The Dragon Factory (24 page)

“Down!” I yelled, and everyone got low and went wide, gun barrels swinging around to find targets, but there were no muzzle flashes. The rock walls amped up the sound of the chattering guns, but we hadn’t stepped into anything. At least not at the moment.

“It’s not in the next room, Cap’n. This is from around the second corner,” Top said as he slithered like a snake back from his observation post and wriggled behind a stack of wooden crates.

“Hey . . . Jigsaw’s come to the party!” Bunny yelled; then he frowned and cupped a hand to his ear. “No . . . no, wait, all I hear are AKs.”

Top nodded, crouched down next to me. “Farmboy’s right. That’s a one-sided gunfight.”

“Unless,” Bunny began, and then bit down on what he was going to say.

So I said it.

“Unless it’s an execution.”

Jigsaw.
Christ, don’t let it be so.

“Saddle up!” I bellowed, but as we clustered by the door to make our run something changed. The gunfire had been hot and heavy for nearly half a minute, with dips in the din as magazines fired dry and were replaced, but during one freak gap in the noise just as I was reaching for the doorknob there was a new sound.

It was a roar.

Nothing else describes it. The sound was deep and rough and charged with incredible power. It slammed into the walls and bounced through the shadows and came howling through the crack in the door.

It sounded like an animal. A really big and really pissed-off animal.

“What the hell was
that
?” Top yelled.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” said Bunny.

“I do,” I said, and opened the door.

The hallway was empty and I could hear another roar and more shouts coming from down the hall. I crept along, keeping close to the wall and low, barrel ready to pop a cap in anyone who stepped out of the next chamber. I knew Top and Bunny were behind me, but they moved as silently as I did.

We stopped outside of Haeckel’s bin. The metal door was still closed, but there were dozens of jagged bullet holes in it, all of them chest high.

Top leaned his head toward me. “We going in, Cap’n?”

Just then the gunfire started up again. We dropped down and got wide. None of the rounds had penetrated the block-stone walls of the bin.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and waited for a lull.

“
Jigsaw!
” I yelled as loud as I could.

The gunfire flattened out for a moment and then there was a second roar. Not a response to my call. Not a human voice. Definitely an animal of great size and immense power.

“
JIGSAW!
” I yelled again.
“ECHO! ECHO! ECHO!”

Then a man’s voice cried out in response. It said, “Help!”

But he said it in Russian.
Pomogite!

Not Jigsaw.

I yelled back using Hack Peterson’s combat code name: “Big Dog! Big Dog . . . this is Cowboy!”

The voice cried out, “
Nyet! Nyet! Bozhe moi!”

No! No! Oh, my God!

Then, “
Perekroi dveri!”

Block the doors!

There was another roar, this one slightly different in pitch, not as deep but just as feral, and a new flurry of gunfire.

Top looked at me for orders. I leaned close to the bullet-pocked door and tried it in Russian. I called for Hack. I called a general question asking what was going on.

No one answered my question. There were more roars, more gunshots, more men yelling in hysterical Russian.
“On moyrtv!”

He’s dead!
I heard that twice. And then a single voice crying, “
Othodi!
”

Fall back!
Over and over again.

“Are we joining this party?” Top asked, but I shook my head.

The flurry of gunfire thinned.

“Fewer guns in play,” Bunny observed. “Still no return fire that I can make out unless everyone’s using AKs.”

The last gun cleared its mag and then we heard something that froze the hearts in our chests. Another throat-ripping scream tore through the darkness, but this one was definitely a human voice: high and filled with pain and choked with a dreadful wetness. It rose to a piercing shriek and then suddenly cut off, leaving behind a terminal silence.

Then nothing.

I pushed the door open and crept out, low to the cold concrete floor, my .45 pointed at the bend in the hall, finger ready to slip inside the trigger guard. A moment later there was another scream, but this wasn’t the cry of a man in pain—no, this was an ear-rending howl of bloody animal triumph. Even after the thunder of gunfire it was impossibly loud; the echo of it slammed off the walls and assaulted our ears like fists.

The silence that followed was harsh and filled with dreadful promise. We stared at the bend in the corridor, and then one by one my team looked to me for direction.

“We’re going in,” I said. “I’m on point. I want two rounds in anything that isn’t DMS.”

“Hooah,” they whispered.

I reached for the door handle and gave it a quick turn. There was no gunfire. I took my last flash bang and lobbed it inside. We covered our
ears for the big bang, but a split second later we were going through that door in a fast line, ready to finish this fight.

We stopped in our tracks.

What I saw hit me like a punch to the brain, but I had enough presence of mind to keep my mouth shut and my weapon ready. Behind me I heard a small gasp escape Bunny’s throat. Top came up behind us. Everyone stopped and we all stood there staring at the Spetsnaz team.

“
Mother of God
,” Top whispered.

The room wasn’t big. Maybe forty by fifty, stacked to the ceiling with file boxes. A few of the old punch-card computers draped in plastic sheeting stood against one wall. There was a desk, a chair, and a sorting table. The floor was littered with hundreds of shell casings. Smoke hung like green ghosts in the air, and on the floor, strewn around like refuse, were the Russians.

All of them, the entire Spetsnaz hit team. Eight of them.

Dead.

And not just dead . . . they’d been torn to pieces. Their guns still smoked; hands were still curled around the stocks, fingers hooked through trigger guards. Arms and legs and heads were scattered like islands in a sea of blood.

Bunny moved up beside me. “God . . . what the hell
happened
here?”

I sensed more than saw the stack of boxes to my left begin to shift and then I was moving, shoving Bunny and Top backward as a ton of boxed paper canted over and fell. Bunny tried to pivot and run, but the bloody shell casings rolled under his feet and he went into a wet slide. His flailing left hand clubbed Top right across the face.

A second stack of boxes began to fall and I leaped aside, swinging my gun around to aim at the shadows behind them, ready to kill.

“Cap’n!” I heard Top yell. “On your—”

But that was all I heard as something came out of the shadows behind the stack to my right and slammed into me. The blow was so fast and so shockingly hard that for a moment I had the unreal thought that I’d been hit by a car. I could feel my body leave the ground as I hurtled
ten feet through the air and slammed into another stack of file boxes. I tucked my chin into my shoulder to buffer the impact, but I struck so hard that the whole tower of boxes canted and fell, knocking me to the floor and then slamming into the adjoining tower. Suddenly the whole room seemed to be collapsing around me as columns of dusty boxes toppled. I heard a barrage of shots, but there was no coordinated counterattack as everyone scrambled to avoid being crushed by the tons of paper.

There was a sound—a roar like a bull gorilla—and I turned to try to see what the hell was in the room with us, but I was half-buried beneath hundreds of pounds of paper, my night-vision goggles knocked askew so that one eye saw green and the other saw blackness. I had the vague sense of something moving toward me very fast and I tried to bring up my pistol, but it was slapped out of my hand so hard and fast that I thought my wrist was broken. I never saw the hand that disarmed me.

I saw the guy—he was a brute with a barrel chest and huge shoulders. I caught a glimpse of a black metal helmet and fatigues, and then he came at me, head down like a boxer, and fired off a punch that was a green blur. I got just enough of my shoulder up to protect my head, but his massive fist crunched into my helmet and tore it off my head. I heard the straps pop. My vision went from green to black as I lost the night vision, but there was light from some other source—one of the Russians’ flashlights on the floor. Bad light, but enough to allow me to fight.

I dropped and rolled sideways and came up into a crouch with my Rapid Release folding knife. I wasn’t going to go down without a fight, not like the Russians, and unless this guy was very damn good I was going to take him with me. The blade snapped open as the big son of a bitch closed in. He was wearing night black BDUs and a balaclava that hid his face. All I could see were his eyes, which were small and sunk into gristly pits, and his wide slash of a mouth. His lips curled back from jagged yellow teeth and he opened his mouth to bellow at me as he lunged forward.

A thousand bits of information flashed through my head in the second before we collided. He was bigger and stronger than me. And unless he was a silverback gorilla he was wearing thick layers of body armor. Something that could stop armor-piercing rounds. There’s a lot
of experimental stuff out there, and some if it even diffuses the foot-pounds of bullet impact. He had a handgun strapped to his hip; I had a knife in my hands. There were yells and gunfire all around me.

The bruiser made a grab for me, and he was fast. Really damn fast.

I’m faster.

I twisted to one side and his fingernails raked across my chest armor. I didn’t try to grapple. I’m good at it, but I’m not stupid. And though I know a knife can often cut through Kevlar, I wasn’t in the mood to find out whether the stuff he wore could turn a blade.

So as I twisted I rammed the blade into his mouth.

I drove my fist almost all the way into his maw, the blade ripping deep into the soft muscle of his tongue and soft palate until it struck bone. I twisted my wrist and tore the blade free, and that tore a scream of white-hot agony from him that was the loudest sound I’ve ever heard from a human mouth. It was like the animal roar we’d heard earlier, but now it was filled with searing pain. His body began thrashing wildly, all control lost. His huge fists swung out in all directions. I evaded the first but caught the second on my shoulder and suddenly I was flying into another stack of boxes.

I crumpled to the floor, and before I could scramble out of the way a full stack of boxes crashed down on me.

The Deck

Saturday, August 28, 3:22
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours; 38 minutes E.S.T.

The Twins walked arm in arm toward their plane. It was an old affectation—a European habit they’d picked up that also allowed them enough physical closeness to have a confidential conversation.

“Slow down,” Hecate said, tugging gently on her brother’s arm. “He’s watching. Probably Otto, too.”

“They’re always watching,” murmured Paris. “God! I can’t wait to get out of this place. He gives me the creeps.”

“Who? Dad or Otto?”

“Either,” Paris muttered. “Both. A couple of pit vipers, the two of them.”

“Mm. Useful pit vipers,” she said, and tapped her purse, in which she carried several CD-ROMs of data Cyrus had downloaded for them. Material that would either solve the rage problems with the Berserkers or at very least dial it down.

They reached the jet. Two of their own guards flanked the stairs and straightened as the Jakobys drew close.

“Anything to report, Marcus?” Hecate asked quietly.

“Nothing much, ma’am. The jet’s been refueled and no one has been aboard.”

Paris snorted. “Did anyone try?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marcus. “Mr. Otto asked to go aboard to leave you both some flowers. I told him that we were under orders to allow no visitors.”

“The flowers?”

“He took them with him.”

Paris shot Hecate a knowing look. “Probably a tracking device hidden in the bouquet.”

Marcus said, “I can promise you, ma’am, that no one and nothing got aboard this plane.”

“Good job, Marcus,” Paris said.

Hecate cast a quick, doubtful look at the plane; then she turned and ran lightly up the stairs. Paris threw a wicked glance back at the Deck and hoped his father or Otto was watching. He mouthed the words:
Kiss my ass.
Smiling, he climbed aboard.

A few minutes later the jet was rolling fast down the runway.

OTTO WIRTHS STOOD
looking out of the observation window in the Deck’s communications center. Now that the Twins had left, the techs had pushed buttons that sent a big wall sliding backward in sections to reveal the other two-thirds of the room, in which there were many more workstations for communication and scanning. The deck panels
slid away to reveal the glass floor below which the computer cold room and the virus production tanks hummed with terrible potential. As he had told Mr. Cyrus, the Twins saw only what he wanted them to see.