Authors: Robert Cain
No answer.
Gripping the CAW tightly, he braced himself against the wall, took a deep breath, then swung around the corner.
He saw them at the far end, twenty meters away.
No one was looking at him.
But there were only three men there, and the RPG gunner was not in sight.
Another door blocked his way. A kick sent it spinning into a small room. Rod stepped inside, scanning. The room was empty, one window smashed open. There were crates neatly stacked in the corner.
Curious, Rod thought. Why would they store machine parts in a bedroom?
If Delgado had been here, he’d gone through that window. Rod looked out and saw the second-floor deck.
Stooping, he pushed past the shards of broken glass and stepped across the windowsill and into the open.
Drake fired, letting the auto shotgun’s heavy recoil walk the weapon’s blast into the targets. One man with an AK-47 spun and tried to aim, but twelve-gauge pellets chopped him down in a bloody mess before he could pull the trigger. Another shrieked, clutching his stomach. The third went down. . . .
The SEAL ran forward as he fired, until he could see past the corner of the garage to where the RPG gunner was kneeling on the grass, a few yards from the others. He swung the CAW’s muzzle to take down the target . . .
. . . just as a narcoterrorist with a Thompson SMG stepped between the RPG gunner and Drake.
The Thompson gunner took most of the blast and went down just as Drake realized that he’d fired the last of his ten-round magazine.
The thundering blasts of some deep-voiced weapon sounded just behind him, but Delgado, crouching a short distance from the corner of the garage, kept his attention focused on the second-story window over the deck. Squinting through the RPG launcher’s sight, he saw his nemesis emerge onto the deck and took aim squarely at the robot’s chest.
There was another loud blast from behind, and something ripped into his arm, stinging ferociously as one of the Salazar soldiers shrieked and fell.
Ignoring the pain, he squeezed the trigger.
An explosive charge kicked the rocket grenade from the tube. An instant later, the rocket motor fired, and the projectile rose in its characteristic swooping climb, arrowing straight toward the robot they called Cybernarc. . . .
Rod! They’ve got an RPG!
Rod heard Drake’s radioed warning just as he saw the flash at the corner of the garage. With telescopically enhanced vision, he could see the grenade rocketing toward him, stabilizing fins on the tailboom unfolding in flight.
Computer overlays on his vision gave the projectile’s range as sixty meters, set its speed at three hundred meters per second, and gave an estimated time until impact—allowing for acceleration—of three-tenths of one second.
He launched himself into a flat, hands-out dive, as though struggling to become airborne. . . .
The backblast from the weapon seared him and obscured his view, but Drake saw the last part of the missile’s flight as it rose toward the deck on a knife-edged contrail of white smoke. There was a bright flash from the corner of the hacienda’s west wing and a thundering crash. Bits of wood and debris spun through the air.
"Rod!” he shouted over the radio as he closed the distance between himself and the RPG gunner. He’d not been able to see whether the missile hit its target or not. "Rod! Are you all right?”
There was no answer.
Running past dead and wounded Salazar gunmen. Drake jumped the RPG gunner from behind.
Only when the man twisted around beneath him did the SEAL realize that the gunner was Delgado.
He’d leaped from the deck an instant before the grenade skimmed low above his back and struck the side of the house. The explosion had propelled Rod headfirst through the air and onto the patio flagstones one story below.
The shock had jolted him. Electronic warnings sounded as he tried to rise. His right leg was damaged, several hydraulic pistons twisted and jammed by the blast or by the fall.
Quickly, he cycled through his emergency diagnostics. His power was becoming critical—less than twenty-five percent—but he was otherwise functional.
Alive.
His telescopic vision zoomed in on the hand-to-hand struggle by the garage. Drake was there, wrestling with Delgado.
Rod had to get there. His Uzi lay nearby, the barrel bent by the fall. Unarmed, the robot began limping across the grass toward the garage.
Delgado managed to pull the Skorpion out of his waistband. Drake grabbed his wrist with one hand, his throat with the other, and the two were locked motionless in a death grip, straining at the weapon.
"Please don’t kill me!” Delgado screamed. Drake’s grip tightened and his shout was strangled. "I can . . . help you!” he managed to say. "I have information!”
The grip on his throat tightened. The DAS traitor looked up into Drake’s face, and in that moment he knew terror as few men have ever known it. He saw his own death in the SEAL’s eyes.
A shadow blotted out the sun. Something battered the Skorpion from his fingers, and Delgado felt a shrieking agony shoot up his wrist. A monstrous hand reached down and effortlessly pried him from the SEAL’s grasp, lifting him by his shirt collar, slamming him against the garage wall.
Delgado blinked, fighting to breathe. The robot was
hideous.
Half of the skin on the face had been torn away, exposing the silver gleam of steel beneath. And the eyes were . . . strange, their interiors reflecting sunlight with a greenish glow, like a cat’s.
The robot brought its face, half human, half nightmare of steel and green-glowing, unblinking eyes, close to his.
"Nothing personal,” the robot said.
Delgado lost consciousness.
THEIR ESCAPE FROM
La Fortaleza Salazar
was almost anticlimactic. The soldiers, the workers and hired help, the family members themselves appeared all to have fled. From the time Rod had driven the jeep through the main gate to the moment he hot-wired a Land Rover in the garage and drove it out of the compound, barely twelve minutes had passed. The robot, using infrared vision, could see dozens of people moving through the jungle and up the Sierra Nevadas in every direction, all of them on foot. The only people left inside the compound were a few still hiding in odd corners, the wounded, and the dead.
Delgado, his continued unconsciousness assured by the injection of thiobarbitol, lay in the back of the Land Rover, bound hand and foot by plastic flexcuffs. Drake sat in the passenger seat, riding shotgun with his CAW. They drove through the shattered main gate of the compound and turned east on the coast road, with not a single challenge from what was left of the Salazar army.
The robot was still trying to assess what had happened inside the electronic workings of his own thoughts . . . his
mind.
He could remember limping across the smoke- blurred lawn, consumed by a burning—there was no other word for it
—passion
to place his hands around Delgado’s throat and tear the DAS traitor’s head from his shoulders.
A machine should not feel such things, he reasoned. A machine should not feel at all.
Was he, then, a machine? Or something more?
The secret, he suspected, lay in the PARET transfer the week before, when he had had a glimpse of the dark and bloody well within Chris Drake’s mind. No sentient being, human or machine, could look into such horror and remain untouched . . . unchanged.
He’d wanted Delgado to die. With the capture of the helicopter pilot earlier, there was no need to take Delgado alive, and when Drake had knocked him down, Rod had been certain that the SEAL was going to kill the man.
But Rod had intervened. Why?
Rod didn’t know. There were too many new thoughts, confusing thoughts that needed further analysis before he knew what to do with them.
The uncontrolled environment outside the laboratory was far stranger and more deadly than Rod had ever imagined.
It was also far richer in data, in experience than he'd thought possible.
Drake, too, was alone with his thoughts as the robot drove them along the coast road toward the early morning sun. And though he didn’t know it, his thoughts were strangely similar to those of his silent, titanium- steel companion.
He’d wanted to choke the life from Delgado with his bare hands. He’d
had
Delgado, his carotid pulse hard and fast beneath his fingers. They no longer needed the man who had betrayed the SEALs in
SNOWDROP,
who had orchestrated the brutal, meaningless murders of Stacy and Meagan, the guy who’d destroyed the two people who’d been Drake’s whole life, saying it was "nothing personal.”
It would have been so easy, so very, very easy to increase the pressure, to feel the bastard’s life slipping away. . . .
But at that moment, Drake knew that he was not going to kill Delgado. The animal deserved to die, but Drake would not make that decision.
Justice had little to do with it. Delgado was guilty and Drake would not have minded being the one to execute the only justice he deserved.
But Drake was involved now in a war that went beyond the deaths of his Meagan and Stacy, beyond the deaths of comrades in SEAL Eight. Delgado’s death would be
personally
satisfying.
But it wouldn’t bring back the dead.
And the animal’s life might, just maybe, give Drake’s side a further advantage in the war. Yeah, the helo pilot might be able to give them Diamond . . . but Delgado had to know a hell of a lot about corruption in the Colombian government, about drug-lord penetrations of American security, about... Christ, who could tell
what
he might know?
Drake glanced at Rod out of the corner of his eye.
What might they learn if they did a PARET link between Delgado and Rod?
Drake pushed the thought away. Nah, bad idea. Make a decent guy like Rod look into a cesspit like Delgado’s mind? No way. It wouldn’t be human.
Using maps of the area Rod had stored in his memory, they found a side road that wound up into the Sierra Nevadas. The road soon became a dirt trail, probably used once by marijuana harvesters, leading to the clearing designated Fox Green. It didn’t take long to uncover their hidden, air dropped gear. While Rod made contact with the circling Hercules, Drake unpacked the balloons and gas cylinders, then began laying out the harnesses.
Skyhook had first been introduced during the Vietnam era. Infrequently used—it had received more attention than it rated when it was popularized by John Wayne in
The Green Berets
—it still provided a quick- and-dirty means of extracting prisoners or personnel from combat zones without forcing helos to land in a hot LZ. When Drake had briefed the SEALs before their departure, he’d specified a skyhook extraction because he fully expected that the Salazar army would be hot on their heels and a helo extraction would be far too risky.
It didn’t matter. As far as Drake knew, the Salazars—Roberto and Jose—could still be alive, and they might rally enough men to cause real trouble. A skyhook extraction was still their best way out of the jungle.
Rod helped Drake into a nylon coverall, then the two of them pulled an id
entical garment onto the still
unconscious Colombian. A web harness fastened the two of them together, seated back-to-back, and padded helmets were strapped to their heads. Normally, extractions were made one person at a time, but the pickup yoke on the Hercules was strong enough to support two medium-sized men.
Two
men.
Rod in Combat Mod was something else. He would have to be picked up on a separate pass.
Helium from a pair of fiberglass containers inflated a dirigible-shaped balloon that rose swiftly above the clearing, trailing a five-hundred-foot nylon line. Three cerise pennants at twenty-five-foot intervals fluttered fifty feet below the balloon, providing a target for the approaching aircraft. Rod secured the line to Drake’s chest harness, and the SEAL prepared himself, facing the direction of the C-130’s approach. It would be coming out of the east, following the valley along a course that would avoid the steeper slopes of the Sierras to the south.
Drake could hear the drone of the aircraft now. He looked up at the robot. "You know what to do, Rod?”
"Perfectly. While I have never PARETed an actual skyhook extraction, I have been fully briefed on the procedure. My role is . . . passive.”
"Yeah. Like a target.”
"I beg your pardon?”
"Never mind. Just nervous, I guess.” The plane was closer.
"I am in radio contact with Rescue Sierra Tango,” Rod said. "They report that they have the balloon in sight.”
"Well, you’d better stand clear, buddy,” Drake said. He extended his hand. "You be careful, okay?”
The robot looked down curiously at Drake’s hand. The SEAL had to lean forward, partly lifting Delgado’s dead weight on his back, to take the robot’s steel hand in his own.
"Damned robot can speak Spanish and tear the top off a tank, but he doesn’t know how to shake hands,” he muttered, pumping the hand up and down. "Good luck, you damned electronic can opener.”
"Best wishes,” the robot replied solemnly, "for a pleasant flight.”
Drake wondered if Rod was serious, or if this was another attempt at humor. He had no time to ask, however. Approaching at an altitude of four hundred feet, the C-130 was almost over them. On its bow, a pair of tubular arms extended like open scissor blades. Using the pennants as aiming points, the Hercules pilot -nagged the line, trapping it in a mechanism that severed the line above the yoke and locked it tight below, feeding the line into a slot along the aircraft’s belly that led aft to the open rear doors of the cargo bay.
The elastic line whipped Drake and his inert backpack into the sky, the laws of physics guaranteeing that the first part of their trajectory was almost straight up, clearing the surrounding trees by a generous margin.
The shock of the pickup was far worse than the snap of an opening parachute canopy. That first, whipsaw crack left him stunned and disoriented. Delgado’s weight strapped to his back made it impossible to orient himself. Sky alternated wildly with jungle treetops flashing past in a blur of green as he dangled astern of the aircraft. The wind was a vicious, living thing, shrieking at him, clutching and battering him, twisting the SEAL like a toy at the end of a string.
On board the aircraft, the line was engaged by an electric winch on the cargo deck, which began to draw him in.
A fish on the end of a five-hundred-foot line, Drake and his prisoner were reeled in toward the gaping maw of the C-130’s rear door.
Rod watched the Hercules roar off toward the west as the severed helium balloon broke free and dwindled into the sky. Drake and Delgado were a pair of tiny specks on an invisible line, following the dwindling aircraft.
Blue Ranger, this is Rescue Sierra Tango,
an inner voice told him.
First package is snagged. We’ll swing around for a second pass as soon as we have them safe on board and the retrieval gear reset.
Copy, Rescue Sierra Tango,
he replied.
I will be ready.
He began by placing their weapons and combat gear in the Land Rover, then dropping an incendiary grenade into the gas tank. There was no sense in leaving military equipment where drug lords would be sure to find it. As the rover burned, Rod began preparing for his extraction.
He didn’t bother with the nylon coverall—it would never have fit his Combat Mod body anyway, but the modified parachute harness went snugly over his torso, and he put the padded helmet on to protect his vulnerable visual and auditory sensors. He used two more gas cylinders to inflate the second balloon and let it rise on the end of its nylon tether.
The biggest problem was getting his weight down. The nylon cord was rated at over 1,200 pounds, but the yoke on the C-130’s nose could not manage much over 400 pounds. The margin for error was too small.
He had already discarded his combat harness, ammunition, and weapons. With machinelike indifference, Rod reached down and opened access panels set into his thighs, then triggered a mechanical release. Large sections of Kevlar-and-ceramic armor came away in his hands, revealing the complex tangles of colored wiring and interlocking hydraulic pistons between his hips and his knees.
There were several hundred electronic and mechanical connections that had to be severed in each leg. Though simpler than if he’d been trying to remove his Civilian Mod legs, it was still a complex and time- consuming process. His hands and fingers worked with inhuman speed, disconnecting, unplugging, unlocking. Restraining bolts slid from the robotic, titanium equivalents of femurs, and his legs came off. Legless now, his total mass would be less than 350 pounds.
He tucked the loose wires back into the gaping holes where his ball-and-socket hip assemblies had rested, then steadied himself on his hands.
He waited for the return of the Hercules.
Drake scarcely felt the hands grabbing his arms and shoulders, dragging him up the ramp and onto the deck of the C-130. He lay there for a moment, gasping for breath, feeling the vibration of the Herky Bird’s engines beneath him. He sensed, rather than saw, two men nearby, wearing combat fatigues and padded crash helmets.
One of them began unfastening buckles and snaps. Delgado’s weight rolled free of his back.
Carefully, aware now of myriad aches and bruises from his rough handling, Drake sat up. Rubbing the back of his neck, he watched while a man in combat fatigues freed Delgado from the harness, then handcuffed his hands behind him.
"Is he still alive?” Drake asked. He had to yell to make himself heard above the C-130’s engines. "I’d hate all the effort to be wasted!”
"He is quite well,” a voice sounded behind him. "But not for long, I fear.”
Drake felt a sharp chill of recognition. He knew that voice!
He turned sharply, rolling over on the deck of the plane. Harold Gallagher, CIA’s EXDIR, grinned down at him, a silenced 9mm automatic pistol aimed at Drake’s head. "And I’m afraid it’s not just your
effort
that is going to be wasted, Lieutenant Drake.”
EXDIR . . .
Diamond!
In their planning for the mission, Drake and Weston had discussed the possibility that Diamond would surface in order to ensure Delgado’s silence. The bad guys on the helo had been more than halfway expected; they’d counted on it, in fact, in order to get another prisoner who would lead them to the CIA mole.
But he’d not expected Diamond himself to show up . . . nor had he expected him to be on the C-130.
Maybe he could use that to buy time. "What are you doing, man?” Drake yelled. "I’m not Diamond. . . .” "Can it, Drake. You know
I’m
Diamond. But you won’t for long.” He gestured to the other man, who pulled Drake’s hands behind his back while Gallagher kept the pistol on him. The SEAL recognized the second fatigue-clad man as well: Smolleck, the guy from the CIA’s Logistics Office.
"We’ll pick up your mechanical friend,” Gallagher said when Smolleck was finished. "Then when we’re over the sea, the three of you will go for a swim. No bodies. No mess. The plane’s crew won’t know the difference. And neither will you.”
"Why didn’t you just leave us in the jungle?” "Shit. You walked out last time. You could do it again. No, it’s better this way. More certain. That’s why Smolleck and I came out to see to the job ourselves this time, instead of entrusting it to the damned meres. I admit you gave me quite a turn a few hours ago. I was at Howard when the word came in that the helo team had been wiped out and the SEALs were back aboard a Coast Guard cutter. I couldn’t do anything about them. But I figured we could jump the C-130 and come see to
you
personally.”
Still seated, Drake turned, hands awkwardly behind him. He could see the jungle behind the plane through the open ramp, caught the flash of sunlight reflected from the sea on the horizon.
"Why not leave the robot? He can’t do anything to you now.”
"I don’t like leaving loose ends,” Gallagher replied. "Even if they’re only machines.”
Blue Ranger, Blue Ranger, this is Rescue Sierra Tango,
the voice said inside his head.
First package is safely aboard and we ’re set for the second pickup. Coming around from the east. Stand by.
Rod waited, sensing the tug of the balloon at his harness, hearing the droning turboprops of the approaching C-130.
The Hercules roared overhead, snagging the line, cutting the balloon free. Rod was snapped into the sky. Trees blurred a hundred feet beneath him. He rose until he was three hundred feet behind the Hercules, twisting and tumbling in the big aircraft’s slipstream. Through the line, he felt the winch take hold, felt himself being drawn toward the open cargo doors.
The wind clawed at his damaged face. He clung to the line, trying to steady himself. Peering ahead, he could see into the plane’s open cargo deck, could see people moving there.
Engaging his telephoto vision, he zoomed in on the scene, enhancing the plane’s dim interior lighting, focusing on the man standing there with a gun.
EXDIR’s photo was already stored in his memory, as was Smolleck’s. While the robot had not seriously considered Gallagher as a likely suspect, the situation now made it obvious: Drake and Delgado, handcuffed and lying on the floor, EXDIR in camo fatigues instead of a business suit, holding a gun on the Navy SEAL.
The winch had drawn Rod to within two hundred feet of the rear of the Hercules. The plane was climbing now, banking gradually into a gentle turn toward the north. White beaches flashed below, and then they were over the Caribbean. Rod caught a glimpse of the pastel- colored roofs of Santa Marta to the west.
He had to get to the plane faster than the winch could pull him. Rod reached down and unfastened the snap that held the line to his harness. Then, with hundreds of pounds of pressure behind each clenched fist as it closed, he began to make his way, hand over hand, toward the Hercules transport.
There was only one problem. The readout for power consumption in his visual display now read fourteen percent, and hand-walking up the line this way would use power at a terrific rate. As he watched, the four changed to a three.
But there ought to be enough to make the trip, with a small bit of reserve.
He kept moving, battling the wind and the drag of his own body.
"We’re over the water,” Smolleck yelled.
"Give it a moment,” Gallagher replied. "I don’t want any bodies washing ashore.” He walked aft a few paces, peering back at the robot. His eyes widened. The damn thing was hauling itself toward the plane, coming hand over hand! "I’ll be fucked,” he muttered. "Hey, Smolleck! Give me your knife!” He handed the pistol to Smolleck. "Watch him.”
Knife in hand, he started forward. The nylon line ran through the slot in the deck forward to where it engaged the slow-turning drum of the winch. If he cut the line, the robot would fall.