King stuck his head through the gap where the rear window had been and addressed Queen. “Can we make that?”
“It won’t be pretty, but I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s all I can ask.” He turned back to the others. “Let’s do something about the tailgaters.”
Asya put the aiming dot squarely between the headlights and loosed a burst that tore the engine of the chasing car apart. There was a small explosion as spilled fuel ignited, and then the car veered off the road and crashed into a tree. As she switched to the other car however, multiple tongues of flame erupted all around it.
“Down!” King said.
Asya didn’t need King’s warning. She threw herself flat, pressing low behind the tailgate even as rounds began creasing the air where she had been only a moment before, or hammering against the tailgate. None of the bullets penetrated, but she could feel pulses of heat and kinetic energy radiating off the metal with each impact. She knew that trying to aim and fire the 240 in the face of the onslaught would be suicidal, but the machine gun wasn’t the only weapon in her arsenal. She dug another grenade from her pouch, pulled the safety pin and let the spring-loaded trigger spoon fly free.
One matryoshka…two matryoshka…three! “Frag out!” She lobbed it out the back in a low arc that she hoped would send it skittering under the approaching car. She kept counting until, just a second and a half later, there was another enormous blast.
Asya’s stomach lurched as the pressure wave lifted the rear of the pickup a few inches off the ground then let it fall back down. When the truck stopped bouncing and settled back onto its three good tires, she popped her head up just long enough to survey the damage. The grenade had detonated in front of the car, which wasn’t what she had been hoping for, but it was better than nothing. One headlight was still shining through the cloud of dust and smoke, but the car wasn’t moving.
Her measured triumph fell flat when she saw more muzzle flashes.
“Crescent’s here!” Queen shouted.
Asya didn’t have to look to know that their ticket out of trouble had arrived. Crescent II, a super-sonic stealth transport plane with vertical take-off and landing capabilities, had just passed directly above them.
The plane was now a one-of-a-kind prototype, its twin having been destroyed. Thanks to some bureaucratic sleight-of-hand on the part of Domenick Boucher, the former head of the CIA, the plane had been set aside exclusively for their use, along with a permanent flight crew that left the United States Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, more commonly known as ‘the Night Stalkers,’ to join the Endgame organization. Now equipped with a slightly less sophisticated version of the chameleon adaptive camouflage system, the aircraft was nearly invisible against the night sky, but there was no mistaking its presence. The downdraft from its turbofans hit them like a gale-force wind.
Crescent settled to the ground right in front of them, its loading ramp already deployed, and Queen steered onto it. When the wheel rim hit the metal deck plate, there was another ungodly shriek and a shower of friction sparks, which lasted until Queen slammed on the brakes twenty feet into the plane’s cargo hold. To Asya, it was like fireworks and music to her ears. They had made it.
“We’re on,” King yelled. “Good to go.”
The turbo fans revved louder, and Asya felt the world tilt ever so slightly. The ramp closed behind them, shutting off the noise. For a few seconds, the five of them just sat quietly, looking at each other in disbelief. Then one by one, they pulled off the camouflage mesh that obscured their faces. In the normal light conditions, the photosensitive lenses in their glasses were clear, making them look like shooting glasses.
King ran a hand through his unruly black hair and cleared his throat. “I guess a LACE report is in order.”
LACE, Asya had learned, stood for ‘liquid, ammunition, casualties and equipment,’ and it was the standard operating procedure for American military units after an engagement. The team used the term a little less formally; King was basically asking if everyone was okay.
Rook answered first. “No hits, runs or errors here, but I’ve pretty much used up all my bullets. Oh, and I seem to have misplaced my 240.”
“And I seem to have found it,” Asya said quickly, a smile coming unbidden to her lips. The simple fact of their survival had done wonders to lighten her mood.
“Maybe we should have let you take the big gun after all,” King remarked. He gave her arm a squeeze. “Good job, up there.” Asya was acutely aware of the fact that everyone could hear him. “I think you’ve got the high score for the day.”
The praise only made her feel her rookie status more acutely.
“Any injuries?”
She shook her head, but then remembered that something had struck her arm in the tunnel. There was a gash in her camouflage suit, and when she probed the spot, her fingers came away sticky with blood, but there was no pain and no apparent swelling. Probably just a small cut from a piece of flying glass, she decided.
“I wish I could say the same,” King said. “One of those pig-things got a piece of my ankle. Which is why I’m glad we didn’t have to walk out of there.”
“Sara’s not going to like that,” Rook said.
“She knows what I do,” King replied, a little defensively. Sara Fogg was King’s fiancée, and she knew all too well the risks inherent in his life. They had met during a crisis several years earlier, when the Chess Team had been called on to protect her, while she had investigated a deadly disease outbreak in the jungles of Vietnam. As a star epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sara lived with her own brand of danger; disease investigators were at the highest risk for contracting the contagions they tried to stamp out.
“That’s not what I meant,” Rook countered. “You’re supposed to be walking her down the aisle in a couple days.”
“Ah,” King sighed. “That. Well, I’m a quick healer.” He leaned his head through the window. “Queen?”
Queen’s blonde hair was plastered to her face by sweat, but she was grinning triumphantly. “Fully mission capable. No injuries. You know, I don’t think I actually fired my weapon. But I could definitely use a drink.”
Rook cocked his head sideways. “What’s that? Blue is buying?”
Disembodied laughter rang in Asya’s ears. “I’ve got a cooler full of Sam Adams chilling on the back deck, but please tell me that you actually managed to accomplish the mission objective.”
Rook thrust a hand into the pile of corpses and pulled up one that was still dressed and looked fresher than the others—so fresh in fact that he was still breathing. “Meet Mano, a.k.a. Juan Beltran.”
“Excellent work.”
Asya’s curiosity finally got the better of her. “Please, what are all these dead people?”
Rook shrugged. “Came with the truck. As you can smell, they’re all a little ripe. Been dead a few days. Here’s something that will give you nightmares.” He pointed to the torso of one of the male victims. A ragged slit had been cut across the man’s diaphragm, right under the rib cage. “I think someone cut his heart out.”
Asya felt her gorge start to rise. “What are they doing in this truck?”
“Pig chow.”
She shuddered. “That’s terrible.”
Rook stroked his long blond goatee like a mystic warrior in a kung fu movie. “That’s why they call them the bad guys.”
King deftly changed the subject. “Knight? You good?”
Asya glanced involuntarily at her teammate. Even though she had worked side by side with him for several weeks, his appearance still filled her with sadness. She still remembered the man he had been when they had first met; his broad, genial face, and eyes that were full of laughter. Now he just had one eye, and there was not a trace of humor in it. Where his other eye had been, there was a black and silver orb that bulged against his eyelids, as if it was trying to pop out of his head. As if conscious of her scrutiny, Knight re
ached up and removed his glasses, sliding a black eye-patch down to cover the artificial orb. Then, in a voice that felt like rain on a picnic, he said, “I’m fine.”
7
Knight had not been injured in the battle, but he was not fine. Not by a long shot.
The eye patch automatically initiated a sleep cycle for his ocular implant, and that brought some relief, shrinking the railroad spike of pain that rammed through his skull down to something a little more tolerable, something more like a mere ten-penny nail.
It was hard to share the upbeat mood of the rest of the team when he felt like clawing his face open to end the constant throbbing. Harder still because he didn’t dare tell anyone.
No amount of technical wizardry or medical science could restore the sight to his ruined eye. That had been the first hard truth he had been forced to accept. The loss of an eye meant losing stereoscopic vision and depth perception. Both were important but not absolutely critical to his performance as the team’s sniper; he did most of his work with just one eye anyway, peering through a high-powered scope at targets that were too far away to see unaided. But there were other aspects of his job where it mattered a lot more. The simple task of being able to sneak through almost any environment undetected relied completely on his ability to judge the distance and placement of objects in the environment.
Lewis Aleman, who was to Chess Team what Major Boothroyd of Q section was to James Bond, was uniquely sympathetic to Knight’s plight. He too had seen his career as a Special Forces sniper cut short by an injury, and he knew how devastating it felt to be declared unfit for duty. Aleman at least had been as passionate about working with computers and electronics as he was about killing bad guys from a distance, which had made his transition to the rear echelon a little easier to bear. Knight had no such fallback position. Everything he loved, his work and his extreme sports obsession—the more extreme, the better—would suffer without binocular vision. And that did not begin to touch the disfiguring nature of his injury. The metal fragment that had taken his eye had also left a ragged scar on the surrounding tissue. Even with a perfect artificial replica, even if he could master the tricky muscle control techniques required to make a glass eye behave like what it had replaced, that scar would mark him.
In his younger days, he had earned a reputation as a ladies’ man. His platoon mates had half-jokingly, half-jealously dubbed him ‘the Korean Casanova,’ perhaps none too subtly trying to diminish his romantic successes with the reminder of his ethnic heritage. He had settled down in recent years, and was currently in a committed relationship with Anna Beck, the head of security at Endgame, but even if that relationship failed—and since his injury, he had grown increasingly worried that it might—he didn’t want to go back to the night life. Yet, if he had been so inclined, he would have had to do so with a ruined face. Even going out in public was hard. He could not endure the looks of revulsion that made him feel like a carnival freak, and the pitying looks were even worse.
For a few weeks after the return from the Congo, he stood on the razor’s edge. Anna had been nothing but supportive, as had the rest of the team, but Aleman had been the one person capable of understanding what he was going through, and he had had the means to do something about it.
“I can’t give you back your eye,” Aleman had explained, repeating that hard truth, “but there is something I can do that will compensate for it, and maybe even give you an edge you didn’t have before.”
The loss of depth perception, Knight’s occupational therapist had informed him, was easily enough overcome simply by learning to see a different way. For routine tasks, it was easy enough to find workaround solutions. For example, when driving, you could gauge stopping distance by looking for fixed cues in the environment—lane markers, mileposts, rocks on the side of the road. For other situations, he could employ the technique of shifting the focus of his good eye back and forth, to get two side-by-side perspectives on an object, creating the illusion of binocular vision.
“We can use that technique,” Aleman went on, “in conjunction with the glasses and the quantum computer net, to show you the world in three-dimensions.”
Aleman had started by designing an artificial eye that was loaded with hardware he had been unable to fit into the glasses the team wore. Thermal sensors that could see through thin walls, an electromagnetic spectrum detector that could actually ‘see’ electrical fields, an optical scanner that could read anything from barcodes to Sanskrit and instantly translate it into readable text. “I could probably make this thing shoot a laser beam if you want,” Aleman offered.
Knight had politely refused.
“The implant will see things just like an ordinary eye would, but the tricky part is turning that into something you can use. Maybe in a few years we’ll be able to figure out how to turn digital code into something the brain can process, but for now what we’re going to have to do is put the feed from the implant into the VR net and then project it into your good eye.”
Knight’s reaction had been skeptical. “So I’ll be seeing two different things at the same time?”
“Yes and no. You know the old magician’s saying: ‘the hand is quicker than the eye?’ Well, it’s the literal truth. It takes the human brain about a tenth of a second to process visual inputs. That’s how a movie projector can turn thousands of still frames into a motion picture. What I’ll do is configure the VR network to show you those feeds, alternating between them so fast that you won’t consciously recognize the change.”
“That will work?”
“Your brain will have to learn to process what it’s seeing, but yes, I think it will.”
“I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.”
Knight’s comment had been eerily prophetic.
It had indeed taken him nearly two weeks to learn how to process the inputs from the implant, during which time, Knight had had to confront a second hard truth.
King and Deep Blue had avoided bringing up the subject of Knight’s ability to continue field operations, but as he struggled to master the implant, they paid him a visit and broached the subject directly. Knight knew what was coming, but like pulling off a Band-Aid, it had to be done.
“You know what’s at stake when we go out,” King said. “We put our lives in each other’s hands every time. You know that better than anyone. If you aren’t one hundred percent confident in your ability to keep doing the job, then you need to step aside.”
Knight wasn’t bothered by King’s forthright manner, but rather by the fact that the burden had been placed on him. You know whether or not you can do it, King had basically told him. We’re not going to make the decision for you.
It would have been easier if they had just fired him.
“I will be,” he promised. “Better than one hundred percent.”
Now he had to live up that promise, and that meant he couldn’t tell them the truth about the implant.
Aleman had warned him of discomfort as he got used to it, but the reality was a migraine that left Knight virtually paralyzed. Anna had been on the verge of taking him to the emergency room. The painful sensation did abate somewhat as the days turned into weeks. By the time his brain learned how to process the inputs, showing him a world that was in most respects similar to what he had lost, the migraine was no longer a constant companion. Instead, it only reared its ugly head when the implant was active.
He didn’t dare tell Aleman or the others just how bad it was.
A further complication had arisen when he had begun showing signs of hypersensitivity to the implant, similar to the body rejecting an organ transplant. A regimen of immunosuppressant drugs had alleviated the symptoms, but at the cost of a somewhat compromised immune system. That risk was manageable, but he would always be at risk for infections, and in the dangerous environments in which the team often found themselves, what might be a nuisance to the others could prove fatal to him. Like the headaches, it was a price he believed himself willing
to pay.
He had not expected it to be a recurring fee however.
Months later, that second hard truth was knocking him upside the head. ‘If you aren’t one hundred percent confident…’
I’m not. I don’t know if I can keep doing this.
The mission to take Mano’s compound had taken about three hours, which included the time spent traveling from the drop zone to the target. The migraine had begun almost as soon as he had activated the implant, and by the time he had arrived at his overwatch position, the pain had been intense enough to make him feel nausea. As he sat on the hill, peering through the scope, trying to decide whether or not to take a shot at Raul Campos, the voice of doubt had wormed its way to the surface.
What if this mission lasts longer than a few hours? What if it goes on for several days?
The fact that he was asking those questions told him that he couldn’t meet King’s confidence test. He was lying to himself and putting the others in danger.
When we get back, I’m going to tell Blue that I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to pull this goddamned fake eye out with my bare hands, and then I’m going to take Anna and…
And do what?
Doesn’t matter. Anything is better than this.
We’ll go to Disney World. Visit Grandma Knight. His grandmother, his last living relative, was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the doctors at the St. Augustine nursing home where she was a patient had warned him to prepare for the inevitable. He had been paying for her care for several years now, and even though she was no longer responsive, it seemed only right that he should be there for her final days. I guess she won’t be ‘Grandma Knight’ once I quit. I’ll have to go back to calling her Halmi like I did when I was a boy.
The decision brought him a little comfort as he laid on a cot in the cargo bay of Crescent, but not as much as putting the implant to sleep. After a while, the pain subsided enough that he was able to doze off.
He awoke to a sensation of heaviness, and he realized that Crescent was lifting off. He had evidently slept through their first stop. When he sat up, he saw that both Mano and the pickup were gone, along with the truck’s grisly cargo. The thought of who those people had been burrowed into his consciousness like a sliver of glass. Were they rival cartel soldiers? Policemen? Judges? Or perhaps just randomly selected civilians, torn from their homes and fields, and executed to enhance El Sol’s reputation for cruelty?
Cannibal Page 5
