Vengeance (The Kurgan War Book 4) (21 page)

He whispered into a mic built into his suit. “Jacobs, Rasil, you’ve got a man about fifty meters to your right. Huan, you’ve got one at your eleven o’clock. He’s closing in on you.”

“Roger, that,” replied Huan.

Saya got to his feet. He looked over to Huan and decide to help her track down and capture the man closest to her. He turned on his feet and sprinted to her side. After what had happened to his comrade, he wanted revenge, but Williams’ orders had been explicit and as a loyal Chosen warrior, he followed his orders.

Sheridan moved up behind the small hill that overlooked a slender, flowing river and took cover. He took a moment to look around and swore when he saw the drone floating above the treetops. He brought his carbine up, took aim, and fired off a burst at the balloon. Two of the three rounds fired went wide. However, one flew straight through the thin skin on the drone, deflating it. Without their eye in the sky, the odds for the Chosen agents had just dropped appreciably. Sheridan crawled back and quietly made his way toward a clump of palm trees. His eyes and ears worked overtime trying to detect his opponents in the shadows cast by the tall trees all around him.
 

A shot rang out.

Sheridan dove forward and landed behind a droid. He scrambled to get under cover when another burst of gunfire cut through the air, striking the side of the robot. Sheridan raised his head slightly and looked for the person who had fired on him. Through a gap in the trees, he spotted someone moving forward with their rifle tight in their shoulder. He waited a couple of seconds until the insurgent was less than fifty meters away before firing off a single shot into the person’s chest.
 

Saya watched in anger as Huan fell to the ground. He knew her wound was mortal. Although he had been in the military for a number of years, Saya could see that neither he nor his men were a match for the professional soldiers they were up against. Without his drone to track the humans, he felt blind. His mouth began to turn dry with fear. He backtracked and made his way out of the woods. He thought about asking Williams for more men but decided that it would make him look weak in the eyes of his leader. Saya needed something to turn the fight in his favor. He looked over his shoulder at a group of stationary droids and grinned. He had found his answer.

Three hundred meters away, Saya’s two other men, Jacobs and Rasil, edged their way around a clump of rocks. A few seconds earlier they had spotted someone moving through the trees and were trying to get behind their prey.

“Cover me,” whispered Jacobs to his partner.

Rasil nodded and brought up his rifle.

As quiet as a cat, Jacobs walked forward scanning the ground in front of him for the man they had seen. His heart began to race when he saw a shape though his thermal sight taking cover behind some bushes beside a pond that glimmered in the moonlight. He flipped the selector switch on his rifle to automatic and pulled back on the trigger. A long burst of gunfire struck the man hiding in the bushes. Jacobs dashed forward, firing as he ran. He emptied a full magazine into his quarry before letting go of the trigger. He stopped at the body, pulled down his hood, and removed his combat glasses to get a good look at the man he had just killed. His stomach dropped when he saw that he had just shot at a canvas tarp. Jacobs dropped to one knee and yanked back the sheet to see a flare sputtering away on the ground.
 

His skin broke out in a cold sweat when he realized that he had walked into a trap. Jacobs spun about and looked behind him. His eyes widened when he saw Rasil’s body on the ground with a knife sticking out of his back. He reached for a fresh magazine on his belt. His fingers fumbled to grab hold of the magazine when he heard a twig snap somewhere off to his right. He panicked and dropped his rifle. Jacobs stood up and drew his pistol from its holster.

“Show yourself!” he yelled into the dark.

The sound of something nearby splashing in the water made him turn and fire in the direction of the noise.
 

The attack was sudden and brutal. Cole stepped out from the dark, wrapped his left arm around his prey’s neck, and pulled back. A split second later, he thrust his knife deep into his opponent’s side and twisted the blade. He felt the man’s knees buckle. Without letting go of the insurgent’s neck, Cole brought him down to the ground before yanking his knife free and plunging it into the man’s heart. He waited a couple of seconds for the Chosen agent to die. When he was sure that the man was dead, he quickly rummaged through he pouches on his belt looking for anything that might be useful. He found three small, flexible hand grenades and a couple of non-lethal flashbang devices. He pocketed them all, turned around, and looked in the direction where he had last seen Sheridan. With his carbine in his hands, he began to make his way through the trees to his friend’s side when he heard the sound of a large industrial saw coming to life.

The trees in front of Sheridan seemed to spring to life. They shook from side to side as they were torn to pieces. A second later, he saw a drone flying just above the treetops. Hanging from the underneath of the machine was a long pole with a dozen circular saw blades on it. The noise of the blades tearing through the forest deafened Sheridan. He turned to run when a spotlight shot down from the drone lighting him up. In an instant, the flying machine dropped lower in the trees and began to cut a swath of destruction straight at Sheridan. He sprinted away, zigging and zagging through the trees, trying to make it hard for the drone to keep up with him. He had no idea how he was going to bring down the robot. His carbine lacked a grenade launcher and without one, it would be hard to bring down the robust machine. In the distance, he saw a cluster of tall-standing rocks and ran for it. The razor sharp blades would be useless against the rock and it might buy him some time to figure out how to deal with the drone.

Cole broke from cover and ran toward the far end of the arboretum. Rather than waste ammunition trying to bring the drone down, he was after the person operating the machine. As he sprinted around a parked vehicle, he saw a darkened shape standing behind a long table. He could see a man controlling the drone with a tablet in his hands. Cole could hear the shriek of the blades as they struck rock somewhere in the woods. He brought up his weapon and fired off a sustained burst into the man, dropping him. Without anyone at the controls, the drone switched off its cutting arm and hovered in the air, waiting for new directions. Cole jogged over to the man he had just shot and nudged him with his boot to make sure the insurgent was dead.

Sheridan couldn’t believe his luck when the drone stopped in mid-air and hovered above him, dark and lifeless. There could only be one answer. He brought up his watch to his mouth and called his friend. “I take it I have you to thank for this?”

“Who else is going to save your butt, Captain,” responded Cole. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I got one, what about you?”

“Three. You’re letting the team down, sir. Grab the tech and meet me by the elevator. I’m going to shoot out all the cameras I can find while I wait for you to join me.”

One floor below in the control room, all eyes were fixed on Harry Williams. No one spoke. No one moved. In a matter of minutes, their number had been reduced by almost a quarter.
 

Williams let out a breath through his nose and shook his head. He had hoped to catch Sheridan alive so he could watch his plan unfold, but it was not to be. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t afford to risk any more lives. He said, “Bring up the station’s schematics on the main screen.”

Tranquility Station came up on the display. Williams walked over and studied the picture for a few seconds before pointing to a series of large clasps spaced out all around the outside of the arboretum. “Are these what I think they are?” he said to no one in particular.

“Yes, sir, they are designed to keep the greenhouse attached to the top of the station,” said a man who had been working for months undercover as a member of the control room team.

Williams clapped his hands together. “Time for some target practice. Detach the greenhouse and fire up the station’s gun batteries.”

“Yes, sir,” replied an insurgent as he typed in the commands on his keyboard.

“Goodbye, Michael,” said Williams to the screen.
 

Chapter 28

The snow stuck to Tarina’s clothes like a cold, wet blanket. With Wendy walking in her footsteps, she walked blindly forward through the swirling snow.

“Where are we going?” asked Wendy.

“I don’t know,” replied Tarina. “I just want to get as far away from the base as possible.”

Through chattering teeth, Wendy said, “My feet are turning numb. If we don’t find shelter soon, I’m going to get frostbite.”

Tarina knew it wasn’t an exaggeration. If they didn’t get out of the cold, they would soon succumb to exposure and die. She slung her rifle over her back and pushed. Together they strode through the knee-deep snow. Before long, each step seemed to be harder than the last. Tarina thought she saw something and brought up a hand to block the blowing snow. A dark shape soon appeared before them.
 

“Come on, I think it’s a shed,” said Tarina trying to encourage her friend.

Seconds later, they pulled open a side door and stepped inside a pitch-back building. Right away they felt safer and warmer now that they were out of the bone-chilling snowstorm. Tarina moved her hand along a table until her fingers found a flashlight. She picked it up and turned it on. The light lit up the room. Inside the small maintenance shed was a snow tractor with a plow on the front of it. She had never seen one up close before but knew that they were used to keep the roads open in the winter.
 

Wendy brushed the snow from her body, opened the driver’s side door on the vehicle, and poked her head inside. After a few seconds rummaging around, she stepped back. In her hands were a couple of survival blankets.

“Thank God for that,” said Tarina as she took one of the blankets, knocked the snow from her body, and wrapped it around her shoulders. It didn’t take long for her body to begin to warm up under the wafer-thin blanket.

“Do you think they’ll come after us?” Wendy asked.

“When haven’t they?”

“For once, I’d like them to give in and let us be.”

“In the snow, it’s going to be hard to track us, but we have to be ready for them when they arrive. Beside these blankets, was there anything else of value in the cab?”

“Only a flare pistol.”

“Grab it. It’s not much but it something we might be able to use.”

Wendy nodded and crawled back inside the vehicle to retrieve the flare gun and its shells.

They had at best ten minutes before they were found, Tarina thought. For a brief moment, she thought of Angela and what fate had befallen her. She didn’t expect the insurgents to treat her well at all. She may be a Kurgan, but that didn’t guarantee her safety in the long run in the hands of fanatics. If they had to, she knew they would kill her to achieve their goals.

“Now what?” asked Wendy, holding up the loaded flare gun.

“Let’s plan a little surprise for our friends,” Tarina said with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

Chapter 29

Sheridan found Cunningham right where he left him, lying face down in the grass. He had to drag the young man to his feet to get him moving. He could hear Cole shooting out the cameras as they walked through the forest. It didn’t take them long to step foot on a path that lead to the closest elevator.
 

Cole was already busy trying to pry open the doors when they arrived.

“Are you okay to climb down the elevator shaft?” Sheridan asked the reluctant private.

“I guess so,” replied the technician.

“There is no guessing here, Private,” said Cole, slipping back into his NCO mode. “Either you can or you cannot. Which is it?”

“I can . . . I can.”

All of a sudden, a loud alarm blared through all of the speakers in the greenhouse. Several warning lights came on flashing red.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Sheridan.

The private came to life and pushed his way past Cole and looked down the shaft. “Hurry!” he yelled as he grabbed hold of the nearest ladder and rushed to climb down below.

Cole and Sheridan exchanged a look before leaping onto the ladder and hurrying after the technician.

Sheridan climbed down as fast as he could. He called out to Cunningham, “What’s the rush?”

“That is,” replied the private looking below them.

At first, Sheridan didn’t see what the problem was. A second later, his eyes widened when he saw a steel plate moving across the elevator shaft to seal it off.

Cole saw it too. He yelled out, “Jump!”

Without hesitating, all three men let go of the ladder. They shot past the steel door and fell another few meters before crashing down onto the roof of a stationary elevator.

Sheridan landed hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. He moaned and rolled over just as the plate slammed into another plate, plunging the shaft into darkness.

Above them, the sound of dozens of latches releasing all at once reverberated down on them.

“What the hell just happened?” Cole asked.