Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8)

by Jeremy Robinson

  The hall was empty, but King knew that there were numerous places between the examination room and the hangar where enemies might be waiting. “Don’t stop for anything,” he said. Then he started out.

  Pain throbbed in his lower back with each step, reminding him of what Alexei had done. He recalled what the Russian President had said to Catherine.

  ‘He should be able to provide what Alexei needs.’

  For the Firebird.

  The pieces were falling into place. The Russians had known about him for several years. They had known about his true heritage as a descendant of Alexander Diotrephes. Perhaps they had known about him longer than he realized, as far back as Julie’s accident. Or further.

  Don’t you know? We can’t die.

  Had Julie said that, or had it been The Dream?

  He wasn’t immortal. Not anymore. He had not wanted it in the first place, and when his long journey through history had finally ended, he had taken a serum to neutralize the effects of Alexander’s immortality elixir.

  He doubted the Russians knew about any of that, but if they knew about Alexander—or Adoon—then it wasn’t impossible that they had learned about the elixir of life. Was that what the Firebird was? Was Alexei trying to create an army of invincible ape soldiers?

  Something about that didn’t quite sound right.

  He glanced back at Joe, who was struggling to keep up. It wasn’t just the added burden of Lynn’s weight that was draining his vitality. King knew the man had routinely carried heavier loads for longer distances during Special Forces training. The fatigue was caused by radiation sickness.

  They thought he was me, King realized. They experimented on him. Dosed him with radiation to see what would happen.

  Bastards.

  They reached the entrance to the hangar without encountering anyone. But as King looked out at the helicopter parked seventy-five yards away, he knew their luck had finally run out. The soldiers who had accompanied them from Moscow—all but the two that Joe and Lynn had removed from the equation—were gathered around the aircraft. The men weren’t in a defensive posture, just hanging out. Smoking and joking. Vulnerable. Unfortunately, a sneak attack was out of the question. There was no way to take them out without shooting up the helicopter in the process.

  But maybe there was another way.

  He looked over at—

  Julie!

  —Catherine. “Will those men follow your orders?”

  She glowered at him. “I’m not going to help you.”

  “We’ll do it your way then.” He pulled her in front of him, resting the stock of the rifle on her shoulder. “Joe, when you get a clear shot, take it.”

  He stepped out into the open, pushing Catherine ahead of him. She did not resist, but as they moved away from the door, she said, “You’re even colder than I thought. First you drag your mother along on a spy mission, then you use your sister as a human shield. I’m impressed.”

  King had to force himself to keep moving. “So you’re my sister again. Is that your final answer?”

  Across the hangar, one of the soldiers looked in their direction, did a double-take and then was instantly on guard, shouting to the others. Almost in unison, the entire group assumed forward-facing shooting stances. Their weapons focused on the pair moving toward them. King took a few more steps, moving forward at an oblique angle to give Joe a clear field of fire, then he stopped.

  “Lower your weapons and move away from the helicopter,” he shouted in Russian.

  The men did not comply but neither did they fire. Instead they began advancing, just as he had hoped they would, fanning out to get a better shot at him. He ducked a little lower behind Catherine, knowing that it would buy him only another second or two. Russian soldiers, particularly those in the Spetsnaz—and he did not doubt that these men were from that elite group—were trained to shoot without hesitation. Even in hostage situations.

  Especially in hostage situations.

  The ruthlessness of Russian Special Forces was well known. In 2002, when Chechen terrorists had taken almost 900 hostages at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, rigging the roof with explosives that would have killed everyone inside, the Spetsnaz had pumped in an anesthetizing gas to render hostages and terrorists alike unconscious. Of the one hundred and thirty casualties in the incident, all but two had died as a result of exposure to the gas. One of the Spetsnaz operators had called it their ‘most successful operation in years.’

  King didn’t think these men would be quite so cavalier with Catherine’s life in the balance, but if they succeeded in flanking him, one of them would almost certainly risk the shot.

  “Anytime, Joe,” he muttered.

  “Don’t shoot!” Catherine’s unexpected shout startled King. For a moment, he thought she was going to cooperate, but her next utterance revealed her true intent. “We need him alive. You know what to do.”

  Crap!

  She wasn’t done. “He’s trying to lure you into the open. Fall back to the—”

  King clamped a hand over her mouth, stifling her, but the damage was already done. The soldiers quickly sought cover, most of them retreating to the helicopter, ducking behind the fuselage.

  A burst of gunfire shattered the tense stillness. King dropped to a semi-prone position. He instinctively tried to cover Catherine with his body, even though the rational part of his brain was telling him she was supposed to be his shield—not the other way around. He couldn’t tell where the first shot came from, but in an instant, the hangar was transformed into a thunderous echo chamber.

  And then, just as quickly as it had begun, the shooting stopped.

  King raised his head, expecting to see the soldiers closing in, but instead he saw only a pall of smoke hanging in the air above the helicopter. The soldiers were all gone.

  No, not gone.

  Dead. Every last one of them.

  “Joe! Status!”

  “We’re good,” came the hesitant reply.

  “Then get moving. If there really is an army of ape-men guarding this place, they’ll be here soon.”

  Joe emerged from the doorway, Lynn still riding piggy-back. “I think we may have another problem,” he said. “I didn’t get a shot off.”

  “You didn’t? Then who?”

  The answer came even as he asked the question. “King! Friendlies coming out!”

  He whirled toward the source of the familiar voice and saw someone rise from a concealed position at the edge of the hangar. Three more figures appeared, and then all four of them were running toward him.

  King shook his head in disbelief as his teammates surrounded him. “It’s about damn time.”

  32

  Bishop was still trying to wrap her head around the fact that King and their mother were here, in the middle of nowhere. That they were at the very research facility the Chess Team had been sent to recon, and if necessary, destroy, was incredible. That her mother was riding on a stranger’s back like he was a horse didn’t make it any better. Then there was the matter of the woman standing next to King—hand-cuffed to him. It was the same woman she had seen on a television screen seven months before.

  Julie.

  King had been right after all. Julie was alive, and somehow, against all odds, he had found her. Yet, Bishop had seen and overheard enough to know that Julie was not exactly overjoyed at the family reunion.

  “I see you have been busy,” she remarked.

  King managed a grin. “I’ll catch you up when we’re in the air,” he said. He might have been speaking to the whole team, but his next question was clearly just for her. “Where’s dad?”

  “In Moscow. He is still trying to find her.” She nodded at King’s prisoner.

  King frowned at that, but then shook his head dismissively. “We need to—”

  Before he could complete the sentence, Julie dropped to the ground like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Bishop’s first thought—everyone’s first thought, judging by the way the entire t
eam immediately went into a defensive posture, spinning around and searching for a possible target—was that a bullet from a suppressed sniper’s rifle had felled her. But Julie was very much alive. She curled herself into a fetal ball and brought her feet together around her shackled hand. Then, like a swimmer pushing off against the side of the pool, she thrust out with both legs. There was a hideous wet crunching sound, like a cleaver slicing through meat and bone, and Julie somersaulted away.

  After she had left the Russian Army, before coming to the United States to join her brother’s team, Bishop had briefly worked a trap line near Murmansk. Up until that point, she had always believed the stories about animals gnawing off their legs to escape the jaws of a trap to be hyperbole, but she had quickly been disabused of that notion. Some animals were desperate enough to do exactly that.

  Evidently, Julie was that desperate, too.

  She did not exactly tear her hand off, but the powerful double-kick had scraped the cuff past the meaty part of her thumb, leaving a bloody ribbon of flesh behind in exchange for her freedom. She was on her feet before anyone could react, running for the passage back into the research facility. As she ran, her savaged and bleeding hand was clutched protectively to her abdomen.

  King was the first to recover his wits. He bolted after her without a moment’s hesitation, shouting as he ran. “Get the hangar door open. Don’t wait for me.”

  Bishop started after him but caught herself. She turned to Queen, who like everyone else was still dumbfounded by what had just happened. Queen managed to nod, which was good enough for Bishop. As she took off after King and Julie, she heard Queen’s voice over the comm, urging her to “Talk some sense into him.”

  She might have said, ‘Knock some sense into him.’ Bishop figured if one didn’t work, the other would.

  She was just a few steps behind King, who was about that close to Julie. The intervals separating them all were not shrinking, though. Julie was running as if the hounds of Hell were at her heels. Unlike King and Bishop, she knew exactly where she was going. She ran through a twisting corridor, passing several doors without slowing. Without any warning, she skidded to a stop and threw open a door so forcefully that it slammed against the wall with a noise like a gunshot. The brief stop allowed King to gain a few steps, but then Julie was gone again, running down a flight of stairs into the darkness. King charged after her, and Bishop followed him.

  After about ten steps, what little light filtered down from the doorway ceased to provide any illumination. Bishop was forced to slow to a near-crawl, probing ahead cautiously one step at a time. The rank barnyard smell that suddenly filled her nostrils brought her to a full stop.

  A smell like that was never a good thing.

  She raised her AKM and started forward again. Over the sound of footsteps—King’s, she assumed—she could distinctly hear animal grunts. She extended her foot for another step down, but discovered that she was already at the base of the stairs. The smells and noise were much louder now.

  “King. We need to go. Leave her.”

  Lights began flashing on overhead, one by one, in sequence. They started at the far end of what she now saw was a long narrow aisle between opposing rows of partitioned stalls. King had come to a halt halfway down the aisle, one hand raised to shade his eyes as the lights above him blazed to life. Julie stood at the far end of the room, her hand still resting on a large circuit breaker handle. There was a look of fierce triumph on her face, as if the light switch had been her goal all along.

  The fixture above Bishop, the last one in the row, came on, casting a circle of light that left the stalls to either side still mostly hidden in shadow.

  Something was moving in those shadows.

  33

  Queen had barely gotten Lynn and the other man situated in the helicopter when Bishop’s frantic call came over the comm. There had not been time for a proper introduction, but she assumed the man was a survivor from the ill-fated Chess Team White. Lynn was calling him Joe, which probably meant he was Master Sergeant Joseph Hager, the King of White Team. Most of Bishop’s call was incomprehensible, but woven into the tapestry of what Queen assumed was Russian profanity, was an actual message: “Trouble. We need to go. Now.”

  “Damn it.” She secured the clasp on Lynn’s seat belt and then rose. “Knight, have you found the garage door opener?”

  By way of a reply, there was a loud ringing noise, similar to an old-fashioned ship’s alarm bell. It was immediately followed by a hiss of hydraulics and a mechanical clanking that sounded like an industrial trash compactor.

  She stuck her head out the door opening on the left side of the aircraft and looked up at the high ceiling. It had split apart down the middle. The two halves were slowly pulling apart to reveal the black night sky beyond. Knight stepped out of a control booth in the corner of the hangar and flashed a thumb’s up.

  “Open sesame,” Rook muttered from the cockpit of the helicopter. “Now if I can just find the button for…”

  A low whine filled the helicopter, as the twin engines ignited and began spinning up. “Ha!” Rook crowed over the increasingly strident turbine noise. “Piece of cake.”

  Queen was not generally superstitious, but she felt like she ought to knock on wood or take some other precaution against jinxing the run of good luck.

  Sure enough, the universe was paying attention.

  As the rotor blades began turning overhead, Bishop burst into view, running full-tilt, with King on her heels. “They’re coming!”

  “Knight, bring your ass or get left behind!” Queen took a knee and aimed her AKM into the corridor behind the running figures, her finger curling around the trigger, ready to shoot the next person that came through the doorway.

  Except it wasn’t a person, and it wasn’t alone.

  Three of them appeared together. Her initial impression, in that fleeting instant as she chose a target and adjusted her aim, was that they were wild men—escapees from an insane asylum as imagined by Edgar Allan Poe. Naked men with shaggy hair, hunched over, almost but not quite walking on all fours.

  She fired a controlled pair at the…whatever it was on the right. Two shots, aimed as close to center mass as its bent posture would allow. The thing stumbled and fell, sliding face first across the floor. She shifted her sight picture, looking for another target.

  “Shit!”

  Finding a target wasn’t going to be a problem. In the time it had taken her to kill just one of them—and she wasn’t even sure she had done that—a dozen more had emerged from the corridor.

  She realized now that they had been wrong to call the creatures that had attacked them outside the facility ‘humanzees.’ While those hulking beasts bore the distinctive simian traits of a mutated primate—a gorilla or chimp—they really had not resembled the other half of the equation.

  The portmanteau was a much better fit for these creatures.

  These beasts were considerably smaller than their wooly cousins who had perished in the avalanche. In fact, most of these humanzees were shorter than Queen. They had the long torsos and even longer arms typical to chimpanzees. Their naked bodies were nearly hairless, with just a shaggy mane on top and tufts sprouting from the armpits and pubic region. The lack of facial hair, not to mention the complete absence of any external genitalia, suggested that they were female. But the almost obscenely swollen musculature hinted at another possibility. Either through genetic manipulation or surgical alteration, these creatures were androgynes. Sexless. The weirdest thing about them was the shape of their heads. Every detail—ears, jaw position, forehead and brow ridge, nose—was distinctly human, distinctly individual. Distinctly…distinct.

  It took her only a moment to process all of this. In that same moment, she realized the futility of fire discipline. She lowered the AKM to her hip, nudged the fire selector lever up to ‘full-auto’ and hosed the oncoming mass.

  Several of the humanzees went down, but there were more to take their place. And those t
hat didn’t fall were getting closer.

  The rest of the team joined the fight, all except Rook who was still at the controls, coaxing more power from the turbines. Bishop and King had turned and were likewise firing on full-auto as they backed toward the helicopter. Knight too, was running and gunning. Their intersecting fields of fire had momentarily stalled the advance, but Queen knew it would be only a brief reprieve. As if to underscore that fact, her gun went still, the thirty-round magazine exhausted.

  Overhead, the rotor disc was turning at what seemed like full speed, creating a whirlwind in the enclosed hanger that only accentuated the chaos of battle. But the raging humanzees did not seem the least bit intimidated by the tumult.

  “Rook! How much longer?” She clipped in a fresh magazine, then added, “‘Now’ would be a great answer.”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Rook shouted. “Another minute, maybe? Somebody come take my place. You need me out there.”

  Queen knew he was just frustrated at being left out of the fight. Rook wasn’t a highly trained helicopter pilot. None of them were. He had received the same familiarity training as everyone else on the team. It was better than nothing, but starting and flying a helicopter—and not just any helicopter, but a Russian Mil Mi-8 with switches labeled in Cyrillic—was most definitely not just a muscle-memory skill like learning to ride a bicycle. Rook was only in the front seat because Queen, who had a marginally better bedside manner, had been helping Lynn and Joe, and Knight had been using his Magic Eye to trace the power cables from the retractable roof to the control room.

  “We need you to get this beast in the air.” She punctuated the comment with another spray of bullets.

  Knight had joined King and Bishop, the three of them laying down an almost constant barrage of lead as they backed toward the helicopter. A score of humanzees were down, dead or writhing on the floor in mortal agony, but the flood issuing from the depths of the facility showed no sign of abating. If the team stopped firing, even for the second or two it would take to climb aboard the helo, the creatures would swarm over them.