by Brandt Legg
The last man, apparently deciding to forgo orders by shooting her, wasn’t quick enough on the draw. Wen kicked the pistol out of his hands and immediately cursed her overzealous attack as the gun went skittering over the edge.
“You should run,” she said.
For an instant he appeared to be thinking about it, but the lure of a big pay day, machismo, or just stupidity, got the best of him. “You’re dead!” he yelled, charging her.
In a move that seemed almost effortless, she rolled off his blow and allowed his momentum to take him soaring off the roof.
She ran to the hatch they had come out of and climbed into the upper stairwell of the building.
“There you are!” a man yelled, grabbing her.
She flipped him over her shoulder and dropped him down the center of the stairwell, not hearing his broken body bash the railings on the way down four stories, nor when he smashed head-first onto the concrete floor below, because she was hearing at least six more storming up the stairs.
She ran down the long hall. “It’s a dead end,” she muttered, then looked back and saw the men coming up fast. Bullets sprayed low against the doors and walls. I guess they finally decided injuring me was easier than catching me. Wen launched herself into the air, catching a ceiling beam just long enough to propel herself through the small glass window above the nearest condo door.
Inside, a startled elderly couple screamed, but Wen never stopped moving. She burst through the sliding screen door and flipped herself over the railing, counting on the pattern being the same as the ones she’d climbed to the roof on the other side of the building.
Going down was a little slower, but in less than twelve seconds, she was back on the ground.
Catching her breath while scanning the area, hoping to see Chase, all she saw was more trouble as one of the silver SUVs barreled straight for her. Wen jumped on its hood, ran up the windshield, across its roof, and kept going, landing on a slowing car’s roof and rolling off the other side, where she crashed into two of her assailants. Another seven were charging from the street.
“You’re done!” a big man barked.
She kicked his head, came down twisting, and snapped the neck of another thug. Wen grabbed his submachine gun and emptied its magazine into the seven operatives on the street. The carnage of seven dead bodies left the area looking like a war zone, locals and brightly dressed tourists fleeing.
She ran to get another gun from one of the fallen, but three police cars suddenly appeared.
Instead, Wen slipped between an abandoned delivery truck and a parked sedan. She headed to the ocean front, searching for Chase, but spotting another group of shadow people at a corner T-shirt shop.
She ran onto Harbour Drive and leapt onto the back of a Honda Accord. That’s when she finally spotted Chase. To her horror, he was climbing to the top of one of two large dockside cargo loading cranes perched at the harbor’s edge. Three men were following right on his heels.
Wen jumped from the Honda, rolled onto a sandy strip in front of a visitor center, came up, and took off toward the cranes. She estimated them to be fifty feet high, and wondered what Chase was going to do once he reached the top.
By the time she got to the base, Chase had less than fifteen feet of crane left. After that, it’s all sky, she thought, but she had no doubt he was the best climber on the island.
She started up. Only a few feet into her ascent, four men appeared below her.
“We will kill you!” one of them said as they all pointed submachine guns at her.
She looked back up at Chase, and then down at the men, studying the face of the man making the threats. “I believe you,” she said swinging down and simultaneously kicking him and another one in their faces. Crashing down onto one of them, it only took three lightning fast round kicks to disarm the other two. Once she had a gun, she killed them instantly. “Normally, I would have liked to question you,” she said, climbing again. “But Chase is in a tight spot.”
Fifteen
Langley, Virginia
Gatewood picked up the conversation of what life would be like without satellites. “It’s not just our base-stationed pilots losing contact with armed drones over the Middle East. We will experience failed communications systems in the field, stranding soldiers, ships, and manned aircraft without the ability to contact command.”
“Right,” Skyenor concurred. “And internationally, general civilian communications will be severely limited. However, the major disruption will come from the loss of the GPS. We’re talking about grounding all commercial aircraft worldwide.”
“A genuine disaster like we’ve never faced,” Tess said.
“We’ve run predictive models,” Skyenor said. “We’ve phased in a series of transactions, taken into account all satellites, including the partially implemented and proposed mega-constellations, everything going on in low earth orbit, merged the data of all top scientists, even commercial patent applications, trade deals . . . we’ve looked at the entirety of the modern technological reality.”
“What’s the program?” she asked, wondering if DARPA had somehow gotten ahold of Chase Malone’s most guarded secret, his SEER program, which allegedly could predict future events with startling accuracy.
“We call it DANN. DARPA Advanced Neural Network.”
“New?”
“We’ve had it operational for eight years,” he said with a sly smile. “Sorry. Up until now, it’s been so secret that no one outside a handful of people at DARPA knew about it.”
Tess and Gatewood were surprised, but not stunned. They each had their own projects that remained in classified cocoons within their agencies. Neither of them even needed to ask if the president was aware of DANN. They knew he would not have been informed. Tess often said, “Presidents cannot be trusted. They’re just politicians who have mastered corruption better than the other corrupt politicians and grabbed the ultimate prize. But they’ll be gone as soon as the next one manipulated the system.”
“We continually tweak and adjust the algorithms, deep learning, machine learning, and a super advanced AI,” Skyenor continued. “We utilize RAI and other proprietary programs. It’s quite something.”
Once again, Tess thought of Chase, wondering if he imagined how far his invention, Rapid Artificial Intelligence, had gone. DARPA regularly utilized unlicensed versions of anything they wanted. They combined, dissected, and revised versions of software to accommodate their needs. “Why would Russia make this kind of move?” Tess asked. “And why now?”
“A chance to grab supremacy,” Gatewood answered before Skyenor had a chance. “Whoever controls space, controls earth.”
Tess nodded. “It really is that simple, isn’t it?”
“Let me read you what a former NATO official said when the alliance was considering whether space should be declared a war domain,” Skyenor said. “‘Being able to control space warfare will be a vital position for any country or organization since it can almost dictate the outcome of armed conflicts. You can have warfare exclusively in space, but whoever controls space also controls what happens on land, on the sea, and in the air. If you don’t control space, you don’t control the other domains either.’”
“We’re in deep trouble,” Tess said.
Skyenor nodded.
“We still have a few ways we may be able to get through this,” Gatewood said. “But we have to stop them. We have to put everything we have on this. Nothing else matters.”
“There’ll be targets,” Skyenor said. “That’s your department, Tess.”
“Tell me who to kill, who to raid, what to steal, what to sabotage, where to attack, where to surveil,” Tess said. “We will do whatever it takes. We will not lose this.”
After more strategizing and dividing up the responsibilities, they adjourned.
“Shall we tell the president?” Skyenor asked.
Gatewood and Tess exchanged a quick glance.
“Not yet,” Tess said. “It’ll
only leak if we do.”
“I agree,” Skyenor said. “Just wanted to make sure we addressed it.”
This was the biggest crisis CHAD had ever faced. It was decided that Skyenor would liaison with the military. He knew who could get things done, who could be trusted. Tess would, of course, handle the intelligence agencies. Gatewood, as always, headed the strategic deployment of beyond advanced high tech equipment and weapons that no one had even heard of yet. Tess called him the Godfather, but Skyenor had another nickname for him: Gatewood the game changer.
Gatewood’s driver left first. Tess and Skyenor lingered in the parking area for a few moments.
“You really believe they have the capability to wipe out all our satellites?” Tess asked.
“Yes.”
“And that they’d really do it?”
“That and much worse.”
“Worse?”
“Be prepared to be back in Bunker W again tomorrow,” Skyenor said.
“Why? What else is going on?”
“It’s related to this. Something . . . I really don’t want to discuss it yet. Today, I’ll be getting a lot more information. Tomorrow. This is enough for today, don’t you think?”
“The complete breakdown of all modern communication, travel, and logistics? The Russians leap-frogging us in space so we’ll likely never catch up? Yeah. That’s why I’m terrified of what could possibly be worse.”
“You should be.”
Sixteen
George Town, Grand Cayman
As Wen rapidly climbed the crane, she could see police involved in a shootout with some of the shadow people. She had been trying to keep a mental tally on how many were left. She had killed at least eleven, and there were two more above her on the crane that would soon be dead. Stealing quick glances at the action below, she noted two more bodies taken out by the cops, and it looked like three had been arrested. By her calculations, after she’d taken care of these three on the tower, seven would be left.
Wen still wasn’t close enough to shoot the men once Chase reached the top. She had no idea if they would continue obeying their orders, or if they would kill him.
What is Chase thinking? she wondered. Why would he climb up to where there was no escape? He must have had no choice.
The burst of gunfire above her answered all her questions. They were shooting at him, and her!
With almost no cover, Wen had to rely on her return fire. She wedged herself between two thick metal crossbeams and shot above.
I’ve got to be careful not to shoot Chase . . .
It was a nightmarish predicament. She had to fire enough to keep them from picking her off, at the same time needing to conserve ammunition and not accidentally kill Chase. Unsure if it could get any worse, she saw one of the most horrifying spectacles she’d ever witnessed.
Fifty feet above the ground, Chase leapt off the crane.
“No!” she yelled. Wen spun to see how far the harbor was. He’d never make it to the water, and even if he did, there was no way it was deep enough to survive a jump from that height.
The men stopped firing, apparently as spellbound by the suicidal feat as she was. Her training took over. Wen swung out onto an outer crossbar and shot one of the men. He plunged past her while she injured another enough that he dropped his gun and clung to a rail.
This caught the attention of the final man. He showered bullets at her. Wen, back in her wedge, knew he had the high ground advantage and realized this was a losing battle.
I’ve got to get back to the ground.
She began working down, inches at a time, with almost nothing protecting her from the machine gun fire raining down from above.
Suddenly, the shooting changed. She looked up and saw he was now shooting at the neighboring crane. Following his bullets, Wen saw what he was shooting at. “Chase!” she shouted with delight. The shadow person had made a mistake. Chase was sliding down the rails out of range, and would soon be on the ground. Wen knew a good idea when she saw it, and mimicked Chase’s method.
By the time she reached the ground, Chase was there. He picked up a submachine gun from one of the dead shadow people and flashed her a smile.
“Don’t ever do that again!” she shouted.
“But it worked,” he said, aiming above her, taking out the shadow person who had been trying to kill him.
Wen glanced up as the man fell. “Nice,” she said.
“I had a good teacher.”
She smiled, even though joking about killing people didn’t sit well with her.
“What about him?” Chase motioned up to the injured man still holding on.
“Wish we could question him,” she replied, pulling extra mags off the dead men. “But there are still too many out there, and the police are a problem. I have a feeling they’re going to arrest anyone moving.”
“Especially while we’re carrying these.” He motioned toward their guns.
“Right.” Wen, already moving back to the road, checked a map on her phone.
“Any sign of Grimes?”
“He’s not here,” Wen said.
“Are you sure?”
“I would have seen him,” she said, wishing she could conceal her guns and ammo, moving toward a street that, from her aerial view, had been clear of shadow people and cops.
“That coward.”
“He may already be dead.”
“I hope so.”
“There’s a chance he was compromised,” she theorized. “Maybe someone found out about the meeting and killed him.”
Chase thought about how powerful the group was that employed the shadow people. They always seemed to know where he and Wen were, a step ahead, an endless supply of weapons and soldiers to use against them, the latest equipment and technology. Once again, he asked the question that had been torturing them for two years. “Who the hell are they?”
“We aren’t going to find out today.”
“How many left?”
“I think seven.”
“We could capture one, question them.”
“Too risky,” she said, moving between two hotels to another street.
“Then where are we going?”
“Our car,” she said, pointing to the end of the street. They had routinely parked a couple of blocks away from the meeting place just to be safe.
“We’re just going to leave?” Chase asked, surprised.
“Why, you want to stop for dinner?”
“Fish and chips,” he said, pointing to a restaurant across the street.
“Funny.”
Chase was surprised she didn’t want to finish off the seven shadow people remaining, but he too had seen the massive police presence—at least six cruisers and two SWAT vans. He knew it must be every law enforcement vehicle they had on the island.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught up in that.”
They reached their car. Each took a quick look around, and Chase inched away from the curb.
“We might pull this off,” Chase said, checking the rearview mirror. “Maybe the cops got them all.”
Across from them, a black SUV suddenly came out of nowhere.
“Damn it!” Chase yelled as he floored it.
Seventeen
Undisclosed location
Tolstoy stood in a moderately priced hotel room, staring out the eighth floor window, enjoying the surprisingly good view.
Years of work had gone into operation Blackout, its culmination a little more than thirty-six hours away. Tolstoy planned to survive the event. Yet, if need be, she would give her life to see it succeed. She wasn’t fooling herself into thinking she’d go down in a blaze of glory, a heroic and noble death. No, Tolstoy did not want to die, and did not believe she would have to. However, she would make that choice not out of devotion to a cause, or even her government, but simply because she sought perfection, the completion of a task—in this case, a monumental achievement that would change the world. She wou
ld die if that’s what it took.
“Now everything is the clock,” Tolstoy whispered to her reflection in the large picture window. “I am chasing time.”
Her phone rang. The call was expected. Yuri wanted an update. Checking her watch, Tolstoy took a deep breath, preparing for her daily chat with her superiors.
Like Tolstoy, Yuri was a code name. Everyone involved had them, and they were strictly adhered to. Secrecy was the only thing between success and failure.
Having used a code name for so long, if someone had suddenly addressed Tolstoy by another name, confusion would be the likely response. Tolstoy had grown accustomed to the moniker. She believed it fit her, saying once to a colleague, “I spin great works of fiction, only instead of doing it on paper, I do it in the real world.” She also enjoyed the concept that she was always walking the fine line between war and peace. However, she’d never read the book.
This call, significantly more urgent than the hundreds of previous conversations with Yuri, would be their final communication before the culmination of operation Blackout. Tolstoy had to admit that skipping the evening call tomorrow was an added perk to the dangerous day ahead.
Unless there is a problem, she thought as she answered confidently.
Everything was in order. The familiar voice of her superior began sounding somewhat tense, somewhat distracted, and even a little warm. She was an expert at detecting slight shifts in mood and personality. However, Yuri was always a tough read. He was a lethal presence in the leadership, intelligence his domain, and, like Stalin, “Dissent and die” was his motto. Advancing the state was all that mattered.
Their communications, although encrypted with a combination 4,096-bit key, and 8,192 forge crossed photon curve, were always cautious.
“All indications look good from the technical side,” Yuri said. “But there appears to be a leak.”
Tolstoy smiled in an irritable way. She had been the one to inform Yuri of the leak via an earlier digital communications. “Yes, as I stated in my last message, this Astronaut working on the DARPA program.” She glanced over at a computer screen, open to a photo and biographical information of The Astronaut. “We have a team taking care of that problem.”