Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8)

by Jeremy Robinson

  They needed a game changer.

  Queen ducked back into the Mil’s cabin, tossed her empty AKM aside and replaced it with the RPG-7 Bishop had brought along. The launcher was already fitted with a PG-7V high-explosive anti-tank warhead. All she needed to do to prepare the weapon was unscrew the safety cap covering the impact detonator at the end of the warhead. Then she cocked the hammer. The actions took less than two seconds to complete.

  It felt like an eternity.

  She hefted the heavy steel weapon onto her shoulder and hopped out of the cabin. In the time it had taken her to retrieve the RPG, the noose had tightened. The humanzees were not charging headlong into the hailstorm of lead, but instead were trying to circle around and attack from the flanks. Spray and pray was no longer a viable tactic. The only way to repel the attack was with selective fire. As the team shifted from one target to the next, the rest of the humanzees spread out a little more in anticipation of a concerted rush, when the opportune moment arrived.

  Armed with the single-shot RPG, Queen could not do much to stop the flanking maneuver, but she could deal with the source. She shifted toward the tail of the helicopter, just enough to clear her backblast area, and took aim at the doorway.

  “Fire in the hole!” she shouted, and then she pulled the trigger.

  There was loud crack, like a lightning strike right beside her, as the booster charge detonated. A hiss sounded as the rocket motor on the grenade ignited and streaked toward its target.

  The HEAT warhead had been designed solely for the purpose of destroying armor plating. When the charge detonated, it produced a jet of plasma that could instantly burn through ten inches of steel. That would allow the secondary explosive charge to detonate in the enclosed interior of an armored vehicle, with devastating consequences. Against an unarmored target—like the unending deluge of humanzees—the results were less spectacular, but no less lethal.

  The impact fuse was triggered when it struck one of the creatures, just outside the doorway. Although Queen could not see what happened next, it wasn’t hard to imagine the plasma jet shooting down the length of the corridor beyond, burning a hole through every humanzee directly in its path, and flash-cooking those that weren’t. When the secondary explosion finally occurred, it seemed disappointingly small. It was just a loud bang, like a cherry bomb in a mailbox. The explosion was so far down the corridor that Queen couldn’t even see the puff of smoke. Nevertheless, the RPG had broken the wave attack.

  The humanzees already in the hangar were stunned, not by the physical blast, which could barely be felt amidst the swirling tempest caused by the helicopter’s rotor blades, but rather by the results. Several of them stopped in their tracks, staring in disbelief at the smoke and screams issuing from the corridor. It was as if they knew that dozens of their kindred had just perished.

  If not for the fact that the creatures were trying to kill them all, Queen might have felt sorry for them. They weren’t enemy soldiers or radical insurgents driven by ideological hatred. The fact that they were abominations created in a laboratory only made the injustice of their fate all the more poignant. Not merely animals trained to kill like attack dogs, which was an atrocity in itself, but animals with the intellect and emotions of humans.

  The moment did not last. Astonishment gave way quickly to rage, and one pair of too-human eyes after another turned back to the team, the source of their woe.

  Light a candle for them later, she told herself, as she scrambled back to the door of the helicopter. The others had already seized on the diversion and were piling inside. Bishop went first, and as soon as she cleared the opening, she stood and braced herself at the edge of the door, then resumed shooting. King went next, but Knight stood his ground a moment longer.

  “Queen! Go!”

  She pitched the spent RPG tube into the helicopter and then heaved herself in after it. King pulled her out of the way and then shouted for Knight to climb in. Queen, still in a prone position, drew her pistol to help Bishop cover for Knight, but as soon as he was inside, the humanzees made their move.

  They did not attack en masse, but instead continued with the flanking maneuver, circling around to either side of the aircraft, removing themselves from the field of fire.

  “Rook,” she hollered. “We need to go!”

  She didn’t know if she had bought him the minute or so he had asked for. It felt like it, but time passed differently in the fog of war. One thing was certain though. If the helicopter wasn’t ready to lift off, no amount of nagging would change that.

  “I see ‘em,” he shouted back. “Hang on to your nuts!”

  The deck shuddered beneath her as the helicopter began to move, but to her surprise and dismay, it rose only a few inches off the ground before bumping back down. The impact was surprisingly forceful, bouncing her off the deck and slamming her back down.

  A feral human face appeared in the doorway, and then it was reaching inside with its long, thickly muscled ape arms. Someone behind her fired point blank. The humanzee toppled back, but she could see more of them moving in, sidling along the edge of the aircraft.

  They’re trying to hold us down! Can they do that?

  The helicopter lurched again but it didn’t rise. Instead, it began to pivot beneath the rotors, spinning faster as Rook increased power to the tail rotor. The aircraft spun completely around, again and again, faster and faster with each revolution. Queen hugged the deck to keep herself from being flung out the open door. She saw several humanzee bodies flying through the air before a wave of vertigo forced her to close her eyes to keep from throwing up.

  An invisible hand pressed her to the deck as the helo rose, not just a few inches and not just for a millisecond. This time it went straight up, until Queen could feel the chill night air on her face. Rook continued to rotate the aircraft several more times, then both the awful spinning and the elevator ride from hell ended.

  “Everyone still here?” Rook shouted.

  Knight answered before Queen could even open her eyes. “Shaken and stirred, but all present and accounted for.”

  Rook chuckled over the comm. “That was some Grade A, E-ticket shit right there.” Before Queen could tell him to stop mixing metaphors, he went on in a more sober tone. “Can someone take a look out the window and make sure we didn’t pick up any hitchhikers?”

  Queen finally opened her eyes and rose up off the hard metal deck. It had already grown uncomfortably cold in the brief seconds they had been aloft. If any of the hairless human-ape hybrids were clinging to the exterior of the helicopter, they would not survive long, but she nevertheless eased her head outside and scanned fore and aft just to make sure.

  Nothing.

  Directly below, the open hangar formed a rectangle of light in the otherwise black void of the forest. It looked deceptively calm, like a magical gateway into another universe, instead of a portal into a hell ruled by laboratory grown demons. She pulled the sliding door closed, shutting out some—but not all—of the cold and noise, and then she turned to King.

  “You finally made it,” she said. King didn’t have a comm earpiece, so she had to shout to be heard. “We were starting to wonder.”

  “You know how I like to make an entrance.”

  “Well the show’s all yours. What now?”

  King glanced back to where Lynn and the rescued Delta operator were seated. That they had succeeded in locating even one member of the team—and alive to boot—was nothing short of miraculous, but retrieving M.I.A.s was only one of their mission objectives.

  They had found the secret facility, and they had discovered at least some of what was going on inside. Queen couldn’t quite fathom how an army of human-ape hybrids gave the Russians a strategic advantage. It didn’t seem like sufficient provocation to start World War III. But whether or not they went back and finished what they had started was King’s call, not hers.

  But King was not looking at the Delta operator. He was looking at his mother, and Queen realized his
thoughts were on an altogether different mission. A personal one.

  He had done the impossible. He had found his dead sister, very much alive, after all. And then he had lost her again. Or maybe he had not really found her at all. Queen had no idea what had transpired between them, but Julie was clearly working for the other side.

  Is he thinking about going back for her?

  If he was, he kept it to himself. “Now, we get the hell out of here.”

  34

  After the last of the horde of subhumans vanished up the stairs in pursuit of King and the younger woman, Catherine pushed away from the electrical panel and headed up as well. The subhumans weren’t as fast as their cousins, the almases. They probably wouldn’t catch King before he reached the hangar, but they would certainly be able to prevent him and his team from escaping.

  His team. The Chess Team.

  The trap had finally caught its intended victim, though not as smoothly as Alexei had anticipated. King’s people had actually gotten past the almases somehow and made it inside Volosgrad, but they would get no further. And now that Alexei had his sample of King’s bone marrow, the Firebird would soon become a reality. Although nothing had gone according to plan, the plan was back on track.

  Her injured hand was throbbing, but the ravaged flesh was already beginning to heal. Soon, the pain would be replaced by the fierce itch of nerve regeneration. The discomfort was better than the alternative.

  The report of gunfire, a lot of it, echoed down the corridors. The Chess Team was making a stand. No surprise there, but it would be a futile effort. They were hopelessly outnumbered by an enemy that was not afraid to charge headlong into a storm of lead.

  Finally putting them to good use, Catherine thought.

  The genetically modified primates were a holdover from another era, sidelined research that, while successful, had ultimately been deemed irrelevant. Cannon fodder didn’t win wars. Human soldiers were much easier to train, house and replace. Cheaper too, especially in a country and culture as fatalistic as Russia. Stalin had figured that out almost from the start, but Ludvig the inventor had contrived a way to continue the research in secret.

  The most robust lines, the big almases, named for the local version of the legendary yeti, and the smaller, but more intelligent subhumans, had been maintained for site security. What better way to keep a secret facility secret? But there was no longer any research being conducted on the creatures.

  There were over a hundred subhumans, and while they lacked the size and strength of the almases, they were much more intelligent. They would swarm over the invaders like army ants, killing the weak and bludgeoning the strong into submission. King might survive, though. He was a child of Adoon, after all. And her mother?

  She is not my mother, Catherine told herself, and she knew that was true in every sense except the literal. She did not know if Lynn Machtchenko was her biological mother. Her mentor had never spoken of her life before, and she had never cared to know. Her life had begun twenty years earlier when her mentor, already a senior official in the new Russian government, had awakened her from the darkness of non-existence.

  I do not care what happens to that woman, she told herself.

  She almost believed it.

  She did not make her way back to the hangar then, but went instead to Alexei’s lab. The door did not open when she tried it, so she rapped her knuckles on it and shouted to be let in. There was a shuffling sound from inside. Then the door opened a crack to reveal Alexei’s agitated face.

  “We heard shooting,” he said. “What is happening?”

  “Everything is under control. Let me in.”

  He regarded her with naked suspicion. For a moment, she thought he might refuse, but then he stepped away. There was more noise from beyond, the sound of some piece of heavy furniture scraping across the floor. Then the door opened a little wider.

  Alexei, who was deathly afraid of sustaining even the most minor injury, had retreated several steps, so his fellow scientists could manhandle a large desk out of the way. As soon as she was inside, Alexei directed them to put the barricade back in place before addressing Catherine. “What is happening?” he repeated. “Did the subject try to escape?”

  “Don’t concern yourself with it,” she said. “Your task is to finish the Firebird. I’ve already dealt with the situation.”

  “He is concerned,” Alexei said, arching his eyebrows imperiously, leaving no doubt to whom he was referring.

  “You called him? You had no right.”

  “He called. He wanted to speak with you. That was when the shooting started.”

  Catherine frowned. She had never liked Alexei, nor understood what compelled her mentor to not only keep him around but give him authority over a project as important as the Firebird. Alexei was little more than a trained technician. He had a formal understanding of the science, barely, but lacked the innovative vision needed to make the breakthrough the project required.

  She understood why the President preferred to employ such creatively sterile lackeys. The technology they were working with was a double-edged sword that could just as easily be turned against him. But Alexei had other issues that made him all but impossible to work with, which was no doubt why he had been effectively exiled to Volosgrad.

  A loud thump shook the room, rattling the beakers and test tubes on the lab tables.

  Alexei jerked as if stung by non-existent flying debris. “What was that?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “The Americans are fighting back, but they won’t win.”

  She did her best to sound confident, but she was not so sure. She did not know what the Chess Team’s capabilities were. It was not impossible that they had brought enough firepower to actually win their freedom.

  “I will call him,” she said, trying to distract Alexei from the nearby battle. “I trust I will be able to assure him that he will have the Firebird before the end of the week.”

  “You can tell him yourself when he arrives.”

  The news hit her like a physical blow. “What did you tell him?” she hissed.

  Then, without waiting for a reply, she stalked across the room and picked up the telephone receiver. There was no need to enter a number. In fact, the dial plate had been removed. The old Bakelite relic connected directly, via a dedicated hard line, to the President’s private switchboard. She waited through a series of clicks as the call was rerouted and the subsequent buzz as the signal reached out to the only man who would ever answer.

  “Da?”

  “You are coming here?” she asked without preamble.

  “Ah, it is you, my Ice Queen. How good of you to fit me into your busy schedule.” There was more than a trace of sarcasm in his tone. “Alexei was very concerned. What is the situation?”

  She knew better than to be evasive with him, as she had been with Alexei. “There was an intrusion. The American team. It’s being dealt with. They freed King and…” She hesitated a beat. “The Machtchenko woman. I don’t know if I will be able to capture them alive.”

  There was a long pause during which the only sound was the crackle of static across hundreds of miles of copper wire and the faint pop of gunfire from within the facility. She wondered if it was audible over the line.

  “That is unfortunate,” he said at length. There was another pause. “Am I to understand that the almases were lost?”

  “I know nothing about that. Security is Alexei’s purview.” The excuse sounded petty in her own ears, but it was the truth. Alexei had told her only that the almases were outside the facility, on patrol.

  “I am dispatching an Airborne Guards division to reinforce external security. And I am coming there to oversee the completion of the Firebird personally.”

  “I look forward to it,” she lied.

  “I hope that you will have everything back in order when I arrive. I am bringing someone very special with me. Someone who cannot wait to see you.”

  The line went dead before s
he could reply. As she stood there, still holding the phone to her ear, she became aware of two things: the first was Alexei, staring at her expectantly, his eyes dancing with a barely restrained manic energy. The second was silence.

  The shooting had stopped.

  She returned the phone to its cradle and turned to the man standing nearest to the barricaded exit. “Move that out of the way.”

  As soon as the door was clear, she threw it open, pulling a cloud of acrid smoke into the room.

  Volosgrad was burning.

  “Bring fire extinguishers,” she shouted without turning. “Quickly.”

  The hallway immediately outside Alexei’s lab was in shambles, littered with cracked plaster and paint flakes, but that was nothing compared to what awaited her around the bend that led directly to the hangar. The walls in every direction at the turn were gone, completely demolished, along with an enormous section of the ceiling. Surprisingly, there were no flames. Whatever had caused the smoke had already burned itself out.

  The damage was not structural. The facility had been built from hardened concrete, on a foundation of native rock. Everything manmade in a fifty foot radius however, had been reduced to rubble.

  The worst part however was the bodies.

  Near the epicenter of the blast, there were only unrecognizable pieces of burnt meat wrapped around jagged bits of bone. She hesitated for just an instant, then began picking her way through the carnage. Further along, she encountered bodies that were more complete but no less dead. But that was not as bad as the ones that were still alive.

  She quickened her pace, as eager to be away from the moans of the maimed and dying subhumans as she was to learn the fate of King and his team. As she went along, a feeling of dread settled into the pit of her stomach. Her worst fears were confirmed when she stepped out into the hangar.