4
April 6th.
Scott Becker:
Henderson called it. We didn’t have to wait very long at all.
07:29 Baghdad local. A utilities contractor convoy (four trucks, two flatbeds of heavy equipment, a pair of Franks APCs loaded with ex-military security contractors, and intercept drones both point and rear) gets hit by the worst kind of rolling IED: a hijacked bus still full of commuting workers and students that had been loaded with enough explosives to make a crater that almost completely severed the highway. It happened on what should have been a highly patrolled artery between greens, and would have been stopped by a checkpoint except that the Regulars manning it hesitated when it came to pulling the trigger on a busload of hostages. (Odds are the checkpoint crew never even got time to see what the bus was going for before it crashed through and hit its target—the mart driving timed it to catch the convoy within three seconds of running the checkpoint. Even the automated spike-strips shredding all the tires weren’t enough to stop it in time).
Preliminary casualty count is what Henderson would call a “headline nuke.” And the number’s still “preliminary” even after the Iraqi Regulars secure the site, put out the fires, evac the injured and start trying to put the gruesome pieces together.
What is known is that the convoy itself suffered sixteen dead and thirty-three injured (fifteen critically). One of the APCs was crushed like a soda can, and one of the rigs carrying contractors was all but vaporized. The same can be said of the bomb-carrying bus, which leads to the biggest casualty question-mark: it’ll be days before we can figure out who was on it—though I’m sure whoever is responsible will help us out by proudly posting the IDs of their own marts on their sites. And then this figure isn’t including at least ten civilians (including two women and four children) that got taken out just for being on the same stretch of highway when the convoy got hit.
In any case, it was more than enough to trigger Dee: Dead civilians equals viable targets.
Dee locked onto the incident site thirty-two seconds after it happened, since Collins had authorized it to monitor all Coalition military channels for something just like this. And because of the progress of the tagging program, there was already a satellite stationed over the area. Dee immediately did a “rewind” and scanned the point at which the bus was taken. Tags lit up like a small swarm of fireflies. The happy news: several of them did not get on the bus to go to heaven with their brothers. They went merrily home, probably to watch their little atrocity light up the news.
07:33. I get buzzed awake. I’d only been asleep for a small handful of hours, and that not good sleep—a combination of being more than a bit amped to be playing future soldier, geeking out about being on a carrier off the coast of Israel, and the general discomfort I get trying to settle into new surroundings (I suck enough at hotels—a junior officer’s berth even on the best the Navy has to offer makes the Langley Basement luxurious). Plus, we’d only just flown over barely forty-eight hours ago (which means I’m on night three with semi-non-sleep), so I’m also suffering from a trip halfway around the world as well as trying to adjust to being ship-bound.
Dee, having no patience for anyone’s cranky human frailties, just starts flashing me what it’s culled from ground and sat video: it’s a smoking mangle of vehicles and bodies and unrecognizable debris which I quickly realize likely includes parts of bodies. I can’t get much clear detail from the blurred POV feed from the Iraqi medics as they try to extract bloodied, stunned, bleeding, screaming humans from the vehicles that did not get so completely obliterated by the blast.
I think Dee culls these close-ups of human suffering on purpose: It wants us to see the blood, the pain. I’m sure it’s piping similar images to the rest of the team, stoking that Manticore programming, winding them up for what comes next. Knowing that this is what it’s doing—making us crazy with righteous rage—doesn’t make it any less effective. Within thirty seconds of this horror show I realize anything resembling fatigue is far gone. My body is already out of the rack and I’m zipping into my boots—I’ve clicked over to using my interface glasses so I can suit up without taking my eyes off of the feed.
And it gets worse when the locals get a more complete look at the mess in the roadway beyond the smashed and burning convoy: the blast scattered and shattered what looks like almost a dozen other civilian vehicles: work trucks, a taxi, two vans, assorted family sedans.
Since there was no secondary ambush (opening fire on the target after the bomb goes off), civilians are carefully approaching to gawk, to scream, to try to help pry flesh out of mangled metal. (The road is cut through, so they can’t get where they were going anyway.) There are already bodies covered with makeshift shrouds of whatever is handy. I get a prolonged shot of a very small body lying next to what appears to be a young woman. They have bloodied jackets over the upper half of their bodies.
The medics and the security forces onsite do what they can, but they’re still more focused on the possibility of a secondary ambush, and they don’t have resources onsite yet to do any more than usher the survivors they can easily extract farther away from the still-smoldering epicenter. In one soldier’s POV, some woman is screaming over the still body of a very young boy whose eyes stare at the sky like a doll’s.
07:47. Henderson, slower than Dee (and looking more dragged than I am, possibly because I’m used to seeing him so together—but then, I have to remember it’s the middle of the night where he is) calls us all up and tells us to get armored and up to Staging because it’s official: We’re on. I’m already suited and grabbing my helmet. Dee already has the dropships warming up on the flight deck.
07:49. I thought I made good time, but Burke and Ram beat me to the pad (again). At least I get the satisfaction of beating the rest of Burke’s Able Company cherry team by a good thirty seconds, hoping it makes me look something like a real officer to the newbies who don‘t know me as just Dorky Doc.
I don’t get to enjoy it long: Dee’s flashing us the mission brief on our visors. It already has a set of profiles to chase based on tag files. It only needs a few pieces of up-close onsite scans to make a confirmation strong enough to justify what we’re going to do next, which means we need to make a stop at ground zero first.
The upside is we’ll be picking up an old friend.
09:17 local.
“Abbas!”
He’s waiting for us onsite, the only one who doesn’t look impressed (or just majorly double-take weirded-out) when the black VTOL dropships swoop in like angry wasps and line-drop us in the road: eight suits of bulky black armor, faceless behind the tinting of our visors. We must look like ninjas from outer space.
He’s certainly not surprised. I’m sure he got the word from his higher-ups that the grand forefathers of what will one day be called UNACT set us up just offshore to wait for something like this to give us the excuse. But whether he’s here by his own choice or because he got orders, I can’t be sure.
The hole in the highway looks even bigger in person. We could land in the damn thing. To the Iraqis’ credit, the wounded seem to have all been evaced. The dead, however, still remain as I’d last seem them—I guess the Muslim rush to bury the dead can be at least briefly forestalled by a pressing need to piece together a picture of what happened in hopes of finding some clue that might lead to proper revenge. They have no idea that an AI main-framed half-a-world away has already compiled a list of likely suspects by watching it all from space.
They haven’t touched all the twisted metal and burned synthetics either, except where they had to pry out the still-living. It’s hard to believe anything can do what this bomb did to a bus, several heavy trucks and a pair of armored personnel carriers. I’m wandering through it like it’s some overdone sim—I have to touch jagged metal to let me know it’s real. And step in blood.
The images of the dead children and the screaming mother come back. My instant reaction is righteous kill-everybody pissed, though in some part of
my brain that’s still rational I know it means I’ve just got the Manticore thing (or maybe I’m just human). Then I see one of the other suits kneel over one of the blood puddles and touch it with the fingertips of its black gauntlet, quiet, reverent, while everyone else gets to work. Then I see the big stainless-steel gun strapped to the right thigh of that suit and I realize it’s Ram and I can only imagine what’s pumping in him right now.
“Major Burke!” Abbas greets back when Burke flips up his visor, and offers a hearty grip. I’d think they’d hug, but it’s hard in the bulk of the armor. There’s still a full platoon of Iraqis covering the site. And they do stare at us like we’re Ninjas From Space. And the whole ninja-astronaut thing gets worse when I jog (as best as the suit will allow) over to the edge of the blast crater to help Wise and Biggs get the necessary scans and trace samples from the wrecks, the road, the hole in the road, the dunes of debris at the edge of the crater. It takes all of three minutes to get enough to “close” our case.
“We brought you your suit,” Burke is offering Abbas (who’s wearing basic Dragonscale armor over his tan Iraqi uniform). “You wanna ride with us, for old times’?”
“Got it,” I have to interrupt when Dee feeds it to me: a rough reconstruct of the device based on what’s left, compared to the tag images of the taking of the bus, that allows Dee to run history in reverse and inside-out: who loaded the bomb (and who handled the materials for a trace scan), who went home vs. who stayed on the bus, where they came from (and therefore likely where the bomb did too), and where they went afterwards. (That done, it’s already making projections as to how and by whom the contractors’ security was breached to allow such an accurate set-up of their convoy…)
Dee sets us up to hard-confirm our targets by loading the material trace scan of the bomb’s component chemicals (including whatever unique compound signatures it has), so that our gear will light up anybody who handled the fucking thing the instant we lock them in our sights.
Burke is explaining this to Abbas, trying to sell him coming with us. But Abbas doesn’t need to think about it. I can easily see the rage simmer behind his dark eyes. And Burkes’ offer makes him immediately very happy in a very scary-bad way. One quick call for release from his superiors (and I expect they intended this all along), and one of the dropships comes low enough for him to jump on the old-fashioned way.
09:26. The sun is beginning to get higher in the sky, and I can feel my suit’s AC kick in as I watch the heat begin to send shimmering waves off the clogged highway toward the horizon. Dee lifts the dropships over us, and I feel the pop of my main rappeller ejecting again. A quick but familiar jerk hauls me up into the air by the back of my neck, and I watch the blasted roadway get further away under my boots. And we’re out of there.
09:44. We would’ve been here faster, but Abbas needed to get suited and Captain Ram had to do his now-infamous costume change.
The target is a small stucco-over-foam excuse for a house buried in a row of almost identical houses, entire suburbs slapped together when the Coalition made a half-assed attempt at rebuilding everything they’d plowed under with half-a-decade of shock and awe. Dee reads right through the tar and pressboard roofing and picks out everybody home, then crosses the ones with tags against the Iraqi’s housing registry.
“We’ve got four high-probability: they were together right at the bus-taking and came back here immediately. Dee thinks it’s got sat-image good enough to show two of them helping to load the bomb. They’ll be glowing with residue if they did. Another three list as low—only one of them is tagged. And three more that read as children…” I read off what Dee is feeding all of us. (My job as support Monitor hasn’t changed: put a human voice on the machine, convince everybody that it’s doing what it’s supposed to, that someone is watching over it to make sure it isn’t going all SkyNet. It also means I have to stay up in the dropship when everybody else drops. I have mixed feelings about this. But I don’t have time to stew.)
“Looks like they’re having a late breakfast,” Burke assesses grimly, his tone implying they were too busy to eat earlier because they were hijacking and blowing up a commuter bus.
“Do we want to hit with children home?” Biggs asks.
“We could risk drawing them out,” Abbas considers, but it’s clear he doesn’t like that idea either.
“No,” Ram lays it down cold, putting his hat on and keeping it held there with one hand while the other draws his big-ass gun and cocks it. “We go. Fast and overwhelming. Time to prove Dee really won’t shoot noncombatants.” Then he shoots a pointed look at me and I try to look as confident as I can. He gives me back a nod: good enough. “Worst case: we’ve got it wrong and have to buy these nice people a new roof. Assuming we’re right, I don’t want any of them getting off a stray shot or blowing a vest or worse with kids around.” The other helmets nod and Dee feeds them the insertion plan. Ram steps into drop position, holding his hat on, his Grayman coat flapping wildly in the wind. I see him grin a grin that looks like a snarl and look at Burke.
“This ain’t rock and roll…” he says.
And the Grayman steps out of the aircraft.
The shaped charges hit the roof a split-second before he does. It’s just enough to seriously weaken it without actually blowing it down all over everybody inside—it softens the tar and chipboard and framing enough that his armored weight pushes him through when he lands on it. Gray coat gray hat go crashing hard through the ceiling.
There were five adults (conveniently within the recommended allowance for terror-cell size) around the low, long wooden table, which is impressively sturdy and doesn’t collapse when the armored Grayman rappels down hard right in the middle of the flatbread.
I can’t immediately see their facial expressions through the smoke-and-dust haze and enhancement graphics. Dee gives them all of half-a-second to freak at the sudden, shocking appearance of the grinning and significantly upgraded Grayman on their dining table. Then a half-dozen other blasts herald the dropping of a half-dozen black-armored monsters all throughout the little four-room house. Angry red laser light lances from their ICWs through the plaster dust and smoke that has now pretty completely filled the house with a swirling chaos storm, and red dots lock the highest-probability targets.
Two of the men at the table immediately try blind flight, and run pretty much smack into Abbas, who (despite being out of things for a while) remembers how to use the plate and the bulk of the suit to hit hard and knocks them both flat out like they just got sacked at the Super Bowl. Wise and Burke have one each pinned back against opposite walls—the sight of the faceless black armor and the twin-barreled maw of the ICW dancing laserdots on their chests has them instantly in the apparently familiar hands-behind-the-head-and-kneel pose. That only leaves the one guy who managed to remain in his seat: he’s cool, and at least a decade older than the others, his hairline well-receded, his beard frosted gray—he’s probably lived through enough of the Bushwar to be numb to whatever chaos gets thrown at him. He just looks up at Ram, right into the muzzle of the big magnum pistol, and puts his glass of tea down on the table pretty much between Ram’s boots. Then he sits back and grins defiantly and seems to be coiling for something.
“Don’t…” Ram hisses at him, pointing his weapon right between the older man’s eyes. Dee blares a translation of the warning through the suit’s PA, followed by droning instructions for everyone to stay calm and not to move. The older man blinks dust out of his eyes but just keeps sitting there, glaring at Ram and looking like he’s royally pissed at the rude interruption of his meal, never mind the big holes in his roof. He barely darts his eyes left and right, looking like he’s working things out and about to jump. Dee sweeps him for trace emissions and his hands almost glow with residue.
One of the younger children is screaming from the kitchen. A woman’s voice is protesting with desperate anger.
“Got it!” Biggs announces, coming through from a small side-room. “Bomb-s
hop under the floor in here!”
One of the men against the wall starts to complain, to protest his innocence, loud and angry. Scans show him clean, but the two that Abbas is making sure stay on the floor glow like the older man. Tags put both of the younger ones as the ones on the bus likely planting of the bomb. Dee starts droning a standard arrest warrant litany. It takes several seconds to get to the bit where they’ve been fingered by “video surveillance” and trace chemicals on their hands. That’s when the old man dives sideways for something—he moves faster than you’d expect—and Ram takes him apart.
The big pistol flames and punches through the man’s left thigh mid-lunge, spraying blood all over the tile floor and slamming him down on his face. He manages a scream, though I doubt anyone heard it after the deafening boom of the gun in the small room. He isn’t discouraged, though: he tries crawling and dragging like he’s got nothing to lose and reaches desperately for a nearby cabinet. He almost gets his fingers on the latch when Ram shatters his forearm with another deafening shot. Then Biggs does the shithead a favor and gets between him and what he was trying to get to, so Ram won’t have to shoot him again. The man gets that he’s all done, curls himself into a fetal position, and tries to bleed himself into shock with as much defiant dignity as he can manage.
Biggs kicks open the cabinet in question, and reveals a mart-belt and a pair of folding-stock AKs. I can only hope he was going for the guns and not planning to blow up his own kids, but my simmering rage wants it to be the latter.
“Get the children out,” Burke orders grimly when Jansen and Roberts herd the two women and three children out of the kitchen where they’d been hanging while their menfolk enjoyed a properly conservative segregated meal. Abbas starts coaching the kids to move along and that it will be okay. Jansen has to physically drag one of the women away from the bleeding head-of-household on the floor. Abbas tells her she needs to be with her children, and she goes, turning just long enough to spit on Jansen’s visor.
Iraqi APCs are already unloading troops outside to surround the house, and the women and the kids get quickly shunted into an armored police van to get secured.
“You swept them, right?” Burke questions Jansen (who doesn’t seem to be sure what to do about the spit on his visor), suddenly paranoid.
“He did, Major,” I soothe him, getting the image of women and children blowing themselves up in a police van for spite somewhat out of his mind.
Meanwhile, Ram has jumped down off the table and is over top of the man he has shot. He sticks the muzzle of the big pistol right up against his temple and uses it to pin the man’s head hard to the floor. His other hand pulls off his interface glasses, and he reaches down and shoves them over the older man’s eyes.
“Show him,” he says to no one in particular, but I monitor the feed and see that Dee is showing the man the onsite video of bombing’s immediate aftermath, dead children and all. He gives him a long fifteen seconds or so to take it all in before pulling off the glasses. The man is whimpering now, shaking, eyes shut, going well into shock. No idea if he saw it or not. But Ram drives it home by leaning in real close and whispering in the mass murderer’s ear:
“Ana al-haq.”
One of the men up against the wall looks like he’s getting extra nervous about the army’s arrival. When he moves, he’s as sudden and fast as the old man was: he jumps Wise (whether he realized or cared about her gender or that she was just close, I can’t guess), tries to get a hold of her ICW, tries to use her as a shield. Neither works. Abbas and Burke and Biggs track and spray, and their combined ICWs almost literally sandblast him off of her, shredding his body and throwing what remains against the wall and across the floor. And when it’s done, she’s just left standing there without so much as a scratch, her armor visibly soaked in his blood, looking numbly down at herself.
“Shit…” I catch her stammer into her helmet. “Fuck…”
The other wall-flower is still down on his knees, hands still tight-clasped behind his head, biting his own lip bloody, tears soaking the dust on his face, shivering.
The old man is in what look like convulsions, lying in a small lake of his own blood mixed with what’s left of the man the ICWs took off of Wise. Their blood all runs and swirls together in the dust.
I’m thinking I’m glad I stayed in the dropship.
“Everybody out,” Burke is ordering. “Get everybody out.”
Then I’m not so glad I stayed in the dropship.
SOP: Fly low and fast so no one on the ground gets tempted to take an impulsive shot at you.
Just as Burke’s giving the orders to clear out, the alarms go apeshit and Dee is flashing “INCOMING RPG” and takes control of the dropship while the human pilot is still trying to figure out what and which way. The VTOL lurches and turns, and I can feel one of the nose turrets spin and start spraying and something goes boom in midair way too close.
It takes me maybe two seconds to get righted enough after the sudden G-force whacking to get out of my harness. Two more seconds to grab handrail and drag to the port side dropbay door and get a look outside.
The dumbshit who fired the RPG at us is still standing put, staring like a moron up at us from the back porch of his adobe shack. Instinct and heads-up prompts make me lock him in the sighting of my ICW as we pass back—dumbshit looks maybe all of fourteen years old and somebody is screaming on enhancement and translation for him to get back inside. I think it’s his goddamn mother. I’ve got him locked and I can’t pull the trigger.
Dee does it for me. The kid trades his empty rocket launcher for a live AK, and the ship’s nose guns make him explode.
SOP: Fly low and fast so no one on the ground gets tempted. Problem is, I can’t tell if this was pilot fuck-up or Dee wagging the dropship’s ass on purpose, daring someone to do the obvious thing, just so it could make a point. Then I remember I programmed it to do shit just like that, back when I was sitting in a VR lab feeling like I was gonna save the world.
There’s a woman in my sights now. She’s kneeling and screaming over a pile of meat in the dirt. She turns her face up and locks her eyes on me, her kid all over her hands. Then Dee buzzes us out of there.
10:18. The dropships circle back to target, dropping low over the now roofless target house. Eight rappellers reconnect and pull seven black armor suits and one guy in a gray hat and overcoat back up into the sky. The Iraqi uniforms and the locals in the street just sort of stare dumbly up at the absurd sight of it. But the message has been sent, and headlines will follow—headlines that will go far to reverse the impact of what the terrorists did on that highway: Yes, they managed their atrocity. But we had them tracked down and cleaned up in less than an hour and a half.
I expect they stare until the dropships have flown off out of sight, vanishing into the clear midday sky as the day only gets hotter.
Welcome to the New World Order.
I’m still shaking…
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 51