Black Box (5 page)

MacDonald came up behind her. “What the fuck
happened to Bell?”

“Came down the chute. Got caught in a
crossfire.”

MacDonald let escape a strange sound, then
started forward into the tunnel.

“Where are you going?” Rodrigo challenged,
getting in his way.

He looked at her. “Payback. We’re gonna take
it out of their asses, right?”

She nodded. “You know it. On my order,
though. Not like a wild fucking animal.”

For just a moment, he looked as if he was
about to defy her. That would have been bad. They were in a tight
spot as it was and she didn’t need a fight with one of her own. He
stood down, though. Maybe he knew better. Maybe he was just well
trained.

“Is everyone down?” she asked.

“Everyone but Beckett,” he said. “He’s
holding out while we clear to a safe distance.”

“Why him?” she said a little too
sharply.

“Why not him?” MacDonald shot back.

Because he’s worth more than all of us
put together,
she wanted to say, but didn’t.

“You got something you want to say about
it?” MacDonald asked. “Beckett more important than Bell?”

And there it was. She had put her opinion of
Beckett up against MacDonald’s feelings for Bell. In all fairness,
though, who could have known that MacDonald could have feelings for
anyone?

Before the situation could escalate any
further, there was movement behind them as the others crowded
forward.

“Beckett?” she called back, her eyes still
on MacDonald.

“Right here,” he answered.

“Good. Let’s wrap this up.”

Behind them there was a giant explosion that
rocked the whole cavern. Chunks of ice cracked off of the walls and
ceiling. Dust and chips rained down on them as they fought to
steady themselves. As Rodrigo had expected, the pirate attackers
had dropped explosives into the hole to try and get whoever was
left. They would soon follow.

These were good pirates.

No more screwing around.

Bell had been armed with two incendiary
grenades. It was pretty close quarters for those little jewels, but
they didn’t have much time before they were squeezed. She also
found three proximity mines in Bell’s pack and handed one to
Icknor.

“Go back and set this at the mouth of the
tunnel. I want it far enough away so that they won’t set it off
just by coming down the chute. It’s a fucking waste if we just get
one of them.”

Icknor nodded and moved off.

“Hit the deck,” she whispered to the squad
as she pulled the fuse on an incendiary grenade. Then she tossed it
into the faint glow ahead of them and hit the deck herself. There
was another huge explosion and the tunnel in front of them burst
into flame. The icy cold turned to inferno in an instant. The
soldiers of the
Titan
pressed their prostrate bodies into
the wall as the heat blanketed them, wilting their protective gear
and clothing. It took only a moment for the whole conflagration to
die down. The squad was rattled but unharmed. Cummings, in
particular, hated incendiary grenades. Even the idea of using them
on an enemy gave him the shakes.

Rodrigo was the first on her feet, rushing
forward into the larger chamber, determined to kill whatever hadn’t
been burnt. She needn’t have been in such a rush. The room was a
large stakeout room. It was defensible to an extent, fortified
emplacements in four positions along the walls and a cannon that
was concealed from view if you were in the passage, but right there
facing you as soon as you stepped into the room. There had been
seven men in the room, all heavily armed, all ready for anything.
Anything, that is, except a burst of flame. The smell burned worse
than the flames had. What kind of maniac would use an incendiary
grenade in close quarters?

These men had clearly never heard of
Anabelle Rodrigo.

“Enemy behind us!” Alraune shouted.

What the hell?

That proximity mine was meant to be a
warning as much as it was meant to take out the enemy. Either they
had managed to defuse it or they had tripped it during the
explosion. Of course, there was always the possibility that Icknor
had botched the job. That, though, was unlikely. No one botched
jobs under Rodrigo’s command. It was unhealthy.

“Fall back!” she called out

They could all turn and fight but she was
sure they weren’t completely clear ahead. There were two more
passages shooting out of the room. Their entrances were on either
wall, dug out between each pair of emplacements. When Beckett
appeared, she showed him the cannon. It was scorched but not
melted. The barrel looked intact and they could only pray about the
trigger. The piece that allowed it to swivel had been fused into
one ball of solid metal making it useless against any approach but
from the front.

“Which way?” Beckett asked, indicating the
side passages.

“Neither.” She put Alraune, MacDonald,
Icknor, and Cummings into gun emplacements while she and Beckett
dragged Knudson back behind the cannon. Bell had been left behind.
They would recover her body later. Rodrigo took two flash bombs and
two grenades from Bell’s pack and stashed them into the pockets of
her parka. She gave two more of each to Beckett.

The cannon was computer operated and she had
about seven seconds to figure out how to operate it. A lifetime
would never have been enough so she hefted her rifle, checked the
clip, and balanced it over the shield. Beckett got right to work on
trying to crack the cannon’s code.

“Forget it,” Rodrigo ordered sourly. “How
many pirates are there?”

He thought a moment. “Four or five. Six at
most. We hit back pretty hard.”

Even odds. She ordered him to line up his
gun the way she had. “You stay the fuck out of harm’s way,” she
said to him.

Beckett furrowed his brow at the remark. How
were you supposed to stay out of harm’s way when you were infantry
in combat?

They waited. Knudson was on the floor
moaning softly to himself. There was pain in those sounds but more
than that there was anger. The upper body wound was preventing him
from firing a gun which left him feeling helpless, like a child in
the care of adults. Alraune had a heavy rifle balanced on her
shoulder, sticking out of the gun emplacements. She was just a
baby, Alraune, but she was hard and callous. And she was a good
shot, getting better. On the opposite side, to counter balance her,
was Cummings. Cummings held two hand guns, one in each hand. For
him, a rifle was out of the question. He was an expert with a
pistol and had been since the age of nine. The power of a rifle was
no good if you missed. With a pistol, Cummings never missed.
MacDonald chewed on his lower lip, something simmering beneath the
surface. Rodrigo worried about him. Icknor was still trembling a
bit. He didn’t like being holed up in a place where so many had
just been burned to death. What if the pirates had the same
idea?

But they were an ambush party, which meant
they were traveling light and were armed with weapons designed to
be more accurate than powerful. If they had any explosives at all,
it would be a grenade on a belt. The shields in each area, as
scorched and melted as they were, would protect them from the worst
of a grenade.

The first pirate came through in a spray of
bullets. They were each tempted to duck down, but the shields did
the job. Alraune, supported only by her own two feet, took aim and
fired. The pirate did a little dance before being smacked to the
ground by the force of the bullets. Two more pirates filed in
behind the first. The lead was firing while the rear slipped off to
the side. He did not have a gun. Instead, he found his way around
the side of the nearest emplacement and grappled with Alraune. He
had a long serrated knife. To her credit, Alraune gritted her teeth
and pushed into hand to hand with no fear. She was outweighed and
overmatched. She was the most incompetent brawler Rodrigo had ever
met in the UESF.

“
Cummings!”

The little man changed his aim and fired
with his right hand. He missed Alraune by a hairsbreadth, taking
the pirate in the only exposed portion of his body, his shoulder.
At first there was no effect. Then the pirate noticed the blood
trickling down his arm and realized he’d been shot. He must have
been more shocked than anything else. After all, what kind of a
maniac would fire into hand to hand combat? But Rodrigo and her
bunch were a group of very particular kinds of maniacs.

Icknor pushed forward to aid Alraune,
knowing that Cummings wasn’t going to get another shot. As he
moved, more pirates came from the passage extending away on his
side. He was tackled by a burly throwback, earring and all, who’d
stripped away his cold weather gear so that he could maneuver
better.

With a howling curse, Rodrigo detached
herself from behind the cannon and charged forward. MacDonald had
flipped around to cover the last tunnel and he was firing so there
was action on that side as well. Trapped rats. Here, it became
necessary for Anabelle Rodrigo to demonstrate what made her the
best in the business. Her eyes and ears took in the whole scene and
graphed out a schematic inside of her head. There was one pirate
still firing his weapon. Another was wounded, but still on the
offensive against Alraune. Two more were coming in from the back
entrance. Two had come from Icknor’s side. One of them had grabbed
him and another was coming around the melee with a weapon.
MacDonald was firing into the last passage. She had no count on the
number of enemies there. She doubted as if MacDonald did
either.

Her first priority was to take out the
firing pirate. His attention was elsewhere but she couldn’t blame
him. It was difficult to defend in so crowded and small a room. If
someone had come after her, she’d probably have been caught off
guard, too. She cracked his goggles with the butt of her rifle and
pulled his feet out from under him. When he was down, scrambling to
recover, she pulled a flash bomb out of her pocket, tripped the
fuse, and dropped it to the ground.

“
Flash!”
she cried out, throwing both
arms over her eyes. It seemed unlikely that any of her squad had
heard her warning but if the pirates were blinded, it wouldn’t
matter. The darkness behind her arms glowed blue white, the flash
reflecting off of her gear. It lasted only an instant and then she
was moving again. Of everyone in the room, only MacDonald wasn’t
temporarily blinded. He was up against a wall changing his clip
when she opened her eyes. Then he slid back around into the open,
firing again into the corridor. There was no return fire so he had
either killed them all or they were taking cover.

Icknor and his new playmate were still
grappling, as were Alraune and hers. The pirate on the floor was
groping around for a weapon. The other two that had come through
were frozen in place, guns out, wondering whether or not they
should just open fire on the room. Rodrigo took them both down
before they could even see spots. Then she dealt with the one on
the ground at her feet. With all of the shooters gone, it was easy
to use her knife on those that had closed on Icknor and Alraune.
She went to Alraune first because she was the most likely to falter
in a straight fight. Icknor could hold his own, even against an
opponent of such size. When it was all over, five pirates lay dead
on the floor and MacDonald had stopped shooting. The air was warm
and damp, the walls beginning to melt around them.

“How many did you get MacDonald?”

“Beats hell out of me.”

Beckett was kneeling by Knudson. “He’s
passed out.”

They were wounded, but not as badly as the
pirates. Even if they’d been falling apart, they wouldn’t have been
able to go back. They needed to find the other entrance to the
hideout. They needed to expedite the process.

Rodrigo ordered Beckett, Alraune, and
Cummings down into the far tunnel while she took MacDonald to
inspect his handiwork. She didn’t want him out of her sight. Icknor
was to recover Bell and remain with her and Knudson.

For all of MacDonald’s shooting, there were
only three men at the end of the corridor. Two were dead and one
was dying. They put him out of his misery and continued on. Rodrigo
was concerned as it wound around to the right, but it eventually
came back left which was the direction in which they wanted to go.
She expected two more main rooms, one for storage and one for
control, with a scattering of barracks. Now that they weren’t busy
fighting for their lives, she could see where the pirates had
burrowed into the rock to place lights and heating filaments. It
wasn’t warm in the tunnels, but it wasn’t frigid either. Their slow
progress uncovered a number of ambush points, none of which were
occupied. That was a good sign. There was no sign of any barracks.
At last, they could see the end of the passageway as it opened up
into a large room. At the far end of the room, they could just
barely make out another entrance. With a little luck, Beckett and
his group would approach from that end.

Taking the second flash bomb from her
pocket, Rodrigo tripped the fuse and tossed it into the room. She
and MacDonald turned away, counted off, and then charged. Inside
they found two blinded men, firing wildly. A third was behind them
and groping for the handle of a door that was set into the wall on
the right. Rodrigo took down the two armed men. MacDonald took a
shot at the third just as he found the door and hit him in the
shoulder. The pirate fell through the opening door and into the
room beyond. They charged after him.

The outer room was storage. They barely
caught a glimpse of foodstuffs and blankets in addition to whatever
had been looted from unfortunate ships. The second room was the
control room. It was smaller with a square table and some wooden
chairs. There was a second battered table against the wall and two
computers wired up to batteries. Other batteries were stacked
against the wall. The pirate was busy erasing the hard drives when
the two soldiers burst in. He turned and raised his good arm, the
wounded one hanging loosely at his side.