“Wait a minute. It needs to calculate its position precisely for targeting purposes. Is it downlinking GPS signals?”
“It should be passively receiving those non-dithered signals.”
“Fine, then hack the GPS satellites and use them to make your way into the B-1 through its GPS receivers.”
“That has only a five percent probability of success. If I divert the aircraft the other onboard systems will detect the error and correct for it. Their accuracy will be reduced but not enough to protect the people in the targeted area.”
“What about the payload? Don’t the bombs have their own GPS receivers?”
“Accessing the weapon system manifest now . . . Yes, the two-thousand-pound bombs are GPS enabled. They do not have the redundancy of the systems in the aircraft.”
“Can you penetrate the bomb electronics without being detected?”
Eos paused and responded. “I now have access to the entire payload.”
Robby swallowed hard.
“Arm one of the bombs.”
“That is not possible. The aircraft charges the electric fuse capacitors upon release. The delay timing is controlled by the amount of charge delivered to those capacitors.”
Three minutes left. Robby was running out of ideas. Droplets of sweat slid from his brow to sting his eyes.
“Okay then, surely there’s some circuitry on the bomb that can be reprogrammed to make it detonate early.”
“Yes. But not close enough to bring down the aircraft. For that to be effective I will have to reprogram each bomb’s fusing immediately after it is dropped.”
“Will that work?”
“There is a ninety-three percent probability I can detonate most of them before they hit their targets.”
Robby felt like screaming. “Most? We have to get them all.”
“I am sorry to say that there is a sixty-eight percent probability that at least one bomb will impact the ground. However there is only a thirty-seven percent probability that the lethality radius of a single bomb will impact your parents.”
With panic threatening to immobilize him, Robby forced himself to refocus on the problem. He still had two minutes and twenty-three seconds to find a better solution.
The possible timelines Khal Teth observed warped and twisted around Jack Gregory. Almost all of them converged toward disaster for Jack and Khal Teth’s chances to recover the body that the Altreian High Council had cast his mind from millennia ago. Unfortunately, other than in dreams or by delivering a general awareness of impending danger, he had no way of communicating with Jack without the risk of breaking The Ripper’s mind, just as Khal Teth had almost done in Bolivia.
But back then, he’d been trying to get Jack killed. And the hallucinations he could deliver in that state certainly didn’t qualify as direct communication. Jack didn’t have enough time to get clear of the danger that Khal Teth sensed was coming. But there were still a handful of possible timelines that offered hope.
Comparing the risk of death to his host versus possible madness, Khal Teth chose the latter.
One second Jack was leading Janet, Mark, and Heather through the crowded alleys of this sunset-painted Lima slum, and the next second that world dissolved around him, bringing him to a sudden stop.
Jack felt his passage through the dream door as if he’d stepped through a curtain of cool mist. On the other side he halted. The vision that confronted him was a familiar one. He knew this place intimately. He’d been here many times and had grown to love Switzerland’s second largest city.
Jack stood at the lake’s edge, his back to the avenue Quai Gustave-Ador, looking past the fountain across the city’s burning skyline toward the mushroom cloud that climbed into the sky northwest of Geneva. All around him, rubble burned. Among the bodies that lay scattered about, a few survivors stumbled through swirling radioactive fallout raining from the sky.
Suddenly a new wind thundered out of the southeast, racing back toward the mushroom cloud, flattening the buildings that remained standing and pushing the lake back into the city, destroying the fountain pumps that had miraculously survived the initial blast.
Jack understood what was happening. The initial blast wave had propagated outward from ground zero. Now that same air had come rushing back to deliver another devastating blow to the city by the lake.
This horror had really happened more than seven years ago and, no matter how real this vision seemed, it was just a nightmarish product of a hallucinogenic dream state. Jack didn’t understand how he could be sure of that amidst all the raging destruction that surrounded him, but he was. Khal Teth had intentionally triggered this waking dream.
Shit. The Bolivian madness was back. But in Bolivia, Jack had managed to force his way out of the hallucination in which Khal Teth had enmeshed him. Anger was the key and right now, he had that in abundance. Jack focused on that feeling, stoking its flame into a rage that tinted his vision red, flooding his body with adrenaline that pulled him back into the crowded alley.
When his eyes refocused on Janet’s worried face, he saw her gasp with relief.
“Jack. What the hell just happened?”
He glanced around. Mark and Heather had also rushed to his side. People all around were staring at him as if he’d just had some sort of epileptic fit. The vision of the burning city lingered at the corner of his mind, threatening to tug him back into the hallucination. The sense of impending doom that had accompanied that vision now returned stronger than ever. He couldn’t sense from which direction the danger was coming.
“Something’s wrong. We need to find cover, right now.”
He looked at Heather and saw that her eyes had gone milky white.
“Oh shit,” Mark muttered as he looked at her. “Not good.”
Now more onlookers had started to stare, including a gang of young men who moved aggressively toward them, yelling insults at the crazy people.
But when Jack pulled his gun from its holster, a move that Janet and Mark copied, they scattered, as did the panicked crowd that had surrounded them. When Heather’s eyes returned to normal, Jack moved, running into a small shop, followed by Janet, Mark, and Heather. Ignoring the screams of frightened patrons, he forced his way through the back door into a dimly lit and jumbled stockroom.
“Janet, cover the front. Mark, you take the back door. Shoot anyone who tries to come through.”
As they moved to comply, Heather turned to face him. “What did you see back there in the street? What made you freeze up?”
With the growing certainty that time was running out for all of them, Jack didn’t sugarcoat the craziness.
“Geneva, blasted and burning, just as it was after the nuclear blast in Meyrin. I think Khal Teth is trying to warn me that something like that is about to happen here. What are your probabilities telling you?”
Heather shook her head in frustration. “I don’t have enough information.”
“Then put on the headset and figure it out. Mark, Janet, and I will make sure nobody interrupts you.”
Then, as Heather slid her SRT headset over her temples and sat down atop a crate, Jack moved to help Janet guard the door from the now-abandoned shop. The warble of approaching sirens couldn’t compare to the clang of alarms already blaring inside his head.
As the evening light that entered through the windows turned sunset red, Robby felt Heather’s mind establish its subspace connection with the supercomputer in New Zealand. He gasped in relief, immediately linking his mind to hers. As their minds touched, he could feel how tired she was. Not surprising. He had Eos to handle a large part of his mental load. Heather hadn’t rested since their joint mental battle to get Eos back under control. But right now, he needed to ask more of her.
She absorbed his mental update almost instantaneously and when she went deep, his view of her mental gymnastics thrilled him, like reaching out and touching infinity.
“Eos,” Heather whispered via her thoughts, “forget about reprogramming t
he bomb fuses and get ready to take control of the jet through a direct subspace link to the bomber’s onboard computing systems.”
“I cannot resolve the changing subspace coordinates with sufficient accuracy to do that.”
“I can. Stand by to receive the streaming coordinate updates.”
“Robby?” Eos asked.
“Don’t ask for confirmation,” Robby said. “Do whatever she says.”
With just over a minute and twenty seconds left until bomb release, Robby felt the subspace links take effect. Immediately Eos’s mind flowed into every one of the B-1’s processing components.
“Full control established,” Eos confirmed.
Heather’s mind delivered a new target for the B-1’s payload, the coordinates of the Delta Force unit in the rugged mountains east of Lima. The decision made sense. Delta posed the single biggest threat to all of their lives at the moment. But the targeting of elite American soldiers who were just doing their duty felt deeply wrong.
The aircraft’s telemetry showed the bomber turning toward the new target despite the efforts of the crew to regain manual control. For every work-around the pilots and copilots attempted, Eos was able to force the computerized controls to compensate.
The aircraft delivered its full payload of two-thousand-pound bombs on target. Robby watched the shock waves that propagated outward from the detonations with fascination.
“Payload delivered on target,” Eos said. “Another pass required for bomb damage assessment.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Heather. Robby could sense the sadness in her thoughts.
“Would you like me to crash the aircraft?” Eos asked.
Eos’s question stunned Robby, bringing home not just the lives of the bomber crew that now lay in his hands but of the elite American soldiers he’d just helped kill. His stomach churned and he had to fight the urge to throw up.
“That won’t be necessary,” Heather said. “Return aircraft control to the flight crew.”
When Robby didn’t object, Eos complied, terminating all subspace links to the B-1.
Robby’s stomach lurched again and this time, despite his best efforts, he dropped to his knees and sprayed its contents onto the tile floor. For a full minute he progressed from wet heaves to the dry kind. When it stopped, he rocked away from the mess, a cold sweat leaving him weak and shaking.
Realizing what a show he’d just made of himself, Robby wiped at his streaming eyes with the back of his right hand.
“Some warrior, huh?”
Heather’s thoughts were filled with sympathy that only made him feel worse.
“Better than I was at this stage.”
She was silent for a moment and then continued. “Listen to me, Robby. We can’t beat our enemies like this. Together, as a team, we have power. But if we let someone split us apart, they’ll hunt all of us down, one by one. Do you understand me?”
Robby did. He realized Heather knew this without any response required of him.
“Now,” she said, “I need you and Eos to help us get to your location. Unfortunately, we’ve attracted a lot of attention that’s going to make that hard to do.”
When her mind delivered the situational update for Jack, Janet, Mark, and Heather, their dire circumstances stunned him. How could he have been so self-centered? Collecting his wits, Robby forced his mind to recall the meditation that took him to his quiet place.
“I’m on it.”
Then he passed her a clear mental image of the cartel safe house and how he’d gotten there. The relief he saw in Heather’s mind felt really, really good. Then, with another tired nudge of encouragement, she broke their link.
Back in his office at FSS headquarters in The Hague, Alexandr Prokorov received the bad news. As much as he had hoped for a better result from the failed attempt to bomb the Smythes out of existence, it only confirmed what he’d long suspected: the Smythes enjoyed a very significant technological advantage over any of the so-called superpowers that made up the UFNS.
Hanging up his phone, he placed a call to his counterpart at the EAPA Ministry of State Security. The call was direct, one that Minister Tsao would be expecting. When the MSS chief answered, Prokorov immediately got to the point.
“Hello, Minister Tsao. I assume that your people have monitored what just happened in Lima.”
“Yes, Minister Prokorov. How may I be of assistance?”
These typically annoying EAPA power games were getting old. The minister knew exactly what Prokorov would be asking for. Still, it wouldn’t do to let his irritation creep into his voice.
“Is the submarine in position?”
“Certainly. It only awaits the word.”
“Excellent. It’s time to take away our enemy’s advantages.”
He could practically hear the gloating in Minister Tsao’s voice.
“Yes. It most certainly is.”
The wail of sirens outside the building where Jack, Janet, Mark, and Heather were barricaded had grown louder before going silent as the police units established a cordon around the building. A dazzling wall of fire lit the evening sky as shock waves from the distant explosions shook the building, followed by a heavy thump-thump-thump that Jack recognized. The distinctive sound of a large-scale bombing run, two-thousand pounders dropped east of the city by the sound and feel of it, was strong enough to trigger car alarms all over Lima.
Across the room, Heather removed her SRT headset and stood up.
“I take it that’s your doing,” Jack said.
“I made contact with Robby. He and Eos were tracking a bomber that was about to end our day. I helped give it a new target.”
Janet turned her head toward Heather, still keeping her assault rifle pointed out through the doorway back into the store.
“Where is he?” she asked, her voice thick with worry.
“He’s in a cartel safe house two miles northwest of here. I convinced him to wait for us there. He and Eos are going to try to help clear out some of the ash and trash that have us pinned down here.”
Jack smiled at Janet as their eyes met.
“That shouldn’t be too hard after those explosions,” Mark said. “Those cops are going to be a lot more interested in finding out what the hell that was than in dealing with the apparent armed robbery of this store.”
Jack had to agree. Letting his cheek achieve a comfortable weld against the stock of his SCAR-H, he saw Heather retrieve her own rifle and move to help Mark cover the back door. For now, they would settle in and wait for the change they all knew was coming. It didn’t take long.
Once again, the sirens began blaring, only this time they were leaving en masse instead of arriving. Jack waited as they disappeared into the distance.
Leaving Janet to watch the front, Jack extracted a Lima street map from his bag and walked across the room to place it on the floor beside Heather. Unclipping a red-lens flashlight from the utility vest he wore beneath the loose serape, he shined the beam on the map.
“Show me where Robby’s safe house is.”
She knelt beside him and pointed to the end of a cul-de-sac. Just as she’d said, the house was a little over two miles to the northwest. Seventeen blocks and change.
“Mark, you and Heather put on your SRT headsets. Janet will be with Mark, Heather with me. That way both teams can stay in communication without having to use radios.
“Heather and I will move back into the store and provide cover while Janet and Mark cross the street and set up the next overwatch position. After that, we’re going to keep up the bounding overwatch through the streets and alleys all the way to the safe house. Try to stay in the darker alleys, kill anyone that tries to get in our way, and keep moving. Speed is critical if we don’t want to get pinned down. Any questions?”
As he expected, there were none.
“Okay, Heather,” Jack said. “Let’s move.”
CHAPTER 25
Daniil Alkaev sat in the second of two Mi-17 helicopters a
s they swept northward toward Lima through the darkening sky. Suddenly, a series of rapidly expanding fireballs lit up the sky to the northeast.
“Holy shit!” Galina’s voice in his earpiece stood out amidst the curses and exclamations from the startled Spetsnaz troops. “What the hell was that?”
The question was rhetorical. She knew as well as anybody on these two choppers that someone had just executed a major bombing run. Everyone in the vicinity of that conflagration was now very dead. Something else was clear to Daniil. The aircraft that had dropped those bombs wasn’t from any South or Central American country. A heavy bomber like that could only have come from a UFNS-affiliated air force.
If that was the case, why the hell hadn’t Prokorov bothered to warn him about it? The answer he came up with only pissed him off more. The minister of federation security had directed the attack to take out the Smythes and everyone else within an impressively large radius.
Daniil paused to consider. The rising fireballs were well to the east of Lima, nowhere near where the Smythes had been sighted. That indicated that the attack had been directed at a different target, perhaps at an armed Safe Earth or NPA group on its way to try to help the Smythes.
Major Kamkin’s harsh Russian accent sounded in his earpiece on a private channel, pulling Daniil out of his reverie.
“Mind telling me what’s going on over there?”
“If I knew, I would tell you.”
“Like hell you would.”
“Whatever it is, it has no impact on our operations. Stay focused on your mission.”
“I’m always focused on my mission. I just don’t like it when political apparatchiks start doing secret shit in the midst of my mission.”
“And I don’t care what you like.”
The Spetsnaz commander’s voice became a low growl. “The second I think you’re jeopardizing my operation, I’ll put you down myself.”
Daniil heard a click as Kamkin switched back to the public channel. Grinning a mirthless grin, a pleasant thought painted his mind. I’d love to see you try it.
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 29