The Rogue Retrieval (28 page)

He said nothing, but unstrapped the crossbow from his saddle.

“What are you doing?” Quinn demanded. He dropped the saddlebags and took a step. Huge arms wrapped around him from behind in a bear hug.
Logan.

“Let me go!” Quinn shouted. “What's he doing?”

“Sorry about this, Bradley,” Logan said. “A burden animal wandering around might attract attention to this cave. We can't afford that.”

“No!” He squirmed, but Logan had him in an iron grip. Quinn had forgotten just how
strong
he was. He fought against it anyway. He cussed at Logan. He tried to shut his ears, dreading the inevitable
clack-­thrum
of the crossbow.

It never came.

Mendez returned and stomped the snow from his boots. He wore a quizzical expression. “The mule's not out there.”

“It must have wandered off,” Kiara said. “Go track it down.”

“There aren't any tracks, Lieutenant. The thing is just
gone
.”

Gods be praised.
Whether it was some piece of Enclave magic, or just an extra smart mule, Quinn couldn't say. When Logan released him, he threw the big man a dirty look and rubbed his arms.

“What did you do, Bradley?” Kiara asked.

Quinn offered her a little bow. “One last disappearing act for our little journey.”

Her face was stormy, but Chaudri laughed. Mendez joined in.

“I did warn you against bringing a magician,” Logan said.

 

“The hardest part about our work over there is the moment we must return home.”

—­
R
.
H
OLT,
“A
D
ECADE
D
EVOTED
”

CHAPTER 25

MODERN WARFARE

L
ogan wanted to be the first through the gateway, but Kiara had different ideas.

“I'm pulling rank on you, Logan,” she said.

Logan planted himself in front of her. “Not this time, Lieutenant. It's a security matter.”

“Command assured us that they have control of the island facility.”

“Those messages could have been faked.”

She sighed, but gave in. “Anything looks off, I want you back here in double time.”

“Roger that.”

Logan unbelted his sword and handed it to Mendez; anything larger than a knife triggered knockout gas on the other side while the security protocols were in place. A gear retrieval team would be through later to decontaminate all of their gear and take it back to the armory.

He took a breath and leaped through. Cold washed over him, then darkness. He landed on the stone of the gate room. Spotlights blinded him. He shielded his eyes and looked down. The incoming alarm sounded, a single klaxon. Four neon green dots appeared on his chest and hovered near the solar plexus. Company-­issue laser sights. Sweet Jesus, they had the facility back.

He laced his hands behind his head and knelt on the stone floor.

“Sergeant Major Logan, Alpha Team,” he said.

The Plexiglas door ahead of him remained shut, but there was a speaker inside. A woman's voice came through it. “Passcode?”

“Echo. Foxtrot. Seven. One. Victor,” Logan said.

“What was your first daughter's weight at birth?”

“Five pounds, three ounces,” he said. Olivia was a tiny thing; she took after her mother. Thinking of his girls made him smile. He missed the next question. “Say again?”

“How many hostages survived in Beirut?”

His smile fell. “Screw you.”

“Answer the question.”

“None of them.” His last mission for Uncle Sam had been a bloodbath. It made saying yes to Kiara much easier.

The Plexiglas slid aside; four black-­clad soldiers lowered their weapons. He stepped out of the airlock. “I've got four more behind me, and one prisoner.”

Kiara came through next. She went through the drill while Logan surrendered his knife, comm unit, boots, and armor to a ­couple of soldiers from the armory. Bradley was next, then Chaudri. The gate room had changed since he last came through; lead panels six feet tall and about half as wide formed a semicircle around the gateway. The men with guns were positioned just beyond. Thorisson stumbled through a moment after, still bound at the wrists. Mendez entered behind him and stepped on his knee, forcing the man down.

Logan picked up a phone that let him talk to the control room. “Gas them.”

“Including Mendez?”

“He'll forgive me. Do it.”

A white cloud billowed noiselessly in the airlock. Two thuds. The exhaust fan whirred into motion, clearing the knockout gas. The Plexiglas hissed open. Both men were down, and had fallen in a scandalous position.

“Well, look at that,” Logan said.

Chaudri laughed softly. “I didn't realize they were so close.”

Logan snapped a photo on his wrist-­camera. “For posterity.”

Four security officers hurried in to check vitals and drag them clear. Kiara took command of things and ordered the gateway lockdown that was standard protocol after a mission returned. Later, a retrieval team would go get the horses and blow artificial snow out of the cave to cover their tracks leading up to it.

Mendez passed both retinal and fingerprint scans; they stripped his knife and boots off him, then lifted him into a cot to recover. Two others searched the prisoner thoroughly, turning up a nylon pouch with a tiny pill capsule inside.

“What is that?” Logan asked. “Looks prescription or something.”

The pill went into a tiny, portable mass spectroscopy instrument. They had the readout in just under thirty seconds.

“Hmm,” Logan said. “Sodium cyanide.”

Kiara pursed her lips; she was impressed. “A suicide pill.”

“Nice touch,” Logan said. “Very KGB.”

As all this happened, both men gradually came around. In about two minutes the effect of the knockout gas wore off.

Mendez sat up and had a coughing fit. “Was that really necessary?” he groused.

“Matter of security,” Logan told him.

“Next time, maybe I'll clear the room and you can bring the prisoner.”

Thorisson woke to the friendly greeting of guards with machine guns. Logan started to walk over, to offer the man a personal escort down to the brig. Thorisson shook his head. He locked eyes with Logan and slipped out of the flexsteel bindings on his wrists.

How in the
hell
?
He must have dislocated a thumb. Now he used his free hand to press something on the inside of one wrist. What was it, another suicide pill?

“Watch him!” Logan shouted.

No, a faint light glowed there beneath his fingers. Some kind of subdermal electronic device.

Logan darted toward him. “Hold him still!”

The guards grabbed him, but they were too late. There was a soft beep.

Explosions began to rock the complex.

Q
uinn was still unlacing his boots when Logan shouted. The force of the first two explosions threw him into a wall of the cave. The fluorescent lights went out, replaced by the weak orange glow of emergency backups.

“What the hell was that?” Kiara shouted.

Logan grabbed Thorisson's wrist while the two guards held him down. He jabbed at the light, but couldn't seem to undo whatever the man had done. He reared back and punched Thorisson in the face. Really put his shoulder to it. The man crumpled. He was out cold.

“Take him to holding,” Logan growled. “Find a sedative that keeps him out.”

Kiara had a radio to her ear; she was getting a report. “It's the goddamn drone!” She had to shout to be heard above the blaring alarm sirens.

Another explosion; this one sounded closer. Quinn laced his boots back up. “Sorry, I'm going to need these,” he told the men from inventory.

Kiara handed out radios. She strode to punch a code into the panel on the wall; the thick steel doors leading out into the complex started to slide open, but halted about a foot apart. “Logan!”

He ran over and threw a shoulder into one of the doors, heaving. Mendez did likewise on the other one. Quinn ran over to help. So did Chaudri. The doors were six inches thick, and some kind of steel alloy. The four of them managed to heave them apart another foot, just enough that everyone could squeeze through.

“Logan, Mendez—­you're on tactical support,” Kiara said. “I'll be in the control room.”

“What about us?” Chaudri asked.

“You're civilians. Find somewhere safe and low until we get the all clear,” Kiara said.

She stalked away down the hall; Logan and Mendez had already jogged out of sight.

“What's the safest place on the island?” Quinn asked.

“Theoretically it's the control room where Kiara's headed. I'm more of a mind to try the subbasement, though. When it comes to this sort of thing, I prefer good, solid stone,” Chaudri said. “No matter what they claim about the Plexiglas.”

That gave him an idea, and it was crazy enough that it might make a difference. “Did you say that we had siege equipment somewhere?”

“On the roof of the armory.”

“Come on.” Quinn started down the stairs.

“Wait! The roof is the other way,” Chaudri said.

“We're headed to the prototyping lab first. I need my team.”

Q
uinn found Julian Miller and most of the techs down in their lab, frantically securing delicate equipment to the walls and floors. Mostly with yards and yards of duct tape. He and Chaudri jumped in to help. There were millions of dollars in this room. The woodworking equipment would hold, but the three-­dimensional printer and other delicate robotics teetered precariously.

“Bradley!” Miller called. “I knew you must have gotten back.”

“Oh, yeah? How so?”

“Things started blowing up.”

“It's the drone,” Quinn said. He helped Miller close and lock the materials drawers that were sliding out of the wall. He did a double-­take when he saw one of them was filled with
gold
ingots. It took another fifteen minutes before all of the equipment was secure. The lab now looked like a hazmat crime scene.

“The drone, eh?” Miller asked finally. “Damn thing ruined my best argon laser.”

“Sorry, chief,” Quinn said. “Hey, you built the siege equipment on top of the armory, right? Is it still there?”

“As far as I know.”

“What's the range on those?”

“A few hundred yards for the mangonels. But the trebuchets can throw half a mile.” Miller frowned. “You'll never get the drone that close, though.”

“Let me worry about that. I need to borrow all of the 3-­D projectors. And a few of your guys.”

“What are you planning?” Chaudri asked.

“A little razzle-­dazzle,” he said, grinning.

L
ogan got to the command center just in time to hear Kiara give the launch order. Six missiles, one second apart. They whined as they streaked around the island, a six-­fingered claw of airborne destruction. The drone shifted back and forth as they targeted and homed in. Maybe its defenses couldn't handle that many.

The screech was high-­pitched and deafening. It came from every speaker, every surveillance system at once.

“What is that?” Kiara shouted.

“Jamming signal!” Logan said. He ran to the window.

Four of the missiles went down like stones. Another one peeled away and diverted back toward the control tower.

Shit.

“Take cover!” he shouted.

He dove behind the console closest to him. The detonation rocked the floor under him. Incredibly, the Plexiglas windows had held. He regained his feet. Most of the surveillance cameras had gone all snowy on them.

Radar was still up, though, and it tracked the last missile. It was making a wide circuit of the island.

“What's it doing?” Kiara said.

“Looking for a target.”

The biggest heat signature came from the cooling units behind the central complex. The missile bore down on these and exploded. A light warhead, but that was sure to have taken out the condensers.

“There goes the A/C,” Logan said.

Kiara got on the radio. “Shut down nonessential systems. Everything but the computing cores.”

­People could sweat. Hard drives could not.

Right around then, Logan looked out the window and saw that the residential building was gone. “What the hell?”

“What now?” Kiara demanded.

“The residential building's gone.”

“Flattened?”

He grabbed a pair of binoculars. The area where the building had been was just empty, bare rock face. Like nothing had ever been there at all. “No—­just . . . gone.” He looked up and then the warehouse was gone, too. “Shit, the warehouse!”

Kiara was at the window, too. “Did you see an impact?”

“No. It just disappeared. Like a . . .” He trailed off, and he figured it out. “Like a goddamn magic trick.”

“Bradley,” she said.

“Has to be.”

The outer buildings went first, then the inner ones. And it worked, too. The drone was almost in rifle range.

“Did they have any luck getting the specs for this bird?” Logan asked.

“Right here,” Kiara said. She unfolded a set of blueprints that had probably been acquired at exorbitant expense through company intermediaries. They both pored over them, looking for weak points.

“Here's the comm array,” Logan said. But a metal dome housed that, and he doubted they'd be able to punch through.

“What about these?” Kiara asked. She ran a fingernail on the wires beneath it, the ones that ran from the comms to the drone's body.

“Going to be a small target,” Logan said.

“It's all we've got.”

Logan got on the radio. “Mendez, you raided the armory yet?”

“I'm here now,” Mendez said.

“Get a sniper rifle, too,” Logan said. “Highest caliber you can find. See you in the bunkers in five.”

“Roger that,” Mendez said.

“Good hunting,” Kiara said.

Logan ran down two flights of stairs and followed the tunnel to the foxholes that peppered the cliffs above the shoreline. Mendez was there with a few men, getting set up. Logan took the sniper rifle. The others had M4s. They opened fire. Not like crazy cowboys, but with each one taking aim, squeezing off a burst. Every shot was plinking off drone metal.

Logan went for the junction, guessing at where those wires would be.
This one's for my girls. . .

He put his shot right in the tiny gap. The drone lurched sideways for three wonderful seconds. Then it righted itself, and decided then to take them seriously.

One of Mendez's men was on the spotting scope, watching the drone for any sign of damage. “Shit!” he said. “Gun port just opened.”

Logan recognized the sound right away. A distant percussion, then the whizz of the incoming round.

“RPG!” he shouted. He and the spotter hit the floor of their foxhole. The first detonation hit the roof, and others rapidly followed. The entire hillside housing their positions erupted in a storm of shrapnel and white smoke.

Mendez had the presence of mind to jump on the fixed-­position M2 with hopes of jamming the drone's weapon. Good old Ma Deuce delivered four hundred and fifty rounds per minute of 0.50 caliber armor-­piercing bullets.