by Ben English
Jack disagreed; the jungle growth around the Picomorph plant was enthusiastic at least. Even with a former Marine Recon like Mack leading the way, movement through that tangle would be a real trick. The entire area was hilly, almost mountainous, and once they forged off the beaten path, away from the farms and sugarcane fields, the men would move through the sheer green mass of the mountain jungle. In the dark, nonetheless.
“And Nicole and the major?”
Alonzo added an icon of a car to the road leading up to the PicoMorph facility. “They’ll be at the front gate, keeping the guards busy while Ian and Mack penetrate the perimeter. We looked at blueprints of the other PicoMorph facilities that are built like this one, and all their external physical security is run from the guardhouse.”
Jack looked carefully at the map. “No helipad. No real path through the jungle. Looks like the gatehouse is the only way to drive troops on or off the property.”
“They own the bottle, but we hold the cork.”
He thought it over. “So you’re betting on Ian and Mack’s ability to get inside and physically hack the network. Plant a transmitter so Steve can access the PicoMorph files more directly. And they’re going to do this undetected?”
“I know what you’re thinking. We need a greaseman. Already sent Brad a get-well-soon card.” Alonzo sighed. “Would be great if the team stayed hands-off altogether, and Steve just hacked in over the ‘net.”
“Oh, I could!” Steve’s voice sounded from the computer speakers, startling both men. “Their firewall is pretty solid, but sure. Definitely. Got two big problems, though. For fast results I’d have to launch a massive denial-of-service attack, probably need to steal and divert cycle time from the NSA or the National Geospatial Agency, they’ve got some serious computing juice. All the three-letter alphabet agencies would notice this right away.
“Second problem: I’ve been running small hacks against their servers all week, just sort of feeling my way around, and I can tell you their online security measures are top notch. Most governments aren’t as locked-down as Raines Capital and its subsidiaries. A frontal assault is going to let them know a whole lot about who we are and what we’re looking for.”
“They’d be on to us,” Alonzo finished. “So tonight, if we attach a physical transmitter directly to their network, you can get around a chunk of their security?”
“It would be like an attack from the inside. Still hard, but doable.”
Jack got it. “What did General MacArthur always say? ‘Hit ‘em where they ain’t’.”
Alonzo shook his head. “MacArthur I understand, at least. Tech war I don’t.”
“And I call that job security,” replied Steve.
“You’re getting funnier in your advancing age, Steve,” said Jack. “Been listening long?”
“I didn’t hear anything about Alonzo’s Oedipal issues or your lack of gamer skills, boss.” They heard a drink being poured, and the unseen man took a bite of something crunchy. “Just glad things are back to normal. All of you bouncing around in the field while I sit here, nice and dry and plugged into the real world.”
Online, Steve transformed. His confidence and humor skyrocketed, and with it his ability to relate to carbon-based life forms. He took another loud bite of something crisp.
Alonzo shook his head again. “Ten minutes. I hope Allison’s driving.”
“So no more ‘major?’ We’re calling her Allison now? She officially on the team already?”
“Almost there,” said Steve. “Lady’s really been pulling her weight around the office, boss. And her pistol shooting scores are way higher than yours. You going to ask her the Golden Questions? I can get her on this conference call—”
“No,” both men said in unison. Jack chuckled, still watching Alonzo. “Bring her online with everyone else.
“You still seeing that French girl, the one with the flower booth?”
“Didn’t work out.”
“She want too much commitment?”
His friend waited a long moment before answering. “Nah, went the other way. She’s already trying to help me pick out a mistress for when she turns thirty-five, after we get married.”
“Which part of that sentence don’t you agree with?”
Before Alonzo could reply, Ian’s voice came across the connection. “You should just try marriage one of these days.”
Alonzo grimaced. “I’ve already learned the moral of that story.”
“Which is what?” he prompted.
“I've learned that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first, the passion fades and there had better be a hell of a lot of money to take its place.”
Ian made a disparaging noise. “You don’t really believe that. There’s always a bright side.”
Alonzo’s eyes settled on the crystal bird, bright and glimmering at the edge of the table. “Sure there’s a bright side. If a man makes enough colossal mistakes, really screws up on an epic scale, he can use up his allotted lifetime supply of regret ahead of schedule. Everything else afterward becomes kind of an adventure.”
“’Use up his lifetime supply of regret’? Where’d you hear a line like that?”
Alonzo stared a moment longer at the falcon, then looked up at Jack. “Steve, where is Mercedes Adams, right now?”
The reply took a moment. “Let’s see, okay. She’s still in Spokane, in the lobby of the Hotel Lusso. Just used her phone to check departure times at Spokane International. Now she’s calling a taxi. I can get her on the hotel surveillance video, give me a second. Want to know where she’s headed?”
“No,” said Jack. “In fact, please take her off active surveillance. No more updates on her location.”
Across the table, Alonzo’s eyebrows started dancing.
Now Nicole’s voice came across the vocal connection. “Did you figure out her tie-in to Raines?”
“Is there anyone who isn’t listening to this conversation?” asked Jack. “Yeah, I did. I’ll brief you later. Steve, since you’re bringing all the comms online, why don’t we have everyone check in. Let’s run this by the numbers.”
Jack removed the crystal falcon from the table, set it aside. Only the electronic board lay between the men.
“Here we go.”
Second Story Work
The foothills outside Santiago de Cuba
Night vision soaked the jungle in varying shades of pea-soup green. Ian moved as quietly and as quickly as he could through the deep foliage, taking extra time to pause and scan with each step. The goggles, while useful, played hell with peripheral vision, and he’d already knocked against a tree and pushed into a number of bushes. The wide profile of Mack Tanner, ahead on the trail by a dozen meters, floated like a green specter through the underbrush.
Ian focused on placing his feet properly. No stranger to the woods, he nevertheless felt more comfortable tracking elk through forests of pine than following an ex-Marine through the jungle.
No such thing as an ex-Marine, Mack would say, and his brother Vern would agree, even though they’d worked at the Drug Enforcement Agency for years. Their training included side-by-side instruction with the FBI; Ian met the Tanner brothers at Quantico at about the same time they began to suspect that a career change to the DEA would deprive them of opportunities to shoot bullets at actual bad people. Ian bought them a beer, let them ask about alternatives to paperwork and desk duty, and introduced them to Jack Flynn.
Who was miles away, in an airplane, hunkered down with Alonzo over a satellite map. Ian pulled his own map from a vest pocket; very close now. They’d chosen the shortest distance from the road to the edge of the PicoMorph property line, where the jungle would be completely denuded.
The plan was simple. After they’d breached the building’s security and paid a visit to the server room, they’d retreat along a different route, uphill, towards the Cuban military and police presence massing to assault the drug lab. Towards Vern, who could spirit them away in the chao
s.
The private security team working the PicoMorph plant was made up of heavies from the U.S., kept isolated from the local population. That was interesting. Their HR files were behind the very firewall Ian hoped to breach, but Jack’s group learned enough about them to know they were mostly ex-desert mercenaries, sand dogs who learned to play soldier in the Middle East, but had less experience in the tropics.
This was a good thing. If Ian and Mack were forced to make a hasty retreat into the jungle, the security team would probably hesitate before pursuing them past the treeline. Meanwhile, every unit in the Cuban Army wanted a piece of the assault on the drug plant, and the roads and horse-trails were quickly filling up with roving clots of armed local soldiers. Ian wondered how the PicoMorph security team would deal with a mass of local authorities, fresh from taking down a major coke lab.
It didn’t sound like much of a plan, but then, Jack’s contingency tactics usually came together pretty smoothly. Even if everything else around them tended to fall apart.
Ian turned and slid between the roots of a magnificent banyan tree. Thought briefly of another moment as the wood closed around him.
Chicago, Illinois
Twenty-five minutes after shaking Jack Flynn’s hand
The elevator was paneled in mahogany. Ian barely felt the upward momentum. And the girl smelled of cordite. Gunpowder and adrenaline, in the enclosed space. “Really, this is going to work out fine as long as you believe.”
“This isn’t Disneyland,” Ian growled back. “Or the movies. We are going to wait for SWAT. The two of you have no idea what the Luchese Family does to civilians.”
“We’ve got a fair idea,” said Jack Flynn, handing a second loaded gun to his wife. She was a stunner. Freckles, and eyes that actually darkled with anger.
At the moment, her eyes were nearly black. A British—no, Irish accent began to creep into her voice.
“Just count yourself lucky that my man here doesn’t hold anything back.” She winked at Ian, and pinched his cheek.
“Believe,” she said.
A thick handful of leaves, painted leprechaun-green by the night vision, brushed alongside his face. Ian negotiated a steep incline, then crossed a stream swollen with spring runoff . He could smell pine trees. The air was cooler this close to the mountains.
*
Allison Griffin resisted the urge to play with the car’s heater. She wouldn’t call it a chill, but having spent the past few days in the tropic lowlands lent an edge to the foothill breeze.
The 1952 convertible coupe rolled right along under the night sky, top down, the tires singing like a charm on the newly-paved road, and Allison propped her elbow on the passenger door. Her posture allowed her to keep one hand over an ear, so the wind wouldn’t blow out her microdot wireless receiver. It also kept her other hand close to the pistol under her seat. She slouched further, as if exhausted from a day of stress-testing bikinis on the beach.
Funny, that sounded like something Alonzo would say. She’d even heard his voice a bit in her head just then.
A CD of Hawaiian music pumped out of the vintage speakers, tuned high enough to be heard over the sounds of the engine, the whisper of the air over the windscreen.
Not that there was much wind. Nicole drove with all the daring and verve of someone in need of an injection of adrenaline directly to the heart. Allison wondered if people even drove this sedately in 1952.
“Did I mention that you remind me of my grandmother?” Allison asked the other woman.
Before Nicole could respond, Steve’s voice sounded over the wireless. “Communications are up,” announced Steve’s voice. “Ready for check, Ollie.”
Allison resisted the urge to adjust the tiny radio in her ear, and settled for further cupping her hand over it.
Jack sounded impossibly close.“Groucho?”
“Check,” said Steve.
Chico?”
“Almost to the fence. Sixty seconds.” Ian’s voice was a whisper. He and Mack would be somewhere close, readying equipment to infiltrate Picomorph. Allison wished she were with the two men. Better to be part of the action than a mere distraction. What had Alonzo called it? A Dumont?
“Harpo?”
“Check.” Alonzo’s voice, conversational. Friendly to the point of sarcasm. “Sitting right next to you, in fact. We’re on the same plane.” Allison found herself smiling.
“Larry?”
“In position,” responded Mack. “Ten meters outside the perimeter fence.”
“Moe?”
“On the ridge, ladies and gentlemen, along with half the Cuban armed forces.” Vern had a dry, laconic slant to his voice, as if he was always on the verge of sharing a joke. “They’re getting ready to move on the target; not much I can do to slow them down.”
“Curly?”
Nicole announced her presence.
“That leaves—”
Allison cleared her throat primly. “Shemp here, check. We’re two minutes away. Or possibly twenty.”
The lights of the industrial compound shone through the trees off to the right. They passed a sign warning against trespassing, and then another announcing PicoMorph’s processing operations headquarters, complete with the logo of the Raines Corporation. In this variation, the stylized bird held a branch or a leaf in its beak, and the bird’s keeper offered what might have been a loaf of bread.
The road ran one entire side of the PicoMorph property; the guards would be aware of them long before the car was in physical sight of the gate. Allison ignored her gun and assumed a girlish smile for the cameras.
*
And just like that, the jungle ceased. Ended as if by sorcery a few yards from a fifteen foot cyclone fence topped with a double row of razor wire. On the other side, close-cropped grass, coarse and thick-bladed, spread flat and green (everything was green, thanks to the damn night vision) across an artificially leveled field. Ian eyed the grounds. He could see everything very clearly, all the way to the buildings, thanks to a series of stubby lamp posts which sat back several yards from the fence. The light they cast wasn’t even interfering with the goggles, that was lucky. Odd, but it was about time fortune started to smile on them.
Ian prepared to leave the shelter of the jungle and paused. Wait a minute.
He turned to Mack, who was readying the equipment needed to breech the fence. The larger man had his night vision headset off and out of the way. “With your naked eye, can you see any light sources on the ground between us and the target?”
Mack barely glanced up. “Negative.” He freed a hand and squinted through his night vision eyepiece. Swore.
The stubby lamp posts ringed the grounds. No visible cables, that meant underground wires. Ian thought for a moment, then keyed his mike. “Ollie, we have a problem.”
“Go,” replied Jack immediately.
Ian looked at his watch. Nicole and Allison would nearly be at the gate. The window of opportunity for the two men to move across the grounds to the outer wall would open quick and slam shut just as fast, and they hadn’t even started working on the fence.
“The grounds are lit up with active infrared. Same frequency as our night vision. They can see everything. We might be blown already.”
With a quickness so deft it was impossible to follow, Mack broke out his heavy weapons. “Recommend frontal assault,” he muttered.
“Negative,” Jack said. He didn’t even hesitate. “Larry, hold position outside the perimeter fence. Do not engage, but get ready to make a big noise. Chico?”
“Ready,” replied Ian. Ready for whatever hat you’re going to pull out of this rabbit, he thought, flexing his hands.
“The guardhouse is a good four hundred yards to your three o’clock, clockwise around the perimeter. Can you make it before the car gets to the gate?”
Ian studied the terrain at the edge of the property even as he began to strip off his field pack and outer vest. Whatever exfoliating agent the Picomorphers used to prepare the area l
eft the ground totally bare between the fence and the jungle, at least the body width of a grown man. “I’ll have to go now.”
“Good. Basic pack and weapon. Larry, can you carry out the rest of his gear?”
Mack helped Ian slough off the rest of his equipment. “We’re travelling light as is, Ollie. I’ll bury what I can’t hump.”
Ian knew him better than that. Mack would bear it all. He felt his holstered pistol and briefly considered the weapons and equipment in his tactical jacket, now in the brush. The only ammo he carried was the mag in the pistol itself, which was fine. There would be no such thing as an extended firefight inside the guard shack.
Time to move quickly.
*
Alonzo began to pace the length of the cabin. It didn’t take long. “Active infrared. Piss. We might as well have come in broad daylight. That’s expensive. You know if they lit up the grounds they’ve paid for active human surveillance as well. Snipers on the roof. It’s what I would do.”
Jack wasn’t looking at him.
“Jack? We’ve got time to pull the girls back, try something else—”
“We’re not blown yet,” he replied. “Give me a minute.” He keyed the microphone. “Groucho, pull up the schematics of Raines' tech campus in Corvallis.”
“I’ve got them onscreen now. Sending.”
Night peered into the small cabin, pressing its perfectly dark eyes up against the plexiglass. Alonzo forced himself to breath evenly, watching the schematics flicker across the bright surface of the monitor. Somewhere hot and dark, Ian was running toward armed guards. Jack was still talking.
“Is that the only other location where their security uses a full-on active infrared and a single point of entry?”
