Cyborg Strike (16 page)

All the eggs in one basket, she thought with
a shudder. The weakest link in the op was this flying museum they
rode in. Though refurbished by the best Australian aircraft
engineers, it was still an outdated bucket of steel – yes,
steel
in many cases, not even aliminum – and it would have
to fly them out as well.

As in most special operations, the later they
were detected, the better off they would be. In a perfect world the
extraction team would be long gone with the packages before their
enemies even got organized.

As the lumbering vehicle came to a halt and
the interior lights came on, she yelled, “Once your kit is on,
strap in again.” Everyone finished their final prep and then pulled
their quick-release harnesses around them again, waiting for their
next ride.

The giant nose and tail both whined upward on
hydraulics, and the smells of jet fuel and the stink of pollution
wafted inward on the humid Russian night breeze. A moment later,
two heavy haulers packed up to the plane, one at each opening. The
aircrew popped the fittings on the lockdown points and fitted a
winch cable to each line of ten pods.

Slowly, like two ungainly trains leaving a
station in opposite directions, the rows of cages were pulled onto
the flatbed trucks. First, five were manhandled onto one side of
each trailer, then the other five, so each set of ten rested in two
rows with their egress doors facing outward. Heavy industrial
strapping cinched them into place, and within minutes the two
haulers set out for the M5 freeway, heading into Moscow.

Accompanied by four SUVs filled with Russian
mercenary-insurgents – well paid and well motivated – the “special
cargo” sped along through the night, heading for the exclusive
Barvikha and Skolkovo luxury villages on the outskirts of
Moscow.

There, legions of well-paid policemen thanked
their good fortune to be assigned there, protecting the wealthy and
elite. There, the families of the Russian oligarchy remained in a
pampered prison, hostage to their puppet ministers’ good behavior.
There, most of the senior government functionaries, attended by
their Shadow cyborg minders, retired every evening by helicopter,
to spend time with their families each night.

This was Alkina’s target.

Up to sixteen ministers, thirty-two Shadow
Men. Even cyborgs needed rest, so one of each team of two remained
awake observing his or her principal, while one slept or exercised
nearby. This much Direct Action’s penetration of the Septagon
organization had discovered, but there were still many holes in
their intelligence, making this a high-risk mission all around.

Complicating it further were the multiple
overlapping objectives General Nguyen had assigned her. Teams of
ten nanocommandos with weaponry specialized against the cyborgs
would attempt to neutralize the Shadows and, if possible, capture
them for rendition to the Australian laboratories. If such was
impossible, then they would be destroyed.

By doing so, Alkina hoped to rescue the
entire senior Russian government in one night of mayhem. However,
if it all went wrong, killing all of the ministers and their
families available was a reasonable fallback position.

And then there was her Final Option, hidden
beneath her feet and that of the other section leader: the smallest
nuclear weapons the engineers could build. She dearly hoped that
would not be necessary, for she was looking forward to many long
years of utterly voluntary bondage to her lover and master.

So as the wheels rumbled and bounced over
badly-maintained Russian roads, Ann Alkina prepared herself for
wholesale death and destruction, hopefully someone else’s.

Keying her helmet HUD, she reviewed her
latest intel from the encrypted satellite downlink Direct Action
had commandeered. Piggybacking off one of the Russian communication
birds, it allowed for near-real-time comms with General Nguyen in
the rear, if she wanted it. She did not expect to call him until
the op was either finished or blown, but the capability comforted
her anyway.

It appeared the American Salmi operation was
a go to begin in an hour, simultaneous with her own. While she knew
about theirs, the Yanks did not know about hers, or if they did,
she prayed to all the spirits of her people that their operational
security was tight. Leaky OPSEC was a surefire way to blow a
mission.

Such temporal coordination was essential.
Human nature being what it was – and she was fairly certain humans
made the big decisions for these cyborgs – as soon as one alarm
sounded, all related facilities would go to highest alert. She’d
much rather hit them
before
that happened. If it came down
to it, she would rather strike first and shift the risk onto the
American op. The Yanks already had functioning cybernetic
operatives, and she presumed they knew a lot about how to take
enemy cyborgs down, while the Aussies were operating with a lot of
guesswork and experimental technologies.

Odds were, many of her nanocommanos would die
tonight.

The latest intel summary and situation report
told her that everything was quiet. For over a week now the
political arena had been stalemated, with no new initiatives from
the Free Communities, the Americans themselves, or the Neutral
States Assembly. The latter always moved slowly and carefully,
dominated by the groupthink Euro-socialists. The other two had
deliberately avoided rocking the boat in hopes of lulling their
opponents into a false sense of security.

Flipping up her HUD visor, Alkina swept her
eyes around the tiny compartment. The other seven and she were
nearly nose to nose, facing inward. If not for the myriad holes in
the containers it would be stuffy. It reminded her of the
Nebraska
hijack mission so long ago, where she had endured
almost a week bottled up inside a tiny submersible, sharing the
breath and body stink of her comrades.
If I could handle
that
, she thought,
I can easily handle this.
They’d only
been in these crates for some twenty hours, and had been afforded
breaks on the long flight.

Nothing to it.

Her HUD comm crackled, then the voice of one
of the insurgents spoke in her ear in Russian. She’d learned enough
of the language for this mission, and some of the locals had a
similar facility with English. They’d get by. In this case, the
word was simple: they were approaching the two enclaves,
custom-built playgrounds of this nation’s elite – the Beverly Hills
and Bel Air of Moscow.

Because the towns rested about ten kilometers
apart, the two trucks diverged as they approached, each accompanied
by two SUVs full of locals to smooth the way. If bribery did not
suffice, they would kill any stray police or military that got in
their way, if they could. If something they couldn’t handle popped
up, eighty heavily armed nanocommandos could leap from their
compartments at a moment’s notice.

If
that
wasn’t enough, they were all
screwed.

A few minutes later they slowed and
approached a checkpoint into the exclusive zone of Skolkovo. The
plan included forged delivery paperwork and called for a routine
bribe for the guards to expedite – not too large, not too small.
Just business, to grease the wheels for a nighttime delivery of
what seemed to be automotive parts for the high-end sports cars and
luxury sedans the inhabitants of the exclusive zones drove. The
hour was not at all unusual; many truckers drove at night to avoid
traffic slowdowns on the clogged and crumbling Russian road
system.

Two tense minutes and they eased through.
Apparently the locals had been successful. Alkina murmured into her
comm, confirming that the other truck had also penetrated its
target, Barvikha.

Two Trojan Horses in place
, she
thought. Seizing Troy would be the easy part, she hoped. With
contingency plan upon contingency plan, she was as certain as she
could be that they would accomplish at least their minimum
objectives.

Getting away would be the rub.

The truck rumbled to a stop, and the locals
gave her the all clear. Alkina held them in place for a minute,
until the other section of eighty reported ready, then she gave the
go code.

Ten gates eased open and eighty commandos
leaped lightly to the ground, to form into eight groups of ten in
the back lot of the warehouse to which they supposedly delivered.
It made a good, secluded rally point, into which none of the
privileged denizens were likely to wander.

From here they would move on foot. Seven
squads hurried off immediately, following the invisible trails
their HUDs showed them, using undetectable 3D mapping recognition
software. They could always switch to encrypted GPS if necessary,
but this method was more secure.

Alkina held the last squad, her own, for a
moment. She watched as the locals, eight hard men, hop out of the
SUVs and raise the backs. Opening the cases there, they broke out
modern suppressed AKs, RPGs, and put on body armor. Their only job
was to secure and defend the vehicles. If they couldn’t, the
nanocommandos would have to escape and evade on their own back to
the airfield.

Or they would die in place if necessary.

That would be a horrible waste of human
materiel. More than half of Direct Action’s highly trained
nanocommandos were taking part in this operation. While anyone
could get an injection of nanites to increase speed and strength,
the expertise to put those advantages to use was just as difficult
to inculcate as ever. No shortcuts to elite status had ever been
found, and probably never would be.

Though these Shadow cyborgs seemed a close
substitute.

They all knew how vital the mission was, and
none of them wanted to let her down. Or General Nguyen, or
Australia for that matter. Napoleon had once said, “The moral is to
the physical as three is to one,” and in battle after battle this
principle had been validated.

Once the locals took their places, she told
Ritter, her team second, to lead on. She hefted her modified
Armorshock grenade launcher and followed as they moved.

And they
moved
. HUDs provided
predicted pathways and “saw” through buildings using the 3D
modeling of highly detailed satellite imagery preloaded into their
databases. The virtual picture each viewed was overlaid upon the
actual picture, as if they existed within a synthesized
video-game-and-real-world hybrid.

Over the back fence the team bounded like a
herd of gazelles clearing a wall, then they leaped atop the next
warehouse. Running lightly along its roof, they hit the far parapet
and leaped blind along their HUDs predicted ballistic paths, to
land on the lower roof of a multilevel, multistory shopping
building.

They next leap took them in a line upward to
seize and climb an external structural member, a rib projecting
from the vertical glass surface of the exclusive stack of shops.
High-end goods, luggage and furniture and even automobiles could be
seen as they passed the sixth floor to roll onto the roof. From the
other side, the ten could look down upon their target.

The grounds of a mansion lay spread out
below, across a wide boulevard. With classical Euro-Russian
architecture in a nineteenth-century style, its well-lit gardens
and high wrought iron fences gave it a fairytale look, a rich man’s
Disneyland that epitomized the extreme contrasts between the
nation’s rich and poor. Looking down, Alkina could sympathize with
the misguided Bolshevik revolutionaries that believed that their
rebellion would usher in a worker’s paradise rather than an age of
brutal repression.

But without a middle class – in fact, by
turning the “bourgeoisie” into scapegoats rather than allies, the
new Soviet system had merely solidified the two-class dichotomy.
The Reds executed the aristocrats and replaced them with the
oligarchy of the Communist Party. The serfs and peasants they
turned into factory workers and collective farmers, a distinction
without a difference in their lives of grinding poverty.

Despite thirty-plus million dead in World War
Two, forced industrialization and the acquisition of nuclear
weapons, little really had changed. The powerful acquired more
power, the rich got richer, and the working class kept working.

Where is this indignation coming from?
Alkina wondered as Ritter called out orders to the team. She had
seldom thought much about politics and history, up until Nguyen
Tran Pham had illuminated her life. Now, to please him, she read
and absorbed as much knowledge as she could, desiring to make
herself indispensible.

And desired.

She found that she genuinely believed the
Australian system, and the Free Communities of which it was a part,
was a better proposition for everyone living there. All were richer
and freer, even in the midst of a wartime economy, and if it wasn’t
perfect, at least it was a hell of a lot better than this.

She found herself proud of it.

“Ready cables,” Ritter said over the comm.
Her motions automatic, she hand-loaded a special cartridge in the
grenade launcher and fired it into the flat roof at her feet. It
sliced through the metal and tar surface, lodging deep in the wood
beneath before its barbs caught and held it fast.

Hooking a thin roll of line to its eye, she
attached the spool to another cartridge and loaded it. Aiming
carefully, she waited for the signal.

Repeth’s blast blew open the hatch and struck
pillow blows against the two cybercommandos. Armor and sound
cancellation reduced it to almost nothing. From the outside,
though, it must have been quite a shock to those nearby.

As soon as the explosion passed, she leaped
upward, catching the lip of the opening. The hatch cover itself had
embedded itself in a nearby building, now gleaming under the harsh
glare of industrial arc lamps. Several screaming people ran away
from the blast.