by Peter Nealen
“I’d still rather fight down, if it comes to it,” Brannigan said. “How long do you think it’ll take to breach it?”
Hancock’s forehead furrowed. “We’ve got some cutting charges, but against that…” He shrugged. “We’ll have to see. If it’s a real vault door, we could have a hard time.”
“Start getting the explosives out,” Brannigan snapped down the stairs. “Pass ‘em up. And get security set. I doubt we’ll be alone in this ladderwell for long.”
A rustling sound started to float up the stairs as the other Blackhearts started to slip off their packs and dig out the breaching charges they’d brought along. Most of them were flex-linear charges, long strips of explosives with hydrogel tape affixed to one side, rolled up and with the priming charges only needing to be attached. The rolls were handed up as quickly as they came out, and the men quickly shrugged back into their packs and got back to covering down the stairs, or getting back into the stack before the vault door in front of them.
Hancock started setting up the charges, muttering to himself as he started calculating the needed yields. A moment later, a door below banged open, and the entire stairwell reverberated with the hammering, earsplitting reports of gunfire. They’d been made.
***
Kirk tried not to wince as he flexed his wounded shoulder slightly. The initial shock had worn off, and now the pain was like a red-hot poker stabbing clear through his arm and side. He was having to keep his arm relaxed at his side for longer periods, his rifle propped on the edge of the gear table that he’d tipped over to act as a barricade in front of the door leading deeper into the complex, where Brannigan and the rest of the team had disappeared.
He hated to admit it, and shied away from even thinking too hard about it, but Brannigan had been right. His initial bravado had been born of adrenaline and pride. He hadn’t wanted to get shown up as softer than the others, particularly the old hands, given some of the stories he’d heard about the Blackhearts’ earlier missions.
Kirk wasn’t a newbie; he’d been there and done that in some very dangerous places. He told himself that he didn’t really have anything to prove to anybody. And yet…he couldn’t just accept the fact that he couldn’t keep driving on when the rest did. It galled him to be left behind, even as his rational mind recognized the reality that he was wounded and would have been more of a hindrance than a help.
He gritted his teeth. He told himself it was because of the pain, but he knew that he was chafing at having been left watching the door with Jenkins, of all people.
He’d sort of tuned Jenkins out after a few minutes. The man had been doing nothing but bitch about being left behind “in the rear with the gear” ever since the rest of the team had disappeared down the tunnel ahead of Kirk. It was getting tiresome.
Unfortunately, he’d gotten so focused on trying not to hear Jenkins’ continual complaining that he almost didn’t notice the oncoming security team on the far side of the propped-open door until they were barely a dozen yards away and coming on fast. He grabbed his rifle’s forearm with his wounded arm, almost blacked out from the pain, and then had to duck as one of them fastballed a small, cylindrical canister in through the door.
The flashbang hit the upturned table in front of him, and Kirk ducked down, squeezing his eyes shut against the flash. He was almost too slow; the concussion rocked the table and actually blew splinters off the rough edge of the plywood. The flash glared red through his eyelids even as he was facing the floor with his eyes closed, and the sheer force of the concussion slapped him around behind the table.
But it still wasn’t as deafening and stunning as it was supposed to be, and he popped up, swinging his rifle level.
Only adrenaline kept him from blacking out from the pain. As it was, his vision seemed to narrow, even as the first two gray-clad security guards plunged through the door, their muzzles already tracking toward him.
He could stay upright and fight, and probably die. So, he dropped flat on his side, even as bullets ripped through the plywood where he’d just been crouched, showering him with splinters. He could feel the passage of the bullets over his body.
Gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder as his whole weight landed on it, he shoved himself out, sliding along the floor, his rifle just clearing the edge of the plywood as he picked up the reticle, little more than a red blur from that angle, and opened fire.
The muzzle blast slapped dust off the concrete floor as his first bullet tore through a man’s knee. He walked his fire upward, blasting two more rounds through the man’s pelvis as he collapsed, screaming, and finally finishing him off with a shot to the head as he fell. The screaming stopped, and then Kirk was shoving himself out farther, getting an angle on the next man, even as Jenkins shot that one three times, walking his shots up into his face. The man fell backward as his head snapped back, blood pouring out of the back of his helmet.
Kirk shifted himself, or tried to. As he shoved with his boots, he pushed the table farther than he pushed himself, but it accomplished the same thing, clearing the way for the next man in the stack to come into his sights. He wasn’t aiming so much as he was pointing, both eyes open, using the illuminated bullet drop compensator in his magnified optic as a red dot while his other eye picked up the target. He slammed three shots at that one, two of them punching into his face, one through his nose. The third skipped off the top of his helmet as he fell, smacking dust and grit off the ceiling.
Then he was scrambling to move as more 5.56 rounds started punching through the plywood, getting a lot closer to him. He almost screamed as he heaved himself up and half-stumbled, half-lunged toward the far wall and the equipment cubbies, as Jenkins poured more fire through the door. A moment later, Jenkins went dry and screamed, “Reloading!”
Hell of a time to go dry. He hit the plywood gear cubby with a jarring impact, pivoting as he lost his balance and dropped to a knee, snapping his rifle back toward the doorway.
Just as another flashbang landed on the floor just inside the threshold.
He almost managed to close his eyes in time, but still got rocked. He opened his eyes, blinking tears away and trying to see through the green and purple blotch in his vision as two more figures plunged through the cloud of smoke that the bang had left roiling in the portal.
He shot one even as he stared at the flickering muzzle blast from the same man’s rifle. He felt the fiery, sledgehammer impact in his chest, even as the man went down, smashed off his feet by a pair of bullets in the guts, just under his plate.
The next breath was fiery agony. How am I still alive? He felt his strength slipping away, and put a hand up to his chest. It came away bloody, but the hole was off to one side and high. It might have missed a lung. He hoped.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, he brought his rifle up and dumped the rest of the mag through the door as he staggered toward the exit tunnel. “Jenkins!” he tried to yell, but the pain just about made him black out, and it came out as more of a croak, drowned out by the gunfire. He got to the doorway and stumbled, slamming against the wall and sinking toward the floor, trying to keep himself upright.
Jenkins was already there. In fact, he was already in the doorway, his rifle aimed at the enemy’s breach point. And he was already starting to turn to run as Kirk reached the door.
“Help me!” Kirk rasped. He thought he was starting to feel a mounting pressure in his chest, and was fighting down the incipient panic. He knew a little bit about what happened when the chest cavity was violated by bullets or shrapnel, and he didn’t want to die that way.
He stumbled through the doorway, his rifle dry, as Jenkins took another half-dozen steps away from him, an empty mag hitting the concrete floor between his boots. Behind him, with their fusillade of covering fire having died away, he heard and felt another flashbang go off in the team room.
He hauled himself the rest of the way through the door, turning back toward the pair of gray-clad Front security men chargin
g into the room through the smoke, letting himself sink down, propped against the wall of the tunnel, ripping the magazine out of his rifle with shaking hands that seemed to be getting weaker by the second. It clattered to the ground, and he almost fumbled the next mag as he pulled it out of his vest.
He was going to die. He knew it. He could feel his life leaking away, and with it the strength and speed that he needed to survive the next few seconds, as the pair of AUGs turned toward him.
Hammering reports slapped at him from just over his head, as Jenkins blasted a pair into the man on the right, then rapidly transitioned to the one on the left and gave him the same treatment. Kirk couldn’t see where he’d hit them, but he didn’t get shot, and at least one was down and out of his field of view. The other was lying across from him, on his side, not moving.
He got the mag into the mag well and rocked it back until it locked. With a shaking hand, he struggled to pull the charging handle to the rear.
Jenkins was looking down at him, his rifle still pointed into the team room. Kirk looked up at him, and saw the indecision in his eyes.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Kirk croaked. “Now, while they’re licking their wounds.”
But Jenkins still hesitated, looking back into the bullet-riddled team room, and then back over his shoulder. “Maybe I should…”
It took a lot of effort and a lot of pain, but Kirk swung his ACE 52 toward Jenkins’ face. “If you try to leave me here, I’ll kill you myself.”
Jenkins froze for a moment. Then, almost grudgingly, he reached down and grabbed Kirk’s arm, helping him to his feet and pulling his arm over his shoulders. Together, the two of them staggered up the tunnel, heading back toward the entrance in the side of the mountain.
The others were going to have to find another way out.
***
Winter slammed through the door as Zeta kicked it open, his rifle up and ready, snapping to his left to clear that corner. He didn’t slow down as he moved to his point of domination, sweeping back across the room with his muzzle. Then he froze for a split second, nonplused. It almost cost him his life.
The room was the armory that he’d expected. What he had not expected, however, was the man in track pants and a t-shirt, flanked by two more black-clad Type-Ns, rummaging in one of the crates.
The Type Ns, both Caucasian, had whirled on the entry, snapping their MP7s level, but while Winter hadn’t expected one of the scientists to be in there, he was still “In the Red” as the Americans liked to say. His rifle was already up and at the ready, his red dot hovering right at the leftmost man’s chest before the man could even bring his weapon on-line.
Winter had learned his lesson when it came to dealing with the Type Ns. He flipped his selector to “auto,” and leaned into the rifle as he opened fire.
The ten-round burst was short, but Winter’s stance was good, and the bullets all chewed a hole about the size of a fist into the man’s sternum. He wasn’t wearing armor, fortunately, and even a hopped-up Type N couldn’t survive when his heart had been turned to pink mist. He collapsed like a falling building, his knees crumpling beneath him.
Zeta had been right on his heels, and had done a similar mag dump into the right-hand Type N shooter. Zeta’s marksmanship had been somewhat messier; a gory track of bullet wounds ran from high center chest up through the man’s throat and into his face.
The blood-spattered man in the track pants had dropped into a panicked crouch at the gunfire, his arms over his head. As the deafening thunder of gunfire fell silent, he started to look up hesitantly past his hands.
Winter knew that he didn’t see friendly faces. Unlike the Type Ns and the facility security, his team weren’t wearing uniforms; they were in a variety of desert camouflage or plain tan khakis. Nor were their rigs all the same, either.
“Who are you?” the man demanded. His voice was slightly high-pitched and nasal, but his tone was hardly that of someone terrified for his life. “Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?”
“I know full well,” Winter replied coldly. “Considering that the Board sent me here in the first place. Identify yourself.”
The man straightened up. Winter was hardly a tall man; on his best days he might measure about a meter and a half. But he still made the man in the bloody t-shirt look small. “I’m Doctor Marsden,” he snapped. “And you’d better have a damned good explanation for this. I don’t know what ass-backwards Board retardation this is…”
“Perhaps you should have turned Jason Bevan away when he tried to take refuge from the American authorities and special operations units in an Indigo Lithium site,” Winter said. “Now that he has dragged his pursuers here and compromised the site, stricter measures are called for. Even more so since he turned the site security against us, even after I presented Organization credentials.”
He tapped his trigger finger against the trigger guard, watching the man with cold, measuring eyes. “Now, Dr. Marsden, as I recall your dossier, you specialize in human performance. What are you doing digging through a crate of Semtex?”
Marsden straightened. “Consider it a last-ditch possibility. Williamson sure didn’t want to make the hard call. He’s up in the command center with Bevan, hoping the Type Ns will clean things up so that things can get back to normal. I still think he’s dreaming.” He glanced at the bodies next to him. There was a noticeable absence of human feeling in his expression. “I was preparing for the worst.”
“You don’t share their confidence?” Winter asked, stepping forward, his rifle still pointed generally in Marsden’s direction.
The doctor shook his head. “The CRISPR stuff still has far too many bugs to iron out. And Williamson’s such a hack that he had to get something working, so I got to do all the real work, which of course he’s taken full credit for. These apes are impressive, but they’re not what they’re supposed to be. We need another five years for that to happen. They’re not going to be able to stop professional soldiers.”
Winter glanced down at the bodies, but didn’t comment. Though he was focused more on the mission, which was sterilizing Site 117 to avoid the truth getting out about what the Front was doing there, the fact that Marsden, who was a sports medicine type, had done the majority of the work, put a different light on the Type Ns. They were supposed to have enhanced speed, strength, endurance, and senses thanks to “gene doping,” something that the Chinese had started experimenting with some years before. If the gene-doping had encountered problems, and other routes had been taken, that meant that the men they were fighting had simply been pumped full of performance enhancing drugs, probably along with a number of psychoactive substances. Given their apparent immunity to pain, that would have been his guess.
Winter’s professorial appearance was not entirely unmerited. He was a thinker. It was what made him effective.
He pointed away from the crate of Semtex, keeping his muzzle pointed at Marsden. The scientist didn’t look happy about it, but he stepped aside. Winter looked down into the crate. “This should be enough, along with what we brought,” he said to Zeta. “Get it passed out.”
Then he turned to Marsden, holding his rifle easily in his hands, his eyes cold and measuring. “Our mission, given the current situation, is to sterilize the facility,” he said.
Marsden was smart; he knew exactly what Winter was saying. “Except that you need me,” he said. “I have the security codes to get you anywhere in the Site.”
“I already have override codes,” Winter said.
“You had override codes,” Marsden corrected him, sounding faintly smug. Winter briefly marveled at the man’s audacity. Having just had his bodyguards get gunned down so close that he was still spattered with their bodily fluids, faced by men with guns, he was still convinced enough of his importance that he could be smug and sarcastic. “Borishnikov had all the backdoors mapped out as soon as the security system was put in; once you used your code to get past the first vault door, the entire set
of codes switched. I have the new ones, but you don’t.”
Winter just stared at him.
“Look, you want to bring this place down,” Marsden said, sounding slightly less sure of himself. “So do I. Even if Williamson’s and Bevan’s fantasy that these drugged-up roid monsters can drive the bad guys away works out, this place is burned. If the rest of the program is going to have a hope of succeeding, then we need to make sure no one can find out what was being done here. At least, that there’s no concrete evidence.”
Winter studied him for a moment, but he didn’t have time to make the man sweat. The Front’s security, along with most of the rest of the Type Ns, were probably regrouping and coming after them. The only hope they had at the moment was that the unknown assailants he’d clashed with in the mountains were causing enough havoc to keep the bulk of the site security’s attention elsewhere.
“Very well,” he said. “Lead the way. We are going to the power level.”
Chapter 21
Flanagan was getting twitchy. He’d mostly recovered from the effort it had taken to get to the redoubt that Curtis and Bianco had occupied; he was in good shape, so even though the thin air slowed him down, he bounced back pretty quickly once he had a chance to catch his breath. But he was generally a pessimist, and the more time that went by without word from Brannigan and the rest of the team, or any move on the enemy’s part, the more he started to tense up.
Which was why he suddenly snapped his ACE 52 toward the tunnel entrance as he heard movement down that way. The rest of the team had gone that way, but once they’d lost eye contact, as far as he was concerned, they had lost ownership of that space.
“Friendlies!” Jenkins called out. Flanagan lowered his muzzle and got up, though he kept low, just in case, and moved to the tunnel entrance.
A moment later, he saw the two men coming out, Kirk with his arm draped over Jenkins’ shoulders, leaning heavily on him, his side soaked with blood. He quickly ducked into the tunnel, moving to meet them, but he didn’t offer to help right away, but pushed past them, his rifle aimed down the way they’d come.
