*
For a moment Jackson was too surprised to do anything. People were running everywhere: guards, men, women and children. A wave of protesters surged back from the fence, some of the less athletic falling to the ground, pressed into the mud by the desperate stampede. The guards were crouched behind vehicles and walls, letting off volley after volley of shots in the direction of the crowd. Jackson watched as one enraged protester ran at the fence, climbing its chain links in seconds and leaping at a guard on the other side. It looked for a moment as if he might win the struggle for the other man’s rifle, until two more men in green joined the fight, beating him mercilessly with their rifle butts. Jackson thought he saw a scarlet mist burst from the man before his stout body went limp.
‘The guards are firing on the crowd! We’ve got to help them!’ Jackson yelled, and without thinking sent his machine over the lip of the cliff and down towards the compound.
Brooke, who had brought her remobot to the entrance of the vehicle park, had her video camera focused on a group of guards. The three heavily armed men were leaning out from behind a large yellow digger, taking pot shots.
‘I’m assuming you’re getting my feed, Jackson,’ said Brooke. ‘Permission to take them down.’
‘Do it!’ he instantly replied.
Brooke threw her MeX1 towards the men, dipping its leading edge so the powerful lift fan could propel it to maximum speed. As one of the guards stepped out from behind the digger’s bonnet, his rifle raised for another shot, Brooke’s machine collided with him from behind. The man was thrown forward like a ragdoll, headbutting the digger’s metal bonnet, knocked out cold.
‘Attaboy! You just lie down and shut up!’ she said, sweeping her saucer high up through the air and turning round for another pass.
The remaining two guards were quick to react, shielding themselves behind the chunky vehicle, spraying automatic gunfire towards her remobot. But Brooke had the advantage, her machine screaming down from above them, their shots wildly off course due to the driving rainfall that stung their eyes.
Time for the Kryptonite, Brooke thought, and brought up the BASS BOMB menu. She was a moment from launching the gut-busting acoustic device when her MeX1 was hit by a barrage of heavy rounds from the opposite direction. It was like a huge hammer had swung down from the heavens and swatted her machine out of the sky. One minute she had the frantic guards in her sights, the next her screen was pitch black.
‘Well, I’ll be darned … I done got shot!’ she said, flabbergasted.
*
Master Kojima pushed his bot to its limit as he hunted the unfortunate guard he had already spooked to within an inch of his life. He might have been content to let the unfortunate man run away, but since the firing had started he feared the guard might be on his way to pick up his rifle and join in. He found him at the wheel of his jeep, winding through the camp at high speed. The young Japanese boy’s prowess with his futuristic flying machine was impressive. Throwing it on to its side, he pushed it through the open door of the barracks, performing a perfect knife-edge manoeuvre through the building and straight out the other end. Now in front of the jeep, he brought his MeX1 to an instant halt. In turn, the guard slammed his brakes on until the two machines were facing each other, motionless in the rain.
The man at the wheel of the 4×4 was shaking so much he could hardly get the rusty vehicle into reverse, his sweaty palms slipping on the polished plastic of the steering wheel as he tried to find full lock. The instant the leather gear knob told him he’d found the slot, he slammed the accelerator pedal to the floor and man and vehicle swung violently backwards. It might not have looked like it, but the frantically fleeing man knew how to handle his vehicle. Before this job, he had spent ten years as a bodyguard, and the ‘reverse slide 180’ was standard escape-and-pursuit stuff when you had a VIP onboard. Today he was the VIP he was trying to protect and the second he sensed the wheels starting to drift freely, he knew it was time to find first gear and get out of there. But in a flash of blinding light his vehicle died. The engine stopped roaring and the tension went from the steering wheel. Worse still, he couldn’t even see. His eyes were burning.
Master Kojima had timed the release of his Dazzler to perfection, frying the car’s electrics as it careered backwards with maximum revs, leaving the useless metal husk to roll down a rocky incline, the face of its driver glassy-eyed with terror.
From his saucer’s position, circling high over the compound, Jackson noticed the jeep freewheeling backwards at considerable speed. He watched as it ploughed through the canteen tent, dragging the entire structure with it before turning over in the garbage pit. But he missed the irony of the blinded driver who loved his food so much crawling out into a sea of rotting potato peelings and putrid leftovers.
Jackson switched his attention to the building that housed Dragos. You don’t even have the courage to do your own dirty work, he thought, hiding away like a coward! He instructed the twins to send their machines to meet his at the entrance to the valley. But before he could rendezvous with the Kojimas, he spotted a small group of armed guards advancing towards several defenceless protesters huddled in a ditch at the roadside.
He dived his MeX1 towards the gleaming asphalt of the road that led out of the compound, pulling up behind the thin green line of armed men as he released his Bass Bomb. The four men and their two guard dogs fell like flies. Jackson couldn’t see their faces, he was already too high above, but the sight of their bodies writhing in the mud told him his Bass Bomb had hit its target.
The three remaining remobots formed up on the road, several hundred metres from the barrier that marked the entrance to the compound. The storm had reached maturity and driven by heaving winds, the rain drilled into the dot.robots’ plastic shells with deafening effect. Even at full zoom, the deluge made it hard for Jackson to make out exactly how many armed men were positioning themselves along the front of the compound’s buildings.
‘There must be a couple of shooters hidden in the hills or something like that,’ said Brooke. The American’s MeX1 was down, but she was still able to patch into her teammates’ video feeds. ‘I’m sure I saw a flash or two. Keep it low and quick and you should be OK.’
As they started their run, Jackson wasn’t even sure what the three of them would do when they reached the camp. But they were determined Dragos should know they were going to get him somehow.
The incoming fire was intense. A couple of times Jackson felt his MeX1 get knocked off course as a bullet found its way through the robot’s soft polypropylene fuselage and embedded itself in the Kevlar casing that shielded all its vital components. Without saying a word, the brother-and-sister duo closed their vehicles together, forming a protective barrier between Jackson’s machine and the incoming fire, the first of the twins’ saucers a metre or so above the ground and the second piggybacking a few millimetres above it, just as they had done at their first training exercise. Jackson watched as the two grey discs in front of his took round after round of small-arms fire until chunks of their outer casing bounced off his camera lens. Suddenly both of the Kojimas’ machines exploded in quick succession, bursting into flames and hitting the floor.
‘I down!’ shouted Master Kojima.
‘Me also,’ his sister added calmly.
‘It’s those snipers … it’s got to be,’ said Brooke, who was looking at the smouldering wreckage of Master Kojima’s MeX1 through the flickering and juddering video feed of his sister’s downed machine.
Jackson pressed on. There was nothing else for it. At least, he thought, his remobot was drawing fire away from the people who were still fleeing. There was a slim chance he could ram or even use the Dazzler against Dragos. But, just metres away from the open door of the main building, Jackson felt the control of his MeX1 start to ebb away. He struggled to keep it flying, but it was hit and there was nothing he could do to stop its erratic corkscrew descent towards the ground. Jackson winced as his machine smacked into the side
of a car.
Before his dot.robot’s video feed went black, Jackson saw the face of the monstrous mastermind behind all this. Rain dripped off General Dragos’s black beret as he walked out from the guardroom and into the rain to stand over Jackson’s machine. There was a strange look of bewilderment on his raw-boned face before it was blocked out by the blinding flashes of machine-gun fire as the guards closed in.
CHAPTER 19
Devlin Lear’s body language was all wrong. He kept standing up so the four of them could only see the bright yellow tartan material that covered his stomach and his gold belt buckle. And he was pacing around so much that for long periods of time he disappeared from view completely.
‘Could you sit down please, Devlin?’ said Brooke. ‘I find video works best when there’s something other than a pot belly to look at.’
Jackson flinched at the stony look on Lear’s face. He and the Kojimas remained sensibly silent.
‘We’ve already told you,’ Brooke continued. ‘We didn’t just punk out … we were under attack!’
‘Yes, from the guards’ machine-gun fire, which you have been well trained to avoid!’ Lear angrily retorted as he sat back down.
‘No!’ said Brooke and Jackson simultaneously.
‘They couldn’t see us most of the time,’ Brooke protested. ‘There had to be someone else out there.’
‘Yes, like you said, Miss English … shooters … in the hills.’
‘No! Look, I know I said that at the time, but you should have seen the way we went down. It was like Boom! Like we were hit by something explosive. We just blew up. This wasn’t the work of a sniper rifle – it was as if someone had a tank up there … an invisible one.’
‘That’s enough, Miss English!’ Lear exclaimed, obviously frustrated. He settled himself, tugging down his bright yellow plaid waistcoat before speaking more calmly. ‘I have reviewed the footage from your mission and it is clear that Dragos’s militiamen attacked the crowd and then attacked you when you unwisely came to their aid; contrary, I may say, to your orders, which were simply to observe.’
Jackson looked at the floor. Lear was right. They had disobeyed orders and revealed themselves to the enemy. But what they’d done had been the right thing to do. Hadn’t it?
Lear seemed to sense Jackson’s regret and looked at him with a degree of sympathy through the video feed. ‘This … calamity is yet another example of the flagrant ineptitude of the international community, who are happy for us to mop up their spills, but leave us defenceless in the face of attack. Suffice it to say, a report has been filed which makes mention of small-arms fire and the possibility of snipers. But I can assure you it does not include anything about invisible tanks.’
‘Enough already with the snipers!’ said Brooke who was now red in the face. ‘We were moving way too fast for that … I’m telling you, it was some big ol’ heat seeker or something.’
‘Miss English! That will be all on the matter!’ barked Lear.
‘We got Dragos bang to rights, didn’t we?’ asked Jackson, desperate to prove to their mentor that what they’d done had been worth something to MeX. And before his American Rottweiler of a teammate said something they might all regret. ‘Isn’t that what really matters? There must be enough material to show to the authorities?’
‘Authorities?’ Lear sighed. ‘What authorities?’
‘The police? I dunno.’ Jackson was beginning to feel the familiar pangs of foolishness that certain people brought out in him and it felt wrong coming from Lear. ‘We got enough on him to lock him away for good, didn’t we?’
‘Your faith in truth and justice, Farley, is noble. But wildly misguided. The footage you and your team gathered will be extremely useful in establishing Dragos’s guilt. But you’d do well to understand that certain men are beyond the law.’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ Miss Kojima’s quiet voice, which hadn’t been heard once during the whole exchange, was enough to stop everyone speaking. ‘When … will be … next mission?’
Jackson felt his stomach drop. It was the question he had most wanted to ask but had been too afraid of Lear’s response. Despite all of Brooke’s protesting and his attempt at justifying their actions, Jackson felt responsible for the mission’s failure. He’d followed Lear’s plan to the letter and, even now, as they sifted through the wreckage of the Ukrainian assignment, he couldn’t explain why it had gone so wrong.
‘It might be an idea to let all this blow over for a while. I will be in touch.’ And with that, Lear was gone.
Jackson yawned. He had spent hours in front of his computer. He hadn’t even dressed or cleaned his teeth, just rolled straight out of bed and plugged in.
With no contact from Lear or the others on his MeX handset, Jackson had checked his email in desperation for some sign that their mistakes had been resolved and he would be needed to lead another exciting mission. But the only mails that caught his attention were one from his dad’s work address, reminding him to buy the sunflowers for his mum’s grave, and a message from Mr Willard about Monday’s chess club, entitled Chess, the Game of Kings. And then, to distract himself from the sick feeling that he’d mucked up everything, he logged into Whisper and checked WizardZombie was where he’d left him, asleep next to the burnt-out embers of his fire: health 70%.
It didn’t work. Jackson needed some air. He threw on some clothes and headed down into the quadrangle at the base of his block of flats.
The events of the last twenty-four hours were taking their toll. Jackson couldn’t sleep – he couldn’t get the faces of those refugees out of his head. Where were they now? Had Dragos’s men hurt any more of them? He’d hoped Lear’s request to convene a group meeting would make sense of the whole thing, but it was clear that he and the other recruits weren’t being offered their usual access to MeX information after their botched attempt to intervene. He hoped desperately that this wasn’t a permanent MeX measure.
It was already impressively hot outside, even in the long shadows thrown by the towerblocks. Having left the flat in the hope that some fresh air might help straighten out the muddle in his head, Jackson soon found himself wandering away from the relative calm of the estate and towards the familiar hubbub of the high street. It was as if some internal sat-nav was guiding him towards a plan of action, because before long he had turned down the side street that led to his local Internet cafe
– The Zap Shack.
The cafe had a dedicated gaming section in the basement. Jackson had spent more after-school hours here than he knew were good for him, surfacing only for pizza and once or twice to an embarrassing confrontation with his dad, wanting to know why he wasn’t home yet. As soon as Jackson reached the cafe’s neon-blue opening, and saw the banks of computers inside, he hit on an idea. If he could find something that would incriminate Dragos beyond all doubt, then perhaps Lear would welcome them back to finish the job they had started.
Jackson bought a Coke and a sandwich containing something masquerading as chicken. He decided to opt for a terminal upstairs today, because he couldn’t stomach the idea of consuming food in the clammy downstairs dungeon – its atmosphere fermented by the bodily functions of thirty teenagers who, given it was Sunday morning, had probably stayed the night in there.
Upstairs the cafe was bright and airy, with concertina doors that opened out on to an alley. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but if you had the right seat you could see the sky while you surfed and feel the wind on your face, which was a welcome relief from the umpteen kilowatts of heat produced by a roomful of computers. As Jackson waited for a page to load, he could see that the bright, warm morning was turning fickle. Rain now, he thought, but be bright for tomorrow. Be bright for Mum.
Tomorrow would mark the third anniversary of his mother’s death and Jackson and his dad were going to visit her grave. His dad was working nights and Jackson had special permission to leave school early. They were both under strict instructions to be ‘happy’. ‘Do something you really enjoy!
’ she’d instructed them. ‘Only talk about the good times … and bring sunflowers.’ He wanted so much to do as he was told, to follow his mum’s instructions to the letter, unlike last year. They’d tried really hard; his dad had even broken out a suit and a tie so loud it threatened to wake up some of the graveyard’s inhabitants. But in the end they’d just stood there, crying, and being thoroughly disobedient.
Thinking about his mum also, weirdly, made him think of Brooke. He’d been unable to contact her, which was a little odd. Even the twins were unavailable, but Jackson was sure this was due to their packed schedule of professional gaming tournaments. He remembered how Brooke had been seething about the meeting with Lear – and tired as well, on account of the time difference. But Jackson hoped she wasn’t mad at him for not speaking as much as she had at the meeting. He had just wanted the team’s efforts to be recognized, with the satisfaction and sense of respect that brought.
Jackson finished the last crumbs of his rubbery sandwich and stared at the screen, more determined than ever to discover whatever underhanded tactics Dragos had used to bring them down. The cursor in the search box blinked like an excited heartbeat. Something about it reminded him of the blips they’d seen on their radars – blips they’d managed to explain away. But the feeling that something had been stalking them remained. Jackson left his thoughts hanging as his fingers automatically started typing: Invisible tanks with heat-seeking missiles.
It was as good a place to start as any.
Jackson sat back, looking at the reams of results that his search had brought up, and marvelled at the varying degrees of relevancy – build your own tropical fish tank! He imagined the web spiders that had crawled all over these pages, virtual insects made of pure code, burrowing into the World Wide Web, collecting, copying and indexing all its pages, at his command. Jackson started to feel a bit better – this was the world he felt comfortable in. A world he knew more about than most. It was why Lear had chosen him and he was going to use his skills to get them all out of this mess.
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