by Peter Nealen
Burgess glanced at Jenkins, then back at Brannigan. After a moment, he shrugged and did as he was told, pushing onward despite the hitch in his step. The old SEAL was no dummy, and he knew what was about to happen. And that Brannigan didn’t necessarily want any of the rest of the team around when it did.
Brannigan didn’t look down at Jenkins right away, but lowered himself to a knee next to him, making sure he was facing toward the east, where the enemy had congregated after breaking contact. They were still very much in hostile territory, so he couldn’t let this get out of hand.
“Take a couple minutes, George,” he said quietly. He didn’t look over at Jenkins, but instead kept scanning their surroundings, including looking up at the half dozen or more tiny specks that were drones circling overhead. None of them had dropped on them yet, so he hoped they were just there for surveillance. Which was bad enough, but not as bad as having a miniature guided missile loitering overhead.
“But you’ve only got a couple of minutes before you need to either get your ass up and keep up, or else lie down and die,” he snarled. “And if you’re going to die, you’d best do it quick, because I’m going to take your weapon and ammo and thermite your body so that the enemy can’t get back to us because of you.”
That got Jenkins’ attention. He lifted his head from off his ruck and stared at the Colonel, though his eyes looked slightly unfocused.
“I know you’re hurting,” Brannigan said grimly. “We’re all hurting. But there’s no time and no cover to lie down and recover right now. We move and we fight, or we die. That’s the merc life, and that’s what you signed up for. So, if you’re going to drop your ruck and let the rest of the team down, I’ll kill you myself, if only to keep them alive. We can’t afford dead weight. There’s no truck waiting to take you back if you fall out. And if you slow us down too much, we’ll get flanked, surrounded, and slaughtered.
“So, it’s up to you. Either reach down, grab hold, and get up and keep up, or do us all a favor and blow your own brains out so that we don’t get compromised.”
It was harsh as hell, and he knew it. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he was quite cold-blooded enough to follow through on the threat. “Leave no man behind” was an ethos that had been drummed into him from the earliest stages of his Marine Corps career. He didn’t think he could leave Jenkins behind, let alone kill him, and still be able to sleep at night.
It would mean abandoning the mission. It would mean letting Bevan get away, and he’d probably disappear into a really deep, dark hole along with all the intel in his head. The Front would be that much harder to dig out.
But he really didn’t think he could sacrifice one of his own men in cold blood. No matter how much of a shitbag Jenkins was.
Wade might do it. Hancock presently looked pissed enough that he might pull the trigger himself. But Brannigan would still have to live with it.
Jenkins blinked up at him for a moment, almost as if he hadn’t heard him. Brannigan knew that he had; it was just taking a minute to penetrate.
He turned and met Jenkins’ gaze, his own cold and level. Jenkins blinked again, then looked up at Hancock, who was watching him like a particularly malevolent hawk.
That seemed to decide him. He gulped a couple more deep breaths, took a drink from the water hose hanging off his ruck, and heaved himself to his feet. Still weaving a little, he lurched toward the riverbed and the rest of the team.
“He’s going to be a liability,” Hancock said.
“He’s always been a bit of a liability,” Brannigan replied. “But he’s still one of ours, and it worked, didn’t it?”
“For now,” Hancock said. “If we get through this, we need to have a long talk with him.”
“Agreed,” Brannigan said. “But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, we’ve got bigger concerns.” He looked up again. The drones were still circling, but they didn’t seem to be concentrating or stooping on them. Not yet. “Let’s move.”
They drove forward, reaching the riverbed in a couple of minutes. Bianco was on the bank, in the prone, peering over his machinegun’s sights and frowning.
“What is it, Vinnie?” Brannigan asked, taking a knee next to him.
“I don’t know, Colonel,” Bianco replied. “But I think I saw the Front vehicles beating feet back toward the compound just a minute ago. And the shooting’s stopped.”
Brannigan listened. The mountains had gone quiet, except for the faint buzz of the drones overhead. But it didn’t make him relax. If anything, it set him more on edge.
“Let’s move,” he said. “Before they spring any more surprises on us.”
The four of them moved as quickly as they could across the dry riverbed, scrambling up into the rocks and scrub on the far side, right at the base of another rocky cliff, with another draw just a few dozen yards to the east.
The rest of the team was gathered in a small perimeter at the end of the cliff, right at the entrance to the draw. Kirk looked over as they joined them.
“There’s what looks like a defensive position up that way, Colonel,” he said. “It’s camouflaged really well, but it’s there. And I think there’s at least one more, higher up and around the side of this finger.”
Brannigan looked up in the direction Kirk was pointing, then up at the drones. He frowned. They hadn’t changed their flight patterns as the Blackhearts had moved across the riverbed. He suddenly thought of Bianco’s report that the react force had dashed back inside the compound. Something was happening, and he wasn’t sure he liked any of it.
“Do you think you can get close to one without being seen?” he asked.
“I can give it a go,” Kirk replied. “Though I don’t know how well it’ll work with those damned flying lawnmowers up there watching.”
“We’ve got a limited number of options,” Brannigan said. “We might find a way in this way, over the mountain, that will give us a better chance than trying to storm the front gate.”
Kirk nodded, slipping out of his rucksack. “I’ll go first,” he said. “If I die, somebody at least kill the bastards who did it, all right?”
Without waiting for an answer, he got low and slipped into the brush and rocks at the base of the draw, heading up toward the target.
Chapter 17
The entrance into Site 117 proper was a massive, reinforced steel vault door in the back wall of the villa, with a keypad next to it. It would have presented a major check; even with the breaching charges they’d brought, that door was over fifty millimeters of solid steel, with more than twenty locking bolts arrayed around it. Even a Broco torch wouldn’t have gotten through it in a week.
But Winter was one of the highest-cleared paramilitary leaders in the Organization. He punched in his universal override code on the keypad. It was a backdoor that few people knew existed, even in the higher echelons of the Front. It was something of a failsafe for the Board, in case a situation like this ever presented itself.
The code went in, and all twenty-two locking pins retracted with a muffled clank. Winter hauled the door open, traveling with it while the rest of his team was stacked up on either side, trying to keep out of the “fatal funnel” of the doorway. It was difficult, as they were in a hallway that had jutted from the back of the house to butt up against the hillside behind.
They weren’t far enough out. Before Eta could toss the nine-banger into the hall behind, a rapid series of gunshots hammered painfully down the hallway, through the still-opening door, and took him in the face. His head snapped back and he fell bonelessly to the floor, the nine-banger tumbling from suddenly nerveless fingers.
Winter closed his eyes a split second before the concussion grenade went off. He still saw the pulsing, red glare of the flashes through his eyelids, even as the deafening explosions rocked him in the narrow space of the hallway. He was partially behind the semi-opened vault door, but it wasn’t enough to shield him from the stunning concussion that was meant to disorient and blind the enemy
.
He was deafened and half-blind, but he started driving against the door, trying to close it. He got about halfway there, with only about a twenty-centimeter gap left, when it suddenly stopped dead.
He pushed, hard, digging his feet in. He had his eyes open, the nine-banger spent, but his ears were ringing and his head felt like he’d just been hit with a hammer. He could see that Epsilon was down, too, a bleeding hole just beneath his left eye, which was bulging out, weeping blood, from the overpressure. A crimson puddle was flowing out onto the floor from under his helmet.
The rest of the team had moved quickly to get behind the door, but now there was someone or something holding it open.
There was just enough give when he pushed that he knew it was another human being, but as strong as Winter was—and he was no slouch—he couldn’t budge it another centimeter. In fact, even with Gamma and Zeta pushing with him, it was starting to creep back open.
“Theta!” he barked. “Get ready!”
Theta, thickset and hairy, stepped out, his ARX160 pointed at the door. Winter couldn’t help but notice that whoever was pushing hadn’t exposed himself or his weapon while he pushed. That they could have dealt with. They might have been able to grab the weapon and yank the man off balance.
He didn’t dare count down. He was pretty sure he knew what kind of soldier was on the other side of the door. So, he had to rely on his teammates’ professionalism. He suddenly stepped back, hauling the door open as he came.
The man in black bulled through the doorway, his short-barrel weapon already up in his shoulder. He planted a foot and pivoted toward them, even as Theta opened fire.
Theta’s ARX160’s muzzle blast slapped Winter in the face as he shot the massively-muscled man in black, center mass. The man was wearing a tactical vest, but didn’t appear to be wearing plates; it was as if he’d grabbed what was closest along with his submachinegun and run to the fight. Theta’s rounds punched into his chest as he drove through the door, his weapon tracking toward the team in a blur.
The twin bullet holes in his chest didn’t even slow the man down. He shot Theta twice in the front plate before the rest of the team opened fire.
Fully two dozen 5.56mm bullets ripped into the man at point blank range. He still stayed on his feet long enough to try to finish the Mozambique drill and shoot Theta in the face. Theta’s head jerked back with a spray of blood, and then Winter double-tapped the man in the head, close enough that the muzzle blast tore the man’s skin at his temple.
The man in black finally dropped, slumping to the floor, his boxy submachinegun hitting the wall with a clatter. Winter kept his rifle pointed around the half-closed vault door, but the man in black appeared to have been alone.
It was about what he should have expected from the Type N soldiers. Their conditioning was intensive enough to keep them moving even as bullets ripped through their bodies, but it also tended to breed the kind of arrogance that Winter had associated with Flint and his picked psychopaths.
Sometimes, Winter despaired of the Front’s paramilitary capability. While the Board was made up of extremely smart individuals, who had a vision of the future of humanity that few could aspire to, few of the staff on any level had genuine military experience. And, as such, they had a skewed idea of what made for good soldiers.
The entire Type N program had been designed with that skewed idea in mind. And while they were doubtless extremely effective, as he’d seen and was attested to by the bodies of three of his team on the floor, that effectiveness was worthless without a proper military mind directing where it was pointed and how.
But the firefight had confirmed something he’d feared ever since the Site security had turned on them. Bevan and his backers in the Organization had suborned the Type Ns, as well.
This operation had just gotten far, far more complicated.
Theta groaned, picking himself up off the floor. The entire side of his face was a mask of blood, but he was alive.
“Where are you hit?” Winter asked, sparing only a brief glance while Zeta moved up to cover the hallway ahead of him.
“Motherfucker blew off half my ear,” Theta said. “If he hadn’t been getting shot, he might have cored my brains out.” He patted himself down. None of the others moved to check him; while the shooters selected for Winter’s team weren’t quite as overtly sociopathic as Flint’s handpicked psychos, they weren’t exactly the brotherly types, either.
Winter sometimes missed that element. But most of the men he’d respected the most had been too close-minded to join an organization like the Front.
“What the fuck was that?” Zeta asked. There was a note that might have been close to hysteria in his voice. “That…monster took almost an entire magazine before he went down!”
“That was a Type N,” Winter said grimly. “Depending on the reports, there are between twenty and fifty of them here. This was the first site set up for the program. So, they are nearly ready for deployment. And Bevan has turned them against us.
“Tighten up, meine Herren,” he said. “It is only going to get harder from here.”
***
Wade followed Kirk up the steep-banked dry creekbed that formed the bottom of the draw. Rough scrub lined the edges of the banks, offering some slight concealment.
He was starting to see where the enemy had gone wrong in the placement of their defensive positions. They weren’t situated where they could see all the way down into the dead space of the wash, which meant that so long as the Blackhearts stayed up close to the right-hand bank, they were effectively hidden from the emplacement.
It wasn’t going to make assaulting it any easier, but it made the approach less fraught with risk.
Wade didn’t mind risk, most of the time, but he’d been at this game long enough that any risk that was unnecessary he considered abjectly stupid, and a sign that the person suggesting it shouldn’t be listened to, much less followed.
Kirk paused, getting up on a low knee, still huddled against the bank, checking over the lip with one eye before dropping back down. He looked back at Wade, pointing to his eyes, then up and just ahead of them.
Wade nodded. The emplacement was just ahead and above, probably less than ten yards away. He looked back at Brannigan, who was right behind him, followed by Santelli and Javakhishvili, and passed on the signal. Brannigan nodded his own understanding, looked up behind them, and then held up a fist.
Wait.
Wade followed the Colonel’s eyes, frowning. What were they waiting for?
Then he saw movement higher up on the finger behind them. It was slight, but it told him enough that he was able to figure it out. Brannigan had sent at least a couple of the team up higher to get set in as a base of fire before the assaulters moved in on the emplacement.
A double squelch break crackled in his earpiece. Brannigan turned toward him and pointed. Go.
At almost the same time that he and Kirk rose up to clamber out of the wash, a long burst of 7.62 fire crackled overhead, hammering rounds into the emplacement ahead of them. Another burst railed overhead, aimed higher up, hitting the next defensive position. Curtis and Bianco were going to make sure that the defenders kept their heads down while the Blackhearts closed the distance.
He heaved himself up over the bank, his boots scrabbling as he fought the crumbling, dusty slope. He had to catch himself with one hand, careful to keep his rifle out of the dirt as much as possible, but he started to slide backward and grabbed a scrubby bush to pull himself up. Fortunately, the roots held, and then he was up on the gentler slope of the hillside, dragging a knee up to get his foot under him as he brought his rifle up and pointed it toward the emplacement.
Puffs of dust marked bullet impacts as either Curtis or Bianco played his bursts across the camouflage cover. The parapet didn’t look like it was made of sandbags; it looked like half-buried concrete. But there was no overhead cover, as such; a fabric canopy had been painted and textured to look like the hillside, and was
currently getting thoroughly ventilated by the Blackhearts’ machinegun fire.
Kirk reached the top, his chest heaving, and the two of them dashed toward the emplacement. Anyone who was in there was keeping their heads down as the MAG-58 raked their position from a higher elevation.
It was only about ten yards, but it felt like a lot longer. Wade’s boots slipped and his legs pumped on the hillside as he surged up toward the emplacement, wreathed with dust as the automatic fire chewed into it. Only as he and Kirk covered the last couple of yards did the machinegun fire finally cease.
Weapons up, Kirk and Wade didn’t pause, but slowed just enough to ensure they could shoot somewhat accurately, even as their heaving lungs and pounding hearts, working overtime to overcome the thin air, kept them from holding their muzzles rock steady. They got to the edge of the parapet and popped over.
Two men in storm gray fatigues and plate carriers were huddled against the inside of the parapet, their Steyr AUGs held close, one of them with a radio to his face. He looked up as the two figures appeared through the dust, aiming rifles, and goggled at them for a second before keying the radio with a yell.
Wade shot him without hesitation, double-tapping a pair of 7.62mm rounds into the man’s face from less than two yards away. The man’s companion barely had time to try to blink the spatter of blood and brain matter out of his eyes before Kirk gunned him down in the same way.
Then they were both vaulting the parapet and dropping the meter and a half into the emplacement.
The defensive position, as well-camouflaged as it was, was pretty barebones. There was a small propane space heater next to the door at the rear, which appeared to lead directly into the hillside. Several ammo cans were stacked on the other side. Two camp chairs were set up, now both half-shredded by machinegun fire, and a small table where a tablet lay that had been shattered by a bullet. An HK21 sat on its bipod next to the parapet.
