The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  I’d contracted with an ex-Mossad specialist to watch all of them. His firm had taken a ridiculous retainer for constant surveillance and shadowing. They’d let someone cross a highway divider and wipe them out, let them bleed to death. Or been neutralized beforehand. Which got me thinking. It was a clue of sorts, a place to start that would help me find Wickham.

  “Murray, engage Protocol Omega please. Assume that you will undergo massive denial of service and full cyberwarfare within five minutes. In fact, assume it’s already begun.” Protocol Omega was a little bit dramatic but my fellow coders had a penchant for that kind of thing and one doesn’t quibble over a little nerdism. What it did was assume that the system had been discovered and penetrated. It chopped the consciousness of the AI into controllable pieces and encrypted them as if they were several dozen smaller independent programs. They used the supercomputers to muscle through multiple parallel operations to make up for what was a massive amount of encryption and decryption coupled with overwhelming redundancy. It meant that Jeeves would use brute force to achieve the simplest operations. But we had brute force in sufficient size to make that possible.

  If my hacker balked, it would blow her cover. So she had to, at least, initiate it for me and then come back later to realign the programs to her choosing. I was betting she’d be extracted long before that was feasible.

  “Protocol Omega engaged. Did I hear you tell The Concierge you planned to close down the American airspace?” Damn skippy she did. But not how she would have planned it.

  “Yes. Murray, please turn off all navigational computers in the entire North and Central American airspace. The program can be accessed using the code Thunderball.” Again Jeeves programmers had a huge geek streak. I always felt Thunderball really undersold the danger of SPECTRE. As if any self-respecting evil bad guy would let a mistress and a gambling addiction get in the way of world domination. Our version of Thunderball was a soft cyberattack. It disabled the airspace permanently. The airlines would need to rip out the computer interfaces and code new ones to get airborne. No one was flying anywhere in the Western Hemisphere for at least a week. But infrastructure stayed put, as did the airplanes. The air force would still fly—they had hardened systems. They’d still be able to splash smugglers and embargo jumpers using jet fighters. It prevented someone sneaky from taking this as a cue to invade but caused a whole lot of panic and mayhem.

  “Thunderball initiated. There are one hundred seventeen passenger airplanes en route.” That was the hacker, trying to guilt me into saving lives. Air traffic control would guide them in just fine but she clearly didn’t know aviation well enough to realize that. That narrowed the hacker down to two agents. With enough time, I’d have a pretty good guess as to which one it was. The problem being I’d shot them both. Along with dozens of other agents.

  “How many cargo flights? Private and small passenger planes?”

  Murray took a long moment. “Over one thousand.” That was a sloppy reply. A computer system would know exactly. I was pushing the hacker with my requests.

  After that, I spent a quarter of an hour working through some local details. When you need to be untraceable, you use real burner phones and laundered cash. What I needed was something a little more complex. I needed to make life hard for anyone tracking me. Phones, cash, guns, vehicles, these are things operatives need but are inherently trackable. Law enforcement on every level relies on crime reports; the NSA and their goons need numbers from license plates to IP addresses to GPS beacons in phones. If you want to evade the people who read those agencies’ mail, you need to get these items from folks who won’t report the loss and who would never admit they existed in the first place. You need to steal from criminals.

  Murray found me what I was looking for: a small arms shipment leaving Rochester from the corner of Orange and West Broad Streets in a couple of days. I memorized the details I needed and closed up shop with Murray. I had the system burn a bunch of records and erase some data feeds in outside systems. Then I had Murray give me five phone numbers where I could access the distributed systems using my voice print. If the hacker had engaged Omega, then Jeeves, underneath all the hullaballoo, had done as I asked. I was halfway through printing some fake driver’s licenses when the data center went dark. Ten seconds later the system rebooted and Murray was gone. Unresponsive and the system locked. It was time to move.

  I had to get mugged four times to collect the money, IDs, guns and clothing needed to sell myself as a wannabe gangster. Pummeling Rochester’s criminal under-achievers seemed poor sport but I had a lot of aggression pent up and it helped to flex my muscles. I likely crippled one of the thugs who’d made the mistake of trying to pull an ankle piece on my after I’d knocked away his Glock.

  Three hours later, Peter Mooksey rolled up to Lil’ Donnie’s crib and spoke the password. Petey was a big guy, dumb as a stump and obedient if you used small words often enough. He worked for Tony Credenza, real name Antonio Al Cadencia, the largest importer of heroin and hashish in the greater Florida region and a recent supplier of top product for a Donnie’s gang trying to muscle out the Bonannos, who had been trying to retake Rochester since the Feds put the kibosh on the Russottis in the late `80s. In return, Donnie and his crew took Canadian shipments of Russian and Chinese assault rifles, machine pistols and, bless them, explosives, down to Credenza as payment. Tony got a safe and ready supply of valuable arms, which he sold to Cuban nationalists and the Haitian Mafia. Donnie got ace product and major pull in New York State.

  Mooksey drooled a little and tended to ask the same question three times. That got him punched in the gut. The weasel who did wore a lot of rings and if I hadn’t been wearing a proper vest with ceramics, that kidney shot would have hurt like hell. As it was, I played Petey as a bit of a crybaby. He wailed and sucked his thumb when he got hit. Just the big teddy bear who, while cringing, showed he wore two Glocks and carried a machete on his back. The weasel naturally backed off. Mooksey had done time upstate for chopping a man’s stugots off in a drunken domestic.

  Donnie wanted to know why Petey was early and Petey kept repeating the same thing—Tony says to get there right away. I know they have the goods. They were just busting balls because they were professionally paranoid and wanted to make sure Credenza doesn’t have some double cross in mind. But Peter Mooksey knew zip and I played him right. In the end, despite it being against his better judgment and threatening to call Tony twice, Donnie gave me the keys to the `84 Impala station wagon with smugglers panels full of C4, twenty AK-74 with full magazines, and 5000 rounds ammunition, and ten Croatian ERO versions of the Uzi with magazines and 2000 rounds ammunition. To make sure no one searches too hard, Donnie has added dirty diapers by the bagful and painted an “Interstate Diaper Laundry” logo on the sides of the wagon. Papers in the glove compartment link the vehicle to a shell company Credenza’s lawyers created that does indeed own five cars and a few laundries along the New York to Florida route.

  Four hours later I’d arrived in Cleveland, swapped the wagon and four Ak-74s for a rebuilt Porsche Cayenne Turbo at a chop shop run by some friendly Latvians. I gave them all my Canadian cash and spoke with a French accent. They assumed I was part of the smuggling ring that moves guns and cigarettes through the Indian reservations on the border and I did not disabuse them of the notion. It took me another hour to reload the explosives and the guns I needed, along with all the extra mags and much of the ammo. I’d taken four Ak-74s and kept the remaining 12 mags, taped together in sets of two - they look like the letter S and allow me to hot swap mags mid fight in under ¼ a second. I only needed two Uzis, but like the Russian assault rifles, I kept all the magazines and tape them the same. I’d loaded an additional thousand rounds of each and all of the C4 into the tire compartment of the Cayenne.

  The guns were under a blanket in the passenger’s seat. I had two Glocks, a funky ankle holstered Saturday Night Special, a good combat knife, a machete, a nightstick improbably sharpened with a spik
e on one end, and a can of pepper spray. I bargained with the Latvians for some detonators and they wheedled the stash of coke I took off some mule. In all, they handed me six radio detonators and an ancient bomb timer for a quarter kilo of cocaine. As an afterthought, they threw in a rocket propelled grenade launcher and three warheads of unknown manufacture. The serial numbers had been scratched off and the all the gear painted a strange shade of pink. Apparently, it was some Texan’s version of a sweet sixteen gift for his daughter.

  The men who took my contract to guard were headquartered in Las Vegas, mostly because it’s built for a twenty-four hour a day living and sports an international airport. Perfect for the security trade. Google told me it was a thirty hour drive. I looked over the texts on the phone I’d taken, mostly from some woman named Adeline to her Baby Boy involving threats, begging, nudes, and some random gossip about her BFF Rosa. It’s a strange moment, looking into the life of a man whose legs I’d shattered a few hours earlier. Baby Boy had been rude and tried to stick me with that spiked tonfa. He wasn’t coming home any time soon. I erased the texts and programmed the GPS to get me to Vegas.

  It took me closer to forty hours because the Americans had achieved near martial law levels of freak out. Police blockades required some clever scenic drives and the Cayenne got searched twice by very thorough officers who found nothing, except a case of Windex that had broken open during the drive. They confiscated it as evidence. A case of cleaning spray. Apparently anything blue merited suspicion. Ammonia and perfume, the key ingredients in said case of Windex also do a lovely job hiding drug residue and the smell of explosives. If they ran dogs on the vehicle I’d have been caught, but the police hadn’t yet unleashed that level of resources. After what I suspected would be happening in Las Vegas, the next road blocks would require a much higher level of ingenuity.

  In that time, I did not access Jeeves/Murray or in any way activate any of my electronic capabilities. My military laptop sat in the Cayenne, several cards removed and powered off inside a soft cooler bag used to haul cold drinks. It also had some illegal lead lining which helped kill any residual signal from the computer. All my meals were bought with drug dealers’ cash. I used the parking lots of truck stops to sleep and bought a trucker’s shower at the thirty-five hour mark.

  In the shower, I shaved my head and scrubbed down my skin with a surgical scrub brush. That won’t eliminate DNA evidence, but it will slow down a forensics unit. The famed Vegas CSI will need a month to find me. In thirty days I would be dead or beyond their reach. When I hit the road again, I was wearing a blond Thor wig I had purloined from a Halloween display, then braided into a rough ponytail, blue colored contacts under large aviator shades, black commando utilities with full armor, and a long khaki trench coat that hid the assault rifles from common view. I’d acquired a pair of punked out metal coated spiked boots with mirrors on the shins and painted red Anarchy symbols on them. I’d added a baseball hat in bright red with a black Anarchy symbol and red leather gloves with no fingers, studded with those silly chrome spikes rockers adore. Mine had been sharpened to razor tips and coated with cayenne pepper and eggwhites, making the whole glove look like a stage prop of red on red.

  Five blocks from the Consolidated Security Solutions building, I pulled the Cayenne to the curb and started my stakeout. It became apparent that my specialist still worked there when he walked in on the arm of an elegant woman I recognized immediately. Mika French. Sonovabitch. The plot, as they would say, had thickened. I sat there considering any number of careful plans until the rage of what had been done to my family overcame good sense. I got out, opened the trunk, and pulled out the guns I would need. I strapped down everything I could under the trench and added my key prop, a gaudy yellow and black electric guitar with red Anarchy themed strap, which hung over the coat, guitar fret down on my back, as if any moment I’d bust out my Pete Townshend move and start strumming like the rock god I clearly considered myself to be.

  In Las Vegas, in the autumn swelter where it was topping local 100 degrees, I didn’t raise an eyebrow. There were several high end streetwalkers, a magician on his way to work, some kind of huckster juggler, and dozens of lost tourists milling about on the street. It was just after nine at night and the neon glow of the strip a klick away cast eerie shadows on the avenue. I walked by the front door, causally dropping a football sized wad of C4 with the old school timer on the far corner of the doors. It took me another thirty seconds to round the block and take cover behind a convenient dumpster. Perhaps a minute later, the entire front of the building blew out in massive uncontrolled explosion that wasted most of the C4. It made a spectacular racket, deafening anyone nearby. I casually walked towards the rear, dropping the guitar and shucking out of the trench. When the rear doors to the building opened I cut down the men inside with an Uzi, swapped magazines, and walked another sixty-four rounds into the hallway and windows above them. Then I placed a second set of charges along six portions of the wall and retreated to my dumpster. I heard men charge down the stairs, machine guns fired into the empty night, and I blew the back of the building. This time the charges surgically cut into the support frames, sloughing a good portion of the first three floors into the rear parking lot in a miasma of fire, glass, screams, and broken concrete. Sirens blared and I set a timer on my watch. I now had 120 seconds to find Mika.

  I entered the building from the distressed front. I’d dropped the Uzi and had a loaded AK-74 ready as I breached the stairwell. Inside were a tough looking strike team of ex-Mossad. I knocked two of them down with vicious rams to the face with the rifle stock, then executed them all in an automatic burst. Above me, someone fired down the stairwell. I swapped magazines and killed everyone above me by firing through the concrete. The Mossad team had grenades, which I nabbed, using two to booby-trap a body closest to the stairs. Then I walked out, opened fire on the escaping fire team in the lobby and, after putting two mags into their backs, I breached the second stairwell.

  It was empty. I rushed up floor by floor, kicking open the doors as I went. On the fourth floor I surprised a hunkered group of suits. I cut them down until the assault rifle jammed. Without conscious thought, I cut the strap with my knife, lifted the second rifle, and opened fire. One of them was the specialist who’d taken my money. I put another mag into all of them to make sure they were permanently dead (no use repeating the debacle with Zeus) and then moved upwards. Someone tried to fight me from below until I let several grenades roll down behind me as I sprinted up. No one screamed when the popping started, so I assume the operative had the smarts to bug out and cut his losses.

  I found Mika on the roof, waiting for a helicopter. AK-74s aren’t particularly surgical, so I aimed low and only hit her feet. Putting thirty rounds into a tight space causes a lot of ricochets. I mangled her feet and shins pretty effectively, then approached with a Glock in my right hand and the fighting knife in my left. Mika tended to shoot with her left hand, so I wasn’t surprised when she lifted a Luger and started to aim. I blew her hand to pieces. The shock knocked her out. I looked at my timer. I had twelve seconds left.

  From my belt, I grabbed some zip ties and applied tourniquets to both her legs at the knees and her left wrist. Then doubled and tripled them and five and ten centimeters higher. Then I put a gag in her mouth, dumped a sackcloth over her head, and put a belt around her waist and shoulders in case I lost my grip. When the timer beeped, I attached belaying line to roof pipes. I finished, hoisted French on my shoulder, and dropped over the rear edge of the West side of the building. Emergency vehicles, cop cars, and some kind of critical response team swarmed the front. Inside, something exploded, maybe my grenade trap and the police set a perimeter. I had taken us down the wall near the demolished rear. With some quick hops, I moved myself and my passenger over the lightest of rubble and was able to run with Mika parallel to the police line. Ten minutes later, I doubled back to the Cayenne, dumped the guns and hostage into the trunk, and drove away. No one stopped me.


  Once I was clear of the immediate area, I pulled over, hoisted the unconscious French into the passenger seat and strapped her in, then strapped her right hand to her right leg with four more zip ties, dumped the wig and hat, and cleared the city. Mika woke up right before we hit the open desert. I let her moan and struggle. She could barely breath, was in incredible pain, could not see or hear much, and had her only good limb trapped. That didn’t stop her from trying to make an escape and, failing that, use her head to knock me out. I elbowed her hard on her third try and she stopped. Mika French was one of the ten most dangerous people alive by most professionals’ estimation. She’d bite me to death if she could, and her knees, elbows, head, and shoulders were still all viable weapons. She was also famous for putting poisoned needles under her skin encased in wax. She would gladly spend a limb to murder me. Because Mika was also an escape artist. The zip ties and cloth over the head would hold her for a small while but not forever.

  Once we were far from any reasonable chance of discovery, I pulled the Cayenne over and dumped her in the desert. When she tried to resist, I kicked her twice in the stomach and dragged her by her injured arm another ten meters into the gully. Then I left her. The ancients said torture always kills two men and I believed it. I might kill Mika, but I wasn’t sure I had it in me to torture her enough to get what I wanted. So I did the right thing. I stopped, drank some water, washed myself off using a bucket and sponge. When I had a clean shirt on and had re-donned my armor, arranged my weapons, and checked the SUV’s inventory for anything Mika might have pocketed—she had grabbed some loose bullets and piece of sharp wire big enough to pick handcuff locks (precisely why I preferred zip ties). That’s how good she was.