The Winter Palace

Extraction

A QUICK WORD OF INTRODUCTION

Welcome to The Winter Palace. 

So where're we at in our story?

Our hero, Carmen, has just captured The Red Duke, the world's equivalent of Hitler, a wicked dictator. But she did it in the middle of a spectacular firefight on the Siberian tundra—and now she and her compatriots have to escape.

Extraction

She touched the knife handle, decided now was as good a time as any, and yanked it out of the Duke's shoulder. Too bad you couldn't be conscious for that, she thought.

Fireflies danced in the air—tracer rounds coming from all over the base, aimed seemingly at nothing. Whoever was alive was firing into nowhere.

A half dozen camo-clad Rangers approached, M-16s with triangle handguards at their waist. Their leader, a thin black man with a goatee, shouted to her.

"That's the Duke?"

"Yeah."

"Give him to me and follow us to the gyro."

She let the Duke slip off her shoulders and drop to the ground with a dull thud.

"Come on, now," the Ranger said, "you can do better than that." As he bent down to pick the Duke up, she read his name patch: Hendrix, 101st Airborne.

Two of the A-14 gyrocopters flew low overhead. Black spheres hung from where their fuselages should have been. The spheres dropped to the ground, rolled, and unfolded, revealing piloted M-43 mechs. Immediately, a voice boomed from a megaphone on the closest one: "101st, get 'em to the gyro. We'll lay down cover fire."

A low hum from the mechs grew to a high-pitched squeal—their miniguns pre-rotating. Then, orange lines erupted from the weapons, tearing up the airbase.

Michael had jumped from his mech's cockpit and was halfway to the rescue aircraft. Hendrix, the unconscious Red Duke now on his shoulders, turned toward the gyrocopter.

"Wait!" Carmen shouted.

Hendrix looked at her.

"There's one more. I can't leave without him."

"Where is he?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen him since the assault began."

"You need to get on that gyrocopter, miss," Hendrix faltered on 'miss.' Carmen didn't wear a uniform—no way to tell her rank.

"We don't leave men behind."

"Ma'am, we'll find him," Hendrix said.

His eyes—I believe him.

She nodded, exhaled, and stepped forward. Her leg was a hot iron.

No, she shook her head, denying the pain. The adrenalin was wearing off. Her readiness and awareness were dropping, like the battle was over already.

False security gets people dead.

"His last location," Carmen shouted to Hendrix over the noise, "right there, about four-hundred feet away."

"Roger."

She forced herself to run. The pain could wait. Over her shoulder, over the firefight, she heard Hendrix ordering his men to search. Her eyes were on the gyrocopter.

A massive BOOM from behind her, maybe a few hundred feet away. She ignored it and kept going.

A-14s had modular fuselages that could be switched out to carry troops, mechs, fuel. This one had an open-air seating module lined with bucket seats (luxurious, she thought wryly). The troops called it a "sky canoe." On the side of the nose, painted roughly, was a cartoon frog with a pair of Old West revolvers and the words, "Mister Toad."

In the canoe, already seated, was an oddly civilian-looking group. At the head of the gyro sat a dumpy man in a trench coat and horn-rimmed glasses. To his left, a teenage boy—as well-groomed as the first was slovenly—carried a small Bell & Howell movie camera, the kind used to film newsreels. The third was the only other woman—pale, red-headed, in combat fatigues; authoritative, but plainly faking a military gait. A fourth man had a 101st Airborne patch and a buzzcut.

Spies, Carmen guessed, except for Buzzcut.

"Hurry, they're shooting at us!" the dumpy man said, clutching a briefcase to his chest.

Carmen stepped into the sky canoe, her boots clanging on the metal grate deck, and laughed.

They looked at her like she was a monster.

"Strap in. There's still more to do," the red-headed woman shouted.

Carmen complied. Dash-Dash-Dash was already there, strapped to his chair, his rifle and kit under the seat. She heard more behind her—it was Hendrix with the Red Duke.

"Let's go! Let's go!" the woman shouted.

Hendrix ignored her, turned to Carmen. "They found your man—dead. His whistler kit blew up on the launchpad. The second sky canoe will extract him."

He prioritized me, thought Carmen. Adam's dead...

The A-14's forward rotor throttled up. Buzzcut pulled up the ramp while Hendrix strapped the Duke in, then himself.

"Hurry, there are Crickets at this base," the dumpy man said, his teeth chattering.

"What are Crickets?" the young man asked.

"Don't worry about it, Arthur," the red-headed woman said, then turned to the dumpy man: "Baker, calm down. Pardon my friend, all; he's never in the field, obviously."

Baker? Quaker? Carmen looked the cowardly man over. He was the last human you would ever bring to a war zone.

Click! Hendrix was in. Buzzcut pounded the cockpit's plexiglass rear window, and the gyrocopter started moving.

Carmen looked through the metal grate floor. She saw the snow blur by underneath her, then trees. Behind them was the wreck of the base, plumes of smoke, aimless tracers, gyrocopters landing, a distant mech battle.

Her thoughts were a jumble.

Adam... Adam... gracious, it's cold.

She looked up. Buzzcut was now wearing a leather gas mask. He pointed underneath the seat between his legs, signaling that Carmen's was underneath her chair. She looked down at the world speeding by beneath her feet...

Five orange lines burst from the trees like claws that cut through the earth. In the air behind the canoe—not thirty feet away—a Glaive mech floated, its long-barreled 20mm cannon pointed straight at them, so close she could read the triangular Siege Ejectable sticker next to its cockpit. Just as suddenly as it appeared, the mech floated toward the ground.

Another Glaive mech appeared, and another. All floated downward again, back through the trees.

Crickets, she thought—Glaive mechs with rocket boosters. They could jump hundreds of feet into the air.

Their purpose: to take out gyrocopters.

But they didn't do anything. They trailed behind the Mister Toad, losing momentum, jumping farther behind the gyro with each leap—not daring to shoot them down. They couldn't risk the sacred life of their Duke.

Carmen looked at Baker, the dumpy man. His head was between his knees.

She laughed.

— — —

Hi all, this is a chapter from a novel I'm serializing online called, The Winter Palace. If you like it, I hope you'll . I'll post a chapter a week.

In the meantime, I've got other books for sale on Amazon, including the Christian thriller Liberator. Check it out!

Also, here's my site:

Have a great day, and see you next week.