Havoc - v4 (29 page)

“Crash positions,” Sasha screamed.

Most of the passengers were too paralyzed to move. A few of the soldiers wrapped their arms around their knees and ducked their heads. Just before they hit, Mercer saw Cali do the same and smiled. She’d doubled her chances of survival by protecting the fragile bones of her neck from the shearing forces of a crash. Mercer snaked his arm into Sapozhnik’s safety belt and held on as the blades ripped into the gravelly soil above the rail spur, not far from the mine’s entrance. The tips threw up a cloud of dust before they disintegrated. The pilot managed to torque the chopper ever so slightly so she came down not on her side but at a slight angle.

The damaged landing gear collapsed as it took the helo’s weight, and the blades gouged deeper into the soil until they blew apart, thrown like javelins across the mine site. The MI-8 slowly rolled onto its side, burying one of the air intakes for her Klimov engines in the ground. It sucked up rock and dust and debris, choking off the turbo shaft. The engine bellowed for a moment, then fell silent. The second engine cut off almost immediately but smoke continued to thicken in the hold.

For the moment Mercer couldn’t hear automatic weapons ripping into the chopper’s thin skin, and even if Poli still had them in his sights the chance of aviation fuel catching fire was too great to use the helo as a redoubt.

Mercer stood shakily. Bodies lay strewn across the cabin and for a panicked moment he thought he was the only survivor, but he soon saw slow movement. He looked to Cali. With the helicopter on its side, she was on her back, still strapped to her seat. She was pale and there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth where she’d been struck by the soldier next to her, but her defiant expression told him she was all right. Mercer was on Professor Sapozhnik’s lap. He looked at the man’s face. His mouth was slack, his eyes open and sightless. His neck was clearly broken. The scientist next to him was also dead. A boulder had punched through the MI-8’s side when it rolled over, and crushed the back of his skull. His head lay in a thickening pool of dark blood.

Mercer looked up to where Sasha Federov dangled from his safety straps. He was alive and working to release the belt’s catches. Trusting that the Russian officer would open the cargo door, Mercer moved closer to Cali. “Are you okay?” he asked, using his finger to gently wipe the blood from her full lips.

“They’re going to be even puffier after this.” She coughed. The smoke was as dense as Tiny’s on a Saturday night.

“I’ll think only pure thoughts.” He unsnapped her belt and helped her to her feet.

The uninjured soldier was already checking on his comrades. He was wasting precious seconds on a man who was clearly dead.
“Nyet,”
Mercer shouted at him. When the soldier looked up, his young face was a mask of uncomprehending fear. He’d never been in combat. Mercer pointed at the cache of weapons and made a grabbing gesture. The boy had been conditioned by the army and seemed thankful to be given an order even if it came from an American civilian. He crawled over the corpses of his friends to retrieve several AK-74s and one of the RPG rocket launchers. He handed them across to Mercer just as Sasha slammed the door back on its roller stops. The acrid smoke boiled out the opening like a volcano, but the sudden influx of fresh air also caused the small fire smoldering at the rear of the helicopter to flare up.

“Come on,” Sasha shouted in Russian. He grabbed Cali’s hand and helped her crawl up the hold. When she reached the door he said, “Jump as soon as you’re outside and run fifty meters straight ahead. The mine is behind us, so they won’t see you.” He handed her his AK-74. “Round is chambered. Is okay?”

Cali nodded. “I’m familiar enough.”

Sasha helped her climb out the open door and she immediately disappeared from view. Next came the two uninjured scientists, a man and a woman. The man was frightened and shaking so badly he was ready to topple over. The woman, with her thick body and Slavic features, looked as imperturbable as a babushka. Sasha repeated his order and was about to give an automatic pistol to the man when he thought better of it and handed it to the woman instead.

He had to struggle to push her ample backside out the door.

Mercer checked the rest of the passengers. The pilot had already escaped through the shattered windshield. The copilot was dead. The only other survivor was a pretty girl from Sapozhnik’s staff with a broken collarbone. She screamed when Mercer probed it gently with his fingers. She said something in keening Russian.
“Stolichnaya,”
Mercer said. “Ah,
mir
.” Having exhausted his Russian, he unstrapped the girl and got her to her feet. She cradled her arm against her chest. The soldier was coming forward carrying a bundle of weapons and haversacks of ammunition over his shoulders.

Sasha gave his orders to the soldier and together they tossed most of the weapons out through the door and onto the ground. Then the soldier scrambled up and out of the helicopter. Mercer shot Federov a scathing glare, thinking the girl should have been the next one out.

“I need him to catch her and cover for her. I also heard automatic fire.”

They used one of the AK-74 assault rifles as a step and boosted her up. She paused on top of the chopper, fearfully looking down at the young soldier outside.

“Go,” Sasha hissed and reached out to shove her.

A sustained burst of autofire slammed into the underside of the helicopter, opening dozens of sizzling holes in the aluminum skin and sending ricochets whizzing through the hold whenever a round struck something solid. There was no mistaking the sound of several of the bullets punching through human flesh. Either the girl or the soldier or possibly both were dead. Cali had found cover behind a hillock some fifty yards from the downed bird. From there she quickly silenced the gunfire with a pair of three-round bursts.

Knowing that jumping out the hatch was suicide, Sasha and Mercer scrambled for the cockpit, and as the echoes of the exchange faded, Cali screamed, “RPG!”

They dove headfirst through the remains of the windshield and hit the ground running. The rocket veered slightly at the last second and hit the tail rotor. The explosion blew the boom from the body of the chopper while the concussion knocked Mercer and Federov off their feet and into a drainage ditch. A moment later the remaining fuel went up in a boiling cloud of orange flame and black smoke that lit the stark landscape like the hellish glow of a blast furnace.

“Who’s out there?” Sasha Federov panted as he checked over his AK-74.

Mercer inspected his own weapon and said, “A mercenary named Poli Feines. I don’t know what you’ve been told but the plutonium we’re here to secure is naturally occurring. It was mined in Africa back in the late 1940s. Feines was in the village where Cali and I found the old mining operation, again in New Jersey while we were tracking a clue about an American who first discovered the lode. Two days ago one of his men and a bunch of Arab terrorists attacked us in Niagara Falls, New York.”

“How is it he’s here?”

“Million dollar question,” Mercer said. He made sure the Yarygin nine-millimeter pistol he’d shoved behind his back was secure. “I suspect there’s a leak within the organizations I’ve been dealing with.” It was the first time he’d given voice to the nagging thought that had been with him almost since the beginning. If true, the ramifications of it were chilling because the only people who knew the truth were himself, Cali, Ira Lasko, and Harry. He trusted Harry and Ira with his life and Cali had been shot at enough times to disqualify her as a traitor, so the theory didn’t make sense. But there were no alternatives, either.

He poked his head above the rim of the drainage ditch. He spotted Cali behind a mound of boulders. The two scientists were with her, and the young soldier had found cover behind a pile of mine tailings. The body of the pretty female scientist had been immolated when the helicopter exploded.

The building that housed the headgear machinery was four stories tall and covered in corrugated metal. The seams were streaked in rust, creating a patchwork effect. Around it were several smaller buildings, offices, and workshops. Also littering the mine were piles of machinery—old ore cars with broken wheel bogies, small electric shunting locomotives, pumps, and hundreds of other items. Most of the old machinery had rusted together over the past decades and thorny weeds grew around everything. But there were two trucks backed to the gaping mine entrance. They were UAZ-5151s, rugged little four-wheel drives that resembled jeeps. Poli was here to steal the plutonium and transport the ore from the mine down to the train with the off-roaders.

Mercer spotted a dozen men around the trucks, more than half of them armed. As he watched, a forklift emerged from the mine, a single barrel lashed to a pallet it carried. Its driver wore a gas mask and protective suit. At least the Soviets had taken a few precautions, Mercer noted. The barrel was massive and obviously well shielded, and when the forklift lowered it into the bed of the truck, the suspension sagged under the load. He looked at the other vehicle. Its tires were still fully inflated which meant it hadn’t been loaded yet. This explained the train, however. The trucks couldn’t handle the crumbling Russian roads carrying such weight.

The guards didn’t seem intent on hunting down Mercer’s party. They just wanted to keep loading their trucks so they could leave. Mercer turned to Sasha.

“Do you have a radio or satellite phone?”

The Russian shook his head. “Radio was on the helicopter and I’ve never even seen a satellite telephone.”

“This just gets better and better.” Mercer plucked a sleek cell phone from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. There wasn’t a cell tower for a hundred miles but he tried anyway. When he didn’t get a signal, he slid it back into his coat. “It’s up to us.”

“You seem like you can handle yourself,” Sasha said. “Cali, too, but that leaves us just four against eight or more.”

“Five. That other woman looks capable.” Mercer’s eyes went hard. “But it doesn’t matter. We don’t have an option. We can’t call for help, and once they get those trucks on the train we’ll never be able to stop them. They’ll be beyond Russia’s borders by the time anyone comes to check on us.”

Sasha nodded grimly. “All right.”

Mercer turned back to study the terrain and come up with a plan. A frontal assault was out of the question. Poli’s force was too large. They could circle around the building, but there was a lot of open ground to cover, and if Poli was smart, which Mercer knew he was, he’d have sent a couple of guards to cover his flanks as soon as he saw people escape the chopper crash. The best way would be to circle even wider, climb up the hill rising above the mountain, and attack from above. It would take time but Mercer saw no other way. He turned to run his plan by Sasha but the Russian was gone.

He looked down the length of the drainage ditch. Federov was crawling away, and for a fleeting second Mercer wanted to put a bullet in his back. Then he realized that Sasha was getting into a better position to attack from the opposite flank, behind a row of abandoned ore cars. From there he could find cover behind the steel pylons that supported the ore chute.

Sasha would still need cover to get into position. Mercer inched his way out of the ditch, crawling across the cold ground. The forklift disappeared into the mine once again as a man emerged. One of the others used a hose attached to one of the trucks to douse his suit with water before he took off his gas mask. Even at two hundred yards Mercer recognized the bald head and eye patch.

Uncontrollable rage made him bring the AK to his shoulder, not caring that the counterfire would catch him exposed. He wanted the son of a bitch dead. He centered Poli’s broad chest in the weapon’s iron sites and eased the trigger. The instant he fired, Mercer rolled to his left several times and lurched to his feet, racing toward where the young Russian soldier had found cover as Poli’s men chewed up the ground at his feet with a steady barrage. He reached the pile of crushed rock and ducked his head around the slope. Mercer cursed.

Poli was directing his men and there wasn’t a scratch on him. Mercer was a fair shot with a rifle but he was unfamiliar with the AK and hadn’t compensated for the wind’s effect on the light 5.54-millimeter bullet.

Mercer glanced back and saw that Sasha had reached the first row of small mine cars and settled his rifle on the side of one. He fired, picking targets who were covered from Mercer’s position but exposed to his. He dropped two of them before half the force swung their aim and raked the ore car. He ducked behind it as rounds ricocheted off the thick metal. Mercer and the young soldier named Ivan opened up, hosing the trucks with little regard to how much ammo they were using up. Ivan had managed to keep his rucksacks of magazines as well as the RPG-7.

Poli’s men sought cover behind their trucks as Cali and the heavy-set Russian woman, Ludmilla, added their guns to the attack. Three of the terrorists were down, two dead, and one had half his jaw shot away. Using all the cover fire, Federov ran from behind the train car, eating ground to reach one of the ore chute’s support pylons.

The forklift emerged from the mine once again. Judging by how the truck had settled, Mercer believed this was the last barrel Poli would load on it. He thought about using the rocket grenade but he only had the one, so he could only take out one truck, not both, and he had no idea how many barrels had already been loaded onto the train.

Poli’s men had no such shortage. A pair of RPGs streaked from behind one of the trucks and exploded on the far side of the gravel pile where Mercer and Ivan crouched. The fifty-foot-high mound of mine waste absorbed the twin explosions as though they were nothing, but a moment later the top of the pile shifted and a hissing avalanche barreled down the slope. It came down so fast that Mercer didn’t have time to shout a warning as he jumped out of the way. Ivan looked up and screamed as a towering wall of fist-sized rocks pounded into him. The sheer weight of rock crushed him flat and the rough edges tore away his clothes and flayed great sheets of skin from his body. He was dead before he was fully buried, but that didn’t stop Mercer from trying to reach him as more rock shifted and slid down the hill. Mercer recklessly waded into the avalanche, getting buried up to his knees in seconds and up to his thighs in just moments more. But there was nothing he could do. The barrel of the RPG launcher poking up from the ground was all that marked the young Russian’s grave.