Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  “Freeze-dried meal packs,” he murmured, reading the labels aloud. “Ammunition, 5.6mm. Universal lubricant.”

  It made him wonder what Franklin had taken with him. He shrugged it off and hurried out the door at the other end of the room. And into a bullet.

  He felt the impact on his chest before he heard the shot. Fire erupted just to the right of his sternum, knocking the breath out of him, and he fell backwards, his carbine slipping out of his hands. Svetlana was standing in the next doorway, a Makarov extended in her right hand, her body turned sideways like an Eighteenth-Century duelist. He tried to move, tried to pat at his waist for the .45, but he wasn’t going to be in time…

  Orlova yelled, jumping over Anton, his carbine sputtering in hoarse fury. The man behind Svetlana threw himself flat to the floor, but she moved only a few millimeters, not seeming foolhardy, just supremely confident. Orlova missed again. Svetlana Grigoryeva didn’t. Kolya Orlova flopped onto his face.

  Anton didn’t take the time to grieve, knowing he had seconds to live. He rolled onto his fallen carbine, yanking the trigger before he’d even lifted it off the ground. Bullets punched into the wall starting at shin level and traveling upward…and she was gone, scrambling back through the door with the man behind her.

  Anton was cursing, Russian first and then into English and Spanish and German, but over and over repeating suka, “bitch.” Every word, every breath cost him pain and he was sure he had a cracked rib from the round impacting his tactical vest, but he ran forward heedless. His hands swapped out magazines automatically and he sprayed another long burst into the wall the direction where the FSB agent had gone, hoping the bullets would penetrate, hoping just the sound of the fire would keep her from turning to shoot.

  He left Orlova dying on the floor, knowing the man would understand.

  Darkness swallowed up the corridor on the other side of the door and his night vision glasses turned everything to a two-dimensional green but the two of them weren’t in sight. He ran on, not caring anymore if he stumbled into another ambush, just determined to kill the woman, the man, someone.

  Another door and he sprayed the carbine back and forth across it, changing magazines again by rote just before he stormed through. Now the light returned and he could see them. They were heading toward the north exit to the White House, sprinting across an open area.

  What had it been, once upon a time? A place for the press to gather and ask their inane, prattling questions? A place to entertain foreign dignitaries? It didn’t matter. This night, it was going to be an abattoir. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and was putting the first ounces of pressure on the trigger when the wall beside his head exploded.

  He ducked reflexively at the echoing roar, eyes drawn to the muzzle flash and away from the cloud of plaster billowing around him. That hadn’t been a bullet. The impacts were close together, but they were almost certainly buckshot. Three more rounds in a deafening chorus of explosions and he scrambled backwards, finally seeing the woman holding the drum-fed shotgun. She wasn’t alone. Another, shorter figure was beside her, firing a handgun, but the report of the weapon was lost beside the blast of the shotgun.

  He wanted to stay, wanted to take them all down, but he was alone.

  God damnit. He didn’t have the breath to curse aloud. Every bit of air, every bit of effort was focused on getting out of the line of fire. But he pushed his thoughts out, screaming them inside his head, directing them toward her. I’ll find you again, Svetlana. I swear I will.

  Shadows swallowed him up and the enemy didn’t follow.

  17

  “Watch your six, kid!” James Fuller snapped. “You got a Tagan circling around behind us!”

  The Fucking Old Guy didn’t sound like the Fucking Old Guy in combat, Hector Ramirez realized. The drawl was gone, along with the easy-going attitude and the “aw-shucks” mannerisms. The old man was all business and since James Fuller had probably forgotten more about piloting mechs than Ramirez would ever know, the younger man kept his ears open.

  “Run your U-mech around at your rear and let it play blindside blocker for you!” Fuller urged him.

  Running the uncrewed Hellfire and his own at the same time was hard. Regular U-mechs, ones designed for it, had some measure of autonomy. You designated a target and they’d shoot at it until they ran out of ammo, and maybe try to move around enough not to get shot down themselves. It wasn’t much, but it was better than he had now. All he or Fuller could do with Roach and Jenny’s machines was send individual commands, one at a time, running the controls on a small and awkward auxiliary panel he’d never even used before since the abbreviated training course the DoD had put him through.

  And it wasn’t easy trying to do that when a Tagan was shooting at you.

  “Roger that,” he said anyway, more of a murmur to himself than an actual reply.

  He had his Hellfire in the air, spinning the mech in a tight arc over what had once been the South Lawn, just meters ahead of the burst of 25mm slugs chasing him, leaving divots the size of post holes in the dirt behind him. The enemy pilot in the Tagan wasn’t better than him, he could tell that already. But the Russians had the benefit of a third crewed mech, and they were using the threat of it to prevent either he or Fuller from decisively engaging with any one of the Tagans. It was damned hard to wait for a targeting lock for your missiles when someone was waiting to put a chain gun round through you the minute you stopped bobbing and weaving.

  And the heat sensors were starting to peg, into the red now for way too long. He was going to have to set down or risk the turbines exploding and taking most of the mech with them. Time to start listening to Fuller.

  Manipulating the auxiliary control panel one-handed while still running the main control sticks with his other hand and elbow, while the angular momentum of his flight was pushing him into one side of his seat was just about as hard as it sounded, but he just had to get Roach’s mech into the air to distract the guy shooting at him. The display screen on the tiny control panel was as small as everything else, but he could see the view in it from the Hellfire’s front cameras and he knew he had it up to about thirty meters, about even elevation with the Tagan he’d been trying to engage.

  The Russian mech began to turn and Ramirez jammed down the button to remotely fire Roach’s Vulcan cannon. Barrels spun and tracers ripped through the night sky, not hitting the enemy mech—that would have been too much to ask—but at least forcing his attention away.

  The mech pilot who’d been shooting at him didn’t have any choice. He had to deal with the slaved Hellfire and Ramirez couldn’t really fault him for breaking off to engage the thing after it had opened fire. The guy latched with Fuller couldn’t do anything, either. Fuller was good. He piloted his mech like he’d been born to it, and it was all the Russian could do just to keep from getting his ass handed to him. Hell, Fuller was somehow managing to use Jenny’s slaved mech to box the Tagan in, piloting the thing much more precisely than Ramirez could dream of.

  It was the third Russian who screwed up. What he should have done, what Ramirez would have done—at least after someone like Roach or Nate had yelled at him a couple times—was to go after Fuller. Fuller was obviously the better pilot and the guy he was fighting needed help. Or, he could have gone after Ramirez, tried to finish him off while he was tangled up with the other pilot.

  Instead, the Russian did exactly the wrong thing and tried to take down Roach’s mech. It was wrong tactically because the remotely piloted Hellfire was probably the least of the threats they faced, and it was also wrong because Ramirez knew Roach would kick his ass if he let her mech get blown up.

  Ramirez brought his Hellfire around in a tight, spiraling turn and descended behind the Tagan, cutting power to the jets almost two meters up. His teeth clacked together and the Hellfire bent into a crouch to absorb the impact, but his main gun was trained right in the center of the Tagan’s back. He bared his teeth and squeezed the trigger.

  The
vibration traveled up the mech’s arm and into his back, as if he were holding the gun in his own hand instead of extending it at the end of the Hellfire’s arm. The flash of the tracers was a flickering strobe in some disco in the Fry and the dance he did with the Tagan pilot was the oldest there was. Smoke and short-lived flames poured from the Tagan’s fractured reactor and the machine slumped forward, powerless.

  Something feral and remorseless in Hector Ramirez’s gut urged him to finish the pilot off, to put a burst through the Tagan’s cockpit, but the impulse scared him and he forced himself to move on to the next target. He didn’t have the time, anyway…that’s what he told himself.

  It was as if disabling the first of the Tagans was like toppling over a domino. The Tagan pilot who’d been engaging Fuller’s Hellfire panicked and tried to run, hitting the jets and burning upward. Fuller might have let him go, or he might not have. The question became moot when the Tagan’s jets critically overheated. At least, that was Ramirez’s best guess. He’d never seen it happen before live and up close, just watched videos of uncrewed test mechs being run to failure in some reinforced lab somewhere out west.

  This looked like what had happened in those videos. The Tagan had been in the air for way too long. Ramirez had noticed it even if he hadn’t put too much consideration into it. The exhaust from the Tagan’s thrusters went from a pale, glowing column to a fiery blowtorch in the space of a second, the flames engulfing the mech’s torso. The actual explosion wasn’t incredibly violent, not like a missile detonation or even an isotope reactor fracturing. It reminded Ramirez of the party poppers he’d played with as a kid, the puff of hot gas and the spray of metal confetti, the shattered remains of the turbine blades blowing through their housings and ripping the jets apart with them.

  The Tagan plummeted twenty meters, twisting in midair like a cat trying to land on its feet, but not quite making it. Ramirez winced in involuntary sympathy at the thunderous, metallic crunch of impact, wondering if the pilot could survive the fall.

  The last Russian mech stood stock still for a full second, mirroring the momentary hesitation of the pilot, and Ramirez swung around his Vulcan. Something held his finger away from the trigger, maybe the knowledge that these Russians were attacking the same guy they’d come to fight, maybe the idea that he’d want some enemy to give him a chance to run away and live someday.

  Fuller had no such compunctions. The older man fired off a long burst from his Vulcan cannon and the Tagan’s cockpit disintegrated in a debris cloud of plastic and metal. Something bright red splattered against the inside of the canopy and the Russian mech collapsed sideways, off balance and out of control.

  Ramirez clenched his jaw shut, trying to keep the bile inside his throat.

  “This is war, kid,” Fuller told him, as if he could see the younger man’s stricken expression through his cockpit. “You freeze like that, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  Ramirez stared through the Tagan’s ruined cockpit at the thing that had once been a man and wondered if he’d ever be as hard as James Fuller…or if he’d wind up like the Russian pilot first.

  He wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Anton crouched in the shadows beside the south exit of the White House and stared at what was left of the Tagans…at what was left of his team. His own mech still stood undamaged off to the side, cold and inactive, but the two Hellfires patrolled the lawn around it, vigilant enough he doubted he could reach the intact machine and get the jets fired up before they saw him. He’d seen a few small cargo trucks parked on the north side of the building. His best bet was to steal one and drive out of here.

  And what will I tell Vasyli? How will I explain to him the men and machines I’ve lost?

  He nearly shot Giorgi when the man eeled his way out of the thick brush beside the steps up into the White House. Anton sighed and straightened his right forefinger, taking it off the trigger of his carbine. Giorgi looked the worse for wear, blood running down his face from a cut over his right eye and scorch marks charring the right shoulder of his fatigues, the burns making their way to the skin beneath. There was pain in the man’s eyes, but he had his sidearm drawn and he was alive.

  “Where are Mischa and Kolya?” Giorgi asked, breathless, panting from whatever sprint through the dark had led him to Anton.

  “Dead.” The word was flat and emotionless because he wouldn’t let himself feel anything else until he was gone from this place. He nodded toward the wreckage laid out under the glare of the floodlights. “Is anyone else…?”

  “No.” Giorgi was trying to imitate his commander’s dispassionate response, but not pulling it off. There was pain in the man’s eyes, pain not adequately explained by his minor burns. “What do we do now, Anton?”

  The tone was pleading, as if he desperately needed someone to take him by the hand and lead him away from here. Anton knew the feeling, but that was the problem with being a leader: there was no one to take your hand and make you feel better, no one to look to for guidance.

  “We wait until these…” He motioned toward the Hellfires, towering sentinels clomping across the dirt, ever-vigilant. “…leave. Then we make our way home.”

  “Home to Russia?”

  Anton glanced sharply at Giorgi, thinking for a moment that the younger man had cracked, had fallen into delusion. But no, he could see in Giorgi’s twisted grin that it was simply dark humor, a defensive response to what he had seen this night.

  “Home to our base,” he answered, playing the straight man to Giorgi’s fool because it was expected of him. He reached out a hand and patted the younger man’s uninjured shoulder, smiling grimly. “We live, we survive, we keep fighting.”

  “When is this fucking war going to be over?” Giorgi murmured, the sarcastic grin slipping, revealing a bit of the horror behind it.

  “For men like you and me, Giorgi,” Anton assured him, “the war will never end.”

  18

  “Drop the gun, sweetheart,” the tall, broad-shouldered woman ordered, the yawning muzzle of her shotgun pointed between Svetlana Grigoryeva’s eyes, “if you’ve grown fond of your head and you wanna keep it attached to your shoulders.”

  Nathan Stout stared down the shotgun barrel, feeling Svetlana’s iron grip around his throat and the cold metal of her handgun pressed against his temple. Cold sweat trickled down his back, and he was confident it wasn’t from the humid swamp outside.

  Things had happened way too fast for him to follow. First there’d been the mech attack outside, then Svetlana had come to retrieve him from his cell and killed her own troops to save him. Then those other guys had shot at them. Svetlana had told him they were Spetsnaz, which made sense, he supposed, if Bob was double-crossing the Russians as well as the US. She’d shot one of them down from ambush, cold as ice, but the other one was still coming after them and might have got them. The Spetsnaz operator had the benefit of knowing there were no friendlies left ahead of him and he’d used that information to spray gunfire through the walls at them. It had been a good tactic and it might have worked.

  But then this big, loud woman with the big, loud shotgun had shown up…and Roach had been with her. Nate had been about to yell a greeting, to run up and pull Roach into a hug, but both of them had swung their guns towards Svetlana and she’d grabbed him as a shield and reality had caught up to him like a speeding train.

  “Put the gun down and step away from him,” Roach said, her tone a good deal more subdued and professional than the big woman with the shotgun but the intensity in her eyes just as scary.

  “Put your guns away and we can talk about this,” Svetlana insisted, her Makarov not wavering from its position at his head. “No one needs to get hurt.” Her voice was smooth and yet, still dangerous, like a well-sharpened razor.

  How did I wind up surrounded by scary-looking women pointing guns at me? At what point in my life did that become an inevitability?

  “Roach,” he said, but the words came out choked and breathless.
Hesitantly, he reached up a hand and pulled Svetlana’s fingers slightly away from his throat so he could get enough air to speak. She didn’t shoot him, which he’d been afraid had been a possibility, and she didn’t resist, merely letting her hand rest on his shoulder blade.

  “Roach,” he tried again, “I’ve really gotten used to the idea I might survive all this, so is there any way we can all point our guns some other direction?”

  Rachel Mata looked at him long and hard, as if she was trying to decide if he were under duress or out of his mind. Both could be argued to be true, he conceded. Finally, she let out a breath and let the barrel of her pistol drift downward.

  “Jenny,” she said, speaking to the other woman, the one with the shotgun, “muzzle down, please.”

  Jenny, whoever the hell she was, was slow to obey, giving Roach a look like she thought the younger woman was out of her mind.

  “Please,” Roach reiterated. “Just trust me.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to trust you,” Jenny muttered.

  But slowly, reluctantly, the big woman lowered the barrel of her drum-fed shotgun, letting it point at the floor, though she kept both hands on it, ready to swing it back up toward Svetlana if she needed to.

  “Your turn, lady,” Roach said pointedly to Svetlana.

  Don’t prove me wrong about you. It was almost a prayer, though to whom, Nate wasn’t sure.

  Cold metal gradually, slowly pulled away from his head, a millimeter at a time, and Nate sensed more than saw the pistol dropping away from him, held loosely at her side. He hissed out the breath he’d been holding and tried to step away, but her hand, resting so deceptively casual on his shoulder, tightened. She still didn’t want Roach and Jenny to have a clear shot.