by Peter Nealen
Even as he thought it, getting back to the top of the steps and barricading on the doorway, Javakhishvili had Hancock leaning against the wall a few feet away. “Damn it, Roger, don’t make me add a head injury to your bullet hole,” Herc said. “I’ll knock you out if that’s what I have to do. You have a hole through you.”
Not only were they trapped, but Hancock was seriously wounded, and he didn’t know what was happening to the other half of the team. All these years, and I die in the mother of all screw ups. Even as a private, I don’t think I ever screwed up this bad.
Then his eye fell on one of the bodies in black fatigues. The man was huge, but it wasn’t the body itself he was looking at.
It was the load bearing gear, and the smaller pouches that might hold grenades…
Chapter 23
Winter was briefly but desperately wishing that he’d planned more for this eventuality. He’d studied the Site’s layout extensively, of course. And he’d brought the explosives, just in case. But he was still having to calculate their emplacement on the fly, and he didn’t like that.
He wasn’t sure if they had enough Semtex. Despite knowing that he might have to take extreme measures, he hadn’t exactly been planning on trying to bring half the mountain down.
He’d trained on building demolitions before. Not because he was any kind of civil engineer, but in order to make high-level terror strikes, should they become necessary, more effective. Flint’s attacks in the American Southwest had been effective, but hadn’t spread quite the kind of chaos that the Board had hoped. If it had been the final push to break the world’s foremost superpower, it would have failed miserably. Flint hadn’t had the foresight to pick his targets to truly paralyze a modern society. He’d relied too much on fear.
Winter had learned from that. He was always observing, learning. And so, he’d studied building demolitions. Let buildings start dropping at random, along with precision strikes at infrastructure, and he could bring any nation in the world to its knees.
But learning to drop a skyscraper was different from learning to collapse a cavern. He only hoped that if he took out enough of the structural columns, the follow-on blast from the exploding heat exchanger would do the rest, giving the ceiling enough of a knock to bring it down.
And with it, the rest of the bunkers above it.
He finished placing the small charge on the top of the heat exchanger. He hoped that it would be enough to rupture the housing and cause a steam explosion. The pressure on the ceiling above should help weaken it, as the structural members were blasted apart underneath. If he had calculated right, then it should bring the whole complex down, though not all at once.
If he’d miscalculated, they were about to turn the lights off and make a lot of noise, but not much else.
He checked the length of time fuse; he hadn’t had time to do a test burn with the stuff they’d taken from the armory, but it should at least be close. Thirty minutes should give him and his team time to get clear and set up outside.
He looked down at Gamma. The man looked up and gave him an “Okay” sign. So did Kappa, when he looked to him.
One by one, he got confirmations that his team had the charges in place. He held up three fingers, then a fist. Thirty minutes. He got more acknowledgements, including a couple to indicate that those men were already prepared and ready to go.
In another couple of minutes, it was time. He reached down, grasped the ring at the base of the igniter, and pulled. A moment later, a thin line of smoke started to drift out of the end around the time fuse.
He scrambled down off the heat exchanger and headed for the control center. They now had less than thirty minutes to get clear.
***
Flanagan looked up at the mountainside thoughtfully. The day was wearing on, though he was marginally surprised to see that it was just after noon. It felt like it should be getting on toward sunset already.
He fought to get his thoughts in order. He was desperately tired. But he’d been tired before, and he was probably in better shape than some of the others, so he forced his brain to comply.
Curtis was helping Kirk into the emplacement while Bianco maintained security, his MAG 58 aimed downhill toward the lower emplacement. There was still some movement down there; Flanagan was expecting another counterattack from one direction or another presently.
But it wasn’t a counterattack that had him nervous. It was a threat, but it was one that they were well-prepared to handle. No, what had him getting jumpy was the fact that they were now in an entirely different position than they had been, with no comms with the men inside. If Brannigan and the rest came back out they way they’d entered, they’d find themselves still separated and running into serious opposition.
“We need to push back inside,” he muttered. Gomez glanced over at him, and he cleared his throat. Between the altitude and the dryness of the Altiplano, he felt like he hadn’t had a drink in years. “The others are somewhere in there, and expecting us to hold the way out,” he explained. “They’re going to fall back to that team room and find themselves cut off, unless we get back in there and secure their exit. Even if they could get out clean, they’re going to be expecting to link up at that lower exit; they’ll run right into whoever’s left in that other bunker.” He peered down the slope again. There was some movement below, but the enemy weren’t exposing themselves to the upper defensive position.
“But they should be able to fight through that team room,” Jenkins said. “And once they’re outside, they can link up with us pretty quickly.”
Flanagan shook his head. Jenkins was probably right, but he didn’t want to take the chance. Something was nagging at him, telling him that they needed to get back inside. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the longer the rest of the team was inside without comms, the twitchier he got.
Maybe he was just feeling the fact that he was outside, on security, while the others were going in after the objective. But somehow, he didn’t think that was it.
“George, Mario, and Vinnie, you’re with me,” he said, glancing at Kirk. The man was clearly in a lot of pain, but despite his wounds, he was still breathing fairly normally, so he wasn’t suffering from a tension pneumothorax yet. That was the greatest threat from a sucking chest wound; air pulled into the chest cavity from the wound could collapse the lung and slowly squeeze the other until the wounded man couldn’t breathe and asphyxiated. “Vinnie, drop the MAG and grab Kirk’s rifle.” A belt-fed machinegun wasn’t of the greatest utility in a close quarters fight, and it didn’t get much more “close quarters” than in a tunnel bored into a mountainside.
He moved toward the tarp that had been draped over the tunnel entrance, while Gomez and a reluctant Jenkins joined him. They waited, weapons vaguely trained on the opening, while Bianco stripped off his machinegunner’s chest rig and exchanged it for Kirk’s. He had to do some quick size adjustment; Kirk wasn’t a small man, but Vinnie Bianco was one of the biggest of the Blackhearts.
Finally, with Kirk’s ACE 52 looking a little like a toy in his hands after the bulk of the MAG-58, Bianco joined them.
“On me,” Flanagan said, and slipped under the tarp and into the tunnel.
He had to take a moment to let his eyes adjust. He had his NVGs in his pack, but the tunnel was well-lit enough that he’d risk whiting them out if he looked too close to the work lights bolted to the wall. So, he moved slowly and carefully, keeping his rifle up and ready, the sights just below his eyeline.
The tunnel looked identical to the passage behind the lower emplacement, only it sloped gently downward instead of upward. He kept peering through the dimly-lit gloom, looking for corners, doors, or other danger areas.
He paused a few yards inside the tunnel. He felt wrong doing it; tunnels and hallways are deathtraps, but he needed to know. “George,” he hissed. “How high did that tunnel below us climb to get to that team room?”
“Not much,” Jenkins whispered back. The four of them were
in a rough wedge, all four muzzles pointed down the tunnel. “Not enough for this one to go straight to it.”
“That’s what I thought,” Flanagan said, before continuing to move cautiously forward.
Soon enough, he saw what looked like a blank wall at the end of the passage ahead. It quickly resolved itself into a landing at the top of a stairwell leading down.
He moved quickly, angling across the passageway to maintain the cover of the corner as long as he could. He paused only a moment before swinging around the corner, stepping just far enough out to be able to cover down the stairs.
Just in time for his sights to settle on the helmeted head of a massively-muscled man in black coming up the stairs.
They saw each other at the same moment, staring down each other’s barrels.
Flanagan never would know just how he managed to get the first shot off. His rifle thundered painfully in the enclosed stairwell, the bullet blasting a bloody hole through the big man’s forehead, even as a pair of tiny 4.6mm bullets clipped past his ear, missing him by a hair.
He fired twice more as the man fell. Flanagan had seen head shots fail to drop a bad guy before, and with what he’d seen of the men in black at the lower emplacement, he didn’t want to take chances. The second round went in just under the rim of the man’s helmet as his head snapped back under the impact, sending him tumbling backward and into the gray-clad shooter behind him, trapping that man’s AUG against his body just long enough that Flanagan’s third shot hammered into his collarbone, just below his throat. He staggered and fell under the blow and the weight of the body, while the others behind scrambled back down around the corner.
Flanagan pressed the attack, moving quickly down the steps, keeping his rifle leveled at the two men he’d just shot. The black-clad shock trooper was clearly dead, his glassy eyes bulging slightly from the ruin of his skull, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The other man was dying, gurgling horribly as he choked for breath, his throat ruined by the bullet’s passage.
He slowed and paused, keeping his muzzle trained on the next flight of steps leading downward. “Mario,” he whispered, but Gomez was already moving, ducking down to rip the dying man’s AUG out of his hands. Flanagan was pretty sure that Wade would have probably just shot the man, and he briefly wondered if he should have done the same. So long as the man still had his weapon, he was a threat. But there was something about shooting a man who was already dying that drew him up short.
The pained gurgles died away. Flanagan stepped over the bodies and started to pop the corner leading down.
He got just far enough out onto the stairwell to see the AUG barrel pointing up, barely stuck around the corner from the lower landing. He jerked his head back as the muzzle spat flame, the sharp report accompanied by a tug at the top of his ear, as the bullet clipped him.
“Screw this,” he growled, looking down at the corpse in black. He squatted down, pulled a grenade out of its pouch, prepped it, and yanked the pin out, letting the spoon fly free.
“Uh, Joe…?” Jenkins sounded extremely nervous as he stared at the armed grenade, the fuse burning, as Flanagan stood there with it in his hand.
“You want to get rid of that thing?” Bianco asked. “Once the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.”
Flanagan finished his three-count and hucked the frag hard down the stairwell. A second later, the entire stairwell shuddered with the heavy thud of the detonation, cutting off what might have been a yell of alarm. Black smoke and dust swirled up the stairway, frag pattering off the rock walls.
“Mr. Grenade is really not your friend if he comes back to you,” Flanagan said grimly, stepping out onto the steps.
The bodies at the next landing down were mangled and bloodied. None of them were moving. Flanagan and Gomez still moved carefully, checking each man as they passed with a muzzle-thump to an open eyeball or other sensitive bit of exposed anatomy. None of them so much as twitched.
A radio squawked, a voice demanding a status update. The voice sounded shrill and half-panicked.
The regular guys in gray didn’t seem to be handling this situation that well. They must not have been prepared for a serious fight, so far out in the Altiplano. They must have signed on figuring that they were going to be little more than lavishly-equipped site security, doing their shifts and then going to slack off in their rooms.
Too bad they’d signed on with the Front.
The next flight was empty. The Blackhearts continued down, still cautious, still covering every angle.
Two more flights down and they were looking at a door with a cypher lock. It didn’t look like a vault door, fortunately.
“I think this is it,” Jenkins whispered. “It looks right.”
“Are we far enough down?” Bianco asked.
“I don’t know,” Jenkins replied. “I didn’t measure the height difference. Did you?”
Flanagan didn’t say anything, but moved to cover the seam where the door would open, gesturing at the crowbar in his pack with his off hand. They had brought some breaching tools, figuring that they were going to have to crack a couple of doors in the villa. Back when they’d thought that this mission was just about going into a villa and prying Bevan out of it.
Bianco moved up, drawing the crowbar out. The two of them studied the door for a moment, then switched places. There wasn’t a lot of room in the passageway, and the door opened outward.
Bianco set the crowbar in the narrow crack at the jamb, and glanced at Flanagan, who nodded tightly.
The big man dug in and cranked the crowbar forward. Metal squealed and bent under his weight, and the jamb started to deform. He drew back, quickly dug the bar deeper in, just below the latch, and then threw his full weight onto it again.
The latch popped free and he hauled backward, dragging the door open as Flanagan plunged through the opening.
Flanagan’s finger had been tightening on the trigger as soon as the door cracked open. The man just inside had been in plain view, not even trying to get a better angle on the door as it swung open. Dressed in gray, his helmet on the smashed, splintered plywood gear table next to him, he was pointing an AUG at the door, a look of shocked dread in his eyes.
Flanagan’s first shot thundered even as the man tried to register what he was seeing. The look of dread was wiped out by a single 7.62mm bullet through his teeth.
Gomez was right behind Flanagan, swinging to cover the rest of the room as Jenkins and Bianco joined them, Bianco turning to cover behind them out of sheer habit. But then, they had no way of knowing, without comms, if Curtis and Kirk were still holding their own above, either.
The four men spread out, Jenkins taking up security on the passage leading toward the lower emplacement while Gomez and Flanagan moved to the door that opened on the deeper levels of the complex. That door was still standing open.
Flanagan frowned as he set up on the door, peering out from a barricaded position behind the jamb. That sounded like a lot of gunfire, echoing down the corridor from the stairwell just beyond.
That had to be where the rest of the team was, and from the sounds of things, they were in a lot of trouble.
He took a deep breath. There wasn’t time to go over all the possible contingencies. They were going to have to give something up to get to the rest of the team. And while he knew he could conceivably clear his way to them with just Gomez, a two-man clear didn’t seem like a good idea right at the moment.
They could stay where they were, holding the door. But something about that rattle and roar clattering down to them down the rocky passageways didn’t bode well. He didn’t think that the rest of the team was going to be getting to them anytime soon.
“On me,” he said. There wasn’t time. He had to make the decision, and it had been made. It might mean they all died, but paralysis was going to end the same way.
He waited just long enough for Jenkins and Bianco to join them at the door, and then he was moving through and toward the next
set of stairs leading up, heading for the sound of gunfire.
Chapter 24
The corridor was eerily quiet. Brannigan glanced at the vault door, remembering the enemy’s taunts over the PA system aboard the Tourmaline Delta platform. He didn’t know whether the silence was better or worse.
Burgess and Wade were barricaded on the stairs, their rifles leveled, waiting for the first hostiles to show their faces.
Hancock was sitting against the wall, blood soaking his side and obviously in pain, but otherwise clear and functional. If anything, the wound seemed to have added new fuel to the burning fury that had been simmering under the surface since before they’d gathered for this mission. Brannigan didn’t know exactly what was behind it, though he suspected. Right then and there wasn’t the time or the place, though.
Just let that fire burn if it keeps you alive, Roger.
Javakhishvili was hovering over Hancock, while he and Santelli kept the vault door covered, just in case. The door was solid enough that Brannigan suspected it probably led to a sensitive area, meaning that it was unlikely that they’d face an assault coming from that direction, but none of the Blackhearts had lived to be old soldiers by getting careless.
Brannigan crouched by the black-clad body, going through the dead man’s gear. Most of it was comms, ammunition for the 4.6mm MP7, and less-than-lethal munitions like two more CS grenades and a pair of nine-bangers. He passed over the CS; the enemy was probably all wearing the same gas masks that the dead men in the hallway and down the stairs were wearing, so the CS wouldn’t be effective.
But he finally found what he was looking for, just as he was about to give up. Two Swiss HG-85 fragmentation grenades were stuffed into the black tactical vest, almost as an afterthought.
Two frags wasn’t much, but in close quarters, they might be enough.
He knew just how untenable their position really was. But it wasn’t in John Brannigan’s makeup to just give up. And given the fact that there had been no demands for surrender, he was pretty sure that it wouldn’t get them anything but a bullet in the back of the head and a shallow grave, anyway. The Front wasn’t interested in the niceties of civilized warfare; that much had already been made plain.
