Swords of Exodus [Dead Six 02] (39 page)

Anders was holding my 9mm.

I stumbled back over to the corner and peered around. If the guards had heard that noise, we were screwed. It was dark, but the reflection from the snow was giving the surroundings a faint, almost pink glow. I had no idea where my night vision had landed. There were a few lights around the Tunguska, and I could see shapes moving. Someone was running a hose into the beast. That’s why they had shut it down. They were refueling.

There was movement at my side as Shen stumbled forward. He still had his night vision. He scanned back and forth, and gave me a thumbs-up sign. We were okay. I checked my watch again. The choppers would be arriving soon.

“
What’s the holdup?
” Roland asked over the radio. “
We’ve got guards headed our way. I think it’s the shift change.
”

I secured my rifle. “We ran into a Brother.”

“
Ooohhh
,” he whistled. “
Is everybody alive?
”

“Barely,” Shen grunted.

“Guys, pop those guards if you have to. Wait as long as possible though. Anders. Let’s go . . .” There was no response. “Anders?” I turned around. The big man was kneeling next to the still twitching Brother and had pulled back his mask and goggles. It was too dark for me to see what he was looking at. The Majestic man stood, dusted the snow off his knees, and joined us. He handed me my pistol.

“What?” I asked as I secured my gun.

“Nothing . . .” He shook his head. “I just had to see if the stories were true.”

“What stories?”

“Sala Jihan cuts their tongues out. Okay. Let’s do this.”

We hit the Tunguska crew hard just as they had finished refueling and turned the engine back on. I took down the man standing at the pump, jerking back his head and plunging my Greco down over his sternum and through his aorta. The other guard looked up in surprise, his mouth forming a perfect O, but he didn’t have time to make a sound before Shen’s arm encircled his neck. The two of them slunk down on the other side of the Tunguska and disappeared.

Anders bounded past us, clambered on top of the armored vehicle, ducked under the spinning radar dish, and was on top of the turret in a flash. Luckily the hatch wasn’t locked. He pulled it back, reached inside, grabbed the man sitting in the commander’s seat by the hair and pulled him out. This one did have time to shout, and you would too if a baseball-mitt sized hand suddenly hoisted you out of a tank, but Anders tossed him over to Shen’s side, where I heard a hacking noise, and the screaming stopped.

We were past the point of stealth. We had to take these guns out
now
. The choppers were probably already leaving the canyon. I could only pray that Jill had been able to reach Ibrahim. I walked around the front of the Tunguska, to the driver’s compartment. He must have seen what happened to his associates, as his head popped down before I could play Whack-a-Mole, and the steel hatch came down, but it landed on the rail system of my rifle. I levered the rear of the gun up, and fired three rounds into the driver’s body.

I threw back the hatch, aimed, and fired one more round into the man’s face. By this point I was soaked with blood, but didn’t have time to care. “Tunguska down,” I said into the radio.

“
Guards are almost on us,
” Phillips hissed.

“Shen, Anders, look for that ZSU!” I spat. They both still had night vision, and their odds of seeing it were far better than mine. A light came on in a nearby bunker. Somebody had heard the Tunguska crew’s cries. I took cover behind the front of the tank, and braced my rifle.

“Northwest. Four hundred meters,” Shen said. I glanced in that direction, but couldn’t make it out in the darkness. I would have to take his word for it. “Near the missile silo.”

“We’ll never make it in time,” Anders stated. “We need to get out of here.”

The bunker door opened, and a slave soldier stepped into the night air, an SKS in his arms. I shot him three times. The feeble subsonic loads barely made a sound, but they didn’t have much hitting power. The soldier looked down at his chest for a long moment, before stumbling back into the bunker. Five seconds later an alarm began to sound.

“Screw that. Anders, can we run this thing?”

“Hell if I know.”

“I drove an armored vehicle once,” Shen said.

“Let’s do it!” I grabbed the dead driver by the shirt and hauled him up and out of the hatch. “Inside!” Shen vaulted into the driver’s seat. I crawled on top, and followed Anders into the top hatch.

It was cramped. There were red lights and buttons everywhere. I flopped into a seat. Anders was smashed into a seat behind me. There was a popping noise that I didn’t recognize at first, but then I realized that it was small-arms fire bouncing off of the turret.

There were controls in front of me, a darkened screen, flashing LEDs, and a joystick like off of a 1980s-era arcade game. “How do we make it shoot?”

Anders didn’t answer. He was scanning across the Cyrillic labels, his mouth moving as he tried to read them. He had pushed his goggles up on his forehead, and it was obvious that reading Russian wasn’t one of his primary skills.

I pulled a small flashlight from inside my coat, turned it on, and started going over the controls. “What, they didn’t teach you that in Navy SEAL school?”

“It never came up. There!” He did something, and the screens lit up. Behind him was a larger screen, obviously a display for the radar dish. Two bright green blips had just appeared on it. At the same time, Shen must have been playing with the controls, as the giant beast lurched painfully forward, slamming us all into various pointy bits inside before rocking to a stop.

I grabbed the joystick. It was articulated to only move in four directions. Through the screen, I could see the darkened shape of the compounds walls. My best guesstimate was that we were about thirty degrees off of where the ZSU was parked. I pushed on the stick, and the turret rotated, surprisingly smoothly and way too fast. I had to hit the stick the other way to move it back.

“I can’t see it!” I shouted, which was totally unnecessary considering we were inside a steel tub together. The small-arms fire had stopped, which meant that the soldiers were now going to do something effective, like set us on fire, or bust out some RPGs. Anders popped out the top of the hatch and started firing his 416.

The screen was mostly dark shapes. This vehicle was pretty advanced, so it probably had some sort of IR floodlight or something, but I had no idea where the controls were. It probably tracked aircraft automatically, as there was no way a human being could track a jet fast enough with this joystick to shoot it down.

There had to be a way. This thing was Russian. Everything they built was made to be run by third world, illiterate goat herders. I cursed under my breath as I read the labels. Too bad Reaper wasn’t here. He had probably played a video game where he had driven one of these at some point.

“If you’re gonna do something, do it fast!” Anders shouted. Then there was an explosion, and he shouted and fell back down into the hatch. “RPG!” Then he was back out the top, firing wildly.

Then the fates smiled at me. The ZSU must have picked up the incoming choppers, because suddenly there was movement, and headlights, actual headlights, came on, two brilliant white beacons, just on the left side of my monitor. I thumped the stick, so that I was now even with the two lights, then thumped the control down to lower the cannons. There was a illuminated circle on the screen, and I filled it with the black shape that had to be the ZSU. I mashed the trigger.

Nothing happened.
Damn it
. I looked at the stick. There were buttons on the side of it. I pushed one of the buttons, and then mashed the trigger again.

The roar was unbelievable. It sounded kind of like an air wrench removing rusted lug nuts from an old wheel, only magnified a hundred billion times, and reverberating through a steel shell until it vibrated your fillings out of your teeth. The twin 30mm cannons fired explosive shells at a rate that had to be around 4,000 rounds a minute. I had only depressed the trigger for a second, but a line of tracers longer than a football field stretched across the compound. The ZSU exploded in a brilliant cloud of flame and sparks like Thor had gotten pissed off and personally came down from Valhalla and whacked it with his hammer.

“Holy shit!” I shouted. “Drive, Shen! Drive! Back the way we came.” There was infantry running around now, and with Phillips and Roland on those machine guns, maybe they could keep them off of our back.

The Tunguska lurched forward with a grinding noise. Anders dropped back down inside, his hands shaking, pulling another magazine from his vest and slamming it into his gun. “When it shoots, it blows fire out the side for like twenty feet!” Then he bounced back up, and kept shooting at random people.

With the sounding of the alarm, every light in the compound was blazing, which helped me see a whole lot better. There were soldiers scurrying everywhere, and I could make out other machine-gun emplacements along the walls. Apparently they hadn’t gotten the word yet to rip the Tunguska to shreds.
What the hell?
I had a giant tank, I might as well have some fun.

I jerked the stick, stuck the emplacement in the center of the glowing circle, and mashed the trigger. The jackhammer noise gave me permanent brain damage, but when the thing stopped vibrating, the machine gun, the gunners, and fifteen feet of wall was gone. I glanced back to the radar screen. The two green helicopter blips were right on top of us.

Shen drove the Tunguska like a madman. I was stunned how fast this thing moved under the roar of a twelve-cylinder turbo diesel. I kept sticking various valuable-looking things into the glowing circle and blowing them to bits. Anders popped down and screamed, “Left! Left! LEFT!”

Shen cranked it hard, and the Tunguska spun like only a tracked vehicle can. Something heavy hit us, and sparks flew through the compartment. “Heavy machine gun!” Anders shouted, pulling me by the shoulder, apparently in the direction he wanted me to shoot. There were specks on the view screen, coming from the top of a bunker.
No
. Not sparkles. Muzzle flashes. I mashed the trigger and ripped the concrete roof off the bunker entirely.

“Out!” Anders shouted. He jerked his thumb, and when I twisted to look, I saw fire. We were on fire, lots of fire, and there were missiles sitting on this thing.

“Shen!
Run!
” Anders was already out the hatch and gone by the time I levered myself out after him, and leapt off the top of the still rolling tank. I hit the ground, rolling over as I lost momentum, then sprang to my feet, and sprinted as fast as I could away from the burning hulk. I had no idea where we were and I had no idea if Shen had made it out, but I knew that if I stopped to look, then the damn thing was going to explode.

It did, but thankfully not before I made it around the corner of another bunker. Fire and noise billowed around behind me as the Tunguska’s missiles cooked off. Without even thinking about it, I was on my face with my hands covering my head.

Boots stopped in front of my face. I jerked up, raising my rifle. Shen batted it aside. “Let’s go.”

“You
are
Jet Li,” I said in awe. Anders joined us a second later, shoving yet another magazine into his carbine. Heat mirage was rising off of his suppressor. A giant black monster screamed overhead, causing the rising smoke of the burning Tunguska to form pinwheel vortices. The choppers were here, and judging from the volume of tracers flying down from their doors, they were entering a target-rich environment. They tore past, heading for the landing area near the missile silo.

“Roland. Phillips. Report.” I shouted.

“
Shooting lots of people!
” One of them shouted over the drum of a heavy machine gun.

“
Bad people!
” said the other.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, but then I tracked in on the noise and the stream of tracers flying from the rear of the compound. A soldier came running around the corner. Shen and Anders dropped him with a volley of quick shots. “Okay, we’ll rendezvous at the gap. Don’t shoot us.”

I could still hear the scream of the choppers’ giant engines, and there was a whole lot of gunfire coming from that direction. The compound had devolved into a state of primal chaos. Anders took point, firing as more soldiers appeared ahead of us. Shen had gotten us back nearly to our entrance point, and it only took a few frantic minutes of leapfrogging from wall to wall to near the gap. The alarm was blaring from sirens located on the tops of the bunkers. Random soldiers, slaves, and functionaries were exiting the buildings. We shot anybody that was armed or that looked at us funny.

“
Belt-fed’s empty! Moving to Roland’s position,
” Phillips warned us. Now only one big gun was blazing at this end of the compound. We had to hurry.

The thrumming beat of the last heavy machine gun was near. We approached the final corner, almost back to the junkyard. A group of half a dozen soldiers were ahead of us, crouched behind a broken concrete pillar. They were trying to sneak up close on Roland’s emplacement so they could overwhelm it with rifle fire and grenades. Just beyond the bad guys was a pillar of sparks and flames as Roland worked over anything that moved with absurdly powerful bullets.

“Roland, you’ve got a bunch of rubble fifteen meters in front of you. You’ve got soldiers hiding behind it. You might want to do something about that,” I suggested.

“
On it.
”

A split second later, the lance of fire shifted to the concrete debris. The giant 12.7 rounds zipped right through the soldiers’ cover, blasting shrapnel everywhere, sending up giant gouts of snow, dirt, blood, and meat. There was a secondary explosion as one of the soldiers dropped a live grenade. Anders stepped around the corner and fired a few rounds, just to make sure all of the targets were down.

“Cease fire, cease fire. Get off that wall.” The two Exodus men were sitting ducks if they stayed up there any longer. We needed to get the hell out of here and meet up with the rest of Exodus by the choppers. “We’re at the corner of building . . . six.”