Cyborg Strike (15 page)

“This would have been a lot easier with more
darkness,” Repeth grumbled.

Muzik shook his head. “Yes, but the lake
starts icing up by September and doesn’t thaw until May. They keep
the harbors and some channels open with icebreakers, but that would
have made for worse problems than this. Besides, we can’t let the
program go on that long. It’s bad enough that Russia has a puppet
government at the top. What if they have time to manufacture
thousands of Shadow Men – and Women I suppose – to bird-dog every
important official?”

“I know that. Just venting. What else is
there to do?” The lights were low to conserve power and there was
no heater so the air was chilly.

“You could read.” Muzik waved an old Kindle
at her. “Got the latest Star Force book downloaded just before we
left.”

“What’s that, #23 now?”

“Yeah. Good stuff.”

Repeth snorted. “Who needs science fiction
when the aliens really
are
invading?”

“Hey, everyone needs an escape,” he replied
defensively. “I got a few hundred books on here. I’m sure you can
find something you like.”

“No, you go on,” she said. “I’ll just
sleep.”

Muzik grunted. That was the last thing she
heard before she nodded off.

When the sun went down again they let go the
anchor and allowed the craft to rise upward to surface. In the
dimness the tiny hatch was unnoticeable, barely protruding from the
still waters of the lake. Armored and kitted out completely, they
deployed fitted floats to allow them to swim to shore while
snorkeling. Several plans existed for extraction; they hoped one
would work.

As the craft settled below the surface on its
bottom tether, the two ungainly figures finned toward shore,
powerful cybernetic legs pushing them in a reasonable facsimile of
swimming while the floats kept them from sinking. A few minutes
later they climbed onto the shore next to a large drainage pipe,
about two meters across.

Tight security in a military base was almost
always a misnomer. As a military police specialist, Repeth knew how
difficult it was to secure a large base, especially one that
included shoreline and was built on the bones of an old civilian
town. Almost by definition there were holes aplenty, and who better
than a cop to identify them?

And she had, studying intelligence reports
and overhead imagery in normal photographs, IR, radar, and other
even more exotic spectra. She probably knew more about the base
than its owners, especially regarding its underground.

With carbon-fiber prybars strong enough to
accept cybernetic pressure without bending, the two quietly broke
the pins that held the rusty grate that covered the outflow.

“Wait,” Muzik said before Repeth pulled it
off. He reached carefully inside, lifting a dirty,
innocuous-looking wire with a fingertip. “Alarm.”

“Got it.” Flipping up her HUD faceplate, she
quickly ran a bypass, blessing the intense Agency training of the
past few months. Then she picked up the three-hundred-kilo barrier
to set it carefully aside.

In they went.

Faceplates down and HUDs up, the IR lamps on
their foreheads illuminated the tunnel like miners’ lanterns.
High-frequency sonar projected from their suits looked ahead like
bat vision, and the computers in their suits built pictures for
them from all available data. Such active ranging carried with it a
small risk, believed by the Agency people to be acceptable.

Acceptable to an analyst is always a bit
different from acceptable in the field, when your butt is on the
line,
Repeth thought.

“Motion sensor,” Muzik called at about the
same time that Repeth recognized it for herself. The distinctive
box, set high in a corner to cover that section of tunnel, also
gave off continuous sonic pings, on a different frequency from
their own. But while the detector could only receive its own
wavelength, their sonar could see in a much wider range.

And do much more.

“Got the freq? Turn on your masking,” Muzik
breathed into his suitcomm, and selected a function on his sonar,
as did Repeth.

Their computerized emitters had analyzed the
detector’s frequency and characteristics, and now blasted out a
tone on the same wavelength that overwhelmed the sensitive sonic
receiver on the detector with noise several orders of magnitude
more powerful. Since it was set to analyze minute Doppler shifts
from moving objects, this effectively deafened it.

The two infiltrators walked directly past the
device, confident that it could not see or hear them, and it was
too unsophisticated to report an anomaly like something screaming
in its “ear”.

They handled two more such detectors in the
same manner before the reached their destination, an
undistinguished point on the tunnel map. “Now it gets interesting,”
Muzik mumbled.

Repeth replied, “You know, it occurs to me
that the Agency could have used non-Eden nanocommandos and gotten
this far, and then just planted one hell of a big bomb.”

“Yeah, I thought of that too…I even asked
about it. Obviously they think retrieving the data is worth risking
our very expensive selves, and we can’t be sure it would be
destroyed. And then there’s the collateral damage.”

“No innocent lives, I know. I feel the same
way, but the coldly rational part of me believes it might be worth
it.”

“Always easier to think that way when the
pucker factor rises.” he paused. “There might be another reason.”
Muzik stared at her imperturbably, faceless in his armor.

“You think they are trying to get rid of us
again?”

Even through the face shield she could sense
his surprise. “Not that at all. I just bet there’s a lot of folks
that would love to see us go up against Shadow Men for real. You
don’t think these suits are wired to record everything? Performance
intel might be secondary, but you know analysts.”

She grunted, not happy with Muzik’s theory.
“Well, let’s get to it.”

“Yeah. Turn around.”

Muzik unclipped the lightweight back-rack she
had been fitted with, much smaller and slimmer than the Space
Marine model on which it was based. Instead of bulky weapons, it
held EMP grenades and breaching charges. He took off several of the
latter, sticking them to the ceiling in a circular arrangement
guaranteed to open a hole all the way through to the room above.
Wiring them together, he attached a radio detonator.

“Next one’s up here,” Muzik led them another
hundred meters along the pipe to an intersection. There he tested
the detonator they had set for function, well away from any
mistake. His handheld showed ready, in the green.

He turned to let Repeth remove his charges
from his back-rack and do the same.

Once she had emplaced the second detonator,
with a different encryption code, they moved carefully toward their
egress point. Once there, she tested the detonator function, then
clipped it to her armor within easy reach. Now they had two sets of
explosives ready to provide surprise access from above to the
underground.

Repeth looked around. They stood in a large
cistern that brought many smaller feeds together into one location
before exiting through the pipe they had entered and to the lake.
Several of them drizzled small amounts of water, condensation or
drainage seeping though the ground. No rain had fallen for some
days, and none was expected.

A rusty ladder led up to a hatch in to top.
Muzik eyed it, then reached up to grasp a rung, and set a foot on
another. Slowly he put his full weight on the lower one, then began
climbing.

The third snapped under his foot.

He skipped that one, climbing up father,
gingerly testing each. The seventh also broke, then the eighth.

“I’m too heavy,” he said, climbing back down.
“Plan B.”

“Right.” Repeth eyed the hatch ten meters up.
“I’m going to jump and try to grab the rim up there. If I can, I’ll
attach a cable and you can climb it. Catch me if I fall, will
you?”

“Right.”

Catching her was not necessary to avoid
injury, but noise. She could probably rebound and land on her feet
without difficulty, but it might be quite loud. Muzik could reduce
that considerably if he must.

“Ready, set, go,” she said, then leaped
flatfooted, with as much accuracy as she could muster. Her hands
scrabbled on the cement lip of the hatchway, then she fell.

Muzik caught her, chest and back, taking
enough of the shock to set her down on her feet without trouble.
They froze that way for a moment, listening with their suit
microphones. They heard nothing, so after a full minute, they tried
again.

This jump she grasped the rim with her
fingertips and held on. Placing one foot gently on the rusty
ladder, she used it to bear some of her weight. Then she put her
other foot on a different rung, and let go one hand to take out a
gas-powered piton.

This was the most dangerous part of the
operation yet, or at least, the most likely to draw attention. She
took a deep breath, then triggered it.

Compressed gas shot the spike into the crack
between the cement rim and the old steel hatch. Enough of both had
deteriorated that the piton lodged deeply. Repeth attached a thin
cable that unrolled from her suit. “Wait,” she said. “If I open the
hatch, the piton will fall out. I have an idea. Give me your
hook.”

Muzik unrolled his own cable and gently
tossed the hooked end up. Repeth caught it and ran it around the
braces that connect the hinges to the hatch, then clipped it to
itself. “That should hold you. Come on up.”

Carefully, Muzik climbed his line, reeling it
back into its receptacle as he did so. Soon he hung awkwardly below
the hatch, cable-locked. “What now, maestro?”

“Now we get up and through this awkward-ass
thing.” She placed a hand on the hatch hinge brace, hoping it could
take a few more kilos, and moved her weight off her own cable,
unclipping it from the piton and stowing it. Now she hung with two
feet on two separate rungs and one hand on the hinge.

With the other she took out a small block of
plastique and handed it to Muzik, who had both hands free,
supported by nothing but his cable. “Break me off about twenty
grams of that.”

“It’s not going to work. As soon as you set
it off, it will blow you off the ladder even if your armor holds –
or the rungs will break, or the braces will break.”

“Yeah, I just figured that out. Plan C then.
Stick a cap in it and give me the whole block.”

“Okay…” Muzik handed her the whole 500-gram
chunk with the blasting cap in it. “You know that canks Objective
One. A blast will alert the whole base.”

“Yeah, I know. Too bad. I told them I did not
do wet work. If they wanted Winthrop Jenkins dead so badly, they
should have sent someone else. The data will have to do.”

“I’m all right with that.”

Repeth jammed it opposite the hinges, where
the latch should be that must hold it closed from the other side.
Then she leaped to the shallow water below, making a loud splash.
“Come on, rappel down your line.”

“Right.” He slid down as the mechanism
belayed him, then backed up into the tunnel. “This cable might
survive the blast. Is that your plan?”

“No, I was just going to jump through the
open hatch.”

Muzik looked at her for a moment, then shook
his head. “That big an explosion is going to drop the crap in the
pot, you know. We’re full-on breach from now on.”

“I know. That’s what we’re trained and
equipped for.” She hefted the detonator. “Ready? Fire in the
hole.”

Pressed it.

Judicious plastic surgery had altered Ann
Alkina’s facial structure enough to fool biometric sensors, and the
human eye. While the Eden Plague healed any wound, it was not
terribly fussy as long as what it helped regenerate functioned.
Thus, the problem of misaligned bones healing into crippling
shapes.

However, this two-edged sword also allowed
easy restructuring; the commercial elective plastic industry
boomed, even in these tight economic times. So Ann was confident
she could be put back the way she was, more or less. Perhaps with a
bit narrower nose, and her earlobes had always bothered her…

She wondered if the alterations had even been
necessary, but then remembered that her natural face was probably
in intelligence databases all over the world. If she was
captured…better not to be known as a senior black operative.

She brought her mind back to business as the
AN-225 heavy cargo jet landed at Bykovo Airport, Russia. Brutal
deceleration slammed her into the restraints inside the people pod
she occupied. One of a score of perforated aluminum boxes, it
contained her and seven others of her team. In total, one hundred
sixty Direct Action operatives rode like cattle in cages in the
belly of the flying beast.

Twenty kilometers from the MKAD ring road
circling Moscow, forty from the city center, Bykovo did not service
commercial passengers. Rather, a great deal of cargo and a limited
amount of government traffic passed through it, avoiding the
congestion of Domodedovo to the southwest, perfect for Alkina’s
purposes.

Once the largest jet Russia ever produced had
turned to taxi, she signaled for the nanocommandos to unbuckle,
perform final preps, and gear up. Within the tight spaces, each in
turn filed out into the narrow corridor between the immobilized
crates, lined up to use the facilities pods, and then rotated back
to begin taking out and putting on their kit.

Alkina watched as her people donned fitted
armor and harnesses festooned with weapons and the accoutrements of
war. This wasn’t going to be a traditional special op, with a small
team of commandos, Guns of Navarrone style. This mission more
resembled a full-up raid on an important objective, like Operation
Claymore, a several-hundred-man World War Two British operation
against the German-held Lofoten Islands of Norway.