Kill Decision (45 page)

“The security guard says the landlord is owed rent for two months now, but the tenant is gone. They paid cash.”

One of Azeem’s companions, a Pashtun man in his fifties, was speaking in what McKinney assumed was Pashto to an elderly man with a timeworn AK-47 slung over his back. Azeem listened intently to their conversation.

“He says the men who came here wore black—their faces always concealed with shemagh. Much like you, and they spoke through translators.”

Odin exchanged looks with Foxy. “Does he know what nationality they were? Were they tall? Short?”

Azeem shook his head. “The workers in neighboring plots stayed away because they thought they were either extremists or a drug gang. You must understand, the workers here are of the lowest social rank. They want no trouble. So they kept their distance.” He gestured to the rusting hulk on the beach behind the place. “That’s why no one’s touched the salvage ship left behind. They’re afraid these men will return.” Azeem listened again to the old man talking. “He says container trucks made deliveries at all hours, and these people did not observe Salah—or any of the Five Pillars.”

McKinney had noticed that Odin was listening to the old man himself, and she suspected he didn’t need Azeem’s translation.

Odin studied the cinder-block warehouse in front of them. “You’ve checked the place out?”

Azeem nodded. “Whatever they did here was very strange, Odin. It doesn’t look like any drug-processing lab I’ve seen. The old man says they cut ship steel but only at night.”

“Wait here, Azeem.” Odin nodded to his team as he moved toward the warehouse.

McKinney followed, surreptitiously producing the jury-rigged chemical detection device Tegu had made for them in Mexico. She unfolded the severed drone antenna that had been connected to the old voltmeter housing and powered up the LED display.

As they walked into a wide, almost empty warehouse, perhaps two hundred feet on a side, the faint peppery aroma of oleoresin capsicum immediately came to her. The entire group exchanged looks.

“That smells familiar.”

“Colony pheromone.” The detection wand in McKinney’s hand started displaying parts per billion of perfluorocarbons as well—the odorless, colorless taggant chemicals that did not occur in nature.

McKinney showed Odin the red LED readout. “It lit up the minute we entered.”

Foxy moved to the nearest wall, where empty plastic barrels were piled haphazardly. “Hey! Look here.” He brought his face near to it but then turned away. “Empty barrels of ‘anger juice.’ From the looks of it. And probably some of the other chemicals too.”

Odin was moving toward a forty-foot orange storage container sitting with its doors open at the far wall. McKinney walked alongside him, checking the readout occasionally. Odin readied his carbine and motioned for Smokey and Mooch to approach from other angles.

Odin peered weapon-first into the opening of the container.

Foxy called out. “What’s in it?”

“Empty metal racks.” Odin stepped inside, examining what looked to be built-in metal shelving. They looked like purpose-built storage racks, with odd dimensions and metal rollers built in.

McKinney scanned the container with the wand, getting only middling readings on her meter. “Not much residue here. Do you think these racks were made for drones?”

“Hard to say.” Odin noticed something and moved to the container wall. He slung his weapon and grabbed what looked to be a sliding panel with handles built into the side of the container. With some effort he slid it down to open a five-foot-wide, two-foot-tall hatch. He was now staring at Foxy, who approached across the warehouse floor.

“Hidden panel.”

Odin nodded as he examined the edge of one rack. “Doesn’t look like this one was finished.”

“Maybe they left in a hurry.”

McKinney was already walking toward the far wall, watching the chemical readings going up again. “Hey! It increases in this direction. . . .”

Odin and the others followed her, weapons ready. “Stay alert, people.” He made a circling motion in the air with his hand, and the team spread out in a skirmish line. They were moving toward a metal overhead door that faced the beach. The door was closed.

As they reached it, Foxy noticed a cracked tan fiberglass mold about ten feet long leaning against the wall nearby. The mold had a wing-shaped depression in it. He tipped it over with the barrel of his gun, and it rolled back and forth for a while on its rounded aerodynamic shape.

“Carbon fiber mold?”

Odin studied it while McKinney scanned with the detector. She looked up. “That’s not where my readings are coming from.”

“Let’s get this door open. Move clear.” Odin watched as the team took up positions to either side of the loading bay door, and then he pressed a worn button mounted on the wall. With a hum and a rattle the metal door started to ascend. The din of distant blowtorch cutting and diesel winches came to their ears as fresh air blew into the warehouse. Looming a hundred meters away was the rear half of a rusted cargo freighter, standing five stories tall in the water, its near end closed off by corrugated interior bulkheads.

The team moved out onto the debris-strewn beach, weapons ready, and taking different paths around piles of detritus. Inch-thick pieces of rusted steel were everywhere, cut cleanly into squares.

Even with the breeze, McKinney was suddenly getting a hundred and fifty parts per billion of perfluorocarbon—nearly three times what she was getting inside the warehouse. “It’s going up dramatically now. . . .” She ignored the constricting black bag she was wearing and focused on the detector as she walked on sandals across the beach toward the grounded freighter. “It’s coming from the ship.”

Foxy pointed down as they moved across the hard-packed sand. “Strange tracks here, boss.” He nudged a booted foot at what appeared to be striation patterns pounded deeply into the sand.

“Professor, let us take point.” Odin edged ahead of McKinney as he climbed a toppled section of hull as a ramp to get onto the keel of the broken ship. The others were close behind, staring into a dark maw that led into the darkness of the one remaining hold.

McKinney ran her hand along the inch-thick steel edge of the hull. A clean, straight cut. “Doesn’t look like someone did this by hand.” She gestured to the ruler-straight cuts, and then out to the men spraying sparks in the distance as they cut the hulls. Those silhouettes looked far more irregular.

“What do you think, boss?” Foxy inspected the edges. “Ship-cutting drones?”

Odin looked back at them, shining his Maglite into the darkness from the edge of the doorway. “I don’t want us all in the hold at once. Bullets will ricochet off this steel like tennis balls. You guys follow when I give the all-clear.” Odin stuck the duct-taped end of the Maglite into his mouth and moved into the opening.

McKinney watched him go. “Be careful.”

He mumbled something around the flashlight in his mouth, and then disappeared into the blackness.

The rest of the team raised their weapons, watching his light beam scan about in what, judging from the echoing, was a cavernous space.

After a tense minute or so they heard a shout. “Clear! Get in here!”

The team exchanged looks and hurried into the darkness. Foxy and Mooch turned on Maglites of their own. McKinney followed on their heels, and soon she was at the bottom of a huge cargo hold that was partially illuminated by bright shafts of light coming in from a series of holes cut farther up in the hull and the deck overhead. It was easily over a hundred feet to the top, with chains hanging down and water dripping into pools on the rusted steel floor, but the cut patterns in the walls were just as symmetrical as those on the hull outside.

McKinney glanced at the reading on the detector. It was now up to a thousand parts per billion. “Good Lord. Judging from the pheromone readings in here, we’ve entered the colony itself.”

“You mean what was the colony.”

McKinney looked up to see the team assembled around some sort of broken machine the size of a dog lying on its back on the floor. She walked up to them. “What is it?”

Odin and Foxy stepped aside to reveal what looked to be a metal armature—obviously not a complete machine, but the base of one. “Broken. Looks like it has magnetic feet.”

“Careful.”

Odin pointed. “Disassembled—the top’s been taken off. There’s no motor. No circuit boards.”

McKinney leaned close and pulled off her veil to get a better look. The device looked like the articulated legs of a weaver ant on a central frame—with what appeared to be magnetic pads for feet. The upper portion of the machine was missing. She tried to raise it and was surprised it lifted off the metal—and it was lighter than she expected.

Odin examined the pads of the feet, tracing wires that led up the frame. “Electromagnets. They could switch off the magnets on each foot to provide traction and leverage for movement.” He flexed the leg and found it springlike, with plastic rods rooted in place like tendons. “I’ve seen this before. Electroactive polymers. They contract like muscle tissue when subjected to electrical current. No moving parts needed.”

McKinney’s hands came up greasy. She wiped them on her black robe, then ran her hands along four aluminum canisters similar to the pheromone dispensers on the quadracopter drones they had encountered in Colorado—only, these containers were liter-sized. “Look. A similar configuration of four pheromone dispensers.”

“But five times larger.” He gave her a look of recognition for her earlier prediction.

She waved the detector over them, and above one it went up into the tens of thousands of parts per billion. “The mother lode. We should take these with us.”

“Leave the pepper pheromone behind. They’re angry enough already.”

“We should take everything.” She started unscrewing the canisters from the frame. “Why would they bother with this? A ship-based drone colony. I don’t see how these would be better than what we’ve already seen.”

Foxy nodded back behind them. “There was that wing section back there. You think these things fly?”

“A flying ship-cutter.” Odin kicked the device over with his boot. “We’re not seeing the whole picture.” He stared up at the cuts made in the side of the hull—square holes. “Shipbreaking drones.”

McKinney stood. “But why bother with that? Why not simply swarms of drones with bombs or missiles?”

Odin shook his head. “I don’t know. But I do know that swarms of steel-cutting drones could play hell with shipping, radio towers, railroads, and bridges. Someone is building an integrated autonomous war machine, with varying types of drones that can work in concert with each other. Each with a specialized job to do.”

McKinney nodded. “Like the polymorphism that ants exhibit.”

“Right. We need to stop them before that integrated system is complete. We know that a few thousand barrels of those precursor chemicals were shipped here, and now they’re gone—along with just about everything else that was here. And it looks like they loaded it all into shipping containers. Foxy, ask Azeem if he still has a contact in customs in Karachi.”

Foxy nodded.

“Pack up those canisters. We need to find out where those containers went.”

CHAPTER 28

Brood Chamber

L
inda McKinney stood
at the bow of the surging workboat as humid tropical air rushed past her. She was happy to be back in Western business casual clothing. Alongside her Odin gazed through binoculars at a row of massive blue loading cranes running in a line that extended halfway across the horizon. The land ahead was essentially a concrete island edged by massive pilings and a black-and-yellow warning strip. The scale of the Chiwan Container Port boggled the mind. Onshore workers looked like specks moving among the multicolored shipping containers that rose like a Lego mountain range as far as the eye could see. Monstrous container ships rested up against the island’s geometric flanks, while high- speed cranes thirty stories tall loaded them like children stacking blocks.

A young Chinese man in a hard hat, rumpled shirt, and slacks stood some ways behind them, chain-smoking near the wheelhouse of the boat. He was looking a little sick as Evans lectured him about something in Chinese—how to avoid seasickness, possibly.

McKinney shouted in the wind to Odin. “Evans knows Chinese?”

“He had business here back in the day.”

“Your other friend doesn’t look like a sailor. Who is he?”

Odin spoke while still scanning the horizon. “Shipping agent. Old smuggling contact. We used to help his father avoid tariffs in exchange for letting us know if certain materials were moving in their ships.” He lowered the binoculars. “We scratch each other’s backs for paperwork-free favors.”

“What does he think we’re looking for?”

“Radiological material bound for the U.S.”

“Nuclear bombs.”

“Dirty bombs.”

McKinney unzipped a backpack on her shoulder that contained the pheromone canisters from Gaddani as well as the jury-rigged detector. She lifted the detector up so Odin could see. “You think he’ll notice this isn’t a Geiger counter?”