SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

“The brief is the same,” King said. “Plant your bomb-spikes. We get out and blow the place sky high. No matter what they’re cooking up here, the remote location will prevent it from spreading and the sands will cover this place up.”

“Damn, remember those guard dogs you wanted, Knight?” Rook’s voice came over the net. “We’ve got a roving patrol here. I don’t think they’ve spotted us. Looks like six men. They’re all bundled up like hairy brown pillow turds.”

“Still nothing on this side,” Bishop added. “I can’t see anything.”

Welcome to my world, Knight thought, still rueful over the loss of his eye.

Then he saw a dozen men, armed with AK-47 rifles, come rushing out onto the floor of the lab below. He crept backward across the metal suspended floor, toward the door to the stairwell. Pawn was already there in the shadows. She raised a finger, pointing at the far side of the catwalk that surrounded the entire lab space. Over eighty yards away, on the opposite wall, was another doorway, most likely to another guard tower.

Eight men rushed out of the doorway, their boots clanging on the metal catwalk. They were bundled up in what looked like rags and furs, and they were each armed with a rifle. The men circled the catwalk, heading right for Knight and Pawn’s doorway.

4

Queen slipped through the snow like a wraith. While Rook attempted to cover her position from where they had been keeping an eye on the south and eastern sides of the building, she followed close behind the roving patrol of men as they moved along the south wall. She briefly switched on the audio for the outside of her helmet, listening for any noises over the howl of the storm, but all she heard was the constant, roaring whine of the wind.

Feeling confident in her approach, because the storm would cover any noise she made, Queen rushed toward where she’d last seen the men, before they disappeared into the blowing ice crystals. The whiteout was thick, but she pressed on blindly, hoping to catch the men and dispatch the entire patrol before anyone was the wiser.

Instead, she ran right into a wall.

Of fur.

In the split second it took her to realize that the men on patrol had performed a ‘Crazy Ivan’ technique, suddenly turning to ensure no one was following them, the man she had run into, covered in rags and furs, and carrying a fur-wrapped AK-47 rifle, began to raise his weapon. Queen’s wasn’t in position. Her rifle was angled off to her left after the unexpected impact. So she lunged upward with it, the side of the SCAR smashing into the man’s gauze-covered head. She figured he could barely see through the layers of cloth anyway. After the weapon impacted his head with a dull thud, the coverings were displaced upward, blinding him.

She didn’t know if a gunshot would be audible over the screaming wind, but she didn’t want to chance it. She dropped her SCAR, and it swung down to her side on its sling. Her hand came up with a SOG SEAL knife instead. The blade was seven inches long, making it a monster of a weapon. She normally preferred a shorter 4-inch blade, but in this environment, where she expected any opponents to be wearing thick layers of clothing, she had thought it best to go with a longer knife. As the blade rammed home into the man’s throat, and continued straight back to sever his spinal cord just above his second thoracic vertebrae, she congratulated herself on the choice. The wide man, looking like an overstuffed brown pillow in his thick clothing, tumbled backward. She held tight to the handle of the knife, and it sluiced out of the guard as he went down.

She was just starting to turn, to keep her own system of Crazy Ivans in the blinding white, when she saw the barrel of an AK-47 emerge from the white fog to her right. With no time to fully turn, she lunged her whole body in that direction, mashing the barrel of the weapon away from her, even as it lit up, spewing 7.62mm death in an uncontrolled burst. She only hoped the man, whose finger had clenched in surprise, managed to mow down some of his fellow guards. Then she and the man were tumbling down toward the ground.

Moving the fight to the rocky soil was a bad enough turn of events, but just as she and the second man hit the hard, frozen ground, something worse happened.

The wind abruptly stopped.

And the blowing snow and sand that had been obscuring her from view, vanished with it.

* * *

“Fight or flight?” Pawn asked, sheltered in the shadow of the doorway.

Knight waited a beat before replying to her. “Option 3. Rook style.” He dove forward, rolling out onto the catwalk. As he went low, Pawn came out behind him, aiming high and firing at the oncoming team of guards. Her three-round burst hit the first man, spinning him, and her second burst hit the next man in line. As the two victims fell sideways, the third man on the narrow catwalk was revealed, and a second later, he was impaled.