Neoliberal Economists Must Die ! (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 3)

by Timothy Gawne

  On the other hand, the increasing violence had done wonders for their reality video show, and had also boosted sales of their video game series. These revenues were not as big as an undiluted score on an apartment full of cocaine or gold or medicine, but they were more consistent. What with all the budget cuts in federal funding he wasn’t sure if they could have continued operations without the video revenues.

  He remembered reading old science fiction stories where, in order to deal with a growing population, the landscape was covered in mile-high skyscrapers. What rubbish. As populations grow resources get tight, and skyscrapers take a lot of energy to build and operate. Except for the super-rich, most people lived in three- or four-story buildings, low enough that they don’t need elevators or high-pressure water pumps or exotic high-strength alloy steel frames. These increasingly ramshackle constructions covered the land in an unbroken swath around the city of New York for hundreds of kilometers in all directions, not ending but rather merging with the urban sprawl of Boston to the north, Chicago to the West, and New Jersey to the South.

  The trick to these operations was all in the planning. They had spent the last week checking out what looked to be a major distribution center of illicit goods. On the surface it looked no different from all the other low extended buildings in the area, but computer analysis of local traffic had flagged it as suspicious. Carefully, so as not to sound the alarm, Masterson and his team had used a variety of techniques to map out the building. Deep radar, millimeter waves, sonar, seismic sensors, and thermographic imagers had been integrated with sophisticated software to give him a complete 3D reconstruction of the building. He watched it on his computer screen, with the floors and walls rendered transparent so he could watch the people coming and going in real-time. Individuals with valid biometric IDs showed up as white outlines with their names and status appended, unregistered people showed up as yellow outlines with provisional intelligence. People who the scanners indicated as carrying weapons were flagged with red circles.

  They had watched a fair number of local police enter the building over the last week. Of course the local law enforcement were in on whatever was going on here, it would have been impossible otherwise. They timed the bust to when there were no local cops in the area: even if they were corrupt, killing the local police was always bad karma. Although, if one or two of them got whacked that would probably be OK, as long as the locals didn’t think that it was deliberate.

  A lot of the stuff that was shipped to and from the building was unknown, but many contraband goods have low-power transmitting ID tags that are either hard to remove, or that used techniques that the criminals didn’t know about. The list of illicit goods stored at the warehouse grew: cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, antibiotics, insulin, unregistered computers, and machine tools. More than enough to justify a bust.

  Normally about this time he would be giving an overview about his attack strategy to the video crews, but this episode the production staff had switched things up. They were interviewing the newest member of the team, doing a sort of human-interest where-did-you-grow-up-what-inspired-you-to-be-the-best-of-the-best kind of fluff, and Masterson would explain what happened after the raid was over. Producing a reality video show was not his specialty; it sounded fine to him.

  He hit the general communications button. “OK people, it’s time to move. We have several possible armed individuals, so set your pharma to level 2, visors on black. Sniper teams take out the sentries; the assault squads move in, the rest hold the perimeter. Initiate in five minutes.”

  They had three levels of pharmaceuticals to use in an assault. Level 1 was hardly more than good cup of coffee and some mild pain-killers: placebo effect, mostly. Level 2 had low-dose amphetamines combined with more serious anti-pain meds and some new kind of anti-fear drugs that the chemists had come up with lately. It would make them faster and more aggressive than all but the most elite unmedicated troops, but not so much that they would lose control or have much of a hangover later. They used level 2 when they faced the likelihood of armed resistance. Masterson swallowed his orange level 2 combat pharma pill.

  Level 3 would turn them into unstoppable berserk twitch-fast killing machines immune to pain or fear, but rumor had it that the payback was a bitch. Masterson had never gone to level 3 pharma and never much wanted to. Originally level 3 combat pills had been colored black with a bright red skull, but this had made the pills look so cool that some troopers had been unable to resist trying them. This had led to issues, so the level three pills had been redesigned to look as boring as possible: they were now small, unmarked, and a slightly dirty white. They reminded Masterson of an over-the-counter antihistamine that had been left in a back pants pocket for too long. Nobody had taken the new design pills without authorization since the design switch.

  The combat pharma pills came in individual foil pouches like the ones used for condoms. Appropriate, because you only opened them when you were getting ready to fuck someone.

  The sniper teams opened up all at once. Using ultra-high-velocity Accuracy International BBB-3 rifles (slogan: “When hitting a fly at a thousand meters is not good enough”) that fired 10 mm solid tungsten rounds, they shot the armed lookouts directly through walls and floors. In order to use the copyright images of various weapons in their games, the Team had made a deal to mention their slogans whenever they talked about them in the voice-over commentary. It was a pain, and sometimes made them sound a bit like morons, but their cut of the in game weapons sales was one more addition to the bottom line.

  The snipers used scopes that were linked into the virtual reality computer-synthesized layout of the building; thus they needed no direct line-of-site, and they were positioned in rooms around the target structure that did not have windows so that they could remain unobserved. There had been no warning; one moment the armed suspects had been walking around in the supposed safety of their building, the next their heads exploded and their bodies dropped.

  Next came the assault teams. It was an art maneuvering over a hundred people around a building in a crowded slum without clueing the residents in that something was going to happen. A few of the assault troops came out of unmarked black armored vehicles that had been parked in the area for some time, and because there were no more of them than usual for this area, they had attracted no attention. Some of the troops were delivered from helicopters that had seemingly been flying routine patrols and then suddenly diverted to land. The rest burst out of delivery trucks that had been making regular runs for months and been commandeered at the last moment.

  The armored assault troops broke through the flimsy doors of the building with shaped charges and raced through the corridors. Everyone they encountered was met with a dozen heavily armed and armored troopers all pointing their weapons at them and yelling “Police! Drop now!” Stunned by the sudden and overwhelming show of force, people simply complied. They were efficiently handcuffed, shackled, and hogtied before they even realized what had happened, and then the assault teams moved on to the next suspect. They used flash grenades and light dazzlers to further disorient the suspects. Their own visors would automatically filter out the effects. Watching the computer display Masterson could tell that this was going to be another textbook operation. The assault teams were already halfway through the building, not a shot had been fired, and at least 80 suspects had already been apprehended.

  Time for that personal appearance that the production company was so fond of. Masterson opened the main hatch at the back of his armored personnel carrier and stepped out into the street. He closed his visor and cycled it to black (it could present as a reflective silver, which could be intimidating, but black was more practical). His ID and rank were on special black panels that could only be seen with the correct polarized lenses (the possession of polarized lenses by civilians had been banned some time back to preserve the anonymity of the federal police). As a personal sidearm he carried an Amalgamated Armaments AA34 “GutterBuster” automatic shot
gun (slogan: “When it’s time to pick up the trash, pick up a GutterBuster first!”), it was only 20-gauge but had a high rate of fire, was easy to control, and the shells were programmable for either fragmentation or armor-piercing.

  As Masterson strode confidently into the target building he was joined by his personal guards. To his left was Sergeant John “Big John” Anderson. He was one of those coffee-colored enormous African-American hybrids whose ancestors had been strong enough to survive the slave ships in the 18th century and then mingled genes with the Europeans. “Big John” carried a Mitsubishi M12 “ThunderBall” Gatling gun (slogan: “When everybody is against you, kill them”) with an ammo feed that linked to an enormous backpack. It was ridiculously overpowered for a personal weapon, but “Big John” was strong enough to handle it, and the fans loved it. It might not have been very practical, but the Gatling gun had great intimidation value, and intimidation was the single most powerful weapon that the team had.

  To his right was Corporal Fred “Assassin” Ayatami. “Assassin” was perhaps half the size of “Big John,” but twice as smart so it averaged out. He carried a deceptively small FN Mark IVb hyper-velocity flechette gun (slogan: “One shot, one kill. And at eight grams a shot, you can carry a lot of shots”). Ayatami was famously edgy and neurotic, and an even more famously expert marksman.

  It had been less than a minute since the assault had begun, but it was already over. Masterson walked down a corridor and passed one of the lookouts that his sniper team had taken out; the hypervelocity round had completely exploded the head leaving only a stump of a neck and a sticky mass on the far wall. Everywhere there were handcuffed suspects that were being tagged and processed by the follow-up troops.

  The floors might once have been carpeted, or tiled, but now they were bare concrete with a century of stains on them. The walls were more variable. In places they were unpainted plywood, or ancient drywall over metal studs papered with tattered and faded posters for rock concerts that had been over before most of the occupants of the building had even been born, or plain black polyethylene sheeting held in place with staples or gray industrial tape. The lights were mostly burned out: shattered glass husks of obsolete fluorescent bulbs in corroded fixtures interspersed with a few operational modern solid-state lights. There were skylights made of clear plastic sheeting in the top roof, and here and there holes had been carved out of the floor to let the daylight penetrate down to the lower levels. Even through his respirator he could catch a whiff of sewage and vomit; the odor must be pretty rank. In short, it was like the inside of any building in this kind of district.

  Masterson raised his visor so that the video crews could get a close-up shot of his face. The filtered air from his respirator blew gently over his face, saving him from the worst of the smell, but it was still pretty ripe. He turned and addressed the cameraman that was tagging along behind him. “That might have been a speed record, even for us. With careful planning and solid teamwork nothing is impossible, and proof that crime does not profit. Now let’s go see what we’ve bagged.”

  They descended into the basement of the structure. There were boxes of contraband pharmaceuticals: erythromycin, hydrocortisone, aldosterone, all drugs that could only legally be sold through a registered affordable health care plan. This was a massive violation of patent and copyright. There was also nicotine and alcohol, technically these were not contraband per se, but standard employment contracts required that workers be totally free of all drugs at all times, so these could only be legally sold to someone who could prove that they did not have such a contract. There was quite a lot of it, and nobody else had a lien on it, so it would make a nice profit for the team at auction. At least if they could keep those bastards from the Copyright Policetm away from their hard-earned score.

  There was a sub-basement to the building. The entrance to it was a steel staircase with a diamond-tread pattern on the steps leading down past ancient salt-encrusted concrete cinderblocks. The scans had shown some sort of machine shop down there. Doubtless there would be copyright and patent violations galore, but jury-rigged amateur machine tools were not as liquid an asset as bulk pharmaceuticals. They would probably end up just selling the metal for scrap, but every little bit helps.

  They made it to the bottom of the stairs and “Assassin” Ayatami burst into fragments of blood and bone. Something hit Masterson in the face; his vision clouded. He was knocked over, but had enough presence of mind to close his visor. People were screaming over his comm link: “What happened?” “What the fuck was that?” and “Holy shit they’ve got a bloody CANNON!”

  Masterson was lying on his side, still in shock. His left eye hurt. Something was stuck into it. His ears were ringing. He saw a big metal tube. Fuck. It really was a cannon: maybe a 30 mm bore, unpainted bare steel, with a crude square blast shield. Primitive, but powerful. As he watched, the cannon fired again. He could not tell if it had hit any of his people but the shock wave from the blast made his whole body hurt despite his armor.

  “Big John” opened up with his Gatling gun. Even with the acoustic dampers in his helmet the sound was like someone tearing open steel plates with their fingernails. The tracers stitched over the far side of the sub-basement. The cannon and who knows how many people disintegrated under the barrage of firepower.

  There was the faint glimpse of a dark gray object flickering across the sub-basement, and then “Big John” was down with both of his legs missing and only stumps of bones and some flesh scraps trailing out of his pelvis. A bomb! The damn terrorists had thrown a home-made bomb at them. Masterson managed to lever himself onto his knees. There was movement at the far end of the sub-basement; he opened up with his automatic shotgun, and kept firing until the ammo ran out. He was still taking fire. It seemed like light pistol rounds. A few of them pinged ineffectively off his armor, but anybody using a real firearm could always get lucky.

  The body of Big John had a large semi-automatic pistol, a Combined-Arms model G “Manstopper” (slogan: “Will the next person to die please get in my face”) holstered on his hip. Masterson frantically undid the fasteners, grabbed the pistol, and searched the body for more clips: he found two, each with 15 rounds. The gun fired big 12-millimeter slugs, and it was comforting to have a weapon back in his hands. He saw more movement at the far wall and he carefully squeezed off two rounds, He thought that he had hit something. The recoil from the damn pistol had sprained his wrist. What was it with his team and over-powered weapons, anyhow?

  He activated his comms. “This is Masterson. Tactical: report.”

  His comms were full of screaming and frantic cries for help. He hit the command over-ride button: “Dammit I want some signals discipline here! Tactical, give me an update. The rest of you can just shut up and die like real troopers. Now!”

  The comms quieted down, and his tactical officers back in the command APC reported in. “Captain,” one of them said, “everything looked good until you entered the sub-basement. The terrorists must have had a lot of serious firepower hidden away there, and our scanners either missed it or misclassified it. We have lost biometrics on four troopers. They are presumed dead, and five others are seriously wounded. The terrorists also seem to have taken casualties but their remaining capabilities are unknown. Suggest a fighting retreat, and then we sterilize the sub-basement with a missile strike.”

  “Agreed. Give the order: all troopers fall back. Tactical: make sure all confirmed wounded are accounted for. Set up a thermobaric strike for the sub-basement. Give us three minutes: mark! Everyone, let’s move it! Go go go!”

  Masterson got up and tried to run up the stairs out of the sub-basement. Something hit him on the right shoulder and he fell. One of the troopers grabbed him and helped him up. As he cleared the sub-basement the surviving terrorists opened up with something else heavy. It was not obvious what kind of weapon it was but it chewed through the concrete walls with alarming ease. The trooper that had helped him was hit. His visor shattered and blood exp
loded out of where his face should have been. Masterson cleared the basement and was running out of the main corridor on the first level. The suspects that had been handcuffed and hogtied tried desperately to wriggle out of the firezone, but helpless on the floor they were slaughtered and mangled by the dozen.

  One of their helicopters had moved in to provide some close-air support. A little too close air support. It was a Mistubishi M444 Quadrotor “Dominator” (slogan: “We own the sky in the 200 to 500 meter altitude range in built-up-environments with a medium threat outlook”), and was nominally protected against anything up to 12 mm standard anti-air artillery. Whoever was left in the target building hit it with something larger than a nominal 12 mm standard anti-air artillery piece. The quadrotor slewed out of control, shearing into the side of another building while its chin-mounted shrapnel howitzers fired at random into the rest of the city killing perhaps two dozen civilians before it finally impacted into the main road level and disintegrated into a cloud of graphite composite fragments and burning aviation fuel.

  Masterson barely made it out of the building when the heavy weapons strike hit. A Lockheed-Cheney Firebird Mark 23 surface-to-air missile (slogan: “Say Goodnight, Dick”) had been launched from one of the drones that routinely circled the city. Its reinforced titanium-alloy casing effortlessly penetrated the concrete floors to the sub-basement, where the warhead exploded within 10 centimeters of the selected target coordinates. Unlike conventional explosives, a thermobaric weapon uses atmospheric oxygen to combine with the fuel, thus creating not just a much bigger blast, but also sucking the air out of the target region. Just before it exploded the Mark 23 sensed the local air currents, oxygen levels, temperature, and relative humidity. In milliseconds it squirted out precisely measured levels of fuel from multiple nozzles, and then ignited the streams. The weapon had been programmed to burn out just the sub-basement, but there were quite a lot of explosives and fuel stored down there, so the fireball erupted up and filled the entire building.