Outlanders 24 Equinox Zero, page 10
Although he was the ranking officer, left in charge by Sverdlovosk, Zakat saw little point in rallying the panic-stricken soldiers, most of whom were just roused from sleep and in states of undress.
He left the barracks and made for the huge Tu-114 cargo plane, the Mossback, which had carried him, the colonel, Captain Ivornich, the Americans and his inner circle of trusted aides from Russia to the Black Gobi.
The mounted Mongols rode down the troopers as they tried to escape, pursuing them like wolves, killing them with bullets, short swords or yard-long arrows loosed from bows made of yak horn and wood.
It was all screaming, dashing chaos as Zakat sprinted across the dim compound, struggling into his greatcoat as he ran. A few troopers set up widely separated pockets of resistance, knocking Mongols from their horses with controlled bursts of autofire from AKM subguns. They were too far apart to establish a solid fire zone. Zakat saw five of them literally pin-cushioned by a hail of arrows.
As he neared the runway, he heard the loud, vibrating drone of the Mossback's four engines powering up. In the cockpit, limned by the lights of the instrument panel, he glimpsed the head and shoulders of Kuryadin.
Zakat increased his speed toward the open cargo hatch in the aircraft's belly. He was so intent, so focused on the door to his escape he didn't see the Mongol warrior until he was literally on top of him.
The roar from the plane's engines and his own pounding footfalls masked the drumming hoofbeats. The warrior leaped from his pony's saddle and slammed him violently to the hard-packed sand.
Zakat managed to fire two rounds from his Tokarev at the swarthy face snarling above him, but not before he felt the ticklish, hot and cold kiss of the Bundhi dagger thrusting into his midsection.
Paying no attention to the pain, clapping a hand over the blood streaming from the wound, he regained his feet just as the Mossback began lurching down the runway. He saw a soldier trying to close the hatch, but when he caught sight of Zakat, he gestured frantically for him to hurry.
With the trooper's help, he managed to clamber into the ship's belly, but a spray of gunfire raked the fuselage and a stray shot caught the soldier in the chest.
Zakat couldn't tell how seriously he was wounded, but he fell, vomiting blood over the hatch's crank and winch control assembly. Zakat kicked him out and down onto the runway and hastily sealed the hatch.
As the plane picked up speed, bullets hammered like hailstones against the hull. Zakat remained in the cargo hold as the Mossback became airborne. He examined his wound, finding it more unsightly than critical. The blade had pierced the abdominal wall without slicing through his intestines. Still, he bled profusely as he used a first-aid kit to apply a field dressing and a pressure bandage. He didn't take any of the pain medications, assuming he would need to be alert and clear-headed for the immediate future.
When the plane leveled off, Zakat made his way forward. The two troopers in the passenger section were surprised to see him and not at all pleased, though they almost managed to conceal it. Their superior he might be, but they distrusted him and his placid facade. He had replaced far too many of their comrades and officers over the past few years.
He found Kuryadin in a state of terror, wrestling with the control yoke of the huge plane and constantly eyeing the fuel gauge. Bullets had ruptured the main tank, and the fuel sprayed out of it as through a windblown sieve. The reserve tank held only half the capacity and wouldn't carry the heavy, ungainly craft far, certainly not back to Russia.
Zakat knew little more than Kuryadin about the finer points of flying. Both of them had received a few hours of flight training as part of their District Twelve duties, but neither of them had soloed. Russia's military aircraft were far too rare to risk on a novice's education. Sitting in the copilot's chair, he allowed Kuryadin to fly while he tried, without much success, to make sense of the navigational charts.
Within two hours, the main fuel tank had drained completely, and the reserve was pressed into service. An hour more, and snow-blanketed mountain peaks shouldered up from the horizon. Zakat was fairly certain they were in the Himalayas, and that was where the Mossback chose to nosedive.
He had survived the crash, but Zakat never did learn what had turned the followers of the Tushe Gun against the Russian garrison in the Black Gobi, but he suspected the three Americans who had accompanied Colonel Sverdlovosk were somehow responsible. Six months later, when facing those selfsame three Americans in the ruins of the Museum of Natural History in Newyork, he had asked Kane and Grant about the Tushe Gun and the fate of his former commanding officer. He wasn't too shocked to find out they took responsibility for killing both men.
The return of Sif brought him out of his ruminations. She gazed steadily at the distant junk, even though she carried a pair of binoculars in one hand.
"How is Chaffee?" Zakat asked in the Thulian dialect.
A bit absently, Sif replied, "Out of the breath. The worm is in terrible condition...nearly as bad as yours when we first met."
Almost involuntarily, Zakat touched his gloved right hand with his left one. "That's hard to believe," he replied.
Sif suddenly handed him the binoculars. "The ship is bypassing the island."
Zakat frowned and lifted the binoculars to his face, squinting through the eyepieces. He saw that the island was actually the largest of a smaller string consisting of three islets. The main landmass reared out of the sea like a massive cube of black, volcanic rock, but he saw green vegetation on the summit of a small peak. Atop it he could barely discern the outline of a watch or bell tower. Castellated cliffs loomed at least
a hundred feet above the surface of the Cific. Thundering waves crashed and broke on the bare rock, foaming spray flying in all directions.
He saw the junk swinging slowly around the headland of the islet closest to the larger mass. The strait between the two islands was a long, narrow channel, and the wooden vessel sailed for that. But the junk moved sluggishly, the hull dragging. The ship seemed to wallow in the shallows. Long slow waves rocked kelp and seaweed back and forth. To the junk's starboard, the dark outlines of the small jangled island rose from the surf. From astern curled up a corkscrew of smoke.
Zakat murmured, "His engine is out... overstressed." Sif caught her breath in excitement. "He's turning to fight."
Zakat smiled thinly. He couldn't see the details of the activity on the junk, but he knew preparations for battle had begun as soon the Fafnir was sighted. The junk had been heading for a place to make a stand all afternoon.
He handed the binoculars back to Sif. Cupping his hands around his mouth, Grigori Zakat shouted in the
Thulian tongue, "Stand to battle stations! Stand to battle stations!"
His crew roared in approval.
"It's about time," Sif muttered before she rushed to her quarters to dress for the fun to come.
Chapter 9
Shields slid onto men's arms and fully armored warriors assembled on the quarterdeck as the Fafnir overhauled the junk. The hatch cover was heaved away from the hold, and a man passed up a selection of lances, grappling hooks, chains, ropes and the long hollow cylinder of the LAW 80 rocket launcher. Sif took it greedily, hefted it in her arms, then pulled apart the two sections to its full extended length. She unfolded the reflex collimator sight on its smooth upper surface. With her back to the breeze, her red cloak billowed open, revealing her chain-mail tunic, sword belt and axe hanging from it by a leather thong. Her eyes blazed cobalt with wild excitement.
All the Thulians moved with speed, determination and discipline. Zakat paced the poop deck, occasionally shouting orders. He wore gilded scale-mail and his feature-concealing dragon helmet. He bore a round embossed shield on his right arm. In his left he held a Ruger Redhawk revolver. The sunlight glinted from the brushed-satin finish of its seven-inch, stainless-steel barrel. A telescopic sight was mounted to the frame.
Although Breeze Castigleone and Chaffee had provided a hold full of death-dealing ordnance, the Thulians scorned firearms as the weapons of cowards; except for the rocket launchers. They likened them to the power of Thor, hurling thunderbolts from afar, and therefore they were acceptable.
Sif took up position by the port-side gunwales as her fellow Thulians, fully armored now in horned and winged helmets and brandishing swords and axes, ran to their battle stations. She held the LAW as if it were an infant. Zakat knew it was a one-shot disposable weapon, designed specifically to take out armored vehicles. But the 94 mm high-explosive missiles had proved devastatingly effective on seagoing vessels, as well.
As the Fafnir bore down on its prey, Zakat absently toyed with the phallic symbol hanging from his neck. The emblem symbolized Rasputin's penis, cut off by one of his assassins, then recovered and preserved in a velvet container by his devoted followers. Upon his initiation into the Khylsty priesthood, Zakat had been permitted to glimpse the blackened, desiccated holy relic, but not touch it.
No one, not even his superior officers, suspected he was a Khylsty priest. The few members of his sect who held high posts in the Russian government had helped him to deceive the rigorous background checks prior to his assignment to District Twelve, the ultra secret arm of the Internal Security Network.
Zakat was not his birth name, but his Khylsty name, yet no one questioned it, even though it meant "twilight." Even the people who had glimpsed the pattern of wealed, raised scars on his back, the result of numerous flagellation rituals, kept their curiosity in check. In the Internal Security Network, it was considered bad form to question a comrade, and even quite dangerous to make personal inquiries of an officer. It hinted at ambition. Grigori Zakat had advanced rapidly as a District Twelve officer under the command of Sverdlovosk, primarily because he didn't appear to be ambitious.
But of course he was. He couldn't be a Khylsty priest otherwise. But he approached the obstacles to his ambition differently than other men. An off-hand comment made to a superior officer regarding rivals, or the discreet planting of black market contraband among their possessions or, if they were particularly impressionable, a campaign of subtle suggestions that they were being treated unfairly, passed over for advancement. When they filed their complaints, they tended to either disappear or be reduced in rank, and Zakat easily stepped into the power vacuum.
He had achieved the rank of major very quickly, after he arranged matters to make General Stovoski believe he had been seduced by his middle-aged, oversexed wife. Zakat managed to smile at the memory of Stovoski's face when he stumbled into the parlor to find his wife kneeling before him, clawing at his trousers, oblivious to his pious protests. The stupid cow of a woman, her brain saturated with vodka, had been childishly easy to manipulate, never realizing that the strength of his will had been imposed over hers. And if his mind was exceptionally strong, his body complemented it. None of his comrades, or even the surprisingly perceptive Sverdlovosk, knew he had the strength in his delicate appearing hands to throttle a man to death— something he had done as part of his ordination ceremony.
Much of his Khylsty training revolved around camouflage, infiltration and deception. Through years of long practice, he could make his gray eyes reflect nothing but a mild, dull disinterest in his surroundings. Infinite patience was one of the prime articles of Khylsty faith.
After all, Saint Rasputin had not been accepted by the family of the czar overnight. He had waited, performing trivial miracles to earn first the czarina's trust, then her bed.
It always amused Zakat to think about the haughty Alexandra spreading her legs for the unkempt holy man from western Siberia. Rumors of her affair with Rasputin had been one of the triggers for the October Revolution, when the starving Russian masses finally understood that the royal family were flesh and blood, not gods, goddesses and godlings.
Of course, those rumors led to Rasputin's assassination by royal retainers, but he had accomplished his mission nevertheless. In Khlysty texts, it was known as the power of casuistry—persuasion and seduction to achieve an objective.
The very fact Grigori Zakat strode the poop deck of the Fafnir, with the half-savage Thulians obeying his every order, was proof of his powers, of his intimate understanding of casuistry.
Men with Oriental features, their heads bound with strips of white cloth, appeared at the rail of the junk, all of them wielding bows. Even from such a distance, Zakat could tell the weapons were beautifully crafted, made of smooth, red-lacquered wood. The arrows were exceptionally long, the tips were steel and, like the bows, gave the impression of being lacquered. He wasn't intimidated, however. So few of the people he had encountered in the Western Isles were armed with anything other than the basics. Except on Autarkic, the only firearms he had seen were crude, home-forged muzzle loaders.
The archers aboard the junk nocked their long arrows, aimed and a dozen bowstrings hummed simultaneously as they loosed a flight of arrows at the dragon ship. Only a few landed on deck—most bounced away from the shields lining the rail or those on the arms of the warriors.
The junk began a port-side board turn just as the rocket launcher in the hands of Sif fired with an ear-knocking report. With a sound as of a gigantic piece of stiff canvas being ripped, the rocket screamed across the surface of the sea, a trail of sparks and smoke wavering in its wake.
The warhead detonated on the junk amidships, just above the waterline. The bowmen staggered backward, drenched by the geyser of water fountaining up over the side. Men went sprawling. Some stayed on their feet by clutching the deck rail.
Moving with swift, practiced moves, Sif loaded another rocket into the launcher, sighted and squeezed the trigger. The second rocket went into the forecastle, smashing wood, flinging jagged shards of broken timber through the air, slashing at the sailors in the vicinity.
A man wearing a short white jacket and an orange headband shouted stridently to the sailors, obviously trying to rally them. Zakat guessed him to be the captain, since the men nodded to him deferentially Once again the archers took up position at the rail.
Zakat braced the barrel of the revolver on his left forearm, squinted through the Redhawk's scope and brought the man's head into target acquisition, framing it in the center of the crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger and a single shot cracked, like the snapping of a whip. The man's headband floated away, surrounded by a mist of blood. Twisting in a clumsy pirouette, he fell behind the rail of the junk and out of sight. Faintly he heard an outburst of shock and fear.
Zakat turned toward Snorri and gestured sharply. "Ram them!"
Snorri put the helm hard over, and the Fafnir's dragon figurehead snarled at the center of the junk. Beneath the ship's bow, just below the surface, stretched a long ramming sprit. It was about ten feet in length, made of sturdy oak and wrapped with hammered-out strips of metal riveted around it for reinforcement. The shaft terminated in a broad-bladed iron triangle, like a plowshare.
Zakat grasped the handrail as the dragon ship hove closer. Then, in a tumult of screams and splintering crashes, the hulls collided. The impact threw half of the Thulian warriors off their feet. They quickly regained their footing and raced to the bow. They drove long lances into the junk's side to serve as makeshift scaling ladders, since the ship rode eight or more feet higher in the water than the Fafnir.
Then, as a final volley of arrows arced down, the Thulians formed a multi-legged tortoise by holding and locking their shields over their heads. They hurled their grapnels aboard the junk, the metal hooks biting and holding into the deck rail. With wild howls, they swarmed up the chains.
Zakat watched them board the junk and sighed heavily. The sound echoed hollowly within the confines of his helmet. He knew the power of casuistry notwithstanding, he couldn't rest on his laurels and assume the Thulians would respect his decision to remain aboard the Fafnir. Thulian respect was not easily given and always required a booster shot of action and risk. That was one reason Chaffee was the butt of so many cruel jokes, since he never participated directly in their attacks.
Shouting to Sif to join him, Zakat scrambled to the bow and leaped over the gunwales and across the narrow space between the two ships. Once he gained the deck of the junk, he and Sif, in a flying wedge, struck the crew like a steel-shod avalanche. If the Thulians expected an easy victory, they were sadly mistaken.
The junk's crew made a crazed, animal-desperate charge against the invaders and for a few minutes, it was a confused, brutal, bloody battle on the decks.
The sailors were armed with flat, mirror-bright, curved swords and they used them well. Bragi, one of the youngest of the Thulians, had his neck sliced halfway through by one of the flat blades. Blood spouted from the half-severed stump, a fountain that splashed across Sit’s face.
She licked her lips and the taste of the man's blood pushed her forward, shrieking and hacking with her battle-axe. The other warriors followed her screaming lead. The sailors were divided in broken groups and were chopped down or driven over the sides. Some closed ranks and fought back with their swords, but they were overwhelmed by the armored Thulians, most of whom towered a full head and shoulders over the tallest of the Asians.
Zakat glanced back at Sif and called to her, but she was unable to hear over the battle cries and screams of pain The Valkyrie had gone berserker. Heaving a sailor's corpse aside, she leaped into a gap with the battle-axe. Three men fell to the weapon—three swipes that split them down the middle before they could think how to engage the fearsome giantess.
She used her ax to cut a bloody swath for Zakat to follow. Curved swords in the hands of terrified sailors menaced her, but they were less than useless. The swinging axe sheared through metal, flesh and bone, beating them to the deck by the sheer weight of the blows.
Zakat followed Sif, managing to fire accurate shots as he ran across the reeling deck. Two men went down, then three and four, knocked back over the stations they were assigned to defend. Zakat emptied the last of the weapon's cylinder into a sailor's face, shattering his head and blowing it back over an archer trying to get into position behind Sif.
