by Andy Straka
“Do you know where you are?” Murnell asked.
“No.”
“Good. You might just have a better chance of living a little longer.”
It was the first time Murnell had made any suggestion of a threat against her, and whether or not he or any of his colleagues was the source of the danger wasn’t clear. But she took him at his word that he was.
Who were they? Genuine Homeland–mainstream, and, she would hope, legal government types? Or some kind of splinter group plucked from within Homeland’s byzantine spider web of interests and gone rogue? Whoever they were, she was beginning to have serious doubts if in any way it had been her good fortune to have somehow dialed up their attention and fallen into their net, their seductive technology and handsome scientist spokesman aside.
But then she understood. The answer was so simple it was right there in front of her.
“You people must really be in desperate need of pilots.”
Murnell looked at for a long moment.
“Let’s go,” he said.
His non-answer told her she was on to something. It made perfect sense, after all. Drones were taking to the skies all over. Any hobbyist with a smart phone could pilot a simple one through an empty sky or around a neighborhood. With more time, training, and sophistication, as with her MAV training, they could hover virtually unseen hundreds of feet in the sky employing the most powerful cameras and imaging capabilities industry could supply.
But the holy grail of covert surveillance was being able to swoop in up-close-and-personal completely undetected. The possibilities were endless–even pinpoint lethal attacks with complete stealth wouldn’t be off the table. But it took a human being like her to deliver the goods. Computers were getting faster and more powerful with every passing day and artificial intelligence software more and more sophisticated. But trusting AI and an autonomous drone to fly the way she’d piloted the hover angel into the building to spy on Nathan Kurn was still far too risky–at least for now. If it wasn’t, she realized, she, and most likely Tye as well, might well have been in prison or even dead by now.
Murnell led the way across the parking lot toward a line of trees, just inside of which stood a dark colored tractor-trailer parked at the edge of the pavement.
“I see you’ve gone mobile.”
“That’s right,” he said. “We’re not the only players on the board, you know.”
Whatever that meant. Did she even know how big the board could be? She decided she better keep her mouth shut from here on in. Just let things play out with Murnell however they were going to play out and hope and pray for the best. Speaking of praying, was it any use praying for Tye or Williamson to come to her aid? Maybe when all was said and done Williamson was somehow working for DHS, too. Maybe she and Tye had been the ones being played for fools all along. Either way, she needed to find a way to get out of here.
They reached the tractor-trailer sitting silent in the darkness. At least four men that she could count, armed with assault rifles, guarded the perimeter around it.
Murnell led her up a set of steps with a railing that led to a door in the side of the trailer, put his hand on some sort of scanner and punched a code into a keypad.
“So what are we doing here, exactly?”
He wrapped his fingers around the door handle.
She was about to find out.
26
The white sedan had departed the complex just as soon as Tye started to pick his way through the brush and boulders along the edge of the darkened hillside. He needed to hurry.
But the remaining team of a half dozen agents–if that’s what they were–had driven the other two vehicles into the gap between the buildings and, no doubt not wanting to call any more attention to themselves than needed, posted a lookout at the front of the alley.
Tye was at the jumping off point. He’d made it this far without detection, so maybe whatever resources were being employed to track and find them weren’t as vast or as formidable as he had feared.
The man posted at the front of the entrance wore a baggy dark sweatsuit, such that he might easily be mistaken for a guy simply out for a late night run. In addition to his gun, Tye had a fighting knife strapped to a sheath inside his boot. No doubt the guard was also well-armed, although nothing was visible.
The closest construction vehicle, a small orange pickup truck, stood at the side of the building a mere fifteen yards or so from where Tye crouched behind a tree with the front of the alleyway another forty to fifty yards distant and two more vehicles, one a large bulldozer, in between. The angle of attack didn’t look bad, but there was a problem. His new hiding spot was just outside the illuminated area. That fifteen yards would be an eternity once he hit the light.
He had an idea.
Kneeling down on all fours, he felt along the ground in the dark until he found what he was looking for: a rock slightly smaller than a baseball but big enough to make a loud sound when it hit something. His high school pitching days may have been long past him, but with a big enough target he could probably get the job done.
He stretched his arm back and forth like a major league hurler warming up in the bullpen. He eyed his target several yards beyond the man standing guard. There wouldn’t be a second chance.
He wound up, reared back, and heaved the rock in a high pop-fly-like arc over the vehicles. He still had a good arm. The rock sailed overhead at the outward edge of the glow from the lights, high enough that the guard failed to spot it. At the far end of the building stood more vehicles and several long metal trailers. The rock landed with a loud clang on the roof of one of them. Bulls-eye.
The guard immediately turned in that direction, drawing a large caliber handgun from beneath his baggy sweatsuit.
It was all the opening Tye needed, sprinting the few steps necessary to make it to the cover of the orange truck. He dropped down and squatted along the fender, still undetected.
He was planning to edge his way from vehicle to vehicle until he got close enough, then hope to take the guard by surprise. But leaning against the truck he spotted something he hadn’t been able to see earlier. This side of the vehicle was angled away from the guard’s line of sight and the driver’s door window was rolled completely down and open to the night air.
The guard crouched lower with his weapon drawn, still looking in the direction of the sound made by the falling rock but also beginning to scan the rest of his perimeter. He turned and called to someone down the alley. A few seconds later, another agent appeared, with longer hair and not as big, a woman. She also carried a gun holding it with both hands in a shooter’s crouch.
Tye stood up and dove in through the open window of the cab, hunkering down low in the seat. No shots rang out. No shouts or cries of warning.
He peered over the back corner of the truck’s seat at the two agents. They had mag lights and laser sights attached to their barrels and were training them in the opposite direction, slowly advancing toward the noise made by the rock in textbook fashion, one fanning out along the side of the building as they’d been trained to do.
He didn’t think he’d be lucky enough to find a key in the ignition, and he was right. But sometimes construction workers left a spare key hidden under a mat or someplace else inconspicuous just in case one of the workers lost the original keys. Before joining the Army, he’d once watched a guy hot wire a car while out juvenile-delinquenting in Buffalo one night with some of his high school buddies. But that was a long time ago. He hoped if it came down to it, he’d remember how to do it, but he wasn’t so sure. He felt around the darkened cab, under the floor mats and inside the seat flaps until his hand came to rest on a small, smooth object. It was a key.
Just as he’d hoped, it slid neatly into the ignition.
At least the truck was an automatic in case he needed to shoot out the window while driving. Easier said than done. This wasn’t the movies. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the two guards now nearly the length of a f
ootball field away, still training their lights and searching among the trailers.
“All right,” he said out loud to himself. “Game on.”
27
With one hand on the railing, Raina took a long look around the exterior of the tractor-trailer as Murnell started to pull open the door. Of course it was dark and she could see very little. She wondered if Murnell had a MAV or two–whatever type they were–like the ones he’d had her flying from the sphere keeping a close eye on her at this very moment. The thought sent a chill through her. With a swift prosthetic kick to the groin, she could disable Murnell and, if she was lucky attacking down from the top of the steps, have a shot at relieving the guard nearest them of his rifle.
But where would that get her? She’d still have nearly a half dozen armed agents to contend with.
From the outside the entire rig looked completely normal; it could easily be disguised as any one of a million big trucks plying the roads. But stepping inside the trailer with Murnell, it became clear, even with the lights dimmed inside, that this was no run-of-the-mill commercial vehicle. The length of the cargo container was honeycombed with bulbous antennas and satellite dishes and some kind of strange composite reflectors and tubing, in the center of which stood a sphere, slightly larger but almost identical to the one she’d worked with at their facility. The wombed cockpit looked pristine, almost antiseptic, and the air around it was permeated with some kind of watery odor.
“What’s that smell?”
“Residue from cooling mixture. We’re shielded in here from thermal detection, but I’m sure you can appreciate this mobile unit generates quite a lot of heat.”
“Mobile unit. I thought you said the sphere was a prototype.”
“I lied,” Murnell said. “So shoot me.”
He closed the door behind them and stood looking at her in the near darkness. He was beaming.
“What?” she asked.
“Dragonflies.”
“Dragonflies? What about them?”
“I was just thinking, that’s what they called your old Army helicopter squadron.”
“So?”
“Did you know dragonflies are nature’s perfect predators?”
She shrugged.
“It’s true. Scientists have spent a lot of time studying their biology and neural structure. They can even take prey when they’re missing an entire wing.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Is that how you see me?”
“Maybe. I guess we’ll know soon enough. Ready to play?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You ream me out after apparently crashing one of your super secret drones and then you kidnap me a second time and expect me to just come in here and sit down and work with you.”
“I prefer not to think of it as kidnapping. More like rescuing you from your own worst impulses.” He continued smiling.
“Worst impulses?”
So, the game of cat-and-mouse. She was tempted to mount an argument, but thought she still better not divulge any more of what she and Tye had been up to. Were these guys the enemy or not? Her gut told her yes, but Murnell remained as charismatic and unpredictable as before. And now here he seemed to want to ratchet up the stakes, seducing her with even more technology. What did he really want from her? There had to be other drone pilots out there.
“I realize this can all seem quite confusing, Raina, and I’m sorry,” he said. It was the first time he’d called her by her first name. “But I’m offering you an opportunity a lot of other people would kill for.”
“Really.” She wanted to send him a message she was unimpressed. “So you want me to go to work in one of these trailers for Homeland Security.”
“Maybe. If you pass the test.”
“If I pass the test.” She snickered, rolling her eyes. “And if I pass this test of yours, what kind of missions would I be undertaking exactly?”
He smiled. “I do apologize. But I’m sure you can understand, information like that has to remain on a need-to-know basis.”
“Hmmm.”
What she really needed to know was how to get the hell out of here and back to figuring out her mission with Tye.
“And what if I don’t want to take this test? Or what if I fail it?”
Murnell sighed. “I don’t want to go there with you, Raina. I want to be on your side.”
If Homeland were trying to pull a major bad cop/good cop with this guy they were doing a pretty good job of it. She wondered for a moment if he’d been somehow trapped in the same manner she now appeared to be.
Murnell had yet to ask her directly about anything to do with Tye or Williamson. That told her he either already knew all he wanted to know about their activities or didn’t care, and she doubted the latter. She wished she could somehow get a message to Tye or Williamson; but of course they’d confiscated her phone along with the other equipment in the van.
She took a step forward, looking over the interior of the trailer again and running her hand along the dome of one of the antennas. It felt warm to the touch.
“All right,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
28
The construction company pickup wasn’t the fastest thing Tye had ever driven, but it was fast enough. After belting in and starting the engine, he threw the truck into gear, turned the wheel and gunned the accelerator to carry the vehicle, which had been facing in the opposite direction, in a tight arc back toward the entrance.
The first shots from the two guards flew wide of the accelerating cab, but soon one struck the back pillar just aft of Tye’s window. He returned fire out the window with his left hand as he came around, not really expecting to hit much of anything, the black weight of the Beretta jumping against his palm. He kept the accelerator to the floor and the tires of the pickup began to lose grip, causing the truck to fishtail, but he corrected with his free hand. All he needed to do was reach the alley.
The male agent broke cover, attempting to make it back to the alley entrance before Tye did. Tye took a firm grip on the gun with as good an aim as he was able to muster with his off hand, and lead the running agent by a step. He squeezed the trigger, putting the guy down with a hit to the neck.
“Lucky shot,” he said to himself.
More bullets came whizzing in from the remaining shooter. One shattered a headlight, another struck the passenger door, and yet another the front fender. He continued to gun the engine and three or four seconds later sailed into the front of the alleyway, swerving around the big construction dumpster.
The alleyway was less than a block long. He crouched as low as he could, peering over the dash to see where he was going and seeing the remaining agents, apparently not expecting to be ambushed and still trying to figure out what was going on, scrambling for cover with few options left to them in the narrowness of the alley than their own vehicles and the van.
More shots rang out. A round blew out most of his windshield. But the speeding truck was the major weapon in play now, which his adversaries had been too slow to appreciate.
Tye wrenched the wheel to the right, sideswiping the first of the sedans, catching one of the remaining agents with his front fender, the guy’s body bouncing with a sickly thud against the side of the truck. Another agent stood directly between him and the van, firing off more rounds into the windshield and grill. Gutsy.
Tye plowed into him head on and the truck bucked and the wheel was almost jerked from his hand with the impact.
In the next instant he slammed into the back of the van with a loud bang. Bodies flew, there was a crush of metal and glass, and Tye was thrown hard against his belt, the airbag exploding in front of him. Momentarily dazed, he managed to unbuckle himself, wrench open his door and drag himself out onto through the opening. He kept a firm hold on his gun as he tumbled out into a pile of twisted metal and shattered glass and dove toward the pavement.
A bullet kicked up a chuck of concrete and blacktop right in front of him. He raised into a crouch, re
turning fire in the direction from which the shot had come, the one remaining intact sedan down the alley. Keeping low, he made a quick survey of the wreckage and spotted the bloody remains of an agent who must have been unfortunate to have been trapped between the alley wall and the van. Counting the one they’d sideswiped and the one he’d just plowed through, that meant three more down, which left only two, the one shooting at him from within the alley and the female agent still approaching from outside. Tye still had more than a half dozen bullets left in the Beretta. The odds may have improved, but they had him in a pincer. One of his two remaining adversaries had to be put down before they could begin to capitalize on their position.
No time like the present. He rose into a shooter’s stance, laying down fire and advancing straight toward the remaining sedan. The agent who was hunkered down behind the fender seemed to panic, starting to return fire before diving beneath the bumper, not realizing he was leaving his head exposed as Tye was closing in. Tye simply shot the man dead with a bullet to his skull.
But as if on cue, the female agent appeared, edging up the wall at the end of the alley and firing her weapon. Bullets sprayed around him, one grazing his jacket, and he scrambled over for better cover behind what was left of the wreckage between van and truck.
He soon lost sight of the woman for a moment, but she must not have lost sight of him. The shooting went on for several more seconds with one large caliber bullet coming so close to Tye’s ear that the concrete wall exploding behind him sent fragments knifing into the side of his head. Wiping them away, he paused to switch clips.
The shooting stopped for a moment. The woman must have been doing the same.
A moment later, it was her turn to advance. She bent into a crouch along the wall and moved straight toward him, sending a hail of fire into the wreckage all around him.