The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  When two equally skilled unarmed combatants meet, the bigger man wins; often strength and size will outclass the best infighter. He had me on weight, height, raw strength, and pure fighting ability. More than that, he felt little pain and he could absorb unthinkable punishment in the pursuit of finishing me. I was majorly outclassed and he was opting to limit my ability to flee. With a half second lead, I could pull a hand gun and kill him. As long as he stayed close to me and kept doling out punishment, I was a dead man.

  So I changed the rules. I needed a weapon and I made Dieter give it to me. I met his advance with my left forearm, trapping his arm against my chest and heaving into the truck a second time, which pinned his dominant hand. He had planned that and struck with his left knee. I had my right arm poised, elbow down to receive the incoming blow. Normally Dieter would have shattered both my radius and ulna with a blow that intense. So far, the combat had gone just as the bigger man had set it up, trading on my panic to make a rookie mistake. No one rational let Dieter Graves inside their guard to strike at full force. Certainly no one put themselves into a position where could break a bone.

  What happened made all that driving discomfort worthwhile. His left knee connected with the spike edge of the night stick strapped to my right arm. The force of the attack made every joint in my arm shriek and most of it was being taken by the sharpened wood. The tonfa shattered and a large chunk popped forward into my right hand. Some pieces broke off into my shirt, and a large stake with jagged edges slid away from my accelerating arm, stuck fast between Dieter’s kneecap and lower leg.

  I hammered the bridge of his nose with the wooden handle. It knocked his head back, forcing him off balance. He wouldn’t feel the pain, but for a moment he had lost his front leg, was bent over his back foot, and still pinned against the vehicle. I was still on the losing end of the fight, he was simply that good. So I got extreme. I leapt onto him, placing my right foot behind the spike in his leg and using it as a stabilizer. I rammed my left knee into his floating ribs and, reversing the broken wood, plunged the sharpest portion of the broken stick into his neck near the jugular vein and carotid artery.

  His knee gave out with a splendid rip, tearing the kneecap free. It also toppled him on top of me. Blood splattered everywhere and, while he was still moving, I’d at least nicked an artery. He ripped his right arm free and started choking me in the dirt, an arm choke that felt like a freight train crushing my neck. I’d been strangled in a fight several times and had the presence of mind not to panic. I turned my head slightly to make sure I didn’t lose consciousness immediately. I couldn’t breathe but I knew I would survive thirty seconds without breathing. As long as I could manage to keep my neck from being crushed, I might yet live.

  With my left arm, I put pressure on Dieter’s right elbow, enough to lessen the choke hold. I wrapped my legs around him and squeezed, forcing his bad leg to bear more weight. His grip on my neck slacked. Then, with all the force I could muster, I dragged that wooden spike sideways through his neck, shaking my hand back and forth like I was scrambling eggs. The unexpected side effect was that I hooked his clavicle and, pushing with my left and pulling with right, rolled him to his side. He kept the arm choke on me and despite the bad angle, I could not breathe. I didn’t try. I still had fifteen seconds left. Dieter did not.

  I pulled the spike from his leg with my right hand, reversed it, and then gently slid it up to under his left jaw. He was so intent on killing me, he didn’t realize what was about to happen. I didn’t give him a chance. I drove the spike as far into his brain as I could, then repeated the scrambled eggs motion once I felt it hit the inside of his skull. Dieter stopped killing me, then a fraction of a second later, simply spasmed and stopped moving. His artery pumped blood for another moment then his heart stopped. All went quiet.

  We’d been fighting for perhaps fifteen seconds total. Neither of us had made a sound other than dull grunts. In the dark, it was unclear whether anyone even realized we’d fought. I rolled over, took a breath, and pulled one of the Glocks from my back holster. If Dieter was here, then other agents would also be here. For all I knew, he sacrificed himself to allow a second agent a chance to kill me. After the suicide soccer mom, I couldn’t afford to take chances.

  Around me, the wounded screamed and someone started giving orders in German. I crept around the truck in a knee high duck walk, trying not rasp as I sucked in desperate breaths. Everything hurt, every breath like a flaming javelin running up and down my esophagus. I ignored it, distracting myself by translating the German.

  Where is he?

  Find him, kill him!

  Flank clear! Rear clear!

  I knew they were coming, the ones still able to fight. I slid under the truck and waited, lurking in the shadows. Six pairs of boots crunched past me, all moving slowly. These were the walking wounded. I waited. Someone confident and upright entered from the front. He had shoes rather than boots and they looked expensive.

  “Report Over, Lieutenant.” I knew the voice from somewhere. Likely it was one of Dieter’s brothers. He had four, all big dangerous men.

  “Yes, Captain Schmidt. So far, no sign of him. Dieter is dead, stabbed it looks like.” Damn, damn, damn! If Section 22 had a Mystery Shopper, Schmidt would be it. He was vile, sadistic, inventive with his cruelty, and absolutely deadly. I’d seen him catch a grenade while sprinting through a firefight and use it to kill someone else. He’d been shot point blank in the face and lived—twice. He was legendary for his recuperative powers. He’d been poisoned, stabbed, hung, burned alive (although likely that was an exaggeration) and held underwater for half an hour, yet he lived. Worse, he had phenomenal senses. He could, and would, track me by scent. The only thing saving me was the hellacious stink of burning helicopter and Dieter’s blood splashed everywhere.

  Come to think of it, I’d been saved often by the amount of smoke and mayhem I kept creating. If I started to rely on that, someone would find a way around it. I needed to get subtle. Subtler than Schmidt would expect. But I was trapped under a truck with limited options and a cocked Glock as my only immediate defense.

  While Section 22 has been lauded for its extraordinary leaps in eugenics and the almost magic way nanotechnology had upgraded their combat capabilities, no one can evade physics. Not even Gunther Schmidt. For example, physics teaches us much about the speed of electrical impulses in the body. Reaction time varies on a number of factors but is never immediate. If the subject is in shock, if he’s been knocked over like a bowling pin, then his reaction time will be less than optimal.

  I fired point blank into Schmidt’s nearest ankle, a shot that covered less than two meters. The muzzle energy released from a Glock .40 caliber bullet can kill a man via hydrostatic shock, a fancy way of saying it hits so hard the shockwave fries your brain. Schmidt snapped like a marionette being tossed the floor. Before anyone could recover, I started putting shots into ankles and legs.

  I can credibly aim and hit a target two or three times a second. That meant I needed at least two seconds to pull off this attack. By my third shot, the commandos had started to rally but had not realized where the shots had come. Two knelt down and paid the ultimate price. The last standing commando started to turn when I blew apart his shin.

  Once they were down, I emptied the clip into them, trying to spread the damage between the bodies. I was going for fast over accurate. Fast was enough to kill them all. The moment the bullets ran out, I shimmed away from them, leaving the gun, pulled the other Glock, and rounded the truck to survey the rest of the blockade site. When no one fired at me, I pulled two grenades from my bandolier, armed them, and tossed them into the wounded men before retreating towards the site of the crash. The explosion rocked the trucks and shattered a window that had improbably survived the prior destruction.

  I circled the area twice before realizing I was alone. I circled it another three times putting shots into every head. As my eyes adjusted to light given off by the still flaming wreckage, I
saw that the men around me were not, as I had assumed, commandos. They were all agents of Section 22. The helicopter had been piloted by four blond gods, now so mangled it was an ordeal to make out their gender. It looked like the pilot who’d gone for the close kill was a tall woman. If she was Gen 15, like the rest of these people seemed to be, it had likely been Ute Eisherzen. For her it had been an uncharacteristic mistake.

  Unless they had been trying to capture me and she’d shot out the back of the Cayenne to run it off the road. That was a chilling thought. Almost anyone would prefer death to being tortured by Hans Gutlicht. I rifled through the wreckage, trucks, SUVs, helicopter. Then I rummaged through every pocket and glove compartment. The results delivered ghoulish stacks of tools, guns, money, IDs, and specialty items situated around the brightest fire for better inspection. Somewhere, I had acquired a good flashlight and that sped the search. I treated it like a crime scene. Either more agents were coming, in which case I liked my odds among the debris and shadows or I had all night.

  By dawn the flashlight had died and the fires burnt down to ash. I’d had to make a torch from gasoline and suit coats to continue. In all, Section 22 had sent ten men in the gunship. I found the six passengers splayed over a hill a klick away, their mangled bodies the only outsiders. From their gear, scars, lack of ID, and armaments, I figured them for the black ops team Wickham had put together. Or one of them.

  I found several small icons made of soapstone or some dark wood. Little carved things that looked like a cross between Quetzalcoatl and angel. On the bottom of each the word Unsterblichkeit had been carved. Immortality in German. Each of the owners had a small tattoo on their ankle in the shape of an infinity symbol. There was some Peruvian and Columbian money, a candy bar common to Brazil, and at least a dozen packs of Nevada brand cigarettes which are the top brand in Uruguay. I found in one pack of cigarettes a cipher with some German notation.

  Six black ops commandos and 47 Section 22 operatives had died here. It was unthinkable. I’d accidentally wiped out nearly all of Generation XV’s best people with a batch of smuggled C4. They’d impute some kind of fiendish genius to what had been a fairly suicidal disregard for safety and self-preservation. Fools.

  As dawn arrived, I made a table of a truck bed and laid out the passports. Between them, they had close to a hundred IDs. The black ops team had nothing, not even dental work that was easy to identify. I surveyed the IDs, looking for a pattern. It took me until breakfast, which was field rations from the backseat of a SUV that had survived the attack. I found some instant coffee as well. Over cold black coffee and hot brown meat that tasted like a rotting moose, the passports and driver’s licenses spoke to me. Almost everyone had a Uruguayan ID with Italian name. Addresses varied but none were from larger cities. There were a smattering of Brazilian IDs and a few duplicates with the same name in Columbia, Belize, and Peru. I studied them. They were not fakes, none of them. Someone had control of a government office and the ability to procure and distribute real identification.

  Coupled with the cigarettes and the idols, I could make a fair guess that Zeus’ cult had regrouped and were somewhere on the shores of Uruguay. None had jungle gear, nor were there telltale insect bites. They had strong, even tans including their feet, indicative of having been to the beach more than once and recently. It also meant that Zeus had been working with Wickham and that one of them had found a way to track me. I found the transmitter set up under the crushed console of a Suburban and the pieces fell into place. They had tracked Mika—once she had died. In a matter of minutes, they’d gotten the gunship airborne and, perhaps, with some luck had been able to throw up a pretty massive roadblock.

  It didn’t explain why so many of them were in Las Vegas. Unless Mika French and the CSS had some larger role to play in the Great Game for Wickham or Zeus. I had no one to ask. I drank more coffee and kept digging into the evidence. I looked at their guns. Guns are not an easy thing to acquire as some would have you believe, especially high powered, untraceable guns. So either these were registered weapons or someone had a cache. I took several of the assault rifles apart and found serial numbers scratched off. So, untraceable weapons had been acquired.

  If I wanted to grab a large cache of weapons, perhaps I would go to an ex-Mossad security firm. Better yet, if I were Hans, I’d contract with CSS to hold a bunch of crates for me in secure storage. That made more sense. It also gave Wickham an in with CSS, a reason to target them. I tried walking through various scenarios until I found one that had few contradictions and made the most sense. It didn’t make it right, but it was the least wrong.

  Zeus and Wickham came across one another in their travels and perhaps collaborated. One thing led to another and a quirky friendship sprang up. Zeus showed Wickham a few things and vice versa. They did one another a few favors. Then Zeus revealed his cult concept. He’d have wanted to test Wickham’s true loyalty to his future overlord early. Wickham saw a perfect sucker and catered to Zeus’ very large ego. Fast forward, the war had begun and allies that they are, Wickham kept arranging mishaps for Zeus on the one hand, and then loaning men, materials and intelligence to Zeus with the other. It’s gone badly for Zeus. Section 22’s lost too many agents, and the White God had been dropped in the ocean twice. Zeus wanted help hauling guns and Wickham offered the six men, no questions asked. He got the locations of a whole lot of stuff he wanted to commandeer after he wins. Zeus thought he had acquired some expendable hard asses to be spent instead of his brothers, sisters, and cousins. Then gunship met my handmade SUV bomb and boom.

  With the CSS building destroyed, and a huge portion of Section 22’s agents downed in one disastrous attack, Hans’ warfighting capability had been degraded. He’d lost his East Coast people, now Vegas was defunct. I’d made Canada a no man’s land for a week or two and cast a lot of suspicion on Florida via my gun runner identity theft. Right about then, Tony Credenza would have been blowing his stack and activating a lot of unwanted attention that made the southeast inopportune for The Web. That left the West Coast and Texas.

  I knew where Section 22’s Austin station chief lived and worked. I had a lot of guns, money, and ammunition, with a good smattering of spycraft tools. Other than my grenades and backpack of C4, I was entirely out of anything explosive, which might have been just as well. I’d been playing the mad bomber long enough. I had surveyed the vehicles and found a car Dieter had ditched a half klick further down the road. It had survived with a cracked rear window and a flat tire. The commandos had plenty of emergency tire repair kits—it’s kind of a necessity when you fight our style of warfare. I had the sedan roadworthy in ten minutes and loaded with my contraband not much later.

  I needed a shower and a place to make a phone call. There was a house in Flagstaff, Arizona that could provide me with both. I put the car in gear and started driving.

  Chapter 11

  R&R with A&D

  I pulled up to the house where Aidan and Declan No Last Name lived. They’d literally erased their last name on a dare and no one could find the original records. That’s how they came to my attention. They were completely outside the world of The Web, a couple of computer game obsessed kidults (a term they had to teach me which is short for kid-adult) who had almost reached their 30s but had re-mastered slacking and made it a kind of Zen art form. A&D, as they called themselves, funded all their fun by stealing software, mostly computer games and cheat codes, then reselling them via peer to peer file sharing sites. When last I’d asked them, they told me their net worth was something around 15 million in bitcoins. Neither law enforcement nor any agency had ever heard of them and they lived so minimum drag, I doubted anyone would ever discover them.

  The house was an unassuming adobe McMansion in the Flagstaff suburbs. It gleamed in the noonday sun, a taupe and glass monstrosity with little topiary shrubs of some hardy vintage and a lot of gray rocks, arranged in a riverbed meets sculpted chaos kind of look. Someone had probably charged them a fortune to make it so art
less. Besides their xeriscaping, a duo of outlandish sports cars sat in the driveway, daring the sun to despoil them. A&D traded up every eighteen months for new and better. One was some kind of silver Jaguar speedster and the other I knew, a Lamborghini Aventador, done out in cherry red with bumble bee yellow trim. Each had a plate with their names. Aidan owned the Jag, Declan was apparently now a Lambo kind of guy. The last time I’d spoke with him, he’d been tricking out Jeeps for survival in the wilds of Kaibab National Forest. Mostly he’d jacked into satellite signals and played games from the tricked out plasma monitor he’d rigged in his Jeep trunk while pretending to camp.

  I knocked politely and was met with “Dude, it’s open.”

  I walked in to scene of utter mayhem. The boys were sprawled on the living room floor, their couch had been tipped and around them were a series of cushions and blankets. They were playing some violent war game on twelve linked plasma screens that took up the entire front wall. On the floor lay the wastes of war: candy wrappers, some empty and half empty microwave popcorn bags, something called Doritos Collisions that came in a five pound bag, and a bunch of ugly triangles all over the shag carpet. Empty beer cans competed with soda bottles, some little Perrier bottles that looked like hand grenades, and a bottle of Dom Perignon that had been wedged into the fireplace grate like a door stop. There were several pizza boxes also pushed to one side, a stray slice of dead pepperoni hanging limply, the last of its kind.

  The brothers wore headsets over their dark hair, with big fuzzy microphones of safety orange. Declan, the taller and older brother, kept whispering into his mic, “Engage left, Python.” Aidan was moving some kind of glove controller while punching a set of buttons on his laptop. One of the 12 screens had an overlay with superimposed print—Cheats. Whenever Declan wanted a specific cheat, he’d tap his brother on the shoulder and make a rolling motion with his hand. When Aidan reached the right one, he’d motion stop, and then order Python, or someone named Wild Willie, to do something on the left.