Vengeance (The Kurgan War Book 4) (3 page)

The colonel stepped close. Sheridan felt himself become uncomfortable as the senior officer stared at him through his helmet’s faceplate. “Did you or your people touch anything in there? Anything at all, Captain?”

“No, sir. We had just arrived when we were ordered to leave.”

“Then you are relieved, Captain. Once my team has transferred over here, I will have my ship depart so your shuttle can land and you can leave. I have informed Captain Barnes that you and your Marines should go through decontamination protocols before you take off your suits. It may seem a bit much to you, but I thought it best to err on the side of caution.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Make room,” said Cole to the Marines standing in the hallway.

Sheridan stepped back against the wall and stood there as the colonel led his team down the corridor in the direction of the control room. He felt someone nudge his arm. He turned his head and saw Cole motioning with his head at a couple of men from the rescue team who were carrying large metal boxes in their hands. Sheridan’s eyes widened when he saw the symbol for biological hazard painted on the side of the cases. In an instant, he knew whatever had happened here was far larger than just the murder of the base’s personnel. Something else was at play. What it was, he had no idea, but it seemed to have the attention of a lot of high-ranking officers and now, Sheridan as well.

Chapter 3

After several hours in his survival suit, Sheridan was more than happy to crawl out of it and get cleaned up.
Sydney’s
hangar bay had been turned into a makeshift decontamination center. Each Marine had to walk through a series of ultraviolet lights and chemical absorbent gel-wash stations until they could safely remove their survival suits. As he had expected, there wasn’t a single trace of a biological or chemical agent on any of his personnel or their equipment. Sheridan and Cole went through the process last. They waited until they had the shower area to themselves so they could talk in private.

“What a waste of perfectly good suits,” griped Cole. “After this cleansing they’ll be good for nothing.”

“Better safe than sorry,” said Sheridan, scrubbing his face with a washcloth. The warm water washing over his face felt good. “I wonder what was down there?”

Cole shrugged. “Dunno. Not sure I want to know either. I always get creeped out when I see people walking around with biohazard markings on their kit.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t see anything on the base that would have made me think they were testing or designing bioagents.”

“Think about it, sir. They were really insistent about getting us out of the control center and off the base as quick as they could. I’m willing to bet that there’s more to the installation than meets the eye.”

Sheridan turned his shower off and grabbed a towel. “I wonder if Captain Barnes knows what’s going on?”

Cole turned off the tap and ran a hand over his face. “Let it go, Captain. It’s not our problem anymore. In case you’ve forgotten, we’ve got bigger fish to fry back home on Earth.”

“I hadn’t forgotten about Harry. It’s just that something odd is going on, and I’d like to know what it is.”

Cole shook his head. He knew when Sheridan got fixated on something he would not let go of it until he had his answer. “Finish toweling off and get dressed. I’m famished and we still need to come up with a plan.”

Sheridan tossed his towel into a bin with the others. “A plan for what?”

“Sir, I still stand by my assertion that you’re the brightest officer I’ve ever worked with, but sometimes you miss the glaringly obvious. Mister Williams knows we’re coming. Hell, he practically sent you an invitation when he allowed himself to be filmed during the assassination attempt outside of ADF Headquarters. He could have masked himself, but he didn’t. If we get off this ship when it docks in Earth’s orbit and return to Earth on a scheduled shuttle run, we’ll never make it to the surface alive. In my humble opinion, the intelligence spooks at HQ have seriously underestimated the threat from these Chosen sleeper agents. I willing to bet
your
pension that they’re everywhere.”

Sheridan was speechless. Cole could be a bit of a conspiracy theorist from time to time, but on this he had to agree with him. He had been so consumed with Tarina and her friend’s fate that he hadn’t stopped to think what he and Cole were going to do when they reached Earth.

“I take it by the stunned look on your face that I’m right,” said Cole, reveling in the moment. “Now get dressed. I want a bite to eat before we make our escape.”

Sheridan hurried after Cole. “What escape?”

 
“It’s all part of the plan that I haven’t told you about yet.”

“When were you planning on sharing your grandiose plan with me, Master Sergeant?”

“After dinner, naturally.”

Back in their cramped quarters, Sheridan and Cole sat down on their cots and drank from the mugs of coffee they had brought back from the ship’s galley.

Sheridan glanced at his watch. “As we’re going to be docking at the Tranquility Station Spaceport in the just over thirty minutes time, I was wondering if you would like to share your cunningly brilliant plan with me.”

Cole set his cup down. “The way I see it, we need to keep ourselves in the shadows as much as possible. If we go about our business as members of the ADF, we’ll be easy to find and track. However, if we disappear and stay hidden then perhaps we can get a leg up on Mister Williams and his cohorts.”

“I’m sorry, you’re losing me.”

“It’s simple, sir. We take a page from the enemy’s playbook. I know some less than reputable people who can set us up with new identities. We can obtain fake identification cards and contact lenses to hide who we truly are. I bet he can also provide us with some micro-jammers to mess with the police scanners and cameras.”

“And just who are these people?”

“Let’s just say, I know a few ex-Marines who were turfed from the service for stealing military property and subsequently selling it on the black market.”

“Can you trust them?”

Cole shook his head. “Probably not, but they’re not Chosen agents, of that I’m sure. Their only allegiance is to the almighty credit.”

“Okay, say we go along with your plan. What about Admiral Oshiro? He’s expecting us to report into Fleet HQ.”

Cole smiled and handed Sheridan his tablet. “Write a note to your dad and let him know you’ve decided to take a vacation and that you’ll contact him when the time is right. I’m sure he’ll read between the lines and let Admiral Oshiro know what’s up.”

“If as you say the Chosen are monitoring everything, won’t they come to the same conclusion?”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing they can do about it. By the time they and your father get the message, we’ll already be gone.”

Sheridan’s head was swimming. It was clear that Cole had been thinking about this for some time. “Gone where and how?”

“We’re going to Russia, and we’re going to get there the most direct way possible.”

Sheridan stood. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I would never make light of a sub-orbital jump. You’re lucky that I couldn’t get my hands on a couple of sets of high-orbit jump gear or we’d be jumping from over one hundred kilometers up. As it is, we’re going borrow an escape pod and jump from it when we’re about sixty kilometers above the Earth’s surface. We’ll free fall for a couple of minutes before deploying our chutes and gliding the rest of the way down.”

“I’ve only done this a couple of times before and it has never been from that height.”

Cole placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Consider this on the job training, Captain.”

Sheridan was speechless as he followed Cole down into the depths of the ship so they could use a pod without being observed.

Twenty minutes later the ship’s XO’s voice came over the PA system. “All hands, we have come out of our jump and will be docking at Tranquility Station in the next ten minutes. All those going ashore should assemble in the hangar immediately.”

“That’s our cue to leave,” said Cole as he opened a panel on the wall and deactivated the failsafe to prevent the pod from being launched without clearance by the ship’s computer. Next, he reprogrammed the pod to allow a manual launch. Cole smiled when the pod’s door opened and the alarm didn’t go off. As far as the people on the bridge were concerned, the escape craft was still working as it should. Designed to hold fifteen people, an escape pod could be programmed to land on a planet’s surface or act as a life raft for several days, giving the crew time to be rescued.

“Where did you learn that little trick?” asked Sheridan, following his friend inside the pod.
 

“After a few drinks, a friend of mine once bet me that I couldn’t hotwire an escape pod. He lost and I won a case of Scotch, which in my younger days did not last very long.”

Both had changed into high-altitude jump clothing. Built to withstand the bitter cold, the suits had slender rebreathers built into them to allow the jumper to breath during the long descent. While Cole inputted the craft’s flight plan, Sheridan moved over to a window and looked outside. He smiled when he saw the blue glow of the Earth below them. After over a year away fighting the Kurgans, it was a welcome sight. Just off to their left was the Tranquility Station, a mid-sized city in space. Built like a giant spinning wheel with arms that connected to a tall central hub, the spaceport was home to over a quarter of a million people. There were dozens of docking ports spread throughout the spaceport. Sheridan grimaced when he looked below the station and spotted three carriers and more than twenty of the fleet’s larger capital ships either in the spacedock or waiting their turn to be repaired. The fight to hold onto the outer colonies was not going as well as he had thought.
 

“Okay, I’m done,” announced Cole.

“What’s our flight plan?”

Cole moved over by the window. Below them, they could see the glare from the enormous solar-power plants covering most of what had been the desolate regions of the Arabian Desert. It combined with two other ones in the Gobi and Sahara to supply power to billions of people around the world.
 

“Okay, Captain, here’s the skinny. When we begin our next orbit of the planet, I’ll activate the automatic countdown. If I’ve timed it just right, we’ll be shot out over the Sea of Japan. The pod will then enter the atmosphere and steer us toward Mongolia. Five minutes into our flight, I’ll open the outer doors and out we go. Everything has been programmed into your jump gear. All you need to do is put your helmet on and follow me down. We should land safely deep inside Siberia.”

“I guess I’ll take your word for it. Just in case we get split up, where are we going, and who is it we are going to see?”

 
Cole reached over and closed the door sealing them inside before taking a seat. “The city we are heading for is called Irkutsk. If memory serves me, he lives somewhere to the north of the city. The man we will need to speak to is called Vladimir Bodrov. Although I doubt that he uses his real name in public.”

“Wonderful, we’re looking for a ghost and I don’t speak a word of Russian,” grumbled Sheridan to himself as he sat down and buckled himself into his seat.

A minute later, the
Sydney
docked with the spaceport. Outside the sun’s light faded as they crossed the terminator and traveled into darkness.

Cole looked over at Sheridan. “Time to put your helmet on.”

Both men placed their helmets on. On the glass, a head’s-up display appeared. Sheridan could see counters for his altitude, speed, and direction.

Cole said, “As soon as we launch I’m going to to depressurize the pod so we’ll be able to open the outside door safely when we’re over Mongolia.”

Sheridan nodded. His stomach felt queasy. He wasn’t afraid of heights, he just wasn’t keen on jumping out of a perfectly good pod when he didn’t have to.

“Hang on,” said Cole a split second before the pod shot away from the
Sydney
and sped toward the atmosphere.

Inside, Sheridan turned his head, looked out the window, and saw the lights from the west coast of North America race past. Soon, the lights from Pacifica, a man-made island in the Pacific Ocean, came into view. Home to over five million inhabitants, Pacifica was known as one of the premier eco-tourist destination in the world. Before he knew it, the pod was being buffeted as it entered the atmosphere traveling eleven kilometers a second. He could see the red glow coming from the heat shield underneath of the craft as it descended through the atmosphere. Before long, the craft’s engines kicked, lowering its speed of descent and steering it toward Mongolia.

“One minute,” announced Cole.

Sheridan took a deep breath and thought back to his parachute training at the Academy. It had been a three-week course jammed in between semesters. All infantry officers had to take it. Without it, a candidate couldn’t graduate. Sheridan had passed the course but hadn’t jumped since then. He silently prayed that he remembered what he had been taught.

Cole unbuckled his harness and made his way to the door, as did Sheridan.

“Captain, I know this isn’t your favorite thing to do so take ahold of my belt and we’ll go together,” said Cole.

“Yeah, thanks, sounds good,” replied Sheridan, grabbing his friend’s belt with his right hand.