4
Queen slipped through the snow like a wraith. While Rook attempted to cover her position from where they had been keeping an eye on the south and eastern sides of the building, she followed close behind the roving patrol of men as they moved along the south wall. She briefly switched on the audio for the outside of her helmet, listening for any noises over the howl of the storm, but all she heard was the constant, roaring whine of the wind.
Feeling confident in her approach, because the storm would cover any noise she made, Queen rushed toward where she’d last seen the men, before they disappeared into the blowing ice crystals. The whiteout was thick, but she pressed on blindly, hoping to catch the men and dispatch the entire patrol before anyone was the wiser.
Instead, she ran right into a wall.
Of fur.
In the split second it took her to realize that the men on patrol had performed a ‘Crazy Ivan’ technique, suddenly turning to ensure no one was following them, the man she had run into, covered in rags and furs, and carrying a fur-wrapped AK-47 rifle, began to raise his weapon. Queen’s wasn’t in position. Her rifle was angled off to her left after the unexpected impact. So she lunged upward with it, the side of the SCAR smashing into the man’s gauze-covered head. She figured he could barely see through the layers of cloth anyway. After the weapon impacted his head with a dull thud, the coverings were displaced upward, blinding him.
She didn’t know if a gunshot would be audible over the screaming wind, but she didn’t want to chance it. She dropped her SCAR, and it swung down to her side on its sling. Her hand came up with a SOG SEAL knife instead. The blade was seven inches long, making it a monster of a weapon. She normally preferred a shorter 4-inch blade, but in this environment, where she expected any opponents to be wearing thick layers of clothing, she had thought it best to go with a longer knife. As the blade rammed home into the man’s throat, and continued straight back to sever his spinal cord just above his second thoracic vertebrae, she congratulated herself on the choice. The wide man, looking like an overstuffed brown pillow in his thick clothing, tumbled backward. She held tight to the handle of the knife, and it sluiced out of the guard as he went down.
She was just starting to turn, to keep her own system of Crazy Ivans in the blinding white, when she saw the barrel of an AK-47 emerge from the white fog to her right. With no time to fully turn, she lunged her whole body in that direction, mashing the barrel of the weapon away from her, even as it lit up, spewing 7.62mm death in an uncontrolled burst. She only hoped the man, whose finger had clenched in surprise, managed to mow down some of his fellow guards. Then she and the man were tumbling down toward the ground.
Moving the fight to the rocky soil was a bad enough turn of events, but just as she and the second man hit the hard, frozen ground, something worse happened.
The wind abruptly stopped.
And the blowing snow and sand that had been obscuring her from view, vanished with it.
“Fight or flight?” Pawn asked, sheltered in the shadow of the doorway.
Knight waited a beat before replying to her. “Option 3. Rook style.” He dove forward, rolling out onto the catwalk. As he went low, Pawn came out behind him, aiming high and firing at the oncoming team of guards. Her three-round burst hit the first man, spinning him, and her second burst hit the next man in line. As the two victims fell sideways, the third man on the narrow catwalk was revealed, and a second later, he was impaled.
Knight had fired one of Rook’s tailor-made spear gun-like bomb-spikes. The compressed-air weapon was strong enough to send the metal spike across the catwalk to drive itself deeply into the man’s chest. Pawn could see the small red LEDs on the ring of explosives around the shaft were lit already, indicating that the bomb was armed. As the man fell backward into the others still standing, Knight and Pawn took off running the other direction along the catwalk.
The remaining three men opened fire on them, bullets pinging off the metal catwalk near their feet as they ran. Suddenly the wall to their left began sparking from additional bullet impacts, and Pawn swept her SCAR over the railing to her right, firing several blind shots down at the floor of the lab, where she assumed the other guards were standing. She knew there was a risk of hitting the vats of fluid down there, and she had no way of knowing what they contained. But since the mission was essentially to break everything, she figured it would all work out okay.
As Knight reached the corner of the catwalk, and another doorway to their left – most likely to another watchtower, he darted inside, holding his arm up to show her that he held the transmitter for the bomb-spike. He was going to flick the switch.
Pawn darted into the doorway, just before the pressure wave ripped along the metal floor, nipping at her heels. As soon as it was done spewing shredded fabric and shattered, blood-stained chunks of rock their way, she darted back out onto the catwalk, which was now mangled and on fire at the end. She leaned over the railing and fired a bomb-spike from her own spear gun down into the lab. The spike implanted in the ground right next to the largest vat of lime green fluid. Pawn then pulled back and swept her SCAR up to cover Knight. He had reloaded his own spear gun and leaned over the rail, as she had done, firing his spike to a far corner of the lab’s floor. They took turns, laying suppressive gunfire and launching their deadly cargo, until Knight had loosed four of his seven remaining spikes and Pawn had fired all eight of hers.
Wordlessly they turned to ascend the darkened stairs of the new tower, hoping there would be an exit, because the space behind them was about to erupt in a fireball of chemicals, pulverized stone and slivers of metal and bone.
“What in the name of Michigan J. Frog happened to the friggin’ storm?” Rook asked, scrambling to his feet and racing toward the distant brawl between Queen and one of the patrolling guards.
With the air suddenly clear of ice and grit, he could see she had already taken one of the men down, but while she grappled with another, there were four more men. Two had turned already and were rushing toward their fallen comrades.
Rook loosed a controlled burst of fire from his FN SCAR, dropping one of the men, and winging the other. He kept running toward them, firing again as he got closer. He dropped the second alarmed guard, just as Queen plunged her huge knife in the chest of the man she had on the ground. Rook kept advancing and was pleased to see the last two guards hadn’t even turned yet.
Queen climbed to her feet. Rook was still half-a-dozen yards from her position and heading for her at a run. He was about to fire on the last two guards, when one of them turned and the other simply dropped. Rook raised his weapon to fire on the turning man, but he dropped as well.
Queen felt the ground trembling again and then saw Rook heading her way, aiming past her. She turned back and saw the last of the guards fall down. Then she and Rook both understood what had happened to the men.
King, approaching from the back of the building, he had taken both men down with single shots from his rifle, as he’d come around the corner.
But something was wrong. He was running toward them, and moving full out.
“King, what’s—” Rook started to ask.
Then Rook noticed the vibration beneath his feet. At first he’d written it off as another of the tremors Aleman had mentioned. But it was stronger now, and the ground was bucking and jumping, as if this earthquake was going to be a huge one.