Operation Honshu Wolf (7 page)

“We should leave,” Miller murmured.

“Yeah,” du Trieux agreed. “Let’s not be here when Mama gets home.”

E
MERGENCY PLANS WERE
issued by Schaeffer-Yeager’s internal security department to most executives and high-level staff, as well as those with access to material useful for industrial sabotage or at risk of extortion. The plans tended to be simple and short. Easy to remember, for when they came home to find the front door hanging open, or when someone broke in through a window at night. If there was a more substantial threat—terrorist attack, fire, natural disaster—a plan to keep the company’s personnel safe until a security team could pick them up was helpful, sometimes lifesaving.

The plan Northwind found for the Baxters had been updated just two weeks before, and was simple as could be. Relocate immediately to a shelter in the WellBeechBeck Washington Heights office, and await retrieval by security team Sabre.

“That’s bullshit,” Miller said. “There
is
no Sabre.”

“
Sabre is what’s listed.
”

“We’ve got Stiletto, Switchblade, Bayonet and Dagger. The security teams are named after knives, not swords—who authored the last plan update?” Miller growled, twisting the Bravo’s wheel. There was a little traffic at the bridges, cars nervously edging across in clumps. Not many drivers; half the city’s mainline electricity was down, and liquid fuels and cars were even scarcer than electrics right now.

“
It’s a numeric account with the internal security office. Forty-six, seventy-two.
” The voice from Northwind paused. “
Doesn’t seem to have a user linked to it.
”

“Harris, maybe?” du Trieux asked. “Bob Harris’s office is on the forty-sixth floor of Sexy Towers.”

“
Don’t
call it that in front of anybody important,” Miller said, as if he’d never spent time coming up with ways to fill in the blank on the ‘S-Y’ logo plastered all over the Schaeffer-Yeager skyscraper.

The Northwind operator snorted back laughter. “
Is there anything else I can do for you?
”

“Not unless you can raise anyone at the Washington Heights office.”

“
There’s a landline, but it’s disconnected.
”

“We’re good, then.”

“
Thanks for calling.
”

Northwind hung up on him, and Miller squinted at the GPS navigator. At least GPS still worked.

Du Trieux petted the Gilboa on her lap like it was an animal, staring out of the windows. “We should leave this to someone else and bring in the next target on the list.”

“The Baxters are on the list. We go look. If we don’t find them at the WBB office, we’ll list them as missing and move on.”

She nodded, scratching at the weapon’s bulky receiver. “What do you think the Sabre thing’s about?”

“Don’t know,” Miller said. “Maybe it’s a placeholder name for drafting up emergency plans, just a typo that slipped through. ‘Dear Mr. John Doe, upon triggering your personal alarm you will be met by team Sabre at the corner of Left and Right street...’”

“You don’t really think that, do you?”

Miller kept his mouth shut, concentrating on the road and the GPS’s audio navigation cues.

“Why the hell were the Baxters’ locks all open? You don’t think this is more of Harris’s bullshit, do you?”

“I think my job’s picking up the Baxters and taking them to safety.” Miller checked the mirrors as he turned, glancing every which way and checking the Bravo’s external cameras for signs of Infected or wildlife. “I’ll leave the mysteries to Sherlock Holmes.”

“But—”

“But nothing. We’re armed, these Bravos can roll over landmines and IEDs without blinking, and if we run into trouble we can’t get out of we can call in Doyle and Morland from their pick-ups. If the four of us can’t handle it, I’m sure there are more of those fucking helicopters on standby somewhere.” He glanced at her. “So one problem at a time. Our problem right now is figuring out where the hell the Baxters are.”

Du Trieux nodded, lightly. “Don’t like this, though.”

“Me either,” Miller replied. “I’d like it better if we had more guns and combat exoharnesses, but I’ll settle for an open barber who does a decent hot towel shave.”

She laughed, and stopped gripping the Gilboa quite so hard. “Is that all you miss? Hot shaves?”

“With just
that
much sandalwood oil,” Miller said, gesturing. “Better than going to the spa. What do you miss?”

“Palm wine,” she said, without hesitation. “My Nigerian cousins used to bring over
crates
of the stuff.”

“Now, I thought good Muslims don’t drink.”

Du Trieux settled back, smirking. “But if I didn’t drink I wouldn’t be a very good Frenchwoman.
Oui
?”

Miller’s turn to laugh. The lists of things they missed from before the famines and the heatwaves, from before all this
bullshit
started, were just about inexhaustible. In the right mood, going over it all brought back good memories, rather than the gloomy certainty that none of it would ever come by again. They reached cream cheese (du Trieux’s) and gay stand-up comics (Miller’s) when the sign for the ‘WellBeechBeck Washington Heights’ turn-off came into view ahead of them.

The medical company was one of Schaeffer-Yeager’s largest subsidiaries, along with S-Y Aerospace. Ordinarily its assets would never be involved with protecting high-level personnel from an entity as minor as DDLN, but it was routine for these office buildings to be used as initial shelters for employees.

The fifteen-storey tower looked dead, nothing to be seen through the mirrored facade, no lights, but the building’s internal systems were online when Miller tried connecting to them. He couldn’t access the closed circuit cameras or any door-locks. Without a live internet connection for the building to authenticate him on, the best it could do was show him the login page and hang up.

While Miller was messing with technology, du Trieux looked at the building like a woman hunting guerrillas. When he told her that he didn’t think anyone was home, she disagreed immediately, pointing out what she could see from her seat.

“See that pile of trash there? Fresh—some of it not yet covered by dust or fungus. That pit looks like a latrine, or somewhere to dump food scraps.” She tapped into the Bravo’s cameras, and zoomed in on something sticking out of one of the windows on a lower floor—a scorched-looking length of air conditioner duct.

“That’s a chimney,” she said. “They have a fire, maybe for cooking. This building is
very much
occupied.”

Miller touched his earpiece. “Dial Cobalt-2-2,” he told it.

Doyle, reliable as ever, picked up on the first ring. “
Miller?
”

“What’s your status?”

“
Moving to drop off civilians at the compound.
”

Miller consulted the GPS navigator, and tried to figure out if its guess of a twenty-five minute ride between Astoria and his location would be accurate. Probably, but they were burning daylight. Wasting both his teams’ time on this...

“Fuck it,” Miller muttered. Better safe than sorry. “Doyle, we’ve got a big scary building to search, and I want more than two of us doing it. Get over here, and bring guns.”

O
NCE IN A
while, channel-hopping as a child and wishing he had streaming video on demand instead of the cable TV provided by the Air Force base his dad had been stationed at, Miller used to stumble across these nature programs. They weren’t documentaries, not like the dramatic ones on Discovery Channel where they got alligators to eat people in protective suits and hunted for giant sharks that were never quite so giant when they found them, but the shows were nice for having in the background while dicking around on social networks.

In the nature programs there was a scientist, or a biologist, always speaking in soft, hushed tones, as if they were frightened of startling what was on camera. And it was just... footage of animals, doing animal things. Sleeping, walking around, hunting, whatever. The footage was either from a hand camera or a drone, and somehow those shows turned a lion getting up and walking toward a jeep into the most terrifying moment in the world, way better than Discovery Channel’s crazy sharks, because the sharks felt like something somebody made up for a monster movie, and lions on the savannah were
real
. And lions were so rare it was illegal to shoot them, so if they attacked, you just got eaten, and that was that.

Miller found himself talking to du Trieux in the same hushed tones, even though he had an M27 across his lap and the Bravo’s armour could hold off RPGs, let alone the claws and teeth of the predators crossing the road a few blocks away. Not terror-jaws, something much bigger and stockier. They might have been nicknamed thugs? Miller wasn’t sure if it really was a thug—a heavy-built scavenger that’d gnawed its way through Canada—he didn’t think they got as big as what he saw in his binoculars. Even so, he wasn’t too worried. Sure, maybe some of these Archaeobiome things had eaten T-rexes once upon a time, but so far as Miller knew, dinosaurs weren’t built to handle IEDs.

Then again, even if these things weren’t lions and Miller was very definitely allowed to blow them away, he didn’t much like the idea of trying to take down something the size of a fucking
rhino
with rifle rounds.

“Do you think the people in there are hiding until nightfall?” du Trieux asked, matching his tone. “Perhaps the predators around here can’t see too well.”

Privately, Miller suspected it was the heat. The Bravo’s interior fans were roaring away, but Miller didn’t even want to guess what it must have been like to suffer outside for hours on end. The building’s shade might have been all that was keeping the inhabitants alive.

“Maybe,” he murmured, quickly changing the subject. “Doubt any decent local clubs open up until eight or nine, anyway.” He glanced across the Bravo at her. “We could come back then, find dates. I call dibs on blondes and redheads.
Especially
blondes.”

She hesitated, lifting an eyebrow. “Do I get first shot at blonde men, at least?”

“Hell, no. Not if they’re short, anyhow.”

Du Trieux snorted. “I hope it’s okay to ask, but... You prefer men? Or women?”

“Both. Maybe a little pickier when it comes to men—if he doesn’t take better care of his looks than I do, not too interested.” Miller tapped the driver’s wheel. “You? Men, women, both?”

“Just men.”

“Really? Didn’t someone say you were dating a Lebanese around the water cooler...?”

She near enough slapped him. “Don’t you Americans know
any
countries other than ones you invade—” And then she saw his mock-serious expression, and laughed.

He left her to chuckle, and glanced through the windshield nervously.

“Why do you do that?” du Trieux asked.

“Do what?”

“Distract us with bullshit when things get serious.”

Miller tapped his fingers on the wheel again, glancing around in hopes of spotting Doyle and Morland’s Bravo. “You know I was in the Army, right?”

“Right.”

“The closest I ever got to war was sitting around the base on rapid deployment alert. They’d line us up with all our gear, sometimes sit us in troop transport planes. It’d go on for weeks at a time whenever they held an election in Saudi Arabia, or if someone blew up an oil pipeline in Russia, or whatever.” Miller chewed his lip. “It was like sitting with a guillotine hanging over us, day after day, and we were
begging
it to drop. There wasn’t any other way to break the tension; bullshitting each other instead of thinking about—it’s an instinct by now.”

Du Trieux joined him in silently watching the building and streets for a while, lightly fingering her Gilboa.

“You remind me of Hasim,” she said, eventually.

“Hasim?”

“A
jihadi
I met while we were liberating Syria from the false caliphate, the Daesh.” She glanced at him uncertainly, but he didn’t explode in war-on-terror speak and bigotry, so she went on. “Mostly, at camp, he sang songs that the Daesh would have executed him for. Not just because they were mocking, but because the Daesh think music is
evil
. All he wanted to do was sing. He didn’t want to fight. Not really.”

Miller nodded slightly, tapping away at the wheel to distract himself. “Yeah, I’m kind of a coward like that.”

“Oh, Hasim wasn’t a coward,” du Trieux said. “He didn’t
want
to fight, but he knew he must. Not out of vengeance for our brothers and sisters, like most of us there, but because it was the correct thing—the
right
thing—to do.”

Miller’s fingers stilled on the steering wheel.

“There isn’t any shame in a fear of violence, Miller. This is what bravery is, isn’t it? Overcoming fear to do what is right?”

He blinked at her. “I heard the soldier needs something of the sociopath in him.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Men like that are good killers, but they are not good
men
, you understand?”

Miller looked away, thinking on what du Trieux had said, and what Gray had said. “Maybe,” he said quietly.

Du Trieux lapsed into silence after that, leaving Miller alone with his thoughts and she with hers.

As the minutes and heat wore on, the behemoth-sized thugs trotted away to find something weak or dead to eat. Eventually the streets were quiet and still, except for the movement of another Bravo rolling to a halt at a nearby intersection.

“
In position
,” Doyle reported a moment later.

They brought the Bravos together, and sat in their air conditioning with the doors open for a quick briefing.

“We’re looking for the Baxters. Their emergency plan directed them to evacuate here, their home’s been abandoned at least a week.” Miller passed the pad with Alphonse and Linda’s pictures on it over to Doyle and Morland, letting them get a look. “Two kids. From family photos, their skin’s a little lighter than their dad’s, frizzy hair like his. The building’s got
somebody
living in it, though we haven’t seen any movement in the half-hour we’ve been here,” he said. “Except for big-ass animals, but they cleared out.”