Blood Of My Enemies (Birth Of Heavy Metal Book 4)

by Michael Todd

  “Wait—we?” Anja asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll need you to drive their Hammerhead back from where it’s parked, provided that it survives until we get there.”

  “Do you think it’s a good idea for us to leave the base unmanned like that?” The hacker asked, not crazy about the idea. The place was home for her, a safe place for her to lay low in. While she had expected that they might want her to do jobs that weren’t wholly in her job description since they were a bit of a patchwork team, she still hadn’t looked forward to it.

  “Well, it’s either that or let an expensive piece of machinery rot close to the Zoo until we can finally arrange to pick it up,” the armorer said with a shrug. “I don’t think it’ll be too much of a problem. Connie essentially has the place locked down.”

  “I thought the two of you weren’t on speaking terms?”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know she’s programmed to want the best for this place,” Amanda said with a broad grin. “So, are you coming or what?”

  Anja shrugged. “Fine, but you should know that I’ve never driven a vehicle that big before. Not on my own, anyway.”

  “Don’t worry,” her companion said and dug into her steak. “I’ll show you everything you need to know.”

  Sal rolled into the French base and rubbed his shoulder. Even though he had escaped a deadly situation mostly intact, that didn’t mean completely untouched. He’d been able to ignore some twisting and bruising in the heat of the moment, but after the day or so that it took them to reach the base, the injuries had come back to haunt him with a vengeance.

  The bruises became apparent as they came through the gate and finally removed their armor suits. He scowled at the collection of purple and red welts across his arms and legs and grimaced when he felt a couple he couldn’t see from when he’d been knocked on his back.

  “Amanda will ream me for treating the suit like this,” he lamented as he inspected the damage done by the hyenas that had munched on his helmet. A few toothmarks had dug deep enough to expose some of the circuitry and the fine crack in the visor was definitely visible, but he was sure that the reason he’d gotten into that mess would more than make up for the trouble he’d gone through to acquire it.

  “Are you sure that that the message was sent to Gutierrez?” Kennedy asked as she packed her armor into crates that were made for the transportation of suits when they weren’t in use. They’d thankfully been able to borrow a couple that had belonged to members of the teams who hadn’t made it home.

  “Yeah,” Sal replied and nodded emphatically. “I even received the notification that it was read. I’m sure she forgot to message us in her hurry to get over here.”

  “Wow, you really do look for the best in people, don’t you?” She grinned.

  “Shut up, Let’s find someplace to get food and drink while the people running this place process our pay for getting their people out of hot water.”

  “Now you’re speaking my language.” They left their suits, packed and ready to be taken back to the Staging Area, in the loading bay. As they delved deeper into the French base, they saw that it was in disarray. A lot more people had arrived since they had last been there and they searched for almost a half-hour before they found what looked like a bar with a sign that read FUBAR over the entrance.

  Kennedy grinned. “You know, as in fucked up beyond—”

  “I know what FUBAR means, thanks,” Sal retorted and rolled his shoulder once more. Maybe there was some deeper injury that he shouldn’t ignore at this point.

  They pushed through the doors and entered an establishment that looked distinctly American. The duo made their way to the bar but a man walked toward them and they paused as he approached. He looked completely at home out there, with graying hair, a moustache, a goatee, and a limp.

  “Welcome to FUBAR,” the man said in a thick, gravelly voice and grinned widely. “They call me JB out here, and you should too. Now, I never forget a face, and I know that the two of you haven’t been here before, so I’ll try my best to make you feel at home. What can I get you?”

  Sal wondered for a second what the initials stood for but it was a passing fancy. He had other more pressing needs than to ask unimportant questions.

  “A couple of beers will be fine,” he said with a smile.

  “Coming right up,” JB said with a quick cough. “Y’all make yourself comfortable and I’ll get right to you.”

  “I think I like this place,” Kennedy said cheerfully as they found an abandoned table. It wasn’t that difficult a feat, considering that the place was all but deserted.

  “Do you think he got his foot messed up in the Zoo?” he asked as he sat opposite her.

  She shrugged. “He definitely has the look of a merc, but perhaps it’s a sideline and this is his real gig? Maybe he needed the money to get this started.”

  Sal shrugged as the man returned with their drinks and immediately headed back behind the bar. No further questions were asked or needed and he sighed as he rubbed some feeling back into his shoulder.

  “Do you think we should have that examined at the Staging Area?” she asked, halfway through her glass already.

  “If it lasts more than a couple of weeks, I think that would be a good idea, yeah.” He took his time with his drink.

  The message that their payment had been processed and deposited into their account prompted another drink and even a round for the bar—which wasn’t a hardship given the handful of patrons. As the time passed, he wondered why a place like this hadn’t opened in the Staging Area.

  Eventually, Sal and Madigan saw Amanda step into the bar. She blinked a few times to allow her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness as she moved over to join her two colleagues.

  “I swear to God,” she said and dropped into a seat beside Kennedy, “I think we should just sell the compound and find a place to settle in here.”

  Sal narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, because we all know how easy it is to find someone who wants to buy a compound near the Zoo for that much money. Why do you think we should move out here?”

  “Well, it’s French, for one thing,” she responded with a grin. “It’s like Paris out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I feel that’s racist,” Madigan interjected. “Is that racist?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “But what is it about this place that makes you think we should drop everything we’ve fought for out here?”

  “Well, I drove in and one of the sexiest blonde women I’ve ever met was there to interrogate me about what my business was here. And call me crazy, but I think she was very loose with her sexual preferences.”

  He nodded. “The woman makes a good point, don’t you think Madi—ow!”

  Kennedy rubbed her knuckles after she’d punched him in the shoulder—to leave yet another bruise on his skin, he thought morosely. “You’re both fucked in the head. I think we should get going. There’s no time to lose, right?”

  “What?” Amanda protested. “I have to drive all the way here to pick you losers up and I don’t even get a quick drink before we hit the road again?”

  “You’re the designated driver, Gutierrez,” Madigan informed her and shoved off her chair with a low rumble of irritation. “You wouldn’t want me to drive your precious Hammerheads while I’m wasted out of my mind, would you?”

  The armorer pouted for a few seconds but she eventually conceded the point. She remembered the damage the woman had done to her babies while she was wasted in the past, and she had no desire to see a repeat. That aside, she had a feeling that the two would have accumulated enough damage to their suits to keep her busy without having to still repair vehicles as well.

  They paid their tab quickly and left the bar before they wandered to the Hammerhead, which had been parked in the loading bay with the suits already loaded up into it. That left them with nothing else to do but scramble in and drive. The day had begun to wind down and the sun hung about three quarters of the
way to the horizon. The green ocean that was the Zoo sprawled magnificently in a breathtaking sun-swathed vista before them.

  “You forget that this is actually a damn beautiful place, don’t you?” Kennedy asked quietly. She leaned back in her seat and drew in a deep breath, grateful for the vehicle’s air conditioning.

  “So,” Amanda said as the silence extended once they reached the highway that led to the Staging Area, “I suppose you’ll find out eventually anyways, so I might as well let you know myself. We had something of a security problem back at the compound.”

  Madigan leaned forward and opened her mouth to release a barrage of questions but Sal, who rode shotgun, raised his hand. It would be best to let her tell her story the way she had clearly rehearsed it.

  “Well,” she began, “in all honesty, I didn’t anticipate that our compound would be attacked by a bunch of mercs in heavy weapons and armor, and it was only thanks to the bitch Connie that we were able to detect them in the first place.”

  The other woman rolled her eyes at the use of the AI’s name, but she fortunately didn’t interrupt.

  “So Connie left a huge space open for them to attack through,” the armorer continued. “We didn’t want them to start a battle of attrition outside the walls, so we let them in and turned all the guns on them from the outside.”

  Sal narrowed his eyes and tried to ignore the feeling that she had kept the storyline tame up until now because things would be a lot worse when the narrative unfolded.

  “As it turns out, the guns have a dart system that delivers a knock-out payload based on weight scans of the people targeted.” She glanced quickly at Sal, her expression still deadpan. “With a little help from Connie, we disabled our new friends but ran into the problem of how we were supposed to dispose of them. The suits were installed with all kinds of tracking tech, so we needed to make sure that they were off our premises. Thankfully, after your endeavor to bring small animals out of the Zoo, I had started to make up a large-ish cage to transport them in. Well, we loaded the sleeping mercs into the cage, drove them out into the Zoo—minus their suits and weapons—and set them loose. They didn’t last very long out there.”

  “You sound suspiciously unrepentant about what you did,” Madigan observed.

  “Repentant?” Amanda asked and glanced at the woman through the rearview mirror. “Hell, it was a lot of fun. Like a videogame version of Home Alone. The first one, anyway, and with an AI, an awesome tech specialist, and many, many guns. I saved the security footage of the take-down. There isn’t any video footage of their trip through the Zoo, but I saved some of the audio.”

  Kennedy leaned forward in her seat. “Is it too late to fire her?” she asked Sal.

  “By a couple of months, yeah,” he replied with a chuckle. “I mean, it’s not like she was the only one who took crazy risks and piled up a crazy headcount over the past couple of days, right?”

  “True. Again, though, you were the crazy one, not me.”

  “What happened in there?” the driver asked as she accelerated.

  “Well, first of all, we picked up some data from our contact with Pegasus,” Sal said. “Next, we managed to get one of the Pita plants out of the ground with one of your little contraptions. You might want to design larger ones, but—”

  “Yeah, there would be a problem to fit them in your packs,” she replied with a nod. “They worked, though? That’s fantastic! So you’re the first one to actually get one of those plants out, huh? That has to be worth some serious cash. So long as we don’t sell it to Pegasus.”

  “Yep. And since I’m the first one to get two of them out, too, I think we’re in for one hell of a payday.”

  Amanda turned to look at him. “You’ve had one of the plants all to yourself all this time and you haven’t taken a shot at the bounty?”

  “I wanted to run tests of my own before I handed it over to people who would abuse it for serious money,” he said reasonably. “Anyway, we decided to help a team out of the Zoo after they were caught in a bad run-in with a bunch of Zoo critters. One of them stole my pack and I ran in after it. I…uh…almost got myself killed.”

  “Huh,” the armorer grunted. “And by almost got yourself killed, you mean there’ll be a shit-ton of work to be done on your suits, right?”

  “His suit more than mine,” Kennedy interjected smugly. “He’s the one who charged in to get his pack back. I was the one who had to go in and save him, remember?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” The armorer’s good mood evaporated as her mind ran through the kind of supplies she would need to repair the suits.

  It was late by the time they pulled into the compound but the lights were on, which indicated that someone was still awake. The Hammerhead parked in the garage reassured Amanda that Anja had managed to make it home reasonably unharmed, although she blurted a couple of curses in Spanish when she saw a few dents on the sides. Anja hadn’t been kidding, apparently. She honestly didn’t know how to drive a vehicle that big. All the pictures of the tiny little cars people drove in Russia came to mind and had the armorer questioning the choices she had made so blithely.

  They moved into the common room after they deposited the suits in the workshop and carried the pack inside. Anja waited for them and fidgeted idly with her phone. The soft sounds of a game could be heard but they quickly stopped when they entered.

  “Did you tell them?” she asked Amanda.

  “I thought you should, since you know more about it,” the other woman replied and continued to the kitchen to start the coffee machine.

  “Tell us what?” Kennedy asked.

  Anja quickly related the details of what she’d found as she dug into the Pegasus records. Her friend had also contacted her during the day.

  “The money’s final resting place was somewhere in the Cayman Islands,” she explained. “But the source was easier to track down. Once we sifted through the shell companies, we found that the original payee into the account was…well, Pegasus.”

  “So… Pegasus has some serious investment in Courtney’s company, somehow,” Sal said and sat, his mind ticking over. “Do we know what they are interested in?”

  “There was a fair amount of chatter regarding some intellectual properties produced and created by a scientific research team run by Courtney’s father. Nothing really specific was mentioned. They basically wanted anything the team were able to acquire.”

  He nodded. “We have to talk to Courtney about this. She’s in this whole situation up to her knees, so she has to know a thing or two about what’s happening.”

  The hacker tilted her head in inquiry. “Do you want me to set up a secure line for you to contact her?”

  “You can do that?” he asked.

  She didn’t reply and simply raised her hands as if to indicate that the question was stupid.

  “Right, yeah, that would be great,” he agreed. “Something else I want to you to start on is to try to find a buyer for this baby.”

  Sal removed the container from his pack and placed it upright on the counter for the other two women to see. Amanda looked entranced, but the Russian, less interested in the plant itself, turned to face him again quickly.

  “What kind of parameters are you thinking about for the sale?” she asked.

  “Well, I think I’d prefer to have someone make the sale for us.” He spoke slowly as he considered it. “A middleman to make sure that the name of Heavy Metal is never associated with the sale. We make it common knowledge that we have a Pita plant, and we’ll be swarmed by people who’d like to relieve us of it in a violent fashion.”

  “You know that they will want a finder’s fee, right?” Amanda pointed out.

  “Sure. That’s the cost of doing business. A quarter of the world’s population are middlemen and women, and they probably wouldn’t be so happy if they are cut out of the business, you know?”

  Anja nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Well, it must be a blind auction, which is actually bet
ter since we need the plant to grow a little before we put it on the market. We also have to make sure that the person handling the money and the plant delivery is at least respectable. It’s important that we can trust them, at least enough to know that we get the full payment due and our client gets what they paid for.”

  “I think I know the perfect guy. And let me guess—you want me to vet our buyers to make sure that we don’t sell to Pegasus?”

  He winked. “That is correct.”

  The hacker nodded and stood quickly. “I’ll get started right away. When the secure line to Courtney is open, I’ll send you a message.”

  “Thanks Anja.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what you pay me for.”

  He nodded. Kennedy had handled the payments wired to their employees, so he would have to find the paperwork and see if they didn’t need to pay Anja a little more for her work.

  Sal made his way up to his room and fifteen minutes later, his phone buzzed to advise him that a secure satellite connection had been opened between him and Courtney.

  A couple of voicemail messages from her hadn’t been delivered until he reached a delivery zone. He listened to them quickly before he dialed her number.

  The call went to a voice machine almost immediately and he shook his head and dragged in a deep breath. “Hey, Courtney, it’s Sal. We’ve dug into what happened to your father and we actually found something that might interest you. It’s probably not the kind of thing to talk about over a voicemail, since it is delicate, so give me a call when you’re around. I…miss you.” He killed the connection almost immediately once he said that. There was enough sentimental bullshit these days and it was all he could do not to let it overwhelm him.

  Some things were better talked about in person, he thought with a nod, placed the phone back on his bedside table, and lay down.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Hey Sal.” Courtney sounded well rested and perky. “I received your message. Is everything okay?”