Cybernarc

by Robert Cain

  The SEALs were in remarkably high spirits, considering they’d just come within an ace of getting themselves killed. They were especially free with their praise for Rod and the way he’d extracted them from a bad spot.

  "Hey, what’d you think of ol’ Rambot now, hey?” Zitterman said, exuberant. "Took on a fuckin’ tank one-on-one and trashed the sucker! Tore the goddamned turret clean off with his bare hands!”

  "It was not a tank,” Rod replied calmly. "It was a Mowag Roland security vehicle with four-wheel drive and—”

  "Hell, I got an eyeful through my scope from up the hill,” Yancey said. "I thought he was gonna pick up that mother and dump it!”

  "That would have been impossible,” Rod said. "The Mowag Roland masses nearly five metric tons, and I—” "Aw, shit, Rambot!” Gordon said. "Stop spoilin’ the story with facts'.”

  "Josh’s right, Cybernarc my man,” Isaacson said, picking up on the popular name given Rod by the newspapers. "If you can’t tell a story, leave it to the experts who know how to stretch the facts to fit. War stories just aren’t any fun, otherwise.”

  Rod appeared to consider this. "It was appropriate, the way things worked out,” he said. He sounded almost hesitant.

  "How’s that, Cyb?” Zitterman asked.

  "The second Roland, the one parked in front of the hacienda. It was a Mowag Roland, an armored vehicle of Swiss manufacture. I destroyed it with approximately seventy .50 caliber rounds from an M2HB machine gun.”

  "Yeah? So?”

  "So, I . . . turned it into Swiss cheese.”

  There was a stunned silence as the SEALs stared at the robot.

  "Rod,” Drake said tentatively. "Was that a joke . . . ?”

  "I admit that the substance of humor still eludes me,” Rod replied. "However, I have noted that humor seems to depend both on exaggeration—stretching facts, as Isaacson suggests—and on chance similarities of the phonetics of key words of disparate meaning. While I did not actually turn the Roland into cheese, I noted that—”

  "Shit, Rod, don’t goddamn explain it!” Gordon said, laughing. "You’re all right, boy!”

  The others joined in the laughter, and Zitterman stood and slapped the robot on its back, eliciting a dull, metallic thump.

  "Y’know, if we hadn’ta had to abort,” Zitterman said, sitting down again and rubbing his hand, "I’ll bet he could’ve womped up a few more good stories. Appeared to me that Cyb was walking all over them campesinos.”

  "Hell,” Saylor said. "I think we oughta take ol’ Cybernarc back in there, kick ass, and take names. Damn all, we were winning!”

  "How about it, L-T?” Campano asked. "They think they nailed us. Let’s sneak back and give ’em a chance to reconsider, huh?”

  "Can’t do it, guys,” Drake said, shaking his head. "The mission’s scrubbed. We go back in there, it’ll be like walking into a stirred-up hornet’s nest.” He nodded toward where Campano was checking one of Hoskins’s dressings. "Besides, Hoss needs a medevac, ASAP.”

  He found he hated himself for his own common sense.

  It was strange, really. During the brief and furious firefight, Drake had almost forgotten about Luis Delgado. The pain, the anguish he still felt over the deaths of Meagan and Stacy had—not vanished, certainly, but—receded. He remembered himself standing in the gateway with Rod and, just now, listening to Rod’s attempt at a joke . . . laughing.

  Back at the Farm a week ago, he’d doubted that he would ever laugh again.

  Now that they were clear of the Salazar compound, he found himself thinking of Delgado again, feeling, savoring the hatred that still burned deep in his soul for the man.

  There was nothing Drake wanted more in life than the chance to walk back into that compound, put his Uzi to Delgado’s forehead, and pull the trigger.

  But he simply could not afford the luxury. To return into that free fire zone would be certain death, for Hoss, for the rest of the SEALs as well.

  "Roger, Duster,” Carter said suddenly, still speaking into the radio. "I read you! The weather is too hot, repeat, too hot. Request immediate pickup, LZ Fox Blue, over. . . .”

  Drake looked at Rod, who was standing quietly a few meters apart from the rest. As though reading Drake’s unspoken question, he turned expressionless eyes on the SEAL officer. "The dust-off chopper has received our transmission, Lieutenant,” Rod said. His head was tilted slightly, as though listening to something beyond the range of human hearing. "It is taking on fuel aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter as planned, seventeen nautical miles from here on a bearing of zero-zero-eight. It will be at the LZ within forty-five minutes. The pilot is requesting information on our package.”

  Drake nodded. The "package” was Delgado. Carter had been coached on what to say.

  "That is affirmative, Duster,” Carter said. "We have the package. Repeat, we have the package. Request immediate pickup. . . .”

  The lie might make Diamond show his hand.

  Of course, it left the SEALs dangling. The only difference between this mission and SNOWDROP was that this time they knew what to expect.

  A moment later, Carter began packing up the radio while he reported the same information Rod had just eavesdropped on. "We’re clear for a pickup,” he said. "Forty-five minutes at Fox Blue. And they think we have Delgado.”

  "Okay, gang,” Drake said, standing. "Let’s move out.”

  The feeling of deja vu was sharp and relentless. The helo landing zone was only two more miles away, just beyond the next heavily forested ridge line, and it took the SEALs less than thirty-five minutes to get there at a steady, jogging trot. The LZ itself appeared to be an old clearing opened up for cultivation. The weird, spiky shapes of marijuana plants bobbed and nodded in the light as the SEALs emerged from the woods and cautiously shone their flashlights across the area, probing for a response. The field might once have been guarded, but as had been guessed from the satellite photos, this one had been abandoned some time ago. The marijuana was growing wild.

  Zitterman and Saylor set out the beacons while Campano tended to Hoskins and Drake watched the dark northern sky.

  He heard the far-off thutter of an approaching helo. He picked up the radio handset and keyed to the helo’s frequency.

  "Duster, this is Blue Ranger,” Drake called. "Come in, Duster. You’re close. Over.”

  "Roger, Ranger,” the voice replied. It was not Texan this time but carried a flat, almost nasal midwestern twang. "Approaching LZ. Show us your light.”

  "Hit the light, Zit.”

  Zitterman angled his flashlight into the sky, the lens covered with green acetate.

  "Ranger, Duster. I see a green light.”

  "Roger that, Duster. Green light. LZ is clear. Park anywhere.”

  The helo’s roar swelled, thundering out of the night. Then a searchlight stabbed on, a dazzling shaft of brilliance illuminating a circle in the middle of the LZ clearing. The marijuana plants and other weeds thrashed back and forth in the chopper’s downdraft.

  "Come on in, everybody,” the helo pilot’s voice said over the radio. "Let’s go home!”

  "Watch it,” Drake warned. He shouted, rather than using the radio, in case someone on the helo was listening.

  The helicopter was a Huey Slick, identical to the one that had ambushed SNOWDROP. Drake found himself trying to feel the intentions of the man aboard that aircraft.

  Combat instincts. Once Drake had prided himself on them. Then he’d relied on them during the nightmare in his house, relied on them and seen his wife and daughter horribly killed when they failed. When he had failed, and the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, had happened.

  His instincts told him now that this was another trap, but the loneliness and grief that had been hidden just beneath the surface rose now, shaking him, shaking his confidence. Suppose he was wrong . . . ?

  "C’mon people!” the pilot’s voice called. The Huey was hovering just above the field now, drifting slightly to the left in swirling clouds of dust. "Shake
a leg!”

  There was only one way to find out.

  Drake stood, then stepped into the light. . . .

  © Chapter Fourteen

  BY boosting the sensitivity of his IR vision, Rod could make out the thermal images of people moving inside :he helo, reading their body heat through the thin metal skin of the Huey UH-1H. Under IR, the drifting helo was a ghostly gray shape with white-hot engine manifold and exhaust nozzle. The side door was sliding back, and within the darkness, the luminous green shapes of soldiers crouched inside clearly visible.

  "It’s an ambush!” he transmitted, in the same moment that he sprang forward, knocking Drake to the ground. The helicopter’s machine gun opened up a second later, the muzzle flash sparkling in the darkness as 7.62mm rounds slashed through the jungle vegetation, shearing off the spiky leaves of marijuana plants.

  Rod and Drake had already discussed the possibility of an ambush. It was imperative that they secure the helicopter without damaging it. The SEALs hidden in the cover of the forest could pour round after round into the chopper and bring it down ... but that would leave the SEALs stranded in the Colombian jungle with a desperately wounded man and a long walk home.

  No, better to do it this way . . .

  Unarmed, he sprinted forward, dodging the hail of fire from the helo’s door-mounted M-60. That weapon did not have anything near the firepower of an M2, but a hit could still penetrate Rod’s armor, rendering crucial machinery or electronics inoperative. He avoided the fire by circling toward the rear of the aircraft, coming up alongside the tailboom. Taking care to avoid the blades of the tail rotor, he rushed forward, put his left foot up on the starboard landing skid, then vaulted through the door and onto the open cargo deck.

  The deck was crowded. Rod sensed seven men there, one crouched over the machine gun, the others waiting, M-16 assault rifles loaded and ready to fire.

  Like a buzz saw, the combat robot waded into the packed troops. One steel fist came down on the M-60 machine gun squarely across the receiver, smashing the feed mechanism, twisting the pintel mount uselessly, and jamming the weapon so that it could not fire. His left hand lashed out and back, fingers held knife-edge straight as they tore through one man’s throat, then splintered the skull of the soldier standing at his side.

  Screams of alarm and gurgled pain rose above the roar of the helo’s rotors. The aircraft lurched to starboard with the robot’s suddenly added weight in the cargo compartment.

  Disengaging his right hand from the ruin of the machine gun, he brought it up, fingers rigid and claw- splayed, smashing into the face of the surprised door gunner with sufficient force to catapult him from the open door of the helo. Pivoting, Rod slammed his right hand, fingers together now, into the chest of still another soldier who was coming up on the robot from behind. The fingers punctured ribs and sternum like tissue, driving through the chest wall, through the heart, and snapping the spine. Rod withdrew his arm, bloody to the elbow, and the man collapsed in a wet explosion of blood from his ruined chest.

  Three men were left, not counting the pilot and copilot at the controls up front. One bolted for the door but slipped on the blood that covered the cabin deck and went down. A second gaped in surprise and blood-shocked horror. The third, backing into a corner, closed his finger on the trigger of his M-16 just as the helicopter lifted, spinning hard to the right.

  Rounds slammed into Rod’s chest and ricocheted in every direction, bullet fragments catching the open- mouthed mere and pitching him out the open door. Rod’s hand descended with superhuman speed on the M-16’s muzzle and bent the barrel up and back. There was a sharp report. The weapon’s barrel split, ruptured by the impact of the next round to fire. The gunner screamed, hands over a face bloodied by the exploding breech. Rod’s hand closed on his collar, lifted him, and flung him through the open door. The last man, scrabbling on the bloody deck at Rod’s feet, finally got his legs under him and leaped voluntarily into the night.

  Unfortunately, the helicopter had lifted now and was a good fifty feet above the ground.

  In the Huey UH-1H, the pilot sat on the right, the copilot on the left, opposite the arrangement in a conventional aircraft. Coming up between and behind pilot and copilot, Rod placed one hand on the back of each neck, fingers applying a firm and steady pressure. "You will land,” he said. "At the clearing. Now.”

  "Fuck you, buddy!” the pilot yelled, trying to turn his head against Rod’s grip. He had evidently not seen the rapid-fire slaughter in the cabin at his back.

  For answer, Rod increased the pressure in his left hand. The copilot screamed, then shrieked, struggling wildly against his harness, trying to reach the robot’s relentlessly squeezing hand. There was a loud popping sound, followed by the crunch of splintering bone. The copilot went suddenly still, his helmeted head lolling forward at an unnaturally sharp angle.

  The pilot agreed to cooperate. The helicopter landed gently in the clearing moments later.

  They loaded Hoskins onto the cargo deck, then helped one another on board. Zitterman replaced the dead copilot, his Hush Puppy pressed against the pilot’s temple, but that particular motivational incentive would probably not be necessary. An ugly, warm, fecal odor filled the cockpit; the pilot’s terror was genuine. He would not be giving the SEALs any trouble on their flight out.

  "All aboard,” Drake said. Rod was on the ground, staring toward the blackness of the jungle. "C’mon, Rod. RTB.”

  "Negative,” the robot replied quietly. "I cannot return to base. The mission is not complete.”

  Drake felt an unpleasant stirring in his bowels. The robot was supposed to obey. . . .

  "Rod. This is an order. Get aboard the chopper. Now.”

  Rod turned to face him. In the glare from the helo’s searchlight, the interiors of the robot’s eyes seemed to take on a metallic-green shine, like the reflecting e « of a cat. It was eerie, and unsettling.

  "No.”

  Drake took a deep breath. There had been several within Group Seven and the CIA who had disliked the idea of using the robot. Cunningham had insisted that McDaniels install some sort of backup programming, a code word or phrase that would guarantee that a human had control of the machine. McDaniels had resisted the idea, though Drake had thought it made sense.

  Now was the time to use it.

  "Rod,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Emergency override function Romeo-Tango-Bravo. Imperative. Execute.”

  The robot smiled ... or was that a trick of the light? "I appreciate your concern for my welfare, Lieutenant Drake. However, my mission has not yet been accomplished. I will return for Delgado.”

  "Come off it, Rod! You won’t have a chance alone!”

  "On the contrary. The Salazars believe they have beaten us. The weapons which might have destroyed me have been eliminated. I estimate at least a forty- percent probability of completing my mission.”

  Without another word, the robot turned and walked into the jungle.

  "Shit!” Campano said, watching from the open cargo deck hatch. "What’s he figure . . . he’s gonna take on the whole Salazar army himself?”

  "Maybe so,” Drake replied.

  His thoughts were racing. The robot was right about one thing. The Salazars would not be expecting another attack. Group Seven now had its link to Diamond—the terrified CIA contract pilot of the helo, a man who knew as much as Braden must have known.

  But they still had a chance to take down Delgado and the Salazars, and Drake found that he wanted that, wanted it with a passion that transcended orders and discipline and mission objectives.

  "Okay, Randy,” he said. "You’re in command of the team.”

  "Now wait just a fuckin’ mike, Lieutenant! What—”

  "Shut up and listen! I’m changing the plan, as of now.”

  "You ain’t going back in there after that screwball robot. . . .”

  "I don’t have time to argue, damn it. Now listen up! I need you to do some things for me when you reach the ship. I
need some toys, some very important toys, fast, and you guys are going to see to it that I get them. . . .”

  Rod examined the Salazar compound under LI, switching the telescopic enhancement for a zoom-in, close-up view from their OP perch on the jungle- covered hillside. Dozens of people were milling about inside the gate. The robot had identified both Roberto Salazar and his nephew Jose, but Luis Delgado was nowhere to be seen.

  The fire was out, the armored car reduced now to flame-blackened scrap. A large number of smaller vehicles were visible, however, jeeps and Land Rovers, plus several private automobiles. The mood of the crowd was panicky, and many of the people appeared to be leaving in a hurry. Rod could see hastily packed suitcases on the ground or being stuffed into open automobile trunks. There seemed to be an argument going on now, between Jose Salazar and several men in paramilitary uniforms.

  "You should not have joined me, Lieutenant Drake,” the robot said quietly, not turning his gaze from the scene below. "The chances of your death or incapacitation are—”

  "Never mind the odds, byte-breath,” the human replied. "I damned well have as much at stake in this as you do!”

  Rod looked at Drake. Under thermal imaging, he was aware of the human’s increased skin temperature. Shifting back to normal light, he noted other traits associated with nervousness ... or emotional turmoil, the enlarged pupils and flaring nostrils, the flick of tongue across dry lips.

  The robot knew that Drake had lost his wife and daughter, but the bonding among humans, especially within a family, was difficult for him to understand. He knew the textbook reasons for such bonds, the genetic and evolutionary purpose for the set of emotions and interlocking needs and responsibilities called love, but actually experiencing them was completely beyond the robot’s ken.