Thunder Run (Maelstrom Rising Book 6)

by Peter Nealen

  The driver started toward Tony, shouting something in German. Tony wasn’t moving all that steadily—some of it was an act, but he’d hit pretty hard, seatbelt or no. He’d be hurting for the next couple of days.

  Jordan stomped on the gas and started the van toward the wreck with a lurch. It wasn’t a smooth ride, and he stomped on the brake as he wrenched the wheel over to bring the sliding side door almost in line with the crumpled front bumper of the BMW.

  I ripped the door open and Scott, David, and I piled out. We were masked, wearing our low-pro chest rigs, and with suppressed Rattlers in hand.

  The driver turned to look at us, his eyes widening as he saw the masks and the weapons. Blood was running down the side of his face from a wound on his temple, and he wasn’t moving very well. He was noticeably shaky on his feet.

  He still grabbed for the pistol in his waistband. He might have been rocked and he might not have been expecting an attack in Ingolstadt, but he still had enough presence of mind to recognize the threat coming at him.

  He was just a little too late.

  I already had the Rattler’s red dot on his chest. It took a fraction of a second for the trigger to break. The suppressor spat as the short-barreled rifle thumped back into my shoulder.

  He wasn’t wearing body armor. The bullet smashed through his sternum and tore into his heart. He was already dead before the reflexive second shot tore through his lung. He sagged and fell on his face in the street, his hand still on the pistol. He hadn’t even gotten it all the way out of the holster.

  I’d been moving as I’d gunned him down, and I was already within a single pace of the open driver’s side door. He hadn’t closed it behind him when he’d gotten out, and the clearly dazed right-seater, blood running down his forehead and into his eyes, was reaching for it, but he was too late. I didn’t take a hand off my weapon, but stepped inside the door, bracing it open with my hip, and leveled my Rattler at his forehead.

  “Don’t be stupid.” My German wasn’t the greatest—there was no way he’d actually think I was a native if his brains hadn’t been rattled too hard by the crash—but it got the point across. He showed his hands and went still.

  I kept him covered while David pushed past me and took up security at the rear of the vehicle. I heard him call out to Tony, in German. “Get in the van.” Tony had taken enough of a hit that we’d already planned for him to be essentially out of action after the initial intercept.

  Scott stepped around behind me, reached in, and unlocked the back door. Hauling the door open, he reached in and dragged Klemme out.

  The EDC commander wasn’t doing that great. He hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, and the impact had clearly thrown him against the front seat and the armored window. There was blood on his head, and he cried out in pain when Scott gripped his arm and pulled. I spared him a split-second glance. His hand was dangling at an odd angle. It looked like his forearm was broken.

  Scott wasn’t especially gentle, but he wasn’t unnecessarily rough, either. He pulled Klemme out of the vehicle, got his feet under him, and propelled him quickly toward the van. The man had no fight in him. The broken arm and possible concussion meant he was off in his own little world of pain.

  Gunfire echoed off to the north, on the other side of the box truck in the middle of the intersection. A moment later, as we started to collapse back on the van, Greg clambered out of the cab, a bullet spiderwebbing the glass in the window above his head, and sprinted toward us.

  David had already turned back to the van as soon as Scott had started moving with Klemme, but he halted at the sound of gunfire, dropping to a knee and covering the box truck with his Rattler as Greg sprinted to cover the forty-five yards between us and the corner.

  I dashed across the street toward the wrecked Karoq, opening a corridor for Greg down the middle of the street, even as Klemme’s other two security men came around the front of the box truck, MP7s in hand.

  I’d wanted to get in, grab Klemme in the chaos and confusion after the crash, and get out, hopefully without firing a shot. But it wasn’t working out that way. Fortunately, that’s why we planned contingencies. If you go into an op—any op—expecting everything to go according to plan, you’ve already failed before you even stepped off.

  That means not only planning carefully, but also mentally preparing to do what is necessary when things inevitably went sideways. And as soon as I’d seen a weapon, it was game on.

  I shot the first one as soon as he came around the open door and raised his submachinegun.

  The controlled pair slammed into his upper chest, probably a little too high. He staggered, got into his partner’s way, and David dumped four rounds into both of them as Greg ran between us. They tumbled to the street, one of them leaving a bloody smear on the side of the box truck.

  “Turn and go!” Greg had made it to the van. And the street ahead of us was clear, at least for the moment.

  I had no doubt that would change quickly. One of our blocking vehicles was in the Fuchs’ way, but that would change. Even a box truck loaded with cinderblocks wasn’t going to stop an armored vehicle for long.

  “Go!” I would be the last one out. David knew better than to argue with me, and he turned and sprinted back to the van. It took seconds.

  “Get in!” At David’s call, I quickly scanned the street, checking the bodies as best I could, then turned and sprinted to the van, launching myself inside and cramming myself against the far wall as David hauled the sliding door shut and turned toward the front. “We’re in! Go!”

  I’d almost tripped over Klemme on the way in, and as Jordan stomped on the gas and started the van moving, I did fall over on top of him. There were no seats or seatbelts in the back of the van, and nothing to grab hold of.

  Klemme tried to scream as I landed on him, but Scott had already stuffed a gag in his mouth and bagged him. He was trying to treat the broken wrist, but the movement was making it difficult.

  He had already zip-tied Klemme’s other wrist to his belt.

  Jordan pulled a three-point turn as fast as he could without tipping the van over, and accelerated down the Gymnasiumstraẞe.

  I got off Klemme and hauled myself up into the passenger’s seat. So far, the way ahead was clear, but we had a limited number of possible escape routes, and it was only a matter of time before the Bundespolizei and their EDC minders figured out what had happened and locked the city down.

  “Well, that got messier than we’d hoped.” Jordan was watching the rear view as well as the street ahead. “Any change to the extract plan?”

  “Only if they start closing the roads off.” That was going to get bad if they got ahead of us. And that was leaving aside regular traffic, which was thin for the time of day, but could pick up at any point. I’d done enough urban operations to know how that works.

  It’s impossible to plan for every contingency. Sometimes the chaos of the world just throws a roadblock in your teeth, and you’ve got to get over, under, or around it, somehow.

  I was not relishing the prospect of an on-foot E&E through a cramped European city with a wounded prisoner.

  Fortunately, we did have a plan in place that should mitigate some of the problems we were facing, especially with the near-ubiquitous CCTV coverage.

  Jordan took the turn south at the end of the Gymnasiumstraẞe, hard enough that the van almost came up on two wheels. There was traffic on the Harderstraẞe, but not enough to get in our way, provided the Bundespolizei didn’t do to us what we’d done to Klemme’s security.

  Fortunately, that kind of intercept usually requires preparation and timing, and I doubted that they had either, especially since they should have been distracted by all the emergency calls up north.

  And it appeared that they had been. We sped down the street as fast as traffic would allow and took the turn onto Theresienstraẞe without any sign of pursuit. “So far, so good.” Greg was peering out the small windows in the back doors, perpetually upbeat as always.


  “We ain’t out yet.” Greg might be Mr. Cheerful, but I had been through too many of these ops to get too optimistic until we were back inside friendly lines. Granted, so had Greg, but he sometimes saw it as his mission in life to offset the cynicism and pessimism that the rest of us expressed freely.

  But it started to look like we’d gotten away with it, somehow, as we pulled around behind the Stadttheater Ingolstadt, where three sedans and a VW Atlas were waiting. Pascal was standing by the Atlas when we pulled up, though he wasn’t watching the van. He was watching the road behind us.

  “Go soft.” I was already collapsing my Rattler and stuffing it and the chest rig back into my day pack. The others were doing the same, though we all kept the packs partway open, just in case. We could fire a single shot from a folded Rattler, though any follow up shot would require snapping the stock open and racking the bolt.

  Tony was already pulling the door open, as Scott hauled a groaning Klemme to his feet. This was going to have to happen fast.

  We piled out, hands near pistols concealed in waistbands, and spread out as Scott propelled Klemme toward the open trunk of one of the Audi A4s lined up on the narrow back street.

  But our spectacular luck was about to run out. I could already hear the whooping European police sirens.

  I stepped around the back of the van, my hand on my pistol. Sure enough, flashing blue lights were already pulling into the Stadttheater’s parking lot.

  “Get to the vehicles! Now!” I slung my pack off my back. There were at least three Polizei cars. I was going to need something more than just the PR-15 in my waistband.

  I yanked the Rattler out, snapped the stock open, and brought it to my shoulder. A fast five shots shattered glass and smashed one of the rotating blue lights, and the blue-clad Polizei who had just gotten out dove for cover.

  I wasn’t necessarily trying to kill them. I just wanted them to keep their heads down long enough for us to get away. Slamming another pair at the cop cars, I swung away as Scott yelled at me. “Matt! Get in! Let’s go!”

  I still had my Rattler in my hand, but I was digging in the pack with the other. I came out with an incendiary grenade, yanked the pin with the pinky of my firing hand, and tossed the thermate grenade into the open van door. I heard it pop as I ran toward the last Audi that was still waiting. I threw myself into the back seat as Scott clambered into the front.

  I barely got the door closed before the Verteidiger driver floored it and sent us careening onto the highway.

  Behind us, the van burned. I only hoped that it would keep the Bundespolizei off our tracks long enough.

  ***

  It really didn’t. At least, it didn’t keep enough of them occupied.

  “This is a shit-show.” Scott had a better view of the checkpoint ahead than I did, but I could get a pretty good impression, and it wasn’t good.

  The road was completely blocked by barbed wire and heavy, deployable anti-vehicle barriers. The official vehicles to either side weren’t armored, but the men and women gathered around them were, all wearing black plate carriers, helmets, and armed with G36C rifles.

  Except for the two carrying Panzerfaust 3s. And what looked an awful lot like a MELLS launcher set farther back, behind hastily-erected sandbags.

  “They’re prepared for a hell of a lot more than just some special operators who just snatched a high-value target.” I was trying to calculate our odds if we had to try to fight our way through. And they weren’t good.

  “The Western Caliphate attacked a police station in Schweinfurt with an armored car bomb a few months ago.” Our driver, Thorben, was a soft-spoken young man who appeared to be one of the less-experienced Vertiediger recruits, but he was calm, collected, and appeared to have soaked up what training the likes of Pascal had been able to give him. “They have really stepped up the armor and weapons since then.”

  “And the incident in Ingolstadt was enough to get them to lock down the highways.” We weren’t that far outside the city, though we still had some open escape routes. It takes a lot of manpower to completely lock down a city without serious terrain advantages, which didn’t exist on the North German Plain.

  I scanned our surroundings. We were still a little distance back from the checkpoint, and there were enough civilian vehicles trying to get through to provide us with a little screening for the moment. Thorben was already starting to turn aside. “Have you been able to get past these checkpoints before?”

  He laughed a little. “We haven’t really needed to. This is a bit more extreme than anything we have done before.”

  Scott glanced over his shoulder at me. I just grimaced. It wasn’t uncommon—we’d run into it before with certain Stateside allies—but it was an aspect of unconventional warfare that was always a bit of a pain.

  “Get us off the highway and find us a route that might get us out of this cordon.” I really didn’t want to get into a firefight with an enemy unit deploying anti-tank launchers.

  He was already taking the turn into a residential neighborhood. We were well to the south of Ingolstadt itself, in the suburbs, but we were running out of maneuvering room. I hoped that the other vehicles had made it out—we’d bombshelled as soon as we’d left the rendezvous.

  Quickly passing through the small cluster of houses and small businesses, we soon found ourselves out in the fields again, heading west.

  ***

  It took almost another hour, but we finally found a major road heading away from the city that didn’t have a checkpoint on it. Apparently, they hadn’t quite managed to close the ring completely.

  We drove southwest in silence. We didn’t have the package; Pascal and Greg did. We were also running comms silent until we got well away from Ingolstadt. So, we just had to wait and pray that they’d gotten clear.

  It was after dark by the time we reached the rendezvous point, in a container yard outside of Schrobenhausen. I counted vehicles as we pulled up. It looked like everyone was there—except for the VW Atlas.

  I counted heads as I got out. We were missing Jordan and Christof. “Any word?”

  Pascal seemed as calm as ever as he put his phone back in his pocket. That didn’t actually make me any more comfortable—if anything, I was even more keyed up, scanning our surroundings for the Bundespolizei ambush.

  “The last vehicle is five minutes away.” I might have breathed a little easier, but not by much. Still, I was somewhat reassured by the fact that while he looked calm, Pascal’s voice was as tight and worried as I felt.

  Of course, that could be because he wasn’t sure what would happen when we reacted to a double-cross.

  We waited in silence, every nerve strung taut, weapons in hand, eyes out.

  Finally, headlights appeared, turning into the container yard. We faded into the shadows, weapons ready, most of us off NVGs for the moment.

  The VW Atlas rolled to a stop and the lights died.

  “Malcom, Deacon.” I had my red dot trained on the windshield.

  “This is Malcom. We’re clean.”

  I still didn’t relax, not quite. There was still time for the EDC or the Bundespolizei to sweep in and end this op the hard way.

  “Bring it in.”

  Jordan and Christof got out of the Atlas, weapons in hand. Christof had an MP7, and I had to wonder how he’d gotten it, if this was the first big, kinetic op that the Verteidiger in Bayern had really run.

  Maybe it was just the only one that Thorben knew about. Or maybe Pascal really hadn’t been kidding about having people in the Defense Ministry.

  But as Klemme was hauled out of the Audi’s trunk, looking more than a little shaky and unstable on his feet, a black bag over his head, one arm splinted, and the other tied to his belt behind his back, Pascal led us quickly toward a new pair of vans on the south side of the container stack. The story he’d told us was that the owners of the container yard were quiet supporters of the Verteidiger.

  Pascal started to climb into the driver’s
seat of the first van, and Christof moved to the second. I pointed to the second. “Weeb, take Malcom, Chatty, and Strawberry. I’ll take Santa Ana, Peanut, Redball, and the package.”

  We loaded up fast. I was still keeping one eye on the sky and an ear cocked for helicopter rotors or armored vehicle engines. But the night stayed quiet.

  “It should take about two and a half hours to get to the rendezvous.” Pascal still sounded wound tight. He glanced down as his phone lit up, and then he seemed to relax. “We should have an easy drive, though. The excitement is still all up near Ingolstadt, and our advance vehicle has encountered no obstacles.” He looked over at me as I pulled the passenger door shut. “Klemme’s disappearance won’t disrupt their efforts as much as one might hope, but it will send a message. That’s how it helps us. I hope that you get the intelligence you need, and that it provides proof of our good faith.”

  I nodded. “If we get out of here and back across the line, you have my word that you’ll get every bit of coordination and support that we can get you.”

  He nodded. The look in his eye told me that he understood just how much I’d promised. He knew we were Triarii. He knew we were, effectively, privateers. My promise came with unspoken qualifiers that he’d heard, nevertheless.

  I hated it, but it was the nature of the beast.

  We pulled out of the container yard in the dark, heading for Munich and the Czech border two hours beyond.

  Chapter 16

  “Something bad’s got to happen.”

  Hartrick looked up at me with his usual sardonic squint. “Not that I’m disagreeing, but what makes you say that?”

  “We got out of Germany way too easily. Not even a hiccup.” I sat in one of the folding chairs against the wall while he leaned against the map table. “Hell, we barely saw the Bundespolizei after we got past Munich.”