by Linda Nagata
GPS coordinates come in, telling me what I already know: We are in a rugged region with no towns or villages close by. The road we are on is a ragged scratch in the mountains, without a name or a number.
I dismiss the map so I can watch Luftar. At the airport he wasn’t wearing farsights, but he’s wearing them now. He has his Lasher Biometric slung over his shoulder, and an SA-40 angel in his hands—a pricey surveillance drone with self-adjusting wings, designed for mountainous environments with erratic winds. He carries it out from under the trees, and when there’s open sky above him, he flicks on the SA-40’s electric engine and lets it go. Its quiet propellers carry it swiftly up and away, in the direction we’re driving.
Luftar doesn’t watch the angel. He moves back under the trees, where he stands with his head cocked, studying the display on his farsights. “Floater,” he growls in English, returning to the LTV.
Damir steps up beside me, an excited glint in his eyes. “Do you see it?” he asks, gazing skyward.
“See what?”
He takes my arm, urging me out into the open. I go with him, crunching through the snow on my titanium feet, with Logan following behind.
“There.” Damir points. And then I do see it. A large bird, maybe a hawk or an eagle—or a drone designed to mimic a raptor.
I turn at the sound of a door slamming behind me. Luftar has traded his Lasher for a Light Fifty. Tran moves in, watching with an incredulous expression as Luftar sets up the sniper rifle, resting the bipod on the high hood of the LTV. Over gen-com, Logan says, No way. Even if Luftar has an AI to help him aim—and I don’t think he does—it’s a crazy shot.
But Luftar looks confident. He crouches behind the Light Fifty, aims high, and squeezes the trigger. The shot echoes off the valley walls as I turn my head in time to see the bird—the drone?—pitch and then tumble, shedding glittering bits of feathers or plastic as it falls, dropping out of sight in a swift arc.
Beside me, Damir erupts in a celebratory whoop, his ecstatic voice echoing in the ravine.
Luftar looks up with a proud grin. “Smart bullet,” he says. “Never miss.” I should have guessed. He was using a self-guided projectile, not ordinary ammunition. He looks so damned pleased, it’s impossible not to smile in return.
“Do you know who fielded the floater?” I ask him.
It’s Damir who answers. “It doesn’t matter, sir. If it’s not ours, it’s the enemy’s.”
“And we have many enemies,” Leonid proclaims. He walks up to Luftar and gives him a hearty slap on the back. “But we are well guarded.”
I look up again at the sky. Luftar’s SA-40 is still up there somewhere. Colonel Abajian will have eyes in the sky too, but the drone he’s using will be high-altitude—something subtle, sophisticated, untouchable.
“Careful, Shelley,” Leonid says in a gently mocking tone. “The floater is gone, but look up too long and a satellite might log your face.”
“Long odds on that.”
To identify an individual in a deep ravine like this, a high-resolution spy satellite would need to pass almost directly overhead during these few moments when my face is exposed—and I don’t always photograph well.
“Ah, my friend, unlikely odds kill men all the time.”
I turn to look at him. He’s still under the trees, standing alongside the LTV. Despite his easy tone, his face is serious. I realize he’s trying to warn me, to counsel me that I’m making a mistake. I glance up once more at the sky. I’m out in the open with Damir. I’m not too worried about it because I want Abajian to know where I am; I want his invisible high-altitude drone to mark my presence. But James Shelley the arms dealer would not feel that way. He would be more cautious.
I nod and, signaling Logan to follow, return to the cover of the trees.
From where we’ve stopped, I can see the road ahead as it climbs a steep slope. Seventy meters on, it jogs around a sharp turn and disappears.
I’m suspicious of this road.
Abajian’s report said the missile launcher was transported in pieces and assembled on site. It would have to be, because this roadbed couldn’t support either the weight or the width of the BXL21. I’m not sure it could support the trucks that would be needed to ferry its components.
I look again at Leonid—Papa—but if he is suspicious, he reveals no hint of it. He’s smiling, joking in Russian with Luftar, feigning a large rifle held against his shoulder. He mimes pulling the trigger and then throws his hands up in pretended shock, stumbling sideways as if the recoil has almost knocked him over. He laughs. Luftar and Damir laugh with him. Hell, I laugh. Leonid is an arms broker. I know he is a bad-ass, stone-cold killer, but it doesn’t show—and he’s fucking funny when he wants to be. Maybe it’s his self-deprecating humor that has let him stay alive so long.
Luftar puts the sniper rifle away and then hands out cans of sweetened tea, bread, and cold roast lamb. We eat standing up under the trees, and then Damir smokes a cigarette. After a few more minutes, Luftar speaks to Leonid in a soft, apologetic tone. Leonid listens closely, nods a grudging agreement, then turns to me. “The SA-40 has sighted a patrol in one of the valleys ahead of us. Luftar would not be concerned with meeting them, except that you are with us, Shelley. Questions would be asked.”
“Okay. What do we do?”
“We stay here. This is a good place. Later in the day, when the patrol has passed, we move on.”
So we sleep in the LTV, with the door partly open. When I don’t want to sleep anymore, I walk under the trees. The SA-40 returns twice. Luftar swaps out the battery pack and sends it out again. The third time it returns, he decides it’s okay for us to move on.
“Do you know how far we’re going?” I ask Leonid when the door is closed.
“Only halfway to Hell,” he assures me.
• • • •
I watch the time tick past in my overlay as I sit braced against the bumps and turns of our crawling progress. The pinpoints of light leaking into the back of the LTV gradually fade as night arrives. On the other side of the blackout screen, I hear Luftar speak. My overlay doesn’t catch what he says, but the tone is positive. A few seconds later, Damir whoops and pounds on the steering wheel. We come to an abrupt stop. Again, I reach for my pistol, though I’m thinking longingly of my HITR in the gun rack on the other side of the blackout screen.
There is the sound of one of the front doors opening, slamming closed. Seconds tick past. Almost a minute. The LTV lurches forward again. Moving slowly, we bump over a low obstacle, rolling onto a smooth, level surface. We continue for a few seconds and then stop again.
Even over the LTV’s climate control I can hear men outside, speaking. There is a thud. Maybe a heavy gate, or door, being firmly closed. Needles of bright, artificial light shoot again through the pinholes in the blackout paint. But it’s still too dark inside to see faces, so I do a sound check. “Logan, you ready?”
“Roger that.”
“Tran?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We are among friends,” Leonid warns, his low voice weighted with caution.
“We look forward to meeting our new friends, Papa,” I answer.
“Yes, Shelley. Exactly so.”
I think, Be ready for anything.
The door swings open.
At first I imagine we are in a garage. It’s the daylight bulbs that mislead me. They’re mounted to the ceiling, but it’s a ceiling of chiseled rock, not concrete. The lights are bright, but the area they are required to illuminate is large and there is too much distance between the bulbs. The result is a grid of shadows. The air is moist and cold, but not as cold as it was out in the wind. Somewhere, a generator is purring.
Damir is standing at the door, looking in, still smiling. Behind him I count twelve men, including Luftar. There are no women.
Like Luftar, most of the men are dressed in forest camouflage—military garb but not American. A few wear black sweaters over olive-drab pants. They are a weathered,
sun-hardened crew, but still young. Half have thick, shaggy hair and beards—black, brown, ginger, blond. The rest have buzz cuts and beard stubble. None show any gray hair.
My overlay tags one of the brown-haired buzz-cuts as Maksim Abaza, leader of this terrorist coven. Abaza is Caucasian, sharp-featured and lean, his face still showing a remnant of brown tint from a fading tan. A pleased half smile conveys a sense of victory as he eyes me.
My overlay fails to tag any of the other men, but my system will remember their faces.
Luftar cradles his Lasher 762. Three others carry the same weapon. I should take that as a threat, but as they crane to see into the LTV’s dark interior, all I see in their expressions is curiosity. Leonid signals me to exit first, so I do, climbing out with my pack in hand. I am met by a murmur, with random words chosen for translation by my overlay, mostly the equivalent of See his feet? It’s him.
Just like Abajian promised, I’m a celebrity, even here.
Wherever the hell here is.
Abaza steps forward, proffering his hand in an American greeting. “Shelley!” He nods at my feet. “No question it is you, alive as promised, though rumor insisted you were dead. I am honored, sir. Honored.”
I reach out to shake the hand of my terrorist host and am pulled into a bear hug, while behind me Leonid protests, “Maksim! I swore I would bring Shelley to you! Did you doubt me? I am wounded! Wounded.” He grips at his heart to prove it while we all laugh. We are a merry bunch, bent on returning the world to the primitive communications of the 1950s.
I shake hands with the muscle, while my own toughs clamber out of the LTV, packs on their backs and pistols on their thighs. Logan and Tran glare, narrow-eyed. They are behind the curve on our program of international friendship. I ignore them, and so does everyone else.
Everywhere is raw, gray stone without any concrete. The floor is flat but gritty, and there’s a lot of open space—enough to easily turn the LTV around. Ours isn’t the only vehicle. Three pickups, all with PKM machine guns mounted in the cargo beds, are backed up against a wall directly in front of the LTV. An empty flatbed truck is backed against the far wall. So my initial impression of a garage wasn’t completely wrong. But the missile launcher I’m looking for isn’t here.
That doesn’t mean our intelligence is wrong. A tunnel leads away from the lighted area. It’s wide enough to drive a tank through—or a road-mobile missile launcher—so it’s possible our target is stored in another part of this complex.
I don’t know much about mining, but my guess is that this UGF was never used as a mine. I’m imagining some paranoid government or well-heeled revolutionary army deliberately carving it from the guts of a mountain to serve as a hideout, a fortress, a bomb shelter.
Just a few meters behind the LTV is a massive gate, closed now, but that must be the way we came in. The gate is made of heavy, riveted plates of black steel, and like the tunnel, it’s big enough to drive a tank through. I’m going to assume Colonel Abajian’s surveillance drone successfully tracked us to that gate. Our job now is to confirm the presence of the missile launcher, but whether we succeed or not, this sanctuary has become a marked target.
Abaza notices my interest in the gate. He grins, showing off yellow teeth. “Come have a look.”
I follow him. The gate towers over our heads, its surface cold under my palm. Abaza spins a mechanical lock. I listen to its smooth, well-oiled mechanism. He’s taunting me, making sure I understand that we’re trapped in here. “Steel bolts bigger than an elephant’s dick hold the doors. No one in. No one out, until our business here is done.”
Leonid joins us, laying his big arms around our shoulders. “And we should get to business, my friends. There is much to do and, I think, not much time?”
Abaza scowls, not appreciating the reminder. “There is time enough, Papa. Come. We will have coffee and a last meal.” He shrugs out from under Leonid’s arm and stalks off toward the tunnel. I watch him go, wondering if there are more men here, or if the thirteen we’ve seen so far are all of Northern Sword.
Leonid’s grip on my shoulder tightens. “Patience, my friend. There is much to assess, much to do. These things always take time.”
• • • •
We follow Abaza into the tunnel, his men trailing behind us. Spillover from the garage lights illuminates the first several meters. More light comes from a side opening twenty meters along. Past that, I can see the black outline of another side chamber or tunnel, though it’s unlit. Without night vision, I can’t see any farther, though I can hear the low rumble of a generator. Louder than the generator are the echoes of our footsteps. Both the echoes and a slight breeze hint that the tunnel runs a long way into the rock.
Abaza disappears into the lighted opening. We follow, and find a deep chamber cut back at an angle to the tunnel. Barrels along one wall probably hold water, or maybe fuel. There’s a workbench with a propane stove and two microwaves. Cushions surround a long, low table, and there are clusters of thin mattresses with crumpled sleeping bags. I count nine, less than the number of men here. Maybe they have a watch rotation, sleep in shifts. But this is definitely a barracks room.
Abaza invites us to sit at the table while his men brew coffee and heat prepackaged food. Across the table, he speaks in Russian with Leonid. My overlay tries to translate, but after I decide they’re discussing business terms, I ignore it and look around instead, trying to estimate the size of the chamber.
Logan is ahead of me in working things out. Tank tunnel, he says.
I glance at him, sitting beside me. Then I consider our surroundings again. A tank tunnel is used to hide tanks and other battlefield assets, and to secretly deploy them close to or across a contested border. This chamber is easily large enough to house a tank. It’s probably possible to park two in here, end to end. The angle of the chamber would make it easy to roll a tank out into the tunnel. We don’t know for sure that there are more chambers, but my guess is there are. I imagine a series of them, hollowed out in a herringbone pattern. A chamber of this size would be big enough to house the missile launcher.
Where the hell are we, that the politics and geography make a tank tunnel worthwhile?
I pop my regional map back into my overlay and scan the terrain, but there’s no obvious candidate for our location, so I close the map again, not wanting to call attention to myself with a vacant-eyed stare.
Steaming plastic trays are set out on the table. Coffee is poured. We eat, until after a few minutes Abaza speaks, this time in English. “Shelley,” he tells me, nodding toward one of his soldiers. “My friend is curious. He wants to ask you about the women soldiers in the American army.”
I feel my stonewall expression slide into place. Around the table, everyone is watching, waiting to hear what use we make of women on the front lines.
The man with questions speaks. My overlay starts to translate, but I stop it, holding out for Abaza’s version—Abaza, who leans back, putting on a cold smile. “When my friend fought in Africa, the older men told him that some of the American soldiers were women. He thought they were making a fool of him and he refused to believe it.”
The man speaks again. Abaza and the others laugh. I feel Logan stiffen beside me, while Leonid purses his thick lips and turns to Abaza. “You insult your guest?”
“It is not an insult,” Abaza says. “It is a fact.” He looks at me, wanting me to know what his man has said. “He refused to believe the women soldiers were more than propaganda, until they took one prisoner. Women do not belong on the battlefield.”
He doesn’t say more. He doesn’t need to.
I look at him, I look around at his men, and I wonder: How many American soldiers have they killed? How many women have they beaten and raped? How many innocent civilians have died at their hands?
They are the enemy. It’s a fact I don’t want to forget.
Abaza frowns down at the table. He has to be desperate for this deal, desperate for cash. There’s no other reason
he would risk my presence here. I hope it worries him that I’m angry. But he offers no apology, choosing instead to pretend that nothing is wrong. Turning to Leonid, he says, “Damir will show you the stock. Take what you will. Take all of it! It won’t matter. Just be ready to go by dawn.”
Dawn is at least ten hours away. I hope Abajian is willing to wait that long.
• • • •
Damir is tired from the road. He comes to us yawning, a young, mad stoic who accepts his fate with grace and veiled pride. “Maksim gives me these tasks because of my English skills. That is the burden of knowledge.”
“Your English is excellent, my young friend,” Leonid assures him. “It is only your driving that needs practice.”
Tran laughs, but for once, Damir does not find Leonid’s joking funny. “You may leave your things here. We will not be going far.”
I pick up my pack by the shoulder strap. “We may need our things.”
Damir shrugs. “Come, then.”
Luftar tags along too, cuddling his Lasher as Damir leads us deeper into the dark tunnel. A dim green light gleams beside the dark chamber mouth we saw before, marking the location of a light switch. Damir turns the lights on inside a chamber identical in size, shape, and angle to the barracks room.
“Not much here,” he observes, and he’s right—the room is mostly empty. There’s a half-pallet of what turns out to be Iraq-War-era AK ammo, and a full pallet of fairly new Russian RPGs. Nothing more.
Logan and Tran stand watch on either side of the entrance, while Luftar idles in the hall, smoking a cigarette and watching every move we make. I open the crates. Leonid gets out a tablet, which he uses to log and photograph the contents. He asks my opinion and feigns interest in the little I have to say. When the crates are closed again, he straps sealing tape over the seams and affixes RF tags to each piece.
He explains, “When these goods reach my warehouse they will be scanned again. When all the tags are accounted for, then the money you have placed in escrow will automatically transfer.”
Advanced banking for terrorists.
