by Ani Fox
Pina had the demonic look of curiosity and, to his credit, Harv looked like he might puke. I liked him more for it. But sadly, I knew my trade and what happened next might save a few lives, mine foremost among them. I held up my hand, pointed at the ballroom’s bay window, and they all went quiet. “Here’s what’s going to happen. In a few seconds a very large helicopter will be at that window. So make me a hole for extraction. All of you except Pierre and me will be on it as soon as the lines are tossed. We go last because we have a phone call to make.”
Harv nodded twice and made some quick hand signals. His shooters had the whole window cleared four seconds later. They took up guard stations scanning the sky and adjacent buildings for movement. The bird showed up thirteen seconds late, her guns firing. Something a few floors down went thud splat boom and the floor shook. The smell of cordite seeped through the vents. I saw Crazy George at the controls give me a thumbs up, and then he rammed the tiltrotor’s tail assembly into the middle of the ballroom leaving Team Spetz a mere two meter jump into the body of the aircraft. A man in an orange jumpsuit with a pilot’s helmet hopped out on a line and slapped down a genuine navy issue gangplank bright blue with handrails and non-slip flooring over that gap. Team Spetz had a bridge.
He saw me, gave me the signal for departure, and I mimicked a harness and held up two fingers. Somewhere on the other side a gunner opened up with the fifty caliber. The clatter was deafening, louder than the screech of the rotors that missed the building by a meter or so. A few seconds later, one of Harv’s shooters ran out to us with two harnesses, lines attached. I handed one to Pierre and pulled mine on, tightening it with several harsh pulls. Then I checked his, yanking on a buckle that cut off his circulation in several delicate spots.
When everyone was aboard, they dumped the plank and the same faceless orange man waved at me and made that most welcome signal, the whirling bird.
I put my mouth next to Pierre’s good ear and shouted, “Call them. Say you saw Karthago’s people leave her. They took some kind of chopper. She’s using the elevator shafts and should be ground floor in under thirty seconds.” Then, before he could respond, I cut open his shoulder, ripped out the transmitter with a large chunk of his warm flesh and rammed it into the neck of the boiling corpse. He screamed until I backhanded him with my offhand. I could see the CV22 starting to tilt forward. Our ride was leaving. “Make the damned call.” He looked at my face and the bloody knife in my hands then flipped open the lighter.
Now here’s a trick for those who’ve never been ripped out of a building in the middle of a battle. Don’t fight it. You’re going to get your ass kicked no matter what. Expect some serious bruises. That macho thing where the hero flies out with one little cut on his cheek and somehow stays upright as a megaton bird stutters through some urban wasteland: total BS. Mostly you come out upside down, face dragging on the floor and windows, ass end to bullets and hostile buildings with their unforgiving walls and, if you’re lucky, you manage not to break too many bones. I pinned La Flambé to my stomach, tucked my head, and let them drag us backwards out of the hotel into New York airspace.
Pierre, for his part, screamed in pain and fear, rasping like a man barely able to breathe. Which he was. That helped sell the story. As we slid out of the building, I knocked the lighter out of his hand. It joined the chaos we left behind. Then the drop started at the same time the winch yanked us hard. I’d been smart to go out backwards because we spun and ended upside down, twisting like pinwheels when George banked our beast and started a kamikaze run down Madison Avenue, dropping low to give people on the eighth and ninth floors a shock. With ten meters of line to pay back in, we dangled above traffic in a most disconcerting fashion.
Section 22’s explosives dropped the block and a hypersonic shockwave rammed us down and forward. I don’t know if we hit an actual car roof or some piece of a building clipped us. I just felt my left arm go numb, the sky turned black, and then I saw endless fire. Endless years later they hauled us aboard and slammed the doors shut.
Pina looked down at me, her eyes unwavering and clear. “How’d you borrow this?” I knew she meant the tiltrotor.
I laughed because we were still alive and the pure genius of my plan was going to absolutely ruin Harv’s day. “Oh no. It’s stolen. As in the entire goddamn American military will be looking for this. Right. Now.” The look on Harv’s face made the whole thing entirely worthwhile. Then as I slipped into darkness, a strange thought hit me. Maybe I should take the job after all.
Chapter 4
The World Ends Not with a Bang but a Bargain
I came to with a woman’s face looking me over. She had cropped black hair and very green eyes. She wasn’t quite beautiful, but I’d always found her appealing. It helped that she was a fellow Ukrainian. It took me a few moments to realize she wore an orange jumpsuit and was the pilot who’d guided us aboard. Hmm. Somebody had been eating their Wheaties.
“Nadya.”’ My voice came out as a croak.
Nadya Karkova, the mother of the famed Karkova sisters, gave me a rare smile. Then she spoke my name with patronymic. I gave her a rare smile back and felt warm fingers grip my right hand. Then we turned to ice. I felt before I saw the immobilizing splint on my left arm.
“Dislocated. Not broken.” She gave me the inventory in Russian. “Bruises across your entire spine, several cuts, eardrum on your right side looks dicey, and you’ve got a piece of shrapnel in your right ankle that appears to be stuck to the bone. No bleeding.”
I nodded. “How long was I out?”
She shrugged. “Three, four minutes?” We were already over water. So, maybe twenty minutes, which meant something had transpired that she felt beneath conversation. I looked around. We still had eleven from the hotel plus La Flambé. A couple of the lunks looked as if they were going to have shiners in a few hours. Also, none of the gunsels were armed. Only my people, Harv, and his shooters. Interesting. Nadya gave me a challenging look so I shrugged in return.
“Three minutes it is.”
She thumbed over to the Pina and Harv. “Hostages?”
I shook my head. “Guests. For now.”
Harv caught that part and looked unhappier for it. Pina just stared out the windows, watching the water. Thinking of something certainly but she had an unreadable face.
Harv squinted then leaned forward and yelled. “What next?”
Nadya showed him. She signaled to a pair of mute thugs in the rear loading bay who had unhooked a SEAL zodiac then started battening down supplies and arms onto its edges. “In five minutes we will put you to sea.”
Pina gave us her attention. “Please explain,” she asked.
I sat up, propping myself against a bench. Everything hurt. “We need to get clear and stay clear. They will have satellite tracking up soon and once they hack into global systems, everything on the grid will be fair game. The ocean screws with radio signals, mutes sound, hides small boats and rafts and generally makes a terrible place to run a search.” She nodded. “Everything the Americans have will be aimed at this Cee Vee until it lands or has been shot down. We stole it nice and openly, in front of a few hundred police officers and military personnel. Until the hysteria dies down, the alphabet agencies and their shadow brethren play second fiddle to the military. We are at war. Open, messy, slow war.” I saw the truth dawn upon her.
“So Section Twenty Two has to wait. Has to bide its time and track us after the navy has tried and failed.”
No slow one, Karthago, and she knew it’d be the Navy going after a spec ops tilt-rotor. “Precisely. So while we have perhaps a thousand times the pursuit we’d have normally, it’s got the effectiveness of any loud panicked manhunt, only with politicians adding helpful suggestions since we just manufactured a terrorist event.”
This got the whole cabin’s attention. Oh, when they fully understood what I’d done. “You can’t blame the sudden destruction of several square blocks of Manhattan on a gas main if the Marines’ stolen attac
k chopper has been sighted at the scene, opens fire, and then escapes down Madison Avenue.” Blank faces watched me. I waited for another few seconds. “They’ll call the president. Scramble jets, lock down airspace, signal High Alert. Every watch list will go live, every known agent will be watched, teams will be assembled to find out who’s missing, who’s made calls, who’s been playing spy.”
Harv started to laugh. “You just blew a whole segment of the intelligence community. Not just Section Two Two, but all the Russians and Koreans watching them. They’ll deport them by the dozen.”
“It’s better than that. They will crucify their own networks, looking for the mole. Within hours they will find my reroute orders and realize it’s an inside job. For the next week, the global intelligence community will be at war, trying to find the bastards who blew up New York and eventually somebody honest will find Hans. Too many pieces moved in advance, too many little mistakes from Roger getting his people to shadow your people. It will kill a portion of the Syndicate and everybody else. It’s Ragnarok.”
Pina looked none too pleased. “If I recall my Poetic Edda correctly, all the gods die along with humanity. I assume in this metaphor you have made us the gods, yes?”
I rose and started grabbing gear. Nadya followed me, helping strap, stow, stash, and otherwise bundle the stuff I was taking with my right hand. “Most of the gods die. Yes. Then humanity rebuilds and so do the gods.”
In the cockpit, I saw George make some adjustments and the bird started to coast down towards the surface. The radar was lit like a furnace with glowing coals. They had at least thirty aircraft up hunting us, some of them Mach capable fighters. Without looking back, he sported another thumbs up. They’d handle it. Fair enough. I looked for some cold weather gear and Nadya, seeing what I was looking for, handed me a bundle of coats and space blankets. We walked back towards the zodiac. When I dumped my gear, I turned and met Pina’s clear dangerous eyes.
“Let’s be clear. Hans and company mean to kill you all. They won’t have made a move without planning this down to the finest detail. You not dying today shouldn’t matter much. The Syndicate, the Internationale, most of the smaller agencies and mafiyas and such, they are about to be exterminated. Then leaders and governments and oligarchs. He means to take it all. For him, this is the end of days, Armageddon.”
She frowned. “Ragnarok is just the Norse apocalypse.”
“No.” I motioned Nadya who started prepping the boat. Whatever she had slipped into me while I was unconscious had started working. My pain eased up and my little bots, slow and steady, would keep inflammation and infection at bay. “It’s the end of the calendar, the end of an era. In Abschnitt’s scenario you all die. The world is enslaved and one god remains to rule us all. In mine, we start anew, smaller and cleaner, with a fertile world cleansed of riffraff.”
“Hans means to kill you too.”
I gave her a curt bow. “Thus I have saved your lives and gotten you to a place where you can make your own decisions about retaliation.” She was also telling me she knew I’d come for more than an interview.
“Because it serves your purposes?” She truly didn’t understand why I’d done it. Maybe she did need someone like me. Littman beside her seemed equally nonplussed.
Likely I’d never see them again. “It’s like whoever Roger really was told you, I’m pretty simple deep down. Incorruptible. It offends me to have you killed when I can save you. It violates my sense of honor, my purpose to let Gutlicht prevail.”
The bird leveled out and I could see we were a few meters above the chop. I motioned to the raft. “In a minute, I’m taking this out on to the water. Somewhere a few miles from here, I have a fishing trawler rigged for a long haul. You can come or you can stay. George, Nadya, and their team will be leaving shortly and would, in all likelihood, be delighted to sell you this Osprey for …”
Nadya gave them a hard stare. “Five million Euros.” Damn. That was painfully cheap.
“…five million Euros. From each of them. Or jump. We have chutes and inflatables. Your call.”
Pina cocked her head and that incandescent smile crossed her lips. Her eyes stayed cold and deep. “They won’t come with you?”
“My people are out and will stay out. I interviewed, they didn’t.” I waved at the cabin with my good hand. “They consider today a bit of fun for old times’ sake.” I left off the threat that if Pina or Harv tried to pull them back in, I’d make sport of wiping out their organization. They knew, and I knew they knew. Just calling off my hunt long enough to save their lives seemed overly generous.
Littman rose and started looking over the remaining gear. The Special Forces had loaded the tilt rotor as if hunting for bear. He found much that pleased him. His two shooters followed, a pair of tigers carefully avoiding Nadya. Ahh, so it had been a near lethal incident. Perhaps Pina had tried to take charge. Or one of her men. Which meant that Nadya would kill them out of hand if I left them aboard. That complicated things somewhat.
Harv caught Pina’s eye. “What’s the word, boss?”
She turned to me. “If I come with you, what then?”
And here it was. She was actually asking me about my commitment to her fight. Would I throw in with her? Or was she? In my prior days as an operative, I’d always been the underdog. Outmanned, outgunned, often with insignificant resources. Just me. And it had carved my mind into a tactical scalpel of sorts. I know my limits. I’m no good at the Grand Game. I’m no Mycroft or Moriarty. In my own way, I’m so much more dangerous than they. I’m the spoiler, the unpredictable seat of the pants wrecking crew that shoots that one guy you needed to open the safe to do the thing that launches the other thing.
Why had Section 22 gone after us then and there? If Roger… If Section 22’s impostor had wanted me dead, he could have had me shot any time in the prior month. Logic dictated that he simply didn’t merit me a threat. So, fact: Section 22 had not planned on killing me today. I was part of a package deal, a sort of lagniappe. Why? Why rule me out? Maybe for the same reason no one expected me to come. I had folded my cards and walked away from the game without a peep for so long I’d been forgotten.
And only returned because random tragedy had screwed up a perfectly good plan to never work again. That was it. In chaos theory there’s a notion that random things happen because the system needs to move towards order. So the universe just threw a big wrench in the works of whatever larger plan Gutlicht and San Valentin were playing out between themselves. Pure random chance. No one had figured me into their plans; not Pina, not Hans, not our enemies or allies. I had done something surprising and been at the right place at the right time. Or if you’re a religious soul, then Fate had lent her fickle hand and pushed me right smack into the middle of the largest covert war since the Berlin Blockade.
Logically, we’d be counted as dead until they could dig out the bodies. I had seen the lighter radio hit the ballroom floor and the trooper’s body would yield La Flambé’s tracker, both close enough to be plausibly linked. Having worked crime scenes, especially bombings, I knew no one would second guess the evidence. Not even the ultra-paranoid Cassandra. We had a few days’ time to do something before San Valentin or Gutlicht, or both of them, figured out the truth. Or didn’t. All we had to do was not make noise and we were ghosts.
What did I want to do? I was free in a way I hadn’t been perhaps in my adult life. No ties, not even reckoned alive. I could stay dead for a very long time. Likely long enough to no longer matter to these maniacs. The world was mine. Or a version of it. I had money stashed. Safe houses. Tools and contacts. I could be out of the Game, free to be rich, decadent and bored beyond reason. Ahh, and there it was. To thine own self be true. My head felt so damned good, my whole body singing with adrenaline. Chaos, war, death, and destruction gave me the warm fuzzies.
No. Not chaos and war. I realized as I stood there, the fractions of seconds crystallizing into a coherent understanding. A single true thought. An ugly but enduri
ng truth. Purpose gave me warm fuzzies. How does it go, David’s Psalm?
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful…
Was I to be the body knit together by the Abschnitt or the soul knit together by Fate? It’s a strange thing to get philosophical in the body of warbird hounded by enemies, but perhaps this was after all King David’s point. He, after all, knew a lot about long odds and hiding from assassins. By all accounts, he would carry that damned lyre around and strum the thing at inopportune times, talking about the Lord God and such. I was just having a quick existential moment by comparison. So, Pina was asking, who owned me? I had to be certain about my family and, right now, Hans and team had just blown my best chance for immediate answers.
I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
“Come with me and find out. The ship has some amenities and it’s got enough petrol to get us past the Bay of Fundy.” I assumed from the slant of the sun that George had put us in a race to the north. It would make the Canadians scramble too. Nothing screamed terrorism as loud as International Incident.
She smiled and the cabin felt tighter. “You’re not going to tell me?”
“Operationally, it’s a bad move. I trust you, Harv, the shooters my people left armed. But your goons there clearly forgot to say please.” I pointed at the closest gunsel, sporting what was now definitely shaping into a large facial bruise. “So, no, Pina, I am most definitively not giving away more of my plans in front of my potential enemies.”
