Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8)

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Do you know what those are?” Rook said, without lowering the binoculars.

  “Nope,” Queen said. She pivoted her skis around so that she was facing the other way. “And I’m not that interested in finding out.”

  “Yetis. Abominable Snowmen.”

  She had expected him to say something like that. Yetis, as far as she knew, were strictly a Himalayan thing, but every region seemed to have its own variation on the theme of a large undiscovered primate. In the Pacific Northwest it was Sasquatch, AKA Bigfoot. Floridians believed that a creature called the Skunk Ape roamed the Everglades. In Arizona, it was called the Mogollon Beast. She did not doubt those stories. Strange creatures—missing links, evolutionary holdovers that weren’t quite as extinct as scientists believed—did exist. She had seen it with her own eyes, with an isolated population of Neanderthals and Neanderthal-Human hybrids living in the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam.

  She didn’t know if these things were Neanderthals or something else, and given the circumstances, answering that particular question was not that high on her list of priorities.

  “Doesn’t matter. Move out. That’s an order.”

  She planted her ski poles in the snow and pushed off, using the skating technique of pushing the skis away at an angle with each step forward, until she had built up enough momentum to coast down the slope. She glanced back to make sure that Knight and Rook were both moving, then focused on staying upright. Skiing off-piste—on ungroomed, untrammeled snow—was challenging under the best of circumstances. Despite its uniform color, there were all kinds of snow, ranging from treacherously slick ice to sticky dry powder. Sometimes deep drifts hid obstacles that could stop a skier dead in their tracks—sometimes, literally. But the way ahead looked clear, the descending gradient steep enough that she could tuck in and glide.

  The journey in had been mostly uphill, which meant gravity was now on their side, doubling or maybe even tripling the rate of travel for the return trip. There was no knowing if that would be fast enough to outrun the massive pack of—

  Yetis. Shit.

  —creatures though, just as there was no way of knowing how far the creatures would go. Wolves were known to stalk their prey for days at a time.

  But these creatures weren’t wolves. They were…

  “Watchdogs,” she said, thinking aloud.

  “What’s that?” Rook asked.

  She risked a quick glance back but saw only dark spots against the snow. Closer? Hard to say. “Later. Blue, please tell me we’re outrunning those things.”

  “Not exactly,” Deep Blue admitted. “They’re moving a lot faster than I would have—oh, crap!”

  “Blue?”

  “They’re sledding.” There was no mistaking the incredulity in his tone. “Like penguins sliding across the ice.”

  “Damn,” Rook said. “So they’re smart, too. You know how this is going to end.”

  Queen did know. If they couldn’t outpace the creatures, they would have to make a stand. She had brought along a compact SIG Sauer P228, with three full magazines. Knight had one too, along with his antique rifle. Rook had ‘the girls,’ but handguns wouldn’t be effective until they let the things get a lot closer. And they would have to stop moving to shoot.

  The slope bottomed out, quickly stealing away the momentum she had built up. To the right lay the flank of a steeper incline than the one they’d just come down. Ahead and to the left, the snowfield undulated gently, like sand dunes on a beach. She double-poled, skating furiously to maintain forward progress and reach the next decline. But in her mind’s eye, she could see the creatures glissading down the slope, like drops of water sliding down a window pane.

  “Screw this,” she said. “Let’s see them try that going uphill.”

  She turned right, still skating hard as she angled toward the slope. It now rose up in front of her like an insurmountable blank wall.

  “Uh, Queen, they’ll be on you in seconds.”

  Deep Blue was not wrong. “I’ll try to slow them down,” Rook said. “You and Knight get to higher ground. Maybe he can put that relic to good use.”

  It was a desperate plan, the chances of success no better now than when they had first spotted the incoming yeti wave, but it was increasingly looking like they would have little choice.

  “Do it, Knight,” Queen said. “I won’t be any good at long range.”

  She expected some kind of chivalrous protest from Rook, but it was Deep Blue that challenged the order. “Shooting anything is a bad idea,” he said. “The noise could bring an avalanche down.”

  “That’s a myth,” Knight said. An accomplished mountaineer and extreme skier, Knight knew what he was talking about. “Sound waves are too diffuse to break the ice holding a snowpack.”

  “Avalanche!” If Queen’s hands had not been gripping the ski poles, she might have smacked her forehead. “That’s exactly what we need.”

  She stabbed her poles deep and pivoted, digging the edges of her skis in for an abrupt stop, and hastily turned to face the yetis. They were still more than fifty yards away, too distant for her to see them as much more than shaggy black forms. They were throwing up clouds of loose snow as they bounded across the flats. She couldn’t begin to estimate their numbers, but half-a-dozen were visible at the leading edge of the wave. Queen drew her pistol but she did not aim at the yetis. Instead, she pointed it at a spot high up on the slope looming above them. Then she started firing.

  The reports echoed together into a sound like a long peal of thunder in the mountain pass, but her shots seemed to accomplish little else. The bullets vanished into the snow without any visible effect. Knight and Rook both grasped what she was attempting and added their own firepower to the effort. The combined noise of the different weapons echoing back from the mountainside was momentarily deafening.

  Beside her, Knight was furiously working the bolt and shifting his aim a few degrees after each trigger pull, stitching an invisible horizontal line across the slope. Five shots in less than as many seconds. He ejected the spent magazine without lowering the weapon, and started firing again.

  Rook was keeping up a constant rate of fire as well, but only half of his shots were directed at the slope. He was firing his left-hand pistol up without looking, but the one in his right fist was aimed directly into the advancing horde. The big pistols boomed like a cannon with each shot, the recoil shaking his entire body. If not for the special customized wrist-braces he wore specifically for the purpose of absorbing the murderous kick, shooting one-handed would probably have broken his wrists. A hit almost anywhere on the body would be fatal to a human. Queen didn’t know if that held true for Russian yetis, but Rook’s precise fire was definitely having an effect. She could see crimson eruptions as the .50-cal Magnum rounds punched holes clear through the shaggy creatures.

  Four down.

  Five.

  But he couldn’t possibly hit them all.

  She gave up trying to bring the mountainside down and shifted her aim to meet the charge.

  Twenty yards now, and even through the haze of disturbed snow, she could see how huge the creatures truly were. They were as big as Kodiak grizzly bears. Their black fur was matted with snow, giving them a mottled appearance, but their snarling simian faces were hairless, more like a chimpanzee than a gorilla.

  More like a human than a chimpanzee.

  She aimed at the nearest fanged visage and fired. The primate’s head snapped back, and the creature went down in a flurry of limbs and snow. She shifted to the next, now just ten yards away, but before she could pull the trigger, one of Rook’s rounds blew the side of its face off.

  “It worked!” Knight’s shout was barely audible over the din of the battle, but almost as soon as he said it, Queen felt a tremor rising up from the snowpack. “We should be going!”

  From the corner of her eye, she could see an enormous cloud of snow rolling down the hillside. By design, they had fired at a point further up the pass, where they h
ad been only a minute before. But as the avalanche gained momentum it also gained mass, spreading out in both directions. A rush of frigid air racing ahead of the cascading frozen wall underscored the urgency of the threat. If they didn’t take Knight’s advice, the slide would bury them along with the yetis, but if they tried to run, the creatures would be on them in an instant.

  She squeezed off another shot, but only grazed her target. The creature stumbled but regained its stride, trailing a stream of blood as it closed within reach of her.

  Hands—actual hands with fingers—swiped through the air, and would have caught her if she had not ducked under them, firing out the rest of the SIG’s magazine point blank into its chest. The 9-millimeter rounds seemed to have about as much effect as poking the creature with her finger. It threw its head back and let out a strange hooting howl, then bared its fangs and lunged.

  She thrust the empty pistol into the gaping jaws, driving the smoking barrel deep into its throat. The yeti flinched and thrashed, but its grasping hands caught her, holding her fast and squeezing. Just as suddenly, the creature collapsed against her. Her nostrils were filled with the smell of the thing, wet dog hair and body odor, stronger even than the sulfurous tang of burnt gunpowder. She could feel its weight, crushing against her.

  Then, darkness crashed down on her, and she felt nothing at all.

  21

  Moscow, Russia

  King never quite lost consciousness, but when his tormentors ratcheted handcuffs around his wrists and drew a heavy burlap hood over his head, shutting out both light and fresh air, he stopped resisting. He willed himself into a relaxed, almost trance-like state. He had been in stickier spots than this, and he knew that sometimes the trick to surviving was to stop fighting and wait for an opportunity to present itself.

  Once shackled and shrouded, his captors had bundled him into a vehicle. Judging by the syncopation of several different sirens, it was part of a convoy moving through the streets of Moscow without stopping for anything. He suspected they might be driving in circles, but after a while he gave up counting the turns.

  Ultimately, the question of their destination was not as important as the fact that he had just seen his sister.

  He was even more certain of that identification now. The woman was Julie. Every detail of her face, which bore all the familial characteristics, was just as he remembered. Even her eyes were that strange hue of light brown with flecks of orange that Julie had shared with him and Asya. The likeness was so perfect, and yet at the same time, so very troubling.

  Julie was his older sister. Twenty years had passed since the accident, which might have been designed to cover an abduction. Yet this woman looked exactly the same as he remembered Julie. Faces changed over time. Even super-models who indulged in exotic beauty regimes and bathed in the blood of newborns to keep their skin elastic and young, did not look the same from one year to the next.

  So it couldn’t be Julie. Could it?

  The convoy stopped and he was dragged out of the vehicle, carried bodily a short distance and then deposited in a hard chair. More shackles were added to his wrists and ankles, and then the hood was yanked from his head, along with a generous handful of his hair. Bright light stung his eyes, momentarily blinding him. He blinked through suddenly watery eyes until the world finally came into focus.

  His mother was in the room with him, seated alongside him, likewise squinting against the relative brilliance of the overhead incandescent light bulb. Her hair was mussed but she looked otherwise unhurt. Evidently, their captors had determined that she wasn’t threatening enough to warrant a pre-emptive tenderization.

  If they only knew, King thought, recalling the cool efficiency with which she had dispatched the agents on the stairs leading to the Lubyanka basement. Yet, there was no trace of that deadly calm now. Lynn looked like someone who had just seen her entire world turned upside down.

  Sensing his scrutiny, she turned toward him. “It was her, Jack. It was Julie.”

  He frowned, glancing around the room to see who else was present, but it appeared that they had been left alone. The austere room with cracked tile floors and crumbling plaster walls made King think of a seedy underworld doctor’s office, where disgraced practitioners stitched up bullet wounds for mobsters. There was a battered wooden table in the room, and three ancient-looking but sturdy metal chairs—one empty, the other two occupied by himself and Lynn. He did not doubt that they were being observed through a peep-hole or hidden cameras, but aside from a single windowless door, the room was a featureless cube.

  “Let’s talk about it later,” he said at length.

  “You think I made a mistake, don’t you?” She shook her head. “What else could I do? We came here to learn the truth, and there she was, right there in front of me. I couldn’t just turn away.”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t know what else to say.

  “She recognized you,” Lynn continued. “You saw that, right?”

  “Yeah.” The importance of that finally hit home. Julie had recognized him, but not as her kid brother ‘Siggy.’ Then she had sicced her dogs on them both. The latter action was yet more definitive proof that Julie was working with the Russian government, evidently in a position of some authority. If Vladimir had betrayed them to the FSB or some other agency, it would have made sense for the agents to be on the lookout for Peter and Lynn, but Julie had been completely indifferent to Lynn.

  She had known his callsign.

  How?

  “She recognized something all right.”

  As if on cue, the door opened and the subject of their discussion entered. She strode forward until she was standing directly in front of King. Then she crossed her arms imperiously over her chest and sank into the empty chair. The harsh light did nothing to dispel his earlier certainty.

  “Julie?”

  “I don’t know who this ‘Julie’ is,” she said, her voice oh so familiar, her English perfect, with no trace of an accent, Russian or otherwise. “My name is Catherine Alexander.”

  “Julie is my daughter,” Lynn blurted. “You are my daughter, no matter what they’ve told you.”

  Julie, or Catherine rather, returned a cold smile. “You’re mistaken.” She turned back to King. “Why are you here?”

  “You tell me,” King said quickly, hoping to stifle any further outbursts from his mother. “Your goons were driving the car.”

  “Let’s dispense with the macho posturing bullshit, okay? Why are you, Jack Sigler, callsign: King, field leader of the U.S. Special Forces Unit known as Chess Team, here, in Moscow?”

  King did his best to maintain an indifferent expression, even though inwardly he was reeling from the revelations. How had she learned all that? Was there a mole in JSOC? No, that didn’t add up. If there was a leak, then she already knew the answer to her question.

  She came here to catch Peter. She wasn’t expecting me at all, but she recognized me. What the hell?

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he replied at length. “You’re American. What are you doing here?”

  Catherine stared at him for several seconds then turned to Lynn. “I’m sure you’ve been trained in all the techniques to resist interrogation,” she said. King couldn’t tell to whom she was speaking, but he guessed the words were meant for him. “But it seems you’ve brought along a particularly vulnerable pressure point.”

  King decided to cooperate, or rather give the appearance of cooperating, not because of the threat, but because he sensed an opportunity to answer some questions of his own. “You’re right,” he said. “Let’s skip the posturing. I’m here because I found… No, scratch that, I destroyed your little supply depot in Virginia.” He stopped there, studying her reaction.

  Whatever else she was, Catherine Alexander was not a trained interrogator. Her eyes went wide in disbelief. “You? You did that?”

  “We know what you’re planning,” he went on. “But you know how it is. Politicians and bureaucrats live in a persistent s
tate of denial. More proof.” He shook his head. “If a Russian army supply base on American soil doesn’t convince them that Russia is planning to invade the United States, I don’t know what will.”

  Her reaction, or rather the lack of one, betrayed her again. “How did you find it?”

  So it is true. Damn.

  Before King could answer, the door opened again and a man strode in. With the hanging light between him and the new arrival, it took a moment for King to bring the man’s face into focus. He saw immediately that the man was shorter than average, maybe five-foot-six, but powerfully built beneath his immaculately tailored suit. Catherine jumped up from her chair, surprised or alarmed. But instead of challenging the man, she shrank back several steps. The man ignored her, advancing until he was standing in front of King, almost exactly where Catherine had been a minute before. King looked up at the man’s face, fleshy but with a blandly arrogant expression, framed by thinning hair that even the understated comb-over could not conceal. King started to laugh. The man standing in front of him was the President of the Russian Federation.

  “If I’d known we were going to get the VIP treatment,” he said, “I would have dressed better.”

  The President cocked his head sideways, as if only partially comprehending what King had just said, then he turned to Catherine and spoke in Russian. “I wanted to see him for myself.”

  “And you are satisfied now?” Catherine replied haltingly in the same tongue.

  King feigned a confused expression, hoping that they might let something slip if they believed he couldn’t understand what they were saying. Of course, if they knew who he was, then they probably also knew that he spoke Russian, but it was worth a shot.

  “Yes,” the Russian president said. “Take him to Volosgrad. He should be able to provide what Alexei needs.”

  Volosgrad?

  Grad was a common Russian suffix, an abbreviated form of ‘gorod,’ which meant ‘city.’ Under the Soviet regime, St. Petersburg had been renamed Leningrad, literally the City of Lenin. But there was no city anywhere in Russia named Volosgrad. As far as King knew, Volos wasn’t even a Russian name.