The Armor Heist

by D. Clarence Snyder

  “There is a foreign object on our hull,” the onboard threat warning system advised the postmen.

  They did not have time to react to the warning. Pigeon triggered the explosives. The hinges and hasp were instantly cut. The door, however, remained in place. The hinges were not magnetic, but a striker plate affixed to the top of the door was. A strong electromagnet held the door closed until it was released by the crew inside. The magnet was strong enough to hold the door up, as well.

  Pigeon did not know why the door did not fall, but he had planned for the possibility. He picked up a heavy pry-bar hidden in his sandbag shelter and started back toward the fighting vehicle.

  When they were expecting combat, a Parcel Service fighting vehicle had a crew of five: the driver, the tank gunner, a loader, and two hoppers. Performing a daily delivery route, there were only three postmen on board; the crew was just large enough to operate the cannon while moving.

  “What was that?” the hopper who also served as the loader shouted his question. He could not hear anything over the ringing in his ears, but the crew’s cell phone link let them communicate the answer.

  The driver jabbed the Parcel Service version of an uplink button. “We’re being ambushed!” he reported, forgetting his professional bearing. “They rammed us and trying to breach!”

  “Please specify enemy force.” Parcel Service was well known for its global power to deliver packages. In the city, the infantry fighting-vehicle was a symbol of that power; it had never been in actual combat. Parcel Service’s dispatcher had never received a distress call, either. She reacted by reading the form she had to fill out the request support. “How many attackers are there?”

  To respond, the driver had to evaluate their situation. “One armored truck, with Brinkloom markings,” he reported.

  The gunner climbed into the cupola chair and started to swing the gun around. “Get the HEAT magazine ready,” he directed the loader. “After I punch through that can, we’ll blow ‘em sky high.” He exaggerated the effect of High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds, but emptying his five-round magazine in four seconds would reduce the Brinkloom truck, and Canbe, to small, unrecognizable pieces.

  The cannon had been aimed straight back, in a storage position, to make driving easier. The mount would not allow it to be aimed low enough to hit Pigeon. Ægis saw the tank gun begin to swing around toward the front. He quickly scanned the cupola and found its sighting system. It was a small block of optics and electronics, shrouded by an armor plate. Ægis only had time for one shot before Parcel Service annihilated his friend, so he turned on Betsy’s laser sight-assistant. In half a second, software calculated his aim point. Using his sniping cannon at an arm’s reach was safer, but it slowed him down enough that the fighting vehicle's threat detection system noticed.

  “I believe we’re being lazed,” the alarm called out.

  The gunsights were flooded by laser light, completely washing out the gunner's display. “Confirmed,” the gunner called to the others, “they're painting the sights. I can't see a thing.”

  “Firing,” Ægis called. Betsy roared as he launched an armor-piercing shell. The tank gun's optics exploded in a shower of twisted metal, shattered glass, and bits of circuit board. He did not wait to see the result before Ægis moved his aim toward the damaged cargo door.

  Pigeon wedged the sharp end of his pry-bar in one of the cut hinges. He put his foot on the step and pulled on the bar with all his might. The door didn’t budge.

  The postman-gunner climbed out of his seat. “Gun down!” he shouted. “They shot the sights off.”

  The driver was turned around in his seat. His foot pressed the accelerator, but the mass of the Brinkloom truck prevented his vehicle from moving forward. “You don’t need sights! There’s an armored car at zero zero. Line up with the hull and fire!”

  The gunner moved his face close to the driver. Unlike Brinkloom trucks, the driver was not separated from the crew in Parcel Service. “I am not going to blind fire a tank round in a city,” the gunner declared. He grabbed one of the personal defense weapons from a rack secured to the wall of the truck.

  The loader grabbed the other one. “Is that truck armed?” he asked.

  The driver looked at the truck in his way. “I don’t think so.” He blinked and corrected himself, “Negative, no vehicle weapons.”

  “I believe we’re being lazed.” Ægis had designated the door.

  “Activating ECM,” the driver called. He hit the “Electronic Counter Measures” button.

  High frequency strobe lights flashed on the corners of his vehicle’s roof. The pulsing lights were invisible to organic eyes, but they mimicked laser targeting systems. The flashes bounced off every flat surface on the block. Only one percent of the false returns were the right frequency and angle to be received by any given hostile weapon system. On an average city street, that one percent was over a million false positives. Betsy could not see her own designator in the noise.

  “They got jammers,” Ægis reported. Pigeon didn’t need to know, but military experience taught Ægis to report everything, as a reflex. Ægis sat up and moved behind Betsy. He nestled her stock against his shoulder and aimed using plain optics and the software of his brain. “On gun.”

  Pigeon thought Ægis meant that he was aiming at the cupola. It was a good misunderstanding, because if he had known that Ægis was actually aiming at his head, Pigeon might have been nervous. Ægis was covering the door, in case the postmen came out shooting.

  Canbe spit her mouth guard into the lunch box. She held her foot on the brake to keep the Parcel Service truck from pushing her out of the way. Ted was hurt and confused but not dead. Brett and the other hopper, Luke, had been tossed by the impact. They got up and pulled their short-barreled carbines out of the truck’s rifle rack.

  “What hit us?” Luke asked.

  “Parcel Service, we’re locked up, I can’t back off,” Canbe lied.

  “Let us out,” Brett suggested. “If we can’t run, we fight.”

  “No. We wait for reinforcements.”

  “What hit me?” Ted finally asked.

  Canbe pointed out his window.

  In his confused state, Ted was not sure of the order of events. He thought he had been knocked out by the collision. “Dispatch, dispatch, we’ve been struck by a Parcel Service fighting vehicle.”

  “They know,” Canbe advised him aloud.

  “Understood, act of war by Parcel Service,” a voice Ted did not recognize responded over the uplink. It reassured him, “Reinforcement is on its way. We’ve also called municipal police. They’re underway with corporate affairs.”

  Pigeon strained his arms trying to pry the Parcel Service truck’s door open. He felt it slide a small amount, which encouraged him to pull harder.

  “Pop the door, we’ll take the fight to them,” the Parcel Service gunner directed.

  “Ready?” the driver called to prepare his crew. He spoke slower, as a countdown, “Go – go – go!” On the third one, he disengaged the electromagnetic lock.

  Five hundred pounds of steel-reinforced ceramics and polymer dropped. Pigeon’s efforts to pry the door free toppled the slab.

  “Fuck!” The door’s mass pressed Pigeon into the pavement.

  Both of his femurs snapped from the impact. Four of his ribs were broken by his right arm, which was pinned between him and the door. The “top” edge of the door rested on the middle of his sternum. He was able to see one of the postmen jump out of the back of the truck. Pigeon could make out the logo on the bottom of his boot before it came down on his chest. Pigeon lost consciousness, so he wasn’t aware that the gunner shot him in the face.

  Ægis did not fire on the postmen. Pigeon was down. The job was blown. His priority became escape – his own, and Canbe’s too. “Pigeon’s down,” he sent by text.

  Canbe changed plans. They had a getaway car a block away. After grabbing the box, she and Pigeon had planned to sprint to the car and flee. Ægis was po
sitioned to provide cover. In her new plan, Canbe would use those elements.

  “Fire two - BLSSS cargo,” she replied.

  Ægis did not know her plan, but there was no time to explain or debate. He trusted Canbe to make her own escape. He fired two rounds into the cargo box of the Brinkloom truck. The twenty-millimeter shells punched through the armor. To Brett and Luke, it sounded like they were wearing a giant soup kettle that was struck by a baseball bat. They ducked.

  “We’re taking fire!” Brett shouted. “That’s it, we’re punching out!”

  Under normal operations, the rear door of the Brinkloom truck was locked and unlocked by the driver. In an emergency, there was a pair of buttons inside the cargo compartment that opened the door. One was on the door. The other was on the opposite side of the space, near the drivers’ compartment. Both had to be pressed to force the door open.

  Brett went to the door, Luke to the front. They nodded to each other and opened the aft door. Brett stepped out and raised his weapon to his shoulder. He used the door as cover as he held it open to let Luke follow.

  Luke jumped out and stepped around Brett. He brought his own weapon up in time to see the Parcel Service loader appear from behind his own truck. Luke fired a burst of bullets into the postman’s chest.

  The loader dropped, but he was not seriously hurt. All of the men wore heavy body armor. Even through that padding, the impact of the bullets bruised his ribs.

  Brett let the door swing shut. The truck automatically locked, sealing their valuable cargo inside.

  Canbe looked at Ted. “Gotta go, boss.”

  Ted nodded. “Dispatch we are under heavy fire, we are abandoning ship.”

  Canbe popped her door open and backed out. She dragged Ted across the seat and out the door, dropping him to the pavement.

  “Zeroize!” Ted directed Canbe.

  Canbe knew he wanted her to reset the truck’s communication devices. It would erase sensitive encryption keys that could be used to break into Brinkloom’s communications. She did not know the correct procedure for it, though. She drew Maria’s pistol from her holster and fired one shot into the dashboard, just below the uplink button. It was a good guess. The bullet pierced the boards that stored the keys. The keys weren’t erased, but they couldn’t be used, either.

  Canbe grabbed her lunchbox and jumped down. The box was full of evidence she did not want found. She looped the handle around her wrist and crouched next to Ted. “Can you run?”

  “I don’t think so.” Ted was groggy and battered from his impact with the windshield.

  “Stay with the hoppers.” Canbe pointed down the cross street. “I’m going to try to flank the mailmen.”

  “Wait!” Ted tried to protest, but Canbe was sprinting away. She turned and was out of sight.

  Brett and Luke joined Ted, using the truck as cover. They traded bursts of gunfire with the postmen. They knew reinforcements were on the way. They just had to hold out for a Brinkloom special response team to arrive.

  Parcel Service had forces on their way, too.

  The city police would arrive first.

  Ægis picked up Betsy and retreated from the roof as soon as he saw Canbe vanish. With her away from the fighting, there was nothing left for him to do. He had his own getaway car parked in the alley at the bottom of the fire escape.

  As he closed the trunk, concealing his cannon, he received a text message from Canbe, “Clear. Main number.” She had gotten away and stopped using Maria’s telephone profile.

  Ægis got into his car and drove away. He thought he had escaped cleanly. Twenty-four hours later, a Brinkloom special capture team put a bag over his head.

  Almost Thursday

  “Help me make sense of this,” Dr. Matthew Redds suggested.

  Ægis and Dr. Redds had been talking for hours. Ægis looked exhausted. It was closer to the truth to say he was bored. Between his military experience and certain contract jobs, he had remained alert without sleep for days. Matthew kept taking the conversation in a circle, asking about the same information in different ways. Ægis was sure he had changed details between retellings of his story, but at that point, his mind was so numb to the information that he didn’t know what he had said.

  There was a table between them with a half-eaten sandwich and an empty glass. Matthew had offered the food. Ægis refused, so Matthew had eaten half the sandwich. Ægis supposed it was proof that the sandwich wasn’t drugged.

  “What’s to make sense of?” Ægis asked. “Pigeon gets a job to recover a box from Parcel Service. He hires me as over watch. We ram the mailmen with an armored car. The door falls on Pigeon and kills him. And here we are.”

  “Oh, Pigeon’s not dead,” Dr. Redds revealed. He was changing tactics again.

  “I watched a postman shoot him in the face.”

  “Yeah, that didn’t kill him. He’s in one of our medical centers right now.” Dr. Redds half-chuckled and added, “Don’t get me wrong. He is really messed up, but he’ll live.”

  Ægis noticed the word “our”. The interrogator had not revealed his name or said for whom he worked, but he had revealed several clues. He was definitely corporate. He claimed to not know about the box, so he wasn’t with Microsoft or their competitor. That left Parcel Service and Brinkloom. Ægis was tired enough that he did not remember that Parcel Service did not operate their own medical trauma centers.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Ægis asked.

  “Brinkloom Sovereign Security Services, of course,” Dr. Redds revealed, plainly. He had heard Ægis’s version of the facts several times. He knew the sniper was leaving something out, so he resorted to the most basic interview tactic. He asked for exactly what he wanted to know. “See, here’s what I don’t understand: we had two drivers in our armored car. How did you get them to ram a Parcel Service vehicle?”

  “I don’t know. That wasn’t my part of the gig.” Ægis asked, “Why don’t you ask them why they did it?”

  “I have,” Dr. Redds explained, “but their version doesn’t make any sense.” He stroked his forehead before continuing. “The assistant driver claims Parcel Service attacked him, but our truck was off route by over two miles. The driver, on the other hand… Well, her story is too unbelievable to be fake.”

  “What’s her story?”

  “She claims she was abducted from her home, and she spent the day locked in an apartment,” Dr. Redds relayed Maria’s version of events. “I have a problem with that because she showed up to work, and we know she checked out her own keys.”

  “So Pigeon abducted her?”

  “She says it was a woman,” Dr. Redds offered. “And that same woman showed up after the job and dropped her off near the battle site. That’s a pretty ballsy lie. If it’s true, then you had a three man crew, and the woman has got to have real stones, you know?”

  “Look, I told you, that wasn’t my part.” Ægis knew Canbe could change her face. He did not know that she could actually mimic another person. The interrogator had also just told him that Canbe got away. “I don’t know anything about another woman.”

  “Another woman? So you know about one?” Dr. Redds tried. “Tell me about her.”

  “I don’t know who all Pigeon brought in.” Ægis did know that Canbe was not in Pigeon's phone. Brinkloom would only know what Ægis revealed.

  “Alright, let me lay this out for you, then.” Dr. Redds gestured with his finger. “I don’t have anything on you. Brinkloom has nothing they can charge you with. So as far as we’re concerned, we can let you go.”

  “But?”

  “But whoever drove our truck into Parcel Service’s almost started a war. So I’d really like to talk to her.”

  “What did…”

  The interrogator cut him off. “No, Pigeon’s phone only had you. Which leads me to believe you brought in the woman. Someone who has a way of making people do things and tell crazy stories.” Dr. Redds took a calculated risk. “Tell me about the blonde woman.”

 
“Is your driver blonde?”

  “No,” Dr. Redds revealed. “But the snap shots she took of her kidnapper are.” He tapped the corner of his eye. “That’s the great thing about everyone having a cell phone camera wired to their eyes. If you train officers to collect evidence, they can do it almost without thinking about it.”

  “I can honestly say I never saw a blonde woman on this job.” Technically, Ægis was telling the truth, but both men knew better. “You said you have nothing to charge me with, so…”

  “So, if you tell me who she is, we will let you go. You’ll never work for Brinkloom, but you’ll be free. If you don’t – well, then I hand you and the transcript of our conversation over to the Federal Authority. I know some of their interviewers, and I think you do too. They will find out who she is. Then, we’ll get her. You, on the other hand, will go to rendition camp for commission of terrorist acts.”

  “You know that charge will never pass a Federal Authority court. Parcel Service aimed a tank gun at me, and I have video to prove it.”

  “What makes you think you would ever see a courtroom?”

  “You don’t know the guys I know,” Ægis boasted.

  “Alright.” His subject was becoming emboldened. Dr. Redds was out of ways to reign in Ægis. “You want to make a call?”

  Ægis cocked his head. He had shut his cell phone off as soon as he was captured. He assumed the interrogation room would have a jammer or, worse, a fake cell service antenna, which would intercept all of his signals. Any call he made or received would be recorded by Brinkloom.

  The panel that led out of the room opened. Two technicians walked in, carrying a box between them.

  “Time’s up, Doc,” the taller one declared. The technicians set the box on the table.

  “What’s her name?” Dr. Redds asked for the last time.

  Before Ægis could consider his options, the shorter technician plugged an SBI cable into the port behind Ægis’s ear.

  Tuesday Afternoon