The Devil’s Noose

by Michael Angel

  Redhawk had finally placed two of the drones on ‘Independent, Evasive’ maneuvers while he searched for Ian Blaine’s whereabouts with Grumpy. He found the man just as he’d co-opted Gorecki’s fire team.

  “Well, doesn’t that just take the biscuit,” Preble grumped. “Ian always did have a finely honed sense of survival.”

  “He’s also taking one of our two remaining fire teams out of the fight,” Redhawk spat. He slammed a fist on the battered desk.

  Sour-smelling dust from the pulverized ceiling tile and smashed equipment puffed up as he did so. The last couple of monitors flickered fitfully. The rest had been crushed by debris or gored by chunks of shrapnel.

  Redhawk’s head and eardrums throbbed from the mortar strike’s explosion. But he and Preble hadn’t been injured otherwise. The blessedly heavy wood of the desk had protected them so far. He couldn’t say nearly as much for the men caught outside in the firestorm.

  Blaine and the three last soldiers scrambled on board the Falcon. Grumpy tagged along behind as best it could. The drone widened its field of view as the tri-jet accelerated down the runway for takeoff.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Preble breathed, as he saw the smoke trails of the RPGs hit both in front of the plane and directly on its wing.

  Redhawk looked on in horror as the jet’s wing sheared off and sent the plane slamming down on top of the men who had cut its flight so brutally short. Even as far away as the C&C, the ground shook with the aircraft’s impact. The sun glinted off twisted metal and glass as it slid to a smoking heap at the far edge of the runway.

  “Deeyá, ma to itsá,” he murmured in Apache. Goodbye, and fly to the next world.

  He did what he could to put the crash out of his mind. The drone Awful had spotted the last two men from Motte & Bailey struggling through the remains of a burned-out side street. On the next block, a pair of dead soldiers wearing M&B’s charcoal gray lay surrounded by at least a dozen bodies dressed in stolen Kazakh army clothing.

  A crackle came from the monitor’s speaker. “C&C, C&C, this is Davis. Redhawk, are you there?”

  “We’re here,” Redhawk replied. “We have eyes on you.”

  “Votorov’s men mortared our position and then charged us,” the man said, his voice full of adrenaline-fueled rage. “Bastards got Collin and Flores.”

  “Can you fall back to home base?”

  “We’re trying. But there’s not much cover out here.”

  “I’ll put an eye out there for you.”

  “Roger that.”

  Just then, they heard another deadly crump. A whistle, and then the image from Awful shook as another round struck home with an earth-shaking whump. The mortar landed in the wreckage outside the C&C, throwing up a huge cloud of sour-tasting dust.

  Davis and his companion charged into the cloud, desperate for any cover as they attempted to make it to C&C. Awful spun on its rotors as it spotted movement to their side. An eight-man squad comprised of yet more of Chelovik’s riflemen also dashed forward into the cloud with the same idea in mind.

  “You’ve got hostiles on your–” Redhawk cried, before the cloud outside the trailer lit up with bursts of automatic weapons fire.

  Men screamed as they were cut down by streams of hot lead. A blast as someone threw a grenade. More shots, followed by a dreadful silence. Redhawk put his shoulder to the computer desk and signaled Preble to join him.

  “Come on, help me shift this thing to face the front doors,” he said, before noting that the doors had been completely blown away. “I mean, face the opening. Where the doors used to be.”

  Preble set his cane aside and did his best to lean into the heavy piece of furniture. The best the two men could do was shift it a few degrees further to give them some cover. Redhawk pulled out his service pistol and peered into the murk outside.

  “There’s no telling who came out on top in that shootout,” he said tightly to the older man. “Stay down.”

  The dust outside swirled like a heavy fog as a breeze came up. Smells of hot metal and bent rebar filtered inside. Redhawk peered over the edge of the desk and into the murk.

  Finally, two shadowy figures appeared. Their fatigues looked dark gray in the dim light.

  He let out a breath and prepared to call out a greeting. Yet something told him to hold off. Back on Salt River, when a dust storm came up, you kept an eye on anyone coming in out of the storm until you knew without a doubt who it was.

  The two figures spoke first. They let their assault rifles do the talking.

  A hail of bullets ripped by overhead. They sparked off the exposed network cabling and shattered another of the surviving monitors. Two more shadowy figures ghosted into view behind the first pair. All four began to pepper the inside of the C&C with automatic weapons fire.

  Redhawk cursed and prepared to fight to the bitter end.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Leigh Austen had seen death before, in many of its more colorful varieties. But her quick and heavy breaths threatened to fog the inside of her climate controlled hardsuit. She fought down both her sense of alarm and a growing feeling of dread.

  “Oh my God,” she said, in a near-whisper. “Look at them, Helen. Just look at them!”

  Lelache took a couple of slow steps to one side, carefully keeping just outside Austen’s field of vision.

  “Oh, ben ça alors,” Lelache breathed. Her voice sounded shocked, but her eyes were bright and hard as orbs of green marble. “What do you think happened here?”

  This had been a supply room, after all. Her hand closed around a crowbar that someone had left behind atop a half-smashed crate.

  The crowbar slid off the crate’s surface with a whisper of steel on wood.

  “They’ve all been shot at very close range,” Austen said, as she shifted slightly to play her lights over the contents of the room. “That’s why I can’t make out any intact faces. No intact rib cages. But that’s not what puzzles me.”

  “No? What, then?”

  Why take their clothes? The only people shooting at each other out here are the Kazakh army and the Ozrabek rebels. Why would Votorov do this?”

  Lelache, holding the crowbar down by her side, moved a step forward. Then another.

  “Men always have their reasons. Besides, who said it was Votorov?”

  “Good point.”

  Yes, and she’s in the best position to know, Austen thought. A little red flag popped up in her head, waving urgently. Lelache has always been in the best position to know.

  Her mind flashed back to the dying Ozrabek miner. In his terrified, dying state, he’d spoken of this place, she was sure of that. But his focus had been behind her – in Lelache’s direction.

  What had he been warning her about?

  Suddenly, she remembered the fire in D-module. Something told her than Preble wasn’t at fault. The man knew his Parkinson’s was progressing. If anything, he’d be double-checking his work.

  When the fire broke out, Navarro and Blaine had been busy knocking down the flames with the extinguishers. She’d crouched down to make her way over to the biosafety cabinet controls and reached out to turn the handles.

  But the Frenchwoman had told her to wait. She’d even tossed over a protective cloth.

  “Helen,” Austen asked casually, “during the fire, how did you know that those environmental controls were already hot?”

  There was no answer. Lelache took one more step, just behind and to the left of Austen. She raised the crowbar, holding it like a baseball bat.

  An impossibly distant crump vibrated through the rocks. It was more felt than heard. Leigh’s head jerked around.

  “What was that?” she asked, just as she caught the flicker of movement in the corner of her eye.

  Lelache swung. The iron bar whined through the dense air.

  Austen’s startled reaction was all that prevented her from outright shattering her hardsuit’s transparent faceplate. The blow caught the side of her helmet at a glancing angle.
Something broke and sheared off with an ear-jangling twang of steel on polycarbonate.

  She fell to one side and hit the wall. Her body rolled with the force of the impact. Her vision turned red as the indicators in the corner of her helmet began flashing.

  But she ignored them for now. Her eyes focused on a horrible spider’s web. A web of cracks that wended their way across her faceplate from top to bottom.

  A dark shape appeared before her. Lelache lifted her crowbar over her head. Leigh scrabbled desperately to find something, anything to defend herself. Her hand closed around a loose board. She brought it up reflexively to shield her face.

  Lelache’s swing smashed the board into kindling, but it took the brunt of her blow. The crowbar gouged a deep scratch atop Austen’s helmet, making it ring like a metal gong. Austen gritted her teeth and fought through the pain.

  Her vision was blurry with tears. But she shifted her legs to aim at the center of the black mass that loomed over her. She lashed out with a vicious kick. Lelache fell back a step, gasping.

  Austen couldn’t find her footing. She clawed at the floor and wall behind her, but the crumbled rock and concrete came away in loose chunks. She managed to get to a sitting position just as Lelache came in again.

  This time the Frenchwoman lunged forward, holding the bar with the intent of skewering her opponent. Austen let out a gasp as she tried to roll out of the way. But there was no time.

  With a gut-wrenching SPRAKK!, Lelache stabbed through the hardsuit’s extended-wear pack. The light mounted just above Austen’s left shoulder exploded in a shower of sparks.

  Just then, one of the loose concrete chunks fell into Leigh’s hand. She brought it up and mashed it into Lelache’s helmet. The woman recoiled, howling, as a crack appeared in her own faceplate.

  Once again, Austen tried to get up. Her gasps and curses mixed with the broken whine that emanated from her suit’s pack. She struggled, but she felt like a fly caught on a piece of adhesive tape.

  The crowbar had gone through her pack and into the wall behind her. She’d been pinned as thoroughly as a beetle to a collection board. She grabbed a second chunk of cement, ready to defend herself as well as possible against Lelache’s next attack.

  But it didn’t come.

  Lelache shuffled backwards until she fetched up against the opposite wall. She wheezed as she held one hand over her midsection where Austen had kicked her with full force. Then she touched the crack in her faceplate, as if to assure herself that it was superficial.

  “Helen…” Austen gasped. “You betrayed me. You betrayed us. The fire in D-module’s lab…you knew that the environmental controls would be hot. Because you’re the one who set the fire from there, weren’t you?”

  She got a weary nod in reply. “Ah, oui. I should have known you’d figure out that mystery soon enough.”

  “And these men…you couldn’t let me live once I saw them. Why?”

  “Because they’re the Kazakh soldiers who guarded this base,” Lelache said. “Votorov’s a fool, but even he would figure that the rebels had replaced the troops here if he heard about this.”

  Austen tried to do more than sit up, but the bar embedded in her pack simply refused to move. So she kept on talking.

  “You don’t care about the Ozrabek cause, Helen. I know you too well for that. Is this about a man? Colonel Chelovik, maybe?”

  A snort as Lelache continued to back away from Austen.

  “Chelovik was useful to me. But too impulsive.” Her voice became tinged with annoyance. “Men are hard to tame sometimes. And the ones I needed just weren’t reliable enough, either of them. I was here before the alert to the WHO went out. I’d already found through trial and error on the villagers which strains spread best. Your people told me which was the most lethal. And more importantly, how to grow it.”

  Leigh Austen felt bile rise in her throat. So did rage.

  “You’re a monster!” she raged. “You slaughtered innocent people to give that man a pathogen that could kill millions!”

  “Yes, but I doubt it’ll go beyond the ‘millions’,” Lelache said offhandedly. “A few demonstrations of what Nostocales can do will suffice. Then he and his Mongol war-god cult will get whatever they ask for.”

  Austen could only stare hatefully at her. Lelache’s emerald eyes sparkled with equal parts wonder and madness as she continued.

  “You see, this organism…it’s the crowning glory of my achievements to have found it, to isolate it. You see, being a colonial organism, it’s learned to adapt. Not to our outside world, not yet. But even here, where it’s too cool, with too much oxygen, it’s learned to thrive. You’ll be amazed at what it can do.”

  “What the hell are you babbling about?” Austen husked. Deep in the back of her mind, her lizard brain began to panic. She shut it down, hard.

  “It’s colonial, you know,” Lelache said, almost wistfully. “Ancient beyond time. And unique in how it can kill. Before you die, you’ll see how.”

  With that, Helen Lelache turned and left the supply room. Austen’s heart sank as she heard the creak and then slam of the pressure door opening and closing.

  The deep gloom closed in as her last shoulder-mounted light flickered fitfully. A few more crumps echoed dimly through the rock, then the deeper boom of a larger explosion.

  Someone declared war up there, she thought. I’ve got to get out of here! They’re going to kill everyone at the lab!

  Austen tugged at the crowbar yet again, but the effort was futile. Her pack continued to let out an anemic whirr, as something broken did its best to keep operating. She lay back for a moment, gasping for breath.

  Her remaining light shone over the piles of dead soldiers. Exploded torsos, smashed skulls, and exposed bone gleamed back at her. She turned her attention to trying–

  Austen’s eyes snapped back to the mass of bodies.

  The movement had been so slight, she first thought she imagined it.

  Then it happened again. Her breath caught as she tried to peer into the darkness.

  Maybe it’s a rat, she thought, as her sanity wavered on the brink. Maybe it’s just a kind of rat that’s adapted to a low-oxygen environment. Please let it be rats!

  A third movement, this one directly in her field of vision. There was no doubt about it. Her rational, logical brain refused to deny what she saw.

  Something within the heap of dried corpses slithered towards her.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Splinters of wood flew as bullets chewed away at the edge of the desk. Redhawk let out a breath and then murmured a quick prayer in Apache. The smells of scorched carpeting and hot metal scoured his mouth. He edged forward, leading with the muzzle of his gun.

  The rat-tat-tat of assault rifles echoed in the confined space once again. Only this time, they came from off to one side. Of the four shadows silhouetted in the doorway, two slumped to the ground. A third did a macabre dance as he brought his rifle up and received two more bursts of fire into the torso for his troubles.

  Redhawk rose from behind the desk and squeezed the trigger on his service pistol three times. The remaining man flung his arm up as the rounds spun him around before landing in the dirt. His collapse kicked up yet more dust, which turned the sunlight that filtered in the blasted-open doorway a filthy gray.

  “Hold your fire!” came Navarro’s voice. “Friendlies coming in.”

  “Damn straight,” Redhawk let out a breath of relief, lowering his gun before calling, “Come ahead!”

  Navarro and October made their way inside. While they weren’t covered in dust, both men looked worse for wear. Redhawk could tell that October was limping and taking shallow breaths, while the side of Navarro’s face sported a pair of horrific bruises.

  Preble came out from around the desk, walked shakily to Navarro, and shook his hand.

  “Your timing is remarkable,” Preble said. “Things have gotten into a proper state around here while you were gone.”

  Redhawk
clapped October carefully on one shoulder. “I’m just glad that you were able to make it back. Had me worried.”

  The larger man sounded puzzled. “Why is that?”

  “Well, you make a pretty big target.”

  October bit back a laugh as he jerked a thumb at Navarro. “What, you expect him to find way back here without help?”

  “We should’ve listened to our misgivings about this place,” Navarro said heavily. “Chelovik’s with the Ozrabek rebels. They infiltrated this base and killed the Kazakhs who were guarding it, then pulled the wool over Votorov’s eyes until this morning. Then they shot him. Doctor Zhao, too. They took out Mendez’s squad as well.”

  A hiss escaped Redhawk’s lips at that news, but Navarro continued.

  “Thanks to October, we got out with our skins intact. But we had to take a roundabout way back. Looks like all hell broke loose here in the meantime.”

  “Yeah,” Redhawk sullenly agreed. “Hell came, and the devil had his due. Chelovik showed up, shot down some of my drones, and gave the order to plaster us with mortars. Then he sent his men in after the shelling to pick up the pieces.”

  “What’re our casualties?” Navarro pressed.

  Preble looked glum at that. Redhawk’s already grim face took on an ashen cast before he spoke.

  “We’re all that’s left.”

  Navarro let those words sink in. He turned away for a moment, leaned against one of the bullet-pockmarked walls and hit it with a bam! of his fist. Two words dropped from his lips.

  “Jesus. How?”

  “You just took out the bastards who killed Davis and what was left of his squad,” Redhawk said. “As for Gorecki, the Ozrabeks got one. I think it was Esposito, but I’m not sure. The other three…they went off with Ian Blaine.”

  That got Navarro’s attention. He turned back to Redhawk. A strange glint lit up his eyes as he finally found his voice.

  “They went off? With goddamn Ian Blaine?”