Strike Matrix

by Aiden L Bailey

  Simon froze in horror as he watched Casey disappear beneath the fast-flowing waters.

  He counted down the seconds. She didn’t come up for air and there were no ripples on the water.

  He peered downwards, risking his precarious balance as the train sped off the bridge and the carriages rattled over land. The opportunity to jump in after her had gone. As the river disappeared into the distance, there were still no signs of her emerging from the flow.

  Remembering he was in danger himself, he looked to the police officers. Five pistols pointed at his head at close range.

  “It’s over,” growled their leader, stepping forward.

  Defeated, Simon gritted his teeth and raised his arms. With a sigh, he faced towards the locomotive, hoping for a tunnel to create confusion and an opportunity to flee again. He saw only rice fields, grasslands, forest-clad hills and a vast openness.

  “My orders are to shoot you.”

  Simon pulled his focus back to the senior officer. His gut tightened, afraid that the men might follow their orders. He kept his hands high. “Then, why don’t you?”

  “I’m a civilized man, Mr. Ashcroft. You may have broken a hundred laws, but still, I must process you.”

  Simon nodded, grateful for the man’s integrity.

  The five sweating policemen fidgeted, shifting their collective weight from leg to leg in the heat. Eyes darted back and forth, between the scenery that was rushing past then returning to him, rubbing at the wounds he had inflicted. Normal behavior while straddling the roof of a fast-moving train. A single threatening action from him would no doubt push them to open fire. At this range, they wouldn’t miss.

  “Shall we climb down?” Simon asked.

  The senior officer nodded. He ordered two men to descend first, then ordered Simon to follow.

  The carriage they landed in was a luggage compartment with bags stacked everywhere. The rattling train drowned out all other noises, including the two waiting officers warning him not to try anything. He saw a coiled rope hanging on a wall hook, which gave him an idea.

  “Cuff him,” said one officer to the other.

  For a second the two men looked away from him, at each other.

  Simon’s fist shot forward with lightning speed, shattering the first officer’s nose. Following up with a punch to the gut, the officer collapsed to the floor of the carriage.

  Startled, the second officer fumbled for his weapon.

  Simon was faster, kicking behind the man’s knee and forcing him to kneel.

  The officer bared his teeth, his face red with anger. He retaliated with a wide punch that missed Simon and had him twisting across himself. He tried to raise his handgun in his other hand, but his unbalanced position blocked him from a clear shot.

  Simon grappled with the man. His martial arts skills allowed him to move by instinct. He punched with his right fist while his left hand twisted the officer’s gun arm, forcing him to drop the weapon.

  Meanwhile, the first officer had clambered to his feet.

  Simon spun on one foot, clobbering the rising man in the back of his head with the other boot, knocking him unconscious.

  With one foe down, he darted forward and snatched at the fallen handgun. Tightening his knuckles around the grip, he brought the gun down with a hard crack on the remaining officer’s head.

  Within thirty seconds both men were down and out.

  Pausing for a breath, he heard the remaining officers descending.

  Simon raced to the carriage door, ramming it shut as the next officer tried to force his way inside.

  Another climbed down and the two officers together pressed their weight against the door. Simon knew he couldn’t hold strong against their combined weight.

  He took the pistol and fired three shots through the paneling. He hoped he was distant enough, so the bullets didn’t injure the men but close enough to scare them.

  The high-speed slugs had the desired effect. The pressure disappeared, long enough for Simon to pull down a few heavy pieces of luggage, blocking the door from opening.

  Crouching low, he searched the unconscious officers, taking wallets, spare magazines, police radios and the second handgun. Back on his feet and running, he snatched the rope hanging from the wall.

  More gunshots. Glass shattered like falling hail around him. Glancing back, he could see one of the policemen who had fired the warning shots clambering through the disintegrated window.

  Ducking low, Simon sprinted in the other direction, towards the back of the train.

  The next compartment contained more of the second-class berthing. He pushed past a group of elderly ladies in saris, wincing as they screamed and slapped at him as he knocked them sideways. He heard a police officer close behind, yelling for people to drop to the ground.

  Bursting through the door to the next carriage, Simon climbed as fast as he could drag his aching limbs, until he was on top of the train again. They seemed to pass by a run-down town, filled with dirty three-story apartment buildings, decrepit roads and rusting power transmission towers. He watched for dangerous encroaching tunnels but couldn’t see any. Tying a loop at one end of the rope, he jogged towards the train’s last carriage, grateful to see an overhead rail signal tower coming towards him. His one chance of escape raced towards him. As it passed overhead, he threw the looped end of the rope.

  It caught on a signal tower pulling him from the train.

  He slipped, burning his palms, but held tight.

  For a minute or more the remaining carriages rushed underneath as he hung precariously.

  He hoped pure willpower would be enough to convince the loop to hold his swinging weight.

  When the rocking train disappeared from underneath him, he shimmied down the rope, panting hard, grateful to have reached dependable, solid earth.

  Wiping sweat from his brow, he stopped to assess his situation. Other than escaping the encounter unscathed, there was nothing positive about this predicament. Casey was several kilometers behind him now and he had no idea if she could have survived her jump. If the fall had knocked her unconscious, she would have drowned already. If she had survived the fall she might swim downstream, or she could try to drag herself ashore somewhere nearby.

  Knowing the last option was the only hope he had of finding her, Simon sprinted down the embankment into the town. He found a parked motorcycle and hot-wired the ignition. Accelerating as fast as the old bike could manage, he bumped along the closest road following the train track back south.

  Twenty minutes later, after several dead-ends and two bouts of cross-country driving through grassy fields, Simon came upon the river’s edge. He scanned the water for many minutes, but could see no sign of Casey. Foliage grew close to the water everywhere. If her dead body had washed up on the shore somewhere, it would be almost impossible to see amongst the dense shrubbery. Even if she had swum to shore and was standing upright, it was still unlikely he could see her. There was far too much terrain to cover, and too many trees in the way. And that was assuming she had even survived the fall. What if she’d swum to the opposite side?

  Massaging his head to fight his worry, he concluded there were only two likely outcomes. Either Casey was dead, which meant there was nothing he could do for her, or she had swum to shore somewhere downstream. He focused on her being alive, hoping she was uninjured and trying to reach him.

  He spied a trail of orange dirt leading west towards the coast, parallel to the flow of the murky waters. Revving the motorcycle’s engine once more, he drove fast down the dusty track. He stopped every few minutes to scan the water, each time seeing nothing to raise his hopes. After half an hour, he reached the Arabian Sea.

  She was nowhere.

  Gritting his teeth, he allowed his emotions to explode from within.

  Simon had promised to protect Casey Irvine from all threats.

  He had failed her.

  He tried the police radio, listening for any useful information. The conversations were
in Hindi or local dialects, neither of which Simon understood. But there were occasional snippets in English. After five minutes of scanning, Simon concluded that the police were still searching the train, not aware that he had jumped off. They reported that Casey had leaped to her death.

  The lack of news about her missing body gave him a tiny sliver of hope, so he turned north, driving until he reached the next town.

  In a touristy bar overlooking the ocean he pulled out enough money from the several hundred rupees he’d found in the police officers’ wallets to buy bottled water, quenching his now raging thirst. He found a payphone, dialing a telephone number he could recite without thought, the direct connection to his boss, Roger Gridley-Brooks. The fifty-something Afrikaans man was the owner and managing director of DevWorld Security, the South African private security company Simon worked for. It had been Gridley-Brooks who had sent Simon on this fool’s quest to protect Casey from all harm. Now he had lost her, Simon knew he needed to report in, but more importantly, he needed answers as to what the hell was going on.

  “Hello?” Gridley-Brooks answered after the first ring.

  “It’s Simon Ashcroft. I’ve lost her. She jumped from a train into a river.” Hearing the frantic spilling of his panicked words brought home to him how much he had cared for Casey, that losing her was personal, that this was more than just another assignment. “Either she’s drowned, or she’s in hiding, or she’s lying injured somewhere.”

  “Yes, Simon, I’d already gathered as much.”

  “What?”

  “You in Ratnagiri, yes?”

  Simon shook his head in disbelief. “How did you know?” He grabbed at a nearby paper menu, reading the establishment’s address to work out the name of this town. Ratnagiri was where he was! Simon’s anxiety rose further, as he realized his boss knew more about his situation than was humanly possible for any man to know, especially when Gridley-Brooks was in Cape Town.

  “Simon?”

  He tensed.

  He was afraid to ask the fundamental question that had been on the forefront of his mind these last twenty-four hours. But, in his fear of not knowing the truth, he blurted, “You’re not Roger Gridley-Brooks, are you?”

  Simon counted to three as he waited for the answer.

  “No.”

  Simon felt an inexplicable shiver run down his spine. The Gridley-Brooks he was talking to sounded and behaved like his employer. But this could not be the same man Simon had known for many years. Nothing was making sense.

  “She said you’re not human,” he blurted, remembering not to use Casey’s name on a communications medium that could be tapped. “She said you are an artificially intelligent machine, an AI, impersonating my boss.”

  There was no answer.

  “For fuck’s sake Roger, she’s out there, maybe injured, probably dead, definitely afraid. I need to know who the fuck you really are!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport, Djibouti

  Fine sand granules blown in from the distant Sahara irritated Peri Keser’s eyes, forcing her to blink away the annoying specks as her tear ducts ran, making it look as though she was crying. Her countering grin was a mere pretense that the sand didn’t bother her, much to the amusement of the U.S. Army Major standing by her side. Peri did, however, embrace the sweat that beaded her forehead, back and neck. Unlike the sand, heat was a welcome relief after the biting Northern Hemispheric winters and the malaria infection she’d endured.

  With a clear view of Camp Lemonnier’s runway, she distracted herself by watching Predator drone after Predator drone race into the skies to complete covert surveillance and assassination missions in Somalia, Libya and Yemen. So many, she felt compelled to count the seconds between cycles. On average there was one hundred and fifty seconds between each drone. Less than three minutes.

  “Do they impress you?”

  She turned to Major Stephen ‘Fitzy’ Fitzgerald. The former Delta Force operator turned CIA mission leader was a tall, chiseled man. Her primary contact in this Naval Expeditionary Base, he looked muscular and confident, the way all American Special Forces soldiers seemed to. The relentless African sun had tanned his skin. He sported a full bushy beard, which she assumed was to ‘fit in’ with the fundamental Islamists he must need to deal with regularly. His only real distinction from the standard Special Forces stereotype was graying hair.

  “The Predators?” she raised her voice to compete with the noisy aircraft. “I thought you only had a dozen at Lemonnier?”

  “We did, two months ago. Now we have well over two hundred. More on the way.”

  “Why so many?”

  The Major laughed. “That’s above my paygrade, Special Agent Keser.”

  She didn’t believe that for a second. “You’re top-ranking CIA?”

  He laughed again. “Maybe it’s a nice way of me saying I don’t have clearance to tell you the real story.”

  She nodded, understanding.

  Before flying out of South Africa, Peri had learned from none other than the President of the United States himself that Major Fitzgerald was the best man to assemble the combined covert intelligence and special forces team she required for her mission ahead: to take down the world’s most dangerous cyberterrorists.

  She lived hoping the President’s judgment was sound, and that he was acting in her best interests, but she had to admit she didn’t believe that.

  Fitzgerald had introduced himself earlier this morning as Peri stepped from the commercial aircraft that had delivered her to Djibouti. He confirmed he was in the CIA’s Special Activities Division, a secretive group even within the Central Intelligence Agency. SAD was responsible for specialized covert operations wherever required across the globe.

  Then, only five minutes into the conversation, he admitted he worked for Special Operations Group, an even more secretive division within SAD tasked with tactical paramilitary operations. He impressed Peri — if what he said was true — for SAD/SOG were America’s most elite special forces unit. They were the men you sent into enemy territory in the middle of the night, tasked to eliminate enemies while they slept in their heavily defended dugouts.

  “So, what can you tell me?”

  “I’m cleared to inform you one drone will be in the Mumbai skies at all times, should you need it.”

  She paused as she considered his meaning: not for surveillance, but for assassination.

  Predators armaments included Hellfire missiles, perfect weapons for taking out enemy combatants with the precision of a skilled surgeon removing a tumor. Despite the pilots being on the opposite side of the world, at Creech Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas in Nevada, they were very effective, being so well trained and well equipped. From their comfortable seats in dimly lit, air-conditioned trailers, they would stare at glowing video and data screens projecting the world as seen through the drones’ many cameras, then toggle joysticks to determine the Predator’s flight paths towards the enemy. When she found her cyberterrorists and if they exhausted all other options, the Predators’ Hellfire missiles could eliminate the enemy permanently.

  “But they wouldn’t fly from here, would they? Isn’t it too far? One of your bases in Pakistan, perhaps?”

  Fitzgerald raised an eyebrow. The Pakistan bases she was talking about weren’t official and certainly not on the public record. “Yes, that seems a sound assumption.”

  She crossed her arms, felt the exhaustion deep in her bones despite having slept for twelve hours on and off during her flight from Cape Town via Nairobi. Over the last few weeks, the malaria had decimated her in ways she had not expected possible. She felt as though her head was full of damp fog. She was sluggish with exhaustion. Little annoyances that would have been inconsequential, like the Saharan sand blowing in her face and getting into her clothes, bothered her.

  “So, you’re Secret Service?” Fitzgerald asked, despite already knowing the answer.

  “Yes.”

/>   “I heard you were on the Presidential protective team?”

  Peri clenched her jaw, refusing to rise to his bait concerning her recent fall from grace. “Didn’t you know, it was the President himself who sent me to you?” She sensed him stiffen. “Sir, I know you know far more than you’re letting on, so why these questions?”

  “I also heard you have malaria?”

  “Had, Major. I’m recovered now.” She shuddered, at the wrong moment.

  He raised an eyebrow as he scratched his muscular chest as if he were battling an itch deep inside he couldn’t reach. “Shall we get to the point?”

  She nodded. “As I have already briefed you, Sir, the cyberterrorist or terrorists I’m hunting might still impersonate the President. We already know he, she or, more likely they, have hacked hundreds of media networks across the planet. They post false directives and policies put out under the President’s name, and fake news is everywhere. Knowing that, I would say taking down this cyberterrorist is classified as Presidential protective duty.”

  Fitzgerald hesitated, as if weighing his next words. “You’re right, I know all this Keser. But you also know the answers to everything you’ve asked me. So, from where I’m looking, all I’m seeing is a dance that is wasting both your time and mine.”

  Peri crossed her arms again, a stance conditioned out of her as a Secret Service agent because it limited the ability to react in a hurry. She realized that she was doing so only because — despite the heat — she felt a chill. She could lie to Fitzgerald about her health, but she couldn’t lie to herself. Peri wasn’t anywhere close to being recovered.

  She looked around again, trying to distract herself from discomfort. Everything was khaki: the stacked shipping containers, the half-circle D-shaped tents, the men and women in uniform, the many trucks, the Spartan containerized living units known as the CLU City, even the expansive desert encircling the base seemed khaki. U.S. military facilities the world over were painfully bland. Just like her.

  “What are we doing, Keser, standing outside in the heat, competing with the noise of the drones?”