Vengeance (The Kurgan War Book 4) (16 page)

Miguel spoke into his headset mic, “Okay, we’re here. Remember, I want this installation taken intact with as many prisoners as possible. Only fire on those people who threaten your life or the life of a fellow team member.”
 

Up ahead, a metal gate blocked their path. The driver slowed down and stopped. Miguel picked up a tablet and typed in a passcode. He held his breath as he waited for the stolen code to work. A few anxious seconds later, he relaxed when the gates parted and the vehicles drove inside.

Through the snow, the front entrance to the small base came into sight. Before the driver had stopped his transport, Miguel was out of the cab and on the ground running for the doors. Behind him ran the men from the back of his vehicle.
 

A man stepped out from the building with a light in his hand. He raised a hand to stop the onrushing men.
 

Miguel brought up his weapon and butt stroked the man in the jaw sending his unconscious body to the snow-covered ground. He ran past the guard’s prostrate body, yanked open the front doors, and dashed inside. He and all of his men had spent weeks memorizing the layout of the base. A couple of his men peeled off and took the first man they came across as their prisoner before he could raise the alarm. Another couple of insurgents made their way to the installation’s operations center and captured the three technicians working there without firing a shot. One of the Chosen agents dropped down behind a computer console and quickly locked the base’s communication lines. No messages were getting in or out without their knowing it. Next, he changed the passcode for the electrified perimeter fence cutting off the station from the rest of the world.

Men swiftly fanned out and rounded up the station’s surprised people and herded them to the gymnasium where Miguel stood waiting for them. From the beginning to the end, the raid had taken less than three minutes to achieve victory.

Miguel smiled at the crowd of scared military personnel before him. They were on their knees with their hands on their heads. He lowered his weapon and undid his parka. “Ladies and gentlemen, do as you are told and no one will be hurt. However, if you chose to resist I can guarantee you that I will kill you with as much remorse as squashing a bug under my boot.”

“Who are you, and what do you want?” asked a major with salt-and-pepper hair.

“Who I am is unimportant. All you need to know is that for the next twenty-four or so hours, you are all prisoners of the Kurgan Empire.”

A murmur ran through the people trapped in the room. At the back of the crowd sat Tarina and her friends. They had been having a late supper when the base had been attacked. None of them said a word. Even Angela, who was a Chosen citizen, did not trust the group of armed men standing before them.

Miguel helped the base commander to his feet. “Now, Major, I want you to open the doors to the operations room on the floor below us. Then I need you to enter your passcode into the control panel so my men and I can operate your station’s computers.”

“And if I don’t comply with your demands?” responded the officer.

“Then this will happen.” Miguel pushed the officer out of the way, flipped his rifle’s safety off, and fired a round into the head of a female technician, killing her. Blood splattered on the wooden floor and the people nearest the hapless victim. In horror, people screamed and recoiled back from the bloody remains.

“Shall I continue, Major?” demanded Miguel. His voice was as cold as a winter’s day.

“No. No more, please. I beg of you.”

Two men grabbed ahold of the officer’s arms. With Miguel leading, the major was dragged out of the gym.

Tarina’s heart was racing in her chest. She had no idea what was going on, but an armed party of Chosen agents was not something she had expected to see at such an isolated post. She glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw that the armed guards were not looking in her direction. She leaned forward slightly and whispered to their liaison, Sergeant Rice, “What the hell is this base, and why do the Kurgs want it?”

“This base is a backup to the operations center on Tranquility Station,” she whispered back. “Should their computers ever suffer a catastrophic failure, this installation was designed to take over and run the station from down here.”

Tarina sat back and tried to understand why the Kurgans had taken over their base and what it meant to the people up on the space station. Whatever it was, she knew it wasn’t going to end well, and while she still had the strength to resist, she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

Chapter 21

“Thanks for your time,” said Sheridan to the ninth person on his list of possible operatives. Like all the others, the man was just another worker who just happened to have Bill as his first name. Sheridan folded up his paper and placed it away. As he made his way to the Dionysus Bar to linkup with his friends, the presidential debate was already underway and was being shown on screens throughout the station. Only a couple of people bothered to pay attention to what was being said. As this was only the first of five planned debates, most people didn’t tune in until the last couple to help them to determine who to vote for . . . if they voted at all.

A hand slapped down hard on Sheridan’s shoulder startling him.

“You need to pay better attention to your six,” said Cole. “I could have been a bad guy and you’d now be dead.”

“I’m wearing my liquid body armor underneath my coveralls,” countered Sheridan.

“Yeah, and what if I shot you in the back of the head?”

“Then the guards would have gotten you too,” he replied, pointing over at a couple of armed men walking down the corridor.

“They look like a bunch of poorly trained amateurs to me. Besides, you’d still be dead.”

Sheridan shook his head. He was tired and frustrated at having gotten nowhere in his search and didn’t feel like playing Cole’s game. He switched topics. “How did things go for you?”

Cole shook his head. “I spoke with a lot of people today but came up empty-handed. Why did the agent have to choose Bill as a name? If he had been called Thaddeus or Rupert, I bet we would have found him by now.”

“I struck out too. I wonder if Elba got anywhere?”

“I hope so because the debate is almost over, and if your hunch of an imminent Kurgan terrorist attack is right, we may only have minutes before all hell breaks loose back home.”

At the next elevator, Sheridan pressed the up button. Nervous energy ran through his body. Without realizing it, he began to tap his foot while he waited for the lift to arrive. If Elba had also failed to learn anything of value, he knew that he would have to call Admiral Oshiro and recommend that the station be quarantined. The virus could be on Pluto for all he knew. Nevertheless, until the virus could be found, he felt it prudent to restrict movement on and off the base.

Polite applause greeted General Wagner as he wrapped up his speech to the men and women on duty in the installation’s command center. From power to water to sanitation and air filtration, it was all controlled by the computers spread throughout the room.

Colonel Rutland, the base commander, a slender red-haired officer, handed the general a coffee cup with a picture of the station’s logo on it as a souvenir of his visit. “Sir, on behalf of all the men and women who work on Tranquility Station, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your kind and encouraging words.”

Wagner took the cup and handed it off to Solari without even looking at it. “Colonel, I thank you and your people for a wonderful and informative visit.” He didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. He said the same thing each and every time he was called upon to say something nice to a crowd of people.

One by one, the screens in the control room that had been covering the presidential debate switched to a concerned-looking news anchor. In the background was live feed of heavy fighting around the ADF Headquarters. All at once, everyone stopped what they were doing and looked over at the screens.

“Turn up the volume,” ordered Wagner.

 
“Ladies and gentlemen, the reports coming in are still confused but it looks like there have been multiple terrorist attacks on government and military installations throughout the world,” explained the anchor. A map of the globe flashed up on the screen. On it were images of chaos and death. From Beijing to Rome, to London and Norfolk, ADF soldiers and civilian police were fighting to the death with thousands of Chosen insurgents. Bodies littered the ground as the enemy combatants tried to fight their way into the heavily guarded bases.

“Put the station on Red Alert,” ordered Colonel Rutland to his duty personnel.
 

An alarm sounded as the warning-indicator displays all over the base turned from yellow to red.

Wagner turned to face Solari. “Get my shuttle ready. We’re leaving immediately.”

“I don’t think so,” she replied as she pulled her pistol from its holster, turned it on, and aimed it at the general’s head.

“Have you gone mad?”

“No. Now shut up, sit down, and do as you’re told.”

The general glared at Solari. He wasn’t used to being told what to do by anyone, let alone a junior officer.

Rutland reached out to grab hold of Solari’s arm only to be shot down in midstride by Harry Williams, who had stood up from behind his computer console. All around the room, Chosen operatives drew their weapons and pointed them at their confused co-workers.

Williams turned off the alarm. He looked around before snapping his fingers in the air. Throughout the control center, the insurgents rounded up their former colleagues and forced them into a couple of nearby offices. When they had them all, they locked the door behind them. On the four floors below them containing the installation’s computer server and management offices, Chosen agents forced the scared technicians into the closest elevators and sent them down to the lower levels.

Solari looked over at Williams. “Seal all of the outer doors and elevator shafts as planned. From here on out nothing gets on or off this station without us knowing it.”

Within seconds, every airlock and elevator on the installation was locked shut.

“Now jam all ship-to-shore communications. Only those computers and comms devices under our control should be able to receive or transmit messages to Earth.”

A Chosen operative nodded and typed in the necessary commands to the majority of the station’s computers rendering them useless.

“Now, show me where everyone is,” ordered Solari.

Williams brought up an interactive map of the station on a large screen. Several clusters of red dots appeared on the screen showing where all of the insurgents were. Almost all of them were on the four floors held by the Chosen. Each imposter wore a tracking device on his wrist so they could be followed wherever they went. In the bottom of the installation were four lone dots deep inside the floor containing the base’s air filtration unit.
 

Solari pointed to a group of dots moving along a corridor in the station’s midsection. “Who are those people and what are they doing?”

“That is Bill and his hit squad,” answered Williams. “They have been tracking Master Sergeant Cole for the past couple of hours. Before you arrived, I gave the order for him to eliminate Cole and his accomplice, Michael Sheridan.”

Solari clenched her fists in anger. Williams was getting under her skin. This wasn’t the first time he had overstepped his authority. He should have spoken to her before ordering the hit. “Does Bill know that he is trapped down there unless we send down an elevator to pick him up?”

“Yes.”

General Wagner shook with anger. He couldn’t remain silent anymore. “Who the hell are you people, and what do you want?”
 

“You pompous ass. Think about it, General,” replied Solari. “We are citizens of the Kurgan Empire. You and everyone on this station are now my prisoners.”

“What the hell?” said Sheridan as they stepped out of the elevator onto the fourteenth floor. A red light flashed on and off as the alarm blared over the PA system. People stood as still as statues staring up at the ghastly images of death and destruction on the dozens of screens spread throughout the corridor.
 

Cole looked over at a monitor and said, “Looks like we’re too late. Whatever they were planning to do has begun.”

“My God,” said Sheridan when he saw a man with a suicide vest set himself off next to a police checkpoint, killing everyone including the reporter covering the fighting.

A few seconds later, the alarm turned off. The sound of scared people crying and weeping replaced the loud wail.

“Look,” said Cole, pointing at the display above the elevator. It read ‘not in service.’

“Someone must have turned off all the elevators,” mused Sheridan.

“Come on, let’s find Elba and then try to see what the hell is going on,” said Cole, taking his friend by the arm. It didn’t take long for them to arrive at the entrance to the Dionysus Bar. Elba was standing outside with a man wearing white coveralls. She waved them over and quickly made the introductions.

Sheridan got right to the point. “Any luck?”

Both Elba and Blackstock shook their heads.