Act of Revenge

by Dale Brown

  “Who’s shooting?” asked Turk. “Who’s firing?”

  The gunfire stopped. Johnny’s preset screen flashed on—Peter was ahead, standing at the end of the hall.

  A body lay in front of it, a gun nearby.

  “Tango down near the bot at the far end of the hall,” said Johnny. He moved up to the next doorway, pausing to wait for the next pair of paras to take the room.

  “Ghadab?” asked Turk.

  “Too far to see.”

  “He’s down?”

  “Yeah. Gun’s on the ground, a few feet away. The bot Tasered him.”

  “Get the room.”

  Another flash-bang announced that Shorty and Spider were going in. Johnny moved up again, sliding to a knee as he saw a blur near the bot. This time there was a flash as Peter’s Taser charge went off. The man went down.

  “Another down,” said Johnny. “They’re in a room at the back.”

  “Stick to the plan,” said Turk. “Johnny, hold position.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Flash—bam.

  “We got two prisoners. Incapacitated,” said Shorty, working through the third room. “They’re having trouble breathing. No threat. No weapons. Tying them.”

  Outside the bunker, Chelsea cringed every time a flash-bang exploded. Hearing the explosions through the radio and in person gave them an odd, surreal tone, extending them into a strange, overlapping echo.

  The mech with the com link finally got far enough into the bunker to pick up and relay Peter’s feed. Peter was standing near the last room of the bunker.

  Two team members ran up past the bot and entered the room. There was another prolonged bang and a flash on the screen.

  “Moving ahead,” she heard Johnny say. Then a shadow loomed in front of him at the end of the hall. He started falling back; a split second later she heard a loud bang—he’d been shot.

  By the time Johnny realized the blur in the hallway had a gun, he was already falling backward, knocked off his feet by a slug fired at close range. The bullet didn’t penetrate his armor, but the impact hurt like hell, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

  Bullets sailed a few inches from his body, ricocheting off the walls. He tried to curl up and turn over to protect himself, but his limbs wouldn’t move. Something dinged his right leg, then his left, twice.

  A team member ran past, above him, shouting something. There was a flash and a bang—they entered the last room. Gunfire, and then nothing but a hollow echo in his ears.

  Turk knelt over him. “You OK, bud?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got hit in the chest, point-blank. And the legs,” Turk added, looking at his torn-up pants. “Ripped up.”

  “As long as they’re still there,” said Johnny. “Help me up.”

  “Let’s get you outside to Docky.”

  Docky—aka David “Doc” Martin—was the team medic.

  “It’s just gonna be a really bad bruise,” said Johnny.

  “Not your legs.”

  “I’ll trade them in.”

  Johnny pulled off his helmet as soon as he cleared the door. The fresh air was like an adrenaline shot.

  Chelsea ran to him and began pulling him back.

  “Get behind the rocks,” she said.

  “The bots.”

  “Peter can take care of himself.”

  “Me, too,” insisted Johnny. But she wouldn’t let go until they were behind the rocks. He sat down and pulled off his vest to inspect the damage.

  Skin intact. Purple, but intact.

  The others started dragging out the captured terrorists. They’d taken three alive; each had been given a strong dose of sodium pentothal inside the bunker, rendering them more or less inert.

  Four others were dead, including the man who had shot Johnny.

  “I have to get the bots packed up,” Chelsea told Johnny, “then help retrieve the computers and such. You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m good,” he said. “Real good.”

  “Pretty bruise you got,” she said.

  “Naw, just a birthmark,” he said.

  It hurt to laugh, but he did so anyway.

  69

  Northern Iraq—a few minutes later

  The Russians were going after Palmyra hard. They had two more flights of fighter bombers heading in the general direction. Meanwhile, the Syrians were almost ready with their artillery.

  So, the $64,000 question: Would they attack Johansen’s people at the bunker? Or when they were on the way home?

  He couldn’t take the chance.

  Johansen picked up the satellite phone he’d set aside to use only for contacting the Russians. He hesitated, then hit the quick-dial combination.

  A voice in Russian told him to leave a message.

  “We have an operation north of Palmyra,” he said in English. “We’re evacuating the area now. We need to exchange clearance IDs. Use the red circuit.”

  Useless. They aren’t going to call, ever.

  He hung up and looked over at Krista. “Tell the Air Force to scramble Option B. Fuckers.”

  70

  North of Palmyra—the same time

  Johnny wheezed with every breath.

  “Nothing broken,” said Docky. “But it will hurt like shit. You want morphine?”

  “Don’t need it,” insisted Johnny. He wanted to keep his head as clear as possible.

  Rosen bent down to check on him. “You OK?”

  “Yeah. Just bruised.”

  “Handle the phones?”

  “I can do coms, sure.”

  Still a little woozy, Johnny followed the team leader to the trucks. With the bunker secured, the team was carting out everything they could. Rosen wanted to supervise, but with Chelsea inside examining the terrorists’ computers, someone had to handle the communications and keep watch on the UAV screens.

  “Ghadab?” asked Johnny.

  Rosen shook his head.

  Johnny put on the headset. He stared at the video from the Hum overhead, orienting himself—his brain felt as if it were still working in slow motion, and it took him several seconds to sort out where he was on the ground. The terrain around them was clear; the terrorists had not alerted anyone to the attack, or if they had, no help was on the way.

  Johnny switched over to the Nightbird screen, which showed a wider view. Palmyra was at the bottom of the screen, a collection of shadows and flares as night came on—the Syrians had begun to shell it.

  “Alpha Seven?” said Krista over the control frequency.

  “This is Johnny,” he answered. “Rosen is in the bunker. What’s up?”

  “We want you to take shelter,” she told him.

  “Shelter where?”

  Johansen broke in. “There’s a wave of Russian attack aircraft, Su-24s, about to hit Palmyra,” said Johansen. “That’s the second wave—the first came north after dropping their bombs. They just shot up a truck on the road. They must be looking for targets of opportunity—and you’re all they’ll see.”

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Johnny.

  “Get in the bunker. All of you.”

  “What if they bomb that?”

  “Better to be in the bunker than in the open. You have two minutes.”

  Inside the bunker, Chelsea finished inventorying the terrorists’ computer equipment. None of it was special; the CPUs could have been purchased at any Walmart. The modems had boxes next to them, which Chelsea assumed were used for encryption, but otherwise there was nothing here that would look particularly out of place in a home office. After having the mechs check for explosives, they cut the power cords, severing the connections with the backup power supplies, and began carting the gear out. It was possible, maybe even likely, that they had already erased the hard drives, but Chelsea was fairly confident that data could be recovered as long as the drives remained physically intact.

  Peter had been hit by several bullets; one had wiped out his radio connection. There was also damage
to his IR sensor. None of the damage, though, explained why the bot had failed to neutralize the terrorist who shot Johnny. Its autonomous programming should have done that.

  “Peter, give me a quick diagnostic read on AI section memory and logic circuits,” she told it.

  “Memory optimum. Logic . . . no problem detected.”

  “Let’s go outside,” she told it.

  The bot turned and began walking down the hall. Chelsea followed it out, walking with it in the direction of the truck.

  Johnny met her a few yards from the entrance.

  “Where’s your headset?” he asked.

  “I took it off while I was working with Peter. There’s something wrong with his AI. He should have protected you but—”

  “Come on! Back inside,” he told her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Russian planes. They’re shooting up everything. They’re close—hear them?”

  “But—”

  “Inside!” yelled Rosen, running up.

  “I need to get Peter.”

  “Inside!” he yelled, grabbing her.

  “Peter!”

  Chelsea’s shout was drowned out by the sound of gunfire as one of the Su-24s began shooting at the ground.

  Failure to Close

  Flash forward

  Approaching the Syrian-Turkey border—two weeks after the fall of Palmyra

  Ghadab hunkered down against the stack of empty sacks, pretending to be sleeping. He was in the back of an empty vegetable truck, being ferried out of Syria with a half-dozen other men. They didn’t know who he was, a precaution against being betrayed. His fellow travelers were likewise guarded about their identities; he assumed most were Caliphate deserters, though they presented themselves as simple refugees.

  They were a ragged, depressed bunch. They’d spent most of the past half hour complaining. But that was a typical pastime of men no matter what their condition.

  “The war is lost,” said one of the men. “The dictator will never be overthrown.”

  “The Iranians are to blame. Them and the Russians.”

  “I blame the Americans. They could have ended it.”

  Another man spit loudly at this. “The Americans cannot finish a meal, let alone a war. They leave and expect others to pay the bill.”

  “As we have.”

  “I wish someone would serve them justice. Kill them with their drones.”

  “Explode them into space. That is what the Caliphate wished.”

  “What will happen now that they are defeated?”

  “The Islamic State will not be defeated.”

  “They have been. All of their cities fall. Aleppo is next.”

  Ghadab resisted the temptation to argue. It was difficult, though.

  But there was truth in what they said. The immediate strategic position would not hold. The dream of creating a state on earth before the end days was impossible to fulfill.

  Surely, he had felt that. He had never had that ambition.

  The men in the truck continued to talk. Maybe they weren’t deserters after all—they seemed too critical of the Islamic State. It was harder and harder to pretend not to hear.

  The truck came to a sudden stop. Ghadab felt someone kick him in the shoe.

  “Up, up,” said a voice in a half whisper. “The border is a half mile away. There are guards. Walk with the others to the east, and you will be safe enough.”

  Ghadab rubbed his eyes and slowly unfolded himself from the truck bed.

  “Go with God,” the driver told him after he jumped down. “But go. I don’t need any trouble tonight.”

  “God be with you,” Ghadab told him. “And don’t despair. Great things will happen for all of us. There will be salvation.”

  “Not in my lifetime,” said the driver, walking away.

  71

  North of Palmyra—two weeks before

  Chelsea screamed for Peter to follow, but her shouts were drowned out by the exploding bombs. Aiming for the entrance to the bunker, the Russian aircraft dropped two large unguided or “dumb” bombs; both missed, but not by much—the first hit the roof above the second barrier, and the second struck a few yards away. Already weakened by the TOW missiles, the roof there collapsed; a hurricane of dust and debris knocked everyone nearby back through the hall.

  Chelsea flew against Rosen, who himself hit the wall. Cushioned, she rolled over, coughing and blinded. All but two of the battery-powered LED lamps they’d placed in the hall were smashed; the light from the others was not enough to penetrate the dust-filled dimness.

  “You OK?” It was Johnny.

  “I’m OK,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Here.” He patted her leg. “Rosen?”

  The team leader grunted. A flashlight pierced the darkness. “Johnny?”

  “Here.”

  “Rosen?” asked Turk.

  “Uh.”

  The beam of light found Rosen’s face, a dark grimace of pain. Christian came out of the room behind Turk. He pulled a small med pack from Rosen’s leg.

  “No morphine,” managed Rosen.

  “You got two compound fractures,” said Christian. “You’re gettin’ stuck.”

  He jabbed the needle home.

  The rest of the team had taken shelter in the rooms before the bombs hit and, except for minor bruises and a few cuts, were all right. Johnny, rising slowly, took out his own flashlight to lead the way out. Chelsea followed.

  They got only to the first bend. The bombs had knocked down the weakened structure, trapping them inside.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  Those were the last words anyone said for a few minutes. Without orders, the team silently formed a chain and began removing pieces of debris from the pile now blocking their way. The narrow hall felt claustrophobic, the dust still thick in the air.

  Suddenly Chelsea threw herself on the pile.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Help!”

  “Calm down,” said Johnny, trying to pull her back. “It’s OK. We’ll get out.”

  “You don’t understand,” she insisted. “Help! Peter, get us out.”

  She was talking to the robot outside. Many of its trials were aimed at rescuing people from collapsed buildings and earthquakes.

  Within seconds, they heard scraping from the other side of the wall.

  Even with Peter’s help, it took two hours to get a hole big enough cleared for Chelsea to crawl through; another half hour of work was needed to make the passage big enough to slide Rosen out. By then, Johansen had arrived with two more vehicles and the rest of the team, except for Krista and Thomas Yellen, back at the base.

  The Russian fighters had torn up the trucks and most of the gear pretty well; they’d also inadvertently killed the terrorists the team had taken from the bunker, who’d been handcuffed in the backs of the trucks.

  A shame, thought Johansen—not because of the loss of life, but the intelligence they might have provided.

  With the attack on Palmyra proceeding to the south, Johansen didn’t want to take the time to sort the debris into usable and nonusable; they piled everything they could into the backs of the two trucks they’d come down with, then blew the others up.

  By the time they got back to their temporary base in Kurdistan, Krista and Yellen had secured the gear they were taking in a large mobile cubicle. Two Ospreys were already en route, tasked to bring them across the border to Turkey, where a C-17 was waiting.

  Johnny and Chelsea sat next to each other on the fabric bench at the side of their Osprey as they took off.

  “Hell of a day,” said Chelsea.

  “Yeah,” said Johnny.

  “Do it again?” she asked.

  “Not in a million years.”

  72

  The desert near Palmyra—around the same time

  Ghadab smelled the destruction before he could see it. It was the scent of sand pulverized and burned in a pit of old, dry wood soaked with kerosene.


  The sun had gone down, but the sky beyond seemed even darker than normal as they crested the last hill above the plain where the city sat. A jumble of black lumps pockmarked with red flares and ribbons of yellow lay across the horizon.

  “Take the west highway,” Ghadab told the driver.

  “That way may not be safe,” said the man. “The apostates’ attack—”

  “It’s faster.”

  The driver complied, his foot pressing the gas pedal to the floor nearly the entire way. Yet even as they neared the city, Ghadab knew in his heart that the worst had occurred. He could feel the loss already, even as he fought against acknowledging it.

  He also knew the outcome of the battle had been decided, though for now the city remained in the hands of the faithful. Caliphate fighters trudged north along the barren fields at the north end of the city, heads hung low, weapons gone.

  “Traitors!” he yelled.

  He took out his pistol and rolled down the window of the car, shooting at several as they passed. Two fell.

  The driver hurried on. A row of houses in the northern residential area had caught fire after one of the bombing attacks. Now out of control, the inferno blocked off part of the road, flames shooting sideways, scorching two abandoned trucks. A small crowd milled around the edges of the flames, watching their homes being incinerated. The reddish-yellow hue of the fire made them look like aliens, marooned on a planet unfit for life.

  They took a shortcut, picking a way around debris and burned-out cars before getting back to the highway. A few minutes later, they came across a pickup truck parked across the road. As they stopped, a dozen men surrounded their vehicle.

  Ghadab jumped from the car and started yelling, demanding to know who their leader was. A slim youth parted the crowd. He was a brash sort, displaying the anxious but cocksure bravado of someone who’d never actually tasted battle.

  Ghadab did his best not to sneer in the boy’s face.