Cyborg Strike (12 page)

Tossing them unconscious under some bushes,
the man continued onward along the side of the mansion. One window
above showed dim light, but its heavy curtains were drawn tight and
he ignored it. Soon he reached the rear garden and climbed its tall
back wall by the simple expedient of gripping its protruding stones
with his fingertips. Not even bothering to plant his toes, he
climbed up the four-meter barrier like a two-limbed spider.

At the top, he reached up to clamp on hand on
the wall’s apex, ignoring the broken glass set into its mortar. He
pulled himself up to perch there, lizard-like, for a moment before
he dropped to the other side. At the bottom he paused, picking a
few sharp pieces out of his fingers, watching with faintly glowing
eyes as the bleeding stopped and the skin rapidly healed. He flexed
his digits, then, satisfied, moved out from under the shadow of a
tree and walked across this house’s garden to its basement
steps.

No dogs came to greet him this time. In fact,
this mansion seemed deserted, as expected. Walking down the stairs
to a belowground door, he reached out and easily forced the portal
to the basement open. Once inside, he closed and blocked it with a
nearby workbench.

Removing an infrared lamp from his pocket, he
looked around the cellar. Ancient furniture, stacks of decades-old
copies of Pravda, and shelves of empty bottles crowded the space.
He took out a small computer tablet and consulted its glowing
screen.

Once certain of his location and orientation,
he carefully and quietly cleared everything from one wall, and only
then did he remove the trench coat from his hunchbacked form. Once
set aside, the deformity was revealed merely to be a shapeless
rucksack beneath the jacket. He reached within, and methodically
laid out his tools.

He soon assembled a hand-powered rotary drill
on a short tripod. The whole arrangement must have weighted fifty
kilos, not to mention the various other tools he lined up on a
nearby table, yet it had not impeded him, even in his climbing.

Once in place, the man grasped the device’s
main grip, and its rotating handle, and began to crank. Gears spun
and the twenty-centimeter circular plug bit into the plaster, then
the old brick of the basement wall. Grinding noises accompanied his
work, but by comparison it was relatively quiet: no jackhammer
pounding, no whining scream of a high-powered motor, just the slow,
powerful chewing away at the baked-clay surface.

Once he obtained a large enough opening
through the hard brick layer, he opened a folding shovel and began
to dig. Moscow soil was hard-packed in this part of town but lacked
rocks or clay to make it difficult, so he progressed rapidly. In
eight hours he had dug, machinelike, for forty feet, angling
downward under the street out front. He filled up a large part of
the basement with the removed dirt.

Working all through the day, he stopped only
to eat high-calorie rations from his stores, drink water from the
basement sink, and relieve himself in that same receptacle. He used
pieces of furniture and shelving to brace his tunnel at strategic
places, eventually tearing apart the interior stairs leading up to
the house proper so he could use its wood as well.

Eventually, at perhaps six p.m., his tunnel
encountered a hard layer of modern concrete, at which point he
stopped using the shovel to dig forward. With only his hands, he
scraped the dirt away from the wall, and then walked back to his
much-reduced cellar space. He washed and then ate once again, and,
wrapping himself in his trench coat, slept on a bed of old
newspapers.

When his watch alarm went off at midnight, he
awoke. After one more round of ablutions, he placed a thick ring of
thermite plastique against the concrete and tripped its magnesium
igniter. Backing away for the minutes it took to cut nearly through
the wall, he stepped forward again when it burned itself out. A few
sharp blows of his hand knocked a hole large enough for him to
squeeze through.

He found himself in a black tunnel, and
switched on his infrared headband lamp, donning it. The invisible
light gave his implanted cybernetic eye all he needed in order to
see, and he soon found himself in front of a steel door at the top
of a set of concrete steps.

A crowbar from his left boot he set against
the hinges. Obviously the door had been built to resist opening
from the opposite side, the expected scenario being escape from
within the Prime Minister’s mansion, through the long tunnel into a
nearby military barracks. It was not made to keep someone from
entering.

More fools they, the man thought. He hungered
for blood, for dominance, and to complete his mission.

Once he had pried the hinges loose, he kept
the crowbar in his hand. Carrying a gun in Russia would have added
a risk of detection, so this weapon would have to do for the
moment.

No problem. There were plenty of guns on the
other side.

The sound of the door bring ripped out of its
place marked the end of his stealthy approach. On its other side,
an alert guard yelled out before the crowbar bashed his head in.
The big man’s right hand shot out and caught the guard’s AK before
it hit the floor. He then strapped the man’s ammunition belt around
his own waist.

Now he had a gun, and ammo. He slipped the
crowbar back into his boot.

Another guard leaned around the end of the
hallway. He and the intruder fired simultaneously at each other on
full automatic.

One of a dozen bullets caught the guard in
the shoulder, spinning him around. Seven of the guard’s bullets
struck the attacker full in the body: naturally the Prime
Minister’s security detail were all crack shots. The invader
twitched, but did not fall. He reached down to pick up the first
guard’s bulletproof helmet, placing it on his own head, then walked
down the hall to finish off the one he’d shot.

With the captured assault rifle, the attacker
advanced through the mansion. Dozens of bullets smacked into him
but he weathered the storm as if they were no more than plastic
pellets. He systematically hunted the guards down until they were
all dead.

Then he cut all their heads off and rolled
them in a blanket.

Outside the Prime Minister’s armored panic
room he dumped his grisly load, in full view of the camera. Finally
he spoke, in Russian.

“Prime Minister, you must come out. If you
do, no harm will come to you. If not, I cannot guarantee such a
favorable result. You have ten seconds.”

He actually waited twelve. No Prime Minister
was forthcoming, so he took out the crowbar and proceeded to smash
his way through the door. At the end of it the high-tensile tool
had been twisted like rubber, but the portal was open.

Inside the small safe room, the Prime
Minister stood and emptied his Makarov automatic into the hulking
figure’s chest. The man merely smiled, showing chromed metal
teeth.

“Just what the hell are you?” the man asked
in wonder, dropping his hand to his side, pistol forgotten.

“You may call me
Professor
. I’m your
destiny, Prime Minister Yermenov. I’m going to make you a very
happy man. Hold out your arm.”

“What?”

Without a second order, the Professor reached
out faster than Yermenov could react and seized his left wrist in
an unbreakable grip. Holding the man’s arm immobile, he fished a
titanium case from his back pocket and flipped it open one-handed.
Inside was a compact auto-injector. “Use it,” he said.

“What? No.”

“If you do not, I will render you
unconscious, painfully, then use it anyway. Just do it.”

Yermenov was a hard, brave man. He hadn’t
gotten to the top of his country’s government by lacking courage.
Taking the injector from the case, he looked at it for a moment,
then stabbed it, not toward his own arm, but at the hand that held
his wrist.

Releasing the case to fall, the Professor
caught the moving arm by its wrist as well, causing the Prime
Minister to let the injector go. Cat-quick, the big man released
one arm and caught the thing out of the air. Then, setting it
carefully on the ground, he struck Yermenov in the groin.

Once the Russian lay on the ground retching,
the Professor picked up the device and set it against the man’s
neck, and then triggered it.

Almost instantly Yermenov relaxed, a beatific
smile on his face. His mouth lolled open and he breathed easily,
despite the damage to his genitals.

“Good stuff, huh?” The Professor smiled, and
then placed the injector back in its case. “But it’s time to go
now.” He could hear sirens, and the sound of pounding feet as
reinforcements gathered outside the mansion. Hefting the drugged
man’s body over his shoulder, he ran lightly down the stairs and
through the tunnel door.

Sprinting as fast as he could run – which was
fast indeed – the Professor pounded down the tunnel to its other
end. He left it pitch black to normal eyes, using his infrared lamp
to guide him. At the other end of the long narrow corridor he
debouched into a small side-street basement warehouse filled with
dusty records of no import. The KGB owned the building but hardly
ever visited the place. Even they did not know its only purpose was
as a bolt-hole for the Prime Minister.

Outside, the big man lifted the Russian
leader into the back seat of a parked Mercedes and climbed in next
to him. “Drive,” he said to the man at the wheel. Soon, they
arrived at the gathering place, where all the other Shadow Men
would meet with their new charges.

The video hotline between Chairman Markis and
President McKenna hummed faintly but seemed otherwise clear. With
new satellites finally being orbited now, worldwide communications
once again had become a reality, at least for the rich or well
connected.

After the pleasantries, McKenna opened the
conversation. “I want to apologize, Daniel, about that Septagon
business. You passed me the information and warned me about its
possible uses, but I was too timid. Just as you suggested, it’s
blown up in the Russians’ faces.” He looked tired and haggard on
the screen.

Not sure exactly what he meant, Markis
fished. “No apologies needed, Nathan. You made the best call you
could, and it happened to not work out, but that’s all any of us
can do. But…what specifically do you mean, blown up? As I recall,
there were several potential scenarios my people thought were
likely enough to mention…”

“You identified the location of the Septagon
research facility, and pointed out that these Shadow Men – these
cyborgs – could be more than just super-soldiers. That unlike other
weapons, they could only be controlled by those who could program
them, and that meant Jenkins and Prandra, not Russia’s
leaders.”

“Ah.” Markis realized McKenna had conflated
several possibilities into one, but he saw no reason to dissuade
the President, since he seemed to be feeling contrite. “Well,
Nathan,” he said magnanimously, “I’m just glad to be of service to
what is still the most important single nation on Earth.”

Stretching the truth a bit, but…not too
far.

“You’re too kind, but I know the real score.
I’m directing my people to pass you on a summary of what we know,
but damned if I know how to handle it.”

“Perhaps if you could explain in a few
sentences?”

“Yes, yes, sorry.”

The man seemed rattled, and not for the first
time Markis wondered whether he was really the right person for the
job. He might win the upcoming first election since the nukes fell,
but probably not the second.
A good man, but just not up to
it.
He made a note to get in touch with Travis Tyler.

“Basically,” McKenna went on, “the Septagon
people seem to have staged a near-bloodless coup. Only a few
reported deaths, and most of the Cabinet, where all the real power
resides in the Russian government, now have cyborgs as minders that
go with them everywhere. At the very least, the ministers are being
coerced. As soon as I get off the line with you, I’ll be calling
the Neutral States Assembly High Commissioner and lobby for
sanctions, and I hope you’ll ask the Free Communities for the
same.”

Markis thought for a moment. “I’ll certainly
call a council meeting and tell them what you propose, but it’s not
as simple as that. Russia is an enormous country. They have gotten
on board and supplied a lot of weaponry and support to the
EarthFleet program – top-notch scientists, rare earths and
minerals, their molten-salts reactors. Hell, they’re ahead of
everyone on fusion research, while we’re all relying on the cloned
Meme engines.”

McKenna sat back as if shocked. “You want to
let it go? Allow these people to run an entire country?”

“No. I’m just not sure sanctions are the
right call. They take a long time to bite, and it’s the survival of
the world we’re talking about. I’d rather explore other options.
They won’t have the Russian people or bureaucracy on their side.
They might simply be marginalized. We can work on helping that
happen, with media, and clandestine support to the opposition,
things like that.”

McKenna stood up to pace in front of the
camera. “I already sat on my ass when you gave me the warning, and
now look what’s happened. Now you want us to sit around on our
asses again, and go slow? No way, Daniel, no way. I need your
support on this. Like you said, the Russian people need to see we
are on their side.”

“Ruining their economy will just drive the
people into the arms of the authoritarians. It’s inevitable.”
Markis crossed his arms and stared at the screen.

“Well, if the Neutral States go along with
it, will you too?”

Reluctantly Markis answered. “If the NS do it
first, I will recommend we support a limited set of sanctions –
targeted, not general.”