by Ben English
“That came from inside the building,” said one of the workers. Several looked up in alarm.
Another explosion sounded, closer, followed by a distant scream.
The security chief was not out of his depth yet, not by his expression. “Internal teams, pull back to the second defensive ring, both floors and basement, outside the operations center.” He indicated the window coverings. “Secure those barriers. Give us internal camera views on the main screen.”
Two men in fatigues took up positions next to Raines, further distancing Mercedes from him. One of them held Raines’computer.
Outside, more of the men were taking sniper hits. They lay supine on the ground, behind whatever cover they could find. The rain danced down around them, mostly horizontal in the hard wind, striking the ground so hard it cast droplets high into the air. There would be mist, if not for the gale.
A third explosion shook the walls. “How could he get inside?” asked Raines.
The main display screen shuffled views once again, showing men running through hallways and labs, storage rooms and stairwells. A fire burned in the lobby, and it looked as though the mural of the corporate logo had toppled forward, destroying much of the stairway.
A schematic of the building appeared on one screen, showing the damage thus far. The explosions and fires elicited a straight line from the front door towards the center of the building. Mercedes didn’t have to read the tiny font to realize which room lay at the center of the building.
The air pressure in the room changed. Mercedes felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck rise. The phone in her hand vibrated and as she dropped to her knees someone called out, “There, sir! Right there! He’s in the hallway on the other side of—”
Three things happened at once. The chief and the two guards flanking Raines shoved him back and drew their weapons, aiming them at the wall. Technicians stumbled out of their chairs and fell over each other in a wild rush for the door. And just before Mercedes clapped her hands hard over her ears, yawned wide, and squeezed her eyes shut, she imagined smelling Jack’s aftershave.
The explosion was monstrous, percussive, rupturing. Reality heaved and strained at its moorings. Mercedes felt the concussion wave even as she heard the crash of the wall buckling, like a Titan had filled a steel cauldron with silverware and then enthusiastically taken a circus performer’s sledgehammer to it. Bits of hot plastic tumbled across her back, and for the second time that day she was glad for the loan of the jacket.
Staccato flashes of light above her showed where the guards stood, firing in different directions. They were distorted, barely visible through a red fog. At about the same time her sense of hearing returned, she realized the light fixtures had all burst, and the room’s illumination came from an emergency lamp above the door and the numerous small fires which had sprung up all around them.
Visibility was barely a few feet, and her first wheezing breath told her it wasn’t fog but dust which hung in the air. She pushed herself up with one elbow, and the mound of rubble covering her shifted and moved on its own. Another body stirred next to her, probably the mousy technician. He pushed back on the wreckage enough for her to think about moving.
“Are you all right? Can you run?” The debris moved again, and there was no denying the form of the man who emerged from it. He winced, and she recognized the expression. For one insane moment Mercedes had a straight mental line all the way back through history to a night when he’d taken a newspaper in the side of the head for her. She half-expected Jack to grin. Not like it was a Sunday edition, or anything.
He cast aside the mouse-colored wig and the tatters of a flowered shirt as he rose in the midst of the soldiers. He wore black underneath, and Mercedes was only able to follow the general position of his head and hands as he whirled into them.
Jack did not fight fair. The group was half-stunned and deafened to begin with, and Jack’s hands and feet found weak points aplenty. He did not wait, throwing his mass behind a blow to the wrong side of a man’s knee, hammering another in the groin, and pushing his momentum up under a chin, driving it all the way up and back with terrible force and speed. By the time he stood at his full height, three of the guards had fallen. Jack spun in a circle, his heel fitting the eye of the nearest guard. A fifth man grappled with him. He merely twisted further into his attacker, gripped his wrist from above, and slammed the heel of his palm into the flat side of the man’s elbow. She heard the bone snap cleanly from across the room, followed by a grunt and a wail.
Motion did not cease. Every step he took in his deadly gyre through the guards, Jack seemed to transfer his momentum slightly from one angle of attack to another, never stopping, not waiting for counterattack or a moment of rest. With every move he took the fight closer to his opponents. They were disoriented, and he pressed them.
When he cut his way through the guards to reach Marduk, Jack slowed, as if savoring the view. As Marduk fumbled with a gun, Jack scooped up the man’s computer where it had fallen and brought it up underneath his face. Teeth clicked together as his head jerked back.
Marduk fell backwards but bent at the waist, arm extended, still trying to get off a shot. Jack brought the edge of the computer down on the other man’s wrist with all his strength and weight. This time the crack was the sound of the device, sundering.
Jack hauled him to his feet, pulled a fist back, and paused. Marduk’s eyes rolled, matching the general nerveless motion of his head. Jack released him and looked back at Mercedes.
“This is Ollie. I’ve got everything I came for.”
Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Pete didn’t even wait for the director to yell, “Cut!” before bolting from the soundstage.
He peeled out of the performance capture bodysuit on his way back to the parking lot, taking care to avoid ripping the garment but not slowing for anything. The cute production assistant trotted alongside him, and traded his duffel bag for the last piece of the suit. For Jack’s sake (the suit probably cost tens of thousands of dollars), Pete allowed the young woman to keep up with him. Down to his underwear, Pete threw himself into the car. He had far to travel, and it struck him as ironic that someone his age should suddenly find themselves so lacking in time.
The eastern skyline glowed. He wondered if he’d make it in time. The Tesla Roadster screamed out of the studio lot, into the blue dawn air, racing daybreak.
Vantage
It wasn’t Jack Flynn. The man on the screen most definitely wasn’t Jack Flynn, but they weren’t listening to him, were they?
As Miklos strode from the room, someone with a tray offered coffee in one of those ridiculous little Cuban cups. He ignored him, and the man couldn’t match Miklos’ stride. Once he reached the hallway, the other underlings pressed out of his way.
If Raines and Marduk paid him no attention, there was even less reason to remain. The force on the outside was obviously miniscule, at any rate. No more than three snipers and a man with a passing resemblance to Flynn, wearing a World War I officers’ uniform. The helicopter would only hold five, maybe seven with difficulty. At worst, the odds were three to one against the invading “force.”
He wondered at the probability of the real Jack Flynn surviving the waves of ‘sickness’ in Cuba. The new construction projects in Havana had made it possible for Miklos and his band of merry men salvaged from Cayo Verad to conceal aerosolized delivery systems in several of the buildings. Everyone in the Cuban government, along with all the visiting politicians, athletes, and elites from countries participating in the ‘Games, would be converted. Tourists were abandoning Cuba in volumes not seen since the Castro thugs took power, and most of them carried the nanodevices home with them.
To his knowledge, Flynn hadn’t been injected, so when Raines’ devices began activating in everyone around him, Jack Flynn would—do what? Come to the island? Even though it would be too late? Miklos thought about that. Perhaps he should have left more clues for Flynn to follow.
Miklos went to the glass walkway connecting the central labs with the worker’s living quarters. The false sunrise outside was failing, but he could still see most of the field of battle. He turned off the lights in the walkway and the adjoining corridors, so as to better see and not be seen. Snipers be damned, but he wasn’t going to give them an easy target.
The kitchen was nearby, and the air reeked of baking fruit. Sweetness wearied a man.
Marduk had shown him a database of the converted. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Miklos could easily imagine a world suddenly losing all the heads of state; such a thing would be glorious—but it was a glimpse of a second database which had taken his breath away. The second database was larger, a list of individuals who had been carrying an older version of the nanodevices for years already. This list sparked a sentiment in Miklos, brought him as close as he’d ever felt to—
To what? Anger? Hatred? Both were old acquaintances. No, something else, another emotion, like a great heaviness, but that wasn’t right. Fatigue—no. The second list represented a goal so primal to all of Miklos’ missions over the years; he should rejoice that Raines and his technology could so easily achieve it. Yet what was this strange disquiet?
The second database filled him with a different kind of feeling, a darkness he recognized immediately in whoever it was dressed as a sham Jack Flynn, cavorting on the hill outside the compound. The imposter walked loosely enough down from the ridge, a carelessness which was a fine mimicry of the real thing, but he lacked something Flynn carried with him, an idea Miklos had been struggling with since their meeting in the Illuminatus Tower. An idea troubling to translate into a measureable term. A lightness.
Peace was such a flimsy word. So were assurance and patience. Yet there it was. Miklos tried to convince himself it was directly tied to the man’s sheer arrogance, but looking at the real Jack Flynn, even in the midst of furious action, was like looking through a window onto a bright meadow in summertime.
The mortars fired. He recognized the tone and pitch of their roar. The walkway shook. Under his fingertips, the glass was cold, cold. Miklos thought of the second list, and actually shivered.
Wind out of the Balkans could bring early snow, and his father always gathered Miklos and his brothers to the lake to help him dig holes for fishing. His first memory was of Father, bringing a meal up out of that roiling dark hole in the ice: a fat, shiny trout.
The year he was finally strong enough to hold the rod himself, the men came. They were big, taller than Father, and wore dark green uniforms and furry caps. He thought their suits, especially the crimson and black piping, looked especially grand. They spoke to both his parents in a language Miklos had only heard on the radio. The men didn’t seem to care what his parents thought about anything. Oddly, they seemed very impressed with him, even though he was just a boy.
That night, Mother made his favorite foods, vegetable pie and sugary, stewed figs for dessert. The family stayed up much later than usual, telling stories. His mother didn’t want to cry, for some reason.
Miklos was drowsy the next morning, barely awake enough to get on a bus with the uniformed men. There were already children his age on the bus, speaking languages he did not understand.
“Where do we go?” he asked a uniformed man, the one with the grandest fur cap.
“We go a’ fishing,” came the reply.
Days passed, other children joined them. Nothing outside looked familiar, but the trees outside had long, green needles and there was less snow. The men were in a hurry, always shouting at the driver. The bus was high up in the mountains, in the woods, when the engine started to smoke and everyone got out. Many of the men got their uniforms dirty climbing under and around the bus to fix it.
A girl from Miklos’ village saw the sunlight first, and quick at a cat’s breath the rest of the children ran toward the meadow. The sun came down in a shining green pane against the mountainside, and there was no snow, just grass and flowers and fat bumblebees, and here and there, a bird. Even the grown men lost their scowls at signs of an early thaw.
They played until the engine was fixed. That hour in the sunlit meadow was the clearest memory of his childhood.
Zeroed
“They’ve got mortars?” Alonzo let this new complication wash over him as he surveyed the destruction below. Another gout of earth and shattered timber blew skyward. They were hammering the hell out of the forest where they assumed Jack would be.
“Groucho, can you get any info on their targeting system? It’s much too precise to be a human.”
Steve answered quickly. “Are you kidding? Do you know how much bandwidth it takes just to maintain and correlate the satellite feeds? Count yourself lucky we still have communications.”
Alonzo had to give him that. “As soon as the jig is up and they figure out Jack’s not really there, drop the Hollywood feed and see if you can hack the fire control system for their mortars.” The range of the weapons made finding a place to hide an effective impossibility. Judging from the speed at which they fired and the sound of detonation, Alonzo guessed they were Patrias. “What do you figure, Shemp?”
The Major had the binoculars. “Can’t see it. Sounds like twin barreled self-loading mortars — probably a single unit Patria AMOS. I’ll bet they’ve got it mounted on a vehicle.”
Okay. That was a problem to be dealt with sooner rather than later. The AMOS had a range of around 6 miles, and with computer-assisted targeting the GPS-guided rounds could arc out and find them pretty much wherever they tried to conceal themselves, anywhere on the island. Whoever Raines had running his security, Alonzo had to admire their choice. A better defensive weapon was difficult to find.
Her eyes still on the field of battle, Allison whispered, “Got a bad feeling, like we’re already zeroed in.”
Now that was a black thought. The two of them had been exceedingly careful since leaving Lighthouse Hill. And if they were targeted, who’s to say the Tanners weren’t also wearing bull’s-eyes on their backsides? Or Ian and Steve, back on the Hill?
Below, the mortar team began shelling the trees again, pounding the stumps and shreds of greenery. Alonzo counted fourteen salvos before the guns fell silent. Definitely a Patria AMOS. Given the right level of technology, the system could be run and maintained by a pair of idiots trained only to reload.
In the pause (while the mortar team topped off their ammo, had a beer, congratulated themselves on inventive gardening techniques, whatever) he heard an odd sound over the comms channel.
“You okay, Groucho? Sounds like you're choking.”
Steve was still snickering. “They think Jack is over the wall by now, so I just sent in some reinforcements. You know, to keep their attention outside.”
“What kind of reinforcements?”
“I’m pulling video files from his World War I movie, right? There’s this render farm in Glendale with four hundred computers crunching data all at the same time—”
Alonzo cut him off. “Stay on target, Red Five. Explain ‘reinforcements’.”
“A couple platoons of doughboys from the 42nd infantry, all dressed up to fight the Second Battle of the Marne.”
Alonzo tried hard not to smile. “That’s brilliant. Overkill, but brilliant.”
Allison handed him the binoculars and pointed. The two groups of soldiers that had been steadily moving toward their position had halted. “They’re taking cover. What do you think—”
She pushed his rifle into his hands. “We have to move, immediately.”
Alonzo scanned the perimeter for signs of the mortar team. “You think we’re blown?”
“I think they’ve known we were here all along and the only reason we’re still here is that they’ve been a bit preoccupied with Jack’s imaginary attack. Look at where we are.”
He swallowed his first response. Allison was combat-trained and her opinions deserved his attention.
The depression they lay in at the base of the tree was textboo
k perfect for a makeshift foxhole. Wide and deep enough to shelter them both, it would be difficult to find another spot just like it.
No, wait. There was an identical depression a dozen steps to their right, and another a bit further on. Instinct screamed against it, but Alonzo raised his head far enough to look the other way. Sure enough, another deep dent in the dark soil appeared an equal distance away.
The major shouldered her pack. “What’s the first thing you’d do if you got your hands on a new mortar piece, designed to defend a fixed position?”
Alonzo began stuffing his vest pockets with equipment. “Spend an afternoon firing live rounds, programming in all the fixed points of attack I could find.” He began to swear under his breath. The long, dark marks on the trunk of the tree were not singes from a forest fire.
The mortar system fired below, staccato, loosing its entire loadout of fourteen shells in rapid succession.
The Major was already running uphill, pumping hard for the ridgeline. Alonzo dropped everything but his gun and sprinted after her. The fact that he did not immediately hear explosive impacts below only spurred him on.
A roar like a freight train filled the air.
The Patria AMOS system was a device designed by men and women who actually felt combat needed to be winnable, and therefore felt no qualms about engineering a weapons system capable of completely obliterating whatever it was aimed at. The designers included a lovely setting, “multiple rounds, simultaneous impact,” in which the first few shells are shot at higher angles and with greater loads of propellant, so that they move in a very high arc. Succeeding rounds are launched immediately afterward at slightly smaller angles and with less propellant, so as to describe a lower arc but travel just as far as the first. A computer adjusted the angle and power of attack so that all the rounds would impact on the target at the same time.