by P. W. Singer
The Valor had dropped them off in a forest clearing, using a valley dipping through the hills to try to mask its approach. From there, they’d advanced on foot as silently as they could. The team’s dog-like, four-legged scout bot took point, stalking forward 100 meters ahead of them. Keegan tasked TAMS to follow in the rear. Even though its sensors were more advanced than those of the HRT bot, she knew they trusted their own gear more.
Keegan crouched at the base of one of the outcroppings and watched the low hills above for any sign of activity. Her eyes said there was nobody up there, and the Iris drone feed indicated the same thing. TAMS, though, pinged her there was intermittent short-distance radio-wave transmission activity in the area, the kind used in personal-area networks. It could be nothing—a hunter, a hiker, even a drone out surveying crops. And, yet, it could be something.
A glance back confirmed that TAMS remained out of sight, the robot’s presence behind a large rock marked on Keegan’s vizglasses.
Orders from Noah came next, and the team of eight HRT operators and Keegan slowly climbed up the ridge and over to a dip in the ground just below its crest. The agents crawled on their bellies to the depression, which they covered with a sensor-defeat material whose patterns refracted the colors around them. If the compound did have a guard detail running scans of the area, it would make it harder to find them. They pushed the scout bot ahead 50 meters more to set a perimeter.
If not for sitting in a hole covered by mesh netting, the setting would have been bucolic. They were at the edge of a vineyard, row after row of flowering vines and young grapes. On her right, Keg tapped Keegan on the shoulder and pointed to the east, where the sky had begun to fill with orange, red, and cream swirls just ahead of the sun’s rise. For all his bulk, he apparently had an artist’s appreciation of the moment. Then, he spat dip, this time onto the dirt.
Keegan looked over at Noah, to her left, who continued to study the Iris’s imagery of the compound.
Reaching up, Keegan snatched a grape off the vine and popped it in her mouth.
“I wouldn’t do that,” whispered Noah. “You don’t know what they put in those things . . . might turn you into a Nazi.”
“Yeah, I don’t think racism works that way,” Keegan whispered back. She waited a beat. “Pretty safe bet, though, it’s all white wine.”
“Good one.” He looked over at her. “You know, as messed up as it sounds, I’m glad we get to do this again, just shooting the shit, while waiting for it.” He held out a leather-gloved hand and they bumped fists.
They stayed silent for another minute, thinking back to the others they knew from those days who wouldn’t be able to watch a sunrise. “So why does anybody drink wine from Virginia anyway?” Noah said, breaking the silence.
“That’s old think,” said Keegan. “Some decent vineyards, though it depends on the vintages.”
“Vintages? Listen to you. What do you think they call this one?”
“Stormfront Cellars?”14
“Alt Reich Riesling?” said Noah.
“You two are really changing the way I think about Marines,” Keg said, interrupting them. “We got five more minutes if you want to place an online order for a case.”
They were silent for another minute that seemed to go by in a second. In that compression of time between the final moments of waiting and dangerous action, Keegan regularly found clarity. It was a precious feeling, that cross of melancholy and understanding what truly mattered. As the shadows lifted further and the sunrise began to paint the green hillside in orange and red light, she pulled one last image of Haley into her mind. Then one of Jared, which made her wonder if she’d done that out of habit, or something more.
“This really is beautiful land, though,” Noah said in a voice that revealed he was lost in the same state.
“It is. Doesn’t seem fair.” Keegan tapped the transmit button and said into her mouthpiece, “TAMS, just how did these fuckers afford a place like this?”
TAMS sent a frown emoji, indicating it was unable to answer Keegan, then a status pop-up that it was not using its network access in order to reduce their electronic signature. Then it sent another message, this one a warning, indicating that Keegan’s biodata pointed toward elevated levels of stress.
“No kidding,” Keegan said to herself.
“Time to go to work,” Noah said and waved them out of the hide site.
Keg went first, getting up from his prone position to a firing position, on his knees, scanning ahead with his scope. Seeing nothing, he moved slowly to the next row of the vineyard, weaving around the staked grapes.
Keegan looked over at Noah, who got to his feet with similar ease and moved to the row ahead of Keg, each footfall deliberate as a stalking lion. He looked over at Keegan and angled his head, indicating it was her turn. As she got into a low crouch, though, she caught a glimpse of bright green. No more than a fine brush stroke, it lined across Noah’s helmet and then dropped just below its brim.
“Contact!” Keegan shouted, instinctively dropping back down into the ditch. But by that point, the sniper’s round had gone through Noah’s goggles. His body snapped back from the bullet’s impact into the inside of his helmet.
“Unable to locate the shooter,” yelled Keg. He had also dropped prone, the exoskeleton suit automatically extending the stalk-like sensors on his back above the grapes.
Keegan slithered up to the top of the ditch. Her primary thought was to get to Noah, to throw up a pop-up ballistic shield to protect him, even though she knew he no longer needed it.
Another volley of shots ripped through the vineyard, splintering wood and kicking up dust beside her, forcing her back down. There was no telltale sound; the compound’s defenders were firing with silencers, a puzzling legal modification that made a weapon perfect for hunting people.
Keg stood up and fired off three thunderous shots. With no clear targets yet, it was mostly to try and suppress their fire.
Keegan’s eyes burned as a fleeting image of Noah’s son, who she’d last seen as a toddler, burst into her mind—and then of Noah and his husband dancing at their wedding. How the hell was Tomas going to raise a kid all alone?
A sudden impact drove Keegan’s shoulder into the dirt, driving out all other thoughts as she yelled out in pain. She instinctively rolled, moving her position to complicate the shooter’s targeting. As she did, she did a mental check: the pain was dull, like being hit with a sledgehammer, not the sharpness of a penetrating bullet. The body armor had held. But the fact that they’d hit her while in the ditch meant there was a second shooter, coming from a different angle from whoever killed Noah.
Keegan ground her teeth, hearing another agent’s garbled message in her earbud. Jamming. What a shit-show. She crawled forward with scurrying movements designed to throw off the shooter. As she did, another round squarely hit her protective shoulder plate. She flashed back to her range instructors and their careful explanation of windage, and how even a barely competent marksman wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.15
She felt her legs being yanked by the ankles, as she was dragged backward. She desperately tried to hold on to her weapon, knowing she’d need it whenever she could right herself. But as she bumped across the ground, soil filling her mouth, it slipped out of her grip.
A few seconds later, she came to a stop. Rolling onto her back, she groped for the automatic tactical knife clipped to the exoskeleton. It was a futile gesture. Even reaching for it, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to snap it out in time, but she wanted to go out fighting.
As her sight cleared, though, she saw TAMS’s blank face looking down at her. It was crouched over her body protectively. Over its shoulder, she saw a wooden shed a few feet away that stood in the line of sight of the shooter.
“We need the QRF and medevac. Direct them to our position,” said Keegan.
“It is not possible to transmit,” said TAMS. “Two small unmanned aerial systems are jamming communications.” As if confirming its report,
a pair of quadcopters, one tailing the other, zipped overhead.
Even in the midst of the fight, part of Keegan’s brain marked a reminder later to instruct TAMS to call them “drones.” It was quicker than the formal name.
The report of Keg’s rifle echoed through the valley, and the squad of HRT operators began to advance out of the vineyard. Their confident movements reflected the agents’ extensive combat experience, most of them former special operations soldiers. But one by one they fell, disappearing between the rows of grapes as if they were slipping beneath waves.
“Where’s my weapon?” Keegan said, carefully pushing herself up.
TAMS sent a thumbs-up emoji and sprinted off. A few seconds later, it had Keegan’s NGSW in one hand and its shotgun in the other.
The drones buzzed by, circling the squad.
“TAMS, shoot down those drones with the shotgun,” Keegan said.16
“OK,” TAMS responded. The bot stood and raised the shotgun, the stock’s butt braced against its left shoulder, its right arm locked straight out to grasp the under-barrel foregrip. In firing position, the shotgun made the bot look even smaller. “Two autonomous aerial targets engaged,” it said, giving an unnecessary play-by-play, something else she marked to change if they got out of this intact.
Then TAMS’s torso spun on its axis, twisting left, then right, as it fired two shots. An incoming round smacked against the robot’s plate armor on its back, and TAMS’s feet shifted slightly to rebalance itself after the impact. Another two shots, and TAMS knelt back down.
“Targets destroyed.”
Keegan’s vizglasses flooded with an array of rapidly moving colored icons and representative data. It took her a moment to process it all. Blue flashing dots indicated four operators wounded and in need of medical assistance, while the dark blue dots surrounded by black boxes marked where their team members’ bodies lay in need of recovery. She had “situational awareness” to be sure, enough to tell her that everything had gone to shit.
What mattered, though, were the red dots.
“I mark fourteen active shooters, TAMS. Is that correct?” As she spoke, she began moving again at a low crawl, no longer as concerned about the snipers pinpointing her without the quadcopter spotters. Her target was a long barnlike building, which the pre-raid briefing indicated was a fortified server farm.
“There are eight adult males, four adult females, and two minors. All of them are equipped with automatic weapons and protective armor.”
“Even the kids?”
“The minors are equipped with AR-15 rifles, ballistic helmets, and vests.17 Their position is located adjacent to the main dining facility entrance.”
“These people,” said Keegan in disgust at someone who would teach kids not just to hate, but to kill for it. In the middle of a shootout, you were supposed to be totally focused in the moment, all extraneous thoughts purged. But that was never the case, she knew.
She crouched against the side of the server building. Her lens marked a suspected shooter in a three-story brick McMansion just beyond the row of grapes.
She rolled out of the cover position, spying a helmeted man in a dark green camouflage smock firing an AR-15 out of the open window on the second floor. He was spraying fire down at two of the injured HRT operators, one dragging the other past the red roses capping the ends of the vineyard rows. Just because you bought the gear of a soldier didn’t mean you knew how to use it. If he’d had any experience, he would have fired from inside the room, not so exposed. Keegan fired three times, the impact of the rounds spinning the man back and out of sight.
Keegan signaled for TAMS to join her and the bot sprinted toward her, drawing fire from multiple shooters. At that, Keg’s weapon boomed again. He’d also gotten the targeting data to his scope, so he could now fire back with more effect.
A message flashed and Keegan ground her teeth. A trio of the local sheriff’s department SUVs would be onsite in less than five minutes. But they were reinforcements for the wrong side. Based on communications TAMS received via the Iris drone, an appeal had gone out from the compound for help from local law enforcement, portraying their stand against the HRT as defending private property against rogue federal agents.18
Keegan designated the approaching vehicles as a threat and indicated the point at which she did not want them to cross. She marked this with a red X, which she dragged on the screen to the center of the narrow road that ran into the ASE compound, placing the target about 200 meters from the main entrance. The Valor crew confirmed the request instantaneously.
Never a subtle aircraft, the Valor thundered above as it raced over the compound. A hard bank left, then right, to evade ground fire. Then it pulled almost straight up with a strained whine. As it did, it released a beer-keg-shaped jet-black canister that broke in half midway through its climbing turn. Dozens of small spheres flew earthward. Moments later, a series of popcorn-like bursts rattled Keegan’s ears as the spheres detonated. Firing together, each one released a pink spray that immediately turned from mist to gel to something akin to a wall of bubble gum. The barrier, nearly as long as a football field, kept growing with an unsettling sound akin to Rice Krispies doused in milk. The sticky foam wasn’t just unpassable, but impossible to get off your clothing. It left coils of intestine-like material that activated the more you tried to scrape it. After the Nairobi embassy evacuation, Keegan and her unit had ended up just burning their uniforms in a pink-hued crackling fire.19
A quick check of her vizglasses showed the bulk of the HRT operators had regrouped in the shelter of the ASE’s barn. The distinctive sharp-sounding detonation of a hand grenade, then another, shook the server farm as the ASE members began to concentrate their attack on the massed HRT.
The main ASE meeting building, a single-story long house with a churchlike steeple, remained the objective. Another grenade detonated nearby. Unless the HRT operators could take down that hall, this would become a drawn-out fight that could last hours.
Another volley of gunfire lashed out at them, rippling the dirt around the robot. TAMS took multiple hits in the chest and back, the protective armor plates now bullet-scarred and cracked. The antennae running along the top of its head couldn’t be shielded, though, and one was split open and frayed. The robot was a bullet magnet.
“TAMS, I need you to go to the center of the main square, approximately 10 meters from the entrance to that long building, you got it?”
“OK.”
“When you get there, stop and stay there.”
“OK.”
It deserved better. Reaching into a pouch attached to the robot’s chest rig, she pulled out the 12-gauge shells and carefully reloaded the Benelli shotgun and passed it back. “You are authorized for self-defense measures,” said Keegan. “Now go.”
The machine dashed around the edge of the server building, and then stood still. Keegan heard the distinctive cowbell-like sound of rounds hitting the bot’s ceramic armor, a cacophony indicating the attention of the defenders was focused on destroying the bot.
As her vizglasses showed the red dots converging on the open area in upstairs windows and under porches, the blue dots of the HRT operators snaked in and out of the buildings to get to more advantageous positions. There was something about the robot that set the ASE defenders off—maybe it was just the fact that it wouldn’t go down.
The robot remained still as gunfire raked its armor. Occasionally, it fired its shotgun at the great hall’s tower, but the non-lethal Taser rounds were of no use.
Another round hit the machine, this one a pinging of metal on metal.
It was too much.
“TAMS, get out of there!” she screamed. “Take cover.”
As TAMS now ran, a trace of bullets following it, Keegan used the opportunity to sprint across open ground to a low building the tactical map said was a pump house. Her body slammed into its brick wall and she caught her breath. She told herself that calling off the bot was the right call, that making it a
harder target would make it a more enticing one. She thought about what Noah would say after the mission, the shit he’d give her for treating a machine that way . . . then she remembered he wouldn’t say anything at all.
That was when she heard the pump house’s steel door roll up.
Shit. She took a step back and snugged the NGSW to her shoulder, keeping both eyes wide open. Hands shaking, she exhaled and forced a loose grip, ready to fire at any moment.
She saw the muzzle first, a boy stepping out from the doorway. The AR-15 had a stubby flash suppressor with some kind of writing on it; the boy couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen judging by the first few hairs of a mustache. Orange-tinted motocross goggles covered his eyes. His tactical helmet was the same model as the one Keegan wore, and bobbled on his head.
Close behind him was a girl, eight or nine years old, armed with a compact pink AR-15 rifle and body armor covered in stickers of cartoon eagles. A long blonde ponytail coiled out from under the helmet and ran over her shoulder down to her waist.
The boy raised his weapon halfway then let it drop, unable to shoot. But the girl brought the rifle all the way to her shoulder and aimed at Keegan’s head.
Keegan froze. She couldn’t do it. Shouldn’t do it.
Keegan lowered her muzzle and said “I love you” under her breath, hoping that Haley, no matter what she was doing at that moment, would feel those last words.
The girl squinted her right eye, as if taking the measure of her target one last time before pulling the trigger.
Then came two blasts, and the children fell back into the dark of the pump house. Keegan pivoted to see TAMS behind her, its shotgun still in a firing position. In shock, she turned back and entered the building, her gun raised again.
The children lay on the floor, their arms out wide, as if they’d just leapt in a carefree summertime swan dive.
Keegan dry heaved and knelt beside their small bodies, feeling for a pulse. They were still alive—non-lethal rounds in the Benelli. Not designed for the body size of kids, which made it a damn close call.