“I’ve killed tougher men with less,” he said.
Valentine looked absently around the warehouse. “I gotta say, this is not the end of the wholesale beer industry I thought I’d find you on. I figured ‘consumer’ was probably your end.”
Terry smiled. “You can waste all the time you want on the ground here,” he said. “Make all the jokes you want. If my people see me talking to you, Mister Tanaka will cuss me out, maybe put me on bathrooms for yapping on the job. Your people see you talking to me…” he let the threat hang in the air. He was just about to restart the conveyor when Valentine slapped a honey- brown envelope down on top of his next flat.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What do you think it is?”
“Not enough money,” said Terry, and brushed it off the top of the flat. Valentine caught it, opened it.
“You think I’d bother printing a cheque?” he asked. He stuffed the paper into Terry’s hand. Servos thrummed away silently as Terry tore it open.
“Office of the Judge Advocate General…A pardon? Is this real?”
“Not yet, it’s not,” said Valentine. “Needs a signature and a seal. But I can get them.”
Terry’s heart dropped in his chest, and his mouth went dry. “I’m not eligible.”
“Times have changed,” said Valentine. “Or they’re about to.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” said Terry.
“You won’t like where you’re going, either.”
Terry read the letter in disbelief. “You sound mighty confident,” he growled.
Valentine folded his arms. “And when am I this confident? When are the only times?”
Terry sulked like a kid made to apologize. “Sure things and chicken wings,” he spat out, under duress.
“Now, do you s’pose I came halfway around the world, to a blackout zone, for cheap wing night?”
“No, sir.”
“You s’pose I came for a sure thing?”
Terry gritted his teeth. “Maybe I’m not that easy to read anymore. Maybe I’m not a sucker anymore, either.”
“There’s worse things to be than a sucker,” said Valentine. “Kid, you’ve always liked to make me sweat. If that’s what you want, we can stand here twenty minutes, trade some witty repartee, and you can come ‘round once I started talking about Samarkand.”
Terry froze.
“Or,” Valentine went on, “you can take it for granted that I wouldn’t be so supremely confident your answer was ‘yes’ unless it was. You can give your notice right now, or not, and follow me back to the gunship I got parked at Miyagino with the meter running, and we can pull chocks by the time you’ve heard enough to agree with me. What’s it gonna be?”
“Give me the elevator pitch,” said Terry.
“I’ll give you the fast rope pitch,” said Valentine. “We found Crate 14. It’s in Uzbekistan. I’m putting together a cr—”
He was interrupted by the hiss of Velcro torn open as Terry pulled his apron off.
“Tell me on the way,” he said.
“I told you,” said Valentine. “I told you, Terry.”
“Shut up and take me there.”
* * *
They were already hustling like hell when the alert went off. It was silent to the casual pedestrians, who took note of the hulking gaijin but didn’t seem to care overmuch as he shuffled past them in his massive, steel-plated Mule exoskeleton. But Valentine’s neural network was still linked to the Security Council’s blackout frequencies, and though he couldn’t understand the words so well anymore, there was no question they’d been found.
“We’ve got to move,” said Valentine, and he took off. Terry engaged and braced himself for a tremendous leap. The whole apparatus threw itself forward, then again, and he bounded ahead of his companion on the straight road.
“Don’t wait for me,” said Valentine. “Response time is seven minutes. We’re cutting it tight.”
The gunship was rumbling away, ready to lift, when Terry bounded into sight of it. A half-dozen bodies—local MPs, probably—littered the gravel parking lot where it idled. An angular, severe-faced woman in iridescent dragonskin sat dangling her legs off the side of the gunship. She looked up as he raced in; her sidearm made a graceful circle on her hip as she spotted him, drew it, recognized him, and holstered it in a single smooth motion.
“Izzat you, Disco?” he asked. She half-smiled.
“D’you bring me a beer?” she responded.
“I’m going to get a lot of shit for that, aren’t I?”
“As long as it keeps being funny.”
“Look, it was a job. Not much work for Mules after the Service. A guy’s gotta eat. I was out of this game. So were you, if I recall.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes getting out’s the best way to survive still being in. What’d you do, leave the old man behind?”
“He’s right behind me,” said Terry. As he reached the helicopter, he looked down at the bodies. “I don’t suppose you ever considered nonlethal countermeasures?”
“Gosh,” she said innocently. “I just knocked ‘em all out with pepper spray, is all.”
Terry narrowed his eyes. “Uh-huh.” He looked down. The one at his feet was face-down, but an exit wound like a grisly rose blossomed out the back of his head.
“The really strong stuff,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You know…for bears.”
They sat in silence for a moment. In the cockpit, the major was barking commands into a transmitter and was two switches away from being airborne. Valentine was quick on his feet, and his internal organs were top-of-the-line. He wasn’t even winded when he rounded a corner and came into sight.
“Dammit, Disco,” he spat. “I told you not to come out of cloak.”
“You needed an exit,” she said.
Valentine looked at he bodies. “An exit,” he muttered, breathing hard. “Exit. Like a door or a window. Not a goddamn ten-foot hole in the side of the house.”
“Is this everybody?” The major asked, calling back to them.
“We’re on,” said Valentine. “Go!”
The ship was up in ten seconds and hit its ceiling beneath the grid in twelve. The major threw the jets to horizontal so abruptly that it dropped two dozen feet as it took off. By the time Valentine caught his breath, they were halfway across Sendai Bay.
Terry was eager to talk. He jerked his head toward the pilot. “Is he all right?”
Valentine looked up to the pilot. “Hey, you got some heavy metal you can stream through that headset of yours?”
The major nodded. “Just give me a tap if you need anything. We’ll be back on the carrier in about seven, eight minutes.” The galloping drumbeat of something loud and crunchy crackled into his headset, almost loud enough for Valentine to make out the tune.
“We’re good,” said Valentine.
“So you wanna tell me where we’re going?” Terry asked. “You wanna tell me why I just left Japan with you on ten minutes’ notice? I could’ve used an hour to grab some underwear and a toothbrush, at least—say goodbye to some friends, maybe.”
Valentine raised an eyebrow. “You made friends?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” said Terry. “Out with it. Somehow after we botched a once-in-a-lifetime raid, you got us a second shot. I wanna know how.”
“Zee knew what he was doing,” said Valentine. “That’s how.”
Terry rolled his eyes. “I should have known. Knew what he was doing, right. That’s why half of Uzbekistan is radioactive now.”
“Hear him out,” urged Disco.
“Far as we knew,” said Valentine, “Zee nuked the whole valley. We couldn’t contend with the artillery and couldn’t get to the target, so he wiped the valley, everything died, and the drones made it out with the cargo.”
“That’s the long and the short of it,” said Terry.
“That’s the short of it,” Valentine corrected. “The lo
ng of it is that he left us a failsafe. Sniping into an explosion, he called it. Two payloads, the first so big that nobody saw the second go in. Long story short, those mountains have been baking in their own gamma rays for years—and it’s only ten years on that his trick paid off. We’ve always known what he used—at least, we thought we did. Karpov and the Atomic Energy Commission knew exactly what the half-life at ground zero was going to be. All he had to do was stash the cargo somewhere, wait a decade for things to cool off, and go back in and get it. Only, there was a second payload, a targeted payload with a different half-life. Something stupid like sixteen thousand years.”
Terry frowned. “You know, five years on a team with nuke assist, I should have learned a little more about the science.”
“Think of it this way,” said Valentine. “You’re getting a homing signal from a transmitter. You know where it is and how to get it. But everything in the whole city puts out the same signal. Every cat and dog, every fire hydrant. Every candy bar wrapper, every cigarette butt. Everything within fifty miles is a clone of your homing device. But they’re putting out a signal from shitty dollar-store batteries. Underneath it all you’ve got one transmitter powered by name brand. All we had to do was wait until the radioactive static decayed—until the fallout from Zee’s nuke crapped out.”
Terry nodded. “That’s brilliant. So we’ve got a pinpoint.”
“Affirmative.”
“We’re going for it?”
“Affirmative.”
Terry grinned. “Fucking legend. Waleed al-Zee. He’s the smartest nuclear cook the Service ever had, you know that? He’s never going to live this down.”
A shadow passed over Valentine’s face. “No…he won’t. He died eighteen months ago.”
“No.”
“Cancer. About four kinds of it.”
Terry nodded, half-numb. “All magic comes at a price.”
“I don’t need to tell you we’re pulling this one for him.”
“No,” said Terry. “Not for Zee. Only for me. I imagine Disco’s the same. I imagine all seven of us are.”
Disco nodded solemnly. “All four.”
“What?”
“You, me, Valentine. Turner’s waiting for us in Uzbekistan. That’s it. Cameron went Fed. Binnie was retired by a land mine in Siberia.”
“What about Ghost?”
Her mouth drew tight. “Ghost settled down.”
“Bull shit.” He enunciated both words for emphasis.
“My hand of God. Got married, bought a house in Vermont. Two point four kids, the whole deal. And then committed suicide in the back yard.”
Terry bit his lip. That one stung.
“Well,” he said sadly. “That…seems fair. Couldn’t have been any other way. The only person who ever could have snuck up on Ghost…was goddamn Ghost.”
Disco chuckled, but not happily. “Goddamn Ghost,” she agreed.
“I guess there’s no getting the band back together,” he quipped.
“This ain’t a high school reunion,” Valentine reminded him. “It ain’t an Auggie nostalgia tour. It’s the last stage of a very long mission—a mission that I remind you is still active, however long you’ve been slingin’ beer. What it means on the world stage, I don’t much care. What the Chinese or the Europe A.I. Trust or the Pentagon think doesn’t mean a damn thing—except insofar as I have not yet found my way to a beach chair in Hawai’i, and one day I might like to. All we have in front of us is a simple drop mission and the chance to make right on a promise to ourselves, for Zee, or for Ghost, or for the peace of mind of your immortal soul. Whatever you got in the tank to get this job done, you get it done. So long as they do not stand between me a sunset in Waikiki, your reasons are not important to me.”
“Fine,” said Terry. “What’s the op?”
“The crate’s in a collapsed cave in the center of the Boysuntov, in a network of military excavations the Americans call the Anthill. We need you to do what a Mule’s always done. We need heavy kit, and we can’t trust a bot or an ATV to go where we need to go. We need to be in and out on a tight clock: if we wait for safe levels of radiation, Karpov sends in his people and audits the cargo, maybe moves it again. He can’t go for it while it’s still kinda-sorta lethal, so we’re going to dose up with anti-rads and make a couple days of it, no more. When we get to the excavation site, we need you to bust us in. It’s not glamorous, but it’s a vital ops role.”
“Opposition?”
“Automated only, light to moderate,” said Valentine. “The Anthills are a deadlands, but they’re patrolled by drone. The tech on those bad boys has gone up a ways since the twenties. I’d prefer no contact—but we’re not exactly sending you in with a pricing gun.”
“Funny,” Terry grimaced. “Who’s bankrolling?”
“Does it matter?”
Terry thought about it. “I like to know who I’m running for.”
“New Persia, mostly,” said Valentine. “Probably CIA. They have an interest if you go far enough up the chain. There must be somebody stateside, otherwise they wouldn’t have the INS to get you that pardon. But don’t worry—we’re strictly outsourced.”
“Yeah, ‘cause that’s what I’m worried about,” Disco chimed in. Valentine smiled at her.
“It’s the tax evasion that’ll get you,” he said. “CIA, NSA, MI-6, ISIL…only initials I was ever truly afraid of are the IRS.”
Terry shrugged his massive bionic arms. “I was just kidnapped,” he said. “Shanghaied. I was not under the impression that I was getting paid.”
“If I recall correctly,” said Valentine, “there was supposed to be some gold in Crate 14 too.”
Disco smiled. “You think it’s like to make us rich?”
“Maybe,” said Valentine. “Maybe. But hopefully not so rich as to be somebody’s problem.”
* * *
Turner was waiting in Tashkent with the gear, as they planned. Most of the fighting was south, around Samarkand, and they had plans to skirt the worst of it and head straight up into the mountains. He’d quartermastered for the Service long enough that he knew what to get them, and the proximity of an active war zone without too much UN oversight made the Fergana Valley a veritable candy shop for a man of Turner’s refined taste in tools of destruction. Dog-tired from the trip in, they crashed on arrival and woke up to an array of dust-covered flight cases like a live-fire Christmas morning as Turner hauled them out of the closet
“Blackout M4 for the lady,” he said, opening the first of the cases. “Right lovely for an infiltrator. Light, easy carry. Nice fellow at the swap threw in a suppressor, because a lady never tells.”
Disco turned up a corner of her mouth. “Won’t do much good without—”
Turner lifted the first layer of packing foam; the mags were underneath. “Subsonic blackout rounds on the left, the finest in leisurely flight and gentle arrival. Obnoxious armor piercing on the right, if you fancy giving something a little more than a love tap.”
She smiled. “You do plan ahead.”
Turner looked to Terry. “Now you, since Valentine had to be a spoil-sport and open his presents early…” he lifted a case onto the table. “For a sidearm…how’s the standard Desert Eagle suit you?”
“Just fine,” said Terry. “For my purse, maybe. In case my ankle gun jams and I gotta use something small.”
Turner went back to the closet. “You’re a hard man to satisfy,” he said.
“Come on, man. You know what kinda shit they were making ten years ago. You know what kind of firepower you can plug into a Mule Rig.”
“Oh, they certainly did play around,” said Turner. “See which kind of walking tank could strap on the biggest, noisiest piece. Seemed like a bit of a pissing contest to me.”
“Only contest I was ever good at,” said Terry.
“They did try and make you walking dump trucks a shorty carbine for Vulcan rounds, didn’t they?”
“They didn’t try,” said Terry. “T
hey did it. Those things were great.”
Turner went back to the closet. “I hear they never got past the prototype stage.”
“Pyrith Arms folded in the early thirties,” he said. “But I hear a couple got out into the wild.”
Turner grinned like a very satisfied snake as he hoisted a heavy case off the closet floor. “I hear some idjit just bought up the last one,” he said.
Terry opened the case, beaming. The gun was a low, squat, massively fat-barreled thing, fitted with a forearm brace and collapsible stock that would interface with the plates of his rig and feed the recoil straight into his frame. He cracked open a magazine thick as a family Bible and looked at the rounds with alarm.
“That’ll do,” he said.
Valentine came out the bathroom, already dressed and half-kitted, brushing his teeth. He almost choked and had to spit in the kitchen sink.
“Jesus Christ, Neville, don’t encourage him.”
Turner shrugged. “I knew what he’d want.”
“I’m heavy infantry,” Terry said. “I need the heavy gear.”
“You’re heavy infantry,” Valentine grumbled. “Not air support. That shit belongs on a fighter jet.”
Terry shouldered the gun proudly. He probably wouldn’t have been able to one-hand it at all without the rig. “You might be glad for it if things go south,” he said. “Biggest thing he could find me.”
“If you need something bigger,” said Valentine, “try learning to aim better.”
“I trust you gentlemen are satisfied?”
Valentine nodded and checked his own hardware. “I knew we brought you along for something.” It was the logistics, he knew, that could make or break a mission.
“I’m none too happy with the underwear situation,” said Terry. “I’m a boxers kinda guy at home.”
Grunting from the strain, Turner hauled a little diesel generator out of the closet as well. “Don’t push it,” he said. “Just put down your new toys and load up the bloody vans.”
* * *
The plan was to drop in from above, swift and stealthy, like in the movies—only it was an empty desert and cloudless skies, the drones could see by night, and there was nothing stealthy about any of it. For the price of one airlift from the PMCs who still funnelled ammo, socks, and expired MREs into the hills around Samarkand, Valentine found them three desert-battered Volkswagen camper vans, stained with just enough of the local flavor to make the trip in real stealth. They’d been at it too long now to suffer any amateurish pretense to coolness in the face of practical objectives. A little before dawn on the first day, they were off the main roads and into the desert, and Terry blasted Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from his smartphone for irony’s sake as they rolled downrange at twenty-five miles an hour.
We Dare Page 25
