Strike Zone

by Dale Brown

  ZEN HAD SPLIT his lower control screen in half so he could see a sitrep feed from Dream Command showing the assault. The screen was tiny, especially in the helmet viewer, but he avoided the temptation to make it his main view—he was controlling two Flighthawks from the hold of the Megafortress, orbiting Dragon Prince, and watching for signs of activity. While the computer was presently doing most of the work, Zen couldn’t afford to let his attention stray too far from the controls.

  “First wave is out of the plane,” relayed Dog, who was piloting the plane. “Looking good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Merce is ready to go with the E-bomb.”

  “Roger that.”

  Zen checked his instruments, purposely trying to draw his attention away from the other operation. His guys were good. They could handle it.

  Best thing to do was let them.

  “Hawk leader, you want to take a run over the ship’s deck?” asked Dog. “Get a real close-up and see if we can spot the clone?”

  Zen acknowledged, then took the helm of Hawk Three—his U/MFs were designated Three and Four to avoid confusion—and tucked toward the oil tanker, which was about ten nautical miles from the mouth of the Kaohisiun harbor.

  The sitrep for the assault flickered.

  “E-bomb went off as scheduled,” said Dog. “The power is gone in that part of the city. Everything’s on schedule.”

  “Roger that,” said Zen, forcing himself to concentrate on the task at hand.

  On the Ground in Kaohisiung

  0004

  DANNY HIT THE roof of the building square in the middle, only a quarter meter from the point the computer had designated. With two quick snaps, he had unhooked his chute. He pressed the trigger on his taser lightly, activating its targeting mechanism. Its aimpoint appeared as a crisp red circle in his Smart Helmet visor. With the helmet’s starscope vision showing him the night, there was no need to pop on the LED wristlight that was an integral part of the fogsuit; instead, he made his way to the end of the building above the door closest to the security headquarters. He saw the door open as he reached it. Kneeling, he waited as two of the company guards emerged from the building, each carrying a handgun. As the door started to close behind the men, he fired.

  Vvvvrooop.

  Vvvvrooop.

  A net of blue light enveloped the men. Both Taiwanese spun slightly, stunned by the shock of electricity pulverizing every muscle and nerve in their bodies. Danny climbed over the edge of the roof and swung down, landing on his feet a few feet from the men he had downed. The shock had rendered them semiconscious. He kicked the guns away, then Danny took a small plastic canister from his pocket. It looked like a grenade with an extra-long spoon handle. He pulled the handle and tossed it between the men, stepping back as netting material expanded over them. The sticky material was not escape-proof, but it would easily hold them in place until the reinforcements arrived.

  Egg Reagan, meanwhile, had come around the side of the building. He slapped what looked like the head of a plunger on the door; it was actually a man-portable radar unit similar to SoldierVision to help them see inside. Using the unit rather than their own Smart Helmets would prevent anyone from homing in on the source of the radio waves and targeting them. Egg strung a wire to the unit and stepped around the corner, viewing it in his helmet visor after attaching the wire at the back.

  “Clear,” said Egg.

  The door was locked. Danny took out a Beretta loaded with metal slugs and fired point-blank through the mechanism.

  “Still clear,” said Egg.

  “In.”

  The hall, dark because both the electricity and backup lighting had been knocked out by the E-bomb, made an L about twenty feet from the door. As they cleared the corner, the yellow beams of small flashlights danced at the far end.

  “We’ll zap them,” said Danny. “I have the ones on the left. Wait as long as we can; get them all in view.”

  He edged toward the side of the hall as the first of the Taiwanese guards came around the corner.

  As soon as one of the lights played across the floor near Egg, Danny opened up, firing two bursts in rapid succession. Three guards shot back against the wall of the hallway, literally blasted off their feet. But another man had been behind them; unharmed, he began to retreat. Danny and Egg gave chase, running for all they were worth down the hall. The bulk of their suits and gear slowed them down, however; by the time they reached the corner, the hall was empty.

  “Fuck,” said Egg.

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “Let’s see if we can find this joker.”

  He tapped his Smart Helmet, activating the unit’s penetrating radar mode. The mode emitted low-power radio waves that could penetrate walls roughly out to thirty feet. Their subject was nowhere in sight.

  Danny flipped back into Dreamland connect mode, taking the display off the Flighthawk. But the U/MF was too far to the west to be of any use.

  “Hawks, I need some coverage down here,” he said. “On my building.”

  “Copy,” said Kick, gunning the aircraft back.

  Aboard Penn

  0012

  KICK HAD JUST started the Flighthawk back when the Osprey veered across his path. He threw the small robot plane down hard toward the earth, realizing even as he did that he had overreacted. Cursing, but only to himself, he came back with the joystick control, trying to swoop level and get back more or less on course. The robot fluttered slightly, her airspeed plummeting.

  “Hawk Two, looking for that view,” said Captain Freah in his ear.

  “Yeah, roger that,” said Kick. “We’re working on it. A lot of things going on up here.”

  Starship, whose aircraft was to the west covering the harbor approach to the complex, started to interrupt. “You want me to—”

  “I’m on it,” insisted Kick, sliding his speed up. The target building was now dead-on in his screen. Kick let his speed continue to bleed off, determined to provide a detailed view to the ground team. The Osprey, meanwhile, began rotating its wings upward, driving down toward a field near the road to drop its men.

  Someone shouted over the circuit—there were people on the ground, near where the Osprey was headed.

  Several things happened at once—the chain gun in the Osprey’s nose rotated, Kick threw his Flighthawk down toward the spot, Danny Freah yelled a warning and told the Osprey not to fire.

  Kick struggled to keep his head clear, fighting the black fuzz of confusion creeping up from behind his neck.

  “The boats,” someone said, and whether it was intended for him or not, Kick started to line up the Flighthawk for a view of the harbor. But he was already crossing over the dock toward the water; he accelerated and began banking to the south to try for another run.

  On the Ground in Kaohisiung

  0014

  AS SOON AS Danny saw the Taiwanese guards emerging from the buildings beyond the battery recycling shed in his sitrep window, he shouted at the Osprey pilots to back out. He saw the Osprey whip away just as one of the men began firing an automatic weapon. An instant later, Sergeant Geraldo Hernandez launched a stun grenade and then fired his taser, scattering the guards.

  “Two of the fuckers down,” said Hernandez.

  It took Hernandez another sixty seconds to work around a pile of discarded metal before he could get close enough to take out the others. He popped a mesh grenade over the pile, then ran around the side and zapped them as they struggled.

  “Osprey in,” said Danny.

  “Can I get my view of the building now?” he asked Kick after the Marines flooded out of Osprey.

  “Roger that,” said the Flighthawk pilot. “Two seconds away.”

  Danny toggled between an IR and a penetrating radar view, preferring to see the details himself rather than using the synthesized and annotated image the computer provided.

  “Freeze,” he said, getting a good visual of the facility. It looked like there was only one man here besides themselves; he was tw
o corridors down to the right.

  “With you,” said Egg, following as Danny set out cautiously.

  Aboard Penn

  0015

  STARSHIP SAW THE boat darting into the harbor. He knew it wasn’t theirs—the computer had the Marines dotted out with daggers—but he hesitated, as if his brain were trying to process the information and couldn’t find the next branch in the logic tree.

  Gun in the boat.

  Big gun.

  Something else.

  “Company,” he said finally. “I’m taking them out.”

  He leaned on the stick, starting the Flighthawk downward. But then something tingled in his brain—the other half of the thought that had started a millisecond before. He pulled back, nailing the throttle slide to full just as the missile flared from the boat.

  Missile.

  They were gunning for the Osprey, coming in over his right shoulder.

  “Flares!” he yelled, hitting his diversionary devices.

  Ordinarily, he would have jinked away, ducking the surface-to-air missile that had just been launched, getting himself to safety. But something had pushed off the instinct for survival; something deeper took over—he kept the Flighthawk on her course, directly into the path of the oncoming missile.

  The shoulder-launched SA-14 hurtled upward at something approaching Mach 1. Though primitive by Dreamland standards, the Russian-designed heat-seeking missile was nonetheless an effective weapon when properly handled. The sensor in its nose ignored the flares, sucking the heat signature of the large aircraft it had been aimed at. But then something juicier stuck itself in its face—the tailpipe of the Flighthawk, flashing within a few meters of the weapon. The missile jerked itself to the right, following the hot scent of its new target, but it couldn’t quite keep up. Afraid that it would lose everything, it ignited its charge, sending a spray of shrapnel through the air.

  Starship felt the small robot spinning to its left before he actually lost the U/MF; whatever sixth sense it was that helped him fly the plane knew he was down.

  The last feed from the cam in the Flighthawk’s nose showed the Osprey just a few yards off. The frame froze, as if the tiny aircraft wanted to show that its death had not been in vain.

  “Nail the motherfuckers in the boat,” Starship told Kick. “I’m outta the game.”

  On the Ground in Kaohisiung

  0021

  BOSTON’S VISOR PORTRAYED the interior of the building in a ghostly gray. A door sat at the far end of the room, leading to a hallway. There was an office at the end outside the range of the helmets’ low-power radar; two guards were holed up there, marked in the small sitrep view in the lower left-hand corner of the screen supplied by the Flighthawk sensors. The guard icons blinked steadily, indicating the view had not been updated in more than thirty seconds.

  Sergeant Liu moved ahead stealthily. Boston saw a shadow in the hall and steadied his taser at the doorway.

  “One coming,” he told Liu.

  “Wait,” said the team leader, his voice so low Boston could hardly hear it. “We want both.”

  The Taiwanese guard appeared in the doorway, holding an M-16. Boston steadied his weapon, watching the man peer through the dark room. He seemed to know they were there somehow. Boston decided he could take no chances, and fired his weapon. The doorway burned blue and the guard fell to the ground. Liu dove through the doorway from the side, spinning left in the direction of the offices where the guards had been earlier. As he did, the sitrep updated itself as the Flighthawk flew overhead once more.

  “Other guard’s still in the office,” Boston told Liu.

  “Yeah,” hissed the team leader, and Boston belatedly realized that Liu was now close enough for his helmet-borne radar to pick up the guard.

  By the time Boston reached the hallway, Liu was next to the doorway. He reached inside his fogsuit and took out a small tube that looked a bit like an old-fashioned folding carpenter’s ruler. He unfolded it, hooking a wire into one end and then pushing it around the corner.

  The near-infrared view was capable of greater detail than the radar, and had the advantage of not giving off a detectable radio wave. Liu configured the feed so it could be shared by the team members; a small window at the right of Boston’s visor opened and both men saw the guard inside, huddled behind a desk at the left of the room.

  A Minimi machine gun sat on one side of the desktop; the guard was pounding a computer keyboard, possibly erasing information. The computer had obviously been hardened against electromagnetic pulses somehow.

  “Flash-bang?” whispered Boston.

  Too close to the door to risk speaking, Liu fisted a yes signal and Boston reached below his fogsuit for the grenade. He thumbed off the tape as he slipped forward, crawling along the floor and then sliding the grenade into the room.

  Time altered its shape in the scant seconds before the grenade went off. Boston felt Liu move, then stop; things flew into fast-forward as the grenade flashed.

  “In,” said Liu, but by the time the word settled into Boston’s skull, the guard at the computer was falling backward, zapped by the discharge of Liu’s taser.

  Boston ran to the computer.

  “No. Check for explosives,” said Liu. “I have the computer.”

  Boston clicked the bottom of his helmet visor, selecting a sniffer mode optimized for explosive materials such as C-4. The unit got two significant hits back in the main part of the building; the computer ID’d them as five-hundred pound bombs.

  There ought to be more explosives, Boston thought—I’m not even picking up what would be used for the nuke.

  “Boston,” said a controller back at Dream Command. “If you guys are secure, we need you to use Probe I so we can locate the nuke. We haven’t caught it yet.”

  Boston stepped out of his fogsuit and pulled out the probe, an ultra-sensitive ion detector that looked like a long wand from a vacuum cleaner and weighed a little more than three pounds. By the time he had the device out and working, Liu had slapped a special modem on the parallel port of the computer and began sending the contents of its hard drive back to Dreamland.

  Boston walked slowly through the hall, passing his arm back and forth. The readings were being relayed directly back to Dreamland for analysis through his Smart Helmet system; he had no idea what the unit was picking up, only that his own Geiger counter had not detected radiation serious enough to warn him away.

  Large metal-working machines dominated the left side of the room. Wooden boxes and other items were lined neatly on the other wall; most of the middle was empty.

  “How we looking?” Boston asked the Dreamland people as he walked toward the area where the explosives sensor had found the two bombs. They were packed into slatted wooden crates, the sort that were used to ship vegetables back in the States. Boston thought these might be the nukes, but in fact they were a bit too small and filled with conventional explosives.

  Sergeant Liu joined him when he was about three-fourths done.

  “Marines are down,” Liu told him. “We have to finish the sweep before they can come in. Find anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They’ll tell you. Keep at it. I’m going to go back up to the rooms in the front, make sure the data transfer is working. You okay?”

  Boston nodded and kept moving forward with the probe.

  Aboard Penn

  0021

  STARSHIP PULLED OFF his control helmet and stared at the white screen at the top of his station. He could see from the sitrep at the bottom of the screen that the Osprey was landing.

  He rubbed his eyes, trying to get them to refocus and adjust to the darkened flight deck. Finally, he pulled on his headset.

  “Shit. You did that on purpose?”

  Kick.

  Was that a legitimate question, or was he being an asshole?

  Both, thought Starship, even though he knew he was being unfair.

  “Yeah, on purpose. Otherwise they’d’ve gotten
squashed,” he said.

  “I got the boat,” said Kick. “Sank the motherfucker.”

  “Good.”

  “You saved them,” said Kick.

  “I did,” said Starship.

  Kick said something to someone on the ground. Starship undid his restraints, stood up, flexed his back and legs, then sat back down. He clicked the radio into Zen’s frequency to tell him what had happened.

  “I heard already,” said Zen before he got two words out of his mouth. “Good going. Watch Kick.”

  Starship grunted, then reached to change the resolution on his main screen. A shiver shook his upper body. His throat was dry, and he felt a thirst more powerful than any he’d ever felt before.

  “Looking good,” he told Kick. “Looking good.”

  On the Ground in Kaohisiung

  0029

  THE GOOD NEWS was that the rest of the site was secure, with the Marines now arriving and holding positions around the perimeter. A computer shielded against electromagnetic pulses had been captured and was feeding itself to Dream Command.

  The bad news was that preliminary data said there was no bomb here. They’d have to conduct a painstaking and no doubt time-consuming search, and hope that the local authorities took their time responding to the alarms that were now sounding about gunfire and explosions around the harbor.

  But Danny had a more pressing problem to deal with: The man they had missed in the hallway earlier had barricaded himself inside a men’s room. He was armed with at least two machine guns—Belgian Minimis, compact 5.56mm machine guns known to American troops as M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, or SAWs.

  Egg and Danny watched him from around the corner of the closed door, thanks to the helmet radar. The image was sharp enough for Danny to see that the machine guns were special short-barrel versions equipped with belt feeds contained in compact boxes ahead of the trigger area. The box could hold a hundred bullets.

  “He doesn’t have a NOD,” said Egg. A NOD or “night optical device,” also known as night goggles, amplified available light or used the infrared spectrum to allow the wearer to see in the dark. “If we could get that door down, we could get in.”