Revolution (6 page)

The long trek had given him more time to judge his guides. As soldiers, they were more competent than he'd thought at first, good at spotting possible ambush points and wary enough to plot escape routes before moving through fields they weren't already thoroughly familiar with. He trusted them, to a point, but knew that if they were captured by guerrillas, it wouldn't take much for them to give him away.

Deniz said something to Kyiv and the two men laughed. Stoner frowned, figuring it was probably some sort of joke at his expense.

“We are almost there. We stay on the road unless we hear something,” said Deniz, gesturing. “Two hundred meters.”

Stoner grunted, thinking, watching. He had a pair of night vision goggles in his pack, but there was more than enough light from the moon to see along the road and well into the nearby fields. The steeple of a church stood up on the right, marking a hamlet. Two houses sat near a bend in the road ahead. Otherwise, the way was clear.

Even though there were no lights shining in the windows or smoke coming from the chimneys, Stoner had Kyiv lead them into a field opposite the two houses so they could pass
without taking any risks. The field connected with another; a narrow farm lane ran north along the end of this second field, separated from a neighboring farm by a thick row of trees.

Stoner put his night vision glasses on as he walked, growing warier as the shadows in the distance multiplied. But nothing was stirring.

The detours cost them another fifteen minutes. Finally, he saw the ramshackle barn where he was supposed to meet his contact. It stood above the field on the opposite side of the road, its foundation built into the crest of the hill.

He scanned the building carefully, then shook his head.

“So?” asked Deniz.

“I don't see anyone.”

“No?”

Stoner turned his view to the nearby field. It too was empty.

The Romanians watched him silently. They weren't joking any more, nor whispering. For most of the night they'd left their rifles slung lazily over their shoulders. Now they held the guns with both hands, ready.

Stoner began moving to his right, keeping the barn in sight. The dirt and dead grass had heaved up with the evening frost, and it crunched as he walked. After he'd gone about thirty yards, he stopped and once again carefully examined the barn and nearby fields.

No one.

Slowly, he made his way up the hill, the two Romanian soldiers trailing behind him. About five yards from the barn, Stoner saw a shadow on the ground in front of it. He froze, steadied his gun.

“Champagne,” he said loudly.

The shadow moved, revealing itself as a man with a rifle.

“Champagne,” repeated Stoner. He curled his finger against the AK's trigger, slowly starting to apply pressure.

“Parlez-vous français?”
said the shadow. Do you speak French?

That wasn't the agreed upon phrase, and the accent was so un-French that Stoner had trouble understanding it.

“Champagne,” he said again.

“Vin blanc,”
answered the shadow. White wine.

That was the right answer, but the delay made Stoner wary. Had it been just a human mistake, or a giveaway that something was wrong?

“I don't speak French,” said Stoner in very slow Russian.

“Anglaise?”
responded the man.

Was it a trick? The contact would surely expect him to speak English.

It had to be a trick.

“You don't speak Russian?” said Stoner.

The man again asked, in English, whether they could use that language.

Stoner exhaled very slowly. He had to either trust the man—or shoot him. Doing nothing was more dangerous than either.

“I can speak English,” said Stoner.

The shadow took two steps forward. Though his voice was deep, he stood barely five feet tall, and had a scraggly beard that matched his thin body. He stopped abruptly, spotting the other two men a few yards behind Stoner.

“They're with me.” Stoner gestured with his left hand. His right continued to hold the gun, his trigger finger still ready to plunge.

“This way, we go,” said the man, pointing to his right.

Stoner let him start. His stomach had tightened into a boulder. They walked eastward across the field, down to a narrow creek, then began following it northward. His escorts fell farther and farther behind; twice Stoner stopped for them.

“You trust him?” asked Deniz when he caught up the second time.

Of course not, thought Stoner. But he only shrugged.

After about a half hour of walking, the stream entered a
culvert under a paved road. The stream was wider here; and while it remained shallow, it was more than four feet across.

“Wait,” said the man who had met them. He put up his hand.

Stoner nodded. The man went up the embankment to the road.

“I don't trust him,” said Deniz when he caught up again. “What is he doing?”

Stoner shook his head. The elaborate precautions made sense—if a man was going to betray his comrades, he would have to expect himself to be betrayed.

“Maybe we should find some cover,” suggested Deniz. “To cover you.”

“Do it,” said Stoner.

He'd already spotted two good places on the right bank of the stream, both protected on three sides by large rocks or thick tree trunks. The Romanians saw them as well and moved toward them.

“Where are your friends?” the man asked when he returned. He looked around nervously.

“They're here. Where is the man I'm to meet?”

“A house. Two hundred meters.” He pointed to the right.

“Lead the way.”

The man shook his head. “I'm not to go. Not your friends either. Only you.”

Stoner looked into his face. He had the face of a man who'd been beaten many times. He seemed more nervous than before.

“All right,” said Stoner. “Deniz, I'm going up the road. Stay with our friend.”

“Yes,” Deniz called out from his hiding spot.

Stoner began walking. The setup seemed too elaborate for an ambush, but he couldn't be sure. He tried focusing on his mission, tried pushing away the fear.

He dropped to his knee when he reached the road, scanning carefully. The house stood very close to the road, just
beyond a curve ahead. It was tiny, barely bigger than a garden shed would be back in the States. The woods thickened to his right, but there was a hill on his left and a clear field. He went up the hill, approaching the house from the back.

The cold ate through his coat. He opened his mouth, flexing his jaw muscles. The tendons were so stiff they popped, as if he were cracking his knuckles.

A dim light shone through the two rear windows of the house. Stoner walked up slowly, moving his head back and forth as he tried to see through them.

Nothing.

He was almost to the back of the building when he heard a footstep on the gravel in front of him. Dropping to his knee, he waited.

“Who's there?” said a woman's voice.

“Champagne,” said Stoner, trying not to sound surprised that his contact was a woman.

“Vin blanc.”

“Take two steps forward.”

The woman did so, walking out from the path near the corner of the building. She had a submachine gun in her hands.

“Why are you armed?” Stoner asked. His own rifle was aimed at her chest.

“It is not safe here to be without a weapon. Not for me. Nor you,” she added.

“Put your gun down,” he told her.

“And you yours.”

“All right.” But he waited until she had placed hers on the ground and stood again.

“You are the American?” asked the woman. Her English was accented, but not as heavily as Deniz's or the man who had led him here.

“Yes.”

“You're more than an hour late.”

“It took a while to get across the border.”

The woman's answer was cut short by a scream and the sound of gunfire back near the road.

Stoner scooped up his rifle. The woman already had her gun and was running. He aimed at her, then realized she was running toward the field.

“This way!” she yelled. “Come on!”

Before he could answer, a hail of bullets rang out from the woods, whizzing over his head.

Dreamland
1434

A
NNIE
K
LONDIKE BENT OVER
Z
EN AS HE FINISHED HIS
checks. He was sitting on a folding metal stool, which had been pressed into service as a kind of launching pad so he didn't have to start by sitting on the ground. His wheelchair was unsuitable, and the standard suits were always used standing up.

“Now listen, Jeff, no kidding,” said Annie in her sternest voice. “We've done a lot today. If you're the least bit tired—”

“I'm fine,” he told her, pulling on his Whiplash smart helmet, equipped with full communications gear and a video display in the visor. He reached back near his ear to the small set of controls embedded in the base, activating the integral communications set.

Danny Freah was standing a few feet away, wearing his own exoskeleton test unit. The Exo3 was fully integrated with a battle suit; its bulletproof armor was twice as thick as the regular units used by the Whiplash troopers, enough to prevent penetration by 35mm cannon rounds, though a round that large was likely to cause considerable internal damage since the suit wasn't big enough to diffuse all of the shell's kinetic energy. Some facets of the suit had not yet been implemented; it would eventually be equipped with LED tech
nology to make its wearer invisible in the sky. But otherwise it was very similar to MESSKIT. Danny had taken it for over a dozen flights already.

“Helmet on,” he said.

Zen could tell he was getting a kick out of playing pilot. “Hat's on,” he replied.

“Go to ten percent,” Danny told him.

Zen looked down at his right hand, then pushed the button he was holding with his thumb. The microjet engines in the back of the MESSKIT powered to life. They were relatively quiet, making a sound similar to a vacuum cleaner at about fifty paces.

Zen slowly twisted the control, moving the engines carefully to five percent total output, then to seven, and finally to ten. As the number 10 flashed in his visor indicator, his wings tugged him gently off the stool.

“You're looking good,” said Danny. “Let's go to seventeen.”

As he said that, Danny pushed his throttle and held out his arms. He rose abruptly. Zen tried the same thing, but without Danny's experience, he started moving backward rather than up. He pitched both hands down, as he'd practiced in the gym. This brought him forward abruptly, but he was able to back off into a hover without too much difficulty.

The designers had worked hard to make the unit and its controls as intuitive as possible, but the feel of flying still took some getting used to. Zen slipped his power up two degrees and found that pushing his head forward helped him stay in place as he rose.

His helmet's visor projected an altitude reading in the lower right corner, showing that he was 4.112 meters off the ground.

“How's it feel?” asked Danny.

“Like I'm on an amusement park ride.”

Danny laughed.

The sensation also reminded Zen of the zero gravity ex
ercises he'd gone through early in the Flighthawk program, when the developers were trying to get a handle on how difficult it would be for someone in a plane maneuvering at high speed to control the Flighthawks. He didn't feel exactly weightless, but the exoskeleton relieved what would have felt like a great deal of pressure on his shoulder muscles. He thought about this as he and Danny rose to fifty and then a hundred feet, practicing emergency procedures. Zen had a small, BASE-style parachute on his chest, just in case; the chute was designed to deploy quickly at low altitude if anything went wrong.

Confident that he could handle an emergency, he started putting the MESSKIT through its paces, accelerating across the marked course, then gliding into a circular holding pattern.

“You're getting pretty good with this,” said Danny as they completed a figure eight. “You sure you haven't flown before?”

“Ha ha.”

“How are your arms?”

“They don't feel bad at all.”

“The thing to worry about are cramps,” said Danny. “When we were first starting the experiments, Boston cramped up so badly we had to replace him in the program.”

Danny was referring to Sergeant Ben “Boston” Rockland, another member of the Whiplash special operations team. Zen got plenty of upper body exercise, and felt confident that whatever strain the MESSKIT was putting on his shoulders was minimal. His real concern was what he would do if he had a bad itch.

“All right, let's do a few sprints, then see how you are at landing,” said Danny.

“Last one to the flag is a rotten egg,” said Zen.

He leaned forward and twisted his throttle. The wind rushed passed his helmet—but so did Danny. Zen pitched his body down farther, then felt as if he was going to fall into a
loop. He backed off, slowing immediately. He looked up, and saw that Danny had already crossed the finish line.

But Danny didn't have any time to gloat.

“Captain, we have an automated alarm going off on Access Road 2,” said one of the security lieutenants, breaking into the frequency. “I have an aerial en route and hope to have a visual in thirty seconds. Maybe a car accident.”

An “aerial” was a small UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, used for surveillance.

“Go ahead and scramble the response team,” said Danny.

“They're out at Test Area 12, covering a broken leg.”

“Call Team 2,” said Danny.

“They're standing by for the fighter exercises. They're already covering three ranges.”

Because of the distances involved, not to mention the danger inherent in the base's experiments, Dreamland procedures called for a pararescue team to stand by near the range whenever live exercises were being held. The recent deployment and a ramp-up in Dreamland's research activities had stretched the available personnel, and there were times, such as now, when only two full teams were immediately available.