Shift Tense: Eshu International Book 2 Read online

  And exploded.

  Mine one.

  The Mercedes slammed to a halt. With the washout compensators in the scope, I could see body shapes swimming in the green-white glare of the burning jeep. Figures leaped out of the truck, fanning out to either side. They ran forward, then scuttled back from the flames. No survivors there.

  If we were very lucky, and the Russians very stupid, the jeep had been carrying their officers.

  The men from the truck assumed defensive positions and dropped out of sight. Ten seconds. Thirty. No shots, no motion. No one wanted to go first and knock on our door.

  Then someone started barking orders. Either there’d been an officer in the truck or some alpha-type wanted a promotion. So much for luck. Eventually, six of the Russian security soldiers appeared, wary, staying near the protective bulk of the Mercedes.

  I found the loud one in the back and settled crosshairs on his torso. Real commissar type, he was bellowing, urging the rest of them forward with big slashes and chops of his arms. My finger took up half the slack, and I waited for Tam’s signal.

  There was motion on both sides of the road—things scurrying through the grass. I squeezed the trigger as the spider mines went off; the boom covered by a rapid crack-hiss. The officer tumbled back, and suddenly there was screaming.

  Smart mines. Claymores with legs, Tam called them. With the brain of a gerbil, Poet9 always added.

  Screams turned to moans turned to wind again. I swept the area through the scope. Flames were the only thing moving on that road. Ten, maybe twelve men had just died, and I’d only fired one shot.

  Poet9 updated us. “Raven One has zero movement in killbox, but Raven Two has those three other vehicles coming fast. There’s a fourth one leaving town. The Cossacks are riding hard.”

  “Raven Three?” I asked.

  “No contacts on the water.”

  “Helicopter?” Tam demanded.

  “No sign of it.”

  “Screw the helicopter. Where’s the damn boat?” I demanded.

  “It’s coming!” Tam snapped back.

  “Three vehicles have stopped half a klick out. Figures dismounting,” Poet9 said. “Carajo. Fifteen. No, twenty-plus coming our way. And we’re out of mines.”

  Tam muttered something nasty in Korean then ordered the Triplets forward. Cottontail spoke one phrase—something short and sharp in their Zulu combat argot—and the three big clones ghosted into the woods.

  I chinned the video from Raven One, and Oryol’s boys popped up on my helmet’s HUD. Twenty-one of them were spread out in a skirmish line, trotting along the road in a hurry. These guys wanted the ladies back something fierce. Most sported compact AK-9 assault rifles, but I spotted at least four Pecheneg LMGs and a RG8 40mm grenade launcher. What Oryol security lacked in finesse they made up for in blunt force trauma.

  The Ivans were about a hundred meters from the curve in the road when three grenades exploded. The deep stutter of H&K G46s followed.

  “Contact,” Cottontail said simply.

  The Russians’ response was immediate. Definitely not mall security wash-outs. They reacted fast and vicious, opening up with everything they had. Continuous muzzle flash washed out the UAV’s video, so I cut the feed and waited. The chainsaw growl ripped through the night for a full minute then fell silent all at once.

  Cottontail’s voice sounded in my helmet a second later. “Repositioning to beta.”

  I smiled.

  I brought up Raven One again, and this time the view was from behind the Russian troopers. Sixteen figures were now creeping toward the bend.

  Not bad. Not good, but not bad. And they were heading straight to our Nightingale.

  An old trick out of the Spec-Ops black bag, a Nightingale device is a one meter by one and a half meter mesh net rigged with firecrackers and cherry bombs. Add a remote detonator, press ‘play’ and it looks and sounds like a platoon unloading on full auto.

  The Russians were around the bend, four teams leapfrogging down the road in angry spurts. They had blood in their teeth, and they knew we were still here.

  Seventy-five meters from the first pier, Cottontail spoke again. “Beta position. Engaging.”

  First, the Nightingale erupted on the right, and the Oryol teams swung into it like it was another ambush, unloading furiously into the woods again. I saw bushes and small trees collapsing. Thirty seconds later, the Triplets hit them from behind. Five went down, and the rest scattered like leaves in a gale.

  One team made the mistake of taking cover near what was left of the jeep. The Vychlop slammed into my shoulder twice before the rest scurried back to the Mercedes.

  The Triplets stopped firing as the Nightingale went out. Off-balance and angry, the Russians regrouped. The no-neck with the grenade launcher was thumping out 40mm rounds into the trees, but Tam’s Tavor 24 coughed sharply, and he stopped.

  Things were definitely looking better. Now if that boat would just show up …

  Eyes back on the road, I spotted the bounce of approaching headlights the same moment Poet9 sang out, “Fourth vehicle coming fast. He’s charging.”

  A large black van swung around the Mercedes truck and blew past the burning jeep.

  “Kill it,” Tam ordered.

  A Bumblebee rocket screeched out of the woods and caught the square-back vehicle in the rear doors. It exploded Hollywood-style, flipping end over end, and tumbled to a halt, blazing in smaller pieces.

  Each of the Bunnies carried a single-use RPO-M thermobaric launcher. Made to crack hardened concrete bunkers, using them to radically disassemble vehicles was definite overkill. Whatever works though.

  “Raven Three has water contact coming our way,” Poet9 spoke up. “Our ride’s here.”

  “Better late than never,” Tam murmured. “Disengage and fall back to the third pier. Curro, Poet9, get the women into the boat.”

  I stayed on my garbage heap, eyes glued on the road. Once again, no one was moving up there. That last display of fireworks must have gutted Oryol’s Slavic zeal.

  The thrum of outboard motors grew behind me. Poet9 emerged from hiding and ran across the road. He was still jacked in, cables running from the side of his helmet to the UAV’s controller. He waved his oversized pistol and Curro emerged, following slowly. The young Spaniard was sheltering the mother with his body. He’d given her his jacket, and she was carrying her young daughter in her arms. The four of them went past me out towards the end of the pier.

  Almost there.

  Tam and the Triplets loosed a final flurry of grenades and tri-bursts. Still no response. Not like Ivans to widdle their knickers, but far be it from me to interrupt when my opponent is making a mistake.

  Tam and the Triplets broke from the tree line at a dead run straight towards me. I kept my eyes on the road. Nothing.

  The Triplets settled into position around me, and Tam tapped my shoulder as he ran past. I got up and followed him down the pier.

  The Microsoft exfiltration boat was a Code X clone: a long, low chiseled shape with a cabin bulge at the rear. It was covered in mimetic smart-camo, so its surface flashed with the heave of moonlit waves. Curro and Poet9 had already helped the two women down the ladder.

  Still jacked in, the wiry Mexican flashed a smile up at me. “Home free, homie.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up. I was spending my paycheck already.

  “We’re leaving,” Tam called over the radio. The Triplets rose out of the shadows and ran towards us.

  They were halfway down the pier when the Werewolf returned and all my sugar turned to shit.

  “Drop it!” Tam ordered.

  Flopsy skidded to a halt and tugged the launcher tube off his back. A thread of fire lanced up into the sky straight toward the helicopter.

  And missed.

  That Russian pilot executed one of the most incredible feats of flying I’d ever seen. The twin-rotor assault chopper literally spun in a three-sixty and sidestepped the rocket. It came around facing us head on ag
ain, fifty feet from its original position. I’d never been so impressed and horrified at the same time.

  The searchlight snapped on again, this time accompanied by a quick belch of a 30mm chain gun. The water geysered directly in front of us.

  “Остановка! Halt.”

  God. Damn. It!

  Tam, the Triplets, and I froze like mystics with a peek at apotheosis. Between the roar of the storm, the helicopter’s engine, the bright light, and the threat of instant death, it was as if God were speaking doom out of the whirlwind.

  All of a sudden, another sound barged in on that weirdly sacred moment, so normal as to seem profane—the loud buzz of fans. It seemed to swoop in from all around us, and I heard three tiny pops before it left. A split second later, there was a soft grinding noise.

  The grating grew louder and louder.

  The searchlight dipped. Righted itself, then dipped again.

  The grinding morphed into a rasp. The Werewolf’s nose dropped, and its engine began to shriek.

  The five of us stared, still rooted in place, watching the pilot struggle for control. The helicopter dropped down and wobbled back and forth like a drunk. The shriek became a grating howl, then the Werewolf reeled up and away, lunging toward land.

  “Go, go, go!” Tam shouted, and the five of us jumped into the boat. Twin Ilmor Formula One engines purred, the deck jumped, and we shot into the frigid darkness on the Baltic Sea.

  The shoreline fell away, and I started breathing again for a second time that night.

  “What just happened?” Tam asked. “What was that?”

  I stared at Curro. “Your mom praying again?”

  He only laughed.

  “All you need is trust and a little bit of pixie dust.” Poet9 laughed. “Knew it would work.”

  The Triplets turned in unison. “Peter Pan!” they boomed out, big grins on their faces.

  Tam blinked twice. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is ‘pixie dust’?”

  “Mostly sand, with metal shavings and chaff to spice it up. Slight drag on the Ravens’ aerodynamics, but when that chopper came back, I stuka-ed it and blew all three at the rotor assembly.”

  My jaw dropped. “Sorry?”

  “I was worried RSC Energia might have their own drones over the facility, and seeing as missiles are obvious, I rigged each of the Ravens with a Tinker Bell payload,” Poet9 explained. “Each Raven had two kilos of pixie dust in a fiberglass canister. Stuff will wreck any drone engine.”

  “You knew it would work on the chopper?” I asked.

  “Not really. No.” He shrugged. “But I figured it was worth a shot.”

  “Holy shit,” Tam said slowly.

  I looked over at Curro again. “Your mom is definitely praying.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t tell her about tonight, OK?” Tam pleaded.

  Curro laughed again and handed the mother a mug of tea.

  I looked over at the two women. Both of them were wrapped in blankets. The daughter was fast asleep, and her mother was brushing hair out of her round little face. She saw me looking and smiled back. Everything was right in their world now. They were warm and safe, going to be reunited with a loved one in a better country, working for a better company.

  This one turned out all right.

  Sometimes I love my job.

  Seven hundred and fifty horsepower throbbed steadily under our feet, carrying us farther into the deep black of the Baltic night. Finding a Code X stealth boat anytime was a task; throw in a storm, and the Russians would never trace us. Ever. This run was over.

  Poet9 had jacked into the boat’s main console. “I told Rao we were clear, and he’s relayed that to the Microsofties. Balance will be in the bank tomorrow.”

  He unplugged the cable from the interface unit on the side of his head. “And he says not to get too comfortable. D-H is sending Hester around tomorrow to brief us on our next job.”

  I looked out at the fat snowflakes swirling past the windows. “I hope it’s somewhere warm.”

  CHAPTER THREE – The Great Satin

  Port city of Berbera, Republic of Somaliland

  Despite the wind off the Indian Ocean, Berbera stank. A reek of sweat, sewage and bio-diesel clung to the city like a sepia shroud. It yellowed stucco and concrete, smeared windows with a grimy film, and lingered sullenly among the vendors’ stalls in the spice-filled markets off the Hargeisa Road. It stung eyes, tainted every bite, fouled every breath.

  The once-proud Ottoman city that had dominated the waters of the Gulf of Aden for centuries had been reduced to a teeming squalor governed on the whim of warlords, shipping magnates, and radical clerics. Commerce still thrived in the deep-water port, billions of dollars worth of goods moving every week, but only the smallest trickle ever filtered down to its filthy streets. Five hundred thousand people crowded into its sixty-square kilometers; half of them unemployed, a quarter of them starving, all of them armed.

  Boom times of slaves, guns, diamonds, and oil had fueled cancerous spasms of urban growth in the ancient city of frankincense and myrrh. Egos, AKs, and suitcases full of hard currency had raised monuments of steel and polished glass among the stretches of cinderblock tenements. Swiss modernist offices towered over a sea of tin roofs. Exiled Columbian narco-chiefs competed with Singapore data-thieves for the flashiest mansions. Walled complexes sported aircraft-carrier-sized security masts while platoons of armed guards patrolled past automated defense pods nestled among traditional English gardens.

  Somalilanders cobbled their own edifices; hundreds of scrap wood shacks sprouted like barnacles on the crumbling brick and flaking concrete walls. In many parts of the city, the riot of architecture trampled the already narrow streets down to a maze of alleys barely wide enough for a single battered taxi.

  The element that tied the city together wasn’t the smell, or the architectural clutter, or the crowds. It was graffiti.

  Only mosques were spared.

  In a rampage of color, elaborate gang tags, militia icons, even corporate logos, were sprayed, slathered, or stenciled on every flat surface throughout the city. These urban hieroglyphics marked territories, directed the flow of traffic and goods, and provided up-to-the-minute news on everything from which shop had the best price on corn meal to the latest developments in the civil war. The key was knowing how to decipher it all.

  If the red fist of the SPLM—Somaliland People’s Liberation Movement—suddenly pimpled on mailboxes, phone booths and bus stops, it was a safe bet Professor Harun Hamid’s rebels were closer to the capital. If President General Goma Dhul-Fiqaar’s face appeared on the billboards, then somewhere tractors were scraping out another mass grave.

  A new ten-by-twenty-meter holo-board was perched over the Burco Highway portraying the general flanked by soldiers in hulking SARKOS suits.

  With the red-berets and the Duub Cas tiger-head insignia blazoned on their ceramic chest plates, the exo-armored soldiers were a not-so-subtle reminder of Dhul-Fiqaar’s personal army, as well as his government’s corporate backing. The Great Man himself gazed confidently out over the city, jowly, grinning at a Somaliland he saw as flourishing under his fatherly guidance and high-tech coercion. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that prosperity was imminent. At least for General Dhul-Fiqaar.

  Some brave but linguistically challenged SPLM sympathizer had hacked the sign’s video feed and spliced in flash text. “Bloody man. The Great Satin will not save you.”

  It was two in the afternoon when a trio of black Mercedes SUVs turned south under that sign and disappeared into the warren of side streets. Universal transportation for foreign executives and high-end warlords, no one looked twice as the little convoy snaked its way among the cramped buildings to finally stop outside an anonymous six-storey edifice.

  Wedged with a bit of cosmic irony between a Dutch landmine clearing outfit and a Vietnamese sweatshop cranking out knock-off Hong Kong prosthetic limbs, the office was the former headquarters of one of a hundred relief agenci
es that had cycled through the region’s misery in the last decade. The flaking sky-blue paint and ornate, rust-orange window grills made a vague attempt to look colonial but only succeeded at appearing exhausted.

  The sweltering heat had emptied the street, but six men burst from the front and rear vehicles like shrapnel. Wearing bad suits, buzz cuts and mirrored optics, they cradled stubby Herstal assault rifles and froze in a five-meter perimeter-like display of CIA statuary. Only their heads moved as they surveyed surrounding buildings and rooftops. After a full three minutes, one of them touched his ear and spoke. Immediately, a side door opened on the middle vehicle. Two more bodyguards with briefcases and large automatic pistols appeared. They stood at attention until two Arab men emerged from behind them.

  Crisp linen ghutrahs completely concealed their faces, and the two men glided across the filthy street swathed in brilliant white robes and the chill of Freon. Then, like apparitions, splendid and remote, they disappeared with their bodyguards into the green glass entryway of the narrow façade.

  Once inside, the four men rode a creaking elevator to the top floor. The smaller Arab hissed in displeasure as it lurched to a stop. The other merely shrugged. The doors slid open, and the two bodyguards drew pistols before leading them into a large room directly across the hall.

  Inside, four Somali men waited. Two were SPLM soldiers holding hatchet-shaped PP2000 sub-machineguns. They stood, lean and alert, facing the door—another species of bodyguard. The other two Somalis were seated at a long table, one of them old, the second a soldier, but middle-aged—an officer.

  The older man wore western clothes—slacks, a collared shirt and suit jacket. He had close- cropped, frizzled white hair and purple-black skin. His face was deeply creased by care and time. He looked up as they entered, his eyes shocking silver and pupil-less. The sockets were filled with cyber-optics—nuggets of mercury set in iron root.

  The younger man was race-hound thin, with olive-drab military fatigues and a pinched, nervous expression. He glanced up as the door opened, then back down at his hands. A single paper file sat on the table in front of him.