The walkway trembled under Eissen, blown out at the opposite end by a missile, the rubble falling across the roadway, crushing the front of a limousine trying to escape. The second, third, and fourth missiles all hit the armored vehicle in its side-door, one after the other until the black wound torn into the car exploded outward in a pressurized blast, the AFV’s hydrogen cells pierced through the internal cabin and boiling out of the vehicle in a screaming tongue of fire.
The second delta-wing UAV, Stud-seven, scythed through at thirty feet over street level, direct-fire cannon under its belly swiveling in quick jerks, like a chameleon’s eye, blasting out the limousine’s wheels one after the other with stuttered bursts. Anti-aircraft missiles buzzed after it, bobbing and twisting above the lip of the street’s canyon, searching for an opportunity to safely dive beneath the skyscraper tops without damaging the buildings. Stud-seven had no such concerns, blowing out an office’s windows and diving through, sending glass crashing down precisely where Eissen had been waiting.
He wasn’t there anymore.
He was running down the rubbled remnants of the walkway, pointing his rifle at the gap in the armored vehicle despite all occupants blatantly having been neutralized within the hydrogen-fueled kiln of its interior, because that was his job. “Armor clear,” he yelled.
Erkner shot one of the bodyguards getting out of the lead vehicle, side-stepping in a wide rolling circle, his camouflage struggling to keep up.
Eissen took another bodyguard in the back of the head as the man straightened up above the height of his limousine’s roof, throwing him forward onto the mulched remnants of his face with a tap of two rounds.
As Eissen got closer to the car he dropped his rifle, the angle of his body-strapping carrying it under his arm and out of the way, and drew his pistol. Held it low against the limousine’s side window, angled forward towards the windshield, and held down the trigger for the quarter-second it took the gun to blow through all fourteen rounds. He ducked aside as the broken glass sagged, reloading — Scharschow stepped in, ramming his rifle stock through the armored glass, gouging a hole in the splintered mass big enough to get a fist through, and Eissen aimed the pistol through instead.
“Open the door!” he screamed, bobbing side to side to keep on target through the miserably small gap.
He screamed it again when the limousine started moving, helplessly scraping across the asphalt on its two left wheels, wobbling in the wheel wells. The limo’s AI had no idea how to protect its cargo now.
Gunfire further up the line as brothers got into one of the limousines — throwing dead and wounded suited guards aside…
The door creaked open an inch — Eissen grabbed it, tore it open, and levelled his pistol at the interior.
One bodyguard in front with a cut-down shotgun — dead, no matter that he was holding it over his head. Second guard in the back — dead with a rapid jerk of Eissen’s trigger-finger. Target in the middle seat…
“Got the target!” Eissen grabbed Ismayil Nesimi, a short (six-two — almost all humans were short to Eissen) pale-skinned man with distinctive dark eyebrows, fingers digging into the man’s shirt-collar, and pulled him out of the vehicle one handed, throwing him to the asphalt.
Ismayil cowered, hands lifted. “You can’t do this!” he screeched, in English. “This is an illegal kidnapping! You can’t do this, I demand a lawyer!”
“A lawyer?” Eissen dropped onto the man, knee over his midsection, pinning him down, arm crooked to hold the pistol high, beside Eissen’s face and out of Ismayil’s reach, angled down towards the man’s throat. “You want a lawyer? You’re the head of the fucking secret police!”
An echo of engines thundered through the streets. The distinctive thudding of a helicopter’s blades — the invading force had no helicopters, piloted or UAV. Azeris. Incoming, and fast.
Behind him his brothers and Malinka swarmed the limousine, plugging EMWAR gear into it — Scharschow dropped down and tore through Ismayil’s pockets, stole his phone and watch, throwing them over.
Ismayil dropped his hands long enough to screech, “All you have is accusations! You can prove nothing!”
“You think we have to prove something? You think this is going to trial?” Eissen laughed. “Shit, buddy. We’re going to kill you.”
“What? What about my rights? A right to a trial, western democracy — that is what you claim to be bringing!” His eyes boggled out in fear.
“But we’re not in charge yet,” Eissen hissed. “You are. This country’s operating under your law.”
He scrabbled at Eissen’s chest, yanking at his uniform, squirming as if he could get out from under him. “No, no, please no, I’ll pay, my father—”
“We have his network access. We don’t need him anymore,” Malinka purred over the comms.
Eissen shot him in the face. Once, twice, a third time — a fourth through his scrabbling hands as Ismayil clutched at the bloody mess he was screaming through, a fifth, a sixth — Eissen aimed higher, for the brain instead of just maiming the man’s jaw, and emptied out the rest of the weapon.
Thirty seconds later they’d stripped every byte of data out of the man’s electronics, and had passed every high level access account within them over to their off-site hackers. By the time the Azeri rapid assault team found somewhere to land, Eissen and the others were gone.
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Ereli Estian.
“Where’s the president?” Eversen yelled.
Ereli pointed over the front of the boat. Ahead of the captured pleasure-craft’s nose rusting oil derricks were still thumping at the bed of the Caspian sea, hunting drops of oil. Beyond the metallic forest of derricks sprouting from the waves, artificial islands jutted from the coast. A glistening network of glass and green fronds, interlocking walkways, beautiful under the blue sky.
The Khazar islands. Someone’s attempt to put heaven on Earth just a short drive down the coast from downtown Baku. “Army’s blocking the roads, checkpoints fucking everywhere,” he explained. “But they ain’t gonna last long!”
“Why?”
“Check the mission map!”
Eversen ducked his head, gaze-flicking through his goggles’ menus…
He froze solid when he saw it.
Ereli had signed off with the rest of the signatories. All other objectives, except for suppressing Azeri air defense, had been put on hold. For every dog in the city, every friendly UAV and allied contractor, there was only one target.
Ilhaim Nesimi, president of Azerbaijan.
Or, at least, his personal phone.
The Azeri military information technology wing had been all but severed over the past few days of fighting — embedded EMWAR specialists killed, forcing them to overstretch themselves to support their men in the field. Most of their gear and software was off the shelf, developed overseas. There hadn’t been any challenge in cutting into their network and isolating the commercial electronics linked to it, once Ereli’s brothers had captured administration level access from the Ministry of State Security and handed it over to Andercom West’s contracted hackers.
The president, or his phone, was pacing in a room on the seventy-fifth floor of the Aliyev hotel. Going round and round and round.
The boat angled itself in towards the islands, the shimmering water between them locked in a crisscrossing pattern of canals. The luxurious Khazar islands weren’t all they were cracked up to be — the receding Caspian Sea had left some of the smaller sky-scraper topped islands on dry land, the main canals and pools and locks had all been deepened and dredged out to keep the water in place.
Ereli sat back and grabbed the railing as the brother at the boat’s console put it on manual control and called out, “Brace for beaching!”
The brother swung his finger over the control pad, and the boat banked. Spiraling in towards the shallowly angled coast beside the main canal, at the edge of the Khazar islands. On one of the footbridges
linking the islands, crossing over the canal, two soldiers stared and pointed — Ereli flattened his ears against the bassy double-boom of Eversen shooting at them. The target slumped against the tailing — the other man, running, was picked off by a brother closer to the front of the boat, and abruptly the keel hit the coastline. The pleasure-craft skidded out over exposed seabed and towards the old marina, now six feet above sea level.
Ereli and Eversen bailed out — seconds later the boat was clear, and brothers were running for the marina. Something popped overhead — Ereli’s helmet cameras caught it, pinged him to look up. He did — madly spinning parachutes, bright in the sky.
“Apeysgems!” A brother screamed an instant later, the acronym spilling out of him in a rush.
APGSMs. Anti-personnel self guided missiles hanging in the air on their parachutes. Scanning for targets, pinging IFF and waiting for responses. And when they didn’t get an IFF response…
A parachute fluttered loose, tumbling end over end as the missile it held dropped. An instant later the rocket motor streaked toward the ground, painting a thick black line of smoke — one of Ereli’s brothers vanished in a black-grey cloud tinged with scarlet mist. The name in the goggles was Enzow.
An instant later something small and hot and astonishingly hard hit Ereli in the muzzle — an explosive fragment. Hard enough to rip through his ballistic cloth mask, hard enough to tear through his cheek, hard enough to lodge between his gum and lip and pour blood into his mouth.
Ereli stumbled, spat, and pulled himself in behind the concrete pillars holding up the marina, making it there three steps behind Eversen, an instant after a second line stabbed down from the heavens and dug a chunk out of the marina sidewall one of his brothers had been scrambling up over.
Heartbeats later there was a black flash — a second flash, smoke blossoming over them. A drone buzzed by, low altitude, popping glowing flares into the sudden smokescreen over their heads, thick wads of silvery ribbon churning and twisting down before the UAV detonated another smoke pod, screening out the sky in a churning black layer.
Cover.
Ereli pulled his mask down, grit his teeth, and yanked the metal shard from his mouth. Stood for an instant, spitting blood in front of Eversen, and stared at the wicked, curved little bit of metal, crosshatched in a diamond pattern — the missile’s metal casing, engraved to break into tiny parts. It was bloody in his hand, small and lethal and twisted.
Ereli stuffed the thing into his dump pouch, and before he’d even finished, Eversen was squirting coagulant foam over his face. A hard slap. “You set?”
Ereli nodded, pulling his mask back up. A wary glance overhead — a missile slammed down through the black layer coating the heavens, hit the exposed seabed fifty meters from any of them. “Cover!” He yelled, and crouched down next to the concrete pilings.
The rest of the missiles rained down, striking blindly but in an orderly pattern, explosions rocking from one end of the marina and over the seabed until finally blowing up the boat — trying to kill the rest of them through the smoke.
No luck for the missiles — when Ereli and Eversen got up onto the marina and into the artificial island’s streets, the worst hit of their brothers who hadn’t been killed in the first attack was pulling himself up and over the marina’s edge, beach-sand and coagulant spray gritting his belly.
Nesimi would need more than fancy hardware to kill Ereli.
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Edane Estian.
Edane limbered the LAMW at waist-level, replaced the magazine, and nodded to Sokolai. Ready, he signaled.
Sokolai nodded once — rifle held up with his right hand alone, armed hand grenade in his left. He released the grenade’s cocking lever, starting the fuse, and counted off with bobs of his left hand, the both of them nodding in time.
Three. Two. One —
Edane blasted out the doorway’s top hinge with the LAMW, aiming with the barrel-camera’s picture in his goggles. The round punctured the armored doorframe, tearing it, and the upper hinge, out of the wall with a colossal scream of steel, peeling the hardened security door apart like an orange. Edane was already ducking in at the wall beside it by the time Sokolai had flung the grenade in through the ripped-open corner, ducking down to the doorframe’s opposite side the moment the grenade blew with a single cut-off roar.
Sokolai shouldered down the rest of the door and stepped into the smoking security room, rifle pointed left, right, up, down — no combatants were still standing. The walls smoked. Clear, Sokolai signed, and began to stalk on through.
Edane followed, keeping the LAMW low to his body, clutched tight against his hip, half the view in his goggles interlaced with the gun’s point of aim.
They were in the Khazar Islands — getting in had been a pain. Everyone was dodging around the Azeri army, avoiding contact instead of engaging, except for the UAV operators laying down cover fire. A little more coordination would have been nice — a blocking force to hold attention, while the rest of them moved around — but it was all good. The Azeri army were spreading themselves paper thin, and once they were inside the protected zone of the Khazar Islands, that made things beautifully easy.
The security room they’d just hit was on the bottom floor of the Heydar Aliyev Memorial something or other, a fancy office named for the cult of personality around one of the nation’s former dictators, and was where the building’s systems were controlled by the guards. As it was, the guards — probably army, except for one corpse in the corner — were dead now, instead of monitoring the building’s systems.
Sokolai checked the corners, kicked the corpses — one was alive enough Sokolai lifted his rifle, as if about to shoot it through the head. He hesitated.
Edane said, helpfully, “Coup de grace is technically illegal, if he doesn’t go for a sidearm.”
“True.” Sokolai lowered the rifle, and used his foot to pin the man to the floor by his helmet. “You surrender?” Sokolai asked, chinning at his translator to say it over in Azeri.
The man just groaned, so Sokolai waggled the guy’s head for him with a shift of the toe — making him nod — then kicked his sidearm out of its holster, and started pawing over the man to see if there was a first aid kit on his uniform.
Meanwhile, Edane got the elevators running and the emergency stairwells unlocked. For good measure, before unplugging his pad and its EMWAR software suite, he uploaded a rootkit for the off-site hackers, and helped Sokolai provide the legally mandated minimal first aid they were supposed to give prisoners and wounded combatants, then flagged him on the mission map for emergency services or someone who wasn’t busy fighting a civil war to come and deal with.
“Upstairs?”
“Upstairs,” Edane replied. Upstairs would give them perfect sight-lines.
But before they got through the lobby, something bad happened.
It started with the lights flickering out. The elevator door jammed, just as it was opening in front of Sokolai.
Then Edane’s ear clicked. Once. Like there was a grasshopper inside it. His goggles blanked — all his feeds going dead at once. The click happened again, stronger — even worse. A hard rattling inside his head from nowhere, his tongue felt like it was being doused in vinegar and metal foil, then his vision pulsed white-blue twice, just as the clicking was joined by pain that got worse and worse and—
“The fuck was that?” Sokolai moaned, pulling off his goggles. His camouflage was frozen, the dynamic countershading gone. He rubbed furiously at his ear.
Edane checked his electronics. They were dead. Everything was dead — the building silent around them, even the air conditioning off.
“We just got HERFed,” Edane breathed.
“What?”
“They just burned out all our electronics with a fucking microwave beam — they know we’re in here!” He yanked at Sokolai’s shoulder and started running. The lobby’s constantly revolving door had jammed shut, none of the
side doors opened — Sokolai blasted out one of the full length windows with a blaze of gunfire, and the pair of them crunched out across the broken glass and into the sunlight outside.
An enemy UAV bounced off the paving in front of them, stone dead. A second followed it — one of the cruciform camera drones. In the distance, a pair of brothers were looking around, bewildered — and past them, Azeri soldiers were standing up, waving back at a group of them around a stalled out armored vehicle…
It wasn’t just Edane and Sokolai that’d been hit by the HERF. The whole fucking Khazar Islands had been burned clean.
Sokolai pulled the dead electronic scope off his rifle, and flung the scrapped thing aside. Then he lifted his rifle to his shoulder, sighted down the iron sights, and shot twice.
One of the bewildered Azeri soldiers fell.
Behind the soldier, behind the stalled armored vehicle, a pair of tanks rolled from the mainland highway and onto the bridgeway into the islands. They shouldered the stalled out armored vehicle off the road, making way for the perfectly functional ones behind them.
“Shit,” Edane murmured, stunned.
Sokolai grabbed him on the run — half dragged, half led him off the street and towards cover.
The grinding sound of the approaching tanks grew louder. Behind an ornamental fountain, Sokolai and Edane ducked down, met the other two brothers they’d seen. One had a pink splotch of dye covering the exposed part of his face, the other a yellow-amber.
“Hi!” Amber introduced himself. “I’m Elwood and this is Eschowitz.”
“From Mark Antony?” Edane gaped.
“Yeah?”
“I’m Edane, from—”
“Triple-H! On the MilSim fields? And you?” Elwood looked to Sokolai.
He shook his head. “Sokolai. I’m not a MilSim player.”
“Huh. Well, good to meet you. Either of you got anything to hit those tanks with? All we have is eight pounds of AGX.”
“Seven,” Pink — Eschowitz — corrected. “We used one of the charges already to get through that wall.”
Dog Country Page 20
