32
“Lights,” I snapped at Long, who was closest to the switch.
He leapt and slapped it down, plunging the room into darkness. Johnson clicked his light on briefly so we could see to take cover. I pushed Rachel to the far side of the room and behind some heavy cabinets, taking a second to make sure Johnson and Long had both found good spots to fight from.
As they settled in, I dashed forward and pressed the call button for the elevator. I was pretty sure they’d be coming here, anyway, to pick up their dead comrade, but wanted to make sure. Moving back, I retrieved two grenades, firmly gripping one in each hand with the spoons tight in my palms. I held them out towards Long.
“Pull the pins,” I said.
“Oh shit, sir!”
He gave me a look, but did as I asked. Pins out, the spoons were held in place, which was the only thing keeping the fuses from activating. I put my back against the wall to the side of the elevator doors.
“Be sure you’re behind something solid, open your mouth and put your hands over your ears!”
The instructions were for Rachel. Long and Johnson would know how to deal with a detonation in a closed space. I just hoped that the concussion didn’t completely scramble all of our brains. Permanently.
Then there was the problem of the time it takes a grenade’s fuse to burn. Release the spoon and it’s flung away by the striker, which is spring loaded. As it’s forced out, it strikes the primer, which ignites a five-second fuse. And that five seconds was the problem.
If I just tossed them into the elevator, the Russians would have five seconds to do any number of things. Dive out of the car into the room to seek shelter. Kick them through the open door. Pick them up and throw them back at us. None of those were good options, as far as I was concerned. They needed to detonate quickly when I tossed them.
The hum continued, and now I could feel a faint vibration in my back where it was pressed hard against the wall. The car was coming. Taking a deep breath, I waited for the ding to announce its arrival on our floor. There is always a brief delay between that ding and elevator doors sliding open. That’s what I was counting on. The instant I heard the ding, I was going to release the spoons.
Then I had five seconds. At the most. The damn things are made by the contractor who submitted the lowest bid to the DOD, so I was placing a lot of faith in trusting that the fuses were made to spec. Cooking off, or using up some of that fuse time, is always a
“what the fuck am I doing?”
event.
But what would happen if I ran out of time? If there were more than five seconds between the ding and the doors parting? I didn’t have a good answer to that. Once the spoon comes off, there’s no going back. It’s like saying the wrong thing to your spouse at the wrong time. Once it comes out of your mouth, you’re committed, and you’d better be prepared to deal with the consequences.
I briefly considered waiting. Timing it differently. Not letting the spoons release until the doors were standing open, then tossing the grenades in before they closed and the car departed. The problem with that was, what if the Russians hadn’t pressed the button for the armory level and were curious about why it had stopped here.
If they came out of the elevator to investigate, I wouldn’t be able to use the grenades. It was dangerous enough to have them detonate within the same space we were in, but the car should absorb much of the shrapnel, even though it would funnel the concussion out into the room. That was going to be bad, but not as bad as if they went off in the room with us.
The bell dinged before I was ready. My palms were sweating as I tried to make the right decision. With a grimace, I let the spoons fly. They’re made of thin metal and clinked like dropped forks when they hit the floor and bounced away.
One thousand and one.
The doors didn’t move.
One thousand and two.
Still closed. My heart was about to beat out of my chest.
One thousand and three.
What the fuck?
One thousand and…
The doors began to slide open. As I said
four
in my head, I leaned out and underhanded both grenades through the gap.
One thousand and five.
There was the start of a shout from inside the car, then a brutal detonation. I had enough time to move away from the opening and slap my hands over my ears. Somehow, I wound up on the floor, the acrid odor of burned RDX and TNT all that my senses could detect. Well, that and a high pitched ringing in my ears.
My brain was working, telling me to make sure all of the Russians were down, but my body refused to cooperate. It had been pummeled and wanted to just lay there for a while.
It finally responded when a hand grasped my upper arm. Turning, I tried to bat it away, reaching for a weapon. More hands grabbed me, holding my arms and a light clicked on. Rachel’s face was inches from mine, her mouth moving as she talked to me. I couldn’t hear her. Slowly, with her help, I sat up and looked at the elevator.
Johnson was standing at the entrance, shining his light inside. Blood was everywhere from the bodies that had been torn open by the twin blasts. And those bodies were in a heap on the floor of the large elevator. Still stunned from the concussion, I could only stare in fascination at the stream of blood that was steadily running from beneath the pile to drip through the gap between the elevator and the room.
Lights came on and, like a drunk, I swiveled my head to see Long standing next to the switch. Only the back third of the room was illuminated, the fluorescent bulbs closer to the elevator having been shattered. Johnson turned away from the charnel house inside the car and stepped in front of me, extending his hand.
After a moment, I understood what he was doing and reached up so he could help me to my feet. I swayed dangerously and Rachel wrapped her arms around my shoulders so I didn’t crash onto the floor. We stood that way for some time, I have no idea how long, as the ringing in my ears subsided and my balance began to return.
“He’s fucking crazy,” Johnson said to Rachel.
“This is nothing,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things this big idiot has done.”
“After that, I’d believe it,” Long chimed in.
“I can hear you,” I said, probably much too loudly as they all grinned when I spoke.
“You’re fucking crazy, sir!” Johnson looked directly at me, a grin plastered across his face.
“Can you stand on your own?” Rachel asked.
I nodded, then wished I hadn’t. One hell of a headache was starting to pound right behind my eyes. Slowly, she released me, but didn’t step away in case I started to totter again.
“How many?” I asked, gesturing at the elevator.
“Fifteen,” Johnson said.
That made a total of sixteen Russians accounted for, including the one we’d found dead when we entered the armory. A Hind can carry eight troops, in addition to the flight crew, and there were five of the damn things sitting on the tarmac. If they’d all been fully loaded, that meant there were still 24 Spetsnaz running around somewhere. Unless the infected got them, but I wasn’t going to count on that.
“Need to check them,” I said.
The two Rangers looked at me for a moment, then sighed and stepped into the car. They began dragging bodies out, tossing them to the side after checking pockets and packs. Soon they were both bloody to the knees and elbows, but they kept at their grizzly task.
Quickly, the pile of items they were removing began to grow. Easing myself to the floor, I sat down to look through them. Soon, Rachel joined me.
Cheap wallets with photos of families. More than a few of girlfriends or wives in a risqué pose, reminding them of what was waiting at home. Lots of packs of American cigarettes. I paused when I picked up a brass zippo lighter and saw the crest attached to its face. USMC. If I’d had any guilt over ambushing them, which I didn’t, that find would have erased it. I slipped the lighter into a pocket and kept looking.
Pocket knives. Occasional key chains. The hood ornament from a Mercedes Benz. Really? A few pencils and lots of folded papers. The first several I spread out were in Cyrillic and looked like military orders or possibly even pay stubs. I couldn’t tell and would have Long look at them when he was finished moving bodies.
Then a file was tossed on the pile. It had a ragged hole all the way through from a fragment of one of the grenades and the edges of the paper were stained red with blood.
The cover was stiff, bright red cardboard. A thick sheaf of three-hole punched papers were clipped inside. Diagonally across the front, in large letters, a warning:
TOP SECRET – SCI
.
SCI stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information and means it is only authorized for individuals who have been specifically cleared. A heavy, elastic band held it closed. Across a small tab that stuck up from the edge was a small label.
Project Athena
.
“What the hell’s that?” Rachel asked.
“Something pretty damn sensitive,” I said, staring at the folder.
I wasn’t worried about opening it. Didn’t give a crap if I violated national security laws and read the information it contained. It was time to get our asses in gear and get out of there. I’d peruse the documents once we were safely back on the plane and cruising at a nice, sedate 40,000 feet.
“Anything else?” I called to Long and Johnson as they shoved the last two bodies aside.
They hadn’t bothered to move all of them, just cleared enough space to search and for the four of us to step aboard.
“That’s it,” Johnson said, slinging blood off his hands. “Unless you want a copy of
Hustler
.”
He held the magazine up, more blood dripping off the glossy cover. Grinning, he tossed it onto the pile of bodies still in the elevator. I scooped up all the papers and shoved them into one of the dead Russian’s packs.
Rachel and I moved inside the car with them. Looking around, I was surprised to see that the control panel hadn’t been destroyed. All I could imagine was that one of the hapless Russians had been standing directly in front, shielding it from the devastation with his body.
Long reached out and pushed the button marked as
Surface
. A few seconds later, the doors slid shut, squishing thick blood out of their track as they moved. The smell in the car was horrible, and when I looked at Rachel she had pulled the front of her shirt up over her nose and mouth. From the look in her eyes, I didn’t think it was helping.
The ride up didn’t take long. A moment before the car came to a stop, I heard the ding announcing its arrival. It was that instant that I realized the mistake I’d made. We had no idea what was waiting for us at ground level. This thought went through my pounding head and I reached for my rifle as the doors began to slide open.
A female screamed and I fired at the leaping body. My shot killed her, but she was so close the corpse slammed into me. I was knocked back onto the pile of dead Russians, instantly getting soaked in their blood, and worse. Johnson and Long stepped close together, shielding Rachel and me.
Both fired several shots as more screams erupted. I was surprised when their rifles went silent. Neither had fired more than half a dozen rounds.
“Clear,” Long said a few seconds later, stepping forward out of the car with Johnson at his side.
I gratefully extricated myself from the pile of bodies, wincing at the wetness I could feel soaking the back of my pants and shirt. Following the two Rangers, Rachel and I exited the elevator and looked around at the remains of a battle.
We were in a large room with a massive security station that protected access to the elevators. Floor to ceiling windows looked out onto a broad parking lot, three of the huge panes of glass broken out. What had to be several hundred infected lay dead, scattered across the floor. Many had been shot as they entered, piling up in the empty window frames. Many more had managed to surge in and reach the Russian soldiers that tried to hold them back.
The Spetsnaz had racked up an impressive body count, but had succumbed to the unstoppable tsunami of the infected. Their bodies were shredded, many of them having been fed on.
“Get a count,” I ordered after a pause to take in the destruction.
Long and Johnson began moving around, checking bodies. Several times they had to shove the corpses of multiple infected aside to positively identify the Russian that was at the bottom of a pile.
“Eighteen,” Long reported a few minutes later after they compared notes. “And all were out of ammo. There’s a lot of infected with knife wounds. Looks like that’s how they made their final stand.”
Both Rangers looked spooked. I didn’t blame them. It doesn’t matter if it’s enemy soldiers. When you come across elite troops that were overrun and killed, it’s sobering. Easy to put yourself in their shoes.
“OK,” I said. “At most, there’s six more Russians. That’s if every helicopter was full. Unless…”
“What?” Long asked.
“Either of you know the normal size of a Spetsnaz platoon?”
“Nineteen, if I remember right,” Johnson answered immediately. “At least that’s what it was a few years ago.”
“Two platoons, then?” I mused. “Thirty-eight? And we’ve got thirty-four bodies. Take attrition into account and all that may be left are the pilots.”
“That’s a big, fucking maybe. Sir,” Long said.
“Maybe’s about all I got at the moment,” I said.
Long and Johnson both nodded in understanding.
“What are you thinking?” Rachel asked, recognizing the look on my face.
“I’d really like to take those helos and pilots out before we leave,” I said.
“We’ve got nothing that will damage those Hinds,” Long said. “Didn’t see anything in the armory other than light weapons, either.”
I nodded, having already forgotten how badly that movement made my head pound.
33