Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8)

by Jeremy Robinson

  With another inhuman cry of agony, Joe heaved himself through the opening and out into the night.

  Queen broke free of Knight’s bear hug. She reached the door just in time to see Joe’s body impact the snow-covered plateau. The helicopter was only about fifty feet above the ground, hovering, close enough that the rotor blades were churning up a tornado of blowing snow.

  King’s voice sounded inside her head. “Queen, what’s happening back there?”

  “It’s Joe,” she shouted. “He fell out. We need to land.”

  “No.” Knight cut in. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

  Queen couldn’t believe her ears. “We can’t just leave—”

  Knight’s face was a grim mask. He pulled her back and slammed the door. “If we stay here, we’re all dead. He knew it. That’s why he sacrificed himself.”

  “Moving from where we are would be a really bad idea,” Rook put in. “They’re looking for us.”

  “Staying will be even worse,” Knight said. “I don’t know what happened to him, but he’s throwing off enough radiation that I can see him through the door.”

  “Firebird,” King muttered. Then in louder voice, he said, “Knight, you better not be wrong. Rook. Go!”

  “Go where?” Even as Rook asked the question, the aircraft began to move, tilting and accelerating away from the shelter of the stone pillars.

  “Anywhere but where we were,” Knight said. “I don’t know—”

  That was the last moment Queen would remember before the world turned upside down.

  37

  Knight’s warning, and Rook’s subsequent quick action, were the only reasons why they were not instantly vaporized or smashed into a pulp. The shock wave created a moving front of air as hard as a concrete wall, and the secondary explosion as the aircraft was ripped apart in mid-air by some combination of those factors would have killed them. But they were more than a quarter of a mile away when it happened. A delay of just two more seconds—one even—would have put them that much closer to the blast, guaranteeing their deaths.

  That they survived what happened next owed more than anything to simple luck.

  For several seconds, or maybe minutes, after everything stopped moving, King’s brain was like a computer struggling to resolve a logic error. It was locked up and not responding. Too much data flooded the processor, every sensory organ demanding first priority.

  Light. Heat. Motion. Noise. Pain.

  Cause or effect? Impossible to tell the difference.

  Do you wish to close the operation?

  Yes, he thought with a groan, but [Control+Alt+Delete] wasn’t going to get him out of this mess. He opened his eyes, and even before the world around him came into view, he caught a whiff of a weird odor, like rotten fish with just a hint of ozone.

  The smell—burning electrical insulation from a short in the helicopter’s wiring—broke the processing deadlock.

  We crashed, he thought. Why did we crash?

  We were tumbling, out of control, damaged by the blast.

  What blast?

  Had there been another missile? He could not recall another warning from the alert system, but he did remember a disturbance inside the helicopter. Something about Joe…

  Forget that. There’s a fire. You need to get the hell out.

  The world came into focus, though he couldn’t see much in the darkness. The indicator lights on the control panel were dark. The only light was a faint purple glow, entering the aircraft above a jagged horizontal line that bisected the windshield.

  King intuited several pieces of information from that observation, but the most important takeaway was that the helicopter was upright and at least partially intact.

  He felt a glimmer of hope.

  “Rook!” He turned his head, which did not hurt as much as he thought it would, and saw the silhouette of his teammate, strapped into the pilot’s seat. The only answer he received was an incoherent mumble, but that was better than he had dared hope for. “Shake it off,” he said, as much to himself as Rook. “We need to evac, pronto.”

  Now that he was finally hitting on all cylinders, he realized that the smell was starting to diminish. The electrical short had evidently burned itself out without starting a fire. That meant at least one potential threat could be taken off the board. Unfortunately, there were still plenty more on the list.

  King tried to get up, then realized that he was still belted in to the co-pilot’s seat. He had no memory of buckling in, but doing so had definitely saved him some pain and suffering, if not a lot more. As he fumbled with the clasp, he called out again. “Anyone else? Sitrep. Sound off.”

  In the long silence that followed, he could hear the incessant ticking of the turbines cooling and the groan of the airframe flexing and settling.

  Finally, a voice sounded in his ear.

  “I’m here,” Knight said. His voice was a sluggish mumble, like someone awakened suddenly from a dead sleep. “I mean, Knight here. I’m okay. I think I’m okay.”

  King got the buckle loose and slid out of his seat. A quick check of Rook showed no visible signs of trauma, but King knew looks could be deceiving. Often the deadliest injuries could not be readily detected. He gently shook the other man’s shoulder. “Rook. Talk to me.”

  “Auntie Em, is that you?” Rook mumbled, his eyes opening. “Oh. Looks like I stuck the landing. I’ll understand if you want to change your mind about making me the team pilot. Unless you came across an elephant with a really small—” Rook’s eyes went wide. “Queen!”

  He exploded out of his seat belt, pushing past King in his haste to reach the passenger cabin. King understood his urgency. Queen meant the world to Rook. King was worried about her, too, just as he was worried about his mother and Bishop. They were all family to him, whether related by blood or not. That was one reason he had not passed Rook by. Another was that he did not want to face what might be waiting for him in the cabin alone.

  He was relieved to discover everyone alive, and to varying degrees, well. Queen and Bishop were coming around, with a little coaxing from Rook and Knight respectively. The jolt of the shockwave had thrown them against the bulkhead, but the g-forces of the sudden acceleration had held them there through the ensuing tumble across the sky. A second impact had come with deceleration, leaving all of them rattled like the marble in a spray paint can. Luckily, their injuries were no more serious than bruises and strained muscles. Lynn, securely buckled in her seat, had come through with the least to complain about.

  In the brief time it took to assess everyone’s condition and remove the possibility of an unmanageable injury from the threat list, King became aware of another danger that he had forgotten to take into account.

  It was getting cold.

  With no power, the metal skin of the aircraft was rapidly conducting away all the heat from the interior. The crashed helicopter was turning into an enormous freezer. For the rest of the team, dressed in winter gear, that would merely be a source of discomfort. But King and Lynn had lost their heavy coats during their arrest in Moscow.

  “Head’s up, everyone.” When he had their attention, King went on. “First priority is SERE.” SERE was a military acronym that stood for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. “Our most immediate survival concern is the cold. Look for blankets, or anything mom and I can stuff in our clothes for insulation. Seat cushions, paper, anything that will help us conserve body heat.”

  Bishop immediately shrugged out of the heavy parka she was wearing and draped it over Lynn’s shoulders. It was a valiant gesture, but it did not change the equation. Now, instead of Lynn freezing to death, it would be Bishop.

  “Get to it,” King said. “Talk and work. While you’re at it, keep an eye out for supplies we might need—food, first aid kits, fuel for a fire.”

  The five of them went to work, searching the aircraft for anything that might help forestall hypothermia. Bishop and Queen began searching the various supply cabinets, whi
le Knight and Rook started tearing down sheets of noise-dampening foam insulation from the ceiling. King stuffed pieces of the foam under his shirt. He did not notice an immediate improvement, but he knew it would help immensely for what would have to happen next.

  “Evasion is our second problem,” he said, as they began tearing apart the aircraft like scavenger ants. “They’ve probably already figured out that we’re down. It won’t be long before they send someone to investigate. We need to be long gone when they get here. So, in addition to everything else, keep your eyes peeled for anything we can use to make snowshoes, skis…maybe a sled we can pull.”

  “Got a destination in mind?” Queen asked.

  King nodded. “Resistance. Or in this case, accomplishing our objective.” His gaze flitted just for a moment to the empty chair beside Lynn, where he had last seen Master Sergeant Joseph Hager. “Our secondary objective,” he clarified. “We’re going to take down that research facility.”

  Although none of them said a word, or even so much as twitched a facial muscle, their silence spoke volumes. It was as easy to interpret. They had barely escaped, and now he was asking them to hump twenty or thirty miles through a frozen wilderness to go on the offensive against an inhuman enemy, about which they knew almost nothing.

  “Well, at least it’s someplace warm,” Rook muttered.

  “We’re going to make it a lot warmer.” King turned to Bishop. “You brought demo, right?”

  She nodded uncertainly. “A few pounds for breaching charges.”

  “That place is off the grid. I’m guessing they’ve got a small nuclear reactor buried deep under the levels we saw. We blow that and the place is toast.”

  Queen mustered an outward display of confidence. “The ventilation system is that place’s Achilles’s Heel. We got in before, we can do it again. They probably won’t expect that.”

  “What about Julie?” Lynn asked.

  King gave his mother a hard look. “I came to terms with losing Julie a long time ago. That woman—Catherine, or whatever she wants to call herself—is with the enemy. She condoned torture and medical experimentation on a prisoner, and she’s up to her neck in plans for total war with the United States. If I see her, I’ll kill her myself.”

  He looked away quickly so he wouldn’t have to see Lynn’s reaction.

  “While we’re on the subject,” Queen said, turning to Knight, “what the hell happened to Joe?”

  “I only know what I saw. He started throwing off… Well, I’m not sure what it was, but the eye picked it up. There was a lot of it.”

  King knew that Knight had a new bionic eye, but he wasn’t up to speed on its functionality.

  Lynn spoke up, evidently over the earlier topic. “Joe had radiation sickness. Could that be what you were seeing?”

  Deep Blue, who had been listening silently over the comm, now spoke up. “In backscatter mode, the eye is a passive radiation detector, but you get radiation sickness from exposure to radiation. You’d have to be pretty badly irradiated to actually start emitting ionizing radiation. And you would have noticed it from the first moment you saw him.”

  “I only know what I saw,” Knight said. “All of a sudden, it looked like his skeleton was trying to burn its way out of his body. And it was getting more intense by the second. Like he was building up to critical mass.”

  Rook straightened as if at last connecting the dots. “That was what exploded? A person?”

  Knight nodded uncertainly. “I think so.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Our bodies are seventy percent water, and the water molecule is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, the same stuff that rocket fuel is made from. It’s just a question of creating the right conditions.” Deep Blue sounded somber over the comm.

  “Turning people into walking bombs.” Queen shook her head. “The next evolution of suicide bombers.”

  “Damn,” Rook said. “No vest needed. Just walk up and go boom.”

  “What about the radiation Knight saw?” Queen asked. “Are we talking a nuclear explosion?”

  “If it was,” Deep Blue replied, “I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”

  “Blue, Julie told me…” King stopped himself. “The Russians are working on something called Firebird. Ring any bells?”

  “Nothing relevant. I’ll run it past Admiral Ward.”

  “It has something to do with genetic engineering.” He didn’t go into detail on how he had come by that information, and no one asked. “They must have tested it on Joe. The only question is whether it was supposed to do what it did, or if something went wrong. We’ll try to get whatever intel we can, but shutting it down is now our primary objective.”

  “Which just leaves us with ‘escape,’” Queen said. “You got a plan for that?”

  “I’m not sure any of this qualifies as a plan,” King admitted. “But if we make it that far, I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

  “So business as usual,” Rook remarked.

  “Pretty much.” King checked his watch. It had been nearly fifteen minutes since the crash. “All right, save any other questions for later. It’s time to go.”

  Rook threw back the sliding door to reveal a snowdrift completely blocking their way. “This is off to a great start,” he said, as he began cautiously pushing the accumulation out of the way.

  The drift was several feet thick, almost completely burying the helicopter, but the snow that had piled up around the stricken aircraft had not been caused by the weather. In fact, a hundred yards or so beyond the crash site, the ground had been virtually scoured clean, revealing bare rock at the bottom of a shallow ring-shaped crater. The edge of the crater curved away in either direction as far the eye could see. At the center of it, silhouetted in the pre-dawn twilight, King could just make out the seven colossal stone pillars, likewise stripped of ice and snow by the blast that had brought them down.

  “What are those?” Bishop asked.

  King turned to find his sister supporting Lynn, and both of them staring at the distant columns with the same perplexed familiarity he felt.

  “Those are the Man Poo Poo Rocks,” Rook supplied with a professorial air. “According to legend, seven Russian giants took a shi—”

  King cut him off. “Mom, do you recognize them? Have you been here before?”

  Lynn shook her head, but her gaze never left the stone pillars. “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “They look different,” Bishop said.

  Lynn nodded. “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Different? How so?” King hoped one of them would be able to answer the question, because he felt the same way.

  “I don’t know,” Bishop admitted. “I’ve never seen them before. Never even heard of something called ‘Man Poo Poo.’”

  “It’s Manpupuner,” King said, shooting a scowl in Rook’s direction.

  “The three of you,” Queen drew an imaginary circle in the air with her finger, “are sharing a memory.”

  “You mean like ancestral memory?” King asked.

  “Something profound happened to one of your ancestors here,” Queen went on. “Something that got written into your DNA.”

  “We need to go there, Jack.” Lynn’s voice was calm, but there was an undercurrent of urgency in her tone. King picked up on it immediately, because he felt it, too. But there were other concerns he couldn’t ignore.

  “We’ll look as we go by,” he said, even though technically they would have to go out of their way a little to reach it.

  Although the bottom of the blast crater looked like bare rock, they quickly discovered that it was covered in a thin layer of slick ice that had formed from snow, vaporized by the blast. Not surprisingly, the explosion itself was a topic that no one seemed interested in discussing. Joe had been one of them, a fellow Delta shooter. His horrible death was not just evidence of the enemy’s brutality, but also of their own failure to bring their fallen comrade home.

  It to
ok a full fifteen minutes to traverse the distance to the pillars, partly because of the treacherous conditions and partly because Lynn, over her protests, had to be carried in a makeshift litter. Nevertheless, as they drew nearer to the pillars, King felt with increasing certainty that it had been the right decision.

  The immense pillars loomed over them, some twenty stories high. As they drew closer to the source of the explosion, King saw that dirt and frozen tundra had been scraped away along with the snow. The blast had revealed grooves in the bare rock. The channels were too straight and smooth to be the work of nature. As before, he was haunted by the sense that something important, something he should remember, had been erased from existence by the passage of so many millennia.

  “King!” It was Knight. “There’s something here you should see.”

  Knight had followed one of the grooves to where it disappeared into the stone, near the base of a pillar. “There’s a void just underneath the surface.”

  “X-ray vision, huh? That’s handy.”

  “It’s not like it sounds,” Knight replied, sounding a little defensive.

  “I’m sure it’s not,” King said with a grin. Even without the ability to see through solid matter, he had no difficulty visualizing what Knight was describing. The channels were just that, part of a system to shunt rainwater runoff and seasonal snowmelt into a subterranean water supply system.

  How did I know that?

  If Queen was right about the memory of this place being imprinted in his DNA, then one of his ancestors, perhaps the very descendant of Alexander Diotrephes that had established the Machtchenko branch of the family tree in Russia, had explored the lost giant city and all its mysteries. Or maybe that ancestor had found the city by following the same ancestral memory, a memory that stretched back much further into the past—before even Alexander himself.

  Julie would have known about it, too, he thought.

  “Julie told me that the research facility was built on the ruins of an ancient lost city. She called it Volosgrad.”

  “City of Volos,” Deep Blue muttered.

  “This is an aqueduct. It leads straight to a reservoir in the lowest levels of the ancient city.” King looked up at the others. “This is our way in.”