Cybernarc (3 page)

"So,” Drake said cheerfully. "Problem with this pile of spare parts?”

"Problem?” Costrini mimicked. The deputy head of the assembly team lifted his head from the viewer eyepieces. "What problem? I
like
testing three hundred separate solenoid relays looking for the one that’s stuck. It gives my life such
meaning,
such
purpose.

Dr. McDaniels grinned. "Don’t mind Ted,” she said. "He got up on the wrong side of his oil change this morning.”

There was a long-standing rivalry between RAMROD’s mechanical engineers and the computer people, the clackers and the hackers as they called themselves. "Do I detect a note of hostility on the assembly team?” Weston asked.

"Not at all,” Costrini said. "Dr. McDaniels simply refuses to believe that her programming could possibly be at fault. Always it’s an
assembly
problem, never the programming.”

"We hear replays of this argument all the time,” Weston explained to General Sinclair. "Last week it was whether the reason the robot couldn’t blink was a programming glitch or something mechanical.”

"We never did figure out that one,” McDaniels said. "Certainly we did. It was programming. As usual.” "We corrected the programming and he
still
can’t blink.” She looked at a clock on the wall. "We’re ready for the feed anytime, Mr. Weston. And we can give you a unit demo as soon as Ted finds the trouble.”

"Unless, of course, what we’re dealing with is a program glitch. In that case we’ll be lucky if we can go on-line by . . .
shit!”

"Whatcha got?” McDaniels turned and studied the monitor screen. Blunt-tipped probes, hundreds of times larger than life, slid beneath hair-thin wires that grew like thick-clumped forest trees on the screen.

"Defective solenoid relay. It’s not drawing power at all.”

McDaniels grinned. "Mechanical. I rest my case. That’s five you owe me, Ted.”

"You’ll get it payday. Fred, let’s have another R-30 solenoid here. Make it a different batch number, huh? I think we’ll have to ditch the one-fifty-eights. This is the third time this has happened.”

There was a feedback squeal from a loudspeaker on the lab wall. "Attention, Mr. Weston. Attention, Mr. Weston. Your party is waiting for you at the security desk.”

"Time to go.” Weston looked at Drake. "Lieutenant, take it easy. This is only a demo PARET run.”

"No sweat, Mr. Weston. Like I said, this is a vacation after my . . . uh . . .
vacation. ”

"We’ll be watching from here. Have fun.”

Walking through separate doors, they left the assembly team and the inert patient on the table. In the gowning room, Drake shed his smock, booties, and cap, then found his combat blacks in the locker where he’d left them a week before. After pinning his security pass to his turtleneck top, he took a side door, ducked into a stairwell, and headed down two levels.

His destination was the building’s armory.

It was a very bad part of town.

The man got out of a white C&P phone-company van. "This shouldn’t take long.”

"Right, Luis,” the blond-haired man in the passenger seat said. "Don’t get mugged.”

The area was primarily Hispanic, a Latino enclave in southern Virginia Beach, a blending of Puerto Rican and Mexican elements. Barrio music boomed from a ghetto blaster on the sidewalk. Voices called to one another in Spanish. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed that this was the territory of
Los Salvajes,
the Savages.

He didn’t have far to walk. Three-story buildings rose on all sides, ugly, far-decayed monstrosities packed four to a city block, their walls covered with graffiti, the alleyways between them cluttered with garbage. On the street corner, several Latino-looking youths were doing business. Cars would pull up at the curb, there would be a short conversation with the occupants, and then small plastic bags were exchanged for money. The block’s protector, an ugly, mustached tough in sunglasses, lounged against the crumbling facade of a liquor store, narrowly watching Luis.

In an alleyway, Luis stepped up to a wooden door and knocked, then stepped back so the occupants could see through the fish-eye leus in the peephole that he was alone. There was a rattling of locks, and then the door opened. A swarthy face peered at him.

"Que tal, Julio?”
Luis asked.

"Quien es?”
another voice demanded from the gloom. Luis heard the snick of an automatic weapon’s bolt being drawn.

"
Fresco, Chaco,
’’Julio called back over his shoulder. "It’s the
man.
C’mon in.”

Luis masked his distaste as he stepped inside. The mingled stenches of alcohol and garbage, of vomit, urine, and feces, were overpowering. In the kitchen, a man and a gaunt-looking woman bent over the stove, where something simmered in a pot. A box of baking soda rested on the counter beside them; neatly wrapped packets of aluminum foil were lined up on the kitchen table.

He heard a baby crying upstairs.

The apartment building was headquarters for the local chapter of
Los Salvajes,
a Hispanic gang that dealt in crack cocaine in cities up and down the East Coast. Luis did not like dealing with these people directly, but Diamond’s orders had been explicit . . . and urgent. Luis would have to recruit the necessary people himself, to ensure that there were no screw-ups.

Chaco loomed up out of the shadows. "Don’t often see you around these parts, man. Whatcha want?”

"I got a job for you,” Luis replied. "I need four guys. Today.”

"
Cuanto?”

"One K apiece now. Five more afterward.”

Julio whistled. "I’ll take a piece of that. What’s the job?”

Luis smiled. "Don’t worry, man. You’ll love it.” He’d used the Savages for errands before. So long as the job was simple, brutal, and direct, they’d have no problems carrying out their orders.

Luis began explaining what he needed.

©
Chapter Three

The woman stepped out
suddenly from behind the corner of a building a few yards in front of Drake. She was tall, blond, and dressed to kill, with dangling earrings and an expensive-looking red dress. The light from a sodium-vapor street lamp on a nearby corner gave the leather of her pocketbook a metallic gleam....

Drake dropped into a crouch, the heavy .45 automatic already swinging up in a two-handed aim when his brain registered the fact that the woman was no threat. He let the motion continue, raising the barrel until it was aimed at the ceiling.

The woman took no notice of Drake but stopped on the curb next to an Infiniti sports coupe and began fumbling in the pocketbook for her car keys.

In one smooth motion Drake touched the release stud, and the magazine, down to two rounds now, slid from the pistol’s grip and clattered at his feet. His left hand slipped a fresh magazine into the .45 and snicked it home. That gave him eight rounds, seven in the mag and one up the spout.

The woman continued to ignore him, unlocking her car door.

The man who leaped out behind her looked like a typical street tough, a gang logo on his motorcycle jacket, his leering grin exposing yellow and uneven teeth. The Walther PPK was already pressed against the girl’s head, his left arm pinning her body against his chest.

The woman screamed as Drake snapped the .45 into line with the mugger’s face. "She’s dead!” the thug yelled, his mouth close behind her ear, but the words were chopped off by the detonation of Drake’s pistol. He fired once . . . twice, deafening explosions coupled to the appearance of twin red spots side by side on the mugger’s forehead like an extra pair of eyes.

Noise, movement ... or some combat-honed sixth sense dragged Drake forward, down and around, facing right. A man burst from a doorway on the front step of a brownstone apartment. A few feet away, another woman, this one standing behind a baby carriage, yelled and pointed. The man held a Smith
&
Wesson revolver in his right hand . . .

. . . and wore a police officer’s uniform. Drake followed his new target only long enough to verify that the cop wasn’t aiming at him, then swung his weapon to cover the woman. She was pulling something long and black from the baby buggy, snapping the pump action, bringing the shotgun to bear on Drake’s chest.

He continued his down-and-forward movement, taking the fall on his shoulder and rolling with it. His shot was not aimed—there was no
time
to aim—but he squeezed off shot after shot as the woman squeezed the trigger of her sawed-off Mossberg M500. The shotgun’s deafening roar obliterated the bark of the .45 auto as

Drake rolled across the ground, firing now rightside up, now upside down as he dragged his aim down toward the woman’s center of mass. Red spots tracked down the brownstone’s wall as he fired, one-two-three-four. The fifth round hit her left shoulder, the sixth high in her chest.

Slowly, Drake rose to his feet. His ,45’s slide was locked back, the magazine empty. He took a deep breath and tasted the tiny, biting stink of cordite. The range lighting came on overhead. The images on the target screens were still there, but dimmer in the bright light than they had been, less substantial, less realistic. The woman with the shotgun still glared at him over the ballooning muzzle flash of her weapon, while behind him, the mugger held his PPK against the screaming woman’s head, their images frozen in time.

"Drake, Christopher C.,” a quiet voice said from a hidden speaker somewhere overhead. "Run number three-five-nine complete. Time two minutes fifty-six seconds. Score ninety-four percent. No collateral damage.”

Civilians, Drake thought. "Collateral damage” meant civilians . . . innocent bystanders.

Damn,
but the simulation was realistic! He took several more deep breaths, willing the racing of his heart to slow, then stood up. It was like this after every run. The techies who had wired him up must be having a field day with his vital signs right now.

The FBI had the training simulator they called the Fun House at Quantico, while down at Fort Bragg, Delta, and the other Special Operations Command units routinely ran through the four-room target gallery they called the House of Horrors. Drake had been through both courses frequently with SEAL Team Eight. Twice, during cross-training assignments overseas, he’d even been through the notorious Killing House used by Britain’s SAS.

At RAMROD, the personal combat simulations unit was called Kiddie Land. Instead of the pop-up cardboard targets once employed, huge projection screens twenty feet tall displayed the life-size videotaped images of actors going about their business on a typical city street. Multiple screens could be arranged in various ways, allowing a trainee to stroll through Kiddie Land’s city streets or the interiors of buildings.

The trick was
not
to fire at the citizens engaged in activities that were legitimate, if occasionally startling or unexpected, but to kill the thugs, gunmen, assassins, terrorists, and gun-wielding crazies who appeared at random, in varying degrees of light and cover, and in attacks that were never the same twice. Each shot, registered by embedded sensors that detected the impact of the low-velocity plastic pellets, was recorded by CORA, the computer handling the simulation, and graded according to its likelihood of killing or disabling the target. A kill froze the image, hopefully before it had "fired,” while the hit was marked by a low-energy laser.

His face bathed with sweat, Drake released the slide and holstered the weapon. With both hands then, he reached up and unhooked his chin strap. The helmet he was wearing was cumbersome. He lifted it off over his head, careful not to pull free the cables that plugged into receptacles in the back. A wisp of cold vapor, released from the superconductor refrigerant pack, boiled away in the air.

Greg Irvin and several Rand technicians walked toward him. "Nice run, Lieutenant,” Irvin said.

"Thanks.” Drake handed the helmet to a techie. "What’s the bad news? Did Miss Mossberg there kill me?”

"Almost but no cigar,” Irvin said. He looked down at his clipboard. "CORA says . . . thirty-two-percent chance that you were disabled. You got her either way, whether she hit you or not. That was pretty fancy shooting!”

"Pretty fancy panic, you mean,” Drake replied. He jerked a thumb at the mugger still leering from behind the woman in the red dress. Drake’s two shots had missed the woman’s head by less than the span of a man’s hand. "That HR bit was cute.”

"Glad you liked it. Maybe next time you can try it full auto.”

Drake laughed, "Full-auto head shots are strictly Hollywood, Irv! And I’d better not catch you telling CORA any different! I—■”

"Lieutenant Drake?” An amplified voice boomed over Kiddie Land’s PA system. "Knock off for a while. Come on back to Lab One.”

"The Master summons,” Irvin said, grinning.

"Yeah. Guess I’ll catch you later.” He started back toward the armory to check in his pistol.

In 1986, President Reagan announced the formation of several multidepartmental task forces charged with battling the rapidly worsening scourge of illegal drugs entering the United States. Most of these groups—involved in fighting the war on drugs through education, better law enforcement, stricter laws—were overt, and matters of public record. A few, however, were covert.

Group Seven was one of these, a secret government task force with members drawn from each of the bureaucracies already involved in the war on drugs. Its personnel included members of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and the military; its chairman was Frank Buchanan, the Democratic senator from Florida already well-known for his outspoken advocacy of using the military to track down the drug barons, the
narcotraffi
cantes
who were flooding America with their poisons, and bring them to the United States for trial.

Rumor had it that more than one attempt had already been made on the senator’s life.

The situation was out of control, and growing worse. America’s cities were crumbling into drug-soaked pits of crime, despair, and violence. More than one major police force had been rocked by scandal within the past few years, with allegations of corruption, payoffs from drug lords, even narcotics trafficking by policemen. The mayor of Washington, D.C., had been convicted on a cocaine charge, and the leaders of several other cities were under Federal investigation as well. The Border Patrol, Customs, and DEA agents trying to stem the flood of cocaine and heroin across America’s borders and through her ports were being overwhelmed by an enemy more numerous, better-armed, better-paid, and far more vicious than they.

Group Seven was searching for a way to fight back before it was too late.

And James Weston was convinced that RAMROD might be the weapon they needed. A combat robot, originally developed to military specifications, could do things no
human
narcotics agent could imagine.

"It’s a whole new way of programming computers,” Weston said. He was standing in Lab One, addressing four men and two women who were, like him, members of Group Seven, "PARET lets Rod duplicate the way humans think . . . lets him
reason.
”

They had just watched Drake’s simulation run on a large TV monitor on the lab wall. Roger Menefee shook his head. "James, are you going to stand there and tell us that that gadget your man wore on his head somehow recorded his ability with a gun? That you can transfer that ability to .. .” He gestured lamely toward the table in the middle of the lab, where McDaniels and the other RAMROD assembly personnel were monitoring the simulator results. "That
thing
over there?”

Weston smiled. Roger Menefee was Group Seven’s liaison with the Drug Enforcement Administration. As an agent he’d led the team that bagged eighty pounds of heroin at O’Hare International in Chicago eight years earlier. As a DEA deputy regional director, he’d coordinated a massive search-and-seizure operation in Arizona in 1989, discovering a half-mile tunnel beneath the Mexican border, a tunnel that had been the entry path for thousands of pounds of cocaine in the past several years. He was a good man and a sharp one, but he had never been keen on the idea of incorporating RAMROD into Group Seven’s antinarcotics efforts.