Hex leapt over the table that held Ethan. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the man who held the great curse landed squarely atop the grenade a half-second before it exploded.
***
There was a concussive thud as explosive materials collided against Hex’s torso, ripping into his chest armor with fatal vengeance. Covering the grenade absorbed the blast but not the sound, and Blake’s eardrums rang from the piercing shriek of the detonation.
Still strapped to the table, he was unable to cover his ears. He opened and closed his jaw to clear the buzzing that was making his head spin.
Slow seconds passed and normal sounds returned to him with clarity: the crackling of boots stepping on busted concrete, and Jackman shouting commands into the microphone inside his facemask.
When Blake opened his eyes he saw Reaper kneeling at Hex’s side, checking for a pulse that he knew would not be there. He spoke into the headset again. “Zodiac, Priest, Worm. Hex is down. Repeat Hex is down.”
A muted yell of response filtered out from Jackman’s earpiece, but Blake couldn’t distinguish whose voice it was.
Jackman barked back, “No. He isn’t ambulatory. We’ve got a KIA. Call it in, Worm.”
Blake knew what that meant, and he saw Ethan had registered the same information. Killed in Action. A demonstration of pure sacrifice had just been made on everyone’s behalf. Blake had witnessed this before and it never ceased to bring him spiritually to his knees. He gave a silent prayer of thanks to Hex.
Hex’s words from what seemed like eons ago came to him again, “You die, and you die alone.” At this very moment Blake couldn’t disagree with that more; Ethan, Tinman, Jackman, and Blake were all here with the fallen soldier.
As Tinman removed the surgical tubing and cut the straps that held Ethan, he gave quick glances at the door in expectation of a Russian counter-attack. When the last binding was sliced clean, Tinman stowed his knife in the sheath attached to his chest and placed one of his side arms on the table for Ethan. He kept the entrance covered with his rifle as he moved sideways to Blake’s table. In a quick motion, the knife was back out. He cut Blake free, keeping his hold on the rifle and his gaze on the front of the room as he worked. Then he went to the door.
Blake sat up, pushed off the ties – felt the tingling in his fingers as blood rushed back – and held his hand out for a weapon. Jackman was at his side then, handing a nasty looking handgun to Blake.
Crouching on one knee, Tinman stared down the sights of his weapon, waiting for intruders. “Where are we regrouping, sir?”
Jackman at first seemed deaf to the question, but he glanced at his watch and answered, “We’re not.” His voice was an echo behind the mask. “Time is running out. They’re going to jump.” He gestured to the gun Blake now held. “That has a thirty round mag, it’s fully automatic and rounds can go quick. Don’t waste them.”
Then the head commando bent over Hex again, removing the sidearm holster and ammunition from the dead man’s undamaged lower body. Hex’s rifle had been blown to pieces, and Jackman kicked it aside in a fit of savage frustration at losing one of his men. Then his military bearing returned, and he calmed instantly. He went to Blake and strapped the weapon and ammo pouches around his waist.
“That was smart work you did with the tracker. How’d you pull that off?” Jackman said, not looking at Blake as he fastened the straps.
Blake tapped his jaw. “I had it implanted in a fake molar. When we were taken, I pulled it out and stuck it inside my leg wound. For a second there, I thought it hadn’t worked.”
“Well, it led us to their base of operations. I don’t think we would have found this place any other way.”
“Listen, I know we had our differences before and said a few choice words to each other, but …” Blake faltered. Was he about to apologize? It wasn’t something he did often, and dammit, he hated to say he was sorry to this turd, but the man and his team had saved their lives. So perhaps Blake owed it to him.
Jackman spoke before Blake could finish. “Never happened.”
“What?” Blake frowned at the other man, thrown off guard by the abrupt response.
“The conversation you had – or think you had – with me never happened. It was from a different timestream. Obviously, you changed something along the way, but in this here and now I only met you five minutes ago.”
This was an outcome Blake hadn’t expected, and with that, he was off the hook. There was no apology needed for something that, in Jackman’s experience, never happened. A sudden grin crossed Blake’s face, but it disappeared the instant Jackman looked at him with those green-hued sockets that seemed to burn right through a person.
“What?” the commando asked.
“Nothing.” A lie, of course. A daydream that he could go back and punch the living shit out of Jackman when he’d had the chance had been playing in his imagination. Damn – I could have gotten away with it.
“Take Hex’s body armor,” Tinman said to Blake. “It’s damaged but still better than nothing.”
“Give it to him.” Blake pointed at Ethan. “It’ll do more good on him.”
Tinman shrugged as if to say, Your funeral.
Jackman spoke into his microphone. “Zodiac. Where are you at?”
“We’re headed down a stairway,” came the static reply. “Should be plot point Echo on the map.”
Reaper held his arm up and pressed some buttons on the strange gauntlet-like object wrapped around his forearm. Then a magic show happened, the likes of which Blake had only seen once before, in Wallace’s office. A single blue light beamed up about ten inches above the apparatus, then folded open and spread out. A transparent, three dimensional map of a building was displayed in mid-air.
Blake saw the astonishment on his twin’s face as he stood watching in awed silence.
Jackman twisted a dial and the floating building rotated on an invisible axis. Then the field of view zoomed in and around. On the futuristic construct three red dots blipped and flickered, all moving in unison down a flight of steps. Jackman touched the floating image with his fingers, flicking them back and forth, and the screen panned left, then right, then backward in response. Now they saw another set of dots – stationary, but blinking as well. Then the diagram scanned back from Jackman’s hand motions and in a flash the view retreated to the exterior of the structure. More quick taps and the image folded up like the closing of a book, and shot back down into the wrist gadget like a car antennae retracting.
“They’re headed to the reactor room,” Jackman said. “We’ll take Sierra stairwell and flank them. We need to stop the jump.”
“What if we don’t?” Ethan asked.
“I’m not sure. I guess it depends on where they go. If they’re foolish enough to repeat things, we could just try again if we fail, now that we know their base of operations.”
“Try again?” Blake and Ethan said in unison.
“Sure. We can send troops back to this location – I don’t know, perhaps a month before this.”
Blake’s head began to ache again. He was growing to hate this habit of considering possible outcomes and adjusted retakes in the timeline. “So what do we do?”
Jackman went to the door. “We make it simple. Stop them now.”
65 The Expendables Knew
April 26, 1986, 12:44 AM
They rounded the corner of the hallway just outside the torture room. There were no Russians in sight. This singular detail puzzled Blake enough to ask, “Where the hell are they?”
“Probably setting up an ambush along the way,” Tinman said, and Ethan nodded in agreement.
Then the real answer to his question came. It wasn’t a spoken response, but a dull humming that rose and seemed to emanate from the floor beneath them. It intensified slowly but at a steady pace.
Jackman stopped, listening to the sound, his head cocked at an angle. There was a short lull of silence, and he said, “They’re firing up the generators. We don’t ha
ve much time.” He punched something on the armband and brought up the holograph of the building again for a moment before shutting it down.
At Jackman’s signal, the makeshift squad sprinted for the south side stairwell. Blake could only follow at a hobbled run, bringing up the rear as the others paved the way. Having a wounded leg and missing an arm weren’t complete game changers, though; the weapon he held was the equalizer in the equation. Still, it would have been nice to have the full use of all limbs.
Down the winding stairwell they went. A few foolish Russians standing guard were shot down; having the high ground gave Jackman and his group the advantage.
They reached the bottom and were proceeding through a door into another long corridor when a hail of bullets peppered them in a sudden, loud burst.
Jackman was hit four times, three along his protective body armor in the chest and the forth nicking his left shoulder. He fell back and rolled to safety behind a large pipe. Tinman took multiple bullets too, all shots landing in his armor. Ethan lucked out, having come in from behind the others.
Still pulling up the rear, Blake hadn’t yet crossed the threshold of the doorway. When the shots came he used the door for cover as he returned fire. He pulled the trigger and almost lost control of the weapon as rounds exiting the chamber faster than any handgun he’d ever used. Jackman had said it was automatic, but this was ridiculous. He was already empty, after pulling the trigger for only two seconds. Two seconds. It reminded him of his first experience at sex. Had he even hit anything?
He pulled the gun back and stared at its smoking barrel. Heat emanated from the slide like a hot poker and the scent of gunpowder rose into his nostrils.
However brief his gunfire was, it gave a window for Jackman, Tinman, and Ethan. The three of them sprinted forward, stopped, found targets and began plugging off rounds.
Jackman, with his face of Death, channeled his inner Reaper and claimed life after life. Blake lost count after a few seconds.
Tinman was just as deadly. Blake saw the commando’s bullets catch one of the Russians in a tight pattern around the heart, followed by a single shot to the head. The high velocity round ripped through the man’s cheek and exploded out of the back of his skull. The trained soldier moved to the next targets with ease, felling at least three more men.
Ethan was armed with a rapid fire pistol similar to Blake’s. His accuracy was not up to par with Wallace’s men, but he was lethal all the same, picking off the soldiers Jackman and Tinman ignored.
Within ten seconds, the hallway was cleared of hostiles, but now littered with the dead. They had to step over the unmoving figures like football players at slow-motion practice jumping through tires.
“How are they going down with shots to the chest?” Blake asked, remembering how Ethan’s gunshots in the hospital did little damage to the Russians.
“Explosive rounds,” Jackman said, turning to face Blake. “Now reload; we have to keep moving.”
Blake ejected his magazine, put the now cooled gun under his arm to hold it tight, and inserted a fresh clip. Fire in bursts next time.
One of the Russians on the floor stirred. Tinman put him down for good with a single round, his emotions detached; just a menial, everyday task.
Jackman called up the digital map again for reference, then closed it. “Our target is just beyond those doors. On the other side will be the rest of their group, all of them loaded for bear. I feel confident in saying we may not all make it out alive.”
He paused then, piercing each of them with the green eyes of his mask, gauging their reaction to this pessimistic outlook. “But also on the other side is everything we’ve fought for up until this point. We hold in our hands a moment to change history and the future.”
As if to reiterate the importance of those words, the roaring of the machine inside the room ahead changed to a lower, but faster, octave.
“Zodiac, Priest, Worm,” Jackman said into his headset, “Provide a distraction. We’ll be entering from the south side on your mark.”
Blake, Ethan, Tinman, and Reaper waited, each passing moment feeling like eons. Jackman and Tinman must have heard a countdown in their headsets because they both braced a moment before the blessed sound rang out. Concussive blasts vibrated the walls and sporadic gunfire joined in the wild cacophony. A symphony of destruction.
They entered the room then, Ethan and Jackman taking cover in one direction, Blake and Tinman in another.
The sudden breach earlier must have taken many of the facility’s troops by surprise because the ones inside this room were not wearing full protective suits like the previous men. Or they were reserve soldiers stationed here with only firearms on the assumption that the interlopers would never make it this far. A fatal mistake.
Blake continued to absorb the scene and noise around him – the computer terminals, the cables coursing across the floor like thick black anacondas, the blinking lights on the walls beyond, the whining of the reactor and its steady pulsing beat. His eyes rested on the round platform in the center of the room. It was raised off the ground with three steps leading to the top. Gernot stood in its center, his mad eyes darting about.
Seconds were ticking down on the machine’s display overhead. The moment Gernot jumped back, all might be lost. In fact, Blake knew that it would. Things had changed in this timestream. He couldn’t let Gernot fuck it all up now.
It seemed they would never make it across the expanse of the room before the Russian left. Despite the opposition’s lack of protective armor, there were so many troops positioned between here and the target that even with the enemy’s force flanked, their numbers were too great.
Tinman spun away from the cover of his safety, firing off at least nine rounds. Then his body gave a strange lurch and came crashing back down beside Blake. Dead. His armor had been no protection against a well-placed bullet, and Tinman had received several. His helmet was scarred with deflections that must have hurt like hell. The fatal injury was to his neck, where – to allow for mobility – the armor was not as thick as the rest. The wound squirted arterial blood in an arc above him. His head lolled to the side, and his legs twitched uncontrollably.
Blake pulled off the dead commando’s head gear, pushed the button he’d seen Jackman do many times before, and yelled as loud as he could into the mic, “Smoke screen.”
Reaper was still picking off strays in the Russian crowd when he ducked down, snapped to cover, and saw Tinman’s body. Then he nodded in response to Blake’s words and grabbed an orb-like device from his belt, unclipped it, and tossed it into the air. There was a pop then a fizz, as the room began to fill with an almost solid smoke. “Go Thermal!” Jackman barked into his headset.
Blake donned Tinman’s helmet. Everything became green and bright white, and he couldn’t see anything. He fumbled with a knob on the side. Nothing. “I need some help here,” he bellowed.
He felt a presence close to him, prayed it was Jackman, and just like that, he could see. The outline of objects in the room came into focus, hued in ocular blue. Pipes that lined the walls shone with orange and red, their super-heated gases providing the illuminating display.
He charged toward the group of Russians, not seeing the smoke that should be in front of him, but taking it on faith that the curtain of cover was there. Humanoid-like figures ran around and in front of him like people covered in flames, their images a similar orange and red hue as the pipes lining the walls. This was business made easy; he was standing right in front of the Russian soldiers – perhaps two or three feet – yet he remained unseen.
He readied the gun, fired calmly and easily, and one of the Sons of Stalin dropped. When the man fell, a psychedelic looking red splotch showed up on the ground in Blake’s field of vision. The splotch began to change color almost immediately, morphing into a light blue, then purple, on the freezing floor.
Blake continued on, dropping more Russians as he went. When he shot off his last round, he ditched the weapon and used
his knife. This was just as easy – running through the blanket of white smoke, slitting jugular veins, or thrusting the blade between ribs, aiming for the heart. He hooked one man around the neck with his stumped arm and dug the blade deep into the man’s kidney, then slashed outward, spilling him open.
Every step carried him closer to Gernot. In moments he was at the base of the stairs. The lone, reddish-orange figure stood on the platform, waiting to be sent back to 1948 or who knew where.
Blake clutched the knife in his palm, psycho-style, and charged up the steps in Gernot’s direction. The man seemed to sense he was there and caught Blake’s arm before the knife could land in his neck. The two of them fell, twisting, rolling, and tangling in a nest of wires that were hooked into the time traveling watch around Gernot’s wrist.
Blake managed to get his knife hand free and aimed for Gernot’s chest. The Russian again seemed to read his mind, and Blake’s weapon clanged in a useless strike against the platform.
Gernot was a formidable foe, and Blake wondered if he had the use of both hands whether he could still best this man one on one.
The Russian pinned Blake’s arm, so he aimed for a head butt. Gernot’s other arm came up, catching Blake’s head before it could connect.
Gernot’s not just a master assassin – he’s a motherfucking mind reader! This guy was predicting his every move. It was eerie.
He felt Gernot’s hand behind his head, yanking on the mask. His neck was twisted back and he heard Gernot growl in his ear. Blake rotated his head, turned sharply back in the other direction and the helmet ripped clean off.
Only then did he realize he was no longer within the cloud of protection, and he never had been since he ran up the steps. The smoke screen was indeed a wall of cloud, but it ended just beyond the stairs leading to the platform. Gernot was no clairvoyant after all. The Russian had been able to see every attack coming. What a waste of time!