Zone War

by John Conroe

  “Thank you JJ. I appreciate that. But when did I ever say I was gonna just have a .338?” I asked with a smile. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve found. All those military and federal facilities all over the place. National Guard, Homeland Security, Counter Terrorism. This book only has two drone caches in it. The rest of the pages are stockpiles of weapons, explosives, safe houses, and more. Oh, and it’s all in code, Brad.”

  His eyes snapped up from the book, the greedy little gleam changing to instant anger. His eyes flicked to Astrid, then back to me. Either he was remembering to act civil in front of her or he was wondering if she knew me well enough to decipher my code. Or both.

  “JJ brings up good points,” he finally said. “Ajaya’s been in love with my daughter since he fumbled his first meeting with her on Drone Night. He may be hopelessly pathetic, but he’s at least consistent.”

  “Dad!” Astrid said. He ignored her, looking at Trinity. “We’ll do it.”

  “Ajaya?” Trinity asked, body tense as she waited for my answer.

  “As long as my family is guaranteed payment if I don’t make it,” I said.

  “I’ll sign a contract that says they can have my share if you don’t make it out,” JJ said.

  “Me too!” Astrid said, flicking a glare at her father.

  “I have no issue with that covenant,” Brad said.

  “Okay. We have a mission and an episode to plan. Let’s get to it,” Trinity said, eyes gleaming with unfettered excitement.

  Chapter 23

  The container of drones was, surprise, on the south end of the island.

  Both caches were located on the outside edges of Manhattan, right up close to the docks. Each was also fairly close to a major entrance to the Zone. Shorter retrieval distance, potential use of a boat, some protection by wall defenses.

  I chose the southern one for obvious reasons… I wanted to be near as possible to Hudson Street. Once I had access to the Zone, I needed to use it for all it was worth.

  “Wait. I thought we were going to pick you up on the way out, like Dad and JJ used to with your father?” Astrid asked during the planning.

  “That might have worked back then, but nowadays, you all have got to go pedal to the metal and haul out of there. I’ll exfiltrate on foot, like I always do. Believe me, it’s safer,” I said, giving her a meaningful glance. I saw the exact moment she realized what I was really saying.

  “Oh, so you’ve got that whole exfil technique you were telling me about?”

  “Yup. Ajaya’s secret sneaking techniques,” I said with a nod.

  The others were looking at us funny. Well, Brad and Trinity were. JJ was studying the map and Martin was cleaning his Sig Sauer 10mm Caseless like a broody psycho.

  “The cache is booby trapped, but easy for a human to disarm. I’ll go over that with all of you next. Astrid, you’ll be able to drive all the way around the container and park facing back toward the egress. It’s located on the Lower East Side, between the Battery Park entrance and the Brooklyn Bridge, which gives you two possible exits almost equal distance apart.”

  “That’s pretty near the ship that originally brought the drones in,” Martin said, lifting his head from his disassembled gun.

  “Real close. I was originally gonna use the ship itself, but it got a lot of flooding from when the military bombed it.”

  “You’ve been in it?” JJ asked, fascinated.

  “Yeah, all through it. Mostly a wreck. Some interesting stuff though.”

  “Like what?” Trinity asked. Everyone in the room was staring at me now, hanging on my words.

  “A couple of bodies, some booklets of programming notes, some spare parts, a few drones that never made it off the ship.”

  “Bodies?” one of production staff asked.

  “Yeah, three. I think it was two sailors and one of the drone techs.”

  “How’d they die?” Trinity asked. Everyone was still listening.

  “Spider sting,” I said.

  “Sting?” Trinity asked.

  “Spider CThree units use their seventh limb as a weapon. It can extend out further than their regular legs, and the end is a sharp claw. Leaves a distinctive hole in the victim,” Brad Johnson said.

  “Distinctive?” another staffer asked hesitantly.

  “Big round hole like the diameter of a baseball,” Martin answered, smiling a little.

  “It killed the person who let it loose?” Trinity’s assistant asked.

  “I think a lot of the shipboard personnel died that night. Whoever set the whole thing in motion had placed really deep, extremely dominant mission parameters. Basically: Kill All Humans,” I said. “Much of the ship sank and flooded when the Air Force bombed the hell out of it. These three were in the front drone hold, the only internal part of the ship still above water.”

  “That would make amazing footage,” Trinity suggested, staring right at me.

  “Amazing and really, really short. You’d get about five minutes of footage before the camera operator was swarmed by drones.”

  “Programming notes?” JJ asked.

  I smiled. “Yeah. Interesting stuff.”

  “Those would be worth a small fortune,” he said, giving me a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m sure they are,” was my only response.

  “Just how much stuff do you have squirreled away?” Brad asked.

  “We spent the better part of six years sorting through stuff, pulling some out, stocking hideouts, storing some things away.”

  “Spent your whole life sneaking around, stealing other people’s stuff,” Martin said.

  “As opposed to driving around and stealing their stuff?” I asked.

  “We killed drones by the dozens,” he said.

  I waved a hand at the photo. “As I said, that’s one of two—and I shot all of the drones in those storage sites in the last two years. Between us, Dad and I have filed more drone kill tags than all five of the current Zone War teams combined. You can check that factoid with Zone Defense.”

  Martin opened his mouth to reply but his father held up a hand. “The proof, Martin, will be in the storage container Ajaya’s taking us to. All the rest of this is just dick measuring,” Brad said. “Sorry honey,” he said to Astrid.

  She waved a hand, brushing the comment away. “None of this matters. How do we avoid being trapped and killed again?” she asked, looking at all of us but ending with her eyes on me.

  “First of all, nothing said in this room gets written on any electronic instrument, email, AI, or spoken about on a phone call. That’s why I asked for an electronics-free meeting,” I said.

  “You think the drones can somehow monitor what happens out here?” Martin asked, incredulous, turning to his brother and father like I was crazy.

  “Yup. Op Sec is paramount. I’ve found indications that the Spiders have access to the Internet via fiber cables that pass through the Zone. Hence why you all changed your mission and still got hosed. Also why the Destroyer boys got whacked so easily.”

  “You have evidence of internet access?” Brad asked. “And you didn’t share it?”

  “Not what I said. I have indications, not evidence. Nothing I can bring to General Davis and prove. Just some intel I’ve been putting together, but it’s borne out by what happened to you and the Destroyers. I’m hoping to get some concrete stuff soon.”

  “So every time we file a mission, the drones know about it?” Brad asked.

  “I think that’s a recent development, which might mean they’ve only just hacked some server or processor somewhere in the information chain. Or else they’d have killed all the teams by now. The amount of prior preparation used in the attack on Destin and Troyer would indicate a long lead time,” I said.

  Martin looked back and forth between his father and brother, but their troubled expressions showed that they likely believed my story.

  “I’ve read everything written,” JJ said, then glanced at me, “at least publicly avai
lable, about the prior programming of the drones. Nothing like this was a part of it.”

  “The upper-level drones, particularly the Spiders, all had advanced AI-specific computing chips installed. The Chinese were actually a bit ahead of everyone else at the time of the Attack. The Spiders were their very best design, with maybe the most adaptable machine learning systems of their day. They’ve spent the last ten years learning under combat conditions. I don’t think anyone on Earth knows what they’re capable of.”

  “But preparing ambush and trap sites that elaborately?” JJ asked. “Where did they learn that?”

  I kept my mouth shut. No real reason to point out that I’d been trapping and ambushing drones successfully at a really high level for the last two years.

  “So operational security is paramount. Trinity, you have to ensure this information is locked down,” Brad said, looking at all the staffers.

  They in turn looked to their boss, each giving her a nod. “You have my word,” Trinity said.

  Brad frowned. “No offense, but this is our lives here. I think this mission has to go first thing in the morning and we file a broad plan with Zone Defense five minutes before we kick it off,” he said, looking at JJ, Astrid, Martin, and finally, reluctantly, me.

  “Let’s do it,” JJ said.

  Chapter 24

  “Where are your weapons?” Trinity asked as I walked up to the Johnson LAV. She looked at my small pack but I shook my head.

  “No Zone license, so I can’t retrieve anything from the police station,” I said. “All I have, for the moment, is this,” I said, pulling my kukri from behind my back.

  She looked horrified. I smiled. “I’m not using any of those weapons anyway. Everything I need is inside the Zone. The Johnsons will drop me off right on top of one of my weapons caches.”

  She looked uncertain, but my calm smile must have convinced her. A Zone soldier came up and held out his hand for my pack. Two other soldiers flanked him, their G45s unslung and pointed at the ground between us. Idiots. Did they think I’d bring Rikki inside in my backpack?

  I gave him the pack, he dropped it to the ground, and his fellows poked it with their rifle barrels. Yup… that’s exactly what they had thought.

  Astrid poked her head out the rear of the LAV. “Hey, get in here already. I need details,” she said. I nodded to Trinity, was ignored by the soldier now tearing open my pack, and headed into the rear of the LAV.

  I tried to pay absolute attention to the vehicle’s details as I followed her, but Astrid’s one-piece battle coverall must have been custom tailored because it fit her like a surgical glove. Focus, Ajaya. Focus.

  The Johnsons’ vehicle was a secondhand retired Canadian LAV 6, refitted with a hybrid electric drive/diesel drive unit and customized at great expense. Theirs had the remotely controlled GAU-17 minigun mounted above the front of the vehicle, which left the top hatches clear to open for salvage. An interior crane let them hoist heavy objects into the LAV, and the whole back of the vehicle was open and roomy as opposed to most armored vehicles’ claustrophobic interiors.

  Astrid drove from the left-hand seat while her brother, Martin, usually occupied the rear-facing gunner’s position. With practiced grace, Astrid slid into her seat and pulled up a map on the LCD screen. I had a feeling that even the current military vehicles didn’t have as many bells and whistles as this one did.

  Which made sense. Military units needed to survive active warfare. The Johnsons needed navigation, cargo room, drone-specific weapons, and urban maneuverability. Before they faced off with the TKs, they had never faced such heavy fire. I had seen new armor patches welded to the exterior where the heavy machine-gun had torn up the original metal hide of the rig. I hoped it was just as tough as the original armor.

  “Here’s the site,” I said, leaning forward to type the address into her nav unit. She smelled like strawberries, her head pushed close to mine to study the route.

  “Out of the way, dweeb,” Martin said from behind me. “You’re blocking my spot and this baby doesn’t go anywhere without its weapons pod live.”

  I squirmed backward, letting him squeeze past me. He too wore a dark green coverall, his Sig holstered in a cross-chest kydex rig. Astrid didn’t carry a handgun. She had a compact Israeli Tavor rifle mounted in a locked rig on the left side of her compartment.

  Brad was already in the commander’s chair, so I moved back to the main troop compartment, finding JJ coming into the vehicle, my pack in his hand. “Zone Defense says your pack is clear, Ajaya. Any reason why they were so aggressive in searching it?”

  “My grandmother’s cookies are pretty sought after,” I said.

  “Your Aama bakes regular cookies?” he asked.

  “One of the first things she learned to do when she moved here. My other grandmother taught her. Killer chocolate chips.”

  He laughed as he went about securing his gear. He was wearing armored chaps over his battledress, but his armored jacket was hanging from a hook by the door. JJ wore a cut-down semi-auto shotgun in a thigh holster. I think it only held like three shots of 12 gauge but really, how many shots are you going to get when facing a drone? I’d noticed Brad had a well-used HK UMP .45 in his own chest holster.

  “You got stuff waiting for you inside, I hope,” JJ said, waving a hand up and down my un-gunned body.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna have Astrid drop me just about right on top of some things I’ve been saving for a day just like today.”

  He scratched one side of his big, blond head, his eyes flicking toward my pack. “You’re packing light because you’ve got some heavy stuff inside,” he guessed. His hand hit a button on the ceiling of the LAV and the back hatch drawbridged up.

  “Yup. Gonna weigh like a bitch but it’ll ruin anything in the Zone’s day.”

  “You’re not going to shoot some military anti-tank missiles, are you?” Martin asked. I felt the LAV move but Astrid must have been using the electric drive because I didn’t hear a thing.

  “He’s not an idiot, Martin,” JJ said, then leaned down close to my ear. “You’re not, right?”

  “Not to worry, boys. No missiles, although you’d be amazed at what the military left lying around.”

  An inside monitor came to life on the left-hand wall, the view showing the outside of the troop carrier.

  We were just leaving the Battery Park tunnel, the massive steel flood door still swinging away from us.

  I reached inside my stealth suit and pulled out a folded paper. “This is a diagram of the booby trap on the outside door of the container. It’s real simple and there aren’t any extra surprises. Just a pair of flash bangs tucked inside a tube of ball bearings. The trip wire secures to a pin on the left side of the door. Slide the pin out of its brackets and you’re good to go.”

  He looked at the rather elaborate drawing, then back at me. “As much as I appreciate the preparation, now it looks like you’re wondering if I’m the idiot.”

  “Just being careful,” I said. I felt a turn to the left and the monitor showed us swinging around onto FDR Drive, headed south to Battery Place. We had agreed this approach would keep us more in the open, let us travel along to State Street, then South Street, the route staying near the water and Zone barriers as we moved up the east side of the Island.