Cyborg Strike

by David VanDyke

  -9-

  The residence of the Prime Minister of Russia was a relatively modest affair by international standards, but then, that’s all it was – a residence, in a Moscow suburb convenient to the Kremlin. Unlike the US White House – and more like Britain’s 10 Downing Street – its basic purpose was simply to provide living quarters for the country’s leader, rather than as a seat of government.

  Even so it was well protected. Its walls were thick, its fences high and spiked. Sensors and cameras and guards inside and out strengthened its defenses, and in a pinch, there was a panic room and a separate tunnel system beneath, to reinforce or escape. Special police parked on every corner of the neighborhood and patrolled every street.

  Its defenses seemed impenetrable.

  At around midnight, a very large, hunchbacked man in a high-collared trench coat walked down the sidewalk in front of a stately mansion two blocks over, heading toward the first checkpoint.

  Idly the policeman on duty there watched as he approached, then sighed with relief when the figure turned and entered the large house’s grounds. He went back to watching the football game carried live from South America, happy not to miss one moment. After all, he had a hundred rubles riding on it.

  Inside the mansion’s fence, the man in the trench coat carefully pushed the iron gate back against its stop, leaving it in a semblance of normalcy. The bit of squealing and grinding as he had ripped its locking plate apart had gone unnoticed beneath the rumble and whistle of a train passing half a kilometer away.

  Instead of walking up to the house’s well-lit front door, he slipped around the side, shielded from the next residence by high walls and abundant plants. The wealthy and connected of Moscow liked their privacy and security, as evidenced by the bars on the windows above his head.

  A growling preceded scrabbling paws rounding the house’s back corner, and two heavy dogs of uncertain breed rushed at the intruder with coughing growls. Training them to attack instead of alarm turned out to be a mistake on their owners’ part.

  The man seized each dog by the throat and, one-handed, lifted them up to half-dangle from his hands, their hind paws touching the ground. Growling turned to pitiful whining before both were rendered unconscious by the powerful grips cutting off the blood supply to their brains.

  It wasn’t mercy that saved the dogs’ lives; rather, it was a desire for stealth. Dead animals might be discovered later, and he only needed a moment to move through the area.

  Tossing them unconscious under some bushes, the man continued onward along the side of the mansion. One window above showed dim light, but its heavy curtains were drawn tight and he ignored it. Soon he reached the rear garden and climbed its tall back wall by the simple expedient of gripping its protruding stones with his fingertips. Not even bothering to plant his toes, he climbed up the four-meter barrier like a two-limbed spider.

  At the top, he reached up to clamp on hand on the wall’s apex, ignoring the broken glass set into its mortar. He pulled himself up to perch there, lizard-like, for a moment before he dropped to the other side. At the bottom he paused, picking a few sharp pieces out of his fingers, watching with faintly glowing eyes as the bleeding stopped and the skin rapidly healed. He flexed his digits, then, satisfied, moved out from under the shadow of a tree and walked across this house’s garden to its basement steps.

  No dogs came to greet him this time. In fact, this mansion seemed deserted, as expected. Walking down the stairs to a belowground door, he reached out and easily forced the portal to the basement open. Once inside, he closed and blocked it with a nearby workbench.

  Removing an infrared lamp from his pocket, he looked around the cellar. Ancient furniture, stacks of decades-old copies of Pravda, and shelves of empty bottles crowded the space. He took out a small computer tablet and consulted its glowing screen.

  Once certain of his location and orientation, he carefully and quietly cleared everything from one wall, and only then did he remove the trench coat from his hunchbacked form. Once set aside, the deformity was revealed merely to be a shapeless rucksack beneath the jacket. He reached within, and methodically laid out his tools.

  He soon assembled a hand-powered rotary drill on a short tripod. The whole arrangement must have weighted fifty kilos, not to mention the various other tools he lined up on a nearby table, yet it had not impeded him, even in his climbing.

  Once in place, the man grasped the device’s main grip, and its rotating handle, and began to crank. Gears spun and the twenty-centimeter circular plug bit into the plaster, then the old brick of the basement wall. Grinding noises accompanied his work, but by comparison it was relatively quiet: no jackhammer pounding, no whining scream of a high-powered motor, just the slow, powerful chewing away at the baked-clay surface.

  Once he obtained a large enough opening through the hard brick layer, he opened a folding shovel and began to dig. Moscow soil was hard-packed in this part of town but lacked rocks or clay to make it difficult, so he progressed rapidly. In eight hours he had dug, machinelike, for forty feet, angling downward under the street out front. He filled up a large part of the basement with the removed dirt.

  Working all through the day, he stopped only to eat high-calorie rations from his stores, drink water from the basement sink, and relieve himself in that same receptacle. He used pieces of furniture and shelving to brace his tunnel at strategic places, eventually tearing apart the interior stairs leading up to the house proper so he could use its wood as well.

  Eventually, at perhaps six p.m., his tunnel encountered a hard layer of modern concrete, at which point he stopped using the shovel to dig forward. With only his hands, he scraped the dirt away from the wall, and then walked back to his much-reduced cellar space. He washed and then ate once again, and, wrapping himself in his trench coat, slept on a bed of old newspapers.

  When his watch alarm went off at midnight, he awoke. After one more round of ablutions, he placed a thick ring of thermite plastique against the concrete and tripped its magnesium igniter. Backing away for the minutes it took to cut nearly through the wall, he stepped forward again when it burned itself out. A few sharp blows of his hand knocked a hole large enough for him to squeeze through.

  He found himself in a black tunnel, and switched on his infrared headband lamp, donning it. The invisible light gave his implanted cybernetic eye all he needed in order to see, and he soon found himself in front of a steel door at the top of a set of concrete steps.

  A crowbar from his left boot he set against the hinges. Obviously the door had been built to resist opening from the opposite side, the expected scenario being escape from within the Prime Minister’s mansion, through the long tunnel into a nearby military barracks. It was not made to keep someone from entering.

  More fools they, the man thought. He hungered for blood, for dominance, and to complete his mission.

  Once he had pried the hinges loose, he kept the crowbar in his hand. Carrying a gun in Russia would have added a risk of detection, so this weapon would have to do for the moment.

  No problem. There were plenty of guns on the other side.

  The sound of the door bring ripped out of its place marked the end of his stealthy approach. On its other side, an alert guard yelled out before the crowbar bashed his head in. The big man’s right hand shot out and caught the guard’s AK before it hit the floor. He then strapped the man’s ammunition belt around his own waist.

  Now he had a gun, and ammo. He slipped the crowbar back into his boot.

  Another guard leaned around the end of the hallway. He and the intruder fired simultaneously at each other on full automatic.

  One of a dozen bullets caught the guard in the shoulder, spinning him around. Seven of the guard’s bullets struck the attacker full in the body: naturally the Prime Minister’s security detail were all crack shots. The invader twitched, but did not fall. He reached down to pick up the first guard’s bulletproof helmet, placing it on his own head, then walked down the hall to finis
h off the one he’d shot.

  With the captured assault rifle, the attacker advanced through the mansion. Dozens of bullets smacked into him but he weathered the storm as if they were no more than plastic pellets. He systematically hunted the guards down until they were all dead.

  Then he cut all their heads off and rolled them in a blanket.

  Outside the Prime Minister’s armored panic room he dumped his grisly load, in full view of the camera. Finally he spoke, in Russian.

  “Prime Minister, you must come out. If you do, no harm will come to you. If not, I cannot guarantee such a favorable result. You have ten seconds.”

  He actually waited twelve. No Prime Minister was forthcoming, so he took out the crowbar and proceeded to smash his way through the door. At the end of it the high-tensile tool had been twisted like rubber, but the portal was open.

  Inside the small safe room, the Prime Minister stood and emptied his Makarov automatic into the hulking figure’s chest. The man merely smiled, showing chromed metal teeth.

  “Just what the hell are you?” the man asked in wonder, dropping his hand to his side, pistol forgotten.

  “You may call me Professor. I’m your destiny, Prime Minister Yermenov. I’m going to make you a very happy man. Hold out your arm.”

  “What?”

  Without a second order, the Professor reached out faster than Yermenov could react and seized his left wrist in an unbreakable grip. Holding the man’s arm immobile, he fished a titanium case from his back pocket and flipped it open one-handed. Inside was a compact auto-injector. “Use it,” he said.

  “What? No.”

  “If you do not, I will render you unconscious, painfully, then use it anyway. Just do it.”

  Yermenov was a hard, brave man. He hadn’t gotten to the top of his country’s government by lacking courage. Taking the injector from the case, he looked at it for a moment, then stabbed it, not toward his own arm, but at the hand that held his wrist.

  Releasing the case to fall, the Professor caught the moving arm by its wrist as well, causing the Prime Minister to let the injector go. Cat-quick, the big man released one arm and caught the thing out of the air. Then, setting it carefully on the ground, he struck Yermenov in the groin.

  Once the Russian lay on the ground retching, the Professor picked up the device and set it against the man’s neck, and then triggered it.

  Almost instantly Yermenov relaxed, a beatific smile on his face. His mouth lolled open and he breathed easily, despite the damage to his genitals.

  “Good stuff, huh?” The Professor smiled, and then placed the injector back in its case. “But it’s time to go now.” He could hear sirens, and the sound of pounding feet as reinforcements gathered outside the mansion. Hefting the drugged man’s body over his shoulder, he ran lightly down the stairs and through the tunnel door.

  Sprinting as fast as he could run – which was fast indeed – the Professor pounded down the tunnel to its other end. He left it pitch black to normal eyes, using his infrared lamp to guide him. At the other end of the long narrow corridor he debouched into a small side-street basement warehouse filled with dusty records of no import. The KGB owned the building but hardly ever visited the place. Even they did not know its only purpose was as a bolt-hole for the Prime Minister.

  Outside, the big man lifted the Russian leader into the back seat of a parked Mercedes and climbed in next to him. “Drive,” he said to the man at the wheel. Soon, they arrived at the gathering place, where all the other Shadow Men would meet with their new charges.

  -10-

  The video hotline between Chairman Markis and President McKenna hummed faintly but seemed otherwise clear. With new satellites finally being orbited now, worldwide communications once again had become a reality, at least for the rich or well connected.

  After the pleasantries, McKenna opened the conversation. “I want to apologize, Daniel, about that Septagon business. You passed me the information and warned me about its possible uses, but I was too timid. Just as you suggested, it’s blown up in the Russians’ faces.” He looked tired and haggard on the screen.

  Not sure exactly what he meant, Markis fished. “No apologies needed, Nathan. You made the best call you could, and it happened to not work out, but that’s all any of us can do. But…what specifically do you mean, blown up? As I recall, there were several potential scenarios my people thought were likely enough to mention…”

  “You identified the location of the Septagon research facility, and pointed out that these Shadow Men – these cyborgs – could be more than just super-soldiers. That unlike other weapons, they could only be controlled by those who could program them, and that meant Jenkins and Prandra, not Russia’s leaders.”

  “Ah.” Markis realized McKenna had conflated several possibilities into one, but he saw no reason to dissuade the President, since he seemed to be feeling contrite. “Well, Nathan,” he said magnanimously, “I’m just glad to be of service to what is still the most important single nation on Earth.”

  Stretching the truth a bit, but…not too far.

  “You’re too kind, but I know the real score. I’m directing my people to pass you on a summary of what we know, but damned if I know how to handle it.”

  “Perhaps if you could explain in a few sentences?”

  “Yes, yes, sorry.”

  The man seemed rattled, and not for the first time Markis wondered whether he was really the right person for the job. He might win the upcoming first election since the nukes fell, but probably not the second. A good man, but just not up to it. He made a note to get in touch with Travis Tyler.

  “Basically,” McKenna went on, “the Septagon people seem to have staged a near-bloodless coup. Only a few reported deaths, and most of the Cabinet, where all the real power resides in the Russian government, now have cyborgs as minders that go with them everywhere. At the very least, the ministers are being coerced. As soon as I get off the line with you, I’ll be calling the Neutral States Assembly High Commissioner and lobby for sanctions, and I hope you’ll ask the Free Communities for the same.”

  Markis thought for a moment. “I’ll certainly call a council meeting and tell them what you propose, but it’s not as simple as that. Russia is an enormous country. They have gotten on board and supplied a lot of weaponry and support to the EarthFleet program – top-notch scientists, rare earths and minerals, their molten-salts reactors. Hell, they’re ahead of everyone on fusion research, while we’re all relying on the cloned Meme engines.”

  McKenna sat back as if shocked. “You want to let it go? Allow these people to run an entire country?”

  “No. I’m just not sure sanctions are the right call. They take a long time to bite, and it’s the survival of the world we’re talking about. I’d rather explore other options. They won’t have the Russian people or bureaucracy on their side. They might simply be marginalized. We can work on helping that happen, with media, and clandestine support to the opposition, things like that.”

  McKenna stood up to pace in front of the camera. “I already sat on my ass when you gave me the warning, and now look what’s happened. Now you want us to sit around on our asses again, and go slow? No way, Daniel, no way. I need your support on this. Like you said, the Russian people need to see we are on their side.”

  “Ruining their economy will just drive the people into the arms of the authoritarians. It’s inevitable.” Markis crossed his arms and stared at the screen.

  “Well, if the Neutral States go along with it, will you too?”

  Reluctantly Markis answered. “If the NS do it first, I will recommend we support a limited set of sanctions – targeted, not general.”

  McKenna sighed. “All right. It’ll have to do. I’ll have my National Security Adviser get in touch with your people and discuss the details. Talk to you later.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. President.”

  McKenna cut the link without responding.

  ***

  In the Oval Office, Pr
esident McKenna looked over at Travis Tyler, who sat sipping Scotch. “You think he bought it? That we’re not going to do anything covert?”

  “Don’t ask me,” replied the retired general. “Mister Muzik?”

  Roger Muzik rattled the ice in his glass, staring at it as if its emptiness had betrayed him. “I think so, sir. You struck the right note of, of being rattled, casting about for easy solutions. As disinformation, it should work very well.” He still didn’t meet the other men’s eyes.

  “But?” asked the President.

  “But the man is my friend. I don’t like lying to him.”

  “You didn’t. I did. And lying is probably too strong a word. I just…gave him the wrong impression. Just like that file he gave me was designed to do. It was sheer bad luck that his outrageous warning – that the Septagon people would try to take over the Russian Government for themselves – turned out to be true.” Now it was McKenna that looked down, avoiding Muzik’s gaze.

  “I hate all this,” Muzik replied. “This feeding each other bullshit, hoping it will be believed, expecting it not to be, and all the while destroying the trust between us. I’d never have believed Edens could be this dishonest.”

  That brought silence for a moment, then Tyler spoke. “People think being an Eden means we can’t kill, either, but we know that’s not true. I executed my own son, because it was the right thing to do, and had to be done. We believe this to be the right thing to do, and it has to be done. Right?”

  “To keep the operation secret? Yes it has to be done. That’s my call. Your consciences are clear.”

  “Sorry, sir, ‘just following orders’ is still the thinnest defense of all.” Muzik held up a forestalling hand. “Don’t worry. I’m on board. After all, it’s my ass on the operation too. And I’d rather if Repeth didn’t know anything about this part of it. Shit, I wish I didn’t either.” He stood up and walked toward the door.