Kill Decision (32 page)

When she awoke they were still on the highway, which now wound along a river in brown hills patched with snow. She looked around in the afternoon light.

“Where are we?”

“Outside Grand Junction, Colorado. Eat something. No telling when you’ll get the next chance.”

She inspected one of the shrink-wrapped sandwiches and started tearing it open with her teeth. “Anything on the scanner?”

He shook his head. “Not about us.”

Before long they came down from the hills into the city of Grand Junction—a prosperous-looking oil town of mirrored glass buildings with a companion older downtown. But Odin blew through on the Interstate and headed out the far side. After a few minutes he took an exit onto a county road and headed into hills covered in snowy pines. The blue-white shadows of the Rockies were visible in the distance.

They passed only two other vehicles while traveling fifteen miles or so into steep forested hills. Odin slowed the SUV at the entrance to a rutted dirt road. There was a metal swing gate blocking it. He turned in and parked in front of it.

“We’re here?” McKinney looked around.

“Hop behind the wheel. I’ll open the gate.” Odin got out and put his Forest Service hat on with military precision.

McKinney did likewise with somewhat less precision. It felt odd playing the role of park ranger. She had never worn a uniform in her life, and she now realized how they caused you to adopt a persona. You could almost “feel” the role you were supposed to play. She imagined that was something authority had always known.

Instead of unlocking the gate, Odin was counting off paces to the right of it. About twenty feet down the road he stopped and flipped over a flat rock in the woods with his boot. With a cautious glance to make sure no cars were coming, he knelt and rooted in a hidden cache to come up with what looked to be a walkie-talkie and an automatic pistol in a sealed Ziploc bag. He returned to the SUV and emptied the bag’s contents onto the hood. He quickly slid the pistol into his Forest Service jacket.

McKinney noticed a packet of twenty-dollar bills, a U.S. passport, and several other items in the pile.

“You have stuff scattered all over the place.”

“When things go wrong, you’ll be shit out of luck if you haven’t prepared.” Odin then started keying numbers into the front of the radio. “Crypto codes—hang on.” Finished, he keyed the mic and looked up the road. “Safari-One-Six, Safari-One-Six. This is Odin. Do you copy?”

They stared at each other across the hood of the idling SUV, listening to radio static.

Then a squawking voice.
“Odin, this is Safari-One-Six. I read you five-by-five. Sky is clear. Welcome home.”

Odin looked visibly relieved. “We’re coming in. Odin out.” He pocketed the radio. “Let’s get off the road.” He pulled a key out of the Ziploc bag as he approached the gate.

McKinney walked around and got behind the wheel of the SUV. Odin unlocked a thick padlock and pushed the gate in, motioning for her to drive through. He then relocked the gate behind them and got in on the passenger side, pushing the seat farther back with a thump. “We’ve a couple miles yet.”

McKinney brought them down a road winding along the bottom of a ravine, which then opened into a canyon that followed a frozen creek. There was patchy snow in the pine forest around them, but only occasional ice on the dirt road. They bumped along at twenty miles an hour for a while until McKinney came around a curve and suddenly saw a man materialize out of thin air alongside the road. It took her a moment to realize that it was a soldier in a camouflage suit, lowering what appeared to be a mirrored shield. The combination of the two had given him something approaching invisibility. The soldier carried a large white sniper rifle in the crook of his arm, and signaled her to halt with the other as they approached.

McKinney brought the SUV to a stop and looked to Odin.

“It’s us.” He got out, and she did likewise.

A Polaris ATV was already coming down the road ahead with another sniper on it, rifle strapped over his back. The first man had pulled back the mask on his ghillie suit to reveal Foxy, grinning as he pulled his long hair out of his face. He slapped Odin on the back. “Startin’ to worry about you guys.”

“Everyone accounted for?”

He nodded. “Now that you two have arrived. But there’s news too: Hoov says the mission’s over. Task Force Ancile is supposed to stand down and return to FB.”

“Stand down? On whose orders?”

The driver of the Polaris had stopped, engine idling, and pulled back his own ghillie suit hood to reveal Smokey. He nodded in greeting to McKinney.

Foxy shouldered his rifle. “Colonel sent word over JWICS. Says you’re to report when you get in.”

Odin exhaled as he contemplated this, sending a plume of vapor out over his beard.

Foxy looked dour. “They’re shooting us down in more ways than one.”

“We’re still on mission. . . .” Odin headed back to the SUV.

“What? What do you mean?”

Odin marched toward the truck. “Let’s get to the house.”

*   *   *

S
mokey and Foxy
led the way on the Polaris, a mile or so down the dirt road where the ravine opened out to a small valley surrounded by wooded hills. The road forked, with the right branch descending toward the valley floor, but they followed the Polaris to the left, uphill to a big chalet built into the hillside and surrounded by sparse pine forest. The first-floor walls were of fieldstone, but stout logs formed the next two floors, with a pine-needle-covered slate roof and dormers rising above that. There was another Forest Service SUV parked near a closed garage door.

McKinney looked up through the windshield as she pulled to a stop.

Odin gestured as he got out. “Old FBI safe house. They used to debrief Russian and Cuban defectors here in the sixties and seventies.” Odin opened the cargo bay and grabbed the raven cage.

Smokey and Foxy had already pushed through the tall oak doors into the foyer of the old chalet. “Hoov!”

McKinney and Odin followed them into a musty three-story entry hall lined with mounted elk and deer heads, balcony railings, and a large staircase. There was a huge fireplace on the far wall, and although it was cold in the house, there was no fire lit. Stacked along the wall were a dozen or so green Pelican equipment cases.

McKinney then stared up at a large antler chandelier hanging on chains overhead. “This place is a vegan’s nightmare.”

“Who’s vegan?” Hoov entered the room from an interior door and nodded greetings.

Odin dispensed with pleasantries. “Get me an uplink to the colonel ASAP.”

“On it.” Hoov departed just as Ripper entered from a different doorway with Mooch. “Hey, Sarge.” She was now wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. “Is it true we’re standing down?”

“No. How’s our security?”

“We’ve got boom cameras topside and an RF-transmitter sensor perimeter established at the ridgeline, but there hasn’t been any movement. No overflying aircraft.”

“Have you swept the place?”

She nodded. “Nothing.”

“Good.” Odin deftly tossed his Forest Service campaign hat over a deer head’s antlers. He then put the birdcage down and opened its door. “Huginn, Muninn. Explore.” They hopped out of the cage.

McKinney couldn’t help but notice that everyone was armed with pistols in nylon thigh holsters and scoped assault rifles hanging barrel-down on straps over their shoulders and combat harnesses with spare clips. “We expecting trouble?”

Odin spoke without looking up. “We’re always expecting trouble.”

McKinney heard a loud
caw
and looked up to see the ravens perched on the antler chandelier. “At least someone likes the decor.”

Hoov entered again. “Colonel’s up, Odin.”

“Thanks.” He headed after Hoov. “I want this recorded.”

“Already rolling.”

McKinney followed them both into what looked to be a rec or family room. This had another large fieldstone fireplace, and the walls were sprinkled with authentic-looking mountain bric-a-brac—snowshoes, muskets, kerosene lanterns, and framed portraits and photos of men posing with large dead animals. There was also a sizable bar along with a couple of sofas and a writing desk—on which Hoov had set up his electronics workstation. As with the rest of the place, the heavy drapes were drawn and the overhead lights and lamps on. Hoov’s workstation consisted of several flat-panel monitors, a couple of ruggedized laptops, radio gear, and wires running out beneath the drapes—through a sliding glass door, perhaps. There was also a small video camera clipped to the top of one of the monitors, on which a red LED light glowed.

Staring out at them from the central monitor was a stern-looking, thick-necked man in his sixties, in a sport coat and button-down shirt, viewed from the waist up. The lines on his face were as intricate as the Utah desert seen from space.

Odin saluted. “Colonel.”

The man nodded. “Glad to see your troop is all accounted for, Master Sergeant. Did Professor McKinney survive?”

“She did, sir. She’s with us.”

“Good. Task Force Ancile is to stand down immediately. You’re all to return to Fort Bragg with whatever intel you have.”

“Why’d they shoot down my plane, sir?”

“Let’s call it a misunderstanding, Master Sergeant.”

“I’d like to know what—”

“Return to base. It doesn’t matter what happened before; now that the drones are public, there’s been a reset. Joint Chiefs are letting Air Force take the lead. We’re to stand down. It came from the very top.”

Odin just stared for a moment. “Colonel, I think you need to—”

“It’s not your job to think, Master Sergeant. It’s your job to follow orders. Now, get to it.”

The screen blinked out.

Odin kept staring at the dark screen.

Foxy sat down in his flowing ghillie suit on the arm of the sofa. “So that’s it, then? Air Force shoots at us, and then we’re under their op-con?”

Odin shook his head slowly. “Hoov.”

Hoov looked up from his laptop screen and pulled his radio headphones off. “Yeah?”

Odin pointed at the screen. “Run it through Visuallistics.”

Hoov frowned and tossed his headphones onto the desk. “You serious?”

Foxy could see the shock on Hoov’s face. “Odin, what’s up? Why would you suspect the colonel? I mean, this is the colonel. Mouse and he—”

“I don’t suspect the colonel.”

“Then I’m not following you.”

“Just do it.”

Foxy still looked confused.

Hoov was turning to another laptop. “That was a JWICS transmission—off our own damn satellite.”

“Do I have to do it?”

McKinney looked from person to person. “What’s going on?”

Foxy shrugged. “Odin thinks someone’s running an IO on us.”

“Which means . . .”

Hoov was opening the image of the colonel on another computer screen. “Influence operation. He thinks the video was doctored—which is fucking unlikely.”

“But how would you know?”

“Digital forensics—software we use to check the validity of photos and video that informants send us. People sometimes add the faces of high-value targets to footage, looking for a reward.” Hoov was clicking away as he spoke. “This works like weapon ballistics: Every brand of commercial camera has an electronic signature—subtle variations of resolution and compression pattern. This software tells me almost instantly the make and model of video camera that was used to make an image.”

“How does knowing the camera help?”

“Once I know that, I can tell if any part of the image has been altered. I don’t know how anyone could do that in real time, though. . . .” Hoov clicked away, and then stopped. He straightened. “Huh.”

Odin, Foxy, and McKinney watched him closely.

Odin spoke first. “What is it?”

Hoov turned. “It hasn’t been altered.”

Odin looked relieved. “Good.”

“I wasn’t finished.” He gestured to the screen. “It wasn’t altered because it wasn’t created by a camera. It was created by Image Metrics. He’s a vocaloid.”

“A what?”

Odin answered. “A computer-generated character.”

The group gathered around the monitor. The colonel’s image looked photographically real.

Foxy was shaking his head. “Fuck me. . . .”

Hoov ran his fingers through his close-cropped blond hair. “They must be using motion-capture. An actor on a green-screen or something. Sampled the colonel’s voice patterns. They use this type of tech to do virtual pop stars in Japan, but I’ve never seen it this real. It’s . . .” His voice trailed off.

“This is some seriously sophisticated shit, boss. And they’re inside our satellite network?”

Odin stared at the screen. “We need to assume whoever’s behind this is deeper in the system than we are. It also means they know where we are. The satellite uplink would have confirmed that.”

Hoov was checking radar images on one of his screens. “The feed from NORAD doesn’t show anything around us for fifty miles.”

Foxy shook his head. “But why would you trust it?”

Hoov swiveled in his chair. “For the moment they think we believed the colonel’s message, Odin. They’ll be expecting us to return to Bragg.”

“We’d never reach the base.”

Foxy sat back down on the sofa arm. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Ripper and Tin Man entered the room and Foxy nodded to them. “Keep an eye on those perimeter alarms.”

Ripper scowled in irritation. “What’d the colonel say?”

“The colonel’s a goddamned cartoon. Keep an eye on the sensors.”

As they exited with confused expressions, one of the ravens flew atop a tall bookshelf and plucked up a large, squirming beetle from a dark corner. The bird then flew down and perched on the lampshade next to McKinney. It held the beetle in its beak, legs still wriggling.

Foxy regarded the bird. “Good one, Huginn.”

McKinney did a double-take on the insect.

Huginn cocked its head at her but did not start eating the huge black beetle in its mouth.

“What have you got there?”

Foxy looked up from the laptop screen again. “Dinner, look’s like.”