Cyborg Strike (21 page)

Switching to the command channel for the
first time – there was no need to stick her oar in until now – she
called for reports from the other seven teams. Number Three
couldn’t be reached at all, even when she keyed in for a general
broadcast. Pulling up an overlay, she determined that the fireball
came from Three’s objective. Perhaps they had self-destructed
rather than get taken alive. The blast had seemed too large for
just one demo pack.

Walking now, Alkina coordinated her teams’
withdrawals. Covered by Finch, she strolled around the large office
building from which they had descended, her mind more on command
decisions than her personal situation. Her bodyguard pulled her
down behind a wall as police vehicles zoomed by with flashing
lights and wailing sirens. Once she was sure everything was going
as well as could be expected, she brought her mind back to the here
and now.

“Let’s go,” she said to Finch, pointing, and
they ran and leaped for the low rooftop of the warehouse that
overlooked the rally point. There she paused and sent the
detonation code for Ritter’s pack, still set in the atrium of the
mansion they had just quitted. She felt the rattle, but the tall
commercial building blocked her view of the thing. Hopefully it
would limit any investigation’s ability to collect evidence, and
destroy any surveillance videos there might be.

If not…well, omelets and eggs, and all
that
, she thought.

Then she and Finch leaped down to the rally
point, trusting the IFF in their HUDs to keep anyone from shooting
at them as they did so. Quickly she took charge of the egress,
ensuring the three cyborgs they had captured were placed inside
crates and instant-foamed into place up to their necks, with the
explosive collars still on them. Their rides back to Australia
might be long and uncomfortable, but at least they would live.

Whatever life might mean to such
creatures.

It’s one thing to have implanted
cybernetics
, she mused.
It’s entirely another to be a
cyborg, programmable by machine code, limited in free will, and
wholly dependent on the machines to sustain your life.

The golem they had taken apart in Australia
had taught them a lot. One thing they had discovered was that the
true cyborg was more machine than man. Probably if true artificial
intelligence were possible, its builders would have dispensed with
the organic entirely and simply created a robot. At present,
though, such a thing, if built, would have been hardly smarter than
an insect, able to respond to preset combat situations but not
sophisticated enough to infiltrate, covertly assassinate, or
bodyguard.

They’d lost twenty-one out of the eight
nanocommandos, with forty more in various states of injury. Only a
few bodies had been left behind, and none of those without the
benefit of a demolition pack. Evidence would be there, if the
forensic teams were sufficiently diligent, but if their mission –
and the Americans’ missions – were successful, the Russians should
be able to reconstitute their own government and be grateful for
the assistance. Spooky had thought it unlikely they would make
Direct Action’s role public. If they felt some perverse need to
point fingers, their old scapegoats the Americans would probably
take the blame.

And as for their little nanocrack
problem…well, Ann chuckled to herself, this country would have to
do
something
for itself, after all.

With all of the cyborgs accounted for, and
the Russian ministers and their families freed or dead, Alkina gave
the order to pull egress. With the severely wounded bundled back
into their crates, the rest of her commandos took positions on the
truck bed, weapons ready. She’d rather not have to shoot it out
with the Russian police, but if they did, it would be no
contest.

As it happened, the police force and fire
brigades seemed far too busy to be concerned about one large truck
and two accompanying SUVs. Fires raged and here and there more
explosions flung debris into the air, perhaps from broken gas lines
or charges that their teams had not, until then, detonated.

With this hellish landscape behind then, the
little convoy rolled out the open village gate and into the cool
Russian early morning.

As they rumbled down the road they passed
vehicles speeding toward the enclave, and she contacted the other
section. Their results were a bit worse; they had captured no
cyborgs at all, and had had to blow five of their targets sky-high.
It appeared they had received some slight warning, or perhaps had
simply been more alert. However, in the end it did not matter. When
they rejoined each other on the road, the commandos indulged
themselves in a cheer that could be heard over the rushing wind of
their passage.

Alkina’s one fear now was that the headless
Frankenstein’s monster of the Russian government would react as it
was designed too, following procedures to block roads and stop
traffic in the event of any disturbance. Countering this concern
was her hope that, between the American’s two operations and the
generally angry mood of the citizenry, they would be slow to
react.

Additionally, right now the twenty-four hour
media and the internet should be full of information,
misinformation and disinformation about what was happening, so that
the bureaucratic nerves and muscles would be twitching in
confusion. And as much as they needed to be, her people were ready
to fight their way through to their extraction vehicle.

Only one checkpoint slowed them, but bursts
of AK fire from their local escort took care of the half-ready army
conscripts and they sped on past. Within an hour they pulled onto
the runway where their enormous airplane waited, engines
running.

Like a smooth-running clock, her people
loaded their wounded and their dead, and then processed the three
captured cyborgs. First, they ran them through a heavy industrial
fluoroscope, obtained by the locals for just this purpose. The scan
revealed small beads of explosives wired into the cyborgs’ cerebral
cortexes, presumably their version of kill switches in case their
masters wished to terminate them, but none of the large
self-destruct charges that were Alkina’s primary fear. Loading
explosive-filled golems onto aircraft would have been the height of
folly.

Thus ensured, the three crates were wrapped
in reinforcing cladding and hooked up to oxygen feeds. If the
explosive collars, the foam and the heavy steel plates failed to
contain them on the long journey back, as a last resort they could
always be ejected out the rear ramp, to enjoy a fall from seven
miles up.

Spooky planned this mission well
, Ann
told herself admiringly,
and I love him all the more for
it.

As the locals dispersed, their aircraft
engines lifted them on roaring jets into the steely Russian skies
of another red dawn.

***

Olsen stared into the hunting cabin’s
fireplace and enjoyed another Aquavit.
Three more days to
go,
he thought.
Then I can leave, one way or
another.

The lake had been busy with patrol craft
since the Salmi base had been hit. Despite the countercoup in
Moscow, the juggernaut that was the Russian military shuddered
onward, fulfilling its standing operating procedure, trying to
catch the culprits despite the fact that no one really wanted
to.

Perhaps that was why it really did not
surprise him when he heard footsteps on the porch, peculiarly light
though the creaks were heavy, as if massive stone statues tried to
tiptoe. He’d known the two operatives had been military, not
Agency, just from looking at them, and when the big man had gotten
into the truck those days ago, he couldn’t hide the way the vehicle
settled on its springs.

Cybernetic augmentation. It was an open
secret in clandestine circles, the coming thing, especially after
the nano program had so many problems. He still wondered what he
would say if such enhancements were offered him.

Olsen went to open the door, hunting rifle in
hand. It was always possible that someone else awaited him.
Occasionally poachers poached from each other, though normally only
in particularly hard times.

He was glad to see the tired and drawn faces
of his contacts. “Welcome back. You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” the woman with the bandaged hand
said. “Got anything to eat?”

“In the cold cupboard.” He meant the
propane-powered refrigerator, which contained such rude sustenance
as could be expected in a hunting cabin. Olsen was far too good an
operative to allow anything that would give him away to be found by
an inquisitive visitor.

“Bread, jerky, vodka?”

“There are some cooked potatoes and butter in
the bin below, and sour cabbage in the crock. Welcome to Russia,”
he replied with a shrug.

The woman pulled out all the food and set it
on the rough-topped table in front of the big man they called
Stein. “I’m not complaining, mind you, but I would rather hear
‘welcome to Finland’.”

Olsen raised his tumbler of the
Caraway-flavored liquor in salute. “You and me both, sister. Now
eat. We’ll go whenever you’re ready.” The two just grunted as they
stuffed their faces with the abundant rustic cuisine.

Once they had eaten all of his ready food,
the woman said, “We’ll go in the morning, or tomorrow evening if
you’d rather go at night. We need to rest and heal.” She flicked
her eyes at her partner, and Olsen suddenly realized that the big
man was almost out on his feet.

“Sure,” he said. “You guys take the bedrooms.
I’ll sleep on the sofa.” He quickly cleared his few belongings out
of one bedroom and watched as his charges went their separate ways
to crash. “Sweet dreams,” he murmured, then hummed idly as he
started making stew with the rest of the supplies, and set it to
simmer on the propane burner for a while before he went to
sleep.

In the morning he got up and turned the flame
back on to warm the pot, expecting the two to eat heartily again.
tasting it, he threw some more salt in it and was about to stir it
when he heard an angry moan from the bedroom.

Seizing his rifle, he pushed to bedroom door
open to see the woman shaking the man and yelling. “Get up, you
stupid bastard, you can’t die on me now!”

“What’s wrong,” were the first, painfully
trite words on his lips, then he put the rifle down and moved to
the bedside to put two fingers on the man’s neck. “No pulse.”

“No shit!” The woman quickly cleared the
man’s airway, and then ripped “Stein’s” shirt open and began
CPR.

Olsen pulled out a folding knife and cut away
the shirt and the sleeves, exposing the man’s arms. After a minute
or two of careful examination he finally said, “You’re too
late.”

“What?” the woman asked between compressions.
“How do you know?” Her face was wild, frantic, and unaccountably
she frightened him. “Tell me!” she said, grabbing his collar with
her right hand in a grip of steel.

Olsen swallowed. “Livor mortis,” he replied.
“He’s been dead for five or six hours.”

His words thudded to the floor like bags of
wet cement, and the woman suddenly collapsed next to them as a
puppet might with her strings cut. A moment later she began to
sob.

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling completely
inadequate. “Something…” he refrained from stating the painfully
obvious: something unexpected must have happened.

“What kills Edens, though?” she husked,
rocking back and forth. Then she whispered. “It must have been the
nano.”

“The nano? Like the combat nanites I’ve heard
about?”

She glared at him, then relented. “Yes. I
guess you’re cleared and now you’ve got need to know. If they get
in the brain of an Eden, they try to repair any damage…and he got
concussed on the mission. Badly.” She put a palm against her face.
“I should have thought of it.” Tears leaked between her
fingers.

“Listen, Miss Johnston,” he began.

“Jill. Call me Jill.”

“Okay, Jill, I’m Gus.” He sank down next to
her and put his arm around her. She turned into his shoulder and
began to sob. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Even if we had gone
straight in to Finland, the only people who could have possibly
helped him are an ocean away.”

“He was alive! He was talking to us last
night.”

“I know.” He couldn’t figure out much more to
say except, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m the sorry one. I’m alive. People
near me die. I’m jinxed.”

They sat there for some time, until Jill was
sobbed out. Eventually she pushed away from Gus. “Thanks, I’m okay
now.” She went into the tiny bathroom to splash water on her face,
avoiding looking at Roger Muzik’s corpse.

“Ah…what are we going to do?” Gus asked.

“Bury him?” Jill suggested.

“Too many bears. They can smell a corpse and
dig him up easily. Graveyards in this area have to be defended by
night watchmen with rifles.”

Jill pressed her lips together. “Then we sink
him in the lake. He won’t float. Maybe someday we can recover
him.”

“He won’t float?”

“Metal bones.” Jill peeled enough of the
wrapping off her left hand to show him her metal pinky finger,
stripped of all flesh.

“Oh, jeez, that’s…”

“Hideous, I know. And it’s highly classified,
so keep your mouth shut, all right?”

Gus nodded. “Yah, you betcha.”

“Okay,” Jill sighed. “Let’s get him into the
lake.”

The Stalinesque clang of sliding doors echoed
down the halls of Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison, causing a
sweat to break out again on the face of Winthrop Jenkins, for a few
months the absolute ruler of Russia. He’d been in custody for
almost forty-eight hours, and in that time no one had come to speak
with him. He’d been fed twice, a metal tray shoved through the slot
in the bottom of his door, and occasionally he saw the flicker of
movement that told him an eye pressed to the spy-hole.