Primary Threat. Джек Марс
the hell is going on?” Big Dog said.
A heavyset man with glasses, Aaron, a company man, tossed a heavy rifle to Big Dog. It had a banana magazine poking from the bottom of it, and a scope up top.
Big Dog chambered a round.
Aaron shook his head. “No idea. We tried to raise them on the radio, but no answer. We figured we’d wait until they got here. Then they got here and started shooting.”
He gestured at the closed circuit security screens.
On one screen, a group of men moved up the docks. They were dressed in black, for cold weather, faces covered except for the eyes, and draped with guns and ammunition belts. As Big Dog watched, one of them approached a man writhing on the dock, pulled a pistol, and shot the man in the head.
“Aw no,” Big Dog said.
It hurt him. It hurt him to his core. And it made him angry. This was his rig, and those were his men being killed out there. During his decades in the Arctic oil industry, nothing like this had ever happened. Were there fights? Sure. Fist fights, knife fights, fights with pool cues and iron pipes. Gunfights, even? Yes, once in a rare while, someone pulled a gun.
But this?
No way.
And it wouldn’t stand.
The men in the control room stared at Big Dog.
The first thing Big Dog did when he left the reservation at the age of seventeen, he joined the Marine Corps. They spotted his eye right away, and they made him a sniper.
“The sons of bitches,” he said.
He didn’t care who they were or what they thought they were doing, it wasn’t going to stand. He went back out onto the deck, rifle cradled in his thick hands.
Below him, the group of men was running through the compound now, running for the Quonset huts that served as housing, the rec hall, the mess hall. Clarion alarms were screeching, and men were starting to emerge from everywhere, running. There was confusion, and there was fear.
Shooting came easy to Big Dog. Men had their skills, he supposed, the things that came easy. This was one of his. He sighted through the scope and put one of the black-jacketed invaders in the middle of the circle. The man was RIGHT THERE, so close Big Dog could reach out and touch him. Big Dog squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked in his hands and pushed against his shoulder.
BANG!
The sound echoed far away across the ice and water.
It was a center mass hit, chest high. The man threw up his arms and dropped his gun. He was knocked backward, off his feet, and he tumbled across the frozen ground.
Not good. That told Big Dog the man was wearing body armor. The bullet didn’t pierce him—it knocked him backward. He was going to feel that thing for a while, and he was going to be sore as hell tomorrow, but he wasn’t going to be dead.
Not yet, anyway.
Big Dog ejected the spent shell and chambered another round. He sighted again and found his man crawling along the ground.
He put the circle around the man’s head.
BANG.
The echo drifted away across the vast, empty wastes. Blood sprayed where the man’s head had just been. Automatically, without thought, Big Dog ejected the shell and chambered a new round.
Next.
Another black-jacketed bastard kneeled by the dead guy. He seemed to be checking vital signs. Checking them for what? Half the man’s head was gone.
Big Dog smiled and put the new guy’s head in the circle, dead center. The guy was an idiot.
BANG.
But not anymore.
The second man’s head exploded just as the first had done, a spray of red in the air, like the white spray from the blowhole of a humpback whale just below the surface. The two dead men slumped together now, black mounds on white ground.
Big Dog pulled the gun down to get a wider view of the field. The scene was chaos. Men were running everywhere. Men were shooting. Men were falling dead.
Too late, he saw two men in black, both taking a knee. They pointed guns up at him. From this distance, he couldn’t tell what the men were carrying. They were small submachine guns, compact, Uzis maybe, or MP5s.
Less than a second passed.
Big Dog pushed away from the iron railing just as the first spray of bullets hit. They went right through him and he felt himself doing a spastic, jittering dance. Then the pain came, as if on time delay.
His feet slipped backward, out from under him, and he fell forward onto the railing. He thought he might vomit over the side.
But his height, and his momentum, carried his whole body forward. There was an awkward moment when it seemed he was perched on the rail, all the weight on his stomach. Then he was falling. He scrabbled madly for the iron slats behind him, but it was no use.
A second or two passed. Then IMPACT.
Time stopped. He drifted. When he opened his eyes again, it seemed he was gazing up at a dark sky. The last of the bleak day had passed, and the cold stars in their millions were coming out, playing hide and seek behind skittering clouds. He blinked and it turned to daylight again.
He knew what had happened. He had fallen to the iron deck two stories below the doghouse level. He had hit hard. His whole body must be broken. His skull must be cracked.
Also, when the memory came, it was like the bullets were piercing him again. His body jerked convulsively. He had been shot with machine guns.
There was no telling how much time had passed. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. He tried to move. It hurt to do anything. That was a good sign—he could still feel. There was a lot of dark liquid around him on the deck—his blood. He wheezed as he breathed, like a hydraulic lift going bad, fluid bubbling from his mouth.
Somewhere, not far, gunshots were still ringing out. Men were shouting. Men were screaming in pain, or in terror.
Shadows moved across him.
Two men stood there, looking down. They both wore heavy black jackets with white patches. The image on the patches seemed to be an eagle or another bird of prey. They wore green camouflage pants, like an army would wear on land, someplace where the world wasn’t covered in white. And they wore heavy black boots.
The men’s faces were covered in black balaclavas. Only their eyes showed. Their eyes were hard, without sympathy.
What did these guys think they were doing?
“Who…?” Big Dog said.
It was hard to speak. He was dying. He knew that. But he wasn’t someone who threw in the towel. Never before, and not now.
“Who are you?” he managed to say.
One of the men said something in a language Big Dog didn’t understand.
He raised a pistol and pointed it down at Big Dog. The hole at the end of the barrel was there, like a cave. It seemed to loom larger and larger.
The other man said something. It was a serious thing. Neither of them laughed. Their flat expressions didn’t change. They probably thought they were doing Big Dog a favor, putting him out of his misery.
Big Dog didn’t mind a little pain. He didn’t believe in heaven, or hell. When he was young, he had prayed to his ancestors. But if his ancestors were out there, they hadn’t seen fit to respond.
Maybe there was life after death, maybe there wasn’t.
Big Dog would rather take his chances here on Earth. The rig doctor might be able to patch him up. A medevac helicopter might come and bring him to the small trauma center in Deadhorse. An Apache helicopter might come and wipe these guys out.
Anything could happen. As long as he was breathing he was still in the game. He raised a bloody hand. Amazing he could