JET - Sanctuary

by Blake, Russell

  Jet gave them a hushed last-minute summary, reiterated that her orders were to be followed to the letter, and then moved out, her stride fluid as she led them along the game trail, night vision goggles illuminating the dark with a neon glow.

  ~ ~ ~

  Drago climbed the final fifteen meters to the top of the peak adjacent to the outpost and stared down at it. He was surprised to see no military vehicles – only five SUVs arranged in a semicircle in front of the main building, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. He gazed down the twist of road and spotted the guards halfway to the bottom, no larger than ants from his vantage point, and then shifted his attention back to the center structure. A group of men in civilian clothes loitered around the front entrance, smoking and talking, their weapons hanging from shoulder straps or leaning against walls.

  He didn’t spend time dwelling on why there were no soldiers. It was immaterial to him. Perhaps the Chilean intelligence service had taken over the duty. What mattered was that his target was somewhere inside.

  He glanced around at the hillside, which was mostly rock with occasional scrub that had managed a toehold on the inhospitable slope. Perfect for his purposes. He’d been unsure that his plan would work until he’d arrived and seen the terrain, but it more than surpassed his expectations. There were plentiful boulders and evidence of prior rockslides. With a little help from his explosive friends, he could arrange for half the mountain to tumble down onto the camp, and in the ensuing chaos pick off any of the defenders who weren’t crushed in the avalanche.

  Drago slipped the backpack off his shoulders and went to work, carefully placing the explosives into three piles as he surveyed the rocks for the most likely candidates to start the landslide. It took him ten minutes to get all the charges situated, and he was catching his breath and calculating how to move to a safe position on the hill from where he could be in the camp moments after the rocks hit when the door of the main building flew open, and four men carrying assault rifles burst through the entry and made for the cliff on the far side of the camp.

  He wasn’t sure what was happening, but whatever it was wouldn’t alter his strategy. What was important to his plan was that the camp’s occupants had no idea he was there, enabling him to find a safe spot and then rain destruction down upon them like the wrath of a Biblical God.

  ~ ~ ~

  Leonid stiffened at the sound of a low beep from one of the motion alarms he’d set up – six different receivers for the six different zones of the cliff slope. It was the far one, which corresponded to the detector on the steepest section. His men were already on their feet gathering their weapons as he stood and moved to the little box. He shut it off, its purpose served, and waited several moments to confirm that none of the others had been tripped. When he was satisfied that it was only the far sector he needed to be concerned with, he turned to his men. “You know what to do. She’s going to try to scale the cliff. Smart. It’s the least appealing, so likely to be unguarded.”

  “We’ll wait until she’s halfway up and pick her off. Almost too easy.”

  “Don’t underestimate her. Nothing is likely to be easy.” He nodded and adjusted the holstered pistol on his belt. “All right. Let’s go. Absolute silence from here on. Watch for my hand signals.”

  Leonid led them out the door. Bastian’s idiots were gathered in plain view, making enough noise to wake the dead. Leonid trotted past them, and when Bastian approached him, Leonid shook his head. Bastian nodded – it was going to be showtime soon, and he was to stay out of it, as agreed. Fine by him. Let the Russians take all the risk. They seemed adamant about doing so, and after all, the customer was always right…

  ~ ~ ~

  At the bottom of the wash, Jet paused and looked up the slope. The satellite imagery had been deceptive – this section was steeper than it had looked, whereas the area to their left was easily scalable, probably with a minimum of trouble. She turned to Alejandro, who was behind her, and pointed forty meters away at where the cliff became a series of rises strewn with boulders and trees for cover.

  “The terrain’s different than I thought,” she said in a low voice. “But that area seems like a better bet. I didn’t see anyone guarding the perimeter, so there’s no reason to take the hard route unless you want to practice your climbing skills.”

  “I’d say I’ve had enough adventure over the last day to last me a lifetime. How do you want to do this?”

  “You and the boys follow me. Once we’re on that section, let’s spread out so if anyone spots us, we’re not easy targets.” She waved Xavier and Simon over. “Alejandro and I will go up the middle. You flank us. We’re going to go up that part instead.” She nodded toward the series of tiers on the slope.

  They moved left, skirting the base of the hill, picking their way through the rocks and trees as silently as the goats that called the inhospitable mountains home.

  ~ ~ ~

  A second motion detector alarm sounded inside the outpost’s main building, beeping softly at the uncaring walls, but there was nobody left inside to hear. Leonid and his men had departed, and Bastian stood out front smoking with his men.

  ~ ~ ~

  Jet was halfway up the slope, taking a break behind a rock outcropping, when she heard something above her position. She glanced over at Alejandro, five meters away, and held her finger to her lips. The others were too far from her to warn – she could see Xavier on her right scrambling higher and Simon a little further down on her left.

  She peered up at the top of the ridge and froze when she saw the outline of two men silhouetted against the cloudy night sky, weapons pointed down the cliff that she’d originally planned as their ascension point. They hadn’t spotted her, but with Xavier moving, it was just a matter of time.

  Another man appeared next to the two she’d seen. She motioned to Alejandro and then brought her M4 rifle around and sighted on the closer of the two. The distinctive shape of a night vision scope had decided her next move – if they were equipped with NV gear, she was at a serious disadvantage, being fired upon from an elevated position. One of the first rules of engagement was, whenever possible, to use the terrain to your advantage, and taking higher ground was rudimentary.

  Her initial burst shattered the night and caught the first gunman in the chest. His body tumbled down the cliff, slamming against the rocks as he dropped before sprawling at the base, head cocked at an unnatural angle. Alejandro fired, and she saw him hit the second man, and she was drawing a bead on the third when the distinctive lower-pitched chatter of an AK-47 barked from the ridge, and Xavier cried out in pain before sliding a few meters down the slope and lying still.

  Simon and Jet kept firing, but they’d lost the element of surprise, and a hail of rounds rained down on their positions. Jet was shielded from the bullets by the rocks, but Alejandro and Simon were out in the open, and all she could do was to lay down covering fire while they took whatever cover they could. She emptied her magazine at the ridge, hoping to buy them some time, and was slapping a full one home when the gunmen above opened back up. Alejandro had managed to scurry to a small boulder, but Simon was still exposed. He’d flattened himself against the slope and was returning fire when a line of divots tore from the earth around him, and then a stream of rounds shredded his torso, the bulletproof vest offering insufficient protection against fully jacketed rifle rounds from less than a hundred meters.

  Alejandro squeezed off some more shots in measured bursts, but it was worse than useless – they were pinned down, gravity working against them, the ridge too far for them to be able to reliably toss any grenades, and the RPGs now lying out of reach next to their dead companions.

  Jet felt on her vest and found the cylindrical shape of a smoke grenade and, after pulling the pin, tossed it as far as she could. A stream of terephthalic acid fog streamed from the canister. Alejandro followed her lead and threw one of his own, creating a curtain of smoke above them. When she couldn’t see the ridge any longer, she scuttled t
o Xavier’s body and recovered the satchel with the rest of the grenades as well as his RPG. Alejandro kept firing into the smoke, hoping to make it unappetizing for the men on the ridge to poke their heads up, but the answering volleys and whining of ricochets off the slope told her that they were professional and weren’t going to let up.

  A slug tore a chunk off a rock only a foot from her head, and she rolled and began military crawling back to the rock outcropping as rounds peppered the ground around her. Alejandro tried lobbing a grenade to the top of the ridge, but it fell short and detonated as it rolled back down, momentarily blinding them both. The smoke was thinning, blown by the breeze, and Jet had barely made it behind the shelter of the rocks when more shooting erupted from above, this time almost directly overhead – the defending gunmen had pinned them down by moving into a more favorable spot from where they could inflict maximum damage.

  Alejandro cringed as bullets tore into the slope, blasting rock chips from the outcropping. Jet held her weapon up one-handed and fired over the small boulder behind which she’d taken cover, unwilling to raise her head and offer a target for the shooters. Her prudence was validated when another burst of rifle fire hit the outcropping – the gunmen were good and, with their night vision scopes at that distance, would be able to easily take them out whenever they showed themselves.

  The shooting waned and then stopped.

  A man’s voice called out from above. “You’re surrounded and have nowhere to go. Throw down your weapons and stand up with your hands in the air. This will be your only chance.”

  Jet’s pulse thrummed in her ears. The man was speaking English with a Russian accent. He repeated the order in Russian and then tried it in poor Spanish.

  What are Russians doing in the middle of the Chilean mountains, at a Chilean army base?

  There was no point engaging with the Russian in an effort to pinpoint his exact location. If he was smart, he would be moving, anticipating her ploy, so it wouldn’t do any good.

  Jet looked over at Alejandro, and even behind his goggles she could tell by his expression that he understood there was no way out. She tapped the RPG and pointed, and he nodded. They may have been screwed, but she could still inflict some real damage with the rocket-propelled grenade if she got lucky. She readied the launcher, waiting for an opportunity, and Alejandro seated another full magazine into his rifle so he could provide maximum cover for her in the hopes that she could fire the RPG without being cut to pieces.

  Doing so was at best a fifty-fifty proposition with the shooters where they were. She drew a deep breath and prepared to fire, aware that it was the last she might ever take. Shooting from the ridge started again, and a brief vision flashed through her mind, Hannah running delightedly after a laughing Matt in a Mendoza park, the sun shining on her innocent face as he pretended to stumble so she could catch him, and then the image dissolved into the grim reality of the killing field the slope had become.

  Chapter 37

  Drago saw muzzle flashes from the ridge as the night erupted with gunfire, followed by explosions. Grenades, he thought absently as he tried to discern what was happening. Someone appeared to be attacking the camp – or trying, he thought. He didn’t like their odds against the gunmen who’d run from the main building. He’d evaluated and discarded that approach as too risky, even if an ambush hadn’t been lying in wait. Better to take the much longer route he had, he thought as he shifted in his hiding place.

  The gunmen by the SUVs made no move to help the ones by the ridge, but rather ambled around aimlessly with their weapons pointed at the perimeter, prompting Drago to use the confusion arising from the shooting to unleash his little surprise. He depressed the transmitter buttons in series, smiling to himself as the whump of the explosives detonated up the hillside, followed by a rumble as hundreds of tons of rubble dislodged and rolled down the mountain, straight at the camp.

  He watched as the wave of rocks and dust washed over the main building like a tsunami, catching the gunmen there by surprise as they tried to run in all directions, and then he was sprinting down the hill, pistol drawn, his eyes on the concrete bunker where two men had been standing guard.

  ~ ~ ~

  The massive blast on the mountainside above the camp took Jet by surprise, as it apparently did the Russians, because the shooting stopped for a brief moment – just long enough for her to rise in a crouch, aim the RPG at the approximate position the Russian’s voice had sounded from, and fire.

  The grenade detonated, and Jet pushed herself to her feet, satchel over her shoulder and M4 clutched in front of her. She saw the blurred form of a body blown into the air as she charged sideways up the hillside. Alejandro’s boots slid on the loose rocks behind her as he forced himself to his feet, and then the ground trembled as the avalanche hit the camp in a blinding cloud of dust.

  She kept moving even as rocks skittered over the ridge and down the cliff. The angle of the main building had blocked most of the landslide, but enough made it past to still pose a danger. The firing from above had stopped, and she willed herself to vault up the remaining three meters of slope, and then she was rolling after throwing herself over the crest, her rifle in her hands.

  Bullets pocked the dirt near her head, and she snapped off a burst, the dust haze so thick she could taste the displaced earth. Another shot from near a tree went wide, and she squeezed off a long volley from her position on the ground as Alejandro’s head poked over the rim. She waited, afraid to move, but there was no more shooting, only the last of the avalanche’s dull roar.

  She caught a blur of motion on the periphery of her night vision and thought she was seeing things – a man running full speed down the mountain in the wake of the avalanche – and then he was gone on the other side of the main building. She returned her attention to the crater the RPG had created as she rose, leading with her M4 as she took cautious steps toward the surviving shooter, who was lying beside a tree.

  Jet made a hand signal to Alejandro to stay back as she neared the gunman, and saw a bloody stump where his right leg had been. That he’d still been firing at her after an injury like that said much about his determination, as did the pistol by his hand, which he was feebly groping for even as she stood over him. He seemed to only just register her as he turned his head toward her, and she frowned – half his face was a raw wound, shredded to hamburger by the grenade blast, the other half as intact as though he’d just woken up. His shirt was dark with blood, and she was surprised he was still conscious, much less trying for a final shot as his life spurted out of him.

  She toed the pistol out of reach and leaned toward him.

  “Who are you?” she asked in flawless Russian.

  His voice was a rasp, barely audible. “More…will come. You…will never…be…safe.”

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “See…you…in…hell…”

  The death rattle was the same as all the others she’d heard, unremarkable, more a groan than anything, finishing with a burble. He shuddered and lay still. Alejandro moved alongside her, eyeing the nearby buildings for more threats. She handed him her rifle, quickly searched the dead Russian, and after finding nothing but an iPhone and a wad of cash, pocketed them for later inspection. Alejandro returned the rifle to her, and she loaded a fresh magazine before pointing with two fingers at the partially buried main building.

  Three pistol shots rang out from the other side of the compound, and they both ducked, but there were no ricochets. More gunfire echoed through the dust cloud, and it became obvious that they weren’t the targets. Jet leapt to her feet and ran to the corner of the building. She peered around the corner, and a burst of automatic rifle fire ripped into the wall just in front of her head. Dropping to the ground, she felt for her final smoke grenade, which she tossed a few meters from the building’s edge, hoping the wind would comply and the smoke would drift toward the shooter, providing her cover.

  It did, and she used the opportunity to duck around the corner
and spray lead at the faint shapes of approaching gunmen. One went down hard, and the other threw himself to the side, firing as he did, but his aim was off and the shots went wide. The power had gone out when the landslide had washed across the camp, which told her that these were more night scope-equipped shooters, probably Russian ex-Spetsnaz mercenaries like the dead one behind her. That was both a negative given their experience level, but also a positive, because she was familiar enough with their training to guess what this one would do next.

  She fired another burst at the man’s position, knowing her chances of hitting him behind the rubble were slim, and then pitched a fragmentation grenade after counting off a few seconds so it would explode close to him. Her effort was rewarded with a blast near the rock he’d taken cover behind, and she followed through by charging toward his position at a run, Alejandro behind her.

  When she arrived, the shooter’s dead eyes were staring at the sky, a gash in the center of his temple where a piece of shrapnel had penetrated. Alejandro crouched next to the man and repeated Jet’s earlier search, but found nothing till he pushed the man’s head aside and spotted the telltale form of an earbud on the ground. He retrieved it and handed it to Jet, and she slid it into her ear. Nothing. Only the faint buzz of static.

  More shooting from the darkened hulks of the SUVs startled them: the staccato rattle of submachine guns. The pop of a pistol answered, and after another exchange the submachine guns fell silent.

  Alejandro leaned into her. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Seems like nothing’s as we expected. These guys are Russian and seriously pro.”

  “Russian?”

  “Does the Chilean military have Russians on an exchange basis or something?”