by Rick Partlow
“How the hell did you guys find me here?” he asked, knowing there was so much he had to explain, but unable to hold the question in any longer. “Is Ramirez here?” He frowned at the one Roach had called Jenny. “And who are you, again?”
“I’m someone these jokers shanghaied along on this goat rope despite my better judgement,” Jenny said, lip curling into a snarl. “To save your scrawny ass, I might add, so you’re welcome.”
“Ramirez is outside, Nate,” Roach said, taking a step toward him. Svetlana tensed up, but didn’t pull away. “Everything is clear right now, but I’d rather not spend more time here than we have to. Can we table all this…” She waved at him and Svetlana with a negligent, dismissive gesture. “…until we get out of here?” She pointed back north, behind the two of them. “We came in Hellfires, but I saw on the way in, there are a couple of trucks parked out there.” She looked Svetlana up and down. “You were with these people. Can you get one of the vehicles started?”
Svetlana seemed to relax just slightly, her hand finally coming off Nate’s shoulder. She turned, as if looking through the wall at the trucks.
“I think I know where they keep the…”
She didn’t get to finish the sentence. Nate had been keeping his eyes on her, still worried she might get spooked by Roach and Jenny and the whole thing would end in a gunfight, so when he saw Svetlana stiffen and seize up, his first thought was she’d been wounded in the earlier exchange of gunfire with the Spetsnaz operator. Then he saw the wires extending back to the stun gun held at hip level in Roach’s left hand and finally understood.
He wanted to reach out and help Svetlana, but he pulled his hand away. The only thing touching her right now would get him was his share of 50,000 volts, so he watched helplessly as the FSB agent collapsed to the ground, eyes rolling up into her head. Roach let off the trigger and stepped over to pry the Makarov out of the unconscious Russian’s hand.
Nate gaped at her, disbelieving.
“She killed Patty,” Roach reminded him, rolling the insensate woman over and slipping flex-cuffs over her wrists, tightening them before moving down and doing the same to Svetlana’s ankles. “She kidnapped you and held you prisoner.”
Svetlana was blinking now, coming slowly back to awareness and as she did, the stunned blankness across her face began to slowly transform to anger.
“I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt,” Roach told Nate, jabbing a finger at him, “and not assume you’ve been drugged or brainwashed or some such shit, and that you have some good reason for not wanting this bitch dead. But if you think there’s any way she’s leaving this place except trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, you are not the commander I remember.”
Nate tried to object but couldn’t. She was absolutely right, given the facts as she knew them, and he wouldn’t be able to convince her otherwise here.
“All right,” he acceded. “Do you want me to go try to start one of the trucks?”
“No. You get out there and get on board one of the empty Hellfires.” Roach nodded to Jenny. “Captain Armstrong, would you mind escorting our guest back to Virginia in one of those trucks?”
“Mind?” Jenny repeated, snorting a humorless laugh. “Hell yes, I mind. But since it involves being gone from here, I guess I’ll do it anyway.” She gave Nate a look of skeptical assessment. “Boy, I sure as hell hope you were worth the effort.”
Jenny scooped up Svetlana as if the woman weighed nothing, throwing her over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Svetlana said nothing but her eyes promised death and Nate swallowed hard.
“At some point,” Roach said, holstering the stun gun and her sidearm, “you’re going to have to explain to me just what the hell has been going on here. But for right now…”
She grabbed Nate and pulled him into a hug.
He was shocked at first, but after a moment, he returned it, squeezing her fiercely.
“Thank you for coming for me,” he said quietly, reveling in her warmth and solidity. “I thought you guys had given up on me.”
“We’re Broken Arrow Mercenary Force,” she said, her voice muffled slightly against his shoulder. He thought he might have heard a sob breaking it, but he couldn’t have sworn to it. “We don’t leave people behind.”
19
“We should just put a bullet in her and be done with it,” Hector Ramirez growled, pacing back and forth across the floor of their makeshift mech bay, his round face hardened into something much less pleasant.
It was nearly midnight and they’d spent nearly a full day travelling back from DC, pinballing from one intact stretch of road to another. They were all exhausted, but Ramirez still seemed full of restless energy and most of it was focused on Svetlana Grigoryeva. She sat in the ancient office chair, still secured hand and foot by flex cuffs, her expression still sharp enough to slice through metal despite—or, perhaps, because of—so many hours in the back of an old cargo truck in the hot, summer sun.
Ramirez pinned Rachel Mata with a glare.
“You saw the video the same as I did,” he said, his tone accusatory, as if she’d lied about it. “She’s a cold-blooded killer. She blew Patty’s head off without a second thought.”
“And if we put a bullet in her,” Roach countered with calm reason, “what does that make us?” She had been sitting on an upturned storage box, legs stretched out in front of her, but now she stood, stepping over to Ramirez, hands going to his shoulders. “Hector, calm down. I know it’s been a hard day and we’re all stretched thin, but you have to relax.”
“I didn’t just see the video,” Nate reminded Ramirez. “I was there. I saw Patty die.”
They’d hauled an old, ratty couch into the mech bay for Nate to sit on so he could put his leg up. It was healing up well, but hours in a cockpit hadn’t done him any favors. He was strung out, exhausted mentally and physically, and he could smell his own sweat where it had stained through his flight suit. He wanted to stand up, wanted to pace like Ramirez, but he hadn’t the energy for it. He barely had the strength to talk.
“Patty was a traitor,” he declared. “He had his reasons, had family in trouble, but he was willing to sacrifice us to help them and himself. When you step into that world, you’re accepting the risks. I feel bad about what happened to him, but when you betray your friends and then try to double-cross the Russians you betrayed them to…” He shrugged.
“So maybe he was asking for it,” Ramirez admitted, gesticulating toward Svetlana. “Does that mean she’s off the hook for pulling the trigger?”
“You ask me,” Jenny Armstrong put in from where she leaned against the wall, arms crossed, “which nobody has by the way, and you should turn her over to the DoD. They’ll take care of her, squeeze everything useful out of her then dump what’s left in a shallow grave. Done and done, no need to get our hands dirty.”
Nate wasn’t sure what to think of Jenny. He’d run into her type before, former military, former merc, currently in some grey, shadowy area in between, a contractor who did dirty jobs for the Department of Defense and the CIA and God alone knew who else. Generally, they were unpleasantly cold-blooded, anonymous types who could blend into a crowd unnoticed. Not Jenny. She was colorful in a job where being memorable could get you killed, yet she’d obviously been at it for many years and was still kicking.
James Fuller, their other new addition, was another anomaly, an old man in a profession where most died young. He’d been quiet on the trip back and now he seemed as if he were half asleep, slumped forward in the chair he’d carried into the room for this impromptu trial/strategy meeting/therapy session. His eyes were hooded and Nate couldn’t have sworn he was even paying attention.
“What about you, Mr. Fuller?” Nate asked him.
“Ain’t nobody calls me Mr. Fuller,” the old man rumbled immediately, as if demonstrating he was still awake. “My friends call me Catfish, my ex-wife…” He nodded toward Jenny. “…calls me James just to get on my nerves. And these two yo
ung whelps insist on calling me FOG, for Fucking Old Guy. I’ll let you decide which you prefer, Captain Stout.”
“Nate. Captain Stout was…someone else.”
“We’re gonna get to that,” Roach put in, glaring at him. “We’re gonna talk, later, about why you never told us you were a dupe.”
Nate rolled his eyes and tried to focus.
“What about you, James?” Nate pressed him, not really wanting to be in the camp who got on his nerves, but unwilling to indulge in the adolescent teasing of Fucking Old Guy or to call the man Catfish. “Do you agree with Captain Armstrong?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the woman snapped. “Do you fucking need a written release to call people by their first names? I am Jenny, not captain anything.”
“In principal, I do,” Fuller said, rescuing Nate from the woman’s rant. “Ms. Grigoryeva here is a foreign agent on US soil. It’s pretty cut and dried. However, I am neither the commander of this unit, nor the one whose life she saved, so the decision is not mine to make.”
Roach was staring down into the bare cement of the floor, eyes clouded over in thought. She sat down on the couch beside Nate and glanced between him and Svetlana.
“Tell me again what this Robert Franklin asshole is planning. Because I think the first time around, I was loopy from lack of sleep. He’s heading to Colorado with an army of clones?”
“Dupes,” Nate corrected her automatically. “He took my stem cells to duplicate me, and he took the equipment with him to Cheyenne Mountain.”
“And he thinks they’ll just let him waltz on in with a shitload of dupe tanks?” Jenny asked, disbelief caked on her face like makeup. “He’s a fucking loon.”
“Robert Franklin may be crazy,” Svetlana Grigoryeva spoke for the first time since Roach had stunned her in the White House, and Nate nearly jumped in surprise, “but he is not stupid. He did not share all the details of the operation with me before he left, but consider…” She trailed off, her steel blue eyes peering into Nate’s soul for just a moment before travelling on to meet the gaze of the others.
“Consider,” she began again, as if she’d had to re-collect her thoughts, “a man who was known to US and Russian military intelligence as the very creator of the Hellfire mechanized weapons platform, a man who was considered so dangerous he was killed by factions within his own government and yet was foresightful enough to have himself duplicated, to plan his revenge so intricately before the crime against him was even committed. And once he returned to life, he managed to build himself up as a facilitator for both the US and Russian governments under a false identity despite the fact they both knew who he was.”
She shook her head, settling back into the office chair.
“No, if Robert Franklin sets out to do something, you can believe he has planned it out to the last detail, that he has assured himself not only that it can work, but that it will work.”
“So, why shouldn’t we just do what Jenny said?” Ramirez demanded. He sounded more coherent now, less overwrought, though no less confused. “Why not take this to the Department of Defense, warn everyone what’s going to happen?”
Svetlana closed her eyes for a moment, mouth tightening, and Nate thought she was summoning patience.
“You do not think the man who did the things I just mentioned would not be prepared for this? That he doesn’t have people in the DoD who would ‘disappear’ me and possibly you as well?” She hissed out a breath. “This is not a terrorist attack. It’s not a heist or an assassination. It’s not even a coup. This is nothing less than an overthrow of your government…and, eventually, mine. You don’t plan something like this without people on the inside supporting you.”
“You were on the inside supporting him,” Roach reminded her, anger still lingering somewhere behind her eyes. “As I recall, you executed a man for double-crossing one too many people. Why don’t you deserve the same reward he got?”
“Deserve?” Svetlana spat the word. “Woman, I deserve so much worse than that. I let myself believe in a self-styled Great Man, let myself think this one might be different from all the politicians and bureaucrats and criminals I knew in Russia, the ones who’d promised me the world and delivered only betrayal. I let myself think he might actually have the good of all mankind in his heart. Go ahead and kill me. Or give me to your government and let them do it. At least that way, when Robert Franklin winds up the dictator he always swore he would never be, I won’t have to live with the knowledge I helped to put him there.”
Nate’s gut twisted at the words. He wasn’t sure if he trusted the woman completely, but he believed her pain was real.
“Maybe you won’t have to live with it,” he said. “Maybe none of us will.” Five sets of eyes sought out his, in varying shades of confusion and incomprehension. “We can stop this. We can get transportation out there and stop this ourselves.”
“Boy, you are fucking nuts,” Jenny Armstrong opined.
“I have to admit, Nate,” Fuller said, shaking his head, eyes wide, “that’s a pretty crazy idea. Just the four of us…”
“Five,” Svetlana insisted. “If you mean to fight Robert, I will go with you.” She tugged at her bonds and her mouth twisted. “If you will have me.”
“Even five,” Fuller went on. “What can we do that the US and Russian military can’t?”
“We can be someone Bob can’t buy, or intimidate or con,” Nate said. “We can make a stand for something, for what we believe in. It’s why I founded this company, to do something no one else could do, what no one else was willing to do. But I can’t do it alone. Who’s with me?”
“You seem determined to get me killed,” Roach said, sighing. “But I didn’t sign up for this outfit to sit on my ass and watch shit happen to other people.” She smiled, the expression softening the severe hardness of her face. “You know you can count on me, boss.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Ramirez said immediately. Nate wasn’t surprised. Ramirez would go wherever Roach went.
He looked over to Fuller and the older man rubbed his eyes tiredly.
“Oh, sweet baby Jesus,” Fuller moaned. When he looked back up, there was something forlorn in his face. “You know, I swore I was done with this shit, but the honest truth is, if I ain’t fighting, if I ain’t piloting a mech, then all I’m doing is waiting to die of something else. I’m in.”
“James!” Jenny Armstrong blurted the word like a curse, staring at her ex-husband in disbelief. “You are just as big a fool as the clone boy here!”
“You knew that when you married me, sweetie.”
Jenny pushed away from the wall and stalked back and forth, fingers clenching and unclenching, mouth working through silent curses.
“Goddammit, Catfish!” she finally yelled, the words echoing off the walls. “Fine, you stupid fuck, you know I can’t let you go off and do this shit alone! You bastard!”
“Love you, too, honey,” James said, smiling below his stringy mustache.
Roach blew out a breath, then slowly and reluctantly pulled a lock blade knife out of her pocket, opening it and stepping over to Svetlana.
“I suppose,” the younger woman said, slicing through Svetlana’s flex cuffs, “that I’m going to have to trust you.”
“You can trust me when I tell you this,” Svetlana said, rubbing at the chafing on her wrists, trying to shake feeling back into her hands. “I am going to kill Robert Franklin…and he won’t be coming back from this death.”
Epilogue
Robert Franklin loved Colorado. It was clean and fresh and unspoiled and everything the East Coast was not. Even here at Cheyenne Mountain, where what had once been nothing but an underground NORAD base and yet was now a thriving government center, with a small city carved into the hillsides, it was still a living place.
No nuclear weapons had spoiled the beauty, no oil spills nor fires. The early morning sun shone golden on the mountains, softening their edges, disguising missile defense turrets in deep shadows. The place
was beautiful, but even Eden had its serpent. The serpent coiled in the depths of this Eden was the shadowy remnant of the US government…and he was heading directly into its lair.
The thrum of the tiltrotor’s engines was muted inside the headphones he’d been given to wear, and interrupted occasionally by the crackle of static and the voice of the pilot and copilot talking to each other, or sometimes to ground control. There was quite a bit of security around Cheyenne Center, as the new city had been unimaginatively named, and clearances had to be checked and rechecked before the airplane was allowed to land.
“We’re cleared, Mr. Franklin,” the crew chief told him, flashing him a thumbs-up.
Franklin smiled back at the young man, his face so fresh and full of idealism, his fatigues clean and neat, his hair cropped closer than regulations required. He was just the sort of person the snakes in the US and Russian governments took advantage of, playing on patriotism left over from their parents and grandparents. There were soldiers who were only in it for three hots and a cot, as the saying went, but not men like this young sergeant.
He won’t thank me for what I have to do, but perhaps his children will.
The tiltrotor descended in a tight spiral, soon passing below the tops of the hills, but in the distance, he could see the highway, see the traffic on it. It was mostly government, since no one else could afford to waste fuel, but still, it seemed like a miracle for there to be an intact road and cars and trucks travelling along it in broad daylight, unafraid.
His trucks were out there, somewhere, heading for a warehouse he’d found for rent not too far from Cheyenne Center, an out of the way place where no one would notice equipment being off-loaded. Worry nagged at the back of his mind, not for his plan but for the people he would have to trust to see it through. He regretted leaving Svetlana behind. She had always been a believer, and you could trust believers to do their job without having to look constantly over their shoulder. People who could be bought were unreliable, even if they were often more competent.
