You see? Take your eyes off him, and he’ll detonate it.
Alex crushed his eyes shut, and reopened them, trying to blink away the devil inside.
He’s laughing at you, just like he was laughing when they tortured her, the senator’s wife, and then butchered him.
Did the technician’s hand edge closer again?
Of course it did, the voice whispered urgently. They trussed the senator and his wife up, and then made him watch her bleed out. Oh, how they laughed as he begged for her life.
Alex’s hand bunched into a fist.
Two minutes later Alex bounded up to the control deck. Franks turned. “Captain on the bridge.” She grinned.
“What have we got?” Alex asked as he wiped bloody hands on a towel he had picked up.
“Two choppers inbound; one HAWC and one Coast Guard. The CG guys also have a containment team and will take control of the vessel once the bomb is removed. And then we both get to spend hours in decontamination and debrief.”
He nodded. “Perks of management.”
“I’m in management?” Casey’s grin dropped as she saw the ripped skin on Alex’s face and red-ragged hole in his shoulder.
“Trouble?”
“Nothing I couldn’t deal with.” He shrugged. “No survivors.”
She grunted. “They were dead the moment we boarded.”
Alex threw the towel into the corner and stared out at the horizon. “No, they were dead the moment they boarded.”
Captain Geoff Jackson and his containment team were dropped onto the Manhattan’s deck. He had been told to expect two waiting Special Forces operatives. One was a tall male, in bathing trunks, looking like he was carved from stone and with eyes that went through him like lasers. The other a stocky woman, he guessed, with a scarred face and more muscles than he had.
He saluted. “All threats neutralized?”
“Confirmed; the Manhattan is yours.” The tall man returned the salute, and then he and the woman turned to jog toward a black — and insignia-free — waiting helo.
Another larger, heavy duty H-53 US Marine Sea Stallion chopper hovered close by, waiting to lift off the disarmed nuclear package when Jackson’s team had secured it.
Jackson stood with hands on hips as the Special Forces chopper left. The guy never introduced himself, but he’d heard the stories. He heard that the operatives sent in were a group called the HAWCs and when they were called in, the only thing left to do was cart out the bodies.
But there was one HAWC who was near legendary, and it was the eyes that gave the guy away. They were said to be like twin windows to hell. And after standing before the man, he’d looked into them, and known it was true.
So that was him, the Arcadian. He’d heard about him, but like most didn’t even think he was real, instead some sort of made-up story about a soldier that couldn’t be killed to bolster support in the ranks.
The guy was a one-man weapon of mass destruction. Before joining the Coast Guard, Jackson had faced enemy fire over Afghanistan, and dropped into some real wild shit in his military days. But something behind Hunter’s eyes unsettled him. Maybe all the weird stories were true, he exhaled. Just glad he’s on our side. He turned to his team and circled a finger in the air.
Jackson followed his team as they lugged a huge lead-lined box down to the lower deck where Hunter said he had left the device. Their own disposal technician went through the galley doors first.
“Jesus Christ.” The man recoiled back out the door, now with an arm up over his lower face.
“What?” Jackson unclipped his sidearm and pushed past him. He froze in the doorway as waves of revulsion swept over him. The smell was the first thing — wood chips, cordite, blood and other body fluids. Then the visuals kicked in. Dead and broken bodies were everywhere — five, six, seven, he had no idea how many corpses at this point. Some were missing limbs, another lay back with eyes open and a knife protruding from his forehead, and in one case, a skull near squashed flat.
“What the fuck did this?” his technician whispered. He looked at Jackson, his eyes now haunted. “Did those two HAWCs do this?”
Jackson shook his head slowly. “Nope, I’m betting just one of them. These assholes just pissed off the wrong guy.” Jackson tried to only breathe through his mouth. “Forget about it. We need to secure the device and get the fuck out of here. The mess is someone else’s problem.” He turned. “Do your job, people.”
The technicians carefully entered the room followed by the box carriers.
“Little help here, boss.” The technician pointed.
Jackson swallowed down some bile, and crossed to the device. There was a body slumped over it, its hands lying on either side of the trigger, but with the top of its head caved in to nose level. It looked like someone had pounded down on it with a sledgehammer.
Jackson lifted a leg to kick the dead body back off the device. He thumbed toward the bomb. “Now hurry the fuck up.”
Jackson looked slowly around the room; a cordite fog still hung in the tight space, and rods of bright sunlight cut through it. There were bullet holes in the ceiling, floor and every single wall.
Just how the fuck do you stand in here and survive that? He shook his head. Easy; you send in a soldier they say couldn’t be killed.
CHAPTER 7
Viktor Dubkin stepped from the elevator on sub-basement 12. The underground levels below the Kremlin senate building continued on down another three floors, but below him there was nothing other than the interrogation rooms, and with them, the smell of blood, fear, and death. They made him feel physically ill. He had no problem with ordering death, and even torture. He just didn’t like to be close to it when it happened.
This floor, and the few above it, were far more interesting; they contained the research and development laboratories, and he was confident this one in particular was going to make a difference to Russia’s future on the field of combat. Though all the major countries were investing heavily in cyber warfare, pulse, magnetic and microwave weapons, Russia had learned significantly from the urban battlefields of Chechnya, and its lesson had been that asymmetrical warfare always demanded close-order contact — hand-to-hand, face-to-face, and where the biggest fist, boot, tooth and claw, won the day.
He hummed to himself. Dubkin knew that if his pet project was a success, then the rewards would be immense — glory, favors, and wealth. He nodded to the two lab-coated scientists, who buzzed around him like miniature satellites, deferring to his seniority, and also well aware he was one of the chief sponsors of their program. They showed him to one of the largest rooms and as they approached, the doors slid back. Entering, the three men found themselves behind a heavy glass partition looking into a hall-like space where six men trained with weapons, in hand-to-hand combat, and lifted weights with heavy gauge iron bars bending like bows.
Once again, Dubkin felt an odd sensation in his chest — he wasn’t sure if it was pride, awe or maybe a little revulsion. These men were the experimental ‘Kurgan’, the code name for the Russian combat troops of the future. The road to success had been long. Decades of grotesqueries were buried in unmarked graves, but eventually the breakthroughs came after they managed to extract information from a captured American scientist who had worked on the Arcadian program.