Chasing the White Lion

by James R. Hannibal

  “And if they do not?”

  “Kill them. Send one of the cobras. We don’t have time.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  AERION AS2

  ADRIATIC SEA

  FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND FEET

  EN ROUTE TO MILOS, GREEK ISLES

  TYLER COULD PLAY SEMANTICS ALL HE WANTED, but forty-five million in blood money paid for guns heading off to who-knows-where raised all kinds of red flags for Talia. “What are we compromising here?”

  Her question brought more ire from Val than Tyler. The grifter set her coffee down for the first time since takeoff. “You’re the one who demanded to be part of this job. You’re the one on a crusade. Why should you care where the money comes from?”

  “I care because I am on a crusade. I won’t trade lives on one continent for lives on another. That’s not how this works.”

  “Talia.” Tyler put enough sharpness in the interruption to command her attention. “Remember what I told you at The Mission.”

  The conversation near the windows of the church, watching Mac outside, came to her mind unbidden. “Faith. You told me to have faith.”

  “And now I’m asking you to place some in me.” He rolled another finger at Eddie. “Nano-quantum Supercomputer Guy, you’re up. Keep it moving.”

  “Neuromorphic.”

  “Whatever.”

  Eddie wiped his nose, giving the hanky an annoyed flick, and tapped his tablet. A video ad for a defense tech company called TACRON Systems played. The logo faded to black, replaced by a micro-drone in flight over a desert road. Eight fans on struts supported a bulbous glass payload, like the abdomen of a flying tarantula. Talia mentally dubbed it a spider drone. The creature drifted left and right, then zeroed in on an approaching SUV and tilted forward.

  “That’s not disturbing at all,” Finn said.

  “Shhh.” Darcy hushed him as if they were watching a blockbuster movie. “Quiet. I want to hear, no?”

  The camera view switched to the spider drone’s sensor package, a three-hundred-sixty-degree camera blending optical and infrared. The perspective narrowed and penetrated the front windscreen. Green boxes appeared all over the driver’s face. Text faded in and out.

  FLAWLESS FACIAL RECOGNITION

  Again, the camera switched to a follow view on the spider, but not for long. A midsize quadcopter drone with a brawny fuselage blew past. The camera gave chase. Fire spat from the front of the quad. Bullets sparked off the SUV, unable to penetrate the hood or the windshield. The driver swerved into the desert. The drone peeled off. More text faded in and out.

  GRADUATED RESPONSE OPTIONS

  The camera ditched the gun drone and rose higher until it passed a spherical drone with a large central fan. Rockets hung vertically from the outer shell. Three of them launched, trailing smoke, and nailed the armored vehicle. Every window blew out in bursts of flame. The camera returned to the spider drone as it flew past, recording the burning bodies inside.

  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

  The screen went black, and the TACRON logo faded into view. A deep voice read the tagline. “Networked. Autonomous. Lethal. TACRON Swarm. Tomorrow’s battlefield solution, today.”

  Darcy applauded.

  Talia rotated her chair to face Tyler. “Tell me that wasn’t a DoD pitch reel.”

  “It was. TACRON made their bid last spring. Each squadron comes with thirty-two drones. TACRON asked the US government to buy a minimum of two squadrons at two hundred million a pop.”

  “And?”

  “And they were laughed out of the Pentagon.”

  “Why?” Finn asked. “Doesn’t the US already use Predators and Reapers to kill people?”

  Eddie fielded the question, putting on his geek-splaining face. “Actually, Predators and Reapers aren’t drones at all. They’re Remotely Piloted Aircraft with whole crews of professionals at the wheel. True drones are autonomous, part of a collective.” He tilted his head toward the screen. “Like those. They take humans and common sense out of the kill chain. The public relations optics are untenable for any democratic . . .”

  Something on Eddie’s tablet drew his attention, and Tyler took over. “The point is, TACRON built three complete squadrons, each designed to fit into a standard shipping container, and nobody bought them. Last month, all three containers turned up on the black market with a 90 percent markdown. TACRON is trying to cut their losses.”

  “And that’s where we come in,” Talia said.

  He nodded. “TACRON’s top negotiator, Emma Knight, has been courting the latest and nastiest warlord to come out of the Kongara Republic of Central Africa—a real piece of work named Martin Iwela. Knight and Iwela’s lieutenant, Mr. Aku, will meet for the final deal in an underworld sanctuary on the Greek Isle of Milos.” He paused, clearly waiting for Eddie to continue, then cleared his throat and slapped his armrest. “Eddie.”

  “Hmm? Oh, right. The briefing.” A satellite graphic of the Isle of Milos appeared on the cabin wall, zooming in on a dormant volcano on its western point. “The locals call this Profitis Ilias, or the mountain of the Prophet Elijah. But don’t be fooled. This mountain is sacred only to criminals.”

  A graphic overlay showed natural formations inside, like an ant hill. “Many moons ago, a silver miner bought the land, only to discover the mountain was hollow—full of defunct magma tubes and chambers, coated with obsidian and flooded with seawater. Fortunately for his struggling bank account, our intrepid miner was born without a conscience. He made seriously evil lemonade out of his lemons.”

  Eddie replaced the volcano with a glamor shot of an older Greek gentleman, holding a pose Talia might expect to see in a painting above a rich man’s mantel. “Meet Orien Jafet, the owner of Club Styx, serving all your underworld needs since 1975. Club Styx is the criminal Switzerland of the Mediterranean. Neutral ground. A criminal sanctuary. Deals go down in the club without the worry of murder or cops, and Jafet takes a cut of every one.”

  “As I’m sure you’ve guessed,” Tyler added, “Jafet is also part of the Jungle syndicate. He is Boyd’s top player, the Maltese Tiger—one step away from the White Lion title.”

  The moment Tyler spoke, Eddie’s attention returned to his tablet. He scrunched his nose. “Guys, I have a message here. It’s—”

  Talia held up a hand to quiet him. She had heard everything she needed to hear, with one glaring question. “So, we waylay TACRON’s negotiator, Emma Knight. Val and I replace her at the meeting with Mr. Aku in Club Styx. And then Aku wires the money to our accounts instead of TACRON’s.”

  Tyler touched his nose, then waggled the finger. “Close enough. We get our forty-five million from the drone sale and send a big chunk of it to the Jungle. With Atan and Jafet—the Jungle’s Hyena and Maltese Tiger—both watching, we should earn our seat at the Frenzy table.”

  “But how will we ensure the weapons don’t fall into the wrong hands?”

  “You’re going to love this.” Holding her gaze, Tyler made a beckoning motion to Eddie. “Show them my favorite part.”

  But they had completely lost the geek, still absorbed in whatever he’d found on his tablet. He scratched his chin. “Seriously, guys, this is weird. I’m putting it on the big screen.”

  The picture of Jafet on the cabin wall vanished, replaced with a gray message box labeled A MESSAGE FROM THE JUNGLE. A little white hand icon hovered over the OPEN button. Eddie shook his head, perplexed. “This shouldn’t be possible. When I hook up the tablet to the aircraft display system, it becomes isolated from all networks—behind a curtain of my custom firewalls. This message shouldn’t have come through until we landed and the tablet left the plane.”

  “Yet there it is.” Tyler narrowed his eyes. “Is it safe?”

  Eddie shot a glance at toward the flight deck. “Probably snuck in through the aircraft SATCOM—text and voice only. That data stream doesn’t have the bandwidth to carry files, viruses or otherwise.”

  They all blinked at him.
/>
  “Meaning yes, the message is safe. Has to be. I’m opening it.”

  The click resonated through the cabin. For a split second, Talia thought she saw the big blue eyes of a white lion on the walls, ceiling, and bulkhead, until a flash of sparks from air vents blinded her. The cabin went dark. The AS2’s three supersonic engines spooled down to silence.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-

  ONE

  ADRIATIC SEA

  FORTY-SEVEN THOUSAND FEET AND FALLING

  EN ROUTE TO MILOS, GREEK ISLES

  “MASKS!” TYLER BOLTED FROM HIS SEAT, heading for the flight deck. “Mac, we’re losing pressure. Drop the masks. Get us down!”

  “Copy!”

  In the red flash of the flight deck warning lights—the only lights in the aircraft still operating—Talia saw Mac flip a toggle on the overhead control panel. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling above every seat.

  Tubes with yellow cups hung like flowered vines from the ceiling. Eddie had pulled his mask on but seemed to be hyperventilating. Finn unbuckled and yanked on the geek’s tube to get the oxygen flowing. Eddie took a deep breath and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Like Finn, Talia did not immediately put on her mask. Her delay was not born of calm, but of the one fear she’d never been able to master. Heights. And by extension—flying.

  Hidden behind the fear, she found intellect, and clung to it. She didn’t see any holes blown in the fuselage. Farm training and life experience had taught her the aircraft would take a while to lose residual cabin pressure. The masks were a precaution. Mac should get them down to breathable air before they became necessary.

  He was sure taking his time, though.

  She released her death grip on the armrest long enough to signal Finn. “Why isn’t Mac diving for better air?”

  “The engines. They won’t start at high altitude, but they won’t start at supersonic speed either. We’re in a catch-22. Mac’s gotta slow below Mach 1 while tobogganing downhill.” The Aussie left his seat and plopped down next to Eddie. “What did you do?”

  Eddie answered with a series of unintelligible mumbles behind the mask.

  Finn pulled it away from his face and let it snap back into place. “Take that off. You look like a nerdy duck.”

  The geek pulled the cup down to his neck and shrugged. “I opened a message. It shouldn’t have killed the engines or sent sparks flying from the ceiling.” At the word sparks, he glanced at Darcy.

  She shook her head. “It was not me this time. I left all my toys in the cargo hold.”

  Through the open flight deck door, Talia watched Mac fight the controls while Tyler jammed a finger into a button on the overhead panel. She heard a thump and a long whine. Lights flickered on. Fog poured from the vents. “Was that an engine?”

  “Negative.” Finn said. “We’re still too high to crank the motors. That was the auxiliary power unit. We have air and electricity, but no thrust.”

  “So, we can see and breathe . . .”

  “But we’re still falling to our deaths.”

  As if to emphasize Finn’s point, the nose pitched over, steepening the dive. One by one, lights and systems came back on.

  The restored power also brought Boyd’s message back to life. A distorted laugh echoed through the cabin. The blue eyes Talia had seen before—a close-up of the eyes of a white lion—filled every display surface. “The law of the Jungle,” the voice repeated after every laugh. “Kill or be killed.”

  Tyler scowled back at them through the open flight deck door. “Shut that racket down!”

  “Working on it!” Eddie’s fingers flew across the tablet. “I’m isolating the message source. Cutting off the data flow. That should disable the virus . . . I hope.”

  From behind the laughing came another thump and another whine, bigger and louder this time. “Engine one is up,” Tyler yelled at Mac. “Pull out of the dive.”

  “Can’t.” There was strain behind the Scotsman’s voice. “Now that the laughing is back, my controls are locked.”

  Talia’s gaze fell on the windscreen. Clouds rushed up at them, and beyond she saw a hint of dark blue. The sea. She cringed and looked to Eddie. “How can a message take down an aircraft?”

  Another thump. Another whine. Engine two was up, but the dive continued.

  The lion’s image dominated the cabin. “The law of the Jungle. Kill or be killed.”

  Tyler fought the controls with Mac. “Anytime now, Eddie!”

  “Got it!”

  The lion disappeared. The laughing stopped.

  “Controls are live,” Mac said.

  Tyler threw a lever forward and the third engine spooled to life. “Full power is available. We’re at the edge of the Mach. Watch the pull or we’ll rip her in half.”

  Blue water glinted with the morning sun, growing in the windscreen as the nose began to track. Talia held her breath. She could swear she saw a wave crest above the horizon before Mac and Tyler had them climbing again. The whole group let out a collective sigh.

  “When we catch Boyd, I’m going to kill him.” The statement came from Val, a little behind Talia and across the aisle, red-faced and angry. She had not said a word through the whole ordeal. Her coffee mug hung limp from her fingers, with most of its contents staining her front. “This was my favorite sweater.”

  TYLER BANNED EDDIE from any and all digital mischief until Mac had the AS2 safely on the ground.

  “You do realize I’m the one who saved us, right?” Eddie asked in his own defense. “I stopped the virus, restoring control. Any monkey can pull back on a stick.”

  The look he got shut him up until well after landing.

  They parked in a hangar looking out over the tarmac, beach, and blue water. Mac, Darcy, and a couple of Greek mechanics pored over schematics to fix the AS2, while the rest of the team gathered around a monitor on a folding table.

  Val placed a hand on the back of Eddie’s chair. “Can you play the full message without bringing the hangar down on top of us?”

  “Funny. But I don’t think Boyd intended to crash our plane. This is a canned message, designed to be opened on a regular computer and demonstrate the sender’s power. The virus shuts the computer down in a pseudo-infinite loop to freak out the user without doing real harm.”

  “It did plenty of harm to the AS2,” Tyler said.

  “Because my tablet was hooked into the aircraft mainframe.” Eddie turned in his seat to face the boss. “Look, this thing is entirely text based, like nothing I’ve ever seen, completely integrated into the message title.”

  “Is that how it got into my jet’s comm system?”

  “Correct. There are several ground-based SATCOM repeaters, all tethered to the internet. When we pinged one, the message spotted the Dark Web address I created for the Macciano Sisters and jumped on board. Only one frame of the video made it through, but the text, the audio, and the embedded virus kept going.” He waited, perhaps for an attaboy at figuring the whole thing out, but he received none.

  Tyler folded his arms. “You’re saying Boyd sent the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile straight through an airplane’s text-and-voice-only SATCOM receiver?”

  “That’s one way to put it, and the possibility poses a serious threat to air traffic. But I think it was accidental. Neither the virus nor the AS2 knew what to do when they found each other.” The geek held up both hands like puppets. “Imagine two cats meeting unexpectedly in an alley. They both hissed, batted each other’s faces for a while, then ran yowling into the night, leaving me to unscramble the mess.”

  “Can you reverse engineer the malware?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Do it. We may have a use for something like this in the future.”

  “Sure, boss.” Eddie seemed to wait one more second for his attaboy, then gave up and went back to the keyboard. “For now, I’ve recovered and isolated the video portion, so we can skip the drama.”

  He was wrong. The message was full of
drama, all based in Boyd’s megalomania.

  The white lion paced on the monitor amid a final laugh and an echoing Kill or be killed. “So, you want to be a hawk. Good. I approve. But even those who fly above the Jungle are not free of its law.” The echo returned. The law of the Jungle. Kill or be killed. “You have one month to earn your wings or I will rip them from their sockets and leave you in a pool of blood.”

  “What does he mean, ‘earn your wings’?” Val asked during the pause that followed.

  The white lion answered. “The hawk preys upon the smaller beasts. To earn your wings, you must eat a field mouse or jackrabbit. Remove your target from the Earth, consolidate operations, and improve the overall take for the syndicate. That is the circle of life.”

  The law of the Jungle. Kill or be killed.

  “If you fail to comply, I will remove you from the Earth. That is all.”

  The lion walked off the screen, and a short list of field mouse and jackrabbit members came up, along with names and addresses.

  Eddie had gone pale. “That is so not right.”

  Finn looked just as stunned. “We’ve got to murder someone to reach the next level?”

  “And if we don’t,” Talia said, “we’ll never get Boyd, and we’ll never save those missing children.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-

  TWO

  ADAMANTAS MARINA

  MILOS CALDERA

  MILOS, GREEK ISLES

  IT SHAMED TALIA TO RECOGNIZE her own disappointment when Tyler didn’t put them all up in some luxury chateau overlooking the marina. He put them in the marina—in a houseboat.

  She took a few minutes to clean up after the drive from the airport and emerged from the stateroom she would share with Darcy, wearing white shorts and a tank top. She found Tyler lounging on the boat’s rear deck with a frosty pink drink. He looked unnervingly calm, given the bomb Boyd had dropped on their plans.

  She stood over him, making sure her shadow blocked out his sun. “What happened to your usual virgin piña colada?”

  “Normally my favorite. But this is a local concoction, a virgin Santorini Sunrise.” He took a sip and smacked his lips. “You know. When in Rome.”