by Rob Jones
“What’s a crock?” Hunter asked, following her. “If you know something I don’t about McCabe’s new friends, now’s the time to tell me!”
“Not now,” Amy said. “Besides, we don’t know if McCabe and Gaius are working for Rorschach or not. It’s a working assumption.”
Jodie gave a dismissive laugh. “I never bought into Jim’s bullshit theory about who’s pulling Rorschach’s strings, anyway. He lets his imagination run away with him sometimes. The idea a secret society hidden in some German mountain can deploy the sort of guys who can take special ops like this at the drop of a hat is just ridiculous.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” Amy said.
“Then who the hell took out Vazquez’s men?” said Blanco, reloading his rifle. “Those guys were the real deal and now they’re spread all over the jungle floor with so many gunshot and knife wounds they look like a barbecue platter.”
“Damn it, Sal,” Jodie said. “Leave that shit in your head next time.”
Amy winced. “Yeah, and before I forget, Sal, can I just thank you for that image?”
“Be my guest.”
Jodie ripped off her jacket, revealing a drenched tank-top and sun-tanned arms glistening with sweat. “Fuck this place already.”
“I see one of McCabe’s choppers!” Hunter yelled. “And just two guards.”
Blanco sniffed. “One each, right?”
“How much?” Hunter said.
Quinn looked confused. “How much what?”
“To bet on who takes his man down first,” Blanco said, lifting his paw to Hunter. “Fifty dollars.”
“American or Mexico?”
“Funny. US.”
“A done deal.” Hunter said.
“Why not just shoot them?” Jodie asked.
“And risk giving our position away to McCabe?” Hunter said. “They’d be all over this clearing before we even had the blades whirring. Everyone stay low. We still don’t know where McCabe and the others are.”
Hunter used the cover of the trees for as long as they lasted, but the choppers were in a clearing. When he broke cover, he kept one of the giant transport helicopters in between him and the guard and then tracked around the outside of the aircraft until he was behind the man’s back. Up close now, he scanned his weapons: an assault rifle over his shoulder and on his belt two holsters – a gun and combat knife.
He crept forward, pulling his combat knife but the man turned and shook his rifle from his shoulder and swung it around in Hunter’s face. He had no time, and threw the knife at the man. It spun silently through the air and the blade buried itself in his chest. In shock, the man fired and got off a single round. The bullet gouged a hole in the heel of Hunter’s palm but broke no bones.
As the guard grunted in pain and reached for the knife’s handle, Hunter rushed him and took out the knife. The guard blinked several times, working his mouth but saying nothing. Hunter grabbed his head and twisted it, instantly breaking his neck. Looking across the makeshift airfield, he saw Blanco’s guard crumpling to the ground, dead.
“Who was first?” he said.
Blanco shrugged. “Beats me. Let’s call it even. What about the other chopper?”
“We blow it up when we’re airborne.” Hunter turned and called back to the team in the tree line. “All clear, everyone in the chopper. I’ll fire her up.”
“Wait,” Blanco said. “You’re not flying with a wounded hand, Max. Let me take this one.”
Hunter looked at the blood pouring from his hand. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“Do as he says, Max.” It was Amy. “That’s an order.”
Blanco shrugged. “It’s not wise to cross the boss.”
Hunter had a smartass reply all ready, but when he looked up and saw the look on Amy’s face, he changed tack. “I guess not. Everyone inside now!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Blanco raced through the pre-flight checks and started the engine. Amy climbed into the seat beside him up front, while Hunter, Jodie, Quinn and Lewis sat in the rear compartment and quickly buckled up their seatbelts. The brusque Brooklynite flashed his eyes over the instrument panel and then raised the collective, lifting the helicopter slowly out of the clearing.
He turned the chopper in the air until it faced the other helicopter and fired the chin-mounted Gatling gun in a remorseless burst of fire. The rounds made short work of the grounded chopper’s thin metal skin and when they reached the gas tank a spark ignited the kerosene and blew the aircraft all over the clearing. Chunks of burning metal rained down on the jungle as McCabe and his men burst out of the trees.
“That’s you done, Brodie,” Hunter laughed, looking down at the bullet-raked heaps of twisted fuselage beneath them.
“Thank God,” Jodie said.
“We’re not out of it yet,” Blanco told her. “They’re getting something out of the metal chest we saw on the edge of the clearing.”
“What the hell now?” Amy said.
“It’s a drone,” said Hunter, peering out of the window as he wrapped a bandage from the first aid kit around his hand. When it was airborne, he turned to Amy and said, “And it’s going to move a lot faster than this old bird.”
“Maybe we can lose it in the mist?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We can try, but we have to presume it’s fitted with heat-seeking technology. It’ll fix onto our heat signature and stay right on our arses. You hear that, Sal?”
“I hear you.”
“So what do we do?” Amy asked. “Just wait until it blows us out of the sky?”
Blanco chuckled. “Hey, you’re forgetting who’s flying this thing. I’m a US Army helicopter pilot with years of combat experience under my belt. I’m not about to let these guys take us out just like that.” He snapped his fingers to underline the point. “I have a plan.”
“Hunter’s First Law,” Hunter said. “Always have a plan.”
“And would you like to share your plan with the rest of us?” Amy asked.
A burst of sustained fire to their right; these were no warning shots. The quadcopter drone was aiming to kill, and then the operator swooped the machine down out of the sky until it was level with them. They all knew what was coming next.
Blanco tipped the chopper down and hard to the right. They felt their stomachs turn as the helicopter barrelled into a narrow valley, levelled out and skimming just meters over the top of the canopy.
Amy gasped. “Quinn, can you hack the drone?”
“Damn it, I hope so,” Lewis said.
Quinn sighed. “While making dangerously low passes through the El Salvadorian mountains in a speeding helicopter?”
“Too much?”
“Not at all,” she said, casually running a hand over her short, raven black hair. “I’m still wondering when you’re going to give me a challenge.” The pale young woman pulled her GPD Pocket laptop out of her bag and pulled it open. The tiny computer was only slightly bigger than a smartphone but contained a much faster Intel CPU and a physical keyboard, favored by hackers. “Just keep me alive long enough to do it.”
Blanco levelled the aircraft. “That’s a deal!”
“I’ll buy that for a dollar fifty,” said Jodie.
As the grey hat hacker’s fingers danced over the keys, they all heard the sound of more gunfire chattering from behind them.
“They’re firing again!” Amy said.
Blanco said nothing. He had seen the drone lining up to take another shot and was already taking evasive action. He swung the chopper hard to the left and banked around in a tight arc before descending into another narrow valley and a thicker bank of mist.
Amy leaned forward as far as her belt would allow. “Whoa, can you fly this thing in that kind of weather?”
“I guess we’re about to find out,” he said through his helmet headset. “How’s that hacking coming on, Quinn?”
“I’m getting there, Sal. It’s not easy. Some of these new drones are based on dr
agonfly neurons. That’s how they’re so agile, but fear not – I’m using the same kind of exploit we smashed that Vegas security system with.”
Blanco gave a quick thumbs up. “That was a great night, let’s hope it works this time.”
“Does what happened in Vegas have to stay in Vegas, or is someone going to tell what’s going on?” Hunter asked.
“Brief the newbie, Amy,” Quinn said, fingers still tapping on the tiny keyboard. “I’m too busy, also I don’t care if he knows or not.”
“Thanks,” Hunter said.
The chopper rolled in some turbulence as more of the drone’s bullets traced past them and vanished in the mist on their starboard side. Amy was gripping her armrest like her life depended on it when she turned to Max. “Quinn overloaded the security system at a major casino in Las Vegas a few weeks ago by sending thousands of consecutive Wi-Fi connection requests into it. Each one of the requests was attempting to take control of the system which resulted in the central processing unit crashing and shutting down the system.”
“It was a work of genius,” Blanco said, piloting the helicopter up out of a valley and around the top of one of the range’s mist-cloaked peaks. “But can you do it this time, Quinn?”
“Not that way, no,” she said, frowning. “I already got into the drone using a brute force attack and injected a rootkit. Right now I’m sending some data packets in an attempt to overload the drone’s flight app buffer’s capacity allocation.”
“If I knew what any of that meant,” Hunter said, “I bet I’d be even more impressed than I am right now.”
“Save your wonder,” Quinn said sarcastically. “Because that didn’t work either.”
“And they’re bringing the drone right behind us again,” Blanco said.
“Give me time, Sal.”
“I'm doing my best, but we’re running out of places to hide.” Blanco steered the chopper down into a misty ravine. “And right now our lives are hanging on a pretty shaky ground proximity warning system older than you, Quinn.”
“I’m not done yet,” she said calmly. “I’m programming my laptop to mimic the drone.”
“What does that do?” Hunter asked.
Jodie screamed when more turbulence rocked them from side to side. “I hate flying!”
“We don’t second-guess the genius, Hunter,” Quinn said. “We simply obey it without question. Damn, I thought you said this guy had been briefed, Amy?”
“Special Agent Fox seems to have overlooked telling me about the north face of your personality disorder,” Hunter said. “Mount Ego.”
Quinn ignored him. “Okay, Sal, hang on just a second longer. I’m sending a whole bunch of fake data packets back to the drone’s controller and… holy crap! Can’t you keep this thing stable?”
“We’re getting shot by a drone, Quinn!”
She rolled her eyes. “Fuck’s sake, everyone’s got an excuse.”
“Are you done yet?” Lewis said.
Hunter laughed. “With the moaning or the hacking?”
She snapped the laptop shut. “Both, and you can all thank me later.”
They all looked out of the starboard windows and watched the drone drop away from the side of the helicopter and streak down toward the canopy. It broke through the treetops and then exploded in a massive fireball, muted by the thick mist drifting over the forest.
“Beautiful work, Quinn,” Blanco said.
“What did you do?” asked Hunter.
“I broke the comms link between the controller and the drone and caused it to go into safe mode, which means an automatic landing.”
“So why did it blow up?”
She slipped her laptop back into her bag and crossed her arms over her chest. Once again, she seemed to get smaller, all folded away in the creases of her baggy black hoodie. Slumping down in her seat, she pulled her hood over her face and closed her eyes. “Because I wanted it to.”
“No one screws with Quinn Mosley,” Amy said.
Hunter looked at the young goth and thought he saw the ghost of a smile through the black lipstick. “Good job. You saved our lives.”
“Can’t a girl get some peace and quiet around here?” she said. “I’m trying to sleep.”
Blanco zoomed up out of the mist and rounded another peak before turning the helicopter to the southwest. “We’re going back to San Salvador,” he said through the headset. “We did it, folks.”
“Yes we did!” Amy said. “Good job, everyone.”
Hunter was frowning.
“Max?”
“Maybe now you can tell me just who the hell you all think McCabe, Gaius and Rorschach are working for?”
A tense silence filled the headsets and everyone except Hunter shared an uncertain look with one another. Amy’s voice broke the silence, crackling with static but clear enough to understand. “Yeah… we need to talk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Their last night in El Salvador was spent in a bad part of town. Deep inside the gang-controlled neighbourhood of Zacamil, they stayed in a cheap motel tucked away behind one of the city’s many housing projects. Hunter was drying his hair with a thin bleach-smelling towel when he stepped out of the shower room and saw the rest of the team waiting for him.
The attack in the jungle had hit everyone hard and when he saw them chatting quietly among themselves, he suddenly felt like an outsider again. “Guess it’s a good job I decided to put my trousers on,” he quipped.
“Pants,” Amy said.
“Trousers.”
“Pants.”
“Whatever you want to call them,” Blanco said. “Max was right to ask about who we think Rorschach is working for.”
“I am right,” Hunter said. “In fact, I’m rarely wrong.”
“Talk about ego,” Amy said.
“Thanks – we can talk about it later,” Hunter said. “I’d like that. But now I want to know who was helping Brodie McCabe hunt me through the jungle. They seem like quite the upgrade from his usual goons. Right now I’m finding it pretty crazy that McCabe and our friend Gaius might be working for Rorschach, never mind who he answers to.”
Quiet, reserved and almost shy, Amy now looked at him earnestly. “If you think that’s crazy, then wait until you find out who we think Rorschach’s working for.”
“You’re making me nervous,” he said with a smile. “Should I sit down?”
“Maybe.” She patted the end of the bed, beside her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If the news is that heavy maybe I need to sit on the toilet instead.”
Lewis laughed, but the rest of the team were stony-faced.
“Sorry,” he said, leaning against the TV cabinet. “I’m listening.”
“Good,” Amy said. “Because this is no joke. We think Oskar Rorschach is working for the Illuminati.”
Hunter paused in the silence and then fell about laughing.
She looked genuinely offended. “What’s so funny?”
“You’re not being serious?”
“Yes, I am,” she said, her face hardening.
“But they don’t even exist,” he said. “You might as well have told me our nemesis is the Joker.”
“It’s not true that they don’t exist,” she replied. “Sure, thanks to a series of high profile adventure novels and movies, the name is bandied about far too often these days. The fictional story that has grown up around the word is outrageous, and while the powers that be want us to believe the truth is more prosaic, the reality could be much darker.”
Hunter tossed the towel on one of the beds. “Wait – you really are suggesting the Illuminati are actually a thing, aren’t you?”
“Oh, they’re definitely a thing,” Quinn said. “There’s no doubt of that. They were formally founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt. Some say today they’re headquartered under Denver Airport.”
Hunter was starting to wish he had sat down. Instead, he uns
crewed the top from a bottle of water and took a long, slow sip. His eyes fell on his bag just behind Amy on the bed. The top was open and the head and wingtips of the precious Winged Guardian were just visible, shining brilliantly in the room’s greasy lamplight. He passed a hand over his face and collected his thoughts. “You guys aren’t yanking my chain, are you?”
“No,” Amy said. “Director Gates is a retired US naval intelligence officer with a distinguished combat record. He rarely goes in for chain-yanking, especially when vital national security is concerned.”
“All right, I’m sorry. You were telling me about the Illuminati. Trying to convince me they’re real.”
“They were real,” Amy said. “We think they’re something a little different now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The history is simple. Weishaupt formed the original society at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, and he intended the society to be based on the principles so important to that time – wisdom and knowledge and what have you. That’s why he used the Owl of Minerva as the society’s symbol.”
“The Owl of what?”
She arched an eyebrow. “I see someone never read his Hegel.”
“Are you still talking in English?”
“Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom and perspicacity.”
“Now I know it’s not English.”
“She went to a very good school,” Quinn said. “Like all blue bloods.”
“The point is,” Amy continued, “Weishaupt intended the Illuminati to be a society of and for the enlightened, hence the Owl of Minerva. As Hegel once wrote, The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Or in other words, only when something has passed can you really understand what it was all about.”
“I get it,” Lewis said. “Like the way you don’t know if you got a bad chili dog until later that night.”
“Yes, Ben,” Amy said. “I believe that is what Hegel was getting at. Some believe that despite Weishaupt’s best intentions to create a society for the promotion of enlightenment principles, the group was infiltrated by another much older and sinister force. They crept into the society covertly until they controlled it and then redirected the entire group to work for their own ends.”