The Clone Assassin (36 page)

Location: Pacific Ocean, one thousand miles off the coast of Mexico
Date: August 12, 2519

An immaculate morning—ice blue sky, cobalt sea, clouds so thin they looked like fading steam. We flew in low, three feet above the water and six hundred miles from shore.

The Navy sent fighters and bombers, and the Marines supplied fifteen transports and nine amphibious personnel carriers, two-story hovering saucers that rode upon cushions of air. APCs worked well on deserts and oceans, but mountains and valleys caused them problems. They were too wide for city streets.

MacAvoy contributed an armada of gunships. The gunships would chase any submarines that tried to escape. Even at their slowest speeds, Tom Hauser’s fighters couldn’t shadow a submarine without falling from the sky.

Far overhead, unseen and outside the atmosphere, one fighter carrier, two destroyers, and three battleships oversaw the operation. If the Unifieds tried to intervene, Hauser’s capital ships would respond.

I rode to the show on one of the personnel carriers along with a battalion of Marines. The floating platform was big and clean, spotless as the day it first floated out of the factory. It hovered above the water, steady as a football stadium and just about as big. Eight hundred combat-armor-wearing Marines sat on padded benches on the bottom deck, waiting for orders.

Ritz and I stood in an office near the bridge. We stood beside a large, three-dimensional tactical display that showed the surface of the water and one hundred feet below it. For now, all it showed was a whole lot of blue and an invisible sky.

This was a Navy operation, run by Admiral Hauser. The Navy provided the bombers and the torpedoes. If the reprogrammed clones came up shooting, my Marines and I would calm them down. If the converts simply surrendered, we would board their ships and bring them home.

Hauser elected to fight this battle in open space from the bridge of the
Churchill
, thousands of miles above the action. I knew I was judging him harshly, writing him off as another scared sailor hiding inside his ship, but, really, he didn’t have much of a choice. His massive, heavy, and not particularly aerodynamic fighter carrier was not equipped to fly in the atmosphere, where Earth’s gravity would tug at it and wind currents would push it around.

Hauser said, “It’s not too late to change your mind, General. They won’t know we’re here until we drop the first torpedo. Are you sure this is how you want to proceed?”

I studied his face on the screen. He wore a determined expression. A slight smile played on his lips, probably from the excitement of the coming battle. The Unifieds had been hitting and hiding for so long, now that we knew the location of their mouseholes, euphoria had set in.

I said, “Let me know when your bomber arrives.”

A Navy bomber dropped out of the sky. An ugly, angular creation made out of a metal-ceramic composite, the AC-221 Hummingbird had a multifaceted face that looked like a poorly cut diamond. Her rusty black color stood out in the sky. She was an atmosphere-traveling jet with nonatmospheric flight capacity, a jack of all trades.

She positioned herself three hundred yards above the sea.

Hauser said, “Okay, she’s dropping the Observer.”

The Observer was a true antique, an underwater communications buoy that transmitted low-frequency electromagnetic waves, signals that could penetrate the thermocline—the thin layer of water that separates warmer surface waters from the colder depths.

In warm waters like these, the thermocline started about one hundred feet down. The Observer piloted itself through the layer to waters with less dramatic temperature shifts in which it could map and read the ocean floor without distortion. Standing on the APC, Ritz and I received its signals and charted the maps it sent back.

Hauser’s engineers had rigged space-Navy torpedoes for this operation. Apparently they swam underwater every bit as well as they flew in the grand vacuum. For the purposes of this exercise, Hauser’s engineers had armed most of the torpedoes with nuclear tips.

In the military vernacular, all flying machines were nicknamed “
birds
.” The Navy’s love of wildlife apparently extended undersea. Hauser looked away from the camera for a moment, and said, “Give me a status on those fish?”

He looked back at me, and said, “General, you might want to prepare your men.”

The first wave of torpedoes dropped out of the Hummingbird like a flock of penguins diving into the sea. Two feet long and sleek, they stabbed into the water as neatly as needles slip through cloth, then they formed into a tidy cluster that reminded me of a school of fish. I watched their water ballet in 3-D holographic detail on my virtual display.

While most of the cluster of torpedoes floated twenty feet under the surface of the water, one lone tactical-tipped torpedo sank down, past the thermocline and past the observer. The torpedo’s NERVA-based propulsion system ignited, and it dashed through the water as gracefully as a jet soars through the air.

The torpedo slowed to a mere fifty miles per hour as it neared the silty ocean floor.

“How deep is it down there?” I asked.

“Twenty thousand feet,” said Hauser.

“That’s pretty deep,” I said.

“The French built Cousteau cities in trenches with geothermal vents,” said Hauser. “I guess they wanted to save on heating bills.
C’est la guerre.
”

I didn’t understand that last comment and didn’t feel like asking what it meant. I got the feeling that we stroked Hauser’s ego when we asked him what this or that meant. I also had the feeling that he didn’t speak his dead languages as fluently as he wanted us believe.

The tactical display showed a holographic image of the ocean floor as the French had mapped it several hundred years ago. One of the screens on the side of that display showed the ocean floor as the Observer’s sonar mapped it today. Both displays showed a nearly flat ocean floor. If there was a trench down there, it was a wide one.

One of the screens showed the world through the eyes of the lead torpedo, a simplistic style of tracking that searched for obstructions and ignored other features. The image on the screen was blacker than space. From the torpedo’s perspective, the darkness of that ocean plain was as solid as granite. The torpedo relayed its feed to the Observer, which broadcast it for us to see.

As the torpedo cut through the dark water, it decelerated to twenty miles per hour, a nearly unmanageable pace for equipment designed to travel at two hundred times that speed.

That speed came into perspective when a tiny spot of light appeared on the torpedo’s eye display. It looked no bigger than a pixel, then a dot, and slowly grew into a spot, at which point the torpedo nearly came to a stop.

Hauser said, “The Observer has run sonar, radar, and light tracking. There’s no sign of movement. They’re either asleep down there . . . or they’re not down there at all.”

“Wake them up,” I said.

“Last chance to change your mind,” Hauser said.

“Change my mind?” I asked. “Why would I change my mind?”

Ritz remained uncharacteristically mute as he watched the proceedings. He didn’t offer any useless opinions or refer to the clones as “Repromen.” He normally made jokes at times like this, his irreverence sometimes endearing and sometimes a source of irritation.

I asked him, “You see any problems?”

Ritz said, “No, sir.” He’d called me, “sir.” That made me nervous.

“Do you want to proceed, General?” asked Hauser.

“You okay?” I asked Ritz.

He hesitated, then said, “Yeah. Yes, sir.”

I told Hauser, “We agreed upon this operation, Admiral. I believe it is time to execute.”

On the tactical, the swarm of torpedoes hovering near the surface dropped below the line marking the thermocline and scattered. If the clones boarded submarines as we expected them to do, the torpedoes would shadow them from beneath.

The lone torpedo, the one that would target the city itself, drifted within several hundred yards of the large red oval representing the city. I said, “Gentlemen, I give you Quetzalcoatl.”

I had spent several minutes learning how to pronounce the name correctly, and now knew it was the name of a Mesoamerican god as well. I hoped Hauser would refer to it as a Mayan god so I could call him on it. It had actually been a lesser known tribe called the Nahua that worshipped Quetzalcoatl, not the Mayans.

I knew nothing about the Nahua other than their worship of Quetzalcoatl, but that wasn’t the point. Pretending like I knew something, so I could one-up Hauser . . . that was the point.

Hauser made no comment, however.

The torpedo exploded. Had it had a nuclear tip, it would have destroyed the underwater city. The tactical device produced a more controlled explosion calculated to rock the city without destroying it.

“Think we got their attention?” I asked Ritz.

He looked at me and said nothing. He stood slack-jawed and stiff, like a Marine at attention, but I saw sadness in his eyes. Until their reprogramming, those men had been our men.

The Observer had a communications array capable of broadcasting underwater using ELF (extremely low frequency) electromagnetic waves that could travel all the way to the ocean floor. Using those electromagnetic waves, Hauser sent a message to Quetzalcoatl. The message he sent was, “Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender . . .”

Nobody involved in planning this operation believed that reprogrammed clones would have the capacity to surrender. It wasn’t in their programming, original or hijacked.

Once the lead torpedo exploded, another torpedo circled in from a different angle, broadcasting a video feed that suggested that the people in Quetzalcoatl had both received our message and understood it.

The outside of the city was encased in an opaque dome that rose above the silt like a mushroom-shaped shadow. Looking on that screen, I had no concept of its size. If anything, the city was dwarfed by the sprawling plains that spread out around it.

We could have hit the dome with more torpedoes, but the clones responded as expected. They evacuated their hideout without putting up a fight.

The first Turtle launched almost immediately. Over the next hour, another thirty took to the sea.

Turtles
were the Cousteau equivalent of fighter carriers. They were enormous mobile domes. The French had built them for transporting workers, equipment, and materials to construct the undersea cities. They were designed to carry everything from cranes to girders to desalinization equipment. I’d never actually seen a Turtle, not even a picture of one, but I’d read their design specifications, and they were enormous. If God ever flooded the world again, Noah wouldn’t need to build an ark. He could borrow a Turtle and fit the whole damn zoo inside.

If my suspicions proved true, the Unifieds had used them for more than moving zoos and building supplies. The reason our radar had never detected U.A. gunships until they had nearly reached land was because their gunships and transports had traveled by Turtle, below the surface, below our radar, and out of the range of satellite surveillance.

Each Turtle was a floating disc, 120 feet in diameter, 10 feet tall around the edges, and 40 feet tall at the center of its convex shell, and capable of launching gunboats, transports, even Harriers, anything with a vertical liftoff. To launch its cargo, the Turtle would rise to the surface of the water, and its shell would open like a lid.

Traveling under the water with its shell closed, the Turtle didn’t look like a mobile launchpad; it looked like a flying frying pan with a lid.

“Well, well,” said Hauser, “a UFO.”

“It isn’t flying,” I said.

“An Unidentified
Floating
Object.”

I sent a message to the Marines piloting our APC. I told them to follow that first Turtle as she came to the surface. We didn’t have enough personnel carriers to shadow every Turtle and sub that emerged from the city. We’d send gunships after some and fighters after others if need be, but I wanted to be there when we captured that first clone-controlled boat.

The giant submersibles had been created for peacetime purposes. They didn’t have guns or torpedo tubes. The Unifieds might have added defenses, but it seemed unlikely. The Observer checked that first one for the seams that would indicate missiles hatches and torpedo tubes.

“Look’s like she’s unarmed,” said Hauser, who sounded just about ready to break out champagne and cigars. The converts had launched their enormous, slow-moving, defenseless underwater platform, which we now chased with a nuclear-tipped torpedo, a gunship, and an amphibious personnel carrier. The clones on that boat couldn’t hold their breath forever. When they surfaced, we would be waiting. If they tried to dive back to the bottom of the ocean, we could blow them out of the water with the torpedo. Sinking the Turtle was a viable option. We would sink one of the converts’ boats to indicate our resolve to the others.

The French may not have armed their Turtles, but they wouldn’t send them to the bottom of the sea swimming blind. That boat undoubtedly had sonar and radar arrays; even if they had been created for navigation purposes, they would detect the torpedo nipping at their heels. They had probably located our gunship and our APC as well, but the men piloting the Turtle seemed not to care.

Watching that floating puck, I realized that a boat that big couldn’t have floated up the Chesapeake Bay unnoticed. Even if it made it across the bay, it couldn’t have traveled the Potomac. It was too wide and too tall.

I looked at the tactical. By this time the converts had launched dozens of Turtles. The floating platforms traveled in every direction. On the display, they looked like a scattering school of jellyfish.

I said, “Admiral, this can’t be all of it. There needs to be something else, something smaller than these boats.”

Hauser had done his homework. He said, “You mean the Mantas. They’ll be out soon. I bet they’re using the Turtles as decoys. They’ll send the enlisted men on the Turtles and load their officers on the Mantas.”