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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 110: Kondor 292
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Slade 287
High-stepping inside, a mix of precision and speed, Kondor moved into the falling dust of the mudroom for the two-story power generator building. He could hear the rumble of the engine and the shouts of men inside. There was stairway up, and a door to the right past a line of boots. He moved to the door and yanked it open, and stuck his head in, and drew it out just in time to miss a pistol bullet smacking the door by his face.
Ducking back inside, he shot the M-16’s bullet into the officer’s leg making the Han officer stagger. After that he looked around for further threats and information. There were ten men, all in uniforms, but none armed save for the wounded man who was holding his thigh with one hand and reaching for the dropped pistol with the other. He had discovered the break room, to judge by the long tables with open food containers and cups of steaming tea.
The men were cowering on the far side of the room with the wounded officer in front of them.
“Hands up!” Kondor yelled. When they did not respond, he jerked his rifle at them and up. This sign language conveyed its message, and hands went up slowly. He pointed his rifle back at the officer, and said warningly ‘no.’ The officer sighed, and slid to the ground. Kondor walked over and grabbed the pistol off the floor. Stashing it in his belt, he grabbed the nearest man, who was recalcitrant and frightened, and forced him to put his hands down hard on the officer’s leg.
“Keep it there!” he shouted, realizing why people shout even when they know the other does not know their language. It was a way of saying ‘hey! pay attention!’ The officer grimaced, and spoke, and the voluntold man looked up at Kondor with relief as he realized his new job was not as hostage.
Kondor looked about, and grabbed a loop of electric cable attached to the small refrigerator, and after unplugging it he cut it free with his Bowie knife. Without ordering the unarmed soldiers, he stepped out and used the refrigerator cord to tie the door handle to a nearby coathook in the mudroom.
There, that should keep them out of trouble, he thought. Kondor had no stomach for killing a roomful of conscripted petroleum generator worker/soldiers even if they were the enemy. Popping his head into the stairway and back revealed no one waiting for him. Working his shoulders, he climbed stairs which creaked under foot. The door at the top was trouble, he knew. The first man must have gone to the top and warned everyone. They had responded by shutting their door, and—what? Probably barricaded the door, Kondor decided.
He took out his Mark VII kinetic blaster, replaced the power pack, and began putting power bolts into the door. Shuddering and shaking with dust everywhere it came loose, and then toppled toward him. Shots rang out above his head, and using the door as a shield he advanced up the stairs toward the cabinet in his path. It was as much a boon to him as them as otherwise there was no cover in the stairway than the broken door he carried with his left hand on the door handle.
Popping a head up, he saw three or--ow. He reached up. Blood. Feeling about he realized he had lost part of his right ear. His right earphone was a shredded mess, so he pulled it off his head to hang about his neck, not wanting bits and pieces of plastic to get in the wound.
He had seen control boards in the room, and suddenly he had an idea. He did not need to kill the men, or control the room. Raising his M-16 high he fired off a burst of three rounds, and then another, and another. Each time he moved it about, and on the third burst he heard the ripping sound of softer metal followed by sparks followed by the power generator dying to a hum, and then silence followed by the electric lights flickering out.
He pulled out the satphone and dialed the number.
“Power is out. Radar should be out.”
“Radar is out. Good job,” Komodo Dragon replied. “Hang tight.”
Kondor began to reach for something to bandage his ear, and realized he had left his medical kit behind. Before he could come up with something else, he heard a call from inside the room, in poor English.
“We surrender, raider. Can we get medical help? Doctor?”
“What happened?”
“Ric, um, bounce bullet. Hit one of us. Bleeding lots.”
Kondor faced a decision. If he entered the room, he would be an easy target. But, as he reminded himself, his part of the mission was over. Now he was just a man, and more than that, a doctor.
“I’m a doctor. I’m coming in.” Shouldering the rifle so as to look less threatening, he stood up and walked into the control room, which was smoking from one of the control panels. A flashlight shone in his face, and he heard a hiss of hatred, but one other voice overrode it. It was all in Mandarin, but he could guess the meaning.
“Let me see the patient.” There were four of them. One had a pistol, and another an AK-47. The AK-47 was aimed right at him, but he focused on the man who was shot in the gut. Looking at the wound, he hoped it had missed the stomach, but he thought it might have hit the liver.
Telling them to flip the injured man on the side, he saw appalled looks on their dark Asian faces, but he was taller, bigger than any of them, and he was the doctor. They did it, and he saw to his displeasure that the bullet had not gone clean through. With what he had, he did not think he could save the man. Abdominal bullet wounds could be bad.
The injured man was laid flat on his back again, and he muttered something. Kondor turned to the poor English speaker.
“What did he say?”
“He is cold.”
Kondor nodded. That was shock. Blood pressure was dropping. He pointed at two of them, including the soldier who was still pointing the rifle at him.
“Tell them to give the man their coats.” The coats were put on top of the man, and Kondor tried to check the injured man’s rough pulse in a wrist. It was eighty or so, which meant he had already lost a good bit of blood. Probably he was bleeding inside the abdomen.
Making sure the patient could breathe, Kondor considered what he needed. What he really needed was that psionic skill where Derek called on the King to heal someone--a delusion that a god was healing, but a most useful delusion it was. With his medical kit, he could do more, a lot more. Without his tools, and with this type of wound, he was mostly helpless. It was a terrible feeling.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and quickly moved out of the room. He called on the comms link.
“Kimodo Dragon, can you send Other Me my direction soonest.”
“You injured?”
“Just send him.”
“Look up.”
Kondor was not sure what that meant as the ceiling was above him so he ran down the stairs and out. Looking up, he saw a clear blue sky. No, wait, there was a white bit in the sky. It was moving. There were other white bits, just like his outfit, even as soldiers ran out of their barracks, and shouts were heard, and black smoke rose from his motorcycle in front of the main building, and some officers were studying the ripped-free fence.
He looked back up. The white dots had gotten a lot closer. They were visibly men in white suits diving head first. Behind them was a larger object, also falling. In the screaming confusion, no one but Kondor was looking up. The Reptile House team were falling right into the camp, followed by a small helicopter. They were getting awfully close.
For a second he turned away, convinced he was about to see a tragedy. Still, he had to witness, and so he looked back up. They were so close, so fast, in another second the lead would be dead, Kondor knew, splatted across the roof of the main building. One was coming straight at him and the power generator. Suddenly white parachutes snapped open, and the hurtling speed radically slowed. Yet it was not enough. They kept coming in fast, and hard. The one coming toward him hit hard, and rolled, and rolled again, and groaned on the ground.
Kondor ran to his other self who was sitting up after removing a helmet with air hose attached.
“Impact at thirty-one miles per hour is no joke, even with the impact dispersal pads,” other Kondor said. “Help me up.” Kondor did, and the medic for Reptile House shucked his single chute. Kondor was still staring.
“It's what we train for. High altitude jump up ten thousand feet over the mountain, and I pulled the chute release at two hundred eighty four feet.” Kondor looked beyond to see clouds of green gas filling the air. He caught a faint whiff, and flinched.
“Military grade tear gas. It's rough stuff. The others led the way by tossing a couple grenades worth for each of them on their landing sites.” They heard short bursts of gun fire, and Mandarin commands repeated. “Show me my patient.” Kondor turned, and walked back even as a man stumbled out of a nearby cloud of green and vomited up his latest meal before crashing into the snow.
Kondor led his other up to the gutshot man, and the two with Other Kondor’s full medkit began taking out the bullet, administering antibiotics, putting gauze on to slow blood loss, and giving the man an IV to keep him going along with pain killers to ameliorate the pain. By the time they were done they heard footsteps, and Kondor turned to see the lethal Cobra step into the doorway.
“We’re ready to leave, you two.”
The verser started to rise, and the poor English speaker suddenly lunged for him, and Cobra moved like his namesake. A knife appeared in his hand, and the speaker wrapped Kondor in a hug.
“Thank you for saving my brother,” he said with a sob. Cobra’s knife, which had been going for the speaker’s throat, disappeared as fast as it had come, and Kondor patted the man’s back. Disentangling himself, he and the other two went back outside. Over two hundred soldiers/workers were sitting in a square in the snow. A dozen were injured, but the local medics were tending to them. Sadly four dead bodies lay in the snow as well. Despite the speed, audacity, and training advantage there was no way to do a mission like this with no one dead, Kondor thought sadly. Happily, he had killed no one, although he had part of the responsibility for the deaths of those four.
One of the big advantages his team had was that they were all armed. Most of the soldiers had not had weapons. Those would be stored in the armory. Settling down, a small copter spun its blades down, and Sea Turtle called out, “Mount up.”
Kondor was not sure how that was going to work, as the copter looked to have space for two men. Then with a wide grin, the pilot threw netting out both sides.
Ten minutes later, with a pack of data and cold fusion devices, a hefty motorcycle, and six men hanging on underneath, the copter struggled into the air. The less said about the next hour and a half of flight, Kondor thought, the better. He was constantly having to rub his nose to ward off frostbite, and force himself awake so that he would not unclench his arm and fall free to hit the mountains beneath. Finally they got to warmer air, and landed at a dusty airbase in Central Asia. From there, it was an American C-130 cargo plane in a hop to Pakistan. In Pakistan, after the other Kondor, known as Skink, patched his wound, they parted ways.
Reptile House went, “Which way we can’t say,” said the cocky young pilot, and Kondor got on a first class Air India flight to London. He slept on the way, wondering what Zeke had gotten up to in his absence. Of course, it had not been that long. A little over an hour in flight, and thirty minutes on the ground, and an hour and a half to the airbase, two hours on the C-130, an hour at the airport, and now he was on his way back on Air India which would be the longest leg of his mission.
He passed on the complimentary martini, preferring to keep his wits about him, but as the hours went by his wits went by the wayside, and he slept most of the way back to London. It had, after all, been a very tough day.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #533: Characters Traveling. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
