Patriots & Tyrants (15 page)

Three men rushed down the aisle with Berettas aimed relying on the machine guns of their mates for cover. Seeing them approach, Sands rolled underneath several pews popping up unexpectedly at the front and unleashing the Makarovs. The first man out took a 9mm slug in the mouth blinding the man behind him with sprayed blood. The third man in the group took a diagonal stripe across the chest and fell away as the second man struggled to clear his eyes. As the man clawed at himself trying to regain his sight, Sands shot him in the forehead and took cover behind the wooden podium, loud bursts of automatic gunfire sending splinters into the air.

"Grenade!" he heard someone yell as the gunfire stopped.

"Jesus mate! Not here! The room's too small!" he heard another man scream.

A metal pattering sounded over the flooring as a fragmentation grenade rolled within two feet of Sands. He pulled the hollow podium on top of himself just as a deafening explosion filled the air, the sound echoing off the rock walls.

Protected in the makeshift cocoon, Sands took a gamble that all of the men had taken cover from the blast. Throwing the podium off, he jumped to his feet and ran firing towards the back of the room. Three men fell bleeding from his surprise assault on the disoriented group. He dropped the empty Makarovs and drew his second set of push daggers.
Four left.

With blinding speed he spin kicked the nearest man, knocking him into the air and causing him to land in a heap. Another raised his rifle. Sands knocked it aside with a kick and landed the push daggers into his eyes, twisting before ripping the blades out again. Loosening his grip on the dagger in his right hand he turned and hurled it through the air into the forehead of the man rushing at him from behind, catching his body and holding it in front of him like a shield as the last man standing fired several rounds from a Beretta. Sands lowered his shoulder into the dead body and pushed it forwards like a battering ram hitting the man with the Beretta, knocking him to the floor. Pinning the Beretta to the ground, Sands drove the remaining push dagger into the man's throat. Retrieving his pistols, he reloaded, making his way to the front.

Brushing the curtain aside with his pistols, Sands entered a hallway that narrowed like a funnel to a single wooden door. He stayed as flat against the wall as he could since there was no cover. If someone decided to open fire from within the room he'd have nowhere to go. When he reached the door he gave it a firm kick just above the lock and it flew open, splintering. He'd expected luxury inside, but was surprised to find humble quarters. An unfinished wooden floor covered by a dusty area rug sat underneath a rickety coffee table, coloring books and crayons spread across it. His eyes followed his guns, sweeping the room clear. A twin sized bed was the only other furniture. Just as he thought he'd reached a dead end something caught his attention: a bare human foot protruding from underneath the bed.

"Come out," he ordered aiming his guns.

Slowly a young girl slid out from underneath the bed followed by one even younger, the oldest ten or eleven, the youngest maybe seven. The two were dirty from head to toe, their hair matted and clothes torn. Suddenly Sands understood the humble surroundings. This hadn't been The Prophet's quarters at all.

"Where'd they go?" Sands asked knowing that the senator and his goon must have come this way.

The oldest girl pointed to a tattered quilt on the wall depicting a serene country setting, the youngest girl hugged her waist tightly with a terrified expression. Pushing the quilt aside, Sands found a door slightly ajar, the dust on the floor disturbed as if it had recently been opened.

Sands considered the girls for a moment thinking of his two sisters in Northern Ireland, one of which had died in an orphanage nearly thirty years ago under similar circumstances. Snowden was dead; hopefully their ordeal was at an end. He banished the thought a moment later and checked off his emotions.

Blazing through the door, he found the entrance welded shut. To his right a staircase led down. He descended the two flights of steps in seconds. At the bottom, another door opened to an underground bunker, the halogen lights still glowing slightly from recent use. As he entered the room, an engine roared to life, a pair of headlights illuminated, and several gunshots erupted. He rolled back into the doorway as chunks of concrete were torn loose from the wall by the bullets.

"Let me finish him!" he heard Dunvegan yell.

"No!" the senator answered. "We have to get out!"

"The hell we do! I can take this prick!"

"No!"

A set of tires squealed as a vehicle moved over the smooth concrete. Sands reappeared in the doorway just as a Humvee truck sped past with Dunvegan driving. He jumped for the back of it, nearly missing but catching the bumper, releasing one of his Makarovs from his grip and hearing it clatter away. He pulled himself up into the back on his stomach.

"You drive!" he heard Dunvegan yell as he slid out of the driver's seat leaving the vehicle unpiloted. Taylor quickly slid over, accelerating as he took the wheel. Dunvegan stepped into the back.

Narrowly dodging a gigantic boot as the Australian stomped for his head, Sands stood. Both men struggled to keep their balance in the moving vehicle.

"I want to kill you with my bare hands!" Dunvegan yelled, tossing his Beretta to the floor.

"I just want to kill you." Sands answered, raising his Makarov. The truck bounced and Sands struggled to stay upright. Dunvegan threw a right hook and caught him on the face. Sands grabbed the roll bar to keep from being thrown out by the powerful strike, his Makarov falling to the floor.

The lighting around them vanished as the senator piloted the truck into a tunnel. Sparks flew as he steered back and forth against the walls trying to throw the men off. He clearly couldn't care less about Dunvegan as long as AU went with him. Flashes of light illuminated them as they passed under the tunnel's running lights.

The brute attacked with another stomp towards Sands' head. Being far smaller in girth, Sands ducked between his legs and drove the heel of his boot into the man's buttocks, causing him to fly forward, his face striking the concrete wall. He screamed in pain as the coarse wall ripped at his flesh. Pulling himself up he threw a back kick towards Sands who took the impact in the shoulder. The Aussie jumped onto Sands, getting his hands around his neck. Holding him back with a raised foot, Sands tried pushing him off, but he was too heavy. Sands knew that he couldn't wrestle the brute forever. The man was twice his size and sooner or later he'd win by sheer strength. Sweeping his arms over the floor of the Humvee, he tried to find one of the fallen pistols. Dunvegan continued to press down on him, choking him, blood from the Aussie's savaged face dripped onto him.

A gunshot echoed. The senator had found Dunvegan's Beretta and fired it over his right shoulder, the bullet passing between them. Using the distraction, Sands pushed his foot against Dunvegan's chest, freeing his other leg and bringing it up to knee the man in the groin. As the pain registered, he grabbed the Aussie's right eye, which had been nearly torn out of its socket by the wall. Dunvegan growled in pain. Sands kicked his face as he brought his leg up over Dunvegan's chest. With a powerful thrust from both legs, the last Torrance Sands saw of Dunvegan was an arm that tried desperately to grab ahold of the Humvee as he dropped over the side and fell away into the darkness.

Taylor looked back and began slamming the Humvee as hard as he could into the walls, sparks flying. Lifting himself into a sitting position Sands looked ahead to see that the tunnel was ending, the slightest crack of sunrise visible through the opening. Taylor turned with the Beretta and fired several shots, almost losing control of the vehicle. Sands dove behind the driver's seat and grabbed the senator's wrist, breaking his arm with a punch to his elbow. The Beretta fell to the floor as the old man screamed. Sands picked up the weapon and hopped into the passenger seat. Per the terms of his contract, the senator was his new target. Nobody got away with stiffing AU. He raised the Beretta just as the Humvee tore out of the tunnel and into the arid morning. The politician's eyes went wide as he looked down the barrel.

"Is this close enough for you?" Sands yelled as he pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the old man between the eyes and his head flew backwards, his body going limp. Sands grabbed the steering wheel and pushed him out feeling a bump as the body was run over by the back wheels. Sliding into the driver's seat he brought the Humvee to a skidding stop. He stood and looked back. The compound was easily a mile back and nobody was pursuing him. He eased himself down as the first reaches of sunlight touched the hood. Looking forward to the news reports and the wild speculation that would accompany the senator's death, he drove away. Brief entertainment would be his only compensation for this job.

Machine gun fire rattled in the distance as Igor Dratshev paced across the dust covered concrete floor to thirteen men standing half-heartedly at attention, their morose faces wearing the pain of the last sixty-two hours like muted death masks. Even to Spetsnaz, the toughest of the tough, men forced to endure the most rigorous and unforgiving combat training in the world, the intolerable evil that began with a GAZ 66 troop carrier skidding to a stop outside of a middle school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan would remain lodged in their minds like searing shrapnel, shifting painfully each time they slept.

With his eyes coming to a rest on his deputy commander, Konstantin Rhyzkov, Dratshev knew that he too, battle hardened commander of the Alpha Group counter-terrorism squadron, would never forget the sight of a seemingly innumerable band of terrorists firing hail Mary at the soldiers who charged selflessly towards the besieged school in an effort to draw fire away from the innocent children, parents and teachers being slaughtered by the vile gang of Chechen murderers.

Pacing slowly in front of the remnants of his unit, Dratshev could see the defeat at the corner of their eyes threatening to overtake them. They had all been on their feet for the better part of the last three days, waiting breathlessly for word that the negotiations had succeeded and that the nightmare would soon end. "You have not failed," he said sharply, his voice cracking with emotion. A single tear slid down the cheek of the youngest member of their unit cutting through the dirt and grime still affixed to his face, a man named Alexei, barely past his twentieth birthday.

"The events that began at one o'clock yesterday afternoon were not your doing; those events were set in motion by the terrorists holding those people. It was their attack. It was their murders. It was their damnation! Not yours. You are heroes!"

"Yes sir," the soldiers barked back at their commander, each doing his best to stand a little straighter.

"Now we have work to do. There are killers who fled the building during the fight and some are believed to have survived. They are here and they are hiding like the cowardly rats they are. Somewhere out there among this ravaged village are the men who took the lives of our brothers, the lives of Anton, Andrei, Vasily and Pyotr along with countless innocent children. We will not stop hunting until we have overturned every rock low enough to shield such scum!"

"Yes sir," the soldiers barked again shouldering their AK-74 assault rifles, chosen three days before over their larger and more powerful AK-47s in order to limit the penetration of bullets through the walls of the school.

Turning from his men to the battered front door of the abandoned bottling plant they had tried to catch a few hours of rest in, Dratshev knew he was asking a lot of his men. Most had fought late into the night, the distraction of war favorable to the images that would invade their minds if left to idle thoughts. Pulling the heavy, steel door open, Dratshev shielded his eyes as the rays of the rising sun pierced the gloom of the 1940's era factory. In a single file line, the soldiers led by Dratshev and Rhyzkov moved out into the morning. In the distance north of them teams of lab coated medics moved about attempting to identify bodies, white smoke rising into the crisp Caucasian air from the ruins of the school like souls freed from the threshold of hell.

Pulling the plastic zipper down and taking a seat on a straw bail in the barn he'd sought refuge in for the night, Ruslan Baktayev removed the jacket portion of the navy blue tracksuit he'd changed hurriedly into as the soldiers had invaded. Like several of his brothers-in-arms, he'd chosen to flee the scene instead of standing to fight. After all, returning home had been the plan all along. Unlike the Mujahedeen they'd brought with them over the border of Ingushetia, he and his men had no intention of becoming martyrs. They would return home to celebrate their victory over the Christians. While he was willing to die for the freedom of Ichkeria and martyrdom would insure his place in paradise, his time had not yet come. He had no intention of dying on the foreign soil of the hated Slavic pigs his people had been forced to share their homeland with. He had other plans. Two days before leading the assault on Beslan's Middle School No. 1, he'd dispatched a twenty-four man team in two waves of twelve to the United States. With the aid of a sophisticated network of Al-Qaeda terror cells, North African slave traders, and Mexican drug cartels, the team would arrive in America within a few weeks where they would await his arrival. Together they would stamp their names permanently on the foreheads of those who occupied Muslim lands where it would live forever as a testament to the vengeance of Allah and of his warriors, the Nokhchii.