Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

was not uncertain, shaky, or quiet. Whoever he was, the airman standing there in the corridor with a laser sight on his chest was calm and confident.

“Who are you?” barked Cooper. Another laser tagged the man and the red dot climbed up his torso and stopped on his forehead.

“Captain William Arol.”

Cooper exchanged a look with Charlie, then nodded and stood up, lowering his rifle. He noticed two more lasers appear on Arol’s chest and tried to suppress a grin. His boys were making double sure the good captain didn’t try any funny business. Cooper took a few quick steps, anticipating an ambush and stopped an arm’s length from Arol. The man was looking over the bound airmen sitting on the ground. He nodded reassurance to them before turning his face to Cooper. He had the makings of a terrific shiner on his left eye and a serrated cut on his right cheek. His lower lip was swollen and bleeding, but there was a fire in his eyes that Cooper recognized and liked.

“Thank you for not killing my men.”

Cooper looked over his shoulder at the prisoners. He turned back to Arol and raised an eyebrow. “Your men?”

“They’re part of my detachment. I’m the XO of base security. Well, I guess I’m in charge now, thanks to the Koreans.” He swallowed. “Who the hell are you guys?” Arol reversed his grip on his pistol and offered it to Cooper.

“Master Chief Cooper Braaten, US Navy.” He took the offered pistol and pulled the slide back, checking the chamber. Brass gleamed back at him in the glow of the florescent tube lights that hung overhead. He worked the release and caught the magazine that popped out. He slapped the magazine home again and rested his hands on the chest pockets of his combat vest, rifle dangling by the sling on his shoulder.

The man before him watched all this with calm eyes, not nervous or impatient. Cooper decided this man was truthful in his convictions—he knew he was right and wasn’t about to back down. Cooper had learned to read people like a book in stressful situations over the course of his SEAL career. None of Cooper’s warning bells went off—his gut told him the man he faced was no threat.

“My men and I were tasked with extracting Slipknot from L.A.—”

“He’s really here?” gasped Arol. “That speech was live?”

“He is,” said Cooper, nodding. “Or, was.” He sniffed. “Doesn’t matter now. We were supposed to get him out of danger and we did—or we thought we did, until we brought him here. Didn’t expect the welcome we received, that’s for damn sure.”

Arol frowned. “Where’s Colonel Molton?” he asked, looking over the prisoners again.

“Back down the hallway in a pool of his own blood. He tried to draw on me.”

“Good riddance,” said Arol. “He was an ass; no one got along with him. He kept going on about some damn personal phone call he’d received from the President—Barron. About how we were under orders to hunt you guys down and kill you all. He said the President would give us all raises and promotions for staying loyal to him.” He wiped sweat off his forehead with a disgusted look. “As if we were mercenaries.”

“So you’re in charge of this goat-fuck, now,” said Cooper. “The question is, what are you gonna do?”

“I’m going to take back this base and try not to get shot.”

Cooper felt a smile spread across his face. He returned the pistol. “Stand down,” he said into his throat mic. The laser’s winked out and Arol visibly relaxed.

“Where’s the base CO? Is he alive?”

Arol holstered his weapon. “Yeah, a bunch of the less-intelligent and more-gullible personnel on base sided with Molton and took control of the chokepoints. The hotheads, kids, some raw recruits. Basically, the worst we got here. The rest of us stood with General Nadina. He got wounded in the chaos when the North Koreans showed up and he’s been under lock and key in sick bay ever since.”

Cooper sighed. “Let me guess, the guards are part of Molton’s crew, right?”

Arol grimaced. “Yeah. I didn’t think anything of it, until he announced that there were traitors in the base and he was assuming command. He didn’t have a clue about the MPs, so he asked me to join him.”

“Why did you?” Cooper already knew the answer.

“I wanted to get close to him and keep an eye on him.” He shrugged. “I hoped that maybe if he was locked up, his followers would just give up.”

“You trust any of the men you see here?” asked Cooper quietly.

“Most of them, yes. But not Thompson and a few others like him. They were just looking for an excuse to shoot someone, I think. We’ve had our suspicions that a few of the men are actually in local gangs and are trying to smuggle weapons off-base. I was running an op to bust the ring when the Koreans screwed everything up.”

Cooper nodded. “Fine. You point out the ones you trust; we’ll cut ‘em loose. My men will secure the rest here. You need to rally the troops and take back your base. Get your CO out of confinement. Can you do that?”

“You bet your ass I can. There’s a lot more of us than there are of them,” he said, nodding toward the sulking form of Thompson. “My question is, what are you gonna do?”

“That’s a comms room, right?” asked Cooper, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m going back in there and linking up with Coronado or NORAD or someone that knows what the hell is going on and can give me some intel.”

“On it,” said Sparky. He shouldered his rifle and disappeared into the comms room.

“Also, I’ve got nurses, doctors, Secret Service agents, and President Denton’s body in there. We’ll need to get all these people out and seen to; most of them haven’t slept in 24 hours and they’re half-starved. Got some walking wounded, too.”

Arol scratched his close-shaven head. “You dragged all these people here?”

Cooper nodded. “Straight from downtown. The President was at All Saint’s Memorial, getting treated for the flu.”

The MP whistled, hands on his hips. “Well, let me gather up a posse and we’ll see what’s what.”

“You’ll want to prepare for infections, Captain. I’m afraid we brought the super flu in with us.” He leaned in and whispered, “I think one of the nurses has it…”

“Damn. Well, there’s no sense worrying about that now. We’ve got work to do.”

Cooper turned to see Agent Sheffield emerge from the comms room and approach him, straightening a dusty, ratty tie. “I need a moment.”

“All right.” Cooper turned back and nodded to Arol to start selecting his men.

“My men and I—we have duties to perform,” Sheffield replied in a pained voice.

“Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t the President dead?” Cooper asked, keeping an eye on Arol as he began to move down the line of prisoners, releasing a few. They stood, rubbing wrists and stretching, but gave no indication they held a grudge against the SEALs. For that at least, Cooper was thankful.

“President Denton named a successor.”

“The Speaker, right,” Cooper said, as he turned back to face the Secret Service agent in front of him. “Orren Harris. Isn’t he a Republican?”

“Yeah,” chuckled the agent-in-charge. “That ought to play hell with the politics back in D.C.—but it’s not my problem. My problem,” he said, hooking thumbs under his belt as he put his hands on his hips, “is that I was in charge of the Presidential Detail. Without counter-orders from the Director, my job is to protect the President, whoever that is, at all costs. I need to get to President Harris.”

Cooper grinned. The man was persistent, if nothing else. “Well, where is the new president? D.C.?”

The older man shook his head. “No, Apache Dawn has been put into play. That means COG is too. They’ll split up the upper-tier officials. I’m pretty sure that Speaker—I mean, President—Harris is assigned to NORAD.”

Cooper nodded in agreement. It made sense to have the backup president in one of the most secured locations on the planet. “Any idea which way they’ll go?” Cooper saw the confused look on the agent’s face. “Which president will NORAD back? Which way will the Joint Chiefs go? You guys work in the White House—you have to know more than us grunts in the mud.”

Sheffield chuckled. “You’d be surprised at the stuff we don’t know. I’m not sure who’s in charge of NORAD, but I can tell you the Joint Chiefs don’t care for Barron. They never liked him as a Vice President. I can only guess they despise him now.”

“Well, regardless of what happens in D.C., we need to worry about up there,” he said pointing to the ceiling, “before you can go anywhere.”

Cooper turned back to Arol. “Got a sit-rep topside?”

“Last I saw before Molton dragged me down here was that there was a North Korean force—we think—approaching from the northeast. All our equipment has been damaged, so all we could really tell was that a fairly large group of something was coming.” He shrugged, wincing in pain. “We assumed it was the Koreans.”

Cooper keyed his throat mic. “Sparky, keep on it until you get something. Let me know when you get a signal.”

“Aye, aye.”

Cooper pulled out his spare radio, a handheld unit. He tossed it to Arol. “Channel 6, if you need anything. I’m counting on you to take back this base, flyboy. We’re going up top to recon. Is there any other way out of this