Who was he kidding, extracted? I knew what that signified. “What, Delta Force falls out of the sky and caps us all? No thanks.” As if this bunch of multinational nimrods could be Ukrainians. Korunov actually was, the real McCoyovich. After the fat man, Nichols with his Paki cigarettes was the safest and sanest of the bunch. There was a reason our little crowd wasn’t out eating snakes on the front line.
“No-risk deal,” said Hannaday impassively.
“That deal ain’t been written yet.”
He folded his hands in his lap, a deliberate gesture straight out of interrogation training. “I’ll be sitting here with you the whole time.”
Well, I could always cap him when the shit went south. Because a situation like he wanted to set up would without question run for the border before it was all over with.
And it ain’t like I was walking out of here.
“Fuck you very much,” I told Korunov. “I guess we’re playing. I’ll go get the boys fired up.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Just some fucking lies. I got a million of ’em.” I grabbed my Stinger rack, waved it at Batugan. “You might want to slap a Band-Aid on Ming the Merciless over there before he bleeds out.”
“Don’t need him anymore,” said Hannaday.
I didn’t let the door hit me on the ass. Paymaster and contract man could gas all they wanted. I’d chosen my poison.
* * *
It took a little while to get a camp meeting together. Beier, the South African, was somewhere sleeping off a three-day bender, while the Belgians were off dust-wrestling and greasing each other down. Those two boys didn’t much like being interrupted at play, so I sent Nichols after them. I rousted the rest of the crew to find Beier.
We wound up in the kitchen ger. It was too damned windy to talk outside. I didn’t want to be near the Antonov—for several reasons—nor near Hannaday and Korunov. The Belgians were madder than hell and Beier was propped up against a stack of North Korean beer beneath a line of curing mutton fatback that kept dripping on him. There was a potbellied stove, thankfully cold, stacks of MREs and Chinese canned goods, and us.
I picked my nails with a Bowie knife till everyone quieted down. That was so fucking theatrical it made me want to puke, but this was the kind of shit that worked on these boys. Visible weapons and getting straight to the point.
“Listen up, geniuses. We’re stewed and screwed here. Korunov’s been forced to accept a transfer of our contracts. We’re getting out soon, but there’s one more task.”
They groaned and cursed in seven languages.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. We got to run a fake hostage situation with a drop-in, pretend to be Ukrainians.” Commonwealth of Independent States political bullshit. My guess was we’d be labeled later as Chechens. The ex-Sovs saw them in every shadow the way Americans saw Arabs. “So if you’ve got a Slavic accent, start using it. If you don’t got one, start practicing.”
“What happens if we say no?” It was Nichols, speaking quietly for a change. Somehow everyone was suddenly listening.
“You’re free to walk home any time.”
“We got return bonds.” That was Echeverria, the ETA guy for whom all of Europe had gotten too hot. I didn’t figure anybody Hannaday swung in here would cop to a Basque accent.
“Yeah. If we can cash ’em. You see an ATM around here, Etchy?”
Nichols again: “So what do we do?”
“Put ’em through the usual course, just don’t kill ’em. Scare the hell out of whoever this is. And…” I glanced at Beier, who appeared to be snoring. “… they keep all their bits and pieces attached and intact.”
I figured the marching orders would change between now and then, several times most likely, but I also figured the bits and pieces part would still apply.
“What happens at the end?”
“An extraction.”
They all got real quiet.
“Staged, boys. And we’ll know they’re coming.”
“I fire no blanks,” said one of the Belgians. Everybody laughed except me.
“Think about it. Unless you can grow a truck under you or sprout wings and fly, we’re pretty much stuck.”
“Knock over the Antonov right now,” said Nichols. “And split.”
“Nope.” I pointed the knife at him. “First off, a couple of stray rounds and that plane’s toast. You know what a piece of shit it is. Second off, they don’t keep no fucking maps on that thing. Three or four of us know enough to get it flying. None of us know the terrain. Something happens to the pilot, you want to navigate the Gobi from the air by eyeball and dead reckoning? Third, I’d bet money Hannaday’s got surprises inside that plane right now, just in case any one of us is a smartass.”
“Hannaday?” Nichols didn’t miss much, and he’d heard a lot of my stories.
“Yep. Mr. Congeniality himself.”
“And you’re going for this?”
Hell no, I wanted to say. What I did say was, “You got a better idea?”
No one had an answer for that question. After a full minute of silence, I put my knife away.
* * *
An hour later Hannaday had me and Nichols on the plane trolling for new fish from five hundred feet.
Antonov 17’s a funny bird. Looks almost like a kid’s drawing of an aircraft, twin props, high wing. Not that big, and a slow fucker to boot, but they really did keep flying forever. The seats had been designed for Chinese grandmothers, not American mercs with incipient butt spread. Tiny aluminum rails with webbing between, idiot cousin to the common lawn chair. Air Munchkin. How the hell a Sov platoon in full kit ever fit inside these cans I couldn’t imagine.
I didn’t bother with the seat belt.
Hannaday hadn’t relieved me of my Smitty, though the Stinger rack was back at camp. Nichols was sucking down another of those Paki horse turds as he fondled the barrel of his Mossberg jungle gun—a 40mm automatic shotgun that should have had Hannaday sweating.
The Gobi lumbered along outside the oval windows, low and slow. The pilot was looking for something.
Someone.
Curiosity finally got the better of my common sense. “We’re doing a pickup out here?”
“Special delivery,” said Hannaday, surprising me. He wasn’t much given to sharing information.
“We’re a thousand klicks from anything.”
“And that, my gimpy friend, is precisely why we’re here.” His eyes narrowed to steel-gray slits. There was another reason he was here, as opposed to somewhere else. Hannaday thought he could run me. He’d done it before.
He was doing it now.
Fuck him. I didn’t want to die of old age walking out of the south Gobi, but fuck him.
Then the intercom crackled to life. The pilot said something fast and tonal—Cantonese, I thought, not that I could follow it. The Antonov banked hard and picked up speed as the engines coughed a bloom of black smoke.
Whatever it was we were looking for, we’d found it.
Hannaday just smiled. “Ready for some ladder work?”
Ladder work? Out here?
* * *
And damn me if we didn’t bounce to a landing somewhere not much different from anywhere else. There were cloud shadows on the ground, and a small herd of yaks in the distance. That meant Mongolians somewhere—their animals had a wide range, but they weren’t left completely unattended.
“Out,” said Hannaday. “Open the cargo bay.”
Nichols popped the door seals in a wash of fuel reek, then dropped the aluminum boarding ladder. I made my way carefully after him, one step at a time on my bad legs.
It stank outside, of fire and something nasty-chemical. Hydrazine? Nichols was banging on the cargo hatch as I bent to look under the plane, scanning for the source of the reek.
I found it. “Holy fuck.”
Nichols was distracted. “What?”
Hannaday dropped down between us and knelt. “Nice.”
; The thing was half rounded, like a stubby bullet, and blackened all to hell. It sat on the flat side. Smoke curled off, dancing in the dry grass around the … the …
“Soyuz TMA-3 landing capsule,” said Hannaday. “Get the ladder. And stay the hell away from the bottom. There’s a gamma-ray emitter down there that will fry your nuts.”
Nichols had found this weird folding ladder, sort of halfway between a painter’s stepladder and a scaffold. He shouldered the Mossberg and dragged the ladder toward the Soyuz with that shiny-eyed focus I normally associated with an impending massacre.
Soyuz. We were dusting off a fucking spaceman. “Somebody’s looking for this.” I glanced at the sky for the fleet of Russian Hinds that must surely be in the air.
Hannaday laughed again. “Yeah, a couple of thousand klicks from here. Get the camo netting out of the hold, Allen.”
I got the camo netting.
* * *
Up close the capsule had that brutal precision so typical of Sov high tech. It could have been whittled from stone, then ground off. Reentry had done the thing no favors either. The surface was covered with burned streaks and pits. A round hatch stood open near the nose, from which lines of a parachute stretched out some few dozen yards across the grass. The smoking ground testified to the retro rockets that had soft-landed the capsule.
At that range the smell was worse, hydrazine and baked metal and some weird ozone thing. It made me wish for a breather mask. I dropped the mound of camo netting and sat on it.
Hannaday took the ladder and set it up against the blunt cone. The scaffold part fit across the top. Of course it did, I thought. He went straight for a little opening, pulled out something I would swear was a key, and went to work on the nose.
“Help me out, boys,” he said and he wrestled open a hatch.
Of course I didn’t shoot him. The Antonov pilot would have taken off without us.
Spy guy fished out a real live astronaut, someone small in a jumpsuit who couldn’t stand on his own feet. Nichols and I got the guy down the ladder, then Nichols took off for the Antonov with the space traveler in a fireman’s carry while Hannaday and I spread out the netting and covered the capsule. He didn’t bother to retrieve his ladder.
“Nice one.” I coughed through the reek. “You’re running a scam of epic proportions. I assume we’re nixing satellite surveillance here.”
Hannaday grinned around the curve of the capsule. “Everybody’s got to make a living, Allen.”
When I pulled myself back up the Antonov’s ladder, I found Nichols up front by the locked pilot’s door, staring back down the narrow aisle. He was pale and sweating.
“What?” I said. “You find Elvis there?”
“She’s a girl.”
I went and looked. Our spaceman was a girl, not more than fifteen, eyes bloodshot from reentry gees, barely moving even as she stared at us. Blue-black skin, shaved head.
A girl.
Who’d dropped out of the Central Asian sky in a Russian spaceship.
Kids on the International Space Station? Not fucking likely. Not in this lifetime.
“Hannaday,” I breathed, “who the fuck is she?”
* * *
The Antonov lumbered back to camp. Nichols sat in the back of the plane with his shotgun, watching the kid and cursing in an extended monotone, mostly Russian. I perched in a chair at the front of the cabin opposite Hannaday.
“Who is she?”
He had the familiar old Hannaday I’m-in-charge-here smile. “No one you’ll ever know, Allen.”
“Bullshit. We’re supposed to run her through live-fire countersecurity drills for a week? We’ll know her happy ass before we’re through.”
It was an unfortunate choice of words. Hannaday’s smile just tightened a little. “Don’t break off no bits and pieces. Not any of her bits.”
We were both thinking of Beier then, the man who would do anything to anyone.
“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”
He shrugged. “Speak Russian for a week, push her around, scare her, then let her be dusted off. Don’t put any bullets or body parts into her, you’ll be fine. What could be easier?”
My legs ached where he had shot me. “Who is she?”
“Ah-ah.” I swear to God he wagged his finger at me. “That would be telling.”
* * *
On landing Nichols bolted from the plane like he had the Tehran trots. That meant the girl’s presence would be known to everyone in five minutes, tops. As if I could control that anyway.
Hannaday looked at me. “I don’t guess you’re going to carry her down the ladder, are you?”
“Got these old war wounds in my legs.”
He smiled, gathered the girl close to his chest, and made it down the ladder himself. Looking down from the door I seriously considered popping a cap in his crown, just as a public service. But then he’d drop that poor kid and where would we be?
Within moments there was a swirl of mercs, mostly barking in Russian or English with Peter Ustinov accents. Hannaday gave up the girl to them, shouting back in Russian about security and escape, then returned to the plane as I made it to the ground.
“Be good,” he told me.
“Fuck you.”
“Whatever gets you through the night.” He set his hands on the boarding ladder, then stopped. “Oh … Allen…?”
My hand strayed to the Smitty. “Yeah?”
“Do take good care of her.”
“Right.”
* * *
They poured Evian water and Mongolian vodka down that poor kid until she sputtered to life. Then the Belgians harangued her in an incomprehensible mix of Flemish and Russian for a while before dragging her outside. She wasn’t up to running around our improvised training course, so they hauled her to the firing range, Korunov trailing behind like a loose grenade.
Oh good, I thought, get the kid drunk then make her shoot.
Better than shooting at her.
Nichols pushed me back into the kitchen tent, where Beier was still sleeping standing up.
“He’s crazy.” Nichols’s voice was a strident hiss.
“Plane’s gone. You don’t have to whisper.”
“We run her through the course, we’ll kill her.”
“We’ve got a forty percent fatality rate as it is. Never bothered you before.”
Nichols looked around, taking a long, hard stare at Beier. The South African was snoring gently, mumbling on each exhalation. “She’s a fucking kid,” he said after a moment.
He knew something, I realized. Nichols knew something about this. “You’re inside this job, aren’t you?”
“No!” Nichols snapped. He glanced at Beier again, then down at the greasy, carpeted floor of the ger. “It’s … look, I’ve never…”
“Yeah?” My voice was getting harder than I wanted it to. I couldn’t lose control with Nichols. He was the closest thing I had to a friend in this chickenshit outfit, and God only knew I needed my friends right now.
“I never told anyone this,” Nichols said, still talking to the floor.
“Yeah?” Get to the fucking point.
“You know I was in Baku when the Barclay’s bombing went off, right?”
Baku? I couldn’t imagine what the hell Azerbaijan had to do with this. “No, actually, I didn’t know that.”
He met my eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen Nichols frightened. I could smell it on him.
“About three minutes before the bomb went off, I got a sudden headache. Like … like … a stab wound.” Deep breath, his chest shaking. “So I went outside for a smoke. Headache didn’t get better until I walked around the block. I headed back for my detail and…”
“Yeah?”
“Headache stabbed me when I got near the building. I turned around, walked away again. Headache left, bomb went off. Allen, if I’d stayed where I was supposed to be, I’d be dead right now.”
Both looney and tunes in one swe
et package. He was picking a hell of a time to crack up. “Okay…”
“No.” He was shaking now. “Listen, I’m not crazy. Three, four times in my life I’ve had that. Once as a kid, when the rattler got my brother instead of me. In Baku, with the bombing. Again in Mosul last year, right before the White Shrine Massacre.”
My neck was starting to prickle. “And?”
“That girl gives me a headache. Only this one’s a bullet, not a stabbing.”
Great. Terrific. Psychic-psycho mercenaries in the Gobi desert. Film at fucking eleven.
I should have popped that damned cap on Hannaday.
“Go get some sleep,” I told him, then summoned up my best soldier-Russian and went out to see how our spacegirl was doing with an AK-47 in her hands.
* * *
One of the Belgians, Henri VerMeirssen, pulled me out into the desert after dinner. “We must talk, mijn vriend.”
I was really looking forward to more headache stories. I went with him, though. Henri didn’t usually talk much, not to me.
“Okay,” I said about forty yards from the grave rows.
“Nichols, he has een spook gezien. Eh, seen a ghost, you would say.”
I stopped, looked Henri in the eyes. Even in the dusk, I could see the cold glint. He smelled faintly of rosewater and gunpowder, just like he always did. He wasn’t laughing.
“What?”
“I do not mean a corpse, a dead person. I mean to say, Nichols is very frightened. I have never seen him frightened. Where did Korunov send you on the Antonov?”
Spacegirl had been wearing a Russian flight suit. Without a name tag. She hadn’t said a word since she’d gotten here. She’d fired her weapon with drastic incompetence, then collapsed into deep sleep.
So far our program of intimidation wasn’t working. But these guys were smart. Dumb mercs were dead mercs. They knew what a flight suit was.
“She dropped out of the sky, Henri.”
“The recovery pod of some kind, no?”
“You could say that.”
“And so what is it which frightens Nichols? Becque and I, we are to think the biologische oorlogsvoering. Eh, the, ah, biologic warfare. Is she a virus host, Allen?”
What he was really asking was whether I’d killed us all already.