Kill Decision (33 page)

McKinney tried to approach the bird, but it walked to the other edge of the lampshade. She caught her breath. “Hang on a second.”

Odin turned to face her. “What is it?”

“It’s a South American flower beetle—its territory ends four thousand miles south of here.” She plucked it from the raven’s beak. Huginn didn’t put up too much fuss. She examined the beetle as its wings beat furiously to escape. But McKinney was an old hand at handling live insects. The others gathered around her, and she pointed at what appeared to be a large third eye in the center of its head. “How did it get here?”

Odin leaned close to it.

“Someone get me a knife. . . .”

McKinney moved over to the bar, as Foxy started rooting around through drawers.

“Get me some tweezers and a couple pins if you can find them.”

“Right.” He handed her a loose razor blade he found in a utility drawer and kept searching. McKinney held up the huge beetle to the light as Odin sat on the barstool next to her.

It was immediately apparent that the bug had been “altered.” McKinney pointed with the razor blade tip at two plastic objects underneath each wing. “I’ve seen this before.”

“What do you mean you’ve seen it before? Where?”

“At an entomology conference a couple years ago. These are tiny generators, capturing the wing movement to power microelectronics.”

Odin looked incredulous.

“It wasn’t classified—it was brain research. They were looking for a research grant.”

Foxy handed her several sewing needles in a mug and a pair of tweezers.

“Thanks.” She put the razor blade down and grabbed a needle—sticking it straight through the beetle’s brain, killing it, as she anchored the beetle to the bar top. Though dead, the insect’s legs were still scrabbling at the wood.

“Hard core, Professor.”

“We’ll see. . . .” She then took the razor blade and started dissecting the beetle, peeling back the carapace to get at the brain. Almost immediately, she noticed fine fiber-optic threads leading from a tiny camera lens into an electronic device the size of a grain of rice. She used the tweezers to tease it away from the brain and up into the light.

It looked like a tiny CCTV camera and antenna assembly, with Asian characters printed on it.

Odin studied it. “We’re through the looking glass, people.”

“Chinese.”

Odin pushed away from the bar. “That’s just the camera’s manufacturer, Foxy.”

McKinney nodded. “The conference presentation was on ‘brain-jacking.’ They insert the transmitter directly into the insect’s brain—adding it at the larval stage so the insect grows around it. They leverage an existing nervous system to make a remote-controlled minidrone out of a living thing. All you do is activate the neurons that handle flying, turning, crawling, whatever, and the bug’s own nervous system handles the rest. We all thought the guy was sick. Apparently he found a receptive audience in the military.”

Odin took the camera from her and held it up to the light, then he ripped the antenna out. He looked around. “There’s no telling how many more of those things there are in here.”

Odin tossed the thing on the floor and crushed it under his boot. “This site is blown. We need to evac immediately. What’s down at the airstrip?”

Foxy answered. “MD500 chopper and a Cessna Grand Caravan.”

“In cover?”

“The Cessna’s in the hangar.”

“Fueled up?”

He nodded. “Wing tanks too.”

“All right. Hoov . . .”

Hoov swiveled on his chair. “Yeah?”

“Destroy the uplink equipment and prepare to move out.”

“You got—”

There was a series of deep
thwack
s as holes appeared in the heavy drapes and fist-sized divots blasted out of Hoov’s chest. Then half of his head blasted apart, spraying McKinney and the sofa with gore. Hoov’s body pitched forward, upending the coffee table.

“Sniper!”

CHAPTER 21

War Mask

M
cKinney was dimly aware
of shouting and people hitting the floor around her as the world seemed to constrict to a tiny focal point on her shoes—which were covered in blood. Hoov’s quivering body lay at her feet. She stared at the interior of his skull, even now coursing with blood that pooled across the floor. Blood was also oozing from several other holes in Hoov’s chest, turning his entire blue Ancile polo shirt maroon.

That’s when someone grabbed her bodily by the shoulders and hauled her over the back of the sofa. She didn’t even feel the hard impact on the floor, but it must have brought her back to her senses. She looked up to see bullet holes systematically drilling into the foreheads of every human portrait and photograph on the wall that faced the covered window. Glass and splintered wood ricocheted around the room as bullet holes appeared with the speed and precision of a sewing machine. Two flat-panel monitors with the colonel’s face displayed on them also got hit dead center, blasting apart.

“Stay down!” Whoever had grabbed McKinney was dragging her. She felt Odin’s beard scratching her face as he pulled her behind the bar. His arm was as hard as a baseball bat, and he had a .45 tactical pistol in his other hand.

Someone shouted, “Sniper, Black, Alpha, Two!”

Odin responded in a booming voice. “Automated sniper station. Probably synth-app radar—stay away from perimeter walls!”

Foxy’s voice. “Hoov’s gone, Odin.”

“I know.”

A voice called out from the foyer. “Odin! Boomerang says the shots came from two locations near the center ridgeline. Plunging fire from six hundred and eighty-three meters and six hundred and twenty meters out.”

“What are we facing?”

“Hard to identify the station model at this angle—both acoustic signatures look like .338s. They’re in heavy cover and burning us with radar.”

Foxy pounded the floor with his fist from behind the sofa. “They must have been here all along—waiting for confirmation that the team was all present.”

Odin nodded. “Mark their location! And turn on a goddamned GPS jammer, Mooch! I don’t want a JDAM down on our heads.”

“On it!”

McKinney saw Ripper with her back to the bar next to them. The woman looked cool and focused as she pulled a metal canister from her harness.

Odin shouted, “Popping Mike Mike particle smoke!”

Ripper pulled the pin and tossed the now fiery canister over the bar into the room.

Odin talked over the hissing, expanding smoke cloud. “All right, listen up! We’ve drilled against this weapon system a hundred times. You all know what to do. Everyone to the foyer, in full AD gear, two minutes! On my mark!”

Looking down, McKinney realized she was completely spattered with gore. Chunks of what must have been brains came back on her fingers as she wiped her hands. The involuntary reaction was instant. She vomited onto the parquet floor behind the bar, sucking for air between retches. “Oh, my God . . .”

People talked to her rapidly from somewhere, but her body wouldn’t let her hear. She had the dry heaves, crawling on her elbows.

Someone pulled her up sharply. Odin. He smacked her painfully on the scalp with his open hand. “Get your shit, together, Professor. I need you on deck.”

The pain brought McKinney back to her senses but pissed her off. “Fuck you! I’m working it out.” She rose to a crouch.

The smoke had almost filled the room, and it was getting hard to breathe.

Odin shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

The team leapt into action, calling out with repeated “Go! Go! Go!” as a form of echolocation as they moved quickly out of the room.

Ripper tossed a bar towel to McKinney. “Move, Professor!” She motioned with her rifle, and McKinney rushed past as she wiped blood and brains off her neck and face—and ran into a choking cloud of smoke. As she emerged into the relatively clear air of the large foyer, Mooch grabbed her. “You injured?”

“No. It’s not mine.”

Foxy and Tin Man were already breaking open the large Pelican cases piled against the wall, while Ripper kept guard with her assault rifle, scanning every opening. Mooch was powering on electronics packages contained in ruggedized backpacks.

“COMJAM up.”

Odin entered, dragging Hoov’s body—a small rug covering its head. “We mourn later. Right now this operation has been compromised at a command level. This house is probably surrounded by class-one sniper stations—no doubt with more serious ordnance inbound. I need an immediate exfil plan.”

Mooch answered first. “I say we make for the airstrip and fly out in the Caravan.”

Foxy and the others were pulling strange weapons, armor, and gear out of the cases. “What about those jet-powered stealth drones? They could just shoot us down if we fly out.”

Odin shook his head. “I think they brought those out for their big show. They don’t have them in quantity yet. That’s what their appropriations bill is for.”

Ripper added, “And Odin took one out.”

Foxy pulled what looked like a Roman shield with a mirrored surface out of one of the equipment cases. It had some sort of flexible fiber-optic viewing lens on a cable attached to its inner side. “Look, let’s just dodge these sniper stations and light out into the back country on foot.”

“Overland on foot it’s two days to civilization, and the longer we stay in this area, the more shit they’ll be able to throw at us. With TRACER radar they could pick us off even in dense cover. We need to get clear out of this region as fast as possible. That means exfil by air.”

Smokey nodded. “He’s right, Foxy. With the wing tanks on the Cessna we could do fifteen hundred miles easy.”

“But to where?”

“We’ll work that out once we’re airborne. For now we just need to get out of this killbox.”

“You wanna fly below radar in these hills?”

Ripper nodded. “I’ll fly the bitch.” To McKinney the woman’s appearance seemed incongruent with her attitude—she didn’t look tough. She looked like a pleasant neighbor. Someone who baked a mean casserole. But here she was, strapping on special-purpose body armor.

Foxy eyed her. “Have you flown one, Ripper? It’s not a one-seventy-
two.”

“Fuck, yeah, I’ve flown one. Remember Caqueza?”

Mooch grimaced. “We were picking branches out of the landing gear.”

“Well, is that low enough for you?”

“Then it’s agreed.” Odin pointed at Foxy. “If Ripper gets hit, you’re pilot, Foxy. Then me.”

McKinney noticed that while the conversation was going on, the team was suiting up in black body armor with odd, irregular edges and color patterns—green and brown splotches, textures. In particular they were strapping on outlandish helmets that looked almost like Pablo Picasso carnival masks—fearsome and highly asymmetrical.

Odin grabbed a thick plastic combat shotgun and jammed a plastic round drum clip into it. He chambered a shell. “They’ve got face detection running. Looks like they’re set to shoot at any human likeness, regardless of thermal intensity—so I want complete facial cover. Mooch, help the professor into Hoov’s cool suit.”

“Oh . . .” McKinney looked down at Hoov’s partially covered body. “I—”

“Not negotiable, Professor. Mooch!”

“On it.”

Mooch pulled a black jumpsuit out of a nearby case and tore open the Velcro fasteners before handing it to McKinney. The thing looked almost like a deep-sea diving suit, except that it had raised ribs running all along its surface. The others had already put theirs on beneath their odd armor. They resembled an oil-rig dive team gearing up for performance art.

Mooch talked while he worked. “Cool suit—it helps conceal your thermal signature. Refrigerant flows through the bladders. You’ll start getting cold if you’re not moving, so let me know if your fingers start to feel numb.” He was already strapping odd body plates onto her arms and legs.

She studied the plates. Their intent appeared to be disrupting the human outline—with special emphasis on the face. Mooch pulled a dense balaclava over her head.

“Radio earphones too. I want her jacked into team comms.” Odin turned. “Foxy, Tin Man, get up to White, Bravo, Two and draw some fire. I want a map of every sniper station between us and the airstrip.”

“What if they’re mobile? It’d be a waste of time.”

Mooch shook his head. “Look at the GBOSS images. They’re dug in like ticks out there. They’re not going anywhere.”

“Right.” Foxy pulled an uninflated pool toy from one case, and then he inserted an air canister into its base. The pool toy quickly inflated into a human bust—a Caucasian male in a suit. He affixed it to a plastic pole, then he and Tin Man ran upstairs with it.

“Watch your ears . . . firing!”

Odin aimed the shotgun at the skylight on the ceiling at the far side of the entry hall. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Glass rained down onto the floor planks ten feet away. The sky was now open above them. Odin leaned down to the ravens, who seemed unfazed by the gunfire. He held up an index finger. “Huginn. Recce. Recce. Muninn. Recce. Recce. Go!”

They
caw
ed back at him loudly, then flew up through the skylight into the blue sky.

McKinney watched them go. “They could get shot, Odin.”