Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

December 28th.

  Mike Ram:

  “This will be your first team simulation,” Henderson is telling us what we already know. “It will also be your first simulation under official scrutiny. We’ll have several VIPs linked live for this one. Make us look good.”

  They picked a worst-case to base this one on: Beslan, 2004.

  “I can’t imagine how your machine thinks it’s going to beat this one,” I hear someone complaining over the link. “Over one-thousand hostages crammed into a school gym that’s wired with explosives. Thirty-nine targets, all heavily armed, also wired with explosives.” You know the voice, you just can’t place it.

  “You know me, Colonel,” Henderson comes back with his trademark smarm. “I don’t do small.”

  “If you think this is somehow amusing, Director…” another voice with a definite Russian accent cuts in.

  “Not at all, General,” Henderson softens up a bit, quickly making peace. “This is a bad one—smart and evil at its worst. Just like Colonel Richards pointed out: it looks like an absolute no-win any way you run at it. The real event took a thirty-five percent hostage casualty count, most of them children. It’s considered unbeatable. I’m just trying to prove we have the tools to do better.”

  “Doc?” Matthew chirps over the closed feed.

  “I’m on.” That would be Scott Becker, the personable but perpetually nervous TG who did most of the design work on Datascan at some DARPA think tank called the McCain Foundation. “Wouldn’t miss it. I’ve got your back. Just like old times…”

  Matthew chuckles like that’s a private joke. “So, how are we gonna pull this off?”

  Datascan answers him. It flashes the 3D of the gymnasium with blips of the hostages, the terrorists, even the explosives. Then it shows us what it expects to happen: Our aircraft come in fast and drop us strategically, Datascan feeds us firing solutions, and we gum up all the bombs and kill all the bad guys. But even Datascan projects a seventy-eight percent probability we’ll be too slow, and at least one chain of bombs will shred children.

  “I heard the initial blasts may have been accidental,” you hear Captain Manning come in, already strapped into his web. “At the real Beslan: The ceiling charges just slipped loose.”

  “Or some of the kids tried running for it,” Lieutenant Abbas—the one we got from the Iraqis—steps right in it. Ivan impressively manages to keep silent.

  “The first objective is the grid of roof explosives,” Becker tries to keep us on track—not that Datascan hasn’t rattled all of this into our heads for days, but perhaps he thinks it sounds better coming from a human being. “Then what they’ve got strung on the floor. But the elevated devices did the most damage in the real deal, blowing shrapnel into the largest number. Real meat-grinder—yes, gentlemen, I’ve run the sim myself. The Chechen gunfire took a few, but nothing compared to the initial blasts.”

  “And you think we can beat their reflexes?” Lieutenant Ibrahim sneers. “All their trigger-man has to do is step off a foot pedal. Or fall off.” You saw his IDF record: he’s dealt with marts up close more than anyone else on the team (“team” being a very technical application of the word—we’ve barely met, much less seriously trained together). Except maybe for Ivan. “How many bombs are we talking about?” Datascan shows him. He just shakes his head.

  “What about the roof?” you cut in.

  “What?”

  “The roof. It fell in when it blew. Can we use our aircraft to take it off? It’d give us a cleaner way in, too.”

  “What?” Becker chokes on it. But Datascan bites, flashing structural specs.

  “What is it doing?” Abbas wants to know.

  “Looking for leverage points. For grapplers…” Becker muses, pleasantly stunned. Graphics flash and update our simulated support aircraft. The roof is steel, with steel arch supports. Datascan calculates a 57% chance that two VTOLs could catch right and rip the structure clear before the bombs wired to it go off; 84% if they’re willing to crash in the process.

  “Nice work, porn star,” Matthew mutters at you.

  “And the other charges?” Ivan—Major Ivan Tetova—suddenly comes to life. “The mines in the crowd and hanging from the basketball hoops, even strung across on wires…” His voice starts to crack, old pain coming back fresh.

  Datascan revises its mission parameters and coughs up a new solution in less than ten seconds. Tearing away the roof will actually make everything easier.

  “Son of a…” Manning is saying.

  “You gonna tell Larry, Doc?” Matthew asks. Becker digests that for a few and comes back:

  “Naw. Let it be a surprise.”

  The techs finish sealing you in your armor, strap you in your web, start the chemical drip, and Datascan takes over reality from there.

  The Beslan Number One School is surrounded: the army, the locals (some with their own guns), the Press. Emergency services are trying to get in to remove those killed in the initial assault that took the school—the bodies have been left unmoved for more than a day. This is the same amount of time since anyone inside has had any food or water.

  “MISSION CLOCK 00:00:19:59.”

  “Twenty seconds?” Manning complains.

  “We need to neutralize all of the explosives in less than two, Captain,” Matthew scolds him. “Don’t miss.”

  “I’m not doing the shooting,” Manning throws back. “Dee is. I just point the thing.”

  Four VTOL aircraft—two dropships and two support fighters—come in low and fast to get the best surprise possible. It’s almost too fast for us to adjust to as the school rushes up below us. On cue, the stress drugs start pounding your heart, trying to make you shake. And then we’re thrown out into virtual free-fall.

  “INSERTION. ACQUIRING TARGETS. GRAPPLERS AWAY.”

  We drop as fast as our rappellers can manage without breaking our legs. Simultaneously, the two fighters blow their own hooks and sink them into what should be the strongest structural joists of the gym roof. Our dropships’ guns are helping the process by cutting surgically into the structure to free it. The momentum of the jets jerk the roof and peel it back like a hurricane is tearing it off, their nozzles turning to compensate and keep them from simply slamming into the ground. But they will anyway—they have to, because they have to pull hard enough that the counter-force will sling them hard earthward, just hopefully not before they do their job. The aircraft were a planned sacrifice, but Datascan at least auto-ejects the pilots just before the jets burst in the surrounding woods.

  And at least in the sim, it all works just in time to make a serious hole for you and Matthew to drop through and down into the mass of terrified hostages. Above you, the shaped charges taped to the ceiling go off, but the peeled-back roof aims most of it overhead. You would take the time to marvel at this, but you have more pressing business.

  Datascan locks the remaining charges in the gym and you follow the prescribed firing solution and your ICW kicks out its 25mm bomb-gel projectiles. From above you, automated projectors in each of the dropships pound down in kind, accurately raining dozens of anti-personnel IED countermeasures. You watch the globular gels hit, stick and swell, smothering every charge in a beach-ball-sized sphere of tough polymer goo in less than a second.

  Matthew is right on cue with his own load of gels, as is Manning, despite being sent flying through a window on his rappeller (for the added distraction value). And Manning’s howling like he’s enjoying himself as all the sticky spheres slap and swallow the targeted bombs—one cluster on each basketball hoop, one for each wire-suspended bomb, two-dozen along the walls and another dozen planted in buckets between huddled groups of victims—encasing each in just enough resistant material to contain the worst of the shock and shrapnel. They all blow about the same instant we hit the gym floor. And, at least in the sim, all we get is enough residual shockwave and noise to send the place reeling, like a dozen flash-bangs.

  “MISSION CLOCK: 00:00:17:25. LIVEFIRE TARGETS.
TRACK AND LOCK.”

  “Down! Down!! Everybody Down!!!” Matthew screams and it gets translated for him into Russian before it leaves his helmet, amplified to fill the gym over the sound of the barely-muffled blasts. You can already hear Ibrahim and Abbas spraying from where they got dropped with Ivan just outside, set to catch the thirty-odd terrorists spaced throughout the school, and then to take down any that try to flee in the chaos (or try to fire upon fleeing hostages).

  You squeeze down on your ICW trigger and sweep the gym. The caseless rounds rattle out of the upper barrel in an uneven tattoo as Datascan holds fire to avoid any hostages in the firing line, then cleanly pops the “livefire targets” with almost undetectable hesitation.

  The masked terrorists drop like magic in the crowd, and you can see their blips on the tactical grid go cold in your heads-up. Datascan even detects any who are wired with mart-belts and launches a bomb-net—an expanding nano-polymer web that wraps the bomber whole and forces his blast back in on himself.

  As soon as you kill one, arrows flash and point you at your next most pressing target, and you follow like reflex. There are only eight of the thirty-nine terrorists actually inside the gym, but it only takes one to kill a hundred kids. Thankfully, you don’t even have to aim, just spray.

  You can feel the shock of simulated bullet impacts on your armor. You try and make yourself a bigger target to discourage them firing at hostages, but the simulated terrorists learn fast.

  One of the targets tosses his AK and reaches to blow his suicide belt, screaming something about his twisted faith, and Ibrahim beats you to it and nails him with a bomb-net that turns his blast satisfyingly inwards. Within the fabric of the web, you see the body fold like he’s been snapped in half.

  Children are running and screaming, trying to get out, and the remaining terrorists have come running, turning their weapons on them as they flee. Matthew and Manning spray at them with their ICWs, and Datascan scores hits, but for some reason it’s not assuring takedown: some of the enemies manage to keep shooting before they die. Reflexively, you rack your ICW and jerk the automag out of your thigh rig, and start knocking the remaining targets flat, your two-ten-grain full-profile-jacket rounds hitting them like a battering ram as the hunting pistol’s flash and boom shames even the enemy’s AKs.

  “Shee-it!!” Manning howls.

  And then it devolves into a free-for-all.

  Abbas is getting similarly frustrated that his ICW is refusing to fire once Datascan declares his targets sufficiently dead, and is cursing it in his native language. Ibrahim is working through some personal issues using his own sidearm to ensure that none of the fallen terrorists has a nervous system left to trigger anything, working his way back through the school, body by body, pumping rounds into hooded skulls. And Manning is climbing out of the remains of the gym, behind the half-naked blood-spattered mass of children and teens and adults, waving his weapon in the air like he’s just won something.

  “Ivan!” Matthew is yelling, running for one of the exits. Ivan had been dropped between the projected path of a group of fleeing teenagers and two terrorists that tried to open fire on them. He played human shield to protect the running teens, and took their attackers out quick and efficient with his ICW before they could detonate themselves. But then he charged into two more without bothering to shoot, popping the interdiction-blades out of his wrists, hacking and stabbing them to digitally-well-rendered bloody meat. Then he moves on to one who’s been shot but isn’t “dead” and repeats.

  Matthew runs to stop him, but you get yourself in between and put up a hand to hold him up, and then you both stand there and let Ivan exhaust himself.

  “Major Tetova!” someone—the Russian General—is yelling at him. But he doesn’t stop, not until he gets done what he needs to.

  Ivan Tetova lost two sisters in Beslan—the real Beslan. You saw this in realistic detail when they made you endure a sim of the massacre, saw Ivan: fifteen years old, pale and thin, running away in his underwear, bloody from an earlier beating he’d taken from his captors and having to sit for hours in someone else’s gore. He had tried to sneak away with another boy, a friend. The terrorists saw and started shooting, and then the whole place blew up.

  Datascan, to its credit, lets the sim run until he’s finished.