by Kyle Mills
He scowled deeply. “Must have slipped your mind.”
“Well, he told me that they put the heads in that top cave.”
“Oh, no, no, no. Sarabat again? That was three months ago, Randi. Let it go already.”
“I did let it go,” she said, reattaching the damaged XM25 to her pack and slipping the straps over her shoulders. “But now here we are. I figure it’s karma.”
“Karma my ass. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed that the sun’s going down and the terrain between here and there is pretty much one crappy scree field after another.”
“We have about another hour of good light. We’ll use it and then hunker down until dawn.”
He looked at her like she was a slow child. “Are you kidding? We’ll be standing at the mouth of that cave in three hours. Maybe less.”
She shook her head. “I left behind my night-vision gear so I could bring the rifle.”
He made a show of running a hand through the short hair just below his carbon-fiber helmet. The studs screwed into his skull were clearly visible—colored the matte black that had become fashionable with combat soldiers. “Pull yourself into the twenty-first century, bitch.”
She scratched her nose with an extended middle finger. “Then you’re on point, Ginger.”
* * *
IN THE END, Deuce’s time estimate was a little on the optimistic side—though Randi had to admit that it was her fault. For one of the first times in her life, she was experiencing what it was like to be the weak link.
They were now standing five meters from the mouth of the cave and the last four hours had been some of the hardest of her life. There was no question that Deuce was younger and stronger, but normally her experience still allowed a slight edge. The addition of his Merge, though, had put an end to that. He’d negotiated the loose, off-camber slopes like it was broad daylight, leaving her to stumble around trying to follow his footsteps in the dim starlight. Thank God the climb from the top of the ridge down to the cave had been easy—a track wide and flat enough for the Taliban to get their carts down. Otherwise, she’d have had to swallow her pride and hold on to him. Or more likely, refused and ended up a lump of broken flesh on the valley floor.
“What’s the plan?” Deuce whispered, pulling his rifle in front of his chest.
“I don’t see a lot of ways to get fancy. We’re just going to have to poke our head in—”
“And see if it gets shot off,” he said, finishing her sentence.
“I’ll go first,” Randi volunteered, removing her pack and fishing out a small flashlight.
“What the hell is that?” Deuce said. It was too dark to read his expression, but she could see the exasperated shaking of his head.
“It’s a flashlight. Night vision isn’t going to work inside—there’s not enough light to amplify.”
“Heat?”
“Not going to help keep you from falling in a hole,” she said, unwilling to admit that while it wouldn’t pick out natural obstacles, thermal imaging would be extremely effective at picking out anyone lying in wait for them. But she wasn’t sending him in first. Billy was already down on her watch and if anyone else took a hit in this particular wild goose chase, it was going to be her.
He brought up a shadowy hand and tapped a small box on the side of his helmet. It wasn’t as seamlessly integrated as the other systems, suggesting that it was a new addition. “Active infrared. Invisible to the naked eye—meaning your eye, not mine—and good to about ten meters.”
“Look, I don’t care about all your electronics, Deuce. I’m going first.”
He let out an audible breath. “Bullshit, Randi. But this is the last time I’m wet-nursing you. When we get back to base, you need to hop a transport to Kabul and get Merged up.”
She swore quietly under her breath as he started toward the cave. They both knew he was right. Not only would her flashlight be obvious to anyone inside, it would be a dinner bell to the local Taliban.
If she had her way, wars would still be fought with swords—a weapon of skill that forced you to look in the eye of the people you killed. But the world didn’t go backward and now her distrust of overly complex combat technology was endangering not only her, but also the people who counted on her.
Randi pulled her sidearm and inched up behind Deuce, stopping when he held a hand out. She assumed he was running a countdown on his fingers, but she couldn’t see them well enough to be sure.
He jerked his head into the cave for a split second and then stood staring into the darkness. She was about to ask him what the hell he was doing, but then realized that he’d taken a heavily enhanced photo and was now examining it in the empty air.
“I think we’re good,” he said before easing into the cave with her holding on to his shoulder.
“How deep is it?” she said, now completely blind.
“Dunno. Can’t see the back. The ground’s pretty flat, though. Just stay with me.”
It turned out to be larger than she expected and they took multiple turns as they inched along. At first, there was nothing but their quiet footfalls for her senses to key in on, but then she caught of whiff of rotting flesh.
“You getting that?” she said.
“What?”
“You mean that thing doesn’t smell for you?”
“Oh, wait. Yeah. Now I’m getting it.”
Another two sharp bends and he came to a stop sudden enough to cause her to run into the back of him.
“What?” she whispered in his ear.
“I’m picking up something on heat. Range is twelve meters.”
“Human?” she said, gripping her pistol a bit tighter.
“No. It’s barely above background temp. Can’t really get a shape.”
The stench was fairly strong now, suggesting a possibility. “Bacteria create a little heat when they’re breaking down flesh. Any chance it’s our pile of heads?”
She felt him shrug and then start creeping forward. After a few seconds, he stopped again. “That’s them. We’ve found your goddamn heads.”
Randi slipped the flashlight from her pocket and held it up, knowing he’d be able to see it. “If I use this, is it going to screw up your vision?”
“Pull yourself into the—”
“Twenty-first century. I know, I know,” Randi said, switching it on.
She was no expert on head piles, but to her calibrated eyeball it looked like all seventy or so adult male inhabitants of Sarabat. The skin of the visible ones had been dried into leather by the mountain air. She knelt, looking into the empty eye sockets of a heavily bearded face staring up at her. The smell and heat must have been coming from deeper in the pile where moisture still existed.
“Come on, Randi. Let’s get out of here. It’s just a bunch of heads.”
She grabbed one by its long hair and shone the flashlight on it. Why were they here? And who paid those mercs to wipe out Kot’eh?
She set the head back down but then saw a strange glint in the hair. When she leaned in for a closer look, her breath caught in her chest.
“Randi, seriously,” Deuce said. “I’m leaving before I throw up. If you’re this desperate for a souvenir, why don’t you just take one?”
She slipped off her pack and opened the top to dump her non-essential gear.
“Jesus,” Deuce whined as she shoved the decaying head inside. “I wasn’t serious…”
28
Military Operation
East of the Walapai Test Center
JON SMITH CREPT ALONG the dirt road, eyes moving smoothly from side to side. Ancient-looking mud-brick buildings rose up on either side, most showing signs of years of fighting: arcing bullet holes, gaping RPG hits, and hastily stacked debris from collapses. The people in the street seemed uninterested in the destruction, preferring to focus their suspicious gazes and muttered Dari comments on him and his men.
About ten meters ahead, a horse-drawn cart piled with scrap metal had broken a wheel and was stopped di
agonally in his path. Two men in traditional Afghan garb were squatting next to it, examining the damage with a stream of animated commentary.
Smith’s Merge failed to recognize the face of either man, but was able to determine that they were Middle Eastern males between sixteen and forty-five years old and therefore gave them the reddish aura of potential threats. A woman standing next to them was also unidentified—not surprising based on the fact that virtually nothing of her was visible behind her burqa—but was given more of a neutral threat rating due to her gender.
The members of his team ahead glowed dark green despite their desert camo and a local coming toward them rated a much paler green—one of the rare locals who had been identified by the Merge’s sophisticated facial recognition software and was deemed friendly.
The man spoke as he passed by but Smith didn’t hear him in the literal sense of the word. He was wearing earplugs and all sound was being transmitted directly to his auditory cortex via five separate microphones attached to his uniform.
“My horse greets a goat for your life,” the mechanical voice said and Smith allowed himself a thin smile. One day the system would accurately translate real-time but for now its interpretation of Dari was for entertainment value only.
In their success column, though, they’d hijacked existing technology to cancel out wind noise, and an app that muted all voices except the one from the person you were looking at was starting to show real promise. On the downside, the directional aspect of the sound coming at him was still almost completely nonexistent. Despite almost two months of work, everything sounded like it came from just ahead and slightly to the right.
Smith scanned left, letting the cameras mounted on his helmet pan over a group of men paying a little too much attention to the American team in their midst. It was broad daylight under a blue sky so most visual enhancement was shut down. The two exceptions—facial recognition and weapon outline enhancement—were coming up empty.
His vision shook when he faced forward again and he gave his chin strap another tug. He’d commandeered the helmet from a Recon Ranger and it had been custom-molded for the Ranger’s larger head. Still, it was an amazing piece of gear. If Smith had any say in the matter—and he did—the bicycle mechanic who’d fabricated it would soon be a very wealthy man.
“Right or left, Colonel?” his point man said as they approached a cross street.
Smith expanded a satellite photo hovering in his peripheral vision and checked the layout of the village before responding. “Right.”
It would be the fastest way back and Smith had to admit that he’d had about enough of this exercise. The sixty-thousand-dollar seventeen-pound camera perched on his right shoulder seemed to be doing nothing but bending his collarbone. A little more tinkering might make it worth bringing out again but he was going to stick someone else with wearing it.
His man approached the corner and Smith swept left, lifting his rifle to provide cover should it become necessary. He left the satellite image up and watched the green dots that represented his people fan out behind him. Both the smoothness and resolution of the image had been significantly improved from his game of capture-the-flag three months ago. Even more important, though, his mind was growing accustomed to all the input, letting him register the flood of information without taking too much away from the reality around him.
“Rick,” he said in a voice that would be virtually inaudible to anyone around him but was easily picked up by his tooth mike. “You’re wandering a little far northeast. Tighten it up.”
Smith picked up his pace, keeping a line of sight on his point man while examining a section of ground along the edge of the road thirty-two meters away. The heat overlay that had been lurking in the background was now coloring an area about the size and shape of a manhole cover hazy orange, suggesting that the dirt had been churned up recently and was now absorbing sunlight at a slightly different rate than was the ground around it.
His man saw it too and, despite it probably being nothing more than some recently buried garbage, diverted through the increasingly dense crowd of pedestrians.
A tall man in a blue robe came out of a building just past the suspicious patch of dirt and after only a few seconds’ delay, started flashing red.
“Terry!” Smith said, raising his rifle and activating his targeting system. “Behind you!”
The soldier spun, but a fraction too late. The man the Merge had identified as a hostile knocked him to the ground before shoving his way through the people packing the street. Smith tried to follow him in his crosshairs, but the crowd started to panic and he couldn’t get a clean shot.
“We’ve got a target running south,” Smith said as the man disappeared around a corner. “Everyone behind me backtrack and try to intercept. Terry and I will flush him toward you.”
On his overhead display, he saw his people comply as he started running forward.
“You all right?” he said as he came alongside his man.
“Didn’t see him in time, sir.”
“My fault. Now let’s go get him.”
The heavy camera on his shoulder was limiting his speed to a fast jog and Terry quickly outpaced him, following the wake their target had left in the terrified throng.
As the street emptied, a hastily coded beta app kicked in and painted a woodpile just ahead of his man fluorescent orange.
“Terry! Trap!”
Too late. The sound of the explosion was heavily filtered by his unit’s processors, but the blinding flash wasn’t. Smith dove to the ground, causing the massive camera anchored to his shoulder to slam painfully into the side of his flimsy helmet. Visual enhancement kicked on, penetrating the smoke and showing his man and a number of civilians down.
The only thing moving was a hazy human outline coming directly at him. He struggled to get his rifle sighted but when the figure emerged from the smoke, it morphed into a tall, athletic woman wearing jeans and a formfitting black tank top.
She stopped and looked down at him, waving impatiently at the smoke. The tactical overhead view still running in his peripheral vision showed three of his team moving in on his position and another two moving south fast—probably in pursuit of their target. He concentrated on the word “time” and a dim display overlaid the woman’s elegantly curved torso.
4:48 p.m.
“All right,” he said, struggling to his feet with the shoulder camera teetering on a broken strap. “Let’s call it a day.”
Bystanders began appearing from the cover they’d fled to and burqas started coming off, revealing women in U.S. Army fatigues and the occasional smaller-than-average man that their system was still failing miserably to identify.
By the time he’d dusted himself off, the only people left on the street were the woman in front of him and Terry, who was still sitting next to the woodpile where the flash grenade had detonated.
“Congratulations,” Randi Russell said, pointing at the massive camera on Smith’s shoulder. “You may have invented the least practical piece of combat equipment in history.”
“It’s a spectrum analyzer that can identify explosive residue to about fifty meters. And believe it or not, it actually seems to work.”
“Yeah, all fifty pounds of it.”
“Seventeen. And we think we can get it down below four, with most of it in your pack.”
Her skeptical expression remained for a moment but then she looked around and broke into a dazzling smile. “I gotta hand it to you, Jon. This place is pretty impressive. There’s actually a real donkey back there.”
“Only the finest when the taxpayer’s footing the bill. Simulations are all about the details.”
The smoke had cleared and she sniffed at the air. “Doesn’t smell right, though. Still smells like Nevada.”
Smith considered that for a moment. “You make a good point. I’ll work on it.”
They looked at each in silence for a few moments before she spoke again. “I’m not sure I like this new wo
rld, Jon.”
He reached a dirty hand out and brushed back her short blond hair. No studs. “Still holding out?”
“You know me. If I had my way it would be daggers at dawn.”
She was only half joking, he knew. The world they lived in was one where you could have world-class skills, the best gear, and near-Olympic-level fitness, only to be killed by a fertilizer bomb built by an illiterate twelve-year-old. It was hard not to romanticize a time when the best man—or woman—won.
“I hear you. But the clock’s never going to turn back, Randi.”
“Tell me about it. I can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone with one of your little gadgets screwed to their heads.”
A typically colorful metaphor but fairly accurate. At the outset, he’d argued passionately that the military didn’t have the right to order people to get the Merge body modifications, but his moral stand had turned out to be completely pointless. After seeing what the unit could do, soldiers were lining up to get them.
“We’re already at three percent penetration in active combat troops and if Dresner can get production to where it needs to be, forty percent of combat personnel will be Merged up by the end of next year. And that’s just military units—soldiers are buying civilian units with their own money because we aren’t moving fast enough for them.”
“Fortunately for me, the CIA isn’t as sold.”
Inconspicuous dots appeared on her face as his Merge began mapping it. They’d been talking long enough for LayerCake to determine that she wasn’t in its database and to assume he knew her. Later that night, he’d receive a text asking him to put a name to the image the system had created. A text he would delete unanswered.
“They will be soon, Randi. Because of the individuality of brain waves, the security is light-years beyond what you’re using in Langley. But enough of that. What is it that you’re doing standing in the middle of my training exercise? Last I heard you were in Khost.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. Maybe we could have a drink?”
Most people wouldn’t notice, but he’d known her long enough to hear the concern in her voice. And when Randi couldn’t completely hide what she was feeling, it was generally something you wanted to pay attention to.