Swords of Exodus [Dead Six 02] (47 page)

We caught up to the others a moment later. They had stopped for some reason, and were clustered together under a rock overhang. “What’s going on?” Antoine demanded. “We must continue.”

Roland looked up at us as he rubbed his eyes. “Kim . . .”

Antoine nodded once. “Let us say a few words over him. Then booby trap his body. Leave him on the trail.” The tall African studied our surroundings for a moment. “There. If we’re lucky, it will cause a rockslide and take a few of the hounds with it.”

Now there were only seven of us.

Every step was agony. My legs burned and cramped. It would have been a difficult trek even under normal circumstances, but I had Svetlana riding piggyback with her arms encircled around my neck and her legs dragging behind. She was actually taller than me.

“The map said that this canyon was sixteen kilometers long,” Svetlana said, “I did not realize that meant an average of thirty up and fourteen down.” Her English was good, but her accent was thick.

“It only feels that long because of the painkillers,” I responded. “We’re on a beautiful mountain walk is all.”

We stumbled on for a few more minutes in silence. The snow crunched under my boots. The other surviving members of Exodus were just darker shadows around us.

“So, Lorenzo . . .”

“Yeah?”

“You have a girlfriend, no?”

“Actually,” I replied as I struggled over a fallen tree. “I’m in a serious relationship.”

“Too bad. You have a nice butt.”

“Now I know you’re high.”

The beautiful Russian laughed weakly. She was not faring well. “If you left me behind, the rest of you could make better time.”

“Shut up,” I grunted.

At least we were walking generally downhill now, not that that was any easier, as the ground was uneven and I kept tripping and sliding. There was probably another mile of downgrade, but then we faced a difficult uphill battle over the highest point of the pass.

“They’re gaining on us,” Roland gasped as he sprinted up from behind.

“How far?” Antoine asked.

“They’ve got an advance party, maybe twenty men. They’re about eight hundred yards behind us. The main group was still around the river bend. I don’t know how far. I set our last claymore.”

That was grim news. An hour ago they had been twice that distance behind us.

“Antoine. Let me slow them down,” I suggested. “If we’re going to do it, we might as well do it now. We haven’t seen any of them equipped with night vision.”

“You would be overwhelmed. No. We should stick together.”

“You forget something. I don’t take orders from you. Sorry, Svetlana,” I told her as I stopped and tried to lower her to the ground as gently as possible. She whimpered in pain as her damaged legs touched down. “Antoine, I’m going back there to kill a few of these guys. That’ll slow the others down. I’m a way better murderer than pack mule.”

Antoine knew better than to try to argue with me. “Very well.” Shen raised his hand. Antoine shook his head in resignation. “You too?”

Shen shrugged.

Roland and Phillips started to speak, but I cut them off. “Wrong. Somebody has to be on point, and Antoine isn’t going to carry two people by himself.”

“Leave me,” Svetlana said from the ground. “I’m endangering the rest of you.”

“No,” Shen said with grave finality. “We will hurt them, then return.”

“But—” Svetlana began.

“No. I was there when your brother died on the side of a mountain, and I’ll be damned if the same thing happens to you. Phillips, pick her up. Good luck, my brothers. Hurry back.” Antoine said as he adjusted the still unconscious form of Fajkus on his back and lumbered on.

I was unbelievably exhausted as I slid in behind the patch of rocks. Shen and I had scrambled up one of the almost-vertical rock faces, tearing our clothing and our skin on the jagged bits, to get above the approaching soldiers. Once we were at the top, I went to one side, Shen to the other. We would try to hit as many of them as possible before retreating. With any luck, the expectation of further ambushes would slow them down from here on.

There we perched, the advance party of slave soldiers now only about a hundred meters and closing. These men were moving quickly. If I had sneezed loud, they probably would have heard it. I tried to take a drink from the Camelbak I’d taken from the crashed helicopter, but the liquid had long since frozen into a block of solid ice. Add dehydration to my list of complaints.

The thief in me told me what I should have been doing. I should have told Exodus to fuck off, and I should have left them. I didn’t owe them anything. On my own, I could have already made it to the other side of the canyon or, worst case scenario, I could have hid, and then escaped during the confusion of the soldiers slaughtering the remaining survivors.

Be good, Hector. That’s all that I ask . . .

For some reason I kept hearing the voice of Gideon Lorenzo in my head. What I was doing here was suicidal. It was asinine. If I was the man that I had been even a few years ago, I would have ditched Exodus hours ago.

But I wasn’t.

I studied the terrain. We were in a good position. We could probably get most of the advance party into the open before we opened fire. The soldiers were moving in the trees, but they had to cross a pretty good-size field of snow with very little cover to get to us. Hopefully we could catch a bunch of them in the open.

Shen signaled me and started passing hand signals. Both of us were wearing night vision. I was wearing Fajkus’ pair since he was still unconscious. Shen and I were on the same page: wait until the last possible second and then nail as many of them in the open as possible. I signaled that I would start close and work my way to the rear, he would start at the rear and work his way forward.

The soldiers moved into the kill zone. They were in pairs, and keeping a bit of distance between each pair. Doing the math, the best we could hope for would be to get ten of them in the open at once, and that was pushing it. The others would still be in a copse of trees, and they would probably take cover and start shooting back. Hopefully, without night vision, we would be able to retreat without getting hit.

I had been able to scrounge up one more 5.56 magazine from the crashed chopper, so I had one full thirty-rounder and one other that I estimated was mostly full. By my calculation, I had already fired about two hundred rounds through my ACR since the fighting had started in the compound.

The soldiers were getting closer, spaced pretty far apart, our earlier claymores having taught them a lesson. I signaled to Shen.
It’s time.

It’s difficult to be accurate at anything more than short range with a red dot sight through night vision. My ACR had an IR laser invisible to the naked eye, but through my monocular, it was a brilliant beam. I put it on the closest soldier and he was totally oblivious. I flipped the selector to semi and pulled the trigger. The round spat from the muzzle with a muted hiss, a small spark of light the only visible indication I had fired. There was a high pitched sound as the tiny projectile traveled at a rate greater than the speed of sound before the bullet struck the soldier in the top of his chest. He stopped dead in his tracks, then fell flat on his back.

Shen opened up at the furthest visible pair while I quickly shifted my gun to the second soldier and popped him once. Normally I liked to shoot everybody a bunch of times, but I didn’t really have a whole lot of ammo left at this point. Besides, if we were lucky, maybe the main body would slow down to tend to their wounded.
Doubtful, but what the hell. Worth a shot
.

I moved from pair to pair as quickly as I could. I was firing on the second group before they realized what was happening. Our suppressed weapons and ability to see in the dark was a huge advantage. Shen and I met in the middle pair as both of us hit the soldier on the right at the same time, and the soldier on the left dove into the snow. It had only taken a few seconds to work across the group.

“Go!” I hissed. We both leapt up and began to scramble back down the rocks. Muzzle flashes erupted from the tree line. Bullets violently struck all around us as the soldiers hosed our general area with automatic fire. I tripped, and tumbled down the last few feet of the slope, sprawling forward, but managing to catch myself with my already-abraded hands. Shen grabbed the back of my coat and pulled me upright. The two of us ran as fast as we could back toward Exodus.

The gunfire behind us didn’t let up for almost a minute straight.

And come dawn, they would actually be able to aim.

It was going to be a tough morning.

VALENTINE

The Mountain Road

The dam was crippled, but we weren’t out of this yet.

Dawn was fast approaching as our ersatz rescue party wound its way through barely passable mountain roads. I drove a beat-up 4x4 with Ling next to me, and it was slow going. Some effort had been made by someone to keep the roads relatively free of snow, but we continually got bogged down in soft spots. Ling, using a map and her GPS navigated, while trying to stay in contact with Lorenzo’s group on the radio. They were constantly fading in and out, as the terrain did a marvelous job of limiting radio range.

We
were
in good contact with Reaper and Jill, who had taken it upon themselves to make a beeline for Lorenzo’s location on their own. Reaper was feeding us real-time information from his little drone aircraft, and it was a godsend. Otherwise we’d have had no chance of finding them in time. He said the Montalbans had been tracking his signal somehow, so he would put the plane on standby, where it would just drift in circles on autopilot, they’d move, and then he’d reconnect.

The situation was dire. The survivors of the raid on Sala Jihan’s compound were on foot, trudging through deep snow and over rugged terrain. There were only a handful of them left, and half were wounded. They were pursued by a mob of Jihan’s fanatical soldiers, numbering well over a hundred by Reaper’s best estimate.

Ling was finally able to get someone back on the radio. “What’s your status?” she asked.

Antoine answered.
“It is good to hear your voice,”
he said, panting.

“We are on our way. What is your status?”

“Not good, I’m afraid. I hope you have good news.”

Ling read off coordinates to Antoine. “This is a place northeast of your position where the canyon reaches the road. If you can get there, we’ll be waiting to pick you up. It’s as close as we’re going to be able to get without walking. There are no other paths.”

“I understand,”
Antoine said breathlessly.
“Stand by . . . ”

Lorenzo’s voice squawked over the radio next
. “Okay, I’m looking at those coordinates you gave us. Shit, that’s a long way. Are you sure there’s nowhere closer?”

“I’m positive, Chief,”
Reaper said, stomping Ling’s transmission before she could reply.
“I’m looking at maps and footage from Little Bird. That’s the closest place anywhere near your path of travel where you’ll even come close to the road. There’s another spot up a different canyon from there, but it’s even farther away from us, and it looks like it’d be a pretty steep climb to get up to road level. The coordinates Ling gave you are your best bet.”

“Acknowledged,”
Lorenzo said.
“Do you still have eyes on us?”

“Little Bird’s running low on fuel, but I’ll be your eyes in the sky for as long as I can. The Exodus guys will probably catch up with us before we get to the rendezvous point. We’ll all be there.”

“Yes, we will,”
Jill said suddenly, transmitting before Lorenzo could reply.
“You damned well better get there, Lorenzo. I mean it.”

The radio was silent for a moment.
“It’s good to hear your voice, honey,”
he said.

“Hang on,”
Jill said, sounding like she was trying to keep her fear under control.
“We’re on our way!”

Chapter 24: Pick a
Direction and Run

LORENZO

The Mountain

“You’re alive. Good,” Antoine said as Shen and I caught up.

“We got a few of them, but they’re still coming,” I bent over, put my hands on my knees, and retched into the snow. Running at this altitude was killer. I stood, wiped my mouth, and noted, “Fajkus is awake?” Ibrahim’s second in command was sitting on a rock, his face in his hands.

“Yes, but he is incoherent. He took a severe blow to the head,” Antoine nodded toward him. “He awoke screaming, talking about . . .
things
coming out of the silo. Now he is not speaking to anyone.”

I watched as Fajkus wrapped his arms around his chest and began to rock back and forth, glancing nervously side to side. I had seen people lose it like that before, especially back in Africa, brains just overloaded with awful shit. “He’s shell-shocked.” In the light of my magnified vision, I could see that the other survivors were deeply disturbed by Fajkus’s behavior, their eyes shining bright, wide, and afraid.

“No,” Shen shook his head. “He’s one of our most experienced men.”

Antoine agreed. “Fajkus has seen more battle than any two of us put together. He has been fearless before certain death many times, and his courage has inspired the rest of us. No . . . this is something else.”

I felt an uncomfortable shiver, and it wasn’t from the cold. “Don’t matter what it is, because if we don’t keep moving, we’re dead.” I strode over to Fajkus, grabbed him by the sides of his head, and jerked his face up. He looked confused. “Hey. Listen up.” I slapped him, hard. This seemed to startle the others.

And I learned why, really quickly. Fajkus moved, way faster than I thought a stocky fellow could, one hand clamped around my throat as he jerked me forward, and something cold and metallic slammed into the side of my head, a pistol apparently, as I heard him cock the hammer.

“No, you listen, asshole. I’m just fucking fine,” Fajkus snarled as he screwed the gun into my ear hole. “As fine as you could be considering that I just met the fucking devil himself. If you had seen whatever the fuck I just saw, then you would need a
moment
too.” He sounded calm, rational, but there was something just beneath that, something that indicated that this man was well and truly
freaked
out
. “I saw hell open up and take a shit on
my
men, on
my
friends, and now Jihan is going to catch us, and swallow our souls, because apparently we’re walking, because
your
girlfriend betrayed us and left us to die, and if I remember right . . . ” he shoved the gun in even harder, and the hand around my throat clenched off even more precious air, “
you
were the one who said we could trust her.”

“Sir, please, Lorenzo is on our side,” Antoine said calmly. “We do not have time for this.”

Fajkus’s eyes flashed down as he felt my knife press up between his legs. “I’ll make time,” I growled back as I put enough force to indicate that I was feeling real serious. The pressure released enough from my throat to let me talk. “Get your hands off me.”

He let go, and lowered his gun. “Well, I guess you are walking too, so at least you aren’t in league with that Montalban Exchange bitch.”

“No, I’ve been taking turns carrying your unconscious ass up a mountain for hours. If I was walking, I would already be out of here.” I rubbed my throat, but I didn’t put away my knife. “What did you see back there? What happened to Ibrahim?”

He shook his head, mind distant. It took him a long moment to respond. “I don’t . . . don’t really know. All I know is that Jihan is more dangerous than the Council knew, more than Ariel expected.”

I had no idea who that was, but Fajkus was a man whose faith had been shaken.

“And now this is all that remains of Exodus’ warriors.” He gestured at the survivors, ragged and tired. “We are ruined.”

There was random gunfire behind us as the soldiers mistook a menacing tree for one of us. The noise was way too close.

“Keep moving,” Antoine ordered, unconsciously taking command. The mystery would have to wait. Dawn was coming fast.

We plodded forward. Roland and Phillips were behind, setting up another ambush. They had demanded a turn. I had turned my borrowed night vision over to Roland and was stumbling along through the shadows beneath the trees, Svetlana again on my back. But it wouldn’t matter for too much longer. Dawn was coming fast.

Already we had moved from real darkness to a fuzzy gray reflecting off the snow. Last night, the sky had been brilliantly clear, but now a fat wall of clouds was coming in from the north, the direction we were traveling. We hoped it brought with it fresh snow and the possibility of evading our pursuers. The weather was actually warming up.

According to the map, we had crossed the highest point of the canyon during the night, and it was mostly downhill from here on out. There was one more bulge on the topographical map, but after that we were heading into Mongolia. Jill would be there waiting. As it stood now, we only had one option: forward. That also meant that the bad guys had a pretty simple path to follow in order to catch up.

Gunfire echoed behind us, bouncing wildly off the mountain walls. Roland and Phillips had sprung their ambush. Hopefully they would live through it. Antoine was on point, and he glanced up, listening, trying to ascertain how far away the shooting was. Shen was helping Fajkus, who was stumbling indomitably along, but the head wound had left him dizzy and uncoordinated.

Now that it was quickly brightening, I could see our surroundings better. I had no doubt that Jill would think that it was beautiful, a pristine, virgin-white, winter wonderland. The canyon was only a mile wide at any given point, and we were trekking along the bank of a river choked with ice flows. Sometime during the night we had lost enough altitude to be back in a real forest and the air smelled clean. For a city boy like me that was kind of scary. At one point, I noticed that there were wolves watching us from the trees. Giant, scary dogs, like Reaper had read about on the internet. They looked at us curiously before moving on to eat something without guns.

“—in. Come in, Lorenzo.”
The chirping of my radio startled me so badly that I almost dropped the sleeping Svetlana in the snow. She snorted loudly in my ear.

“Jill?” I gasped, my throat parched and aching.

“Oh, thank God. You’re alive,”
she said.
“Where are you?”

“We’re most of the way through the canyon, heading into Mongolia. We’re close to the coordinates Ling gave us.”

“We’re almost there. Reaper’s got the Little Bird in the air . . . He’s looking at the guys following you right now. He says he can walk you in to us before they catch up.”

I was too tired to think. “Careful, the Montalbans will find you.” My words were slurred.

“Reaper says he can handle that. He started to talk about trigonometry and the curvature of the Earth or something, I almost drove the truck off a cliff because it put my brain to sleep. Keep going. You’re almost there. Reaper can walk you in.”

“Awesome,” I spoke up so the others could hear. “Guys, we’re almost to our ride.”

“Excellent,” Antoine said just before the bullet hit him.

FFOOoooooommmm!

The shot had come from quite far away. It took the sound a moment to catch up. Antoine fell into the snow, clutching his side.

“Sniper!” Shen shouted as he and Fajkus dove to the ground. Svetlana gasped in pain as I took us down.

“I’m hit!” Antoine shouted, scrambling through the snow and finally coming to rest behind a log.

“Where is he?” Fajkus said. I raised my head and scanned the mountainside. They had to have been paralleling our path on the mountain above us, there was no other way.

The bark on the tree next to my head exploded in a shower of splinters and pulp. “Damn it!” I flinched back down. “I don’t see him!”

“Antoine. Status?”

The big man didn’t answer.

Shen leapt up, heedless of danger, and dove toward where Antoine was hiding. The two men were like brothers. He was only up for a split second, then back down. A bullet whizzed through the space that he had been occupying, sounding like an angry bee on steroids. The sound of the muzzle blast came a moment after.

Fajkus popped his head up to look, and the snow next to him erupted. That one had been very close. The Exodus leader began to speak into his radio, trying to raise Phillips and Roland to tell them to take cover.

Svetlana was lying on her back, Sako across her chest, bloody and bandaged left hand hugging the rifle close, as she calmly scanned the mountainside. “Six hundred meters,” she stated flatly.

“You see him?” I was scared to lift my head again.

“Not yet,” she grimaced as she rolled over and began to low crawl into the trees, dragging her broken legs uselessly behind her. “I could tell by time takes sound to travel.”

“What are you doing?”

“What I do best,” she said.

“You can’t even walk.”

“I don’t need to,” she glared at me.

“Let me do it. You’re missing fingers.”

She held up her right hand, and then extended her middle finger. “I still have all these. Are you a trained sniper?”

“No.”

“Then shut up and spot.”

I was kneeling behind a rotted stump, now damp as the temperature, by some miracle, was moving slightly above freezing. Svetlana was on her belly, ten feet ahead of me, covered in pine needles, and scanning the mountainside through her scope. I was amazed how far we had crawled, how fast.

“Reaper, come in.”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“Do you have us on thermal yet?”

“I lost you under the trees. It doesn’t have X-ray vision.”

“I’ve got a sniper on the mountain approximately six hundred meters to the northeast. Find him, Reaper. Fajkus?”

“Go.”
Everybody was switched on to the same channel now.

“Svetlana is going to try to take this guy. As soon as he’s distracted, you three need to move. We’ll catch up.” The main body of soldiers had to be almost on top of us by now. “Where’re the Mormons?”

“Almost there,”
said one of them over the radio. I couldn’t tell which because the speaker was breathing really hard.
“The soldiers are right behind us. Roland took a round.”

“Shut up . . . Just a flesh . . . wound . . .”
Roland was gasping.
“Jerk.”

This was going to be close.

“Lorenzo,” Svetlana hissed. “There are three places I think he could be hiding. I need your help.”

“Okay,” I answered, scanning the mountainside, waiting for her to tell me which spot to watch.

“When I tell you to . . . stand up.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Not for a long time, stupid. Just get up and move to side. When he shoots at you, I kill him.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” I said sarcastically. But we didn’t have much time. “Okay.”

Svetlana let out a long breath. “Now.”

Despite my brain telling me not to, and every fiber of my being screaming
no
, I stood, ran to the side, and dropped. No shot came.

“Did you see him?” I gasped.

“No. Do it again.”

“What?
No.
Screw that.”

“Not from same spot. He will blow your brains out from there. Crawl first. Then move when I tell you.”

Son of a bitch
. I started low-crawling, slush moving up my sleeves and down my shirt.

“Now.”

Aw, man.
I stood, and it took my brain a split second to process that the burning sensation I felt across my scalp was a hot piece of lead moving at just over 3,000 feet per second. My legs buckled without me even telling them to.

Her big rifle roared.

“Got him,” Svetlana said as she worked the bolt. “Lorenzo, are you alive?”

I rubbed my hand across the top of my head. The bastard had creased the top of my skull. My stolen glove came away covered in fresh blood to match the dried blood from earlier. “You sure you got him?”

“Yes. It was one of the Brotherhood. I was a little off center, but with a .338 Lapua, you can be a little off. He won’t be shooting back, that’s for sure.”

I sure hoped she was right. I keyed the radio. “Sniper down. Move. Move.” That was two Brothers dead. Through the trees, back the way we came, I could make out Shen and Fajkus, with Antoine hoisted between them. A split second later, two other shapes came running up behind them, Phillips and Roland. “We’ll catch up. Jill will walk you in to her position.”

“Moving,”
Shen replied.

“Come on,” I said as I stood up, fully expecting to get shot by some yet unknown danger, and ran over to Svetlana. I squatted down next to her, so that she could clamber onto my back. My muscles ached and burned and I hoisted her up. She wasn’t light.

“See? And you wanted me to drop my rifle,” the Russian insisted.

“You were right, that what you need to hear? Now hold on.” Now we had to sprint to the finish. We had to make it through some pretty thick brush, but so did our pursuers. It was a good thing I worked out a lot, because all I wanted to do right about then was curl up in a ball and die. I couldn’t ever remember being this tired. Svetlana’s bandaged hand was bouncing right in front of my face, and I tried to ignore the missing fingers, and concentrate on my footing, as I half ran, half stumbled forward.

“Lorenzo!”
Reaper shouted in my ear.
“Your sniper’s back.”

“Impossible!” Svetlana screamed in my good ear. “I shot him in the chest.”

“Maybe you missed,” I suggested, but from what I knew about the Exodus sniper, I really doubted that.

“No. He must be wearing armor plates,” she spat.

From what I had seen earlier in the compound, I could assume that the Brother was probably a dead man walking, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference until his heart finally quit beating, damn fanatical bastards. “Where, Reaper?”

“He’s moving downhill. Wait, there’s two of them. One’s moving fast, and he’s got a short gun with some big drum on it, the other’s moving slow, like he’s injured, and has an old-fashioned rifle.”