Dark New World (Book 3): EMP Deadfall (32 page)

“I don’t know how special ops people manage this over and over in training. My brain is fried from searching so hard for the traps, and I think I could have crawled just as fast,” Ethan said into the radio.

“Yeah, that took forever,” Amber replied. “I thought maybe I lost you. I think I see you now on the edge of Camera Fourteen’s view. Stay put for a while. Their guard is awake and looking around. Wait until he ducks down for a smoke or something.”

Ethan shook his head. Screw that. It could be quite a while before the guard had to take a leak or light up, and that wouldn’t take long enough to keep him out of view anyway. He had to neutralize the guard without firing a shot. Ethan felt at his hip to reassure himself the taser was still firmly in place. Good, he hadn’t lost it in the woods. He set down his pack and other gear. He’d have to sneak up on the guy, tase him, tie him up, and blindfold him. He wasn’t sure if people could still yell when tased, but he didn’t think so and they were pretty far from the nearest sentry. Then he could safely repair the directional antenna.

“Where is he now, in relation to me?” Ethan asked.

“Inside the paddock, facing toward you. Oh wait, he turned around. He’s walking to the far side. Now he’s staring down the north face of the hill. He’s sitting down now, and lighting a smoke. Good time to move.”

Perfect. With only his knife, pistol, some zipcuffs, and the taser, Ethan moved out of the tree cover and speed-walked up the hill. He didn’t dare run, afraid of drawing the guard’s attention if he made noise, but it didn’t matter; in only moments he was at the simple three-strand cattle fence that faced the food forest, and crawled through. He crept to the small barn with the animals’ feed, keeping it between him and the guard, and caught his breath. Adrenaline had him panting. “Status,” he panted into the radio.

“He’s still smoking. Sitting down, leaning back on his elbows, staring at stars or his bellybutton or something. You’re clear. Be careful. Beginning radio silence.”

He appreciated that. He’d need to focus and didn’t need Amber trying to talk at him until this situation was dealt with. He spared a moment to consider how hard it must be for her, sitting in safety, watching him attack the guard and being unable to help.

Ethan drew the taser and moved out, sliding first to his left, to position himself directly behind the guard, then crept forward. He took a step, paused. Took two steps, paused. Then another, and another pause. The guard took a languid draw off his cigarette, held it, and slowly exhaled. Ethan kept moving. Now he was ten feet from the guard. Six more feet and he could reach the man with the taser. Three more steps…

Ethan’s foot hit a small rock and it skittered across the dirt. Shit. He rushed forward.

The guard’s head whipped around and he leapt to his feet, bolt action rifle in hand. He swung the rifle barrel toward Ethan, his eyes wide with surprise.

Before he could bring the rifle to bear, Ethan grabbed the barrel with his left hand and thrust the taser at the guard with his right. The guard let go of the rifle and jumped back, narrowly avoiding the menacing
click click click
of the taser, and then raised his booted foot and thrust it into Ethan’s undefended chest. Ethan flew backward, and the rifle went flying as well. The guard rushed toward his fallen foe.

Ethan sat upright and thrust the taser forward. The guard must have seen the move because, without losing momentum, he kicked with his right foot and connected hard with Ethan’s wrist. The taser, too, flew away. Pain shot up Ethan’s arm, radiating from the wrist; his whole arm felt heavy and refused to obey.

Ethan instinctively clutched his wounded hand to his body. The guard didn’t lose a beat, however, and taking a step forward he drove his knee into Ethan’s face. Ethan felt his nose break and blood flowed freely as he saw stars. The force of the blow knocked him backwards so he lay on the ground grabbing his face with both hands, heedless of the pain in his right wrist, while the guard stood over him. Ethan rolled over, panicked, trying to get away from his foe and clear his rattled mind. He crawled to get away, trailing blood behind him.

The guard laughed. “I don’t know who you are, but you done screwed up. Dumbass.” He followed Ethan, kicking him in the ass every other step, which knocked him to the ground. His wounded hand just couldn’t hold him up.

Ethan felt the guard grab a fistful of his hair and cried out as he was yanked upright, onto his knees. “Please,” he begged, and spit out a mouthful of blood. He moved his right hand toward his boot, where he kept his knife—a Ka-Bar fighting knife. The pain in his wounded wrist made it hard to undo the snap holding the blade in its leather sheath, especially with his pants leg in the way, but he fumbled at it while he spoke: “Why are you doing this to us? We never hurt you…”

It worked. The guard paused, and Ethan discreetly tried to free his knife.

“Your leader led the invaders to us. My family was wiped out,” he said, panting, his words pushing into the back of Ethan’s head. “She’s on all your heads. Say goodbye, Clanner.”

Success! The knife slid from its sheath, and Ethan drew it around to the front of his body, and his mind raced through the fog, trying to figure out what to do with the damn thing. Then he felt the guard shift his stance. With a jolt, Ethan realized the man was forcing his head forward and down from behind to put him into a prone position, the perfect position to simply grab Ethan’s jaw with his free hand, twist with both hands, and snap Ethan’s neck.

Ethan felt a surge of adrenaline course through him as his final moment ticked closer. The world seemed to slow down, and his vision crystalized. Every detail of the dirt and pebbles toward which his face was being thrust became clear. Two ants crawled through the dirt, oblivious of the life-and-death struggle taking place over their heads. Somewhere, a mockingbird chirped and the happy sound was completely at odds with Ethan’s situation. It was surreal.

With the knife held like an ice pick, point down, Ethan drew his strength and then, in a sudden burst of effort, let his left arm collapse and flipped over in one fluid movement. He felt his hair tear away from his scalp, a huge clump left in the guard’s hand. He whipped his other hand around at the same time, and felt a thrill of victory as the deadly knife point plunged into his attacker’s right hip. His momentum continued, and Ethan landed on his back with a solid thud that knocked the wind out of him.

The guard screamed, eyes bulging in surprise, and his right leg buckled. This left him straddling Ethan. His hands went to the knife and Ethan’s wrist and pried at them with a strength Ethan couldn’t believe.

Ethan felt the bones in his wrist grinding and fire shot up his arm, and heard the “pop” of the cracked radius bone separate from the scaphoid, ligaments tearing with the sound of shredding paper. He lost his grip on the knife.

The guard snarled in pain and fury, face red and contorted, and pulled Ethan’s knife out of his hip. With total clarity, Ethan saw blood ooze from the wound in pulses, in time to his heart beat, and knew he’d bleed to death soon—but not before he could ram the knife down into Ethan with the full weight of his body, and with Ethan’s wounded wrist there was no way to stop it. The guard raised the knife over his head and held it in both hands, point down, and screamed.

Ethan saw his opportunity, his one chance at life. His legs were pinned under the man straddling him, but the rest of him was free. He grabbed the man’s shirt with his left hand and pulled as hard as he could, at the same time sitting up with all the power left in him and tilted his head down. With the combined force of his sitting up while pulling his enemy down toward him, he smashed his forehead into the guard’s nose. Ethan’s face was immediately covered in blood, which geysered from the guard’s ruined nose.

Then Ethan wrapped his right arm around the guard’s back, pulling him down toward him as Ethan fell backward. The guard fell on top of him—and the knife missed.

The guard’s leverage was gone, but he tried to swing the blade toward Ethan’s head anyway. Ethan grabbed his wrist with his left hand, but the guard’s full weight was on him, and he found himself pinned. The guard strained to drive the knife into Ethan’s face or neck. Somehow he got his wounded arm in front of him and used the length of his forearm to thrust at the guard’s neck, trying to shove him away. For an eternity, the two sat locked in that deadly embrace, both wounded, both growing weak from blood loss, shock, and exhaustion.

And then Ethan felt his strength fading. The guard atop him might be bleeding out all the faster for their exertions, but he had the leverage and body weight to wear Ethan down. Ethan squeezed his eyes shut and put every ounce of strength into one last attempt to shove the guard off him, but it was futile. He knew the HAMnet would fail. The 20s would fail. America would burn before its implacable enemy. All because of one fucking rock that he hadn’t seen in the darkness. God had a funny sense of humor. They would die atop that hill together, first Ethan and then his mortally wounded enemy.

The knife moved inch by inch inexorably toward Ethan’s head, and the insane guard grinned down at him like a wolf over its prey. Ethan’s arm shook from the effort of holding the bloody blade at bay. It was about to give out, and then it would all be over.

A bolt of lightning passed through both Ethan and the guard. What the hell? The faint light of the moon faded in an instant as consciousness fled him. The last thing Ethan saw was another man standing over both of them.

* * *

What the crap? He was alive. Or, he felt alive. He hadn’t left pain behind, at least. His arm throbbed with fire, and his face was a pit of agony. Ethan fluttered his eyes open, trying to see, but he could sense only darkness. Then he remembered it was the middle of the night. He forced his eyes to stay open, and his sight slowly adjusted. A light to his right… There was the moon! Hello, moon. How beautiful it was—he’d never truly noticed that before. He decided to just lay there for a moment, reaching out with all his senses while he tried to decipher what the hell was going on, what his situation now was.

A rich and beautiful voice spoke up, a woman’s mezzo voice, an angel’s voice no doubt. “Bunker man, I see you live. Thanks for the taser, it sure did work.”

Ethan turned his head toward the sound and saw an attractive woman couched nearby, sitting on her heels with a rifle across her lap. “What happened?” he asked, and felt stupid for doing so.

“For someone who avoided getting caught by Peter, you sure are dumb, mister. You were fighting. I picked up the taser. I tased him and it knocked you both out.” She laughed, and it was the sound of a choir singing. It had the moon’s beauty in it.

Okay, that was the after-effects of still being alive after a fight; he’d felt it before, after the ambush where Jed had died. Survivor’s High, Michael called it.

“Why?” Ethan croaked, keenly aware that his own voice sounded ragged at best.

“Why did I save you? That’s complicated I guess. But mainly because you’re a Clanner I don’t recognize, and so you must be working against Peter somehow. And this guy here,” she said with a motion at a tied up guard, “is a total scumbag. One of Peter’s creatures. Now my turn to ask. Why are you here, and what are you doing? Why shouldn’t I just kill you and turn your corpse in to Peter?”

A chill washed over Ethan, but then he remembered that she hadn’t bound him. She’d bound the guard instead. So, she must want to spare him. This was his game to lose, at this point. All he had to do was not screw up. Hopefully. “Well,” he began, “I have a big tin can I’m going to use to fix an antenna, so we can save America…”

* * *

Captain Taggart watched as Eagan ran up to him in the tunnels. The unit had been searching for Black and his goons for half an hour, and the grin on Eagan’s face told him volumes.

“Cap, we found them. Black and his men are holed up in an alcove waiting for an enemy unit to pass overhead before they go up through a manhole cover. It’s a really big unit, sir. Been going by for ten minutes already. Even has a couple of tanks. So Black can’t escape us, yet. We still could have tracked him if he hadn’t been blocked in, but this let us catch up faster. It could have taken days to find them if they got out of the tunnels before we found them.”

Taggart saw Eagan was babbling with excitement and smiled. “No kidding,” he said and smiled wider. “Alright, get our troops in position to open fire into the alcove once the upstairs ’vaders have left the area. We can’t engage until the troops are gone, unless we want to rush into hand-to-hand, and we’ll take unacceptable losses if we do that. We have to ambush them. For that to work, we can’t let them know we’re there until we engage them with small arms. Once the troops pass overhead and they seem to be starting to go for the manhole ladder, engage them with everything we have. I want it over before it even began. And search the bodies for hidden weapons.”

“Yes, sir. I’m on it,” Eagan said, and rushed off to implement the plan.

Taggart watched him sprint away and allowed himself another smile. Eagan was a terrible trooper in barracks, but in the field? He lived for this. And Taggart liked having him at his back. Maybe it was time to promote the kid, if he’d even accept a promotion. He had always enjoyed his lack of responsibility a little too much to ask for promotion, but maybe he’d take a higher rank if Taggart made it an order? Or maybe not. Well, time enough to think about that later—the invaders would pass by soon. Taggart thought of the men in his unit who would become casualties in the ambush, and frowned. In a just world, he wouldn’t lose anyone at all.