Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

  McKinney brought the SUV to a stop and looked to Odin.

  “It’s us.” He got out, and she did likewise.

  A Polaris ATV was already coming down the road ahead with another sniper on it, rifle strapped over his back. The first man had pulled back the mask on his ghillie suit to reveal Foxy, grinning as he pulled his long hair out of his face. He slapped Odin on the back. “Startin’ to worry about you guys.”

  “Everyone accounted for?”

  He nodded. “Now that you two have arrived. But there’s news too: Hoov says the mission’s over. Task Force Ancile is supposed to stand down and return to FB.”

  “Stand down? On whose orders?”

  The driver of the Polaris had stopped, engine idling, and pulled back his own ghillie suit hood to reveal Smokey. He nodded in greeting to McKinney.

  Foxy shouldered his rifle. “Colonel sent word over JWICS. Says you’re to report when you get in.”

  Odin exhaled as he contemplated this, sending a plume of vapor out over his beard.

  Foxy looked dour. “They’re shooting us down in more ways than one.”

  “We’re still on mission. . . .” Odin headed back to the SUV.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Odin marched toward the truck. “Let’s get to the house.”

  * * *

  Smokey and Foxy led the way on the Polaris, a mile or so down the dirt road where the ravine opened out to a small valley surrounded by wooded hills. The road forked, with the right branch descending toward the valley floor, but they followed the Polaris to the left, uphill to a big chalet built into the hillside and surrounded by sparse pine forest. The first-floor walls were of fieldstone, but stout logs formed the next two floors, with a pine-needle-covered slate roof and dormers rising above that. There was another Forest Service SUV parked near a closed garage door.

  McKinney looked up through the windshield as she pulled to a stop.

  Odin gestured as he got out. “Old FBI safe house. They used to debrief Russian and Cuban defectors here in the sixties and seventies.” Odin opened the cargo bay and grabbed the raven cage.

  Smokey and Foxy had already pushed through the tall oak doors into the foyer of the old chalet. “Hoov!”

  McKinney and Odin followed them into a musty three-story entry hall lined with mounted elk and deer heads, balcony railings, and a large staircase. There was a huge fireplace on the far wall, and although it was cold in the house, there was no fire lit. Stacked along the wall were a dozen or so green Pelican equipment cases.

  McKinney then stared up at a large antler chandelier hanging on chains overhead. “This place is a vegan’s nightmare.”

  “Who’s vegan?” Hoov entered the room from an interior door and nodded greetings.

  Odin dispensed with pleasantries. “Get me an uplink to the colonel ASAP.”

  “On it.” Hoov departed just as Ripper entered from a different doorway with Mooch. “Hey, Sarge.” She was now wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. “Is it true we’re standing down?”

  “No. How’s our security?”

  “We’ve got boom cameras topside and an RF-transmitter sensor perimeter established at the ridgeline, but there hasn’t been any movement. No overflying aircraft.”

  “Have you swept the place?”

  She nodded. “Nothing.”

  “Good.” Odin deftly tossed his Forest Service campaign hat over a deer head’s antlers. He then put the birdcage down and opened its door. “Huginn, Muninn. Explore.” They hopped out of the cage.

  McKinney couldn’t help but notice that everyone was armed with pistols in nylon thigh holsters and scoped assault rifles hanging barrel-down on straps over their shoulders and combat harnesses with spare clips. “We expecting trouble?”

  Odin spoke without looking up. “We’re always expecting trouble.”

  McKinney heard a loud caw and looked up to see the ravens perched on the antler chandelier. “At least someone likes the decor.”

  Hoov entered again. “Colonel’s up, Odin.”

  “Thanks.” He headed after Hoov. “I want this recorded.”

  “Already rolling.”

  McKinney followed them both into what looked to be a rec or family room. This had another large fieldstone fireplace, and the walls were sprinkled with authentic-looking mountain bric-a-brac—snowshoes, muskets, kerosene lanterns, and framed portraits and photos of men posing with large dead animals. There was also a sizable bar along with a couple of sofas and a writing desk—on which Hoov had set up his electronics workstation. As with the rest of the place, the heavy drapes were drawn and the overhead lights and lamps on. Hoov’s workstation consisted of several flat-panel monitors, a couple of ruggedized laptops, radio gear, and wires running out beneath the drapes—through a sliding glass door, perhaps. There was also a small video camera clipped to the top of one of the monitors, on which a red LED light glowed.

  Staring out at them from the central monitor was a stern-looking, thick-necked man in his sixties, in a sport coat and button-down shirt, viewed from the waist up. The lines on his face were as intricate as the Utah desert seen from space.

  Odin saluted. “Colonel.”

  The man nodded. “Glad to see your troop is all accounted for, Master Sergeant. Did Professor McKinney survive?”

  “She did, sir. She’s with us.”

  “Good. Task Force Ancile is to stand down immediately. You’re all to return to Fort Bragg with whatever intel you have.”

  “Why’d they shoot down my plane, sir?”

  “Let’s call it a misunderstanding, Master Sergeant.”

  “I’d like to know what—”

  “Return to base. It doesn’t matter what happened before; now that the drones are public, there’s been a reset. Joint Chiefs are letting Air Force take the lead. We’re to stand down. It came from the very top.”

  Odin just stared for a moment. “Colonel, I think you need to—”

  “It’s not your job to think, Master Sergeant. It’s your job to follow orders. Now, get to it.”

  The screen blinked out.

  Odin kept staring at the dark screen.

  Foxy sat down in his flowing ghillie suit on the arm of the sofa. “So that’s it, then? Air Force shoots at us, and then we’re under their op-con?”

  Odin shook his head slowly. “Hoov.”

  Hoov looked up from his laptop screen and pulled his radio headphones off. “Yeah?”

  Odin pointed at the screen. “Run it through Visuallistics.”

  Hoov frowned and tossed his headphones onto the desk. “You serious?”

  Foxy could see the shock on Hoov’s face. “Odin, what’s up? Why would you suspect the colonel? I mean, this is the colonel. Mouse and he—”

  “I don’t suspect the colonel.”

  “Then I’m not following you.”

  “Just do it.”

  Foxy still looked confused.

  Hoov was turning to another laptop. “That was a JWICS transmission—off our own damn satellite.”

  “Do I have to do it?”

  McKinney looked from person to person. “What’s going on?”

  Foxy shrugged. “Odin thinks someone’s running an IO on us.”

  “Which means . . .”

  Hoov was opening the image of the colonel on another computer screen. “Influence operation. He thinks the video was doctored—which is fucking unlikely.”

  “But how would you know?”

  “Digital forensics—software we use to check the validity of photos and video that informants send us. People sometimes add the faces of high-value targets to footage, looking for a reward.” Hoov was clicking away as he spoke. “This works like weapon ballistics: Every brand of commercial camera has an electronic signature—subtle variations of resolution and compression pattern. This software tells me almost instantly the make and model of video camera that was used to make an image.”

  “How does knowing the camera help?”

  �
��Once I know that, I can tell if any part of the image has been altered. I don’t know how anyone could do that in real time, though. . . .” Hoov clicked away, and then stopped. He straightened. “Huh.”

  Odin, Foxy, and McKinney watched him closely.

  Odin spoke first. “What is it?”

  Hoov turned. “It hasn’t been altered.”

  Odin looked relieved. “Good.”

  “I wasn’t finished.” He gestured to the screen. “It wasn’t altered because it wasn’t created by a camera. It was created by Image Metrics. He’s a vocaloid.”

  “A what?”

  Odin answered. “A computer-generated character.”

  The group gathered around the monitor. The colonel’s image looked photographically real.

  Foxy was shaking his head. “Fuck me. . . .”

  Hoov ran his fingers through his close-cropped blond hair. “They must be using motion-capture. An actor on a green-screen or something. Sampled the colonel’s voice patterns. They use this type of tech to do virtual pop stars in Japan, but I’ve never seen it this real. It’s . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “This is some seriously sophisticated shit, boss. And they’re inside our satellite network?”

  Odin stared at the screen. “We need to assume whoever’s behind this is deeper in the system than we are. It also means they know where we are. The satellite uplink would have confirmed that.”

  Hoov was checking radar images on one of his screens. “The feed from NORAD doesn’t show anything around us for fifty miles.”

  Foxy shook his head. “But why would you trust it?”

  Hoov swiveled in his chair. “For the moment they think we believed the colonel’s message, Odin. They’ll be expecting us to return to Bragg.”

  “We’d never reach the base.”

  Foxy sat back down on the sofa arm. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

  Ripper and Tin Man entered the room and Foxy nodded to them. “Keep an eye on those perimeter alarms.”

  Ripper scowled in irritation. “What’d the colonel say?”

  “The colonel’s a goddamned cartoon. Keep an eye on the sensors.”

  As they exited with confused expressions, one of the ravens flew atop a tall bookshelf and plucked up a large, squirming beetle from a dark corner. The bird then flew down and perched on the lampshade next to McKinney. It held the beetle in its beak, legs still wriggling.

  Foxy regarded the bird. “Good one, Huginn.”

  McKinney did a double-take on the insect.

  Huginn cocked its head at her but did not start eating the huge black beetle in its mouth.

  “What have you got there?”

  Foxy looked up from the laptop screen again. “Dinner, look’s like.”

  McKinney tried to approach the bird, but it walked to the other edge of the lampshade. She caught her breath. “Hang on a second.”

  Odin turned to face her. “What is it?”

  “It’s a South American flower beetle—its territory ends four thousand miles south of here.” She plucked it from the raven’s beak. Huginn didn’t put up too much fuss. She examined the beetle as its wings beat furiously to escape. But McKinney was an old hand at handling live insects. The others gathered around her, and she pointed at what appeared to be a large third eye in the center of its head. “How did it get here?”

  Odin leaned close to it.

  “Someone get me a knife. . . .”

  McKinney moved over to the bar, as Foxy started rooting around through drawers.

  “Get me some tweezers and a couple pins if you can find them.”

  “Right.” He handed her a loose razor blade he found in a utility drawer and kept searching. McKinney held up the huge beetle to the light as Odin sat on the barstool next to her.

  It was immediately apparent that the bug had been “altered.” McKinney pointed with the razor blade tip at two plastic objects underneath each wing. “I’ve seen this before.”

  “What do you mean you’ve seen it before? Where?”

  “At an entomology conference a couple years ago. These are tiny generators, capturing the wing movement to power microelectronics.”

  Odin looked incredulous.

  “It wasn’t classified—it was brain research. They were looking for a research grant.”

  Foxy handed her several sewing needles in a mug and a pair of tweezers.

  “Thanks.” She put the razor blade down and grabbed a needle—sticking it straight through the beetle’s brain, killing it, as she anchored the beetle to the bar top. Though dead, the insect’s legs were still scrabbling at the wood.

  “Hard core, Professor.”

  “We’ll see. . . .” She then took the razor blade and started dissecting the beetle, peeling back the carapace to get at the brain. Almost immediately, she noticed fine fiber-optic threads leading from a tiny camera lens into an electronic device the size of a grain of rice. She used the tweezers to tease it away from the brain and up into the light.

  It looked like a tiny CCTV camera and antenna assembly, with Asian characters printed on it.

  Odin studied it. “We’re through the looking glass, people.”

  “Chinese.”

  Odin pushed away from the bar. “That’s just the camera’s manufacturer, Foxy.”

  McKinney nodded. “The conference presentation was on ‘brain-jacking.’ They insert the transmitter directly into the insect’s brain—adding it at the larval stage so the insect grows around it. They leverage an existing nervous system to make a remote-controlled minidrone out of a living thing. All you do is activate the neurons that handle flying, turning, crawling, whatever, and the bug’s own nervous system handles the rest. We all thought the guy was sick. Apparently he found a receptive audience in the military.”

  Odin took the camera from her and held it up to the light, then he ripped the antenna out. He looked around. “There’s no telling how many more of those things there are in here.”

  Odin tossed the thing on the floor and crushed it under his boot. “This site is blown. We need to evac immediately. What’s down at the airstrip?”

  Foxy answered. “MD500 chopper and a Cessna Grand Caravan.”

  “In cover?”

  “The Cessna’s in the hangar.”

  “Fueled up?”

  He nodded. “Wing tanks too.”

  “All right. Hoov . . .”

  Hoov swiveled on his chair. “Yeah?”

  “Destroy the uplink equipment and prepare to move out.”

  “You got—”

  There was a series of deep thwacks as holes appeared in the heavy drapes and fist-sized divots blasted out of Hoov’s chest. Then half of his head blasted apart, spraying McKinney and the sofa with gore. Hoov’s body pitched forward, upending the coffee table.

  “Sniper!”

  CHAPTER 21

  War Mask

  McKinney was dimly aware of shouting and people hitting the floor around her as the world seemed to constrict to a tiny focal point on her shoes—which were covered in blood. Hoov’s quivering body lay at her feet. She stared at the interior of his skull, even now coursing with blood that pooled across the floor. Blood was also oozing from several other holes in Hoov’s chest, turning his entire blue Ancile polo shirt maroon.

  That’s when someone grabbed her bodily by the shoulders and hauled her over the back of the sofa. She didn’t even feel the hard impact on the floor, but it must have brought her back to her senses. She looked up to see bullet holes systematically drilling into the foreheads of every human portrait and photograph on the wall that faced the covered window. Glass and splintered wood ricocheted around the room as bullet holes appeared with the speed and precision of a sewing machine. Two flat-panel monitors with the colonel’s face displayed on them also got hit dead center, blasting apart.

  “Stay down!” Whoever had grabbed McKinney was dragging her. She felt Odin’s beard scratching her face as he pulled her behind the bar. His arm was as hard as a baseball bat
, and he had a .45 tactical pistol in his other hand.

  Someone shouted, “Sniper, Black, Alpha, Two!”

  Odin responded in a booming voice. “Automated sniper station. Probably synth-app radar—stay away from perimeter walls!”

  Foxy’s voice. “Hoov’s gone, Odin.”

  “I know.”

  A voice called out from the foyer. “Odin! Boomerang says the shots came from two locations near the center ridgeline. Plunging fire from six hundred and eighty-three meters and six hundred and twenty meters out.”

  “What are we facing?”

  “Hard to identify the station model at this angle—both acoustic signatures look like .338s. They’re in heavy cover and burning us with radar.”

  Foxy pounded the floor with his fist from behind the sofa. “They must have been here all along—waiting for confirmation that the team was all present.”

  Odin nodded. “Mark their location! And turn on a goddamned GPS jammer, Mooch! I don’t want a JDAM down on our heads.”

  “On it!”

  McKinney saw Ripper with her back to the bar next to them. The woman looked cool and focused as she pulled a metal canister from her harness.

  Odin shouted, “Popping Mike Mike particle smoke!”

  Ripper pulled the pin and tossed the now fiery canister over the bar into the room.

  Odin talked over the hissing, expanding smoke cloud. “All right, listen up! We’ve drilled against this weapon system a hundred times. You all know what to do. Everyone to the foyer, in full AD gear, two minutes! On my mark!”

  Looking down, McKinney realized she was completely spattered with gore. Chunks of what must have been brains came back on her fingers as she wiped her hands. The involuntary reaction was instant. She vomited onto the parquet floor behind the bar, sucking for air between retches. “Oh, my God . . .”

  People talked to her rapidly from somewhere, but her body wouldn’t let her hear. She had the dry heaves, crawling on her elbows.