The Armor Heist

by D. Clarence Snyder

  “Well, get on it. Brett needs to pee. He’s been asking for a stop.”

  Canbe checked her phone’s available connections and noticed Maria’s profile had settings for a “personal” network with a very strong signal. She connected to the truck.

  “About time, my eyeballs are floating back here,” Brett complained.

  “Alright, alright.” Canbe looked around. “There’s a McDonald’s up here.” She turned the truck off its route toward the restaurant.

  “You forgetting something?” Ted asked her.

  Canbe tried to imagine what he might mean.

  Ted noticed her pause. “Call it in,” he reminded her.

  She had been staring at the dashboard most of the morning. She had seen the uplink button and noticed it was not lit. She realized its purpose and pushed the button. “Dispatch, we are deviating from route.”

  “For what reason?” a woman’s voice asked in response.

  Canbe looked at Ted for a clue as to how to answer. Finding none, she replied, “Biological.”

  “Understood; remain linked until you’re back on route.” The dispatcher could initiate the connection, but it was quicker if the truck kept the uplink on.

  After Brett returned to the truck, Canbe drove back to its scheduled route. She was less than a block from the McDonald’s when she felt the text message indicator from her cell phone. She checked it immediately.

  The word, “45Mike,” floated in the air in front of her. It was invisible to everyone else because the image was only simulated on Canbe’s optic nerve. Even though it passed through the truck’s wireless network, pure data like text messages were not broadcast to everyone. The system was designed for crew safety – to facilitate responding to emergencies – not tracking their personal messages.

  To be doubly sure the message was not intercepted, Ægis had encrypted the message using Canbe’s SSL Certificate. Ægis and Canbe had traded encryption keys so that they could communicate securely, with mutual authentication. It seemed paranoid to most people to encrypt every text message, but most of the communication between the mercenaries was about buying and selling forged identity cards.

  The Parcel Service truck had entered the city. Canbe had forty-five minutes to be at the ambush site. She checked the dashboard mounted navigation system and compared it to the Google maps app on her phone. If she stayed on the Brinkloom route, she would be eight minutes from the ambush site in thirty minutes. Eight minutes of driving the wrong way and seven minutes of sitting still was a long time to be doing the wrong thing. Canbe would have to occupy the armed men in the truck with her for that time.

  Wednesday

  “So, how were you going to find the truck?” Dr. Matthew Redds was very interested in the job’s plan. He did not ask about what Ægis did. Mostly he asked about what they had planned to do – what each man was supposed to do.

  Ægis had noticed that Dr. Redds alluded to the mercenary crew, but he had only named Pigeon. By sharing minute technical details and keeping his lies small, Ægis hoped to keep the interrogator off Canbe’s trail. He did not know what real information his captors had. Pigeon had surely recorded the tracking number of the box on his phone. With that, Dr. Redds could know a lot about the job, so Ægis tried to stick to the information he was sure could be looked up.

  “There’s no trick to finding a mail truck,” Ægis explained. “Delivery routes aren’t secret. Expected pickup times are published on Parcel Service’s information space.”

  “Still,” Dr. Redds injected. “You have to know which truck and what route it’s on, right?”

  “Yeah, if you’re trying to steal something specific,” Ægis confirmed. “But if you just want to hit a mail truck, all you have to do is sit on a corner and wait.”

  “But, in this case, you were after something specific, weren’t you?”

  “I was after the money Pigeon was going to pay me for helping.”

  “Okay.” Dr. Redds would come back to the question. He needed to keep Ægis in a helpful mindset. “So he was after something specific? How did he know it was on that truck at that time?”

  “Really?” Ægis looked at the interrogator with disbelief. “How do you think he would know a particular box was on a particular mail truck?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Redds lied. “I don’t rob armored cars for a living.”

  “He had a tracking number, of course.” Ægis fell into a simple conversational trap. “Parcel Service told him what truck the box was on.”

  Ægis was getting tired of the circular conversation. He wasn’t dancing around simple, obvious information. He was sure he hadn’t admitted to committing a serious crime. He was pretty sure, anyway. The terrorism charge would be trumped up and both men knew it.

  As a licensed mercenary, Ægis could do things like fire on an armored car as long as it was connected to an actual gig and did not represent a danger to the general public. The hiring party, not the mercenary, was responsible for any crimes committed. The legal concept of the mercenary was that he was a tool. Mercenaries had no motive in a crime, except for the completion of the job, so they were not legally responsible. It got more complicated where nation-status corporations were involved. As sovereign states, they had their own laws. Some did not recognize mercenaries’ statuses, and certain corporations, like Parcel Service, had special arrangements with the traditional governments.

  Ægis tried to stick to a narrative, which identified Pigeon as his employer. It would be up to Pigeon to reveal the source of the job, and Ægis was sure Pigeon wasn’t doing that. Passing job information to police could allow a mercenary to walk free, but confidentiality was a very important part of his resume. If Ægis revealed he was acting on behalf of Microsoft: the information might be used to start a war between two corporations; Microsoft might disavow the relationship, making Ægis responsible for his actions; Microsoft might put him on their “do not hire” list; or worse, other corporations would learn he had turned in an employer, and he would never work again.

  “The box?” Dr. Redds focused on the detail. “What’s in the box?”

  “I don’t know.” Ægis tried back-peddling. “I don’t know it was a box. I mean, you can assume it was a box. What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about what you were after. How big? How small? How heavy?”

  “Small enough to be carried by one man, fragile enough that I couldn’t vaporize the guys inside the truck.” Ægis added, “Because it might damage the thing.”

  “What do you mean by vaporize?”

  “You know I shot – that I shot in defense. We knew we were hitting an armored car, so I brought Betsy…”

  “Your cannon?”

  “My twenty millimeter rifled sniping cannon, yes.” Ægis elaborated, “I could have fired shells that can punch through an armored car. I could have used a delayed fuse sabot, packed with micro-flechettes.”

  “What would that do?”

  “Penetrate an armored car and then explode. The flechettes are tiny darts, like a million needles in the air.”

  “Vaporize the occupants?”

  “Effectively. I guess it might be more accurate to say it turns them into hamburger.”

  “You didn’t do this because the box is fragile?”

  “That too.” Ægis did not want to kill the men in the Parcel Service truck if he did not need to.

  “Too?” Dr. Redds led him to explain.

  “That Parcel Service vehicle was no normal truck. I would have needed something straight up armor-piercing to punch through it.”

  “You mentioned that before. So, how did you stop it, then?”

  “The Brinkloom truck stopped it.” Ægis cocked his head slightly. He didn’t know if the interrogator was playing dumb, or just learning about what happened. “Block an armored car with another armored car.”

  “Yeah, okay. But, how did you – he – get Brinkloom’s truck to block like that?”

  “I don�
��t know what you mean.” The answer seemed obvious to Ægis. “It was driven into Parcel Service’s path. Block road; truck stops. Simple.”

  “How did you get the Brinkloom crew to do that?”

  Tuesday

  “Are you sure you don’t want any soup?” Canbe offered her thermos to Ted. “It’s just going to go to waste.”

  “Why did you bring it if you didn’t like it?” Ted shook his head. He felt like he did not understand women.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Canbe explained. “I said I’m not in the mood for it. When I packed my lunch at five, it was cold outside.”

  “I packed my own lunch. Thanks, anyway.”

  Canbe had hoped she would be able to be discrete about drugging Ted, but he would not eat anything she offered him. She was running out of time. She stopped at the last light before she would have to deviate from Brinkloom’s planned route.

  She intentionally stopped short of the intersection. A building blocked her view of the traffic to the right. “Clear right?” she called out.

  Ted leaned forward and turned his head away from her to check the street. Canbe stabbed him in the neck with an auto-injector. It emptied quickly, spraying barbiturates into his blood.

  Ted felt a pinprick and a sudden throbbing pressure in his neck. He thought he had given himself whiplash. The world started to bend, and he realized something was not right. He sat back and turned to look at Canbe. “What, something, do you?”

  “Sorry about this.”

  Ted reached for his gun. His fingers felt like they were zeppelins. He managed to release his holster’s retention strap before falling asleep. He was held upright in his seat by his restraining harness.

  Canbe reached over and took his pulse. She felt it slow dramatically, but it didn’t stop. She had guessed what Ted’s weight would be. The drug she used had a wide margin for error, but if she had underestimated Ted’s weight, he might have had enough clarity to call for help before it knocked him out. If she had overestimated by more than twenty pounds, the dosage would have killed him. The soup would have been safer. If Pigeon’s timing were correct, Ted would wake up in time for police to arrive at the heist.

  Canbe hit the uplink button. “Dispatch, we’re deviating from route.”

  “Why now?”

  “Some kind of roadwork. They’re detouring ground traffic.”

  “There is nothing on the city maps for that block,” the Brinkloom dispatcher reported after checking.

  “Uh, there’s a hole in the road surrounded by men in orange vests,” Canbe lied. The men in back couldn’t see. With Ted unconscious, there was no one to refute her story. “Do you want me to drive through it?”

  “Exercise caution, I’ll advise your next stop of the delay.”

  “Thank you, will advise when we’re around it.” Canbe turned off the connection and turned right. Being in a stopped truck would make the hoppers suspicious, so she drove slowly to use time.

  She reached her starting position for the ambush. According to Pigeon’s schedule, she had five minutes to wait.

  “Hey guys, we’re stopping for a minute, Ted needs some alone time,” she lied to the hoppers. “I’m going to drop off comms, I have to make a call.” Before they could protest, she disconnected from the truck’s wireless network.

  Canbe sent an encrypted text message to Ægis, “In position,” before pulling a neck brace and a mouth guard from her lunch bag. The truck’s restraining harness was designed to keep her body in place. The extra items would prevent her from injuring her neck or biting her tongue if the Parcel Service truck decided to ram her.

  Ægis was lying on a roof almost a block away. He was covered with a camouflage blanket made of smart fibers. Using a sensor to sample the roof, the fibers changed to match its color and visual texture. From the air, Ægis was invisible. A casual observer standing more than a few feet away would probably not see him, either. The edge of the roof was a short, brick barrier. Ægis was behind it, so he could not be seen from the street. Betsy was set up on top of the barrier. She was also cloaked in a smart fiber blanket. Given time, a trained counter-sniper could find his position, but probably not before Ægis accomplished his mission. Once he fired Betsy, though, his stealth would be compromised. Even suppressed, the cannon was loud enough to alert everyone on the entire block that something was being attacked, and a second shot would confirm his position.

  Betsy was custom built. Ægis had started with a basic semi-automatic sniping cannon and added several features, including an SBI ported control module. When they were connected by a cable, Ægis could see through Betsy’s sights as if she were his eyes. That let him use Betsy like a periscope – observing the street while staying behind cover. Her optics package included a laser range finder with wind detection. Once he designated a target, Betsy would show him how to adjust his aim to hit that target based on range and atmospheric conditions. Ægis was an expert shooter. He had once shot down a fist sized observation drone at five hundred meters using a common hunting rifle. Using Betsy, he could have shot the antenna off the drone’s remote operator at a thousand meters. Of course, that would just be to show off. Normally, Betsy fired an explosive bullet that was two-thirds inch across. Ægis would have just shot the man.

  “Canbe’s ready,” he thought over his phone to Pigeon.

  “Alright, Parcel Service shows the truck should be on the next block,” Pigeon replied.

  Ægis panned Betsy around. “I don’t see it, yet.” The distinctive red and gold colors of the Parcel Service livery suddenly filled his view. He had been looking too closely. He zoomed out. The mail-carrying vehicle turned onto the street. “Contact!” he shouted at Pigeon and sent a text message to Canbe simultaneously.

  Ægis looked at the Parcel Service truck. He had expected an armored car. All mail trucks were armored. What he saw, though, was a tank. The technical term was “infantry fighting-vehicle.” It was a squat, six-wheeled frame with a sloped front end. The driver’s windows were shielded. The vehicle’s body was angled to deflect projectiles. Everything about it screamed that it was built for heavy fighting. Like the stem of a cherry on top of a combat sundae, the barrel of a fifty-five millimeter smoothbore autocannon protruded from a motorized cupola just behind the driver’s compartment.

  “Oh, shit,” Ægis exclaimed. It was a much tougher vehicle than he had expected. He knew Parcel Service had heavy combat vehicles in their armory. They used main battle tanks to make deliveries in parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. He did not know there were any used for daily routes in the city.

  “Go go go go!” Pigeon’s voice was simulated on Ægis’s cochlear nerve. “Where’s your girl? She needs to stop this truck.”

  Canbe received another message from Ægis, “Execute.” She pressed the accelerator, pushing the Brinkloom truck away from where she had been waiting. She turned onto the street and saw the Parcel Service tank. Its gun was pointed away from her because the Parcel Service crew did not perceive her as a threat, yet.

  The same could not be said for the Brinkloom employees. Brett started banging on the armored divider that separated the cargo box from the drivers’ compartment. He shouted, loudly, “Hey? Are we moving again? Why isn’t Ted on comms?”

  Ted was heavier than Canbe had guessed. He was physically fit, and his body processed the drug faster than she liked. His eyes opened and he started moving. His voice was incoherent, but he would be conscious soon.

  The yellow uplink light caught her attention. Everything was about to go wrong.

  Canbe connected to the Brinkloom truck’s network and shouted over the uplink, “Dispatch, we are under attack!” The hoppers ‘heard’ her, too.

  “Sorry, Ted,” she offered aloud. The padded plastic guard between her teeth impaired her voice. Canbe slapped the release on Ted’s seatbelt.

  “What’s happenenening?” Ted’s brain tried to regain control of him.

  Canbe steered across the center lane, directly into the Parcel
Service truck. She did not try to stop and block the road. She did not even slow down. She rammed the Parcel Service truck, driving her truck’s right front corner like a wedge into the middle of the fighting vehicle’s front end. The combined impact cracked the nose armor and shoved the Parcel Service truck’s wheels onto the sidewalk.

  Ted was thrown forward. His body hit the dashboard and windshield. Had he been fully conscious he might have been badly hurt. Still limp, he was battered, bruised, but not broken.

  The impact also stunned the three postmen inside the Parcel Service truck.

  Pigeon was only feet away from the impact. It sounded like an explosion. He was not prepared for the violence of the hit, and it paralyzed him in awe.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ægis' calm, but stern, voice asked him. “Go!”

  Pigeon snapped out of his amazed state and sprinted to the Parcel Service truck’s rear steps. He carried four iron blocks. They were magnetized and contained a few grams of high explosive. No matter how heavily armored a truck was, its doors opened outward. That meant the cargo door’s hinges had to be partially exposed to the outside. That made them vulnerable. The high explosive in the blocks would cut the hinges at their pins. Pigeon did not have to break through the armor parts of the hatch to get inside. He would break the door parts.

  He set the first one against the top hinge. It only stuck for a second before dropping away, narrowly missing Pigeon’s wrist. The heavy strap-type hinges on the Parcel Service truck’s cargo hatch were not magnetic.

  The demolition expert who made the blocks did not know what Pigeon planned to use them on, so he fitted the cutting charges with two-sided tape, as well. Pigeon pulled the backing paper off and stuck the first block back on the top hinge. It held

  Using the tape took Pigeon longer than he wanted to apply the explosives, but he was fast enough. One went on each hinge and a larger block was taped to the doorjamb next to the latch box. He sprinted away, toward a pile of garbage in an alley. The garbage was camouflage for a short stack of sandbags. The cutting explosive was just strong enough to cut into the door, but it would throw pieces of iron with lethal velocity for several yards.