Cybernarc (20 page)

And there’d be no danger of that thing washing ashore. It would sink like a stone, miles off the Colombian coast.

Rod saw Smolleck hand Gallagher a combat knife, saw the CIA EXDIR walking toward the winch. There was nothing he could do about it, however, except pull himself along more quickly.

Thirty more yards to go.

Power reading eight percent.

Drake was handcuffed, but his feet weren’t tied. He knew he couldn’t take the time to get his hands in front of him, as he had the last time he’d found himself in this position, but he might not need them. Navy SEALs train extensively in the martial arts form called hwrang- do.

His immediate problem was Smolleck, who was standing close by, a silenced Smith & Wesson automatic in his hand. He would have to take the gunman down before he could deal with Gallagher, and he had to do it
now.

He gauged the distance between himself and Smol- leck’s feet. The logistics man had misjudged and stepped just a bit too close.

Timing his move with the motion of the aircraft, Drake rolled suddenly toward Smolleck, lashing his feet out in a hard double scissors, locking his ankles around Smolleck’s calves and continuing the roll, knocking the CIA man off balance.

"Watch out!” the man screamed, and then the gun went off as he fell, the noise sharp and loud despite the sound suppressor, punching a neat round hole in a first-aid locker on the bulkhead. The gun clattered across the deck.

Drake lurched to his feet, drew back, then snapped his right foot hard into the side of Smolleck’s skull.

Gallagher spun, knife up. "You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Navy,” he said. He turned slightly and clicked the switch that controlled the winch to off. "Why don’t you step outside with your friend?”

He advanced with the knife.

Drake stepped aside as Gallagher lunged at him. He knew better than to try kicking the knife; he could tell by the way the CIA man moved that he’d been trained in close combat, and lashing out with his foot would only get him stabbed . . . and probably incapacitated.

Instead Drake lunged
feet first
at Gallagher’s feet, imitating the move of a baseball player sliding into home plate. His feet locked around Gallagher’s ankles. A hard snap-twist and roll sent EXDIR crashing against the aircraft’s bulkhead. Quickly, he jerked his feet clear and scrambled upright, looking for a chance to end the fight.

He was too slow ... or simply unlucky. Gallagher had dropped the knife when he hit but was already clawing across the deck toward the pistol, now lying only a few feet away. Drake took a step forward, then stopped. Gallagher stood five feet away, crouched over, the Smith
&
Wesson aimed at Drake’s chest.

"Good-bye, SEAL . . .”

Rod had kept climbing the rope even after the winch was shut down and had almost reached the end of the aircraft’s open tail ramp. In the lee of the Hercules, the air was calmer. Clinging with one hand to the line, he reached out with the other, clamping down on the end of the ramp.

His power reserves were down to five percent.

He would never make it back aboard now. He knew that. Perhaps, though, he could still save Chris Drake. All he needed was a projectile of some sort. . . .

Closing his left elbow over the line, he locked it tight with five hundred pounds’ pressure. Swinging wildly, buffeted by the wind, a yard from the cargo ramp, he reached with his right hand to his left, peeling back an armored access, releasing a clamp, severing electrical connections. The fingers of his left hand closed into a fist, then froze as he lost all sensory input from it. He severed another connection, then quickly unscrewed his left hand from his arm. The thing came away in his right hand, still tight-closed, a lump of steel literally the size of his fist.

Still locked to the line by the pressure exerted by his left arm, he drew back with his right, targeting the back of Gallagher’s head. He had to wait for a fraction of a second, calculating his body’s uncertain motions on the end of the line, the wind pressure, the range. ...

He would have only the one shot.

Rod’s right arm snapped out and forward. The steel fist struck Gallagher at the base of his neck with the crunching sound of splintering bone. EXDIR’s arms and legs splayed out as though he’d been jolted by an electric shock, then he crumpled forward, the Smith & Wesson dropping from nerveless fingers.

The robot’s right hand scrabbled at the end of the ramp. His power level read one percent.

It wasn’t enough. . . .

Drake was past Gallagher before the former EXDIR’s body hit the deck, dropping onto his belly as he tried to reach Rod across the slanting surface of the ramp. He caught his breath as he looked down into blue water far, far below. The wind tore at his clothing, his hair. His hands closed on Rod’s hand, where it clung to the metal grating of the ramp.

He tried to pull and nearly pulled himself out of the aircraft. He would never be able to haul Rod’s three- hundred-pound-plus body onto the plane.

The line.

"Hold on with your right hand!” he yelled at the robot. "Let go of the line!”

"Power . . . going . . Rod replied. The two words seemed to exhaust him. His left arm unfolded, and the line fluttered free in the breeze.

Drake pulled in two forearm-lengths of nylon, looping it around Rod’s right wrist and snugging it into a fisherman’s bend.

Then he was scrambling back up the ramp, knees shaking with exertion. He reached the winch and switched it on.

Slowly, metal grating on metal, Rod was drawn into the aircraft. Drake hit the "cargo door close” lever, then ran back to where Rod lay legless, helpless, face up on the deck.

"Thank . . . you . . . Chris . . .”

Drake collapsed beside the machine, the strength gone from his legs now that the crisis was past. "Rod! Rod! Can you hear me?” There was no response, and Drake realized he was conserving power. "Listen to me! Thanks for taking down Gallagher. He would have had me if you hadn’t jumped in.”

The robot’s eyes tracked, focusing on Drake’s face. A strange sound came from Rod’s throat, then words. Drake had to lean closer to make them out.

"It looked like . . . you needed . . . a . . . hand. . . .”

©
Epilogue

ROD WAS DEAD
by the time the C-130 touched down at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Fortunately for the RAMROD prototype, death was a correctable malfunction. A trickle charge from on-board emergency power packs kept his memory intact when all other systems shut down. At Camp Peary, the RAMROD team was ready to transplant his core units into Civilian Mod.

Function nominal.

It wasn’t until he joined Drake and Weston in a subterranean conference room at RAMROD headquarters days later that he learned what had happened after his return.

The Salazars had, indeed, escaped the bloodbath at the hacienda. Colombian government troops, alerted by Group Seven, had descended on the compound within hours of the battle, discovering forty-two bodies, nearly three tons of cocaine stored in a warehouse near the airfield, and enough arms and munitions to fight a small war. The soldiers were tracking the survivors through the jungle.

But the Salazars were gone. A small aircraft had
b
een tracked leaving the airfield shortly after the battle, heading toward the interior.

AMBER HARVEST,
however, was an unqualified success. The rogue faction within the CIA had been broken, and Diamond himself was dead. Delgado was a prisoner, as was Smolleck—assuming the former CIA logistics man recovered from his fractured skull. Background checks on those two suggested that Gallagher had begun dealing in drugs ten years earlier, back when he was still the head of CIA logistics. The man who arranged flights in and out of countries all over the world, who dealt with criminal elements, who had to strike deals with everyone from corrupt local officials to the Mafia, had found himself in a position of supreme temptation.

And the maze of security and need-to-know restrictions had made it easy to use the system to create his own inner circle of corruption and greed. Delgado and Smolleck were expected to lead Group Seven to quite a few others like themselves, government officials ensnared by billions in narcodollars, by the power those billions could purchase.

"We’re never going to get them all,” Drake said, shaking his head. "The whole thing seems pretty hopeless, you know? I mean, three
tons
of coke captured in that warehouse ... and it’s just a drop in the bucket. In the
ocean
. . .”

"Annual consumption of cocaine in the United States alone is estimated at five hundred tons,” Rod said. "The drugs seized at the Salazar estate represents six- tenths of one percent of that amount.”

"So we didn’t even make a dent in it.”

"You did better than
dent
it,” Weston said. "You destroyed the Salazar operation, put them out of business.”

"They got away.”

"You wrecked their pipeline into Washington. You know, your friend Delgado is telling us an interesting story. About how the Salazars were planning on using their CIA connections to ship the stuff on U.S. military transports into military bases.”

"Oh, God, no . .

"They’d already sent one ton through. Thanks to Delgado’s information, the DEA went into a warehouse outside of Andrews and grabbed most of it . . . along with twelve members of the
Salvajes
motorcycle gang who were dealing the stuff in the D.C. area.”

"That’s something, anyway.”

"Something? One metric ton. That’s a lot of doses. A hell of a lot of kids getting hooked on the stuff their first or second time they play with it, babies addicted inside the womb, first-time users looking for a high and ending up dead. Yeah, that’s something.

"And I’ll tell you another thing. Our nation is in serious trouble, and it’s not just the cokeheads and crack houses and rising crime and gun battles in the street that’s doing it. It’s the corruption. Drugs and drug money foul everything they touch . . . and they’ve touched plenty in this country already. Including some highly placed people inside the Washington Beltway. Delgado has told us a lot about
them,
too.”

"Who?”

"The DEA is working on them. It’ll take time, like a surgeon working o
n a very persistent, very deep-
seated tumor. It has to come out, but the cancer has infected so much of the rest of the body . . .”

"The patient could die,” Drake said softly.

"Yes, it could,” Weston said. "The surgeon is going to have to be ruthless.”

"Is there any chance at all?”

"We think so. Group Seven . . . and the President. You see, we can only do so much trying to close our borders. People like the Salazars and the Ochoas and the Sicilian Mafia and God knows who else are going to keep shipping the stuff in, so long as there’s a market for it here. And humans being what they are, there will
always
be a market. . . .”

"So what’s the alternative?”

"We can strike back. Like that surgeon’s scalpel. . . cut out the tumor before it destroys the patient. Before it destroys us.” Weston’s eyes moved from Drake to the robot, and back. "And you two—you and Rod—can help.”

"That sounds suspiciously like a proposition.”

"If you like. Group Seven was impressed by the way Rod handled himself in Colombia. He could play a part in hitting the drug lords where they live.”

"Why me?”

"Because you know Rod. You work well with him.” Weston grinned. "Because, so help me, the two of you
think
alike.”

Drake looked at Rod and grinned. "You want me to be his keeper?”

"Well, like Dr. McDaniels says, he still has some trouble getting along in a human world. In acting human,
being
human . . . though from what I’ve seen, he’s well on his way. What do you say? Want the job?”

No one asked Rod what he thought, but that didn’t matter. He already knew what Chris Drake’s answer was going to be, knew the part they would have to play 

Drake thought about it. Nothing could bring back Meagan or Stacy. The pain was still there, part of him, like a robot’s programming, a nightmare that went on and on.

But the nightmare was not his alone. Drug lords, monsters in human form, were growing rich by selling wholesale misery and slavery and death to men, women, and children by the thousands, by the
millions.

They had to be stopped.

He looked at the robot, knowing he’d found a partner there, someone he could trust.