Precipice: V Plague Book 9 Page 10

  Feet braced against the deck as I pushed in with all my strength I finally succeeded in drawing his knife just in time to deflect a blade that would have skewered me like a bug. The three Russian troopers were shouting and struggling against the weight of the body and when I deflected the blade I slashed forward and buried it in the throat of the one seated in the middle.

  Yanking it back, a gout of arterial blood came with it, splashing across my arm and onto my face. The Russians had stopped shouting now, fighting for their lives with grunts and hisses of exertion. The pilots finally reacted to the commotion, the deck suddenly tilting sharply as they headed for the ground. I needed to finish this before they could join in, but as the aircraft banked I lost my traction on the steel floor, all of us winding up in a pile of flailing, punching limbs.

  I felt a sharp tug on my left shoulder. It didn’t hurt, but I know what being sliced open by a sharp knife feels like. It would hurt like hell later, if there was a later. The helo was still turning and an arm smashed into my face. Grabbing it I pinned it against my body and stabbed twice, fast and deep, into the exposed armpit.

  Shoving the limb away I turned in time to take a fist directly on the nose. I felt my nose break, again, and fought against the pain that blossomed in a white explosion behind my eyes. The fist came again and I saw it just in time to lower my head and absorb the impact on the front of my skull. I heard bone break and hoped it was bones in my attacker’s hand, not my head.

  Twisting away from a limp body that was partially pinning me I scrambled on the blood slicked deck, winding up on top of the last Russian. He was the smallest of the four, but was wiry and strong as hell. I stabbed for his chest but he caught my hand at the last second, holding me with a shaking arm.

  I pressed hard and tried to get my body weight behind the knife, but I couldn’t push it the last few inches. He had gotten his second hand locked on my wrist and was trying to turn the blade away from his flesh. Using my free hand, I began raining blows on his head, but they had about as much effect as banging on a rock.

  Changing tactics, I fumbled for a grip on any part of his face. I wanted to cause him enough pain to weaken his resistance and end this before I was shot from behind by a pilot, or the Colonel regained consciousness and weighed in to the battle.

  I tore his ear free of his skull, but he didn’t react other than to grunt and start raising his knees to deliver blows to my lower back. I forced a finger into his nose and ripped a nostril open. He grunted again and twisted his head away, struggling to get leverage to reposition my knife hand. Still fumbling on his bloody face I felt my thumb slip into his right eye socket and savagely squeezed as I used the power in my shoulder to push harder.

  There was a moment of resistance from his eyelid, then my thumb pushed past and I felt a pop as his eyeball ruptured and my entire thumb disappeared into his skull. He screamed and his grip weakened. With a surge of force, I buried the knife to the hilt in his throat.

  The immediate threats were neutralized, but I didn’t have time to rest. As the Russian died I felt a hard thump as the landing gear hit the ground. Shoving bodies aside, the first weapon I found was a short-barreled AKM rifle. Snatching it up I released it from the sling wrapped around one of the Spetsnaz’ shoulders and got to my feet. I nearly slipped and fell when I stood. There was an entire lake of blood covering the smooth steel deck.

  As I turned towards the cockpit I came face to face with one of the pilots who was working his way into the troop compartment. He had a pistol in hand, but it wasn’t aimed yet. I fired a burst into his chest and dashed forward, yanking the corpse out of my way and sticking the muzzle of the rifle into the cockpit.

  The other pilot was still seated and strapped in and was trying to raise his weapon. I smashed the barrel of the rifle into the side of his helmeted head to get his attention, reaching forward and grabbing the Makarov pistol out of his hand. Taking a moment, I looked through the windscreen.

  We were sitting on the tarmac at an airport or airbase, probably Mountain Home, and a couple of hundred yards away a Gulf-stream G-IV jet sat with the door open and air stairs lowered. Half a dozen men in Russian Air Force uniforms stood around and another Mi-24 sat on the asphalt in the distance.

  “In the air and destroy both of those aircraft,” I said to the pilot, punctuating my order by pressing the muzzle of the rifle to the back of his neck.

  It was still hot from when I killed the co-pilot and a moment after he yelped in pain I caught a whiff of seared human flesh.

  “Now!” I shouted, banging the muzzle against his helmet again.

  He nodded and reached forward to take the controls. A moment later we lifted straight up in the air and I braced myself against any attempts to suddenly tilt the helicopter and send me sprawling. We got to about two hundred feet of altitude and just hung there, hovering.

  “Shoot!” I yelled with another reminder of the weapon pointed at his head.

  He mumbled something in Russian then reached to his side and disengaged a safety. I took my attention off him long enough to make sure there weren’t any other aircraft on the ground, then watched as he squeezed a trigger built into the control stick.

  There was a roar, the Hind shuddering slightly, then a missile impacted the Gulf-stream. The explosion shook the big helicopter, but the pilot held us steady. He was moving slowly, delaying switching aim to the helo. I reached out and ripped the helmet off his head and laid the barrel of the rifle along his temple so he could plainly see the muzzle. He gulped, trying to tilt his head away but I held the weapon tightly against him.

  “Fire or die,” I growled at him.

  He adjusted position, said something else I didn’t understand and pulled the trigger. It took the missile nearly a full second to reach the parked aircraft, and then it erupted into a massive ball of fire.

  I was panting, trying to catch my breath as some of the adrenaline in my system bled off. Where did I want the pilot to take me? It couldn’t be far because I was certain the AWACS was tracking us. Had to be somewhere close and somewhere I could hide.

  Before I could give any instructions, strong arms wrapped around me and pinned my upper arms against my body, jerking backwards away from the cockpit. Grushkin was awake. I don’t remember having my finger on the rifle’s trigger but I must have because I pulled it as I was attacked.

  The AKM was on full auto and my finger reflexively held the trigger down, emptying the magazine into the cockpit. Maybe I killed the pilot, or maybe I just damaged the aircraft’s controls to the point that it could no longer stay in the air. Regardless, a moment later the deck dropped away from my feet as we plummeted to the tarmac below.

  19

  We hit the ground hard. Nowhere near as hard as the Osprey had when I’d been in that crash in Oklahoma, but hard nonetheless. Grushkin and I had both gone airborne during the first moment of the fall out of the sky, then fallen back to the gore covered deck a few seconds before the impact with the tarmac.

  I was stunned. Aware of sights and sounds around me, but more like how you’re aware of something in a dream rather than a waking state. I could hear the Hind’s engine running, apparently still throttled up to flight speed. Then the whole aircraft tilted several degrees to the side and there was the horrible sound of a rotor blade disintegrating from striking pavement.

  Still unable to make my body start responding, I lay there and realized that we’d come down hard on the landing gear, then one side had failed and let the belly of the helo fall at an angle onto the ground. The engine continued to bellow out its power, but without the resistance of a rotor it quickly rose in pitch before automatic safeties kicked in and shut it down.

  The whole machine groaned as the sounds from the motor died. I told myself to start moving several times, the connection from my brain apparently interrupted by the shock of the crash. I had a couple of bad moments when the thought that I was paralyzed from the neck down went through my mind, then mercifully my body began slowly res
ponding. I knew I was in shock, or very close to it, as I forced myself upright.

  Taking several deep breaths, I looked around as I continued to struggle to get my brain and muscles working together again. I was sitting in the middle of the troop compartment and there were bodies strewn and piled all around me. Grushkin lay a few feet away with a nasty gash on the side of his head. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive, and somehow my scrambled synapses never decided that it would be a good idea to check.

  Looking down I held my hands out to the side and surveyed myself. I was covered in blood. Not bloodstained; blood covered. There’s a difference. When you flap your hand and drops of blood fly off your fingertips, you are blood covered. I may have sat there for only a few seconds, or it could have been minutes before I realized I needed to get moving.

  If there were more Russians in the immediate area, it was probably already too late. Even if there were troops and aircraft that had been miles away, they had almost assuredly been alerted to the destruction of the two parked aircraft and crash of the Colonel’s helo and were on their way by now.

  Forcing myself onto my hands and knees I crawled across the deck and began taking weapons and ammunition off the bodies. Halfway through rearming myself I remembered my weapons. When I’d surrendered I had taken them off and placed them on the ground. While I was being searched and restrained I’d noticed one of the soldiers collecting them and taking them to the helo. They had to be somewhere on board and I’d much rather stick with weapons I was intimately familiar with.

  It only took a few moments of searching to find the locker under the bench seat where they had been stowed. I was starting to think more clearly and the body was responding faster so I was quickly rearmed, my vest loaded down with spare magazines. Scooting to the side door, which was uphill now, I released the latch and pushed it open. Pausing before climbing out I turned my head and looked at Grushkin.

  He was still immobile on the Hind’s deck. The gash in his head was bleeding freely, the way head wounds tend to do. So he was alive. The blood coming out of the wound answered that question. Corpses don’t bleed. There’s no heart beating to create blood pressure, which is what pushes the blood out.

  Drawing my pistol, I pointed it at his head, clicked the safety off with my thumb and moved my finger onto the trigger. I probably needed half a pound of pressure to complete the travel and fire a round into his skull when I paused. I’ve killed a lot of men, but I’ve never killed an unconscious and helpless one.

  I hesitated, surprised that I was having such an internal struggle. The first time you take a life it’s nothing like you thought it was going to be. The emotions don’t really hit you for an hour or two, or maybe even a day. The second time you know what to expect. The thirtieth or fortieth, or one hundredth – hell I’ve lost count. Despite what most people would think, you tend to reflect on what you’re about to do if it’s not in the heat of battle.

  What the fuck is wrong with you, John? This is a goddamn enemy who has invaded your country and was taking you to Russia to be executed. If you don’t put him down he’s just going to keep coming after you, twice as hard because now it’s personal. I had let the muzzle of the pistol drift off target while I was sitting there mulling things over. Snapping myself back to reality I started to reacquire my target as a female infected screamed at me.

  Whipping my head and weapon around I came face to face with a young female who was already half way through the open door. I pulled the trigger, shooting her in the face, and cursed as her body dropped clear of the aircraft and I could see half a dozen more females sprinting directly at me.

  Holstering the pistol, I brought the rifle up and began picking them off. But as fast as I could put them down, more were appearing from around the corner of a large hangar. I was keeping them back, but if I stopped fighting for one moment they’d gain more ground. One thing I’d learned about infected was that it’s much easier to keep them back than it is to beat them back once they get too close.

  Forgetting about Grushkin, I moved forward and swung a leg over the lip of the door. For a moment I sat there, half in and half out of the downed aircraft, picking off the runners. My magazine ran dry and I did a quick change before swinging my other leg up and out and dropping to the ground.

  As little time as that had taken, I gave up nearly ten yards of open space. Firing, I moved sideways to the nose of the Hind, keeping my back pressed against the armored exterior so I wouldn’t be the recipient of a surprise rear attack. Reaching the front, I glanced around and wasn’t happy with my situation.

  The helo had come down on a runway. That meant there weren’t any places to hide or take refuge other than the row of hangars to my front, and that’s where the infected were coming from. For what it’s worth I had guessed right about where we were. A large sign was attached to the face of a massive hangar that welcomed me to Mountain Home Air Force Base. It was the home of something that I didn’t have time to read as I had to turn my attention back to the charging females.

  Another empty magazine and I was starting to worry about running out of ammo. There was no time to verify, but I was pretty sure I only had another 150 rounds on my vest. I’d already burned through 60 in less than two minutes and probably half of the magazine I’d just put in. The volume of infected didn’t seem to be slowing, rather staying the same or possibly even getting heavier. I needed to do something while I still had enough bullets to fight or I was going to be royally screwed.

  I spared half a second to look around the nose of the helicopter, but there was nothing other than flat, open tarmac leading to a twelve-foot fence with flat grassland beyond. There was no doubt that I couldn’t outrun a sprinting female, and even supposing I made it to the fence, they’d be on me before I could scale it and clear the coil of razor wire at the top.

  Turning back to my front I resumed targeting the females, dismayed when males began appearing. A clock was ticking in my head, screaming at me. I had limited ammo and a seemingly unlimited supply of targets. There were almost certainly more Russians on the way. Nothing about this gave me a warm fuzzy.

  Traversing the rifle across the latest wave of infected that were charging my position I noted the gaping maw of the large hangar. The sun was down and it was dusk, not completely dark out here on the tarmac, but pitch black inside the massive building, which had east facing doors. There was some light from the two burning aircraft that I’d forced the pilot to destroy, but it didn’t penetrate into the darkness of the structure.

  Swapping mags, I realized I had two options open to me. Climb back in the crashed helicopter and close the door, or fight my way into the hangar in hopes there was a vehicle of some sort inside. The Hind would become my coffin. The infected would never leave, but long before I died of wounds suffered in the fight, or best case scenario I expired from dehydration, there would be more Russians who would show up in force. They’d clear out the infected and check inside the helo, find me, and either shoot me on the spot or put my ass on a plane to Moscow if they realized who I was.

  Making up my mind I took the first step towards the hangar. It was a long way off and I had to get there before I ran out of ammo. Females were coming fast and there were too many of them for me to be able to lower the rifle and fight with my Kukri and knife. I had no choice other than to keep firing as I pushed directly into the teeth of the assault.

  I kept moving, not realizing that I was steadily dripping blood onto the pavement. The hot, coppery smell was exciting the infected and they were trying hard to get to the source. Two grenades bought me some open space for a couple of moments, saving a few rounds, but not many. I would shoot every female within fifty yards then move as far forward I could, as fast as I could, then I’d have to repeat the process.

  It seemed to be taking forever, and I kept expecting at any moment to hear the sound of approaching rotors. But combat has a way of dilating time, making every action and event seem to last longer than it actually does. By now I did
n’t have the slightest idea how long I’d been fighting, but all that mattered was getting to that hangar as quickly as I could.

  More grenades and I gained another twenty yards, then back to firing my rifle. Push forward as I shot females, then I was finally within thirty yards of the giant door. It was even larger than I’d originally thought, the hangar definitely capable of holding very large aircraft. That meant the door probably weighed several thousand pounds and the only way to move it was if the electric drive motors were working. I seriously doubted the power was on.

  Once I made it into the hangar, if it was empty I was dead. With no way to close the door I could only hold the infected back until I ran out of ammo. Once that happened they would flood in and I’d kill a few with my blades, then I’d be overwhelmed, taken to the ground and eaten alive.

  “That won’t happen,” I said to myself. There was still a pistol with ammo on my thigh and before I’d let the infected get close enough to turn me into dinner I’d stick the barrel in my mouth. Not that I wanted to die, but fuck me if I was going to go out being alive and aware that I was some infected bitch’s evening meal.

  I finally reached the hangar door. Dangerously low on ammo I was still firing at a ferocious rate, but couldn’t back off for a moment. The flashlight attached to my rifle’s rail was on, but I didn’t have even a moment to shine it around the hangar. Waiting, I timed it until a larger group of females were charging and used my final grenade. It detonated in their midst, shredding bodies and buying me a few seconds until the ones behind them were dangerously close.

  Spinning, I shined the light into the darkness, heart dropping when I didn’t see anything other than smooth concrete. In those few heartbeats I resolved myself to the circumstances, steeling myself to use the pistol when I fired my last round from the rifle. At least I’d bought Katie and Rachel’s freedom. That mattered more to me than what I was about to have to do.