The Eagle's Last Stand Read online

  That suited her just fine. Let them try their best to break her. As a standard precaution, during orientation to her role at Groomlake, Menendez had taught her a handful of techniques to stay sane during an interrogation. She drew upon them.

  Deep breaths. Think of the best times of your life.

  She settled into a routine breathing. That wasn't too hard. The second part proved a little tougher. The Naga had appeared when she was in 8th grade. Before then, she'd been fairly popular. Never short of boys asking her out to the dances. Life had been...more innocent then. She might've focused on that.

  But a far more meaningful time was her marriage. She'd met Chris at the Groomlake facility. As a Marine, he'd witnessed the Anunnaki's mind Conifer technology first-hand in a battle in southern Mexico. In fact, he was the only survivor who hadn't gone out of his mind. Naturally, the Snake-eaters and a few politicians wanted to debrief him. When he saved Commander Ham's bacon after an Anunnaki prisoner broke free inside the facility, the Eagle invited him to be a Snake-eater. And he'd accepted.

  Chris was a quiet, broad-shouldered soldier with a hardened face that sometimes seemed to mask his good looks. She never pegged him as the type to start telling her corny jokes. But as soon as he started, she knew she'd never be able to get rid of him. Pretty soon, she found herself thinking about him more and more.

  They got married four months later. Those four months of flirting then dating then truly romantic moments almost made her forget the war sometimes. There'd be days where the two of them would drive out to Lake Mead with Suzanna and some camping gear. Or he might surprise her and reveal a permit to visit the green zone in Las Vegas. She'd discover herself in a fancy casino restaurant with a wonderful man she both cherished and respected.

  Hermano Menendez's training kicked in again. Remember there's a whole world outside your prison cell. Remember your friends and loved ones.

  She couldn't let the Anunnaki isolate her. So she thought hard, but all that came were troubled memories.

  Commander Ham wouldn't even reveal her husband's final mission. He gave the bogus “It's classified” line. She'd had to wait until the Eagle came to her quarters one night and laid it all out. A routine bag-and-tag operation, but the Anunnaki had hit them with new technology. Hunter drones that wouldn't die until they were completely wrecked. He was gone in a heartbeat, the Eagle had said.

  Courtney issued a sigh. She would never see him again, but, yes, she would remember him and all he stood for. If she gave the Anunnaki the Conifers' locations, she'd be letting his death be in vain. It pained her to think of it as that, but it was sickeningly clear that so much rested on her shoulders. The lives of every human. The memories of every human, both dead and alive.

  Accept the reality. You are where you are and you might not make it.

  She couldn't help wishing for her husband to burst into the chamber, guns blazing and rescue her. Less than a fantasy, she forced the idea away. The best she could hope for was a team of Snake-eaters pulling off that maneuver.

  “What's going through that head of yours?” the overseer asked, snapping her from her trance.

  Her mouth fell open on pure instinct.

  The Anunnaki's face gave away nothing, yet there was a hint of cunning in his voice.

  To his credit, he guessed what she'd been thinking. “Maybe you're weighing your chances of being rescued. If only you knew how well we're guarded.” He drew the word out and then a strange enthusiasm stole over him. “If I'm to be honest, I welcome a rescue attempt.”

  Pure dread unfurled in her as she opened to her new reality for the first time. Logically, rationally, it was impossible to imagine a feasible way for her to escape this prison. She would never leave.

  7

  “You know who I am,” Dagos said sharply. “You could do a lot worse than to let the two of us go free.”

  “Yeah, they call us snake-eaters for a reason,” Sledge added.

  The two guards were sweating profusely, their shotguns leveled at the door as if the Anunnaki might barge in at any minute.

  Dagos inhaled deeply and shifted in the chair. She couldn't deny her own unease. Her here, so vulnerable, was like a gift basket for the Anunnaki, complete with a bottle of their life source, manna.

  “Hey,” she snapped at the guards. They ignored her. She rose an inch. That got their attention.

  “Sit down!” the man yapped.

  Dagos did a check around the room. She and Sledge sat directly opposite each other. The guards were standing to her right, at the far end of the table. On edge, but focused on the door. Dagos exchanged a meaningful look with Sledge and motioned to the guards then the table. He mimicked the gesture with his eyes.

  One, Dagos mouthed, pressing her palms up against the bottom of the table.

  Two, Sledge mouthed.

  On three they shoved the table up, right at the two guards in a single fluid motion. It wasn't exactly textbook close quarter combat, but it worked like a well-choreographed shootout maneuver. The light wooden frame of the table crashed against the guards, battering them against the wall. They were unconscious before Dagos and Sledge had even gotten to full stands.

  “Where'd you come up with that one?” Sledge asked, grabbing a shotgun off one guard and lobbing it to Dagos.

  She caught it and turned for the door, her eyes dimming. “Operation with Menendez.”

  She didn't need to outright say he died. Sledge wiped away dust in the air that had caked off from the ceiling in their sweep of the table. “Always was creative. Remember when the Hermano snuck us past that assault unit in Brazil?”

  She did and grinned at the memory. On an operation many months earlier, Menendez had claimed the optical Conifer that could create holograms of whatever the user was thinking. He'd navigated them through a small army of Anunnaki warriors without a scratch simply by making them look like Anunnaki. It was one of those rare moments when you got to laugh at your enemy. “Are you getting sentimental on me, soldier?”

  And that was as much as they would grieve for now.

  Sledge let her decide for herself and joined her by the door, leveling his shotgun. Gunfire and hollering sounded from outside, but the walkie-talkie he'd slipped into his pocket offered nothing. Anunnaki standard operating procedure suggested they'd only get radio silence thanks to a jamming signal. The Anunnaki's objective then, at least, was offensive in nature. Whether that meant an abduction, a massacre or something in between, Dagos knew they had to hightail it out of there soon or face far worse than the blood mob.

  Time as the Anunnaki's prisoner taught her first-hand how brutal they could get with their probings and interrogation techniques. The thought made her picture Courtney sallow-faced and bruised, and her heart sank. Best case scenario, Courtney would escape Anunnaki captivity with nothing more than a few scratches. But Dagos knew far too many people who weren't the same after they got out of an Anunnaki prison.

  “You got point,” Sledge said, all but telling her to get moving.

  She wanted to slap herself for losing focus.

  Leaning in, she nudged the door ajar and led with her shotgun. Instantly, the ruckus of shouting and gunfire closed in. Oddly, she found comfort in that chaos, even now, no longer a spring chicken. In school, she'd never excelled at any particular subject, not even at any particular sport, but she'd found her calling in war. In the madness of a shoot-out, she found that flow of highly effective combat maneuvers, low-risk micro-decision making, hyper-alert situational awareness and luck and followed it all the way to the other side. Out of the tide of the firefight.

  She scanned the hall in a quick visual sweep. Nothing. And then motion flashed to her left. Shadows from the direction of the street. She sidestepped into the doorway an instant before two figures dashed through the hall and out of sight. She didn't bother looking at their faces. It only mattered that they carried twelve-gauge shotguns. That meant they were humans.

  Then, a chrome-colored creature burst onto the scene. I
t looked like a massive metallic lion with a giant snake's head. Technically an artificial, robotic life form, the sirrush stopped with the same predatory pose of a tensed wolf. Dagos knew at once that it had sensed them.

  “Go!” she cried, bolting down the hall. Sledge barreled along beside her.

  “Really wish we brought our own guns to this party,” Sledge muttered.

  “Shut up and color!”

  They were ten feet from the corner, when a chunk of the dry wall erupted into dust. Dagos's ears rang, her head throbbing. Unlike all the cool aliens in sci-fi movies, the Anunnaki didn't use lasers. But their resonance blasts still packed a wallop.

  They burst through a pair of generic back corridor doors and entered into the part of the apartment structure more suited for its former clientele. A golden marble floor with intricate designs hosted the darkened storefronts of famous fashion, jewelry, and accessory brands. French perfumes, Italian shoes, Swiss watches. Boutique shops that hadn't seen any real customers in years. Like the rooftop garden, the head honcho of the Komodos must've claimed them as his own private collection because they looked completely untouched.

  “Oh good, we can die pretty,” she quipped, rushing to the glass doors of a shoe store. The door opened without a hitch and she breathed a sigh of relief. The shop wouldn't be a very good hiding spot if they had to smash the glass.

  Heart hammering in her chest, she slid behind a rack of pumps, her shoulder pressing against Sledge's. In front of her, a mirror revealed the sirrush bounding into the hallway of shops. There it slowed to a single step at a time, its snake-like head angling clockwise with surgical precision.

  It would detect their thermal heat in the mirror.

  “Fuck vanity,” Dagos said under her breath.

  Just then the hiss of a burning match sounded, and Sledge flicked one to the ceiling.

  With a creak, the sprinklers began spinning and water droplets cascaded over them. For a Navy Seal, there was nothing quite as refreshing as being doused in the middle of a battle.

  Then the infamous whine of the sirrush's resonance blast went off again. And again. In the mirror, she watched the creature lobbing pulse surges in every direction, like a panicking beast. To an untrained observer, it would've resembled exactly that. A frantic creature. But she knew better. The method to this madness was trapping them. Or flushing them out. It would accomplish one of those.

  She gritted her teeth. The sirrush wouldn't be alone for long, of course. Soon Anunnaki foot soldiers would show up. And then they'd really be in trouble.

  “Give me that walkie-talkie,” she whispered. “And get ready to run like hell.”

  “The ole misses bomb?”

  “Yup.”

  Everyone called it a misses bomb, but misses was really supposed to be MSES, or make-shift electrostatic. Electrostatic bombs were the Achilles' heel of Anunnaki. The special frequency of the electrical discharge temporarily disabled most of their technology. The effectiveness of a make-shift electrostatic bomb depended on the individual bomb. In this case, she didn't expect much. Maybe fifteen to twenty seconds of a nullified sirrush.

  He handed her the walkie-talkie and she rose up, water dripping down her face. The sirrush's metal hide was also slick with water.

  “The door,” she said.

  Without hesitation, Sledge shattered the glass with a shotgun shell. The sirrush whipped around right as Dagos lobbed the walkie-talkie. The radio slid directly under its feet, the battery pack exposed. As it halted there, Sledge blasted it. In a surge of blue sparks across its body, the sirrush froze.

  Dagos didn't have to say anything. They were already barreling out the shattered glass door and through the corridor. In five seconds they were past the sirrush.

  Ten seconds and they came to a fork in the hallway.

  “Nine'o'clock,” Dagos cried, glad she'd memorized the diagrams when the Komodos brought her inside.

  They darted left. Sledge's shoes squeaked in his pivot, but neither of them slipped. They had run countless drills jogging through water-logged marshes and muddy roads.

  Three out-of-order escalators awaited them. One leading to the ground floor. One leading to the second floor. And one leading to the third floor. Dagos went for the ground floor.

  They shot through an elegant lobby, avoiding benches and artificial potted plants, and directory displays, and onto the broad street outside.

  The warmth of the afternoon sun was a welcome change to the interior of the apartment skyscraper. Doing a tactical sweep, Dagos noted the eight-foot walls of piled up cars, organized at the intersections and between buildings. Blockades. Smart.

  “Can't believe we made it out of there,” Sledge said.

  “I just wish I had time to grab a new blouse,” Dagos sighed.

  “I'll assume you meant for tactical purposes and not superficial gratification,” Sledge said.

  “You come up with those last two words yourself or you read them from one of those conspiracy theory books?” Dagos teased.

  Sledge looked at the puddle forming at his feet and gave his uniform a shake. “We do need new clothes, though.”

  Dagos began shaking her uniform out, too, knowing even drops of water could provide a bread crumb trail for the sirrush. She wished she had her classic black bomber jacket. They stopped dripping after a few seconds and Sledge asked, “Which street?”

  Heading south would help put as much distance between them and the Anunnaki as possible. They couldn't go too far, though, and abandon the chopper wreckage entirely. A run-down three-story apartment two hundred meters beyond one portion of the wall seemed the perfect position for monitoring this area.

  She called it out to him. Ten seconds later, they were clambering over the pile of cars. She couldn't help checking the shiny blue surface of an over-turned Corvette for signs of the sirrush closing in behind them. Fortunately, she didn't see it.

  Yet as soon as they made it over the cars, they whirled around with their shotguns ready to blast anything coming at them. When nothing attacked, they peeked through a tiny opening in the layer of vehicles.

  Suddenly, the sirrush burst through the glass door of the Estates, swiveling its head left and right. But it didn't rush in their direction. Dagos swallowed and cocked her head back. Groaning, Sledge massaged his knees and they frog-walked along the battered pavement.

  The remains of an old cigarette shop rested on the bottom floor of the target building, shopping carts lying toppled where the windows had once been, every shelf ransacked long ago. Refugees were sleeping inside, wearing thick down comfort jackets or hoodies despite the warm weather. Almost all of their supplies bore the logos of the various companies who donated them.

  Dagos pitied these people, but she also respected that the seemingly helpless could be pretty dangerous on the wrong occasion. Case in point, the blood mobs.

  They jogged down the adjacent alley, busted open a backdoor in unison with the butts of their shotguns and hiked up the steps, past a frightened stiff dark-skinned woman, her eyes locked on their weapons.

  Dagos wanted to tell her she knew how she felt. Because she still didn't feel safe. In fact, she never really did. Even sleeping in a fortified bunker thousands of miles from the latest Anunnaki sightings, she could never truly let down her guard. They were dealing with an enemy that could warp soldiers around the planet in a matter of minutes.

  And she knew that if they hadn't already, the Anunnaki probably would've deployed a couple drones to monitor the situation from the sky.

  The two Snake-eaters crept into the first room on the right and proceeded with short, cautious steps. A good thing because about seven people were snoozing on a pair of mattresses. Three women, three kids, and a baby.

  Dagos motioned for Sledge to watch them from the hall and skirted around to the window. She watched from behind a white curtain for several minutes as the family dozed. Aside from the smog and a few crows, the sky was clear.

  The sirrush had retreated inside the W
endenberg building.

  Normally, the Anunnaki would've flooded the area with soldiers and surveillance drones. Either they didn't believe the Komodos when they said they'd captured the Eagle or they were trying to lure her into a sense of false security. Or perhaps they knew they wouldn't find her using the same tactics they used to hunt average humans. She had outrun quite a few of their best efforts by now.

  She fell away from the window and stepped out of the hall. There, Sledge pushed a beige shirt, jeans, and a blue scarf into her. A green shirt and baggy sweats hung over his broad shoulders.

  She exchanged a grin. Yeah, sometimes saving humanity from a killer alien species meant stealing a couple clothes here and there. Nothing personal. And they'd leave the family a set of fancy para-rescue uniforms.

  At the end of the hall, they outfitted themselves. She padded her hair down and wrapped the blue scarf around her head and pulled what was left around her mouth. Sledge slipped on a gray headband. Then they sank onto the wooden dresser there.

  “If we can make it to the rendezvous point before eighteen hundred hours, we've still got a chance at pulling this off,” he said.

  “That chopper was our way past about a dozen Anunnaki check-points,” Dagos pointed out. The Anunnaki were willing to receive human patients in need of medical attention and provide it. At first, some theorists believed the Anunnaki possessed this shred of decency. Dagos knew the truth. She knew that the old woman in that stretcher would've been as good as dead in Anunnaki hands. Because the Anunnaki only wanted human patients for medical experimentation.

  The woman had terminal cancer, but she probably still would've suffered for a few weeks in the Anunnaki base before she succumbed.

  All this passed through her head in a matter of seconds. She pushed the guilt away.

  Then Sledge pushed it right back. “You think we would've accomplished the secondary objective and taken her out of her misery before...”