Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (49 page)

it was the presence among them of the third of the Horatii
that tipped the scales toward this seeming recklessness.

Twice before Smith had gone up against one of those
powerful and deadly killers. In both fights he had been lucky to limp
away alive and he was not going to be able to rely on stumbling into good
fortune again. This time he needed to make his own luck—and that meant taking
chances.

He ran on, with his feet flying through the tall grass lining the eastern
edge of the runway. The range to the oncoming drone and the four enemy gunmen
was closing fast—falling rapidly as they moved toward each other with
increasing speed.

Two hundred and fifty meters. Two
hundred. One hundred and fifty meters. Jon felt
his lungs laboring under the strain. He brought the M4 up to his shoulder and
sprinted on.

One hundred meters.

The flying wing came whirring along the runway toward him. All fourteen of
its propellers were spinning now, carving bright flashing circles in the air.

Now!

Smith squeezed the trigger on the M4, firing short bursts on the
move—walking his rounds across the tarmac toward the startled enemy gunmen.
Pieces of concrete and then tufts of grass flew skyward.

They dropped prone and began shooting back.

Jon swerved left, zigzagging away from the tarmac. Bullets tore through the
grass behind him and cracked past his head. He dived forward, hit the ground,
shoulder-rolled back onto his feet, and kept running. He fired again, then swerved right.

More rifle rounds screamed past, reaching out to tear him apart. One tore
through the air close to his face. The superheated gases trailing in its wake
slapped his head back. Another clipped his side, glanced off his body armor,
and knocked him down into the grass. Frantic now, Smith rolled away—hearing
bullets rending the earth right behind him.

In the midst of all the shooting, he heard a deep, bull-like voice shouting
angry orders somewhere on the other side of the runway. The last of the Horatii
was issuing new commands to his troops.

And then, suddenly, astonishingly, the firing stopped.

In the silence, Jon cautiously raised his head. He grinned weakly in relief.
As he had intended, the second drone flying wing, still serenely taxiing toward
its programmed takeoff, had come rolling between him and the men who were
trying to kill him. For a brief moment they could not shoot at him, at least
without the risk of hitting one of their own precious aircraft.

But he knew their self-imposed cease-fire would not last long.

Smith pushed himself up, and crouching low, he moved backward-trying to keep
pace with the huge slowly accelerating solar-powered plane. He peered beneath
the enormous wing, looking for any sign of movement on the concrete runway.

He caught a quick glimpse of running combat boots through the narrow gaps
between the flying wing's five sets of landing gear and its aerody-namicallv
shaped avionics and payload pods. Two of the gunmen were sprinting across the
wide tarmac, cutting behind the drone in an effort to gain a clear field of
fire.

Jon kept backing up, waiting with the M4 tucked against his shoulder and his
finger ready on the trigger. He breathed out, feeling his pulse pounding in his
ears. Come on, he urged the running men silently. Make a mistake.

They did.

Impatient or overconfident or spurred on by the wrath of the auburn-haired
giant who commanded them, both gunmen crossed into the open in the same
instant.

Smith opened fire—pouring rounds downrange into the suddenly appalled pair.
The carbine hammered back against his shoulder. Spent cartridges flew away from
the weapon, tinkling onto the concrete. Fifty meters away, the two gunmen
screamed and fell away into the grass. Multiple 5.56mm hits ripped them apart.

And then Smith felt a series of hammer blows punching across his own chest
and right flank—a cascade of agonizing impacts on his Kevlar body armor that
spun him around in a half circle and threw him to his knees. Somehow he held on
to the M4.

Through vision blurred by pain, he looked up.

There, only forty meters away across the tarmac, a tall green-eyed man
stared back at him, smiling coldly down the barrel of an assault rifle. In that
instant, Jon understood the mistake he had made. The last of the Ho-ratii had
expended two of his own men—throwing them forward to draw fire in the same way
a chess player sacrifices pawns to gain an advantage in position. While }on killed them, the big man had slipped quickly
around the front of the taxiing drone aircraft to strike at him from the flank.

And now there was nothing Smith could do to save himself.

Still smiling, the green-eyed man raised his rifle slightly, this time
aiming at Smith's unprotected head. Beside him, just at the edge of Jon's
wavering, unfocused vision, the leading edge of the huge flying wing came into
view, liberally studded with the plastic cylinders containing its murderous
payload.

The fear-ridden primitive part of Jon's brain screamed in silent terror,
raging futilely against its approaching death. He did his best to ignore that
part of himself, straining instead to hear what it was that the colder, more
clinical, more rational side of his mind was trying to tell him.

The wind, it said.

The wind is from the east.

Without thinking further, Smith threw himself sideways. He fired the carbine
in that same moment, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. The M4 barked
repeatedly, kicking higher with every shot as he emptied what was left of his
thirty-round magazine. Bullets lashed the huge flying wing—punching holes in
carbon fiber and plastic surfaces, slicing flight control cables, smashing
onboard computers, and shattering propellers.

The drone plane rocked under the force of the high-velocity impacts. It
began slewing west, slowly turning off the runway.

■

Terce watched the dark-haired American's last desperate move without pity or
concern. One side of his mouth curved up in a wry, predatory grin. This was
like seeing a wounded animal thrashing in a trap. That was something to savor.
He stood motionless, choosing only to follow his target with the rifle
barrel—waiting for his sights to settle on the other man's head. He ignored the
bullets shrieking off to his right. At this range, the American could not
possibly hope to hit him with unaimed fire.

But then he heard the smooth hum made by the drone aircraft's fourteen
electric motors change pitch —roughening in fits and starts as they shorted out
or lost power. Bits and pieces of shattered plastic and carbon fiber spun away
across the tarmac.

Terce saw the huge plane swinging toward him, veering wildly off-course. He
scowled. The American's last gamble would not save his life, but the damage to
one of his three irreplaceable attack aircraft would infuriate Nomura.

Suddenly Terce stared in disbelief at the thin-walled plastic cylinders
slung under the huge wing, noticing for the first time the rough-edged
star-shaped punctures torn through so many of them.

It was only then that he felt the murdering east wind gently kiss his face.
His green eyes widened in horror.

Terror-stricken, Terce stumbled backward. The assault rifle fell from his
shaking hands and clattered onto the concrete.

The auburn-haired man groaned aloud. Already he could feel the Stage IV
nanophages at work inside his body. Billions of the horrid devices were clawing
their way outward from deep inside his heaving lungs—spreading their poisons
wider with every fatal breath. The flesh inside his thick transparent gloves
turned red, sloughing off his muscles and tendons and bones as they
disintegrated.

His two surviving men, temporarily secure in their gas masks, looked up at
him from their firing positions. Eyes wide in fear, they scrambled to their
feet and began backing away.

Desperately he raised his haggard melting face in mute appeal. “Kill
me,” he whispered, choking out the words past a tongue that was falling to
pieces. “Kill me! Please!”

Instead, panicked by the horror they saw before them, they threw their
rifles aside and fled toward the ocean.

Screaming again and again, the last of the Horatii doubled over,
wracked by incomprehensible and unending pain as the teeming nanophages ate him
alive from within.

■

Smith ran north along the runway, moving fast despite his fatigue and the
terrible punishment he had taken. His jaw was set, held tight against the pain
from several cracked ribs grinding under his body armor. He stumbled once,
swore under his breath, and pushed himself onward.

Keep going, Jon, he told himself savagely. Keep going or die.

He did not look back. He knew the horror he would see there. He knew the
horror he had deliberately set in motion. By now the nanophage cloud was
spreading west across the whole southern end of the airfield-drifting on the
wind toward the Atlantic.

Smith came pounding up to the grounded Black Hawk.
The rotors were still spinning slowly. Torn blades of grass and lingering
traces of missile exhaust swirled lazily in the air around the waiting
helicopter. Peter and Randi saw him coming. Their worried looks vanished and
they moved toward him, smiling and laughing with relief.

“Get aboard!” Jon roared, waving them back to the Black Hawk.
“Get that thing spooled up!”

Peter nodded tightly, seeing the shot-up drone careening off the runway out
of control. He knew what that meant. “Give me thirty seconds, Jon!”
he called.

The Englishman swung himself back aboard the helicopter and scrambled into
the pilot's seat. His hands danced across the control panel, flicking switches
and watching indicators lighting up. Satisfied, he rotated the throttle,
pushing the engines toward full power. The rotors began spinning faster.

Smith skidded to a stop beside the troop carrier's open door. He noticed
Randi's left arm dangling at her side. Her face was still pale, drawn with
pain. “How bad is it?” he asked.

She smiled wryly. “It hurts like hell, but I'll live. You can play
doctor some other time.”

Before he could react, she glared at him. “And you will not make any
smart-ass comments. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Smith told her quietly. Hiding the pain from his own
injuries, he helped her climb up into the Black Hawk. Then he swung himself
aboard. His eyes took note of the two other passengers—recognizing both Hideo
and Jinjiro Nomura from their pictures in the files Fred Klein had made him
study so long ago in Santa Fe. So long ago, he thought coldly. Six days ago. A lifetime ago.

Randi dropped into a rear-facing seat across from Hideo. Wincing, she
cradled the M4 carbine in her lap, making sure its deadly black muzzle was
pointing straight at his heart. Jon settled in beside her.

“Hold tight!” Peter called from the control cabin. “Here we
go!”

Engines howling, the Black Hawk slid forward across the runway and then
lifted off—already turning as it climbed away from the airfield.

At three hundred feet, Peter leveled out. They were high enough now to be
safe from the nanophage cloud blowing across the Nomura Pharma-Tech airfield
and complex. Or so he hoped. He frowned, reminding himself that hope ran a very
poor second to absolute certainty. With a twitch of the controls, he took them
up another hundred feet.

Happier now, Peter pulled the Black Hawk into a gentle turn, beginning a
slow orbit over the corpse-strewn runway. Then he glanced back over his
shoulder into the troop compartment. “Where to now, Jon?” he asked. “After our friend Lazarus' first drone? The one that got away?”

Smith shook his head. “Not quite yet.” He stripped the empty
magazine out of his carbine and inserted a fresh clip. “We still have a
couple of things to finish up here first.”

He slid out of his seat and lay prone on the floor of the helicopter,
sighting along the M4 out through the open door. “Give me a shot at that
third drone, Peter,” he called. “It's still trying to take off on
autopilot.”

In response, the Black Hawk tilted, swinging back to the south. Smith leaned
a bit farther out, watching the huge flying wing grow even larger in his
sights. He squeezed the trigger—firing a series of aimed bursts down into the
drone rolling determinedly down the runway. The carbine hammered back against
his shoulder.

The UH-60 roared past the aircraft and pulled up sharply, already curving
back through a full circle.

The carbine's bolt locked open at the rear. Jon pulled out the empty clip
and slapped in another—his last. He hit the catch. The M4 was loaded and ready
to fire again.

The helicopter finished its turn and flew north, heading back for another
pass.

Smith stared down. Battered by thirty rounds of 5.56mm ammunition, the third
drone now sat motionless on the tarmac. Whole sections of the single long wing
sagged, shattered by multiple hits. Fragments of engine pods and nanophage
cylinders littered the concrete paving behind the wrecked aircraft.
“Scratch one drone,” he announced in a matter-of-fact voice.
“That's two down and one to go.”

Hideo Nomura stiffened in his seat.

“Not a move,” Randi warned him. She hefted the weapon on her lap.

“You will not shoot me inside this machine,” the younger Nomura
snarled. Every trace of the amiable cosmopolitan facade he had cultivated for
so many long years of deception had vanished. Now his face was a rigid,
hate-filled mask that revealed the raw malice and egomania that truly drove
him. “You would all die, too. You Americans are too soft. You do not have
the true warrior spirit.”

Randi smiled mockingly back at him. “Maybe not.
But the fuel tanks behind you are self-sealing. And I'm willing to bet that
you're not. Shall we find out which one of us is right?”