Hammerhead

by Jason Andrew Bond

  “I haven’t heard of a bell for Special Forces,” Leif said.

  “Not Special Forces,” Stacy said, “that’s Army. We’re Navy Special Warfare. They were once called SEALS, but–when the Navy started doing most of its operations in space–the name SEALS was changed to Navy Special Warfare Group, supposedly in respect to an old SEAL team. However, the unique Hell Week the SEALS developed is still the same. The insignia is a holdover from the old days,” Stacy said, pointing to her shoulder patch. On the gray background, a black eagle gripped a rocket with its left talon and held an ancient musket in its right. An anchor sat centered in front of the rocket.

  “As I continued on with training, I became fascinated with explosives and asked to follow that career path. The officers agreed and set me on a blended training path. That was a year ago, and now here I am sitting on an island… where are we again?”

  “Tonga,” Jeffrey said with a slow yawn. He stretched out his arms and folded them across his belly and closed his eyes. Then he asked, his eyes still closed and sleep in his words, “So your training was in explosives?”

  “Yes, but it’s not complete,” Stacy said. “I’ve got a year in and have the general explosives concepts down, but now I have to learn to apply them.”

  “Making it through all that is pretty impressive,” Leif said.

  “Not nearly as impressive as the Hammerheads,” Stacy said. “It’s not every day that you get to meet a mythic figure. What about it Jeffrey? What about your story?”

  Leif, who had been prodding the fire with a stick, dropped his hand to his lap, and his eyes snapped to her. “What the hell do you mean ‘mythic’?”

  Stacy held up her hands. “It’s not like that. Not like those conspiracy nuts who say the war never happened. Let’s say ‘heroic’ then, okay?”

  Silence followed, and Stacy and Leif looked over to Jeffrey leaning back on the survival bag, legs stuck out across the sand, his forearms crossed over his belly, asleep.

  “Oh that is so unfair,” Stacy said. “He owes me. You’re my witness.” She kicked a bit of sand into the fire, and then asked Leif, “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “I don’t really have a story. I grew up in Ramona, California playing video games and floated through school. I could have done better, but I just didn’t care. I give my dad a lot of credit for not tearing my head off. I’m not his ideal son. I tried sports, but I wasn’t any good.”

  “I gravitated toward the Army because I knew he’d like the idea of me signing up. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what to do with my life. They moved me into electronic countermeasures. Pretty boring really, but I like the life and will probably make a career of it. Hopefully I can stay in San Diego the whole time. The beaches are nice. I’d love to go to Hawaii, but only the Marines get stationed out there anymore.”

  “Do you surf or something?”

  “No.”

  “That’s it? Nothing more?”

  “Sorry, I lead a pretty simple life: Work, eat, and sleep.”

  “Well there is definitely something to be said for simplicity.”

  Leif and Stacy sat for a time. When the sun had set and darkness folded around the fire, Stacy stood and walked out toward the breakers. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she found herself under a heavy curtain of stars. In deep space more stars fill the darkness, but they burn as sharp points of light. Here the stars shifted and twinkled, and it felt natural. Out where the breakers rumbled, a wisp of foam curled now and again. Beyond the surf, out across the ocean, a violet line stretched along the horizon.

  As she looked out on the vastness of it, with her bare feet in the cool sand and her face and arms catching the night breeze, she felt the reality of having lived through the day. She knew how close she had come to never seeing the world again, and she believed this moment on the beach and every moment beyond was a gift that Jeffrey had given her. Jeffrey kept saying how she had played an important part in their escape, but she didn’t feel it. It was his actions, plans, and flying that had saved them in the end. She felt as though he had handed her a box of diamonds, and she had no words to thank him. The diamonds were the stars, and this moment looking at them was hers alone.

  CHAPTER 10

  The sun lay behind the volcano preserving the cool morning as Jeffrey showed Leif the tarantula. Leif picked through its abdomen with a pair of tweezers. They had left Stacy asleep by the burned-out firepit. The skin on Jeffrey’s shoulders and neck crawled as he watched Leif hold the spider with his bare hands. Jeffrey heard Stacy’s voice and looked up to see her just entering the palm forest from the beach. She shouted out and then hopped, holding one bare foot. She continued through the bushes with more careful steps. When she reached them, she sat down on the ramp and smiled.

  “I had a dream last night,” she said, “and I remembered something new.”

  “What is it?” Jeffrey asked.

  “In my dream, I was running down a corridor jumping through hatches. People were running behind me. I could hear their footsteps. It was vivid, as if I was really there. I was scared as hell and running for my life. I turned around to look behind me and David and Matt were right on my heels. I saw Matt’s eyes go wide, and I turned around and saw a guy dressed in black BDU’s.”

  Leif and Jeffrey continued to look at her. She just looked back at them, saying nothing.

  “Is that it?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Well, it’s something isn’t it?” Stacy said, “I’m just glad to have remembered something. I hope that means I will get the rest of it back.”

  Leif had gone back to inspecting the spider.

  “I hope you’re right,” Jeffrey said. “I have a feeling whatever is locked up in your head is the only thing that’s going to give us any hope of getting out of this situation.”

  “Oh, man,” Leif said, scraping out some gray material from the spider’s rear abdomen and rolling it into a ball between his fingers, “that was lucky.”

  “What’s that?” Jeffrey asked.

  Leif motioned for Jeffrey to hold out his hand. He pressed a pea sized chunk of a pliable gray material into Jeffrey’s palm.

  “You know what that is?” Leif asked.

  “C4,” Stacy said, looking over Jeffrey’s shoulder.

  “I know what it is,” Jeffrey said. “It was in the spider?”

  “Yeah, it looks to be some kind of self-destruct mechanism. Probably designed to go off when the spider was done with its injection. It looks like when you stepped on it the collapse of the chassis yanked the blasting cap out. Somewhat of a design flaw, don’t you think?” Leif reached over and pointed at the ball, “You see that burn on the side? The cap, not being imbedded, only set it on fire and it must have extinguished under your boot.”

  “Is this enough to kill someone?” Jeffrey asked, as he touched the ball of C4 in his palm.

  Leif looked to Stacy.

  Stacy shook her head. “No, it probably would have knocked you off your feet and might have been able to break one of the bones in your foot, but that would be the worst. It would have completely destroyed that little guy though. With that amount of C4, I’d agree with Leif that it’s probably just a self-destruct mechanism. You could put a lot of different, modern explosives in to make it more lethal. C4 is old. It has a slow rate of burn compared to what we have now. But it’s cheap and destructive enough to obliterate that spider.”

  Jeffrey said, “So it probably finds its target, jabs it, and blows, covering up any specific detail. Or, if it’s caught and tampered with, it blows. When I stomped on it, there was a puff of smoke, but I thought it was electronics shorting out.”

  “Nope, that was the blasting cap going off,” Leif said. He had pulled away the skin of the spider and cut away the broken body panels, exposing the electronics inside. He took up a magnifying glass he had found in the survival gear and looked over the circuit board with it.

  “Stupid,” he said.

&nb
sp; “What?” Jeffrey and Stacy both asked at the same time. Stacy moved to the other side of Leif.

  “They left the manufacturer’s data matrix right there.”

  “Why would they do that?” Stacy asked.

  “Either they were too confident in their self-destruct system, or they were lazy. Judging by the quality of this spider, I’d guess they were overconfident. It would have taken a lot of extra work to go through and scrub all manufacturing data off the boards and chips, so the self-destruct was a faster, cheaper way. The odds of the blasting cap getting pulled out are pretty small. Maybe the wires for the cap were laid in wrong, you know, caught on the chassis somehow.”

  “So what do we have here?” Jeffrey asked.

  Leif took his sat-phone out of his pocket and zoomed in on the data matrix. Then he scanned the matrix and the text. He handed the phone to Jeffrey. Systemic Alliance Development Board number AX1593C93-000017 showed on the screen. Jeffrey handed the phone off to Stacy.

  Stacy said, “Sure, Systemic Alliance does a lot of work for military robotics. That makes perfect sense.”

  “This is an amazing piece,” Leif said, exploring the mechanism with his screwdriver. “The motors that drive the legs are tiny, but really well made. Look at the articulation.” He held up the spider and pulled one of the legs out, released it, and it curled back. Jeffrey shuddered and held up his hand.

  “That’s terrible. Don’t do it again.”

  They all sat looking at the spider, and then Leif said, “So what do we do now?”

  “We need to start formulating a plan,” Jeffrey said. “We should go over what has happened, what we know is fact, what we think we know, and what we don’t know. Then we decide on a way forward. Right now we can’t simply walk up to the military and ask for help. We’ve killed several soldiers and destroyed a lot of equipment. We have to assume those soldiers were innocent, or at least will be perceived as innocent. We need to find out what’s going on, gain proof of it, and then go as high as we can for exposure. We don’t know who or which branches of the military are compromised. We don’t know how far spread it is or how high it goes. So, once we have some more information, we’ll have to choose that exposure point very carefully.”

  “Let’s start with this spider,” Stacy said. “Where can we find out more about it?”

  Leif said, “We can learn more about it from the Systemic Alliance Development’s manufacturing records. We can try and hack into their system, but I wouldn’t know where to begin, and the minute we fire up a link from this ship, it’ll light us up on their boards.”

  “Can they identify our location in that situation?” Jeffrey asked.

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Do you think we dropped our pants when you looked up that data matrix on your phone just now?”

  Leif looked at the phone for a moment and shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope not. If they hack into my phone records and search my data, it will be one tiny piece of data in a long stream of information. Also, I looked it up on a large general table, so knowing the site I went to will not give them specific information. Even if they do figure it out, they only know the one board, which looks like it’s used in a lot of different applications. They might come to the right conclusion, but it’s a long shot.”

  “Is your sat-phone reporting location?”

  Leif shook his head, “That’s old tech, Dad. Sat-phones have better location security by default now.”

  Jeffrey nodded. “Let’s take the risk of making the assumption that whoever has been after us doesn’t know we have the spider. I don’t want to let them know we have it by having your phone or the computers on this ship start pinging away at the company’s servers. If we don’t find what we’re looking for remotely, they’ll know right where we’re headed, and they’ll likely know what we’re looking for. We have to proceed quietly. The less they know about us the better.”

  “So what do you propose?” Stacy asked.

  “We kidnap someone,” Jeffrey said.

  “Oh, God,” Stacy said, dropping her head into her hands.

  “But first,” Jeffrey said in an upbeat tone as he stood, “we have to get fuel and get to wherever this Systemic Alliance Development is.” He looked to Leif for the answer.

  “I don’t know where it’s headquartered,” Leif said.

  Jeffrey began putting items back into the survival bag. “Okay, well, the first order of business is to get fuel, and then find some way to access the data we need without using this ship’s computers or your personal sat-phone.” He pointed to the magnifying glass in Leif’s hand. “You want that in here, or what?”

  “That’s as good a place as any,” Leif said, and then looked at Stacy. “I guess we’re going.” He tossed the magnifying glass into the bag.

  Jeffrey zipped the bag shut and threw it into the gunship. He held out the ammo can, let Leif set the spider back in it, clamped it shut, and set it in the gunship. Then he looked down at Stacy’s bare feet and his own and then out to the half bay where the light-blue water glittered in the morning sun. He breathed in the fresh sea air. “First, I think we should all take one last swim.”

  “Really?” Leif asked.

  “Sure, you don’t know how long it’s going to be until any of us gets a proper shower again. Can’t die smelly.” He stepped into the gunship and found the first aid kit. He dug around, took a sheet of self-adhesive plastic out, trimmed it with scissors and then came back out. He walked over to Stacy and lifted her chin with his hand. He saw that the skin just around the edge of the bandage had bloomed with a black and purple bruise, and a deeper green bruise ran off toward her ear.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  When she did he blew a bit of sand off the bandage. Then he took the sheet of water proofing adhesive and laid it over the bandage. He pushed down the edges, careful to avoid the injured area of the cheekbone. Stacy winced a bit at the pressure.

  “There you go,” he said, “ready for a swim.”

  The three made their way out to the beach. Out on the broad sand, they stripped down to their underwear and waded into the bay. Stacy dunked her head in the warm water and scrubbed the dirt and scraps of blood out of her hair. Jeffrey floated as best he could in the water and then dove down into the deeper center of the bay. He swam along the sandy bottom, feeling his ears pressurize as he went deeper. Then he swam up to the surface, drew a breath, and went down again. When he surfaced, he looked back to where Leif and Stacy lounged in the water. Stacy stood thigh-deep in the water, the sun glowing on her skin, and Jeffrey chuckled to himself when he noticed how often Leif glanced over at her. She was incredibly pretty and a strong woman.

  When the sun burned down from high overhead, they made their way out of the water. Jeffrey noticed red on Leif’s neck. He touched his own neck feeling the light burn. He looked over his forearms and saw that they had turned pink as well. Stacy, with her black hair and perhaps Greek or Italian skin, had only turned a slight shade browner. She pulled the waterproofing sheet from her face. Then she picked up her jumpsuit and looked it over. It was torn and spattered with blood and she folded it up as she walked away. Leif stared at her as she went.

  “You look like a man dying of thirst,” Jeffrey said.

  Leif lowered his eyes as he blushed.

  “I only–” he said, but Jeffrey interrupted him.

  “Don’t justify it, just play your cards right.”

  “Yes sir,” Leif said, “and I suppose the great Hammerhead will give me some advice on how to play those cards?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jeffrey said, as he buttoned up his shirt. “I was a charity case to your mother,” and he laughed. Leif stood on one leg to put on his pants. Jeffrey walked past him and slapped him on the shoulder. Leif hopped several times to regain his balance.

  “Come on,” Jeffrey shouted over his shoulder. “Let’s go hijack some fuel.”

  …

  The gunship fired up with a smooth rumble. L
eif settled into the navigator’s seat behind Jeffrey, and Stacy strapped into the troop area. Jeffrey waited the few moments for the engines to come up to operating temperature. When the gauges flicked to green, he lifted the gunship straight up out of the palm trees, turned, and flew over the shallow bay. He tilted the ship nose-down and flew sideways so he could look into the water. Regret for having to leave rose in him as he spun the ship around and flew out over the ocean, staying 500 feet above the waves. When there was no land in sight, he pulled back on the stick and put the ship into a hover.

  “Is 500 feet enough to get the antenna working?”

  “Yes, that will work, no problem,” Leif said. “Are you ready?”

  “Go for it,” Jeffrey said. He heard Leif clicking on the keys of the navigator’s console.

  “See if you can find what we need in Australia,” Jeffrey said.

  “I’m going to assume,” Leif said, “that everything I search for is going to get logged and targeted, so I’m going to start off searching for trucks transporting aviation fuel all over the Pacific rim, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, even the US Marshal Islands. Then I’ll move over to the Chinese mainland. That will create a big mess that hopefully will give them too many targets to focus on.”

  He clicked on the keyboard for several minutes. In the distance, white clouds were rising up in the heat of the blue sky.

  “Oh, and there you are,” Leif said.

  “Did you find a truck?” Stacy asked from the back.

  “Not yet, but a message just popped up on my screen that says, ‘Out of fuel?’”

  “Really?” Jeffrey asked, looking in his rearview mirror. He saw Leif hunched over the console and could make out Stacy’s knees beyond the bulkhead.