm rounds the enemy used. Attached to the side of the rifle was what looked like a large flashlight. The former MARSOC Marine pointed the rifle at the wall and activated the flashlight. It blinked on and off, flashing a ghostly green on the wall.
“It is a visual disruption laser. The guys hit with it were blinded, but their vision is already clearing up.”
“Why use non-lethals?” Kurt asked.
“Because they didn’t have any machine guns or other suppressive weapons on shore; they didn’t have this site prepared properly because they never planned on coming here. We caught them with their pants down and they used the non-lethals because they can be used as area weapons, putting down a large group of us quickly. With that done, they can casually walk around and flip our off switch with a bullet,” Deckard finished, pointing toward the bodies.
“So that is what they got you with.”
“No, I wasn’t just blinded,” Deckard insisted. Planting one hand on the ground, he pushed himself up to his feet. “It was more than that. C
omplete disorientation.”
Just then, Chuck Rochenoire walked into the room. “Hey, what is this?” He reached down and picked something up off the ground. It was boxy and black, with some kind of pull lever at the top.
“No, no, stop!” Deckard shouted just a moment too late.
The black box flashed.
Kurt Jager immediately vomited all over himself. Deckard went crashing back down to the ground as if someone had cut his legs out from under him. Rochenoire’s eyes rolled back in his head as he fell backwards and slammed into the floor.
* * *
Old Uncle Joe’s hands dug into the snow like claws as he pulled and struggled his his way over a berm that could not have been more than knee height. Safely back on shore, he got to his feet and dusted himself off. Reaching into his jacket, he palmed another single of whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and swigged it down in one gulp.
Surveying the carnage around him, Joe shook his head.
“What a time to be alive!”
Chapter 16
The blade master climbed over the brambles. He had been struggling through them, the thorns leaving long red streaks on his forearms and face as he scaled the approach leading up to the dark castle. Storm clouds were gathering overhead, heat lightning fanning out high above his head in surges that radiated across the sky in all directions.
The invitation had come by courier and was waiting in his inbox for him when he arrived back in Pangea. He had gotten their attention. Now they wanted to see him.
Past the thorn bushes, the path opened up slightly, turning into a series of switchbacks that cut back and forth. The footpath was only wide enough to inch forward by placing one foot in front of the other. The blade master considered himself lucky. At least the orc lords at the first gate had let him through, and then the sorcerers at the second gate had also granted him safe passage. All he had to do was walk.
Finally, he arrived at the castle. As he stood in front of the drawbridge, it slowly lowered and spanned the gap between him and the moat. He stepped across the wooden drawbridge, peering down into the spike-filled moat. It was filled with rotting body parts.
