by Brian Parker
Stupid politicians, I mused, listening idly to the police chatter on the radio. They’d put their people in danger, just to make themselves look good for the voters.
“Chief Brubaker,” Lieutenant Fairchild’s voice cut through the chatter, silencing everyone. “Alpha Team is in position to follow the breaching team on the eastern side of the building. The department’s High Rise Assault Team is ready to enter the warehouse simultaneously from above. Baker Team will breach the front entrance thirty seconds after Alpha and H-RAT go in. All we need is your word to go.”
“Roger that, Lieutenant,” Brubaker replied. “I have to get final authorization from the commissioner. Wait one.”
I relaxed slightly. We would enter the old cargo ship at the back ramp during the commotion across the water. The pause gave me a little bit more time to think about the findings of the report and the decision by the district chiefs’ panel to fire me.
The more I thought about my situation, the better I felt. Being a cop had defined me for far too long, and I’d gotten nothing but pain and misery out of it. True, I’d helped ease the suffering of thousands of people over the years since I busted criminals, but I rarely interacted with any of those I’d supposedly helped.
As I waited, quietly contemplating my future, I’d decided that the interaction with victims, their friends, and families was the part I was missing. I didn’t see the final results of my hard work from that perspective; I just saw whether the case was solved or not. It wasn’t truly satisfying work—which may have attributed to my inability to start, or more recently keep, a relationship.
I also thought about what Chief Brubaker had told me at the scene of the latest murder at the Regal Eagle, the one where I got stabbed after the medical examiner’s droids left. He’d said, “You know the deal. She was a prostitute. Don’t spend too much time on this one.”
Looking at it objectively, as a cop who was constantly running out of time and resources, I understood where the chief was coming from. But as a person who was sworn to protect the population of New Orleans—all of the population—it was a shitty way of doing business. That girl’s family deserved justice as much as the rich businessman’s family did.
I knew what the next chapter of my life would be and I had roughly four weeks to get it set up. There were licenses to obtain, space to rent, advertisements to place…hell, furniture to purchase. I needed Andi to begin working on everything immediately, but I was still without my phone and without a way to contact her.
“Lieutenant Fairchild, this is Chief Brubaker,” the chief’s voice came over the radio.
“We’re listening, Chief,” she replied.
“You are authorized to move forward with the hostage rescue. This authorization is straight from City Hall.”
“Understood, sir. We are a go for the rescue.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant.”
I tapped Drake on the arm and he tapped the officer next to him, and he did the same to O’Brien. We moved around the old shipping container and jogged lightly down the jetty toward the boat where I’d determined Karimov had holed up. The drone lifted skyward, flying silently fifty feet above us.
An explosion from the vicinity of the warehouse meant SWAT had breached as planned. A quick glance upward saw several dark shapes rappelling from a large, black hoverskiff. They disappeared quickly. “H-RAT is inside,” I whispered as we ran, the sounds of gunfire reaching us from across the water.
Suddenly, the jetty exploded with bright, white light from several floodlights. “Shit!” I cursed, diving to the ground and crawling rapidly toward a large round pillar that held one of the offending lights. The damn things must have been motion activated, or more likely, on a laser tripwire that could be turned on and off from inside the ship. It wouldn’t do to illuminate your delivery drivers trying to sneak away with several cases of synthaine.
We did our best to hide from view of anyone watching from the boat, but it was pointless. Even if we’d had proper cover, the three camera drones they launched spotted us before the SWAT drone fried their circuits with a burst of electricity, knocking them out of the sky.
“Can you do something about those lights?” I asked Collins.
“Yeah, hold on.” He tapped a command into the small flexscreen display on his forearm and the drone shot forward. A probing rod extended from the bottom of it, and as it flew rapidly along the jetty, the rod smashed into the floodlights, shattering them one-by-one. Once again the small strip of land was plunged into darkness and silence.
It didn’t last long.
The rhythmic chugging of a pneumatic rifle filled the night as someone from the ship fired into the drone. Sparks rained down on us from the impacts overhead. The drones could take a lot of damage, but I’d seen firsthand how those discs had destroyed one in a matter of minutes.
“We need to assault now!” I shouted.
O’Brien shook his head. “I called for backup. We should pull back and wait until they get here.”
“And create another standoff? No way,” I said. “We go now!”
I emphasized my words by sliding around the pole and running toward the boat. A sharp jolt of pain in my hip caused me to catch my breath.
Apparently, I wasn’t fully healed.
I continued to run through the pain with a slight hitch in my gait; stopping in the open meant certain death if the defenders on the boat saw me. I dodged left and right, avoiding imaginary bullets from the security element as they continued to fire at the drone overhead.
I made it to the bottom of the gangplank leading to the boat before anyone spotted me. A shout of alarm from above me was answered by a burst of automatic weapons’ fire. I threw myself sideways, almost falling into the water. Then the gunfire went silent.
“One hostile down,” the voice of our sniper, Blevins, reported over the radio. “I see the weapon of another one, but can’t get a shot on him.”
“Shoot the damn weapon!” I ordered.
“Roger.”
The sound of a ricocheting bullet was followed immediately by a howl of anger. One of the SWAT guys, I couldn’t tell which, rushed past me up the gangplank as I struggled with the awkward footing. The other officer followed quickly.
By the time I’d made it up the narrow bridge, the SWAT guys had a muscular cyborg in handcuffs. He wasn’t as big as Corrigan, but he’d been given the same treatment. One arm was replaced by the pneumatic rifle, which had a hole in the air reservoir. Collins and O’Brien had handcuffed his remaining wrist to his ankle and the disabled weapon to the ship’s railing. I ripped away the rubber air hoses from his weapon arm for good measure.
The remains of a second man lay on the deck. Most of his face was a grotesque pink splay of flesh and teeth since the sniper’s bullet had taken him in the back of the head. The corpse still held a heavy machine gun.
“Thank you,” I said into the radio, waving toward the Dockyards where I knew the sniper was watching us. “He’d have wiped us out.”
“No problem,” Blevins answered.
I reported up to Chief Brubaker that we’d encountered resistance, but were now on the boat with no injuries to police officers. He acknowledged tersely, which meant he was probably more concerned with the hostage rescue at the moment than my hair-brained belief that the manufacture, shipment, and sale of the nation’s synthaine supply was occurring right under everyone’s noses on a boat in the Easytown Dockyards channel.
“What’s the drone say about movement?” I asked Collins.
He tapped his computer and a shaky thermal image appeared between us, filled with static. The drone had taken some serious damage from the miniature saw blades and I was impressed that it was still flying.
I examined the holograph closely while Drake and O’Brien guarded our flank. I saw our four heat signatures crouched down behind one of the life rafts and the two guards, one of which was not nearly as warm as the other since his lifeblood covered the deck. The workers on the bottom decks hadn’t c
hanged positions, but it looked like some of the others had. I wasn’t sure if they were moving up to intercept us or if they’d simply moved as a normal security rotation. We hadn’t heard any type of audible alarm system, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one sounding below decks where we couldn’t hear it.
“Can you do a side-by-side compare with the original image—the one we took before we left our last position?”
“Sure. Hold on.”
I tried to ignore what seemed to be his catchphrase. Collins said ‘hold on’ to just about everything and it was becoming annoying. He tapped the flexscreen on his forearm while I held on.
“Here you go,” he said as an image superimposed over the first. “I changed the heat signature colors to red in the original image so you’d be able to compare it to the white ones in the live feed.”
“Good thinking,” I replied. Most of the figures I’d thought were guards earlier had stayed roughly in the same place on all but the first two decks below us. Those two had each moved to a position in easy view of the stairwell. “It’s a good bet that they know we’re here.”
“The reports from those machine guns probably echoed throughout this old metal tub,” Drake said tapping the deck with his index finger. “If they don’t know we’re here, then they’re idiots.”
“We should probably wait for backup, Detective,” O’Brien chimed in once again. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to make it down those stairs alive, let alone eight sets of them.”
The guards below hadn’t moved, they were waiting for us to enter the fatal funnel—the kill zone inside an entrance where it was impossible to seek cover when an officer assaulted a position. A terrible idea crept into my head, one that could earn me the death penalty if I was wrong.
“Collins, I need the ship’s dimensions from your drone.”
He looked at me strangely, and then said, “Okay. Hold on.”
“You want to what?” Brubaker asked after I’d called him for permission to move forward with my idea.
“It’ll force them to evacuate and we can grab them as they come out,” I answered. “Otherwise, we’ve got to go down and get them. That’s probably going to get a lot of people killed.”
“How do you know they won’t stay down there and drown?”
That was the part of my plan that worried me. If the workers down below were somehow restrained or locked in the section where they were at right now, then it was all over. The water depth was fifty-three feet, which meant the first six decks would sit below the waterline when it was all said and done. That left two decks that wouldn’t be flooded, but I was betting Karimov’s people would panic and try to get off the boat.
“I can’t guarantee that they’ll evacuate,” I replied honestly. “I’m willing to take the responsibility for my actions if they don’t.”
“Goddamn it, Forrest. Switch over to channel eight and encrypt for Denver Seven One,” he ordered.
I did as requested and several moments later, the chief’s voice came over the new encrypted radio frequency. In theory, we should have been the only ones on the channel, but anyone who’d been listening to our conversation could have dialed in using his instructions.
“This isn’t some bullshit way to get yourself incarcerated, is it?” he asked.
“What? No. Why the hell—”
“Because you were just notified of your termination and you’re staring down the barrel of unemployment.”
“No, Chief. I’ve got a plan for my next job. I’d never do something as stupid as that.”
“You’ve done things almost as dumb, Forrest. I don’t want a bunch of innocent lives on our hands. We can request federal assistance for this mission. The US Navy has teams who do ship takedowns all the time.”
“I thought the mayor wanted to keep this local,” I said.
“Screw the mayor. If we can make this go away without further loss of life, then that’s the option I’d prefer.”
“How long would it take to get them here?” I asked rhetorically. “Twenty-four, forty-eight hours? Plus mission prep time. Chief, I can end this in less than an hour. I just need two police drones and my Aegis. Stopping the synthaine flow will be the second-biggest win for the Easytown Precinct in history.” I said it that way to remind him that I’d saved the Pope’s life, by far the most important act in the NOPD’s long history. It was also a reminder that my actions had gone against the NOPD’s conventional thinking since they’d thought they’d stopped the threat when they arrested Harold Wilson.
“I’m not sure, Forrest. If you’re wrong, this will come down on me as well.”
“Chief, we’ve already lost six officers to these people in the last few days. How many more do we have to lose before we take action and put an end to it?”
There was silence on the other end for what seemed like an eternity while Brubaker deliberated. Finally, he replied, “Alright. I’m sending you two of the drones from the security perimeter. Communicate with them on this frequency.”
“Thank you, Ch—”
“Don’t thank me. Just end this. Now.”
TWENTY: SUNDAY
I called up the drones that Brubaker sent over from across the channel and tried to tell them what I needed, but it didn’t work. I’d never tried to give a drone such a complicated task before, and most of the time, Andi had acted as an intermediary, converting my instructions into a language the drones could understand.
I didn’t have that option now, so I had to think of simple ways to instruct the drones to do what I’d wanted them to do. It wouldn’t be the flawless execution I’d explained to the chief, with me working in tandem with the drones, but we’d make it work.
“Target the first deck, below the water line, six feet from the back of the boat.”
“The stern, Detective,” O’Brien stated.
“Is that what it’s called? I thought it was aft, but decided to say it differently at the last minute.”
“Trust me. I practically grew up on my family’s sailboat. It’s the stern.”
“Thanks,” I replied. Into the radio, I repeated the instructions with the correct wording. “Target the first deck, below the water line, six feet from the stern. One hundred rounds per drone. Once you’ve fired one hundred rounds, target the second deck six feet from the stern.”
I continued on this way until I’d walked the drones up to the eighth deck. “Begin firing now.”
The night erupted in a cacophony of sound as the drones fired their miniguns at blazing speed. I didn’t have time to think about how fast they were going because I ran to the front of the boat and aimed the Aegis at the deck. I squeezed the trigger as I moved the pistol in a large circle. The decking melted and the circle of metal dropped downward. I heard several more decks collapse in the same manner below me, but I couldn’t be sure how many had an entire hole cut away and how many just had a bunch of random laser holes.
I moved several feet away and repeated the process, but the Aegis ran out of charge about three-quarters of the way through another hole in the deck. Once again, I had to hope that the Aegis had penetrated all the way through each of the eight decks and the hull.
I holstered the Aegis and casually walked back to where the others crouched watching the thermal feed from the SWAT drone. Already, the workers on the bottom deck were rushing for the ladders that lead upward to safety. My plan of punching a ton of holes in the hull at the front and back of the boat seemed to be working.
Now we just had to wait and have the drone hit the runners with Taser lines and subdue them.
The boat began to list to the starboard side—thanks for the terminology, O’Brien—and standing was a strain on the calves. I checked the thermal again. The entire bottom deck was vacant except for one person. It looked like they were trying to pick things up as they ran back and forth between the stairs and the center of the ship. Must be trying to save the synthaine, I mused.
There was a loud groan of metal bending under the stress of
the rushing water and then a screech as part of the boat’s stern sheared off. The angle of the boat was further complicated by the water pouring in through the back side, causing the front of the boat to lift higher.
Water had filled the lowest three decks of the boat when the first of the people from below decks appeared at the ship tower’s doorway. The droned zapped him right away and he fell, dropping a rifle, to convulse on the deck. The two SWAT officers rushed out, bending forward awkwardly against the angle of the boat, and slapped a pair of handcuffs on him. Once he was secure, they took up a position nearer to the door where they could work in concert with the drone to snatch as many of the bad guys as possible.
One more person fell for it before Karimov’s people wised up and refused to come out of the interior. Instead, they began going upward, to the ship’s bridge thirty feet above the deck. As I watched this unfold on the thermals, several people burst through the tower doorway. They screamed, running for their lives, scattering like roaches when the lights come on. The drone was able to Taser six of them, but three more ran for the gangway.
“Goddamn it,” I groaned, pushing myself up and angling to intercept one of them, a dark-skinned female in a chemical protective suit. Running, I realized that all of the people who’d just emerged were wearing the same type of suit. They must be the workers who produced the drugs in the bottom of the ship.
When she was two feet from me, I dove forward, catching her at the waist along her blind side in a tackle that would have made the defensive coordinator of my beloved New Orleans Saints proud. She crumpled, folding in half from the force as my momentum carried us to the deck.
Even as I fell, I felt it; the hypersonic displacement of air near my ear.
Then I heard the reports from several rifles above me. I grabbed for the worker’s collar, but missed, coming up with only a fistful of hair, and scrabbled backward on my ass toward a metal container on the deck, grimacing at the pain the odd movement caused in my hip. The woman wailed as I drug her by her hair to safety as bullets pinged all around her.