16
Gray Man:
Project Jericho:
It doesn’t look like much, and that’s probably it’s most appealing feature: a compact-car-sized bundle of tubes that looks like some kind of industrial art installation, hooked into a pair of heavy forced-air “horns” that generate the initial wave pulse and shove it through the mile or so of resonant tubing until it gets shaped into a wave down in the ultra-low Hertz range. No explosives or radiologicals to trigger screening gear. Broken down, the components are fairly non-descript. Even assembled, you’d have a hard time guessing it’s a weapon.
But warmed up and pumping, the finished product can generate a sound wave—deep below human hearing—capable of crumbling rigid structures and even causing tissue damage with prolonged exposure.
Geeking in high school, you’d heard of such things: flakey weapons proposed for fantasy battlefields, based on the Biblical tale of how the Israelites crumbled an ancient citadel by making a big noise at it. You remember reading about attempts by physicists and engineers with archeological bents trying to duplicate the effect, and rumors about shadowy military contractors playing in. Supposedly nothing effective came of the attempts, but they claimed the science was good: it isn’t the audible sound that does the damage, it’s the super-bass that throbs through conductive materials and starts breaking things down. Low frequency means long waves. Long waves penetrate.
Luckily, the haste you’ve driven them into has made them forgo the opportunity to really test the thing. It’s also rushed them past considering a few obvious fatal flaws.
Project Jericho:
Their target was blatantly symbolic: the high-visibility heart and soul of despised Greece, the foundation of hated Western Civilization, and a symbol of ancient pagan idolatry that remains a visible irritant to the intolerant radical Wahabi mentality.
Acropolis.
Flattening it—crumbling it to dust—would be a blow that would resonate through history, far worse than when the Taliban demolished those colossal millennia-old Buddhas almost two decades ago in Afghanistan. (That pissed you off, even as a child, you remember—making you even more determined to ensure their utter failure this time.)
Acropolis. You hiked up the hill and through the postcard ruins at dawn, despite the pain in your left foot (where a single pellet from the vests you blew in Larissa slipped under your coat and through your boot and took a chip out of your outer metatarsal—you dug it out easily enough, but twenty-four hours later it’s hit its peak throbbing). Collapsed for an hour or so at the base of one of the Parthenon’s huge columns. If you looked nothing like a tourist, none of the other early morning visitors seemed to take much notice of you. Except for one: a small child, being led wearily by the hand by his enthralled parents, who found you more interesting than the history. You smiled at him. Waved. He waved back. Tried to tell his parents about the strange-looking man in the big hat and coat and got ignored.
You played with the idea then that you were doing this for him, for them, for the world. Playing hero. Saving the day from the bad monsters out there. And it made you laugh, because you know that being heroic has nothing to do with this.
You enjoyed the sunrise over the city, then hiked back down on your throbbing foot (thinking of Oedipus Rex), down to show your legitimate prey what a real monster is.
Lunchtime.
Despite the continuing assurances of your anonymous benefactor that you are not alone, you have seen no sign of the “good guys” converging on the weapon. It’s hard to imagine, considering all the flashware that you’ve been leaving them, that they still got suckered into chasing the Wabs’ “decoys” instead of focusing on the actual threat.
The Wabs original design had been for a two-pronged strike: symbolically crumbling a major cultural site and simultaneously unleashing a nightmare plague. But their own intel hinted that they’d been screwed: their bio-engineers had grown them shit. The Jericho virus isn’t viable.
But with time running out (thanks to you) the Wabs have to go with a sloppy substitute plan: counting on Counter-Terror Intel to be terrified enough of a biological attack to go running after their decoys through the active subways, instigating some messy gunbattles in crowded places with those smuggled Fletchers (they’d have a lot more of those, if you hadn’t intercepted the case Klemp was sending them) while they try to pull off their half-assed little science-experiment.
You did see ample signs of “covert” surveillance on the active stations on the way here, but nothing at all in or around the still-under-construction station they’re using to stage their primary attack. The synthetic voice that keeps intruding into your gear promising assistance seems to be lying to you. But then, you’ve considered that your faceless online “ally” has actually been some Wab TG setting you up, or maybe a third party with and entirely different agenda—why else would it insist you run from the CT guns back in Larissa?
You think about that yet again: the maze of contradictions you have willingly stumbled into. You leave the Coalition terabytes of hot intel, yet they seem to have blithely ignored it at every opportunity. They could have stopped Sarah De Paolo instead of making you chase after her alone. They could have crashed the Bari house and stopped that beheading themselves, but they left it entirely to you. And then Larissa: they just sit back and watch you blow the Wab armory, then come chasing lamely after you, all the while the anonymous feed is actively helping you ditch them (even providing a clean rental car to get you here after you limped out of the sewer past the cordon).
No. An enemy would have ensured you died in Larissa. So somebody has an agenda that can only be served by leaving the bloody work to you.
The best part: You’re okay with that.
You check the Striker and slide yourself into firing range.
The Wabs brought the “horn” down in pieces, passing it off as materials for this latest expansion of the Metro. This particular tunnel is not even currently being worked on thanks to an economic slowdown, so it provides relative privacy as well as proximity to the ruins above.
Expecting you, they brought guns: you count seven armed guards around the weapon itself, and they do look nervous. There are four more stationed at the obvious approaches on either end (but again, your mystery ally linked into your gear and warned you to avoid them).
They’re counting on the tunnels to help resonate the wave. This would be their first potential error: the Metro is built with buffering—the designers didn’t want to risk the subway’s own vibrations having any impact on the ruins—so this may actually muffle and contain rather than enhance their wave. Still, they might damage the Metro itself, and the vibrations might harm all the people stuck in the tunnels.
But there’s also a devastating design flaw: the sound weapon is delicate. Anything crushing or puncturing any part of the resonating tubes will diffuse the wave and result in a very loud but otherwise harmless noise. And you intend to do more than just shoot a hole in it.
You’ve slid down through an unfinished ventilator, coming up on the Wabs’ supposedly inaccessible flank (exactly the way the synthesized` voice suggested as it fed you the blueprints of the station). You’re careful to stay out of sight, because they’ll certainly be smart enough to watch the vents just in case, so you rely on your interface gear to give you a discreet fiber-optic feed of their progress.
You hear the first gunshots echo in the subway system far away: the Coalition has started gunning it out with the decoys. Then you hear the low thrumming as the weapon’s turbine system starts to pump. It takes a few seconds to begin pulsing. When it does, you feel it through the metal of the vent shaft, almost like a mild rolling earthquake, and your head feels like it’s under about ten feet of water.
The Wabs are feeling it too, because they’re not so attentive anymore as you slide up to the mouth of the unscreened vent (and try not to fall out of it because the shaft is angled downward) and prop the Striker for a shot. You wonder if the vibrations translating into the assaul
t shotgun might set off the spin-armed 25mm grenades, so you decide to support and aim the thing by hand to buffer it from hard-surface contact. This will make things harder: You know how bad a shot you are with anything rifle-like, so you’re very appreciative that the sound-weapon is a big target as you pop off the first grenade. You don’t wait for it to hit before you send another after it blind, then reflexively cover up and rely again on the fiber-optic feed to show you a blurred heads-up of the grenades going off.
You see two flashes obscure your rough view of the tube cluster as your eardrums feel pierced by the echo-magnified bangs. And then the weapon screams.
Shattering the tubes has resulted in a death-wail that is so loud it almost makes you drop the Striker. In the reverberant cavern of the tunnel, it’s fully as loud as the grenades. A hundred frequencies screech as the forced air wave escapes through countless jagged openings. It feels like your head is being crushed and there are long hot spikes being driven into your ears despite your earplugs. Thankfully, the worst only lasts only a few seconds. Almost immediately, frequencies begin to drop out at random, whittling the agony down. You can hear the pressure and vibration of the weapon—now thrown into hopeless chaos—continue tearing it apart. By the time you manage to recover yourself enough to look, the once neat-stacked tube assembly has popped apart into a mangled blossom of rent piping. The compressor turbines still push air, though, thrumming a low bass like some ancient great herald’s horn. And though it’s a welcome respite from what it replaced, it’s still deafening in its intensity (or maybe you’re just still deafened by the worst of the screech).
Your ears have been so badly overwhelmed that it’s the bursting of bullets against the concrete vent-mouth that makes you realize that they are shooting at you—you can’t hear their guns.
You feel a round ricochet off the top of the vent and smack you roughly in the ass. It numbs your leg down to the heel, leaving a burning sting where it hit, which you hope is due to the coat stopping the bullet from penetrating. You use your arms to shove yourself back away from the vent against the slope of the shaft and reach out with the Striker and empty its remaining ten grenade-rounds into the tunnel in a sloppy spread. You can feel them go, but can’t see anything with the coat thrown over your head for cover, face-down in the shaft.
You wait for ten solid bangs to register through the duct-work, toss the Striker and draw the Browning from the clamshell at the small of your back. Thankfully, your legs seem to be working, and you push off and send yourself sliding face-first out of your hidey-hole.
It’s a good ten feet to the hard deck of the unfinished platform. You lock your arms into the smooth curves of your best Aiki dive roll, knowing full well that this is really going to hurt, but trusting the coat and the armor you have on underneath to take the worst of it (and trusting your arms to keep you from coming straight down on your head). It’s an almost blind fall, but your arms do save you the expected concussion and deflect the impact. You curl and come down hard between your shoulder blades, and you can feel things pop as your wind goes. Your hips don’t fare much better as you keep rolling, but at least nothing obvious seems broken in the sloppy landing. However, you end up sprawled on your back because you stunned yourself too much to translate the momentum into rolling you back up onto your legs, so you wind up in an embarrassingly vulnerable position, your coat open and legs splayed toward the most likely angle of attack. But then you realize that the reason that your legs did not slam the deck as hard as the rest of you is that you half-landed on a body, which is offering some slight cover.
That, and the combined shock of the sound-weapon blowing itself apart and the dozen grenades has had a significant impact on the composure of the Wabs that are still able to return fire. You feel rounds thunk into the body at your feet and concrete dust rains on you from the shells that hit the tunnel wall over you, and it gives you time to pick a few targets and return fire.
You can only see muzzle flashes in the haze of dust and smoke left by the Striker’s load, so you have to trust that your opponents have even less cover than you do. You empty the first magazine and make yourself roll and spin onto your belly and elbows facing them as you dig out a fresh one. You’re hacking for air, which is not making things easier, and your ribcage feels cracked. Then a shell grazes your back across the protection of the coat, but you feel it tear into the meat of your left calf, and it feels like your leg has turned to liquid below the knee. Your stomach flops and your blood turns to ice, threatening impending shock. You can’t move your leg. You scream your rage out and empty the Browning in the direction of the offending gunflash and get the satisfaction of seeing the tracings of a weapon emptying itself wildly into the tunnel roof.
Then you have to cower down behind your corpse-shield because you definitely haven’t finished them yet.
“PROXIMITY WARNING. LIVE TARGETS LOCKED. FIRING SOLUTION:”
What?
Your interface glasses suddenly come alive with a graphic of the tunnel wing that you’re in, and blips indicate your position in reference to the remaining Wabs. There are three of them left “live,” apparently (it also pops up little “X”s on the four who aren’t). It also shows you what cover they’ve taken, drawing lines of fire around it, and their lines of fire back at you.
“LATERAL MOVEMENT—REPOSITION AND FIRE…”
The coolly droning vox is definitely the same one that’s been playing you since the hotel in Trikala.
“LATERAL MOVEMENT—REPOSITION…”
Insistent little bugger. It even draws lines showing you where to go. Having few presenting options, you throw yourself rolling (flopping, more like—your left leg is dead sloppy meat—at least it hasn’t really started to hurt yet) rightward and wind up behind an unfinished pillar, just big enough to hide behind. You drag your leg out of harm’s way and try not to notice the fairly impressive smear of blood you’ve made. Your rage seems to have gone a long way to staving off shock, but you doubt it will be able to keep doing so.
Bullets ping the pillar behind you, and the graphic in your glasses warns that your opponents are shifting positions. You drop the Browning and go for something with significantly more punch. Then, when the heads-up shows the first of your “live targets” moving out of cover, you flip up onto your good leg in a half-kneel and poke around the pillar. The graphic has already shifted to an FPS perspective and makes your target glow despite the haze. You pop a single round from the Israeli .44 right into the center of the target graphic and the heads-up shows him get taken off his feet even though you’re already ducking back out of sight-line.
“TARGET ONE NEUTRALIZED. TARGET TWO: FIRING SOLUTION…”
Target Two is apparently behind a tangle of what’s left of the sound-weapon. The fire-lines on your heads-up are telling you that your gun will penetrate his poor choice of cover, so you flip back out and try it: the graphic draws him clearly through his makeshift shield and you punch two rounds through the tubing and into where it tells you he should be. His virtual image folds on the graphic and the electronic voice dully confirms your kill.
Nice. Very nice.
But you realize you’re sitting in a spreading puddle of your own blood and you’re getting shaky and nauseous even as the graphic tries to show you that your last target is making a kamikaze charge behind his roaring AK and the pillar is threatening to disintegrate behind you and you know you can’t roll out and shoot under this kind of fire and…
Pop pop. Pop.
The full-auto rattle of the AK gets cut off by three quick lesser bangs that you recognize as handgun fire. The graphic shows your last target get knocked sideways and crossed-out. Then the overhead returns and shows a new blip sliding in from down the tunnel, this one in blue.
“HOLDFIRE TARGET... HOLDFIRE TARGET…”
Your glasses suddenly flash an ID file with a fairly unthrilled-looking mug shot of some geeky-looking jarhead who seems vaguely familiar. You could read more, but you’re beginning to see spots
. You have to pull the glasses off. It doesn’t get better. You’re sweating and shaking and feel like you need to lay down or throw up or both, but you manage to pull yourself up into something resembling sitting, back up against the pillar, your leaking leg pulled up under you in hopes the pressure of sitting on it will slow the bleeding.
Cautiously, your rescuer slides around the pillar to where he can see you. He’s still got his gun in his hand—his left hand only, because his right is wrapped in bloody packing and hugged to his chest like a crippled wing—but he keeps the muzzle pointed downward. Ready, you realize, but not eager to instigate you.
He’s wearing civilian clothes—a nondescript jacket and khakis that are splattered with blood. His face is smeared with it, especially the right cheekbone, which looks like someone lanced it with an icepick (it takes you an amusingly long time to recognize the same kind of Fletcher wound you riddled seven Wabs with back in Bari). He’s also wearing interface glasses similar to your own, and you can almost make out the dull glow of his heads-up feed behind them. He’s got chopped dark hair and thick dark eyebrows and a neat beard accenting a longish square-ish face that it takes your shock-fuzzy brain maybe five more seconds to realize is the same one from the Café in Larissa.
He sees the big pistol still hanging into your hands, resting on your bloody lap, and points his own weapon further out of line, trying to put you at some level of ease or at least convince you not to shoot. You doubt you could still lift the gun anyway.
“So… What do I call you? Commissioner Gordon…?”
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 14