Extreme Instinct. Don Pendleton

Even the military crossbows. Misdirection had always been the best friend of any mercenary.

      “Same thing happened to me,” John Barrowman said through clenched teeth, cradling his left arm. The limb was bent at an impossible angle, the sleeve of the gillie suit torn and spotty with blood.

      “Let me give you a shot for the pain,” Saul Kessler offered, swinging around a small Red Army medical kit.

      “Can’t.” Barrowman grunted. “The drugs’ll make me fuzzy. Gotta stay sharp. This is too important.”

      “Agreed,” stated Lindquist, reaching inside his gillie suit to pull out a map. “Which is why you’re going back to the escape vehicle to wait for us.”

      Barrowman frowned. “But, sir…”

      “That was an order, mister,” Lindquist said, tucking away the map once more.

      Their employer had not raised his voice, but the mercenary reacted as if he had. Stiffening, Barrowman snapped a salute with his good arm and moved off into the forest, soon disappearing into the darkness and the shrubbery. The man had five miles to cover, and his left arm was useless.

      “Think we’ll see him again?” Kessler asked, rubbing his jaw with the back of a gloved hand.

      “Let’s go,” Lindquist said, turning to proceed down the sloping hill.

      Moving fast and low, the rest of the mercenaries skirted past the access road and the creek, keeping to the trees. Reaching the halfway point, they went motionless under a spreading oak as a Mi-28 Havoc helicopter gunship moved overhead, a blinding searchlight sweeping the roadway and creek.

      “Damn, these guys are predictable,” Hannigan subvocalized into a throat mike. The softly spoken words could not have been heard a foot away, but the rest of the Foxfire team heard them crystal-clear in their earbuds.

      Clearly annoyed, Lindquist slashed a thumb across his throat for total silence. The burly mercenary nodded in understanding. The team was very close to Mystery Mountain, and God alone knew what kind of security the Russians had there.

      The complex was rumored to be three times the size of NORAD high command at Cheyenne Mountain, which sounded very impressive but was also a great weakness. That much land could not be securely guarded without using so many troops that you gave away its location to enemy satellites.

      As the Havoc gunship moved away, Hannigan pulled out a sonic probe and moved it around the sky and then along the roadway. When the passive sensor detected no other Russian troops or aircraft, he gave a thumbs-up to the others, and the team went on the move again. Only a few yards later Johansen detected a cluster of land mines on an EM scanner, and they skirted the area. Officially, land mines were banned in Russia, but here at Mystery Mountain, the military was free of most legal restrictions and did whatever it wanted.

      Heading away from the clusters of bright lights that marked the military base, Lindquist and the mercenaries soon reached a cliff that overlooked a forlorn section of the valley. The landscape below was bare dirt and rock, the material churned and burned as if it had been strafed by a thousand heavy bombers. The only plant life was a few resilient weeds growing out of the bomb craters. Lindquist thought it resembled the dark side of the moon and was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

      Down in the dried river, a full company of armed Russian soldiers walked alongside a BMW flatbed hauling a large cylinder of burnished steel. The object rested in a wooden cradle and was securely strapped into position with several heavy canvas belts.

      Judging the cylinder against the height of the soldiers, Lindquist would guess it was just about the right size to fit snugly inside a SS-X-27 Topol missile. He had not expected anything so huge and immediately began to adjust his plans accordingly. This was going to be tricky….

      Four armored scout cars flanked the procession, the drivers bulky with body armor, the young gunners standing behind the heavy machine guns alert and suspiciously watching the hillsides through infrared goggles.

      Their breath fogging, several of the older technicians dressed in white lab coats fiddled with the controls set into the flat end of the cylinder. Their words were lost in the distance. One of them removed his glasses to make a suggestion. The others eagerly agreed, and more internal corrections were made. Suddenly a bank of lights changed colors and the technicians closed an access hatch, locking it into place with crescent wrenches.

      At the sight, Lindquist felt his smile fade away. Son of a bitch! The soldiers were right on time, but the goddamn technicians were ahead of schedule. The T-bomb was live!

      “Sir…” Kessler started to ask.

      “This changes nothing!” Lindquist snapped, pulling a radio detonator from his belt. “We must have that bomb. End of discussion.”

      But even as he spoke the words, a gunner in one of the scout cars jerked his head in their direction and shouted something to the driver.

      “They know we’re here,” Hannigan cursed, working the bolt on his silenced assault rifle.

      “Too bad for them,” Lindquist snarled, flipping back the cover and pressing a button as if thrusting a dagger into the heart of a hated enemy.

      In the next microsecond the two weeks of work by the camouflaged mercenaries paid off as a series of explosions ripped along the riverbed. The fiery blasts threw the scout cars and pieces of the soldiers high into the cold night air. The flatbed rocked from the concussions, but did not flip.

      The Foxfire team was amazed at the sight. The armored truck was completely undamaged. This crazy plan might just work after all!

      Heads reeling from the ringing concussions of the detonations, the battered technicians barely had a chance to recover before a second explosion came from somewhere in the far distance. They flinched at the noise, then relaxed somewhat. However the new detonation kept building in volume and power, until the very ground itself shook.

      Even as the truck driver turned off the engine of the flatbed, a strange and terrible light began to brighten the darkness until a fiery column rose above the craggy hills to form the classic mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Instantly every light in the entire valley winked out and the earbuds of the team went dead. But that was part of the plan. The EMP blast of a tactical nuke permanently fried every piece of electronics within the blast radius. Until shielded equipment was brought out of storage, nobody at the military facility could call for help. This gave the mercenaries a window of several minutes. Hopefully, it would be enough.

      Resting her AK-47 assault rifle on a shoulder, Johansen started to speak when unexpectedly something dropped out of the sky. A few seconds later there came the whine of a helicopter spinning out of control and the Havoc gunship crashed into the trees on the opposite side of the valley.

      Down at the flatbed, the technicians were frantically shouting into radios for help. Except for one man with silver hair and thick glasses. Fumbling in his pockets, the scientist unearthed a keycard from his clothing. It was attached to his belt with a slim chain.

      “That’s him!” Lindquist stated.

      Aiming their crossbows, Kessler and Johansen fired, the long quarrels slamming into the scientist. Gushing blood, he tumbled off the flatbed, and the mercenaries fired again, pinning him securely to a truck tire.

      “Do it again,” Lindquist snapped just as a hot wind blew along the valley, rustling every tree and sending flocks of startled birds streaming into the starry heavens.

      “Too late!” Hannigan shouted.

      Quickly, Lindquist and the mercenaries grabbed the nearest tree and held on tight. Somewhere a pistol shot rang out, closely followed by another, then several more that became a fusillade of rounds, the crackling rising in volume until it was a near deafening roar. The wind abruptly turned bitterly cold as a wave of blackness swelled from the distant mountains.

      “Here it comes!” Kessler shouted, closing his eyes.

      Rapidly growing in power, the tidal wave of escaping water