Jaunt (15 page)

“Go to hell!”

“If I could do that, do you think I’d be in this mosquito-infested swamp right now?”

Gilmour cranked the boy’s arm up further, eliciting a whimper. “All I came here to do was save us.” He looked to the man across from him, his three sergeant’s chevrons glowing in the gunfire. “That goes for you, too.”

Additional gunfire illuminated Gilmour’s face as he heard the rampaging engines circling about his comrades.

“Your friends will die if they resist,” the sergeant said, his breath visible in the chilled air.

Gilmour snapped open the young soldier’s holster and withdrew his sidearm, placing it inside his own parka. The agent then scanned for the sergeant’s holster, but saw it had already been emptied. He pushed his own sidearm into the man’s face. “Your weapon. Give me your sidearm.”

“I can’t...I lost it when we crashed...it’s over there.” His head swung back, nodding to the opposite edge of the heap.

Gilmour pursed his lips. Reaching within a side pocket of his trouserleg, he produced a length of cord. Relinquishing his grip on the young soldier’s left arm, Gilmour tied one end of the cord around the boy’s wrist, then joined it with another tie around the other wrist, effectively immobilizing him.

Fidgeting and cursing at the agent now that he had been bound, the young Russian was shoved to the taiga by a high kick to his back from Gilmour, letting the boy fall on his chest.

“Those are very adult words you’re using,” Gilmour warned. He ripped off the boy soldier’s glove, scrunched it into a ball, and fed it to the cesspool of a mouth.

Despite the violent action taken against one of his men, the sergeant continued to nurse his wound, a black stain leaking from a horrendous tear. “What about me?” he asked, his brow heavy with perspiration, even in the cold.

Gilmour discerned an island of exposed bone in the blood. “You probably have a compound fracture. I’m surprised you haven’t fainted yet. But I’m not going to do anything.”

With a mighty groan, the sergeant’s knees imploded, surrendering him to the ground. Clutching the shred of flesh and bone, the sergeant’s eyes followed Gilmour as the agent walked behind the wounded vehicle and found the missing pistol. Before long, the sergeant and his subordinate had been abandoned to the freezing Keremesit bank, while their singular, and now former, prey rejoined his comrades under continued fire.

Permafrost soil vaporized behind Mason as he stayed a pace ahead of the gunfire tracking him. Diving into a growth of low, nearly bare spruces, he caught his breath, and then his bearings before more shots pecked at the flora above him. His holobook provided the position of the chase vehicle and its riders, allowing him an opportunity to know their exact distance to return fire. Stowing the black device, Mason sat on his haunches, careful not to lose his head.

The ATV’s engine clicked off, and a momentary lapse in gunfire afforded him time for his pistol barrel to clear a small tunnel through the spruces’ taut branches. Blue laser light streamed from the barrel’s circumscribed sight, finding a pair of dark, amorphous shapes advancing to Mason’s two o’clock. With two quick bursts from within the spruce, the men were felled, never seeing the scattered blue dots on their helmets.

Leaping over the spruces, Mason ran to the parked vehicle and commandeered it. Fumbling through the Cyrillic stamped on the vehicle’s rusted controls, he managed to get the engine started, although it coughed and grumbled. Choking out exhaust, the vehicle lumbered past the fallen soldiers and headed for the remaining Russian team.

Pumping the throttle, he raced forward, jumping over cracked boulders and other deposited debris from the Keremesit’s past. Ahead, he could see two other ATVs circling around Louris’ last known location. Craning his head back, Mason looked for the other two vehicles, but found none, at least none with lamps shining into the night.

Mason heard the chink of gunfire from the attacking vehicles, but just minutely over the rumble of his ATV’s engine. Twisting the steering column to the right, he rounded an accumulation of prostrate birch trees to gain a straight avenue to the pair of machines. Mason fed the engine more fuel, increasing his speed despite fighting the steering column to maintain his dominance of the vehicle, which threatened to buck him. The two enemy vehicles, tightening their circle around Louris, were now just meters away. Clamping his left arm onto the steering bar, Mason’s other hand retrieved his sidearm and sighted the first approaching ATV. He fired three times before his hand was forced back to the steering bar, which had caused his vehicle to drift leftward sans a steadying pair of hands.

The rear chase vehicle, rounding the circle, narrowly missed Mason head-on as he struggled to retain command. Clouds of dirt rose in his eyes when his ATV’s front tires carved into the loosened silt and rock soil, fishtailing hard. The motor gagged hard, then died, sputtering Mason forward with inertia until the tires locked up. His left hand fingered the starter several times while he pumped the throttle repeatedly, but without success.

Mason cursed at the hobbled vehicle before jumping out of the fractured vinyl seat. Potshots meant for him whined through the air, puncturing the ATV’s front tires and what remained of a quarter panel. The agent ducked and fell to his haunches, allowing the stationary vehicle to block the gunfire, for now. A hiss, followed by a soft whoosh, sounded in his ears as the left front tire lost pressure, eliminating the ATV as a means of escape.

Looking ahead, he estimated Louris, Constantine and McKean were at least ten meters away, a solid ten-second run to their positions. Of course, he wasn’t going anywhere while those Ruskies were aerating his shield. His holobook projected an image of the other three—minus Gilmour, whom he had lost a while back—spread along a semi-circle over a distance of fifteen meters. Constantine was the nearest, followed by McKean and Louris. Their vital signs looked good, not tremendous, but alive. Small blue isobars at the end of their arms signaled that the agents were returning gunfire, meaning they hadn’t been incapacitated.

Mason peered over the curved body of the vehicle during a slight pause in weapons fire, just long enough to glimpse the enemy machines heading away from him and back to the three holed-up agents. Spotting his chance, Mason’s pistol sight located the spine of the armed, rear soldier in the backup ATV. A dark splatter erupted from his overcoat, sending the soldier cascading from the edge of the vehicle.

Mason launched himself, timing the distance in his head. At three seconds to go, the front ATV bisected the region harboring Constantine and McKean from Louris, turning back around to the running Mason. One second from the frozen river bank, Mason prompted himself to dive, throwing his arms towards the ground, leaving his feet to propel him. He heard the gunfire buzz pass him as the pain of peculiarly sharpened stones in his left flank broke his fall. His legs and arms flopped about while he rolled over himself fourfold, stirring up a heap of pebbles and soil.

Spitting out a glob of saliva and dust, Mason clutched his sidearm, slowly realizing the ache of the fall was not ebbing. He groaned; it was increasing.

“Sonuvabitch!”

A gnawing burning deafening screaming shock then bit his torso, crawling and acidizing his organs, the angriest and most terrorizing sensation his nerves had ever given him.

“Get up, fucking yankee!”

Swirling greens and reds mingled with the pitch in Mason’s eyes, the excruciating tendrils choking his mind into dumbness. Another boot to his abdomen later, and he was too deep into his anguish to hear the round silence his tormentor.

“Oh, Jesus...Greg! Greg, can you hear me?”

Gilmour crouched down to the balled-up Mason, by now face first in the soil, spattered blood caked into his nostrils and beard. Gingerly, Gilmour rolled his partner belly up, his hands roaming Mason’s body for possible wounds. His fingers caught on two sticky, black holes in Mason’s flank. Entrance holes, leading straight to Mason’s cardiac system, possibly perforating his heart.

“Greg, it’s me, James. Can you understand me?!”

His twisted countenance, streaming with porphyric tears, froze as his body succumbed to shock. The poor man’s skin already looked cadaverous.

Gilmour found Mason’s holobook and programmed it to run a medical scan of his partner’s body. The holograph revealed a pair of clean piercings in Mason’s pericardial tissue, with no remnants of the rounds to be discovered. Gilmour deepened the scan, and located two exit wounds in Mason’s left shoulder; the rounds had burned straight through his body. He probably didn’t even know he had been hit.

Mason’s heartrate became arrhythmic, the damaged muscle flailing all over its chamber, pouring its vital fluid into his lungs, unaware of the damage it had sustained. His lungs had filled with blood fast—drowning him in his own chest—a wound exacerbated by the impacts done to him by the formerly living soldier behind them.

Gilmour’s hands scooped up the clotting blood bubbling out of Mason’s throat and mouth, fruitlessly trying to clear an air passage to his foundering alveoli. Periodic gurgling gave Gilmour a fading sense of hope that he could save his fallen friend, despite the fanatic beeping of the holobook’s cardiac sensor.

“Oh, Greg...I’m sorry God I’m sorry I....”

Next to him, the cardiac failure alarm sounded, contrasting the degenerating cardiac sensor. A second later, his heartrate monitor flattened, leaving nothing but a monotone from the holobook’s audio alarm.

His stained hands pulled away from Mason’s gaping jaws, allowing his partner’s limp cranium to rest easy against the wet soil. With the back of his left parka sleeve, Gilmour wiped the remains of perspiration from his forehead and collapsed onto his haunches, small breaths only escaping his mouth.

“Gilmour, we’ve got to get the hell out of here! Gilmour! Do you hear me?!”

Constantine grabbed two handfuls of Gilmour’s backpack and pulled him off the permafrost. Yanking the agent’s face to his, Constantine looked deeply into Gilmour’s eyes.

“Goddammit, Gilmour, we’ve got to get rolling! The Russians are sure to find a mess of things in the morning. Do you have Mason’s equipment?”

Gilmour’s dreamy gaze found his partner’s corpus before he nodded. He looked down at the lockbox in his hands. Equipment; Mason’s pack, check. Mason’s dead body, left for the mosquitoes and foxes. Fuck.

“I’m sorry, man. You did the best you could. We couldn’t save Chief anymore than you could save Mason.” Constantine put his arm around Gilmour’s shoulder and hurried him away. Ahead, McKean readied the two ATVs captured by the agents; one by Constantine and McKean, and the other by Louris, with which he was leaving behind his body and soul as payment.

Driving out of the Keremesit valley and into the Indigirka’s many frozen basins, the three agents made the last leg of their journey in the span of three days, more than quadrupling their leg speed. Stopping only to rest and refuel themselves in the limited daylight, the three men damned de Lis’ mandate of inconspicuousness.

Beyond the mist and fog of the waste sea, a dark tower rose from the horizon, solidifying as the twin ATVs tracked across the snowpack, roaring away from the haunted taiga. The conning tower shone a blue laser light towards them, signaling to the trio of agents that the
Hesperus
had arrived to take them home.

Once the agents crossed over the shallowest section of the shelf, they cut a twometer hole in the ice, then scuttled the pair of ATVs into the depths of the East Siberian Sea. Walking into the relative comforts of the submarine’s vertical shaft, the men held tight to the retrieved cargo, completing their assigned duty. Burying their dead comrades, however, and committing them forever to the ultimate tomb of memory was the one duty they could not yet do.

“Two Americans are dead, sir, the rest fled. We are presuming a ship, perhaps a subma—”

“Presumptions are not what we require,” Lieutenant Vasily Nicolenko snapped. “Facts, get me facts. If there was an American vessel in our sovereign waters, I need to know the specifics: deuterium decay, infrared detection, hell, even visual confirmation from one of the local fishermen.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant trotted off to meet up with his men, who had busied themselves with the scanning of the permafrost soil.

In the grey morning hours, he could see the numerous tread tracks and half-formed footprints where the valiant effort to neutralize the invading Americans had taken place. Walking up an incline onto the banks of the Keremesit River, the pair of black bags containing the American corpses fluttered in the bitter wind to his left, disappointing him greatly. The orders from down high had been to shoot to kill if necessary, but capture the interlopers alive, more importantly. Judging by the wounds Nicolenko had seen on these bodies upon arrival this morning, the two Americans had been needlessly silenced, leaving him the unenviable task of reporting the failure to St. Petersburg.

Of a lesser concern were the three dead of the detachment of Muscovite regimental soldiers, who had been assigned the task of interceding here. For all Nicolenko cared, they deserved what they got; his orders were to clean up the mess left by the botched assignment. Fortunately for their wretched hides, his captain had ordered the Muscovites back home, before Nicolenko could have them gunned down and thrown into the Keremesit.

Walking away from the mess, he lit a cigarette and damned the cold. The sergeant’s men were several hours from gleaning any forensic evidence from the site; if the Americans were clever, they would have removed any clues from the taiga. Nicolenko still couldn’t imagine what drove their military here; didn’t they have their own diamond and oil fields to exploit? Surely the Premier had sent the Muscovites here for something far more essential to the security of the Confederation than black gold?