Cybernarc (13 page)

But despite Cunningham’s suggestion that Vanecki had been the CIA mole, the chances were still pretty good that one of the men at the table was Diamond. The plan worked out with Weston and the DCI hours earlier counted on Diamond learning about
amber harvest
and adding a few twists of his own.

Twists that would implicate the traitor within the CIA’s ranks.

It also depended on Rod functioning flawlessly and intelligently in a true uncontrolled environment. Was Rod ready for that kind of test?

He didn’t know.

Later, Weston caught up to Drake in a corridor. "Lieutenant? How are you doing? Really?”

Drake’s eyebrows rose. "Fine, sir. No problem.” "You don’t have to do this, you know.”

"I did ask to go.”

"I know. But some of us . . . well, we’re wondering how you’re handling what happened. Your family.” Drake kept his emotions clamped down, hard. "I would be lying, Mr. Weston, if I said it doesn’t bother me. But it’s under control. Believe me.”

"You’ve never entirely believed in RAMROD. As a combat-operational system. If that’s a problem . . .” Drake sighed. "Mr. Weston, at this point, if you ordered me to stay behind, I’d swim to Colombia. I
want
these people. And I’ll do it with or without a robot as a sidekick.”

"That’s not exactly a reassuring answer, son,” Weston said. "The mission is to capture Delgado. Not to ... to avenge your wife and kid.”

Drake’s eyes locked with Weston’s. Neither man spoke for several seconds. "Yes, sir. That is understood. Will there be anything else?”

"No. Just . . . good luck.”

Drake turned and walked away, his emotions still rigidly in check.

The nuclear submarine
John Marshall
was an old Ethan Allen—class boat. Originally commissioned as a Polaris boomer in 1962, she’d been converted to an attack sub in 1981, then reconverted in the mid-eighties for the transport role.
Marshall's
missile tubes had been removed to make room for up to sixty-five troops and their equipment, and fittings on her afterdeck were designed to accommodate Dry Deck Shelters that held a pair of Navy swimmer delivery vehicles.

The
Marshall
had been slated for retirement in 1990, but cuts in the Navy’s budget for such luxuries as special-mission, frogman-carrying submarines had forced her indefinite retention.
Marshall
had slipped her moorings at Little Creek four days before and, traveling underwater at a steady twenty knots, was now approaching the north Colombian coast. On board were Lieutenant Drake and Rod, together with two four-man SEAL elements, the strike force for
amber harvest.

Drake had been watching Rod with increasing misgivings during the voyage south through the Bahamas and the Windward Passage. He watched the robot now as he applied talcum powder to the inside of his own jet-black wet suit, preparing for the mission.

Rod needed no wet suit. Normally, while wearing what RAMROD personnel referred to as his Civilian Mod, Rod looked about as ordinary as it was possible to look-—a tall man with light brown hair and pleasant features, somewhat on the rangy side, and with the somewhat disconcerting habit of turning his head while he spoke with you, as though he were watching the room rather than any one person in it.

He had arrived on board the
Marshall
in full Combat Mod, however, and looked anything but normal.

Blue-black, low-gloss titanium-steel in the place of synthetic skin seemed to drink the direct overhead lighting of the troop compartment. Legs, arms, and the massive, armored plastron over chest and back appeared bulky, giving Rod the hulking silhouette of a football linebacker.

Yet for all his bulk and mass, Rod moved as lithely and as easily in Combat Mod as he did when he looked human. The openings at his joints exposed the intricacies of overlapping armor plate, of wires and miniature hydraulic pistons that worked together under microcomputer direction to deliver tremendous power to each of his movements. Though powerful, the robot had the grace of a cat. . . although the way he turned and held his head from time to time still had a mechanical quality, and the sheer precision of his movements was eerily inhuman. His hands were no larger than normal—they could not be if he was expected to use weapons or controls designed for human beings—but they had the same lusterless, light-drinking matte finish as the rest of his body, and a touch proved that they were made of the same unyielding titanium-steel alloy.

When he was wearing Combat Mod, only Rod’s head and facial features appeared unchanged, and the bulk of his new body made his head seem curiously small and out of place, recessed in the well between his shoulders that received his armored neck. It looked, in fact, as though he were wearing some sort of bulky space suit. In combat, Rod would also wear a special helmet to protect the vulnerable and unarmored head and its extremely sensitive, broad-spectrum optical gear.

That helmet gave Rod a decidedly alien look. Those cool, gray eyes were masked behind a black visor strip that fed visual, thermal, and radar imagery directly to his visual processors, bypassing the eyes entirely.

A power cable trailed across the deck as the robot topped off his batteries.

"Lord Almighty,” one of the SEALs in the compartment said, watching Rod as the machine made some minute adjustment to the battle helmet in its lap. Boatswain Chief Randy Campano shook his head in admiration. "That sucker is damn near invisible sittin’ in here with the lights on. He’s gonna disappear in that jungle.”

"They say you’ve worked with oF Bot before, Lieutenant,” RN/3 Matt Zitterman said. "Think he’ll hold up in a stand-up fight?”

Drake shrugged. "All I can say is he’s managed okay so far.”

"Stow it, Zit. Don’t you worry about oP Rambot,” GM/1 Carl Hoskins said. "You saw him on the gunnery range, didn’t you? Hell, he can outshoot any man in this compartment! You just worry about your own proficiency scores!”

"Aw, up yours, Hoss,” MT/2 Joshua Gordon said in his soft, west Texas drawl. "You know as well as the rest of us that it’s not the shootin’ that counts in a firefight. It’s what you’re
made
of.”

"Well, hell’s bells, Rod oughta do okay then,” Zitterman observed. "Looks to me like a LAW rocket wouldn’t more’n scratch him!”

Drake shook his head as he listened to the banter. They’d spent the last four days living together underwater, but Rod had spoken little, volunteered nothing. As H-hour approached he could sense the SEALs’ growing curiosity about their strange comrade, and he knew that all of them were wondering the same thing: could they count on Rod in combat?

The hell of it was, Drake himself wasn’t sure how he would answer. Rod’s silence seemed like brooding, though Drake knew it was silly to attribute such a human state of mind to a machine. Drake began peeling on his wet suit, turning the question over in his mind. How
would
Rod behave in combat?

There was no question of Rod’s combat ability, but the one time he’d been under fire for real, the robot had taken down the bad guys on his own. He’d not worked with human soldiers as part of a team.

Oh, Drake and Rod had trained briefly together with the eight SEALs at Dam Neck, but only in the mechanics of egressing from the sub and making their way ashore. There’d been no time for more than that and a couple of turns at the firing range. The SEALs seemed to accept him, had nicknamed him "Bot” and "Ram- bot,” but when it came to working with him in a combat environment, none of them, Drake included, knew exactly what to expect.

If Rod had been a human member of a combat team, that would have been a sure recipe for suicide. In a firefight there was one absolute: each member of the team had to be able to depend on every other member.

The robot was an unknown quantity, however. Recognizing that there simply was not enough time to train the covert operations team to accept and use Rod as they would a human comrade, Weston, General Sinclair, and the mission planners had elected to incorporate him as just another piece of equipment. In their briefings to the SEALs before embarkation, they had stressed the fact that Rod was a machine, as much a tool as the weapons they carried.

That was why Weston had ordered Rod not to speak to the other SEALs except in direct response to their questions. It was felt that if the men began talking freely with Rod, they would quickly begin thinking of him as a person. So far, no one had ventured a guess as to whether that would be good or bad. It was safer, though, to think of him as a
thing
of unknown potential, rather than as a man who might let them down at a crucial point with some distinctly unmanlike goof.

Drake could already tell that Langley’s strategy was not working, however. Rod still
looked
like a man— however strange he might appear in Combat Mod—and when he spoke, it was with the same low, precise, and very human-sounding speech that Rod used at the Farm. It was impossible for the eight other SEALs to live with Rod for four days, to speak with him and listen to his replies, and not think of him as a man.

The enlisted SEALs had paired off, each man applying stick camouflage to the portions of his partner’s face exposed by his wet-suit hood when there was a metallic bang and the forward watertight door swung open. Captain Wyler stepped across the raised kneeknocker and into the compartment. Zitterman called attention on deck, and the other SEALs straightened up. Rod, interestingly enough, remained seated. The robot had not received PARET training in military courtesy.

The submarine’s skipper only glanced at the robot, then turned and addressed the SEALs, hands on hips. "At ease,” he said. "Okay, gentlemen. We’re twelve miles off the coast, at a depth of sixty-three feet. We took a periscope sighting on your objective, and your compass bearing will be one-eight-seven. Sunset was four hours ago and it’s a dark night. Looks like a perfect evening for a swim.” He paused, looking at each of the nine, black-faced SEALs in turn. "I just wanted to repeat the word I had from Washington. After the SDVs drop you froggies off, they’re to beat it back to the
Marshall.
As soon as they’re stowed, my orders are to RTB. Once you boys hit the beach, there’s no coming back.”

"Understood, Captain,” Drake said. "We have . . . other arrangements for pickup.”

"Well, you damned well better. It’s a hell of a long swim back to Norfolk!” Captain Wyler glanced again at Rod, still sitting in the corner. "You have all the gear you need.” It was a statement, not a question.

"That’s affirmative, sir.”

"Well, if you’re ready, the sooner I have you off my boat, the sooner I can take my merry crew back to civilization, women, and beer. And the sooner you can get on with . . . whatever the hell you’re supposed to be doing out here.”

"Yes, sir,” Drake replied. Captain Wyler had not been briefed on the SEALs part of the op. As much as possible, each segment of the mission was isolated from the rest, the individual players knowing nothing but their own part in the drama. He smiled. "And if anyone asks, Captain, you never saw us.”

"Take care, then.” The Captain grinned. "Don’t start any wars that you guys can’t finish yourselves!” "Aye aye, Captain.” Hoskins said, chuckling. "We always finish what we start!”

We finish what we start.
Drake thought about that as he buckled his weight belt, then checked wrist compass, depth gauge, and watch. He had
some business to settle with Señ
or Luis Delgado.

Business that the Colombian had started, but that Drake was going to finish.

For a moment, the memories of blood, gunfire, and horror threatened to close in on him again. He pushed them aside, concentrating on his responsibilities as dive master. Grimly, he went to each of the other SEALs in the compartment, checking their equipment, harnesses, and weapons. Each man was fully rigged out in black wet suit, fins, mask and snorkel, and Mark VI semiclosed circuit SCUBA. Each man carried a sealed equipment bag holding his boots, ammo, canteens, medical kits, and other dry gear the team would need ashore. As their
SEa, Air,
and Land acronym suggested,
SEALs took pride in operating effectively both in and out of the water.

When he was certain that every man’s equipment was functioning and complete, and after Chief Campano had checked him, Drake gave the order for the team to begin cycling through
Marshall
’s escape trunk. Rod completed some last-minute adjustments on his helmet and put it on. Armored, with angled surfaces and no recognizable features except for the optical visor strip, the helmet gave Rod a sinister, malevolent look.

They locked out of the chamber two at a time, swimming through the hatch opening as soon as the airlock was flooded and into the inky blackness of the sea. Drake went through with Rod, who moved with extra caution. Where the divers had their weight belts and equipment adjusted to give them neutral buoyancy, Rod in his massive Combat Mod armor would sink like a stone if he stepped off the submarine’s deck. As they’d practiced at Little Creek days before, Rod attached himself to the sub’s deck with a safety line, standing clear as the swimmers, working in the shifting, murky light of handheld lanterns, began unshipping the SDVs from the Dry Deck Shelters.

The Swimmer Delivery Vehicle (SDV) EX-VIII was a minisub capable of ferrying six men and their equipment for long distances underwater. Designed for covert insertions, it was termed a "wet” submarine because the crew, passenger, and cargo compartments were fully flooded during underwater operations. For this mission, two SDVs would be used, each carrying five passengers plus an operator who would return the minisub to the
Marshall
after the swimmers were dropped off at the beach.

Drake took his place aboard the lead SDV next to Rod, turned off his SCUBA, and connected himself to the vehicle’s on-board life support. Moments later, there was a gentle whirr as the sub’s electric battery motor began propelling the vehicle swiftly through the black water.

In the dim glow from a chemical light in the compartment, Drake looked again at Rod. The effect was startling. With its helmet on, the robot definitely looked far more like a machine, worse, like some armored alien monster in a science fiction epic, than a man.