Their injured man trailed behind them, and he looked back, saw Michael and sprayed a hail of bullets at him with a submachine gun. Bullets pinged off the cars and concrete; a wing mirror shattered.
Michael dove behind the nearest vehicle. He waited for an instant, then returned fire with his .45. Six rounds missed, but the last clipped the gunman in the kneecap and he went down. The others stopped to return fire.
He went down on the ground and looked under the car, and he saw the gunman getting up again. Michael put a bullet through his foot. He leaned out from behind the car and caught a glimpse of the others climbing into the back of their escape vehicle.
The injured gunman was already up again and moving for the van. Michael broke cover and sprinted forward, shooting him four more times in the back. The slide locked on his pistol, and the gunman kept going, staggering, nearly falling, and now slowing down. One of his cohorts leaned out the window.
The man pressed the button on the detonator he held, and the injured gunman exploded in a flash of fire and debris. Car windows shattered into thousands of pieces, and Michael collapsed under the force of the blast. He heard the screech of tires as a dust cloud washed over him. Sirens wailed in the distance, coming closer.
The dust and smoke dissipated as quickly as it had formed. Michael rubbed his eyes and wiped the dirt from his face. He coughed and choked on the filthy air, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears, while irritated tears ran down his cheeks. He blinked them away with the last traces of grit and turned around.
The motorcade burned with the smell of charred flesh and cordite. Empty brass casings rolled about the concrete with a gust of the wind. Samantha was standing outside the bar, staring down at some of the bodies, and her dirty face turned pale. Blood leaked from cuts on her palms.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Are you?”
She looked down at her hands. “I'm okay.”
“I think it was him on top of the car. The one who shot up Belton's family.”
“For certain?”
“Maybe. I'd need a better photo to be sure, but it doesn't matter now; he's long gone. I thought I almost had something then. They were wearing suicide vests to avoid capture.”
Samantha lifted the screaming baby out of the pushchair. She rocked it gently, whispering to it, but the baby only cried more. “I don't like the way things are going around here.”
She walked towards to one of the ambulances.
The SAM battery had been bought from the South Africans, sitting on a tracked carriage with two missiles mounted either side of the turret, and a radar dish spun circles on its mast. Three teenage soldiers stood guard beside it, dressed in old DPM camouflage and woolly hats in place for their helmets.
They carried their rifles with bayonets locked over the barrels. Michael wondered what life was like in the army now, or what was left of it at least. He moved on towards the airport.
Three terminals were still in ruins, and rubble was strewn about the car parks, long since stripped of anything that could be sold for scrap. Cluster-munition craters pockmarked four runways and left only two untouched. He approached the east terminal, where five European men with skinheads lurked off to the right of the entrance.
They wore combat boots, muscles bulging beneath their clothes, and a group of teenage girls waited beside them, dressed like prostitutes in low cut tops and imitation leopard print. One of the men argued with the youngest. He held her wrist with a vice grip, jabbing his finger at her head every time he barked another barrage of foreign words.
She cried and trembled, tears turning black with mascara as they washed away her make up, and the other girls regarded her with scorn. Some of the men saw Michael watching, and one of them came towards him, puffing away on his cigarette.
“You want to fuck her? One hundred pound,” he said with a Balkan accent.
“She's sick. Her hair's falling out,” Michael said.
The man flexed his muscles. “Fuck off, you little bitch. None of your business. I can break your neck.”
She let out a sob, and snot trickled down her upper lip. One of the other girls shouted at her and then slapped her twice across the face. Michael turned away and joined the crowds going into the terminal.
Harsh lights lit the interior, shining off polished floors, and people came up to him, offering to sell items he had no interest in for far too much money. A single moment of hesitation and they'd renew their sales pitch with twice as much vigour, hounding after him as he tried to get through the crowds, and finally they'd move onto somebody else and it would start all over again.
Beyond the market stalls was a unit of contractors from some private military company. They paced the terminal with a cocky swagger, sometimes taking a cut off the merchants or deeming a young woman to be a possible security risk, so they could march her off to be searched in private.
The self-service terminals hadn't worked since the war. He went straight to the desk and checked in. He was early, the planes were delayed, and he joined the crowds in one of the waiting areas.
Plastic signs on hung on the walls, telling him he could purchase a magazine or book to pass the time from one of the shops that did not trade in black market goods. He'd been there for twenty minutes when somebody sat down beside him.
“Long time no see,” the man said.
Michael looked up. He studied the man's face for a moment. “Really long time.”
Paul Howe gave him a grin. “I'm glad to see somebody else from our unit is still alive these days. I didn't think you'd be one of them, though. Last I saw, you were pretty fucked up. Small world.”
“I saw Charlie the other day. Small world indeed.”
“Really? That is a surprise,” Paul said. He was dressed in a sharp business suit and smelt of expensive aftershave. “Myself? I'm making some proper dosh working for the bank. They're sending me to Washington for a bit to see up some stuff in one of their offices. Working for a big company does have its perks. You?”
“I'm going to Texas.”
“Too bad,” Paul said. “We could've had a few drinks and trawled some of the nightclubs. I hear they have some real hotties there, and a lot of them are desperate for a sugar daddy or two. Lots of fun, not that I'd oblige them for more than a night or two. Maybe some other time.”
There was a woman waiting for him with a sign bearing his name. She was in her mid-thirties, hair tied back in a bun and dressed in a black business suit.
“You're here to meet me?” Michael said.
She flashed him an amused smile. “It does seem like it, unless there's another Michael Ward on your plane? Call me Megan. Did you make it through security okay?”
“The platoon of Marines back there? Yeah, I got through them all right. It's a little more efficient than what we have back home. Who are you with?”
“Who am I with?”
“What agency or company do you work for? What's your job?”
Megan gave him that smile again. “I'm not here in any official capacity. Look, it's best if you don't ask questions; things will go a lot smoother that way. I can get paid, and you can get what you came for.”
“What have I come for?”
“They didn't tell you? Figures. Let's just get going, this isn't the place for this kind of discussion. Come on, my car's parked outside.”
He followed her through Terminal A of the Reagan National airport. Private contractors escorted a line of shackled deportees in orange boiler suits past him.
“It's a little tense around here,” Michael said.
Megan nodded. “We're on the verge of a second civil war here, and everyone's eyeing their neighbours. Lots of suspicion and accusations flying around. It's not pretty. What's wrong? You keep looking back.”
“Just trying to avoid some guy I know from the war. He was an arsehole then, and he's still an arsehole now. He killed a lot of people, and not all of them were soldiers.”
“Raw,” Megan said.
They took her car away from the airport and found a line of traffic on the main road stretching up to the bridge, ending suddenly as though it was were blocked by an imaginary wall.
A tank rolled across the bridge. Baggage, spare parts and reactive armour bricks covered its turret and hull. Another followed, and then more; infantry fighting vehicles, trucks and humvees joined the convoy. Drivers honked their horns in support, as the column passed them by.
“Don't worry, they're National Guard moving down to Virginia. The government are worried enough that they're stripping garrisons from the Canadian occupation force.”
The car shook with each vehicle that drove past.
“Somebody planning on starting a war?”
“The country is practically split in half. It's north versus south all over again, but the reasons are different this time, not that it counts for much. There's problems on the Mexican border as well. I don't think anybody really wants another war, but there's a lot of posturing going on. I'm hoping it'll die down soon so we can sort Mexico out.”
“Maybe the people here wouldn't be itching for another war if they'd seen what happened in Europe.”
“Do you guys even have an army?”
“Half of it is still rotting and rusting in Germany. They sold another quarter off on the cheap to private companies and kept the left overs.”
The traffic started forward again.
“What happens if you get attacked? We can't keep bailing you out all the time. You're on your own now.”
“Your lot sat the last one out, but it was probably for the best. Europe wasn't like the Asian flashpoints. Nobody wants to invade our country, or what's left of it, anyway. They can save themselves the time and effort by buying it out with a few billion here and there.”
Megan smiled. “Okay, but I don't want to hear any whining when you get yourselves in trouble and we can't come to the rescue.”
Michael leaned back in his seat and looked out the window. He fought off a yawn. “Nobody cares.”
Washington was free of destruction; no destroyed buildings or abandoned cars scattered across the roads, and people walked the streets without fear of being set upon by cannibals. Eventually they pulled up outside a hotel.
“I'll get you settled in here. Don't worry, it's on the house.”
“So when do I find out what you're not telling me?”
Megan sighed, and her expression turned cold, devoid of what little amusement she'd shown during the ride. “Look, I know you're in way over your head, and you don't have a clue what's going on, but you've heard of that old expression, 'curiosity killed the cat', right? Have a long and hard think about how that might relate to you, and then think on it again. You'll live longer that way.”
“You can take the hood off now,” Megan said.
Michael pulled it off, and daylight blinded him. He waited for his eyes to adjust, and then looked around, surveying the abandoned buildings that surrounded them. They'd been on the road for an hour and a half.
“I spend days of my life crawling around crumbling factories and warehouses back home. You could have taken us to somewhere a bit more scenic.”
“Nobody comes here; we'll have plenty of privacy. Let's go, we're meeting two others inside.”
They left her car and trod their way across broken bricks and gravel. The factory, warehouse or whatever it had been, was cleaned out and devoid of everything except dust and bits of the ceiling which had fallen in. Dull streaks of overcast daylight streamed through broken windows.
“Who are we meeting?” Michael said.
“They're not here yet. They'll give you their names if they feel like it, if not, don't ask.”
Michael kicked a chunk of roof tile across the floor. “Are they going to keep us long?”
Megan gave him that wry smile again. “For somebody who shouldn't be asking questions, you sure do ask a lot of questions.”
He shrugged and stared up at the grey sky through the windows. “I'm hoping your threats are just bluster.”
“That's hoping for a lot, isn't it?”
“Well, I figure that's a very expensive suit you're wearing, so you're probably a professional, and I've seen people with the same walk and posture; they're normally security, military or law enforcement, so it doesn't seem like it's in your best interests to shoot me.”
Her smile widened. “That's an interesting assessment, but more fiction than truth. It's not just you who gets in trouble if you ask too many questions, I do as well.”
“Then we're both pieces in somebody else's game,” Michael said, checking his watch.
“More or less, but some are more powerful and important than others, right?”
He paced towards one of the steel pillars supporting the roof and leaned against it. “Sounds like something out of a terrible book on philosophy.”
A car approached nearby, crunching gravel beneath its tires. They exchanged a glance with each other, and her hand drifted towards the pistol holstered on her belt. The engine went quiet, doors opening and slamming shut, and footsteps came closer.
Two men in suits entered the empty building, and the youngest, a man who looked to be in his late twenties, wore a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. His counterpart had a black eye and several slight scars down the left side of his face.
The rougher looking one waved them forward. “It's better if we do this in the van, unless you like sitting on the ground. This way,” he said, gesturing for them to follow.
Megan nodded to Michael. He followed after them. The utility van was an inconspicuous white, but the windows had been blacked out. They slid the side door open and motioned for him to get inside, and he complied after a moment of hesitation. A foam mattress had been laid over the vehicle's floor, and the roof was just high enough for them to sit cross-legged.
Megan squeezed in beside him, and he smelt expensive perfume as she slid the door shut and plunged the interior into darkness.
“Sorry for the tight fit, but this really is the best way for us to meet. And the safest,” the elder man said.
“You're late,” Megan said.
“Traffic, sorry. You can call me Rick. This here is Danny.”
Danny unfolded a laptop and pressed the power button. The glow of its screen lit their faces.
“We've been briefed on what to provide you, but there's a catch; it's part of the deal made by whoever sent you here. You only get a limited hard copy on a memory stick. What we're dealing with here is top secret, classified data. Even if you talk about this to everybody, there'll never be enough evidence to implicate anybody. People will think you're full of shit. Do you understand?” Rick said.
Michael glanced at each of them in turn, silent, and finally he nodded. “You know why I'm here, then?”
Danny pushed his glasses up as they slid down the bridge of his nose. “It's quite an interesting turn of events, I'll give you that.”
“I'm sure you have some suspicions of your own already, based on what you've seen, correct?” Rick said.
“I've seen some very strange things. Men capable of wiping out entire security teams single-handedly. I've seen gunmen go down with fatal injuries, and then get straight up again like they don't feel pain. We're always one step behind them, turning up medical supplies that I've never even heard of before.”
“Well, you're not dealing with the supernatural, I'll tell you that. It's military technology developed for us during the wars. Ten years old and still top of the line. Only the Chinese came close to anything similar, but we don't know what they've got these days,” Rick said.
“Go on. I gather we're not talking about simple body modification for fashion models or cosmetics.”
Danny nodded. “That would be correct. Some of it's based and founded upon off the shelf commercial technologies sold and traded worldwide. It's the other bits you need to be worried about, developed for special forces teams operating in China.”
“You know, sometimes we get wind of stuff like th
is. Surgical enhancements to increase people's abilities in work or sport, but I never thought they could do this with it,” Michael said.
“No,” Rick said, shaking his head. “What you get wind of is cheap knock off tech out of Africa. It's over hyped and over sold, and the only people who buy this shit are desperate middle-class families trying to make their children perform better in school. They it sell it to them saying that'll get better grades, concentrate for longer or do better on the athletics team. It's useless for anything in the real world, but people don't know any better.”
Michael fingered a piece of grit out the corner of his eye. “This is all new to me. We're on the ropes back in England.”
“You and everywhere else. Black market surgeons will fix you up on the cheap in Johannesburg, if you don't mind the risk of dying from blood poisoning or infection. You can get the same here or in China. Anywhere else? Forget it. Probably for the best. I've had to clear a ton of this shit up in Washington, a real pain in the ass. A lot of people take the risk, and some end up regretting it more than others.”
Danny flipped the laptop around so Michael could see a screen of the human body, diagrams and charts. He stared at the screen for several seconds, aware of the others waiting for his response. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “This doesn't mean much to me; I don't know what any of these things do.”
“Okay, okay, that's fine,” Danny said. “I can explain for you; it's a map of all the modifications made to the body. You see here, you've got surgery performed on the muscles for better running performance, right? Eye implants here, and more surgery done on the arms and organs. You can see everything that's changed when somebody undergoes these enhancements.
“And with these graphs here, this line is a general averaging of results from an infantryman who's passed through performance tests during training. This line up here is what the average looks like when they've been enhanced. It's a composite of things like physical fitness, endurance, cognitive thinking, yeah, you get the picture.”
“That's quite a jump, but it's just a number. How does this number translate into the real world? I need to know how to find these people, and I need to know how to kill them. Shooting them obviously doesn't work,” Michael said.
The Chop Shop Page 10