by Michael Todd
“Understood,” he said, and immediately killed his connection with her. She raised another thumbs-up to him and nodded as he shifted himself closer to the driver’s seat.
“Step on it,” he ordered and checked the screen again. The drone was still there, which meant that whoever was tracking them was still a fair distance away since they needed the little device to keep track of their movements. He didn’t think that would last, however.
He resisted the urge to use the hatch at the top of the Hammerhead to gun the tail down. As much as he disliked being tracked like some sort of animal, he didn’t want Pegasus—since they were most likely the ones behind this—to have to scour the desert to find something when he didn’t want them to. He wanted their focus to be on him and him alone.
“What are the chances that these people will bring weapons in that can actually take out one of our Hammerheads?” Sal asked Collins, who was seated beside the driver.
“Well, the use of RPGs hasn’t been allowed in this little slice of heaven,” the man replied. “All things considered, the militaries involved don’t want to bring weapons in that could be used against them for fear that bounty hunters and outside mercs might lay their hands on them. But we can’t rule it out either, not with the funding Pegasus has. What we’d really need to worry about are armor-piercing rounds. The armor on these things was substantial already, and with the upgrades that Gutierrez added to them, we should be safe inside this compartment. The real problem is the isolated engine section. They might be able to shoot the block out, and if they do, we’re sitting ducks.”
“Is there anything we can do to avoid that?” he asked.
“Didn’t Kennedy brief you?” the soldier asked and constantly watched the drone still on their sensors.
“She did, but I wouldn’t mind a second—or, in this case, third—opinion.”
“Well, the armor should hold attacks off for a couple of minutes under sustained fire,” Collins explained cautiously. “Depending on the rounds they use and how sustained their fire is, of course. Yeah, I’d give us a couple of minutes, so we should always keep moving, even while under fire.”
“Agreed.” Sal leaned back. “And since the drone just pulled away, I think we need to warm up those evasive maneuvers.”
Collins nodded and drew his rifle from its holster in his suit. “Let’s lock and load, people. We’ll have company in five mikes and counting. Loosen the convoy up and keep moving. No matter what happens, always stay moving, do you hear me, drivers?”
“Roger that,” both men said in near unison. Sal pulled himself over to the door of the Hammerhead. The rest of them would handle any cover fire that would be necessary from the hatch at the top. He had another job to do.
Rodrigo didn’t much care to run operations personally. He was the kind of man who liked to keep his distance from these things. Remaining clear of the crimes that he committed was the most important part of any defense that involved plausible deniability. When his only connection to the cases that he was involved in was a burner phone that was quickly fed into an incinerator, things were so much easier and cleaner.
But when he was paid one of his best paychecks in his career and his all-time best client since he’d left the special forces wanted this done without any hiccups, he needed to be there. It had been a while since he’d been out in the field, so he intended to hang back and oversee the operation.
In person. Fuck, this was already way too complicated. After this, he needed to get Carlson into a room and explain to the man how to run an operation that didn’t require his people involved in crazy things. He’d learned a new definition of crazy lately—he thought of it as being in the middle of a firefight with a bunch of crazy animals and the people who willingly charged into the most dangerous spot on earth for what could only be called a minimal profit. It was asking for bad things to happen.
“Five mikes away, sir,” said one of the men driving the top-of-the-line Hammerhead in the middle of a convoy of five, all loaded with angry and well-armed mercs in need of money. His best people had been wiped out or had refused the mission entirely, which meant that Rodrigo had needed to hire from outside his own organization. That was why he needed to be there to run it personally. The fucking ass-wipes at Pegasus needed to get their shit together.
“Keep this trajectory,” Rodrigo said. “We’ll intercept them on the road, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to take the sandy route around us when they see us. It would be best for that to be delayed as long as possible.”
“Roger that,” the driver said, followed by a chorus of affirmations from the others. They were mostly specialist ATV drivers from South Africa, which made them the best that could be acquired on short notice. They were also notoriously expensive, which meant he had to skimp on the other men. He, too, had a board to answer to regarding his company spending, and with the budget that had been left after he’d hired the drivers… Well, he was glad that he had the advantage of numbers—and, hopefully, surprise.
“We have a visual,” the lead driver of the convoy called in. “Two Hammerheads with significant improvements to armor now headed our way.”
A link to a live feed from the lead driver’s HUD showed him that the Heavy Metal team had brought both their Hammerheads out. They had made a good investment with their recruitment of the mechanic Gutierrez. He could see the armor enhancements. Hammerheads already looked rather squat, but with the enhancements, they had been altered to look stronger, made to bypass most landmines without taking heavy damage, and would be harder to hit dead on with armor-piercing rounds as well as RPGs. Rodrigo hadn’t been able to bring the latter in on short notice, but he’d compensated with a good supply of the former.
“Put up a blockade. Use three of the vehicles,” he ordered. “Keep two in the back to pursue any that go off road.”
“Roger that,” one of the drivers confirmed and the first three vehicles quickly formed a heavy-duty barrier across the road. In the open desert terrain, it wasn’t the most formidable roadblock, but it would make their quarry pause and rethink their movements—and hopefully expose where the mutual exchange drop would ultimately happen.
The two ATVs took a few seconds to come to a halt, and Rodrigo tried to understand what was happening. The glass didn’t reveal any kind of reaction from the people driving the vehicles, but both Hammerheads came to a halt some two hundred meters away from their blockade.
What was their plan? Rodrigo leaned forward in his seat as he studied the vehicles in an effort to discern what Salinger Jacobs and Madigan Kennedy might be thinking. He should have put more money into higher-quality people, he mused. He could have hand-picked a couple of long-range shooters who would be able to find a weak spot in the armor and disable the vehicles. That would allow them to deal with the people inside at their leisure.
Instead, he was stuck there in a frustrating attempt to anticipate whether they would run or fight.
Movement from the vehicles held his attention. Doors peeled open from both of the Hammerheads and six armored figured exited each one. Most wore what looked like the armor that was regularly used by the military out there, which made it simpler to identify the suit that Madigan Kennedy usually wore. It was heavier and sturdier than the rest, and he knew that she had a couple of shoulder-mounted rockets to launch should things go poorly, the sign of a well-funded freelancer.
One of the Hammerheads reversed a couple of dozen meters before it stopped once more and the second pushed forward a few feet. This seemed to be a coordinated effort as a few seconds later, the men in the barricade yelled a warning.
“Take cover!” At the loud cry, the men ducked quickly. Rodrigo resisted the urge to mimic them since he wasn’t in the line of fire, but the man whose HUD had streamed to him had gone suspiciously still and a handful of holes appeared in the glass of the windshield. He knew that it was supposed to be bulletproof, but that didn’t help much when the bullets were armor-piercing and punched through the impact-resi
stant glass like it was made of…well, glass.
The point where Rodrigo actually did take cover was when the shoulder mount on Kennedy’s suit raised and a white trail of smoke appeared. This clearly demonstrated that they had come ready for a fight and didn’t have any inclination to avoid resistance either. The small rocket streaked towards them at an impossible speed, exploded in a white-hot flash, and left them coated in a cloud of smoke for a few seconds.
It was a diversion tactic. He knew this almost before he raised his head once more. It pained him that he’d actually had to duck but he hadn’t worn a suit of his own, knowing that he couldn’t be involved in any of the fighting. He still needed legal exculpation from all this.
As the smoke cleared, two Hammerhead engines roared to their full capacity. He peered into one of the streaming HUDs that remained functional and immediately detected the ruse. Most of the men and woman in armor had dismounted from the two ATVs and now fired relentlessly. One of the ATVs accelerated toward the blockade. He couldn’t see if there actually was a driver, but it seemed that they planned to ram the three vehicles that blocked the road.
It was all a diversion, of course. Rodrigo couldn’t see Jacob’s hybrid suit among those who had dismounted, and the second ATV hurtled away from the road and into the desert, away from the Zoo and toward the wall and the Staging Area.
“We’re in pursuit,” Rodrigo advised through his mic. “My Hammerhead will pursue the one that has broken away. That has to be Jacobs in there. The rest of you, hold the blockade and take these motherfuckers out.”
“Roger that!” came the response from the men in charge of each vehicle. They dismounted hastily from their vehicles in anticipation of being rammed by the oncoming Hammerhead, while Rodrigo remained in the vehicle that roared onto the sand to pursue Jacobs.
He assumed that Gutierrez had been responsible for armoring the vehicles, and she had done one hell of a good job, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t drawbacks. In a heavy fight, they had an advantage, and the men holding the blockade would have their work cut out for them to keep that one from busting through. Which, of course, made it a good idea to leave the vehicle, but that was neither here nor there. The real prize now attempted to escape, and with the added weight of the extra armor, it wouldn’t get far.
A resounding crash indicated that the first vehicle had impacted the blockade. The men’s weapons exploded into life as they engaged the Heavy Metal team. It would be an interesting fight, since the men and woman on Jacob’s side were better armored, armed, and trained for a fight like this. The men he’d hired wore suits that where already three years old and it showed. While they were able enough as bounty hunters, they lacked in the kind of training and coordination that came with a proper military background. They would be slowly picked apart out there, and Rodrigo knew that it was highly unlikely that anyone would miss them too badly. He’d read their records. To a man, they were all amoral sons of bitches.
But none of that mattered if he obtained his prize. Sal had broken away too quickly. He’d obviously seen his people outnumbered and wanted to make a break for it. As skilled a scientist as he was, he certainly lacked in the same qualities that the men and women he’d hired for protection possessed, and that would be his last mistake.
And what was better, it seemed that his quarry was alone in that vehicle. Heavy Metal had hired a twelve-man team. Assuming someone was driving the vehicle that had crashed into the blockade and Salinger himself was driving this one, that accounted for all fourteen people on this mission. Rodrigo gripped his arm rest with one hand and his seatbelt with the other and his heart raced with anticipation as they closed the gap on Jacobs.
He could tell that the scientist knew they were in pursuit due to the crazed way that he drove. The vehicle raced almost blindly across the sand and didn’t slow, even for the sharp drops through the dunes. The idiot was headed for a bad crash, and that definitely would not work for Rodrigo. They were there for something in particular, after all—a plant that could very easily be destroyed in the crash. That was a risk that he wasn’t willing to take. They needed to find a way to stop him without destroying the Hammerhead.
One of the men in his vehicle shoved the top hatch up and heaved himself through the hole before he drew his rifle from the holster on his back. It wasn’t the newest of weapons but considering the stagnancy in firearms over the past couple of decades, it wasn’t like the gun itself made much of a difference. They were always made with reliability in mind, so he didn’t have to worry about its quality.
The quality of the shooter was another story altogether.
“Shoot the engine block out,” Rodrigo commanded through the comm line. “If that Hammerhead tips and our prize is destroyed in the chaos, none of you will be paid. Keep that in mind.”
“Roger that,” the man said and clearly sounded irritated at the lack of respect their leader had for their abilities. He didn’t care. These men would be paid a lot more than their worth if they obtained that plant, and he would make damn sure that nobody would be paid if he didn’t get what Pegasus wanted. Too much money had already been wasted in down payments on failed expeditions.
The man raised his rifle close to his face, more out of habit than necessity. While you wore a suit, you couldn’t pull the gun close enough to your face for it to make a difference. Most of the suits, even ones as old as these mutts wore, would have the aiming software embedded in the HUDs that would make all that irrelevant anyway.
He’d hired people who weren’t trained or experienced in the use of power combat suits. That was discouraging information to find out this late in the game.
The merc opened fire. Rodrigo could hear the shots even without needing to patch into the man’s HUD. He did anyway but quit hastily after the first few seconds. It was bumpy up there and bouncing around in the back of an ATV at high speed over desert terrain made it all hellishly more nauseating to add the experience from another perspective as well. He simply patched into the more stable and reliable viewpoint from the driver and leaned back in his seat. The highly trained driver would know how to corral Jacobs in a way that would hopefully leave their prize intact.
Eventually, all his schemes and concerns were unnecessary. Rodrigo was pleasantly surprised when the cut-rate mercs came through instead of the drivers. Smoke issued from the engine of Jacobs’ ATV and while he pushed it harder, it eventually ground to a halt when it crested one of the dunes.
Rodrigo’s ATV circled to block any escape that Sal might have with an open demonstration of menace by the man at the top who held the heavy rifle aimed at the driver’s side door.
Relief washed over him as he connected to the Hammerhead’s speaker system.
“There’s nowhere to run, Jacobs,” he said in as convincing a voice as he could manage. “Step out of the vehicle with your hands above your head. Hand over the merchandise, and we’ll let you walk out of here alive.” It was a lie, of course, but a necessary one. He didn’t want Jacobs to put up any kind of last-stand fight that would put lives at risk unnecessarily.
Rodrigo could see the merc who manned the hatch tense, ready to shoot.
“Don’t shoot until we have the merchandise,” he warned. After a few moments of thought, Sal made the right choice, pushed the door of his Hammerhead open, and stepped out with his hands raised above his head.
“Aren’t you a clever boy?” Rodrigo said to himself and a small smile played on his face. The lack of noise on their comm channel told him that the fight back at the blockade was already over and his men had probably not fared as well as their superior numbers might have suggested, but who cared about that? It was actually a good thing, since he had to pay fewer salaries and would have less loose ends to tie up.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sal stepped slowly out of the Hammerhead. He had to admit that, all things considered, his circumstances certainly appeared disappointingly bleak. As he moved and registered the comfort of the pack that he carried
at his side, he looked at the six men who simply stood and stared at him. They’d dismounted from their ATV with alacrity and speed, determined to aim as many guns at him as possible. He wondered if it was an intimidation tactic.
It was rather impressive, he acknowledged. There weren’t many people in the world who would have thought that he was worth enough trouble to put this much security on him. He wondered vaguely if he should feel flattered.
An eighth man stepped out of the Hammerhead. Most of the men, including the one who glared at him from the hatch at the top of the vehicle, wore suits of armor. Older but still sturdy and reliable, and more importantly, necessary for anyone who worked this close to the Zoo.
The final man wore a suit. It looked expensive, but Sal’s knowledge of which suits were expensive or not was rather limited. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that. It was all a matter of perspective, and he hadn’t owned enough to know which was which. The fact that the man was out there in a suit, though, and carried only a pair of glasses that seemed to be his only HUD connection to the rest of the team, made it a fair guess that he was the one in charge. He was tall, lean, and good-looking. A sharp crew-cut and no hint of a beard made him look younger than the gray that glistened in his black hair might suggest. Sal wondered if he was some kind of pencil pusher who ran this operation. It made sense, all things considered.
“Salinger Jacobs,” the man said and his accent indicated some Mediterranean heritage, though it wouldn’t be easy to pinpoint from where, exactly. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person.”
“Yeah, no, the pleasure is all mine, I assure you…dude,” he said with an offhand shrug. He didn’t really want to offend anyone, but it wasn’t like he even knew who this guy was. Then again, the man obviously thought he didn’t need to introduce himself to a soon to be dead scientist. It was all about priorities, after all.