Cybernarc (15 page)

He squeezed the trig
ger, slapping a precise, three-
round burst into the chest of a Colombian gunman. The man staggered, choking on a gurgling scream, then pitched over the balcony railing and onto the pavement below.

Shifting aim, Rod sent a burst into one of the spotlights. There was a flash and the light went out. Holding the subgun like a pistol, Rod continued to track and aim, snapping off burst after burst. Another light went out . . . and another. The compound was plunged into darkness again, illuminated only by the blue-hued lights from the pool, the orange slashes of tracers, and the sparkle of full-auto muzzle flashes.

Drake reached Hoskins. Though still alive, the SEAL was bleeding pretty badly. He was reaching for the first-aid kit in one of his harness pockets when he became aware of Rod firing as he zigzagged across the compound. Despite its bulk, the combat robot moved like a panther, sleek, black as the night, and incredibly fast. In an instant, Drake had lost sight of the quickly dodging machine in the darkness.

"Rod!” Drake called over his radio. "What the hell do you think you’re doing?’’

"I am taking down the machine gun,” the robot’s voice replied over Drake’s earpiece, as cool and as unhurried as ever. Across the yard, the Roland’s turret swiveled. The gunner was firing short bursts, seeking to hit the SEALs randomly now in the darkness.

At point-blank range, the .50 caliber round fired by a Ma Deuce could penetrate armor thirty-nine millimeters thick—an inch and a half of steel plate. Drake wasn’t sure what the specifications of Rod’s Combat Mod armor were, but he didn’t think the robot could take very many hits from that rapid-fire cannon.

"Don’t let that heavy MG hit you!” Drake called. "It’ll make Swiss cheese of your armor!”

There was no reply but the steady hammering of the Roland’s gun.

The Roland was now lumbering across the driveway in front of the garage. Rod accelerated, legs pumping, each step chewing divots from the lawn like blasts from a jackhammer. In Combat Mod he could manage eighty kilometers per hour for short spurts on a flat, straight track, but he was not running straight here. His movements were sharp, erratic sprints dodging from shadow to shadow, each rush designed to avoid the sweeping lines of tracer fire from the Roland’s M2.

He’d heard Drake’s warning but decided there was no point in answering. He knew precisely what would happen if the machine gun caught him with a burst. Traveling at 2,930 feet per second, those .50 caliber rounds would pierce his Kevlar-and-ceramic armor like cardboard, shred vital circuitry, smash delicate hydraulics, destroy solenoids and microcircuitry, rupture fluidic pressure and lubricant lines. . . .

In short, a single well-aimed burst would reduce his body to inoperative junk.

Selecting his next hiding place, Rod rose from cover and sprinted forward. His goal was a clump of trees flanking the armored car. From there, he might be able to . . .

The Roland’s turret slewed, the gun firing as it tracked the running robot. Something slammed into Rod’s helmet, a sledgehammer blow to the side of his head that knocked him down.

Circuit test . . . function nominal.

Hydraulics . . . nominal.

Systems diagnostics . . .

His vision was gone on all levels: normal, telescopic, light-intensified, infrared, and his audio sensors were out as well. The robot was deaf and blind, lying on its back forty meters in front of the armored car.

Circuitry diagnostics showed everything intact. Reaching up, Rod hit the release catches for his helmet and pulled it away. He switched his remote sensory inputs off. Normal vision and hearing returned. It was just his helmet electronics that had been smashed. Glancing at the helmet as he lay there, he saw that a .50 caliber round had struck the helmet just above his left eye, been deflected just slightly by the curved armor, and torn a gouge through the tough ceramic that ruptured three vital circuit nodes.

Another centimeter to the right and the round would have gone straight through his head, smashing his primary sensors.

He tossed the ruined headgear aside and examined the objective through his own eyes. Thinking the robot down and out of the fight, the armored car’s driver had urged his mount forward, passing him.

Rod picked up his Uzi and fired, a quick burst that sparked and clanged across the side of the Roland’s turret. The car stopped abruptly, and the turret swung to face him. . . .

"Now’s our chance!” Drake yelled. "Go! Go! Go!”

For long seconds, the Colombian ambushers had been distracted by Rod’s fast-paced fire and movement. The SEALs were no longer pinned.

Gunfire cracked from one of the hacienda balconies. Drake rose to a kneeling crouch, snapping the Uzi’s folding metal stock out and nestling the weapon against his cheek like a carbine. He waited until he saw the muzzle flash again, then squeezed the trigger. The gunman crashed backward through the glass of the balcony door.

Slinging the weapon, he pulled Hoskins into a fireman’s carry. He’d managed to stop the SEAL’s bleeding. If they could only get him out of the compound and into the jungle . . .

Above the gunfire, Drake heard the roar of another heavy vehicle. Behind him, toward the west, a second Roland rumbled past the west wing of the hacienda. In another minute, the SEAL would be squarely trapped between two of the metal monsters.

It was time for an immediate tactical decision. With gunfire coming now from three sides, with the compound’s defenders obviously alerted, there was no longer any hope at all for carrying out the mission. If he didn’t order a retreat at once, the team would be cut to bits.

"Blue Ranger Leader to all Blue Rangers!” he called over the tactical frequency. "Abort! Abort! Execute three-zero!” That called for a general withdrawal, every man for himself, with a rendezvous at the OP. "Backboard!” he called, addressing the men left at the OP. "Let’s have some cover fire!”

"You’ve got it, L-T,” was the reply. "We’ll reach out and touch someone!”

He couldn’t hear the bang of Yancey’s rifle over the roar of close-range gunfire, but a moment later a man fell through one of the hacienda’s third-floor windows in a shower of glass. With the Model 500 and its powerful LI nightscope, Yancey had no problem picking off targets from eight hundred meters away.

But he wouldn’t be able to do much about those Rolands. MG fire from the second Mowag vehicle joined the first, sweeping the compound grounds.

"Rod!” he yelled into the circuit. "Time to pull out! Abort! Abort!” Damn it, the robot wasn’t responding! They would need his help to disengage.

The
amber harvest
raider team could not survive for more than a few more moments. . . .

Carlos Suarez squinted
through the vision slit as the Roland’s turret turned. His ears were ringing with the terrible crash of the M2, his nostrils burning with the acrid mix of gun smoke and diesel fumes that filled the cramped vehicle’s fighting compartment.

He felt someone tug at his trousers and looked down into the vehicle. The turret was too small to accommodate more than the gunner’s head and shoulders; his legs and torso were within the Roland’s hull as he stood behind the driver and beside the loader, who kept him supplied with ammo cases stacked in the rear of the compartment.

The loader’s young face peered up at him. "What’s happening?”

"Someone to the left!” Suarez bellowed, straining to make himself heard above the roar of the engine. He gripped a handhold as the armored car lurched over a rock. "Keep the ammo coming!”

He looked out the vision slit again as the turret slewed around.

There!
His eyes narrowed. What in the name of Mary and all the saints was
that
?

It looked like a man . . . but it was big, massive, and as black as coal. He caught only a glimmer of light reflected from its side. . . .

Gone!

Suarez blinked. Where was it? Where had it gone? The thing moved like a cat ... or had his eyes been playing tricks on him in the dark?

The clash of metal on metal grated a few feet behind the Mexican’s head. He turned—uselessly, since all he could see was the back of the turret—then cursed and hit the turret rotate lever. The machine gun pivoted....

The armored car rocked ominously, and Suarez grabbed onto the handhold for support. What . . . ?

There was a slamming clang, and the metal of the turret wall six inches in front of his face puckered in, molded in the shape of a human fist.

Suarez screamed. . . .

Rod withdrew his fist, then struck again, the blow ringing across the compound. The Roland’s armor was too thick to punch through, but he was certainly denting it. . . and the shriek echoing from inside suggested that someone was either badly hurt or in mortal terror.

The Roland lurched to a stop, and Rod grabbed a handhold bolted to the armored car’s broad back.

A hundred meters away, the second Roland edged past the corner of the house. Shifting to IR vision, Rod could see the SEALs beginning their withdrawal, zigzagging through the darkness to escape the second vehicle’s fire.

He’d heard Drake’s order to withdraw, but there was no way the SEALs were going to escape with two heavy machine guns zeroing in on their position. Those guns had to be silenced, and fast, or the SEALs would be staying right here.

He slammed his fist into the turret again, trying to tear the turret open by sheer force. No good. The blow dimpled the metal inward perhaps five centimeters, leaving a curiously hand-shaped dent, but it would take too long to batter the armored car to pieces this way.

He needed something better. Faster . . .

The turret was rotating, the gunner trying to sweep him o
f
f with the long, protruding muzzle of the M2. Rod stood on the back of the Roland. As with a human, his legs were far stronger than his arms. Balancing himself on one foot, he drew the other back, snapped it forward. . . .

There was a groaning crash. Rod extracted his foot, then reached down and began peeling back jagged edges where steel had torn. Grasping the turret rim in a viselike grip, he straightened his back . . . straining. . . .

On his visual display, Rod’s power-level reading appeared in the lower left, showing eighty-five percent. As he fed more and more power to the hydraulic actuators, the readout number began dwindling. He was drinking energy from his batteries at a fantastic rate.

When he hit seventy-two percent there was a rasping shriek of tortured steel. Rivets popped and snapped like gunfire . . .

. . . and then the Roland’s steel turret peeled back from the hull like wet cardboard, exposing the interior. Careful to avoid damaging the M2 machine gun, he braced himself and pulled. With a crash, the turret came free from its twisted travel guide.

A face looked up at him from the hole, gibbering terror. Tossing the wreckage aside, Rod reached down, grasped the man’s collar, then heaved him up and out of the Roland, sending him sailing across the sky in a loud-wailing arc that ended with a gigantic splash squarely in the middle of the swimming pool, almost thirty meters away.

Another face looked up at him from down in the body of the vehicle. There was a flash and a bang, and a 9mm parabellum slug ricocheted off Rod’s torso.

Ignoring the pistol fire, Rod grasped the machine gun that was still secured in its mounting inside the turret. Careful not to bend the barrel, he yanked it free of its mount, snapping the pintel pin with a crack that sounded like another gunshot.

Standing erect, he pulled the M2HB free of its mount, holding the weapon in two hands. Empty, the machine gun weighed thirty-eight kilos—almost eighty-four pounds. With an ammo box of belted .50 caliber rounds attached, it weighed closer to fifty kilos, but Rod held the heavy-barreled weapon like a man would hold a submachine gun, tucked under his right arm as he pivoted at the waist, tracking.

The range to the second Roland was now seventy- four meters. Shifting to infrared, Rod saw the heat spilling from the other armored car’s engine compartment as a white-hot plume in the darkness. He focused his crosshairs, adjusting for range and the distance between his helmet sensors and the muzzle of his captured weapon.

The Ma Deuce barked and kicked in his metal hands, sending a stream of tracers in flat-line trajectory across the compound. There was no need to adjust his fire, no need to correct for movement or deflection. Rounds slammed into the second Roland’s engine compartment, a hammering fusillade that tore through the vehicle’s hull armor.

Rod kept the butterfly trigger at the rear of the gun depressed, holding the line of tracers dead on the target as spent brass flipped from the gun’s receiver. When the target’s engine quit working, he began moving the muzzle in small, precise circles. He shifted his vision to LI, then used his telescopic enhancement to zoom in for a detailed look.

The rounds used in the Ma Deuce had been developed from a WWI antitank round. Though useless against modem tanks, they punched through the thin armor plate of the Roland like bullets through plywood. Rod doubted that the .50 caliber rounds had energy enough to go all the way through the vehicle; they were probably fragmenting, bouncing around the vehicle’s crew compartment with deadly effect.

A fuel line must have parted, filling the compartment with fumes. A tracer round, or a white-hot piece of spalling metal was all it took. . . .

The Roland exploded, sending a boiling cloud of orange flame and smoke mushrooming into the night sky. The gun stopped firing, out of ammo. Rod’s finger came off the trigger.

Looking down, he met the terrified eyes of one of the men still trapped inside the vehicle he was standing on. The man had given up trying to shoot the robot and appeared to be cowering on the deck, his hands out in front of him as if to ward off a blow.

"More ammunition!” Rod barked. When the man didn’t respond, he increased the volume of his vodor and shifted to a different language program.

"Mas munic
i
ó
n! Ahora!”

The vehicle’s loader nearly fell over himself scrambling for another metal box of .50 caliber rounds, handing it to the driver, who passed it up through the turret opening with trembling hands.

"Don’t hurt us!” the man screamed in Spanish. "Please, don’t hurt us!”

The Roland crew was no longer a threat. Ignoring the pleading men, Rod discarded the empty ammo container and replaced it, locking a fresh round into the receiver. By the blaze of light from the burning armored car, he could see the SEALs running toward the compound gate. Bracing the M2 under his right arm, Rod jumped off the vehicle and sprinted after them.

"Saylor!” Drake called over his radio. "Isaacson! Are you guys clear yet?”

"Roger that, L-T! We’re over the walls and making for the woods!”

Drake had almost reached the hacienda’s gatehouse, charging it at a dead run. The gate was closed, and a security guard was stepping out of the tiny building’s doorway with a G3 rifle in his hands. Drake fired, one quick burst from his Uzi, and the guard spun back against the building, then collapsed in a heap on the pavement.

Inside the gatehouse was a security TV monitor, plus a portable TV tuned to a soccer match. On the console was a lever marked "open” and "lock” in Spanish. Drake shifted the lever to "open” and heard the click of machinery. Outside, the wrought-iron gate began swinging open.

"Move it! Move it!” He pumped his fist in the air, signaling double time. Gordon and Zitterman hurried past, carrying the bloody form of Hoskins between them. Where was Rod?

"Rod!” he called over the radio. "I said pull out!” He’d caught a glimpse of Rod when the second Roland went up, standing straddle-legged on the first vehicle’s turretless back, firing an M2 from the hip. Drake stood next to the gate, his Uzi at the ready. If that damned robot didn’t make an appearance pretty quickly now . . .

Rod loomed up out of the flame-shot darkness, the meter-and-a-half-plus length of a heavy-barreled M2 under one arm.

The relief was so intense he laughed out loud. "Rod, you damned black walking can opener, what the hell are you doing with that?”

Small arms fire banged out of the night from the hacienda, someone firing a submachine gun. Rod spun smoothly, leveling the machine gun at the house, and opened fire, walking backward now in long, easy steps. The gun roared, the muzzle flash stabbing at the night. Glass shattered in the distance as Rod’s portable autocannon found its mark.

"Laying down suppression fire to cover the unit’s withdrawal,” Rod replied. The volume was up high, and the robot’s voice boomed like thunder.
That’s
what that amplified demand in Spanish for more ammunition had been a moment earlier, Drake realized. Rod adjusted the level of his voice. "I felt this necessary to effect a retreat.”

Drake laughed again as the robot kept firing. "Damned right, buddy. Let’s
di di.
...”

The M2, abused by continuous firing for hundreds of rounds instead of the short bursts recommended by the manufacturers, jammed, its barrel overheated. Rod tossed the weapon aside.

"Affirmative.”

Following the other SEALs, Rod and Drake trotted through the open gate and into the Colombian night.

Thank God the Colombians hadn’t followed the SEALs into the jungle. After rendezvousing at the OP, the
amber harvest
team had packed up their gear within five minutes and began trudging up the northern face of the Sierra Nevadas. Their destination was another clearing detected on satellite photos of the region, a field beyond the first line of ridges broad enough for a helo to set down in not far from the blowdown where
snowdrop
had been ambushed.

For Drake, it was virtually a replay of the last time he’d been here two weeks earlier, except that this time they had a wounded man with them. Campano, the best medic among them, had patched the wounded SEAL with sterile dressings and compresses, but there was almost certainly internal bleeding and they would have to get him to a decent hospital fast if he was to survive. Rod carried Hoskins in his arms.