The Polaris Protocol pl-5

by Brad Taylor

  She pushed herself the final stretch onto the rough shingles, hearing a gunshot and the scream of the dog. She took off across the building, looking for a way out. She jumped the small gap to the next roof, a tin one, making an enormous racket before reaching the edge next to the street. She squatted down and studied, seeing an abandoned industrial park across the way, the moonlight illuminating the broken windows and graffiti, the small manufacturing plant an unintended victim of the past violence. Beyond it, she saw the lights of Ciudad Juárez. Close. Very, very close.

  Get there. Get some help. Get into the light. Get to people outside this ghetto.

  She was scrambling off the roof, hanging on the edge with her hands, when two cars pulled to the left and right corners of her block. Men spilled out on both sides, placing her in the middle. She dropped and sprinted across the street, her goal now shrinking even further.

  Lose them. Get out of their search grid.

  They didn’t notice her until she hit the fence of the industrial park, the noise alerting them to her escape. She flipped to the far side and sprinted into the abandoned manufacturing facility, full of machinery, pulleys, and conveyor belts. The men followed, and her goal shrank yet again.

  Separate them. Take them out one at a time.

  She ran six feet in and crouched behind a generator, the moon illuminating the ground through the skylights above. She heard the men coming and debated her position, knowing she was wasting precious time. Run, or fight? She might be able to outdistance the men and reach the lights on the far side. But she couldn’t outrun a radio, and she’d seen a man using one. Stay here and fight, and she could remove them one by one as they searched. Getting a weapon in the process.

  The decision was made for her as shadows broke the light. She counted five and dashed back, waiting on them to spread out.

  17

  She heard muffled talking, then noises from the men moving in different directions. She backed up slowly and crouched behind some piece of machinery she couldn’t have identified in the daylight, her primary concern to always leave herself an out. Leave a means of escape.

  Don’t get cornered. Hit them one at a time, and move on.

  She heard one man approaching, walking slowly in the darkness, and waited. She caught a glow behind her and whirled around, seeing nothing, then felt the vibration in her purse.

  Christ.

  She’d slung her purse across her back and it was her smartphone, coming to life, the glow spilling out. The buzz of the vibration sounding like a bullhorn. She frantically swung the purse around and silenced the buzzing, seeing it was Pike. She powered down the phone completely, listening for a reaction.

  The man had paused. She waited, breathing through an open mouth. She heard him shuffle forward and got ready to fight.

  She considered what she would do. What technique she would use when he arrived. She wanted to subdue him and grab his weapon. To knock him out. In truth, she wanted to give him the chance to surrender. Other foolish thoughts flitted through her head before she realized she couldn’t do any of them. Not if she wanted to live.

  He broke the plane of the machine she was hiding behind, and she struck to kill, launching forward like a rattlesnake behind a rock.

  She drove a palm strike into the bridge of his nose with her full weight behind it, then circled her right arm around his neck as he staggered back, breaking his balance. She swept his legs out from under him and facilitated the fall, dropping to a knee and slamming the back of his neck onto her thigh. Snapping it cleanly.

  She searched him rapidly, finding no weapon whatsoever.

  Shit.

  She heard the men calling, shouting among themselves from the commotion, then heard them begin to move her way. She slid along the floor, using her feet to check for debris, not wanting to make any noise that would give away her position. She stopped in the shadows of a giant press, sick at what she’d been forced to do, the adrenaline flooding through her body.

  Go away. Please, please go away.

  She heard two men find the kill, both screaming in Spanish about what they would do to her, as if that would make her surrender.

  Four more.

  She found another ambush position and waited, needing them to split up again. She felt around the ground, her hand closing on a piece of lumber. She heard the men separate, one moving deeper into the warehouse and the other coming her way, but at an angle that would cause him to pass her position about ten feet away. She needed him close. She rapped her knuckles against the steel of an empty tank, the noise sounding like a subdued gong.

  The man hissed and began jogging in a stutter-step, slowed by the darkness. She saw the shadows, the flickering of movement, and waited. He broke into her line of sight, and she struck, cracking him in the head with the length of wood. He screamed, whirling his own club full force, catching her in the shoulder and slamming her into the metal she was hiding behind. The pain snapped through her like an electric shock, bouncing the two-by-four out of her hand.

  She rolled on the ground, and he struck again. She writhed, and the club missed, hitting the concrete. She lashed out with her leg and caught his knee, breaking his stance and opening him up. She rose into a crouch as he brought the club high. He swung and she darted inside. She popped his chin back with her left hand, then speared his throat, driving her knife-hand as if she was trying to hit something behind him. She sprang back, and he fell to his knees, choking out phlegm. His throat swelled, and he collapsed face forward.

  Three more.

  She heard the men reacting to the noise and moved away in a crouch. She saw a shadow pass to her left and began backpedaling, looking for a new position that allowed escape. She saw a shadow to the right and froze, needing the man to continue on. Needing one-on-one combat.

  The shadow moved down a section of Conex containers, then disappeared. She strained her ears and heard a gasp, followed by the meaty thump of something striking metal.

  What the hell?

  She remained still and heard the man begin moving again, searching away from her.

  She circled back the way she’d come, slipping into a block of conveyor belts. She went twenty feet and realized her mistake. The equipment was pinning her in, giving no escape, leaving a single lane to advance. She turned to get back into the facility proper, among the machines, when she saw another shadow. She crouched, staring into the darkness, praying it was her imagination.

  The shadow became a man, coming toward her. She slowly started slinking the other way when she heard a noise. Coming from the other end.

  She stopped, trying to focus through the overwhelming fear.

  Two on one. Two on one. Need to kill the first immediately.

  She knew it would do no good. She couldn’t take them both on and win, and they were too close to separate.

  The man to her left shouted something in Spanish, and the one to the right answered. They continued on, both with their arms up, one with another club.

  They know I’m close.

  She crouched and scuttled backward, the belt above her head. Panting, she swiveled left and right, watching them advance, the one on the left much closer. He reached her position, unsure of her exact location. She struck, swinging her leg from underneath the conveyor, whipping it just above his ankles and sweeping him off of his feet.

  His head cracked the ground and she fell on top of him, forgetting her skills, instead attacking like a thing possessed. She grabbed his hair and thumped his head into the concrete as hard as she could. Once, twice, three times, until she saw a growing pool of fluid.

  She jumped to her feet, hearing the second man closing the distance. Behind him she saw a third, sprinting toward her.

  Lord help me, I don’t want to die.

  She crouched into a fighting stance, snapping her head left and right for a piece of machinery to separate them. Anything to keep her one-on-one, where she stood a chance of survival. And seeing nothing.

  The third man closed
the gap, assuring a two-on-one fight, both men less than ten feet away. She growled like an animal and raised her fists. He slapped his hands into the hair of the man up front and yanked him off his feet, slamming him into the ground. He rotated around onto the man’s chest, pinning him and clamping the head in a vise with both arms. He twisted violently, then stood up, facing her.

  “You think you could answer your fucking phone?”

  Pike. She sagged to the floor.

  18

  Crossing the border in Pike’s rental, the danger behind them, Jennifer felt the tension begin to fade, leaving her drained. She said, “How’d you find me?”

  “Taskforce phone. Did you forget they’re interconnected? I was tracking you the minute I hit El Paso. I was scared shitless when I saw it had been stationary for my entire flight, then I picked up your movement to the industrial park. I couldn’t believe it when you shut it down. The one thing that I could use, and you turned the damn thing off.”

  She felt her face flush, only now realizing the phone had saved her life. She snaked her hand into his and said, “I couldn’t talk. It was giving me away…. I thought I was on my own….”

  Pike glared at her. “I told you that you weren’t on your own. I said we’d figure this out together. I still can’t believe you did this. Did it help your brother? I broke a shit-ton of rules getting here, tracking phones, and…”

  Jennifer leaned back, turning to face him. “And what? I should have listened, but my brother is in real trouble. He’s been kidnapped. I’m sure of it. I have a video in my purse, and a picture of the house he’s in.”

  She expected support but saw the beginnings of a sneer. He said, “So what now, you want the Taskforce to assault a place in Mexico? Is that it? Because you got a voice message from your brother? Jennifer, we’re not the damn A-Team. You just made me kill two men in Mexico to save your ass. You did that, whether you like it or not, and it didn’t do a damn thing for your brother. All it did was prove a point.”

  She dropped his hand. “What the hell does that mean? My brother’s not worth it? He’s probably being beaten to death right now, by men just like the ones you killed!”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “Pike?”

  “It means maybe I can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. Maybe I can’t separate our relationship from the job. Maybe this was just a bad idea.”

  What?

  She said, “Stop the car. Right now.”

  “Screw that. We need to get away from the border. Get away from the damage.”

  “Stop this car right now or I’m jumping out.”

  He looked at her, trying for bravado, but she saw apprehension at what had slipped out of his mouth. He pulled over, letting the other cars pass.

  She said, “Who talked to you?”

  “Nobody. I’m just thinking. I mean, I need to keep my head, and I’m not sure I can with our relationship. I’m not sure it’s right. Listen, I left a site survey early, got to Atlanta, then caught the first flight to El Paso because of you. I shortchanged a mission because of you. I’m not sure I can do both anymore.”

  She stared at him for a second, then said, “So you mean because we’re together in the Taskforce, we can’t be together? Are you asking me to choose?”

  He looked out the window. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m making decisions out of emotion, and I can’t do that in this world. With our business.”

  She smiled, relieved at his answer. “So Knuckles talked to you.”

  He said, “No, nobody talked to me.”

  “Liar. He talked to me before I flew. Before the stakeout. He suspected and gave me the same line of bull.” She took his hand again and said, “Look, I can’t answer how you would react in combat without me in the mix, because I don’t know what you guys did before I arrived. I do know that all decisions have a basis in emotion. Just because emotion is there doesn’t make it wrong. It’s only wrong if the emotion leads to a bad one.”

  “Jennifer, I just made a bad decision! I misused Taskforce assets and funding to get here. And killed two men. Based on our relationship.”

  “And that was a bad decision? I’ve seen you ‘misuse’ Taskforce assets before. All for the good.”

  He looked out the window again, saying nothing. She said, “Answer me this: Would Knuckles have gone to Mexico for his brother? With the voice mail that I got?”

  He said, “Knuckles doesn’t have a brother.”

  She took a breath and exhaled. “Just say he did, would he have gone to Mexico?”

  He thought, and said, “Yes.”

  “Would you have come and helped him, if he’d called, using whatever means were at your disposal?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes. I would have.”

  “Then what the hell are we talking about?”

  Pike closed his eyes for a moment. “You really twist up what I’m thinking.”

  She squeezed his hand and said, “No I don’t. Others are doing that. And you know it.”

  He let go of her hand and put the car in drive, saying nothing. She said, “You know that, right? I wouldn’t stay if I thought what you said was true.”

  He said, “I know. It’s just that we can’t be pulling shit like this. The other times you mentioned were for national security. Averting risks to our nation, not something personal like this. It was wrong.”

  She said, “Listen to the tape. I don’t think it’s just personal. I think it’s a Taskforce problem. Something bad’s going on, and I think it affects national interests.”

  As she pulled out the recorder he said, “Jennifer, drugs might be a national problem, but they’re not Taskforce business. There’s a whole agency dedicated to that.”

  She said, “Just listen. Jack might have been working on the cartels, but he found something different. There’s an American on here talking about something much bigger than drugs.”

  “What?”

  “Our GPS constellation.”

  19

  Not for the first time, Arthur Booth considered bringing mittens with him to work. The temperature inside his trailer was damn near freezing due to the number of servers, and it wasn’t like he was going to be banging away on a keyboard any time soon. Well, unless there was an anomaly in the system, which had happened only a few times since the Air Force officially accepted the latest upgrade to the GPS Architecture Evolution Plan.

  Located behind the wire on one of the largest secure areas within the Department of Defense, the trailer was nowhere near as nice as the control room it supported two hundred meters away, but it was supposed to be temporary, and anything beyond the barest of requirements was a waste of money in the eyes of the defense contractor that maintained it.

  Boeing had won the bid to create the next-generation Global Positioning System and had been working nonstop for over a decade to implement it. Designed to replace the aging, monolithic mainframes with a distributed network, along with launching more robust and capable satellites into space, it was an enormous undertaking that had to be accomplished seamlessly. Sort of like upgrading a propeller aircraft to a jet-capable one — while the aircraft continued to fly. Given the criticality of the system, it couldn’t be treated like cable TV, where the United States could tell the world, “Sorry for the inconvenience, but GPS will be experiencing some unpredictable outages over the next ten years….”

  And so Boeing built the system with robust backups, monitoring the architecture on a twenty-four/seven clock. The new AEP operational control segment at Schriever Air Force Base was fully functional now, monitoring the health of the global constellation of satellites, and Boeing, using Booth’s station, monitored the health of the control segment, reacting to any anomaly it found.

  Booth, however, was watching for a very different reason. He wanted an anomaly. Wanted official access to the control segment. Wanted to be able to ostensibly solve a problem while introducing a new one.

  Booth was a hacker and always had been, although he
would say he was of the breed known as “ethical.” With ethics being decidedly in the eye of the beholder. He never compromised systems for financial gain, like eastern European Mafia groups, or for general mayhem, like a high school script kiddie defacing a pop star’s website. He only hacked for what he perceived as the greater good, exposing corporations and government evil, as it were.

  Hacking, in and of itself, was nothing more than unauthorized penetration of computer systems. It was an action, not an attribute that could be spotted across a room at a party, and thus, like the group he sometimes worked with, he remained anonymous. The same skills he employed as a hacker were in great demand in his work as a computer technician, and thus he commanded a significant salary from Boeing, complete with a secret security clearance.

  His initial foray into government employment had been with the CIA, where he’d applied to work in a cell developing some decidedly nefarious computer applications, something at the time he’d thought would be right up his alley, using his skills for the greater good in defense of the nation and gaining a sense of self-worth he couldn’t obtain by writing code designed to increase advertising sales. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pass the lifestyle polygraph test, which was designed to determine if there was a risk in exposing an applicant to national secrets. Apparently, he had been deemed risky and had been denied employment. Luckily for him, there was no such thing as cross talk among the divisions of the government, and Boeing didn’t require anything more than a background check, which had come up pristine.

  Booth finished the initial survey for his shift and sat down, exhaling hard in an attempt to see his breath in the cold air but coming up empty. Having nothing else to do, he turned on his personal laptop after inserting a thumb drive with a boot segment that would control the laptop’s operating system. He placed his thumb on a small biometric scanner at the base of the keyboard and unlocked the system. Wading through various partitions, he pulled up an executable file called POLARIS.