Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4)

by Jack Murphy

  “I’m going to pound down a couple of Monster energy drinks and get back to work,” Will announced. “No reason to sit around jagging off to gay porn or whatever it is you guys do when I’m not around. Time to call the CNO office upstairs and get a persona to access the game with.”

  CNO, or computer network operations, was a polite way of saying computer hacking.

  Gary looked at the clock on his cell phone.

  “Another five hours until the satellite window opens,” he sighed. “Give them a call.”

  Will reached across the table and picked up the secure telephone before pressing the appropriate extension number.

  “So now we’re passing time by playing video games? When the inspector general investigates this office, the report will make one hell of a read,” Craig said looking up at them.

  “Hey, this is Will down at SCOPE,” he said as the CNO office picked up the phone. “We need a persona.” He frowned as he listened to the techie on the other end of the line. “Yeah. Yeah. No. OK. Hold on, look, what personas do you have on Infinity Blade?”

  Another few seconds.

  “OK, I’ll take the chaotic neutral blade master. See you in a few.”

  “What the hell was all of that?” Craig asked.

  “Borrowing a persona from CNO.”

  “You keep saying that. What do you mean by borrow a persona?”

  “An online persona. Really Craig? How long have you worked here?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “And worth every dime of taxpayer money you are. The techs here maintain digital personas in order to conduct cyber reconnaissance and infiltration. Each persona has its own laptop computer. Each computer has a name, a persona name. Every computer has a set of rules that you follow—that persona’s bible. His turn-ons, turn-offs, political views, what websites he frequents, and so on.”

  “Building a false identity.”

  “A false persona,” Will corrected. “You can then use that persona to infiltrate jihadi message boards or white supremacist websites, whatever you need. Every so often the techs pull out each laptop, be it named Mike, Bob, or Muhammad, and tool around on the web for a few hours, then move on to the next laptop to maintain the next persona’s online presence.”

  “So we actually pay people to fart around on Facebook and play Farmville all day?”

  “Well….” Will said as he thought about it for a moment. “Yes. But the system does work. And some of these personas have maintained a presence in online games. Since Infinity Blade is a popular game, we have three personas run out of this building with characters in it.”

  There was a knock at the door and Gary slid across the office on his rolling swivel chair to open it.

  “Hey Jerry,” Will said to the guy standing in the doorway.

  He was a very unfortunate-looking man. Essentially, exactly what most people thought a computer hacker looked like. His face was drawn, his muscles atrophied, and his mustache and beard grew in so weak that it looked like he had pubic hair glued to his chin.

  “So what do you need Roger for?” Jerry asked as he closed the door behind him, a laptop computer secured under one arm.

  “Roger?” Gary asked.

  “Roger is the name of this computer, and the persona on it,” the computer hacker replied. “So what do you need him for?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” Will said as he interlaced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Just saving the world, that’s all.”

  “This is a level 37 blade master that I’ve built up over five years,” Jerry cautioned. “You can’t just take him and throw him into Panchea, Wintersebb, and Ravendale without hurting my stats.”

  “Jerry,” Will said as he leaned forward. “It isn’t your character profile, it’s JSOC’s.”

  Jerry shook his head.

  “No, you can’t just take him away from me like that!”

  Will jumped up out of his chair and lunged for the laptop under Jerry’s arm.

  “Give it to me you squirrely little shit!”

  “No!” Jerry shrieked.

  The two entered into a tug of war for the computer, the fate of America potentially hanging in the balance of a full-on nerd rage. Finally, Will snatched the laptop away from him.

  “You still have a level 14 paladin and a level 32 battle mage you can play while billing DOD for your time,” Will sneered. “Now get the fuck out!”

  Jerry’s lips and nose shriveled as he stepped out and slammed the door behind him.

  “Goddamn short bus-riding window lickers they employ around here,” Will complained. Sitting down, Will fired up the laptop and cracked his knuckles. “Time to go save democracy, boys.”

  Craig and Gary were still in shock, their minds trying to catch up with what they had just witnessed.

  That was when Joshua finally woke up.

  “What's going on, guys?”

  * * *

  The tension was nerve-racking.

  Samruk International's leadership element met to conduct mission planning while they were still underway. Deckard, Sergeant Major Korgan, Fedorchenko, Shatayeva, Aghassi, Nikita, and their mortar section sergeant, Ivan, stood around a monitor looking at images they pulled off of Google Earth. Pat, Kurt, and Chuck were also in attendance. As senior soldiers in the company, they were always around to provide input during mission planning.

  While most of them were sleeping, the second pass from a satellite in polar orbit came in. The imagery indicated a faint wake from the enemy vessel. It had only deviated slightly from their original heading, making way for a small cove along the Russian coast. The JSOC think tank provided some additional imagery and data, then Samruk leadership began planning the mission.

  Concepts of the operation were cast aside just as quickly as they were dreamed up by the veteran soldiers. In the Arctic, mobility options were extremely limited. The cove was surrounded by steep cliffs covered in ice. Flanking around would take hours that they probably didn’t have. The direct approach led them through icy waters where they were prone to being ambushed along the same cliffs.

  At the far end of the cave was their objective, an abandoned naval port from the Soviet era. The imagery they had showed oblong objects strewn around the end of the cove. Apparently, it was a submarine graveyard. Doing some calculations, Otter estimated that the enemy must have set up a fuel depot there ahead of time to refuel their ship. Without knowing the size of the enemy ship, he made an educated guess that they would be running low on fuel at this point.

  Whether or not they were still in the cove was another matter altogether. Again, all Otter could do was make an educated guess as to what the enemy ship’s speed was relative to the Carrickfergus. They might catch them in the act of refueling, or they might miss them by several hours.

  Deckard didn’t like it at all. He’d screwed up royally by deploying with gun trucks when he should have brought more snowmobiles and Zodiac boats, but in the end, you deploy with the Army you have, not the one you want. Now they had to make the best of it.

  Rochenoire was sketching something out on the whiteboard and waving his hands at Pat as they argued about some tactical detail. Deckard had reviewed their options and now he had made a decision as well. Once again, this was going to be sketchy as hell.

  Chapter 9

  Cody overhanded the miniature unmanned aerial vehicle into the air.

  The wind caught the UAV's wings as the small electric engine buzzed, spinning the propeller. The drone itself was French in origin, while the sensor package had been bought in the U.K. and Austria. Cody had assembled the drone himself in his hackerspace several weeks prior. Turning away from the deck of the ship, the computer hacker quickly ducked back inside and handled the small control unit.

  Using two joysticks retrofitted to a tablet, Cody could look through the drone’s cameras and steer it where he needed it to go. On the screen, broken ice scattered throughout the sea quickly gave way as the drone climbed to a hundred feet abo
ve sea level and flew over land. Maneuvering the drone in a long, lazy arc, he flew around the cove, looking for signs of the enemy. Flipping a switch, the thermal camera kicked in. White splotches on the tablet would indicate the infrared signature given off by human body heat.

  Leaning up against a bulkhead, he put the drone in a loiter route over the objective area. Everything looked clear. It would have a little under an hour of fuel before he had to return the drone back to the Carrickfergus and attempt to land it on the deck. Reaching into his pocket, he palmed a radio and held it up to his mouth.

  “This is Fapper-1,” Cody said into the radio, barely holding back a laugh as he gave his self-selected call sign. “The coast is clear. No signs of an ambush on the cliffs, over.”

  “Roger.” It was Deckard’s voice. “We're about to get underway. Can you give us a pass straight up the cove and see if anyone is active down there?”

  “On it,” Cody said.

  Pocketing the radio, he went back to the control unit, glad that he wasn’t going to be out there paddling in the Russian Arctic.

  * * *

  With the Carrickfergus’s barge deck lowered, twin Zodiac FC470 boats were launched simultaneously. The black inflatable boats each carried 10 mercenaries, making for a total of a 20-man assault force. They were going in light, but it had been decided that sailing the Carrickfergus into the cove could end catastrophically if the enemy had another ambush prepared. Better to go in with the Zodiacs while their mothership cut off entry and exit from the narrow channel.

  The coxswain of each Zodiac steered the gas-powered engine, taking them on a slow approach through the mouth of the cove. At the head of each boat was a PKM machine gunner, ready to lay down some cyclic fire if the need arose. The riflemen sat on the sides of the Zodiacs, their eyes darting around, looking for targets. Rocky cliffs lurched by on both sides of the mercenaries as the Zodiacs slipped into the cove. Coxswains eased them around drifting sheets of ice.

  Deckard looked up as Cody’s drone buzzed overhead like a giant paper airplane. As expected, the terrain was barren, devoid of life. Out this far, the only sort of person you ever saw on land was the occasional impoverished Russian searching for and digging up mammoth tusks for sale on the black market.

  As the rubber boats edged around the rocks and ice, the submarine graveyard came into view. The aquamarine waters parted as the boats churned forward, revealing dozens of dark red and brown rusted submarine hulls dead ahead.

  Back in Tampa, SCOPE had done some analysis and determined that most of the decaying husks were Tango-class attack submarines. Now they were just fading vestiges of the Cold War, abandoned in a forgotten corner of the globe.

  The PKM gunner at the head of the Zodiac shifted, the black barrel of his weapon sweeping across the submarines as he scanned for signs of the enemy. The subs were in a state of obvious disarray, some lying on their side, half in the water and half out of it. Beyond the tangle of rusting metal was a dock and large industrial crane.

  “Six, this is Fapper-1.” Cody’s voice came over the command net. “I just lost the drone, over.”

  “What does that mean?” Deckard hissed in response.

  “It had plenty of loiter time left. All of a sudden the engine went down and it began to go into a spin. Then the video cut out. I don’t know what went wrong. It could have been a gust of wind, over.”

  “Catch anything on video before it went down?”

  “SHIT,” Cody cursed, his Tourette’s acting up again. “No, nothing.”

  Deckard wasn't about to abort the mission just because the drone went down. They had gotten some good situational awareness from its surveillance feed before the UAV crashed, at least. Now they had to get in there and do the grunt work.

  Once they were a hundred meters away, Deckard radioed to Fedorchenko in the other Zodiac.

  “Do you see any signs of the enemy ship?”

  The Kazakh platoon sergeant turned and looked at him from the other boat, which was cruising 10 meters off their right flank. His dark eyes were wide as they drilled into Deckard. He shook his head in reply.

  “Carrickfergus,” Deckard said as he bumped up radio channels from the assault net to the command net. “This is Six. No sign of enemy activity. They were never here or we missed them. I’m taking our element deeper into the AO to look for signs. Maybe there is something we can use to pick up their trail again.”

  “Understood, Six,” Sergeant Major Korgan replied from the bridge of their ship.

  The head of the cove was a tangle of rusted, twisted steel that looked like it belonged on the set of a Mad Max film set in the ice age. Deckard directed Fedorchenko to take his boat to the dock while his team would explore the submarine graveyard. Deckard was already having a bad feeling that this would be a dry hole.

  Still, as they approached the nearest submarine that had been scuttled along the shore, Deckard looked carefully through the snowflakes swirling in the wind. He couldn’t get over the feeling they were being watched, even though Cody’s drone didn’t pick up any thermal signatures.

  The nose of their Zodiac rubbed up against the submarine’s deck. The PKM gunner immediately jumped off and scrambled up the hull. Deckard and seven other Samruk International mercenaries lumbered up in their cold-weather gear and jumped onto the sub. The coxswain stayed on the boat, making sure they were ready for extraction.

  The mercenaries quickly found a hatch and descended into the belly of the Soviet-era submarine. Deckard pushed his goggles up onto his forehead, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. They stepped carefully, avoiding rusted-out portions of the deck as they walked through the corridor toward a light in the distance. The submarine was literally coming apart at the seams, as it had been exposed to the elements for years on end, including the water freezing and then melting each year.

  Stairways with rust brown railings, leading to nowhere, made it feel like they were in a haunted house straight out of some Cold War nightmare. It was evident to Deckard that no one had been there in a very long time.

  At the end of the corridor, the sub was blasted open where the torpedo tubes were located, the tear in the hull leaving a gap a few feet from the next submarine. The mercs hopped across the gap one by one onto the next submarine, this one lying on its side. The wind cut into their faces again, forcing Deckard and the others to pull down their goggles and pull up their face masks.

  “Six,” the earbud connected to Deckard's radio crackled. “The dock...clear.”

  Fedorchenko’s voice was cutting in and out, his words full of static.

  “Roger.”

  Fedorchenko had cleared the docks, but there were about a dozen abandoned submarines in the cove. He might as well search as many of them as possible just to be sure. It wasn’t like they had any other leads. The mercenaries crawled down the hull as it began sloping down into the sea.

  From where he stood, Deckard could see there was another submarine hull just under the surface of the water, adjacent to the one they were on. Trudging through an inch of water wasn’t a big deal in boots. They could use the sub as an underwater bridge to make their way over to the next section of the submarine graveyard.

  Deckard spoke to the Kazakhs in Russian, instructing them on which route to take. The PKM gunner went into a prone position behind what was left of the submarine mast while the rest of them shuffled down the side to the submarine that was just barely submerged. Deckard took the lead, slinging his AK and sliding down the edge of the hull on his ass. For a moment, he fell through the air, then his boots came down on the top of the sub with a splash.

  Waving the other mercenaries after him, Deckard sloshed through the ice water as he walked along the top of the submarine. His fear was that the aging submarine would give way under his weight and he would tumble right through the fuselage and into the cold water, but even after decades of sitting in the cove, it was probably unlikely. Submarine hulls had to be extremely strong, made with hardened steel to withstand the pressures
found in the depths of the ocean.

  Looking over his shoulder, Deckard could see that the other mercenaries were lined up behind him. Their PKM gunner was still up above on the other submarine, ready to provide suppressive fire if they made contact with the enemy. Keeping his rifle at the low ready, Deckard scanned for targets. He could hear the low creaks and snarls of metal against metal that echoed through the cove as the elements took their toll on the Soviet subs.

  Reaching the far side of the cove, Deckard put an arm out to grab onto the next submarine. There was a rust-encrusted ladder rung sticking out from the fuselage. Just as his gloved fingertips reached out and brushed against the ladder, machine gun fire seemed to blast all around him. Deckard was suddenly propelled backwards. One hand tightened around his rifle while the other reached out in vain to find something to brace himself against.

  He flew through the air and came down hard on the top of the submarine, then continued, somersaulting backwards, and rolled off the side into the Arctic Ocean. Disoriented, Deckard suddenly realized why it felt like a giant iron hand was crushing his chest. He couldn't feel his arms or legs. And he was sinking.

  Sinking deeper as everything began to go dark.

  * * *

  Fedorchenko was stunned as he watched the submarine that Deckard and his men were crossing swing around without warning and pop up out of the water. The cigar-shaped black ship didn't look like any submarine he had ever seen. The ship executed a sharp left turn that tossed the Samruk mercenaries over the side like rag dolls in a gale-force wind. Arms and legs went spinning and kicking through the air before they splashed down in the freezing water.

  With its nose now pointed toward the mouth of the cove, the ship rose even farther out of the water, almost like a hydrofoil, and shot toward the Carrickfergus. Fedorchenko squeezed his radio’s push-to-talk button.

  “Incoming ship!” he shouted. “Tag it! Tag it!”

  The black ship was just a few hundred meters from the Carrickfergus now, set on a collision course.