They charged forward, over carpets of glass and pieces of blinds and other debris.
The pair of glass entrance doors had been blown off, and they couldn’t see through the clouds of brown-and-gray smoke.
“Marc, it’s not safe yet!”
“I don’t care! Jesus, they hit us here?” Rakken gasped.
The question was who. The Russians? Any one of the hundreds of terrorist groups out there? Or was it just some grunt who’d gone insane and strapped himself with explosives before sitting down to breakfast?
After waiting another moment for the smoke to clear a little, Vatz followed Rakken into the mess; an oppressive wall of heat still emanated from the area. He held his breath, spotted a lance corporal on the ground, clutching his bleeding arm. He helped the guy to his feet, got him through the front, and led him to the grass. Then Vatz, coughing hard, his eyes burning, headed back into the mess.
The smoke and dust cleared a bit more, and it appeared that the blast had come from the center of the large dining area; there was a gaping crater in the concrete, tables upturned and shattered by the concussion.
And there were pieces of soldiers everywhere.
Vatz gagged. The rest of it became a blur of images accompanied by the sickly sweet odor of burned flesh. Someone shrieked, and the cry wouldn’t stop echoing.
In the hours that followed, he and Rakken learned the truth: the Green Brigade terrorist group was responsible for the bombing.
Formed in 2012, they were a militant environmentalist /antiglobalist group with cells throughout the world but primarily in Europe and South America. From 2012 until 2018, they were credited with more than a thousand acts of violence, including acts of intimidation against factory and refinery workers and the kidnapping and murder of business executives, military personnel, and computer scientists.
One of their operatives had infiltrated the base and walked into the mess hall. He’d removed his uniform to reveal the explosives strapped to his chest. He’d made some announcement, but no one Vatz had spoken to remembered what he’d said before detonating his bomb.
At the same time, the terrorists had struck a motor pool at Fort Bragg and a dozen other facilities all over the globe, including a few more Euro military bases, a refinery in Venezuela, and even a Japanese whaler.
The group had gone silent after their leader, who dubbed himself “Green Vox,” had been killed when his plane was destroyed by Spetsnaz forces late last year.
Oh, the man portraying Green Vox was dead. But the impassioned true believer who was next in line had simply assumed his place and his identity.
Green Vox was the ultimate terrorist.
You could never kill him.
There was always another one.
Vatz and Rakken had watched the bastard on one of the base’s big screens, standing there in some undisclosed and heavily wooded location, wearing his green balaclava, shaking his gloved fist, and crying out in English but with a thick, German accent: “I am Green Vox. I am alive! I have returned! We are the Green Brigade Transnational. Today marks our return. We will not stop until the warmongers and tyrants raping our dear Gaia and threatening to scorch her from above are wiped out. We call for all free-minded citizens to join us in curing our green mother globe of this disease that will eventually kill us all.”
Soldiers in the room began to throw paper cups and balled-up napkins at the screen, cursing and shouting at the terrorist.
Vatz drifted back to a chair in one corner, collapsed into the seat.
Rakken sat next to him. “I’m still in shock.”
“You? I lose my entire team in Moscow and come home to this. Just who the hell did I piss off up there?”
“Piss off? You escaped death twice. Go play the lottery. We could both use the money.”
“Marc, I should’ve died in Moscow.”
“The survivor guilt is natural, man. You didn’t die there. And you didn’t die here. So that makes me believe you still have a lot of work to do.”
“So it’s fate?”
“I don’t know.”
Vatz sighed loudly in frustration. “I need to work this out, go for a run, do some boxing, something…”
“I hear you. And I don’t know if I believe in fate, but I believe in faith. I got faith in you, faith in me. We’ll get past this, move on. That’s it, man.”
Vatz nodded, took a deep breath, closed his eyes.
And there, in the darkness of his mind, stood Colonel Pavel Doletskaya, wearing a crooked grin. Beside him, materializing from the shadows, came the hooded Green Vox, who folded his arms across his chest.
SIX
They had given him the drugs.
They had spent hours questioning him.
They had grabbed him, shaken him, pummeled him, threatened to kill his wife.
And still, Colonel Pavel Doletskaya would tell them nothing.
Even he could not believe how long he’d held out. Surely, the drugs should have loosened his tongue.
Or maybe they had.
Maybe he’d already told them everything and had simply forgotten his betrayal of the Motherland.
The thought sent chills fanning across his shoulders.
He sat in the corner of his cell, elbows pressing against the painful confines of the straitjacket. He stared up at an energy-efficient fluorescent lightbulb glowing dimly from its socket.
That’s what it was all about. Energy.
No changing that. And here he was. The end of his journey, perhaps. Major Dennison’s people had shoved him into one of the JSF’s submarines, a rather impressive little boat, and had secretly ferried him to Cuba. He’d managed to overhear something about the decoy flight being shot down but nothing more. He’d lost track of time; oddly, that bothered him more than anything. He’d spent his entire professional life chained to the clock, and now he was free of those shackles, only to have them replaced by a prison cell.
He nearly grinned over that irony as he glanced reflexively at his wrist, covered by the straitjacket. Some men had given up the watch, in favor of their phones, but not him.
General Sergei Izotov wore a watch as well, a watch that told him that Doletskaya was still a threat. The chip in Doletskaya’s head had been their only way to silence him. Once the Americans had deactivated it, they had detached him from the system. Even if it took years, the Americans would try to extract intelligence from Doletskaya, one tooth at a time. Yes, Izotov knew that the Americans would keep Doletskaya alive, perhaps even use him as a negotiating tool, but Izotov and Kapalkin would not bargain.
This was his life now. He should resign himself to it.
But how does a warrior do that?
He didn’t know. For now he turned his back on the present and looked to the past, the glorious past, if only to make himself feel better.
It was he and Izotov who’d come up with the brilliant plan to secretly fund the Green Brigade Transnational and train them to attack the Freedom IV lifter at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The plan was to prevent the Americans from completing the Freedom Star Space Station from which three companies of Marines could deploy anywhere on earth within ninety minutes. It was a simple matter of hiring terrorists to become your mercenaries. The difference was, the Green Brigade actually believed in what they were doing. Ideals were more important to them than money. As the Americans said, it was a win-win situation.
While the attack turned out to be a failure, it led to an unexpected and ultimately beneficial series of events. The JSF tracked Green Vox and his cronies to a training camp in the mountains of Bulgaria, but before they reached him, Izotov was able to plant information on the terrorists linking them to members of the European parliament.