Gears of War: Anvil Gate (8 page)

“I can find a non-com to do that. You and Cole go back up Fenix. Sorotki’s standing by. Don’t come back until you find me a live one.”

Dom had his orders. He also had a pretty good idea what was going to happen to any asshole he caught and handed over to Trescu. For a moment, he struggled with the idea and wondered how different that was from his urge to take a few of them down for Andresen. Maybe it was no different at all. But the fact that he stopped to think about it told him that—for him, at least—it was.

“You got it, sir,” Dom said.

CHAPTER 3

Bernie’s radio crackled. “Andresen didn’t make it,” Anya said. “I’m sorry.”

Everyone paused halfway up the slope, even the dog. Bernie found her head level with Marcus’s boots. He took one hand off the rock above him to press his earpiece.

“Okay, Anya. Thanks.”

“KR-Two-Three-Nine is inbound with Dom and Cole. Orders are to take live prisoners. Do you have an RV point?”

“Negative, Control. We’re at grid seven-echo, approximately
nine-four-zero-nine-eight-zero. Tell Sorotki to stand by while we check this cave. Fenix out.”

Baird prodded Bernie in the back of the leg. The slope was about forty degrees here, a real hands-and-knees job, and he was right beneath her foothold.

“Consider me extra-motivated,” he said. “Get moving, Granny. You feeling okay? I’m only asking because I don’t want you collapsing on top of me.”

“’Course you are,” she said.
Poor bloody Rory
. Even after so many years, so many deaths, it still punched her in the gut. But she was halfway up a precarious hill with the palms of her gloves punctured by thorns, and about to run into the enemy. She swallowed it for later. “Yeah, let’s make them pay for Andresen.”

Bernie wasn’t expecting to find anyone home in the cave. If it didn’t have a rear exit they hadn’t spotted, then it was a place where you could only get trapped, because even the most direct path to it was a long, steep slog. On the other hand, it was a good place to lay up undetected.

And the Stranded had to stash their explosives somewhere close. Fertilizer bombs were bulky. If you had to move around on foot, you needed caches close to your targets.

Marcus scrambled onto the shelf of rocky soil where the hill leveled off. They’d come up at the side of the cave entrance. Bernie caught Mac by the scruff and put the leash back on him before he ventured in.

He’d definitely scented something. He stared unblinking into the shadows, back legs shifting impatiently like a sprinter on his blocks. Bernie gave Marcus a thumbs-up.

Marcus jerked his head toward the entrance.
Send the dog in
.

Bernie’s first thought was to hang on to Mac until they knew what they were dealing with. She crouched to follow him into a low space, leash wrapped around her left hand. She could let him loose and grab the rifle two-handed if they ran into trouble.

Ricochets. Shit. Can’t fire in a small space like this
.

But that was what the chainsaw bayonet was for. Combined with a dog, it made her feel invulnerable. The explosion that had
nearly killed her felt like it had happened to someone else—for the moment. Adrenaline was a wonderful thing.

Baird squeezed past her. She tried to elbow him out of the way before it occurred to her that he was moving forward to cover a right-hand fork in the passage. She patted his shoulder in silent apology. This wasn’t the public kiss-my-arse Baird.

And, somehow, it wasn’t pitch-black in here, either. As her eyes adjusted, she could see Baird’s scrubby blond hair lit up like a faint halo by dim light. It wasn’t from their armor indicator lights. There had to be other vents in the rock here.

A hand grabbed her shoulder and she almost shat herself before she realized it was Marcus.

“
Smell,
” he whispered.

The faint odor she inhaled was a cross between a greasy diner and a cow shed—old fat, burned meat, and a hint of animal shit. There was a metallic rasp as Baird pulled something out of his belt.

“Go,” Marcus said.

Now it was down to the dog. As soon as Bernie snapped the leash from his collar, he shot into the tunnel and vanished. Marcus went after him. The passage was too narrow and uneven for running, and Bernie stumbled a couple of times. Baird grabbed her webbing and hauled her upright. The diffuse light was getting brighter; she expected to hear barking and firing any second, and glanced down to check that her chainsaw indicator light was on, but she could now see what looked like a bright chamber at the end of the tunnel. Marcus stood silhouetted in the light.

“Nobody cough,” he said.

Baird edged past Bernie again and looked over Marcus’s shoulder. “Hey, talk about overkill. Look out for a trip wire. Bernie? Careful where you put your boots …”

The chamber looked so regular that at first she thought it had been built that way, but it was natural, a void left by lava. There was an opening at the top like a chimney. And most of the space was filled with old fuel drums and other rusty containers. It took
her a few seconds to add it all up and realize the Stranded were making nitrate bombs, or at least storing the stuff here.

“They can’t have gone far.” Marcus poked around the floor with slow care. “Warm ashes.”

“Where’s Mac?” Bernie asked.

Marcus pointed down the continuation of the natural tunnel. Baird started examining the haul, crawling around the stacked drums as if the risk didn’t apply to him.

“I don’t see wires on most of these,” Baird said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not five seconds away from being ground beef.”

The element of surprise was gone now, and locating this stuff at least meant that it wouldn’t be used against the COG. But Mac was still on the trail. Bernie set off after the dog, suddenly aware of bruises and pulled muscles every time she stooped to negotiate the twists in the rock. Marcus followed her.

“Great, you’re leaving me babysitting the explosives?” Baird called.

“Come on,” Marcus said. “When we get a radio signal again, call it in to Control.”

“Can you hear a Raven?”

Bernie couldn’t hear anything over her own ragged breathing now. Sorotki had their position. Shit, if he was hovering overhead now, and those bastards were making a run for it—or maybe they were already an hour away, already in some other hideout. It looked like there was another way out of the honeycomb of passages under the hill. Mac hadn’t come back.

Now she was relying completely on the faint light from three sets of armor. For a stomach-churning moment, she wondered how the hell they’d find their way out again if they hit a dead end. Somehow she’d never worried about that while going after grubs. Fear didn’t bother with logic.

And Andresen’s gone
.

She kept forgetting the news, and then remembering it again every time her attention wandered from the task at hand.

Bastards
.

Suddenly the ground reared up in front of her and became a
rocky slope. And yes, there was light ahead, getting brighter with every step she took.

“It’ll be a frigging sheer drop,” Baird muttered. His voice didn’t even echo. “Anyone consider whether those assholes had
another
route out to the front door?”

“Trust the dog,” Bernie panted. She could definitely hear the chattering rotors of a helicopter now. God, she was running out of steam fast. “Most recent traces—probably the strongest scent.”

Marcus grunted. “Hey, we got comms again. Sorotki, can you hear me?”

Mitchell answered. “Loud and clear. No visual on you, but we can see the dog.”

“We’re still in a tunnel. Call the engineers to clear a cache of explosives in there. Can you set down anywhere?”

“Small patch of grass at the base of the hill. I’ll aim for the pooch. Two-Three-Nine out.”

Bernie scrambled out into bright daylight, and a dense mass of waist-high thornbushes that snagged the exposed fabric of her pants. The Stranded gang didn’t have armor, so they must have been shredded to hell escaping through here—and that meant blood, skin, and sweat traces for Mac to follow. No wonder he was excited.

“Sorotki? The dog’s still tracking.” Marcus waded through the bushes, finger pressed to his earpiece. The Raven dropped onto long grass at the foot of the slope. “We’ll continue on foot and narrow down the search area for an aerial recon.” He looked at Bernie for a second as if he was weighing up her reaction. “Stand by to extract Mataki if necessary. She should have been casevacked hours ago.”

Bernie grabbed Mac as he raced back to her.
If I stop now, I won’t get up again
. “What’ve you got, fella?” She put the leash on him. “
Seek!
Good boy.”

The dog nearly wrenched her arm from its socket in his frenzy to resume the chase. It was like water-skiing on rubble. Her spine jolted with every stride. Mac followed the line of the trees, heading
deeper into the woods, where the Raven couldn’t see what was happening on the ground.

“Can’t expect the assholes to make it easy for us.” Baird jogged alongside her without so much as panting, reminding her what it was to be young and fit. “Might be leading us into an ambush.” Maybe he was chatting to keep her going. But the more stressed he was, the yappier he tended to get. “Except they’d have made it easier to follow.”

The Stranded had to be on foot. They couldn’t run their junkers through woodland like this. And vehicles were too noisy for covert action here—four-wheelers, at least.

The radio clicked. “Byrne to KR-Two-Three-Nine, I’m in your grid. Want an assist, Lieutenant?”

“Two-Three-Nine to Byrne, you got the bike?”

“Yeah. Just direct me. I can get pretty well anywhere on this. Byrne out.”

Rat bikes could handle dense woodland. And if Sam wanted to teach Baird a lesson, this was as good a time as any to do it. Mac dragged Bernie for another hard kilometer. She knew exactly how far it was because Marcus was keeping up a running sitrep on their position for Sorotki.

“They’re heading for the river,” Marcus said. “I don’t think that’s going to fool the dog.”

“Delta, I’ve lost visual on you again,” Mitchell said.

“Two-Three-Nine, go ahead of us—north—and come back down the course of the river. If the dog’s on the right track, then they might be moving along it—
in
it.”

“Two-Three-Nine to Byrne,” Mitchell said. “Sam, are you getting this?”

“I’m about five klicks north of you. Moving in.”

Bernie caught a glimpse of the Raven’s strobing rotors through the tree canopy as it crossed from right to left, then the engine noise faded into the distance. Marcus kept pace with Bernie, but that pace was getting slower by the minute. He held out his hand.

“Give me the damn leash,” he said.

“Leave the dog to me.”

“You’re going to drop.”

“I’m not bloody Anya,” Bernie snapped. “Stop nursemaiding me.”

In the heat of the moment, Gears said all kinds of shit to each other. It was just adrenaline. Bernie regretted it the instant she said it, but she’d have to save her apologies for later. Baird was to her right, jogging about ten meters parallel to her. There’d come a point where she had to let Mac loose, but she needed to be much closer to his quarry first, and nobody knew just how fresh this trail was—except Mac. He was acting as if he could see something she couldn’t. Maybe he could hear it. By the time they reached the river, he was practically walking on his hind legs, and she struggled to hold him. The leash was wound so tight around her hand that her fingers were numb.

“Sorotki’s on his strafing run,” Baird said. The Raven was getting louder again, heading back toward them. “Listen.”

“Better not be,” Marcus said. “
Alive
, remember?”

Then Mac stopped and cast around, throwing his head up from time to time. He edged down to the water—shallow, fast-moving over a pebble bed—and stood with his nose pointing upstream for a moment before lunging forward on the leash. He’d been trained to hunt silently but his excitement was forcing little squeals out of him. Marcus turned his head slowly as if he was scanning the trees, but Bernie got the feeling he was just keeping a cautious eye on Mac. He’d even been wary of the sheepdogs at Jonty’s farm. She found herself filling in gaps again as she caught her breath, wondering where Marcus might have run into a dog that made him mistrust them all that much.

“Your asshole-hound’s telling us they went in the river
there,
” Baird said, wading across to the other bank. The water was knee high. “Or else we’ve been chasing a frigging aquatic
rabbit.
”