Deep Black (8 page)

Malachi knew that for a fact, since he had helped develop the virus that placed the code into the systems.

The computer began counting down the seconds to Hydra. At H minus forty, Malachi cut the rocket motor but left it attached;
the standard contingency plan called for using it to attempt to complete the mission if the winglets failed to deploy.

Not that they would. But you always had to have a backup.

At H minus three seconds, the computer flicked a small switch located nearly at the midpoint of the Vessel. This moved an
actuator into position at the opening of four long tubes connected to the blisters on the pipe’s body. At precisely H zero,
a small nanotrigger activated. A flood of hydrogen gas shot into the blisters. The thin metal around them, already partially
burned and worn by the friction of the flight, burst away. Hydrogen, under somewhat less pressure, flowed into what looked
like a compressed paper bag directly beneath the ellipses where the metal had blown away. Like a butterfly emerging from its
cocoon, the pipe sprouted a set of composite wings and steering fins from the bulges. Malachi got a tone from the computer
that indicated the winglets had been properly deployed, then glanced quickly at the instrument data on screen one. There wasn’t
time to scan the numbers—he looked only to make sure they were all green, rather than yellow or red. He saw green, then quickly
typed the command to lose the rocket motor. As he did, the Vessel began sending its video image back to the platforms above,
which in turn gave them to Malachi, supplying a real-time image for his forward display.

The separation pushed the nose up and the Vessel began to jitter, not only making it difficult to steer but also hampering
the pilot’s ability to stop its spin and fly it like a normal aircraft. Malachi’s fingers flew to the right side of his keyboard,
thumbing the bat on the bottom and then poking the large red arrow at the right, initiating commands to deflate the rear fin
and push out the leading edge on the starboard wing. His fingers flew back and forth for nearly thirty seconds, until the
craft was completely stable and on course. At that point he began controlling it using the yoke, which operated like a standard
pilot’s control stick. His left hand rested at the base of a pad that could control the limited maneuvering rockets as well
as the attack angles and dimensions of the winglets.

“Sensor launch in ten minutes,” he said.

“Hallelujah,” said Telach. “I thought I’d be filing my retirement papers before we got there.”

“They let you retire from this outfit?” asked Rockman. “I thought they just took you out back and shot you.”

“That’d be too easy,” said Telach.

Malachi was too busy to joke. Stabilized, the Vessel was now gliding through 200,000 feet at about Mach 5. The optimum speed
for dispensing the sensors in the Vessel’s belly was just under Mach 1, and the computer showed they’d be going at least three
hundred knots too fast. Folding the middle and fourth fingers of his left hand into his palm, he hit the top triangular buttons
on his control pad simultaneously, telling the computer to inflate the leading edge pieces two degrees, the standard way to
slow down the probe’s descent.

Ninety-seven percent of the time, the procedure worked perfectly. This time belonged to the other 3 percent.

The inflatable membrane on the winglet was made from a sandwich of metal and thin plastic alloys. One layer of the sandwich
was pure copper, and while it had a number of advantages over other materials that had been tried in its place, it also had
a tendency toward hairline creases that caused problems under high-stress regimes. Pretty much by definition, the entire flight
was a high-stress regime, and when the leading edge inflated now, the crease caused a dent in the winglet geometry. Within
seconds, the dent created a strong vortex on that side of the Vessel; the new stress point made a hole in that part of the
wing.

The hole was less than a millimeter, but it allowed a fair amount of hydrogen to escape. The winglet was constructed in small
tubes or pockets, so structural integrity could be maintained, at least for a while. But even with the computer’s help, Malachi
knew he was going to lose the battle to keep the Vessel from sliding into a spin.

“Problem?” asked Telach.

“I’m out of milk,” he told her, struggling with the controls.

Within a few more seconds, the control panel on the left went from yellow to red. Malachi opted for a trick he had practiced
several weeks ago on the simulator—he jettisoned the winglets, guiding the probe entirely by the fins as if it were a missile.
While doable, this complicated the sensor launch pattern.

“We’re going to be a little off-target,” he said.

“How much?” asked Telach.

“A little.”

In the simulations, he had managed to get about 75 percent of the sensors within five miles of the target.

Something moved behind him. Malachi jerked his head around, a shudder of shock running through him.

It was Telach. She came over to him and crouched next to his station. “You’re my man, Malachi. Do it.”

“Hey,” he said. While he appreciated the verbal stroke, her presence made him nervous. He tapped the keys with his thumb and
pinkie, sweat pouring from his fingers.

“Ground team has to know—go or no go,” said Rockman. “It’s getting toward day out there. Should I bag it for tonight?”

“Hang on,” said Telach.

Malachi pushed his head down toward the keyboard, tilting his head toward screen two, where his course was projected. He was
below the spaghetti tube by a good hunk.

“Go or no go?” asked Rockman.

“Just hang on,” said Telach.

The computer had calculated new launch data, recommending a sweeping arc as he approached the site. The pattern would rob
so much momentum that he’d have to find a new self-destruct site, but he’d have to worry about that later. Malachi got a tone
from the computer, counted another three seconds, then hit the keys as the diamond-shaped piper in his main screen glowed
bright red.

Twenty-eight sensors shot out from the belly of the Vessel as Malachi applied just enough body English to slip the spinning
pipe through a pair of drunken-S maneuvers. They fell in a jagged semicircle around the target area, hitting it like a hail
of rocks.

They were supposed to form a circle, but this was going to have to do.

“All right,” said Telach, standing up. “Jimmy, you have the sensors?”

“Just starting to bring them in now,” said the Art Room techie charged with hooking into the bugs Malachi had dropped. “Got
a couple of dead ones.”

“Enough for a profile?” she asked.

“I think so—got a couple of dead spots.”

“All right, ask Tommy if he can work with it.” She slapped Malachi on the back hard enough to make him lose his breath. “Good
work.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he told her, scanning for a place to blow up his high-tech dump truck.

11

The canvas bag hit Dean in the back as he stood a few yards from the van, his hands on his hips, admiring the moon and wondering
what the hell they were going to do next.

“Put ’em on, cowboy,” said Lia.

Dean picked up the bag and held it as she walked toward the edge of a stone wall about eighty yards away where Karr was watching
the nearby highway with a starscope. The moon was so bright it was possible he didn’t even need the device. Karr gave her
the scope and walked back toward the van.

The bag contained a thin vest and a pair of black pants. Dean stripped down and put on the pants, which were a little loose
and stiff-legged. He pulled the vest over his black T-shirt. It looked and felt like the thin vest a hunter or skier might
wear for additional warmth beneath a jacket. Karr explained that beneath the quilted fabric were flat tubes made from a boron
alloy; the tubes could stop a bullet from an AK-47 at twenty paces.

“What’s the deal with the pants?” Dean asked Karr. “They shielded?”

“Nah, just black. Princess is very fashion-conscious. That and they have a locator in them. If you get lost I can find you.”

A car passed on the highway nearby. Dean watched the vehicle move past, its headlights making a long arc across the empty
lot and the building.

“Another hour they usually send a guard around,” said Karr. “But we should be inside by then.”

“What are we waiting for?” Dean asked.

“Just waiting. You a big coffee drinker?”

“Cup or two a day. Why?”

“You ought to give it up. Makes you too jittery.” Karr walked over to the van and got in, emerging a short time later wearing
a vest similar to Dean’s. As Karr walked toward him, something sparkled in the northern sky.

Dean stared up at it. “Shooting star,” he said.

“Nope,” said Karr. “Not even close.”

Karr stretched his arms and put them behind his head, staring in the direction of the meteor. Dean decided that he must be
listening to something over the complicated com system that was partially implanted in his head.

He couldn’t imagine working with something like that. You’d feel like a psycho, hearing voices.

It was a damn good thing they didn’t have that in Vietnam, he realized. There was no telling what the people back at headquarters
would try. He imagined being on patrol and having Dick Nixon whispering in his ear.

Dean laughed. Karr turned around, gave his own laugh, then went back to staring into the night.

The next step would be using pure robots, thought Dean. Maybe that was a good thing—better a machine got broken than a man
killed. Still, it didn’t feel entirely right.

Could’ve used this vest in Nam, though. Lightweight sucker.

Karr turned abruptly and walked toward him. As he did, he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled very loudly.

“They hate when I do that,” he told Dean, tapping him and heading back to the van.

“They had some problems putting out the sensor net, but we’re good to go,” Karr said, opening the door. “Hop in. Princess
can ride in the back.”

He started the motor, then took a small handheld computer from inside his shirt. He clicked a switch and a grid map appeared;
another flick and a white-and-black diagram filled the screen.

“Are we going or what?” said Lia, opening up the back.

“Keep your shirt on.” Karr slid the van into drive and they started rumbling toward the highway. “Here’s the layout,” he told
Dean, handing him the handheld computer. “This part here is a set of pumps and piping for underground oil tanks; don’t worry
about it. We go through this fence, down through this storage yard to this compound. It’s like an auto salvage place, a junkyard.
Except the cars are hot, and generally new. That’s where our parts are. If they’re ours. We don’t think there’s guards, but
we’ll know in a minute or two.”

“How?”

“That flash of light was a space-launched plane self-destructing. Before it did that, it dropped a bunch of little sound and
motion detectors, okay? They’re on the ground, and our people back home are using them to augment the other data they have.
We wait until they’re sure they have all the players set, then we move out.”

“They can see what’s going on in there?” asked Dean.

“Not exactly. There wasn’t time to move the optical satellite that covers this region, and besides, it’s night, right? Can’t
see in the dark. You’re going to ask me about infrared, right?”

“Not really,” said Dean.

“Not precise enough, not for this. This’ll do; don’t worry.”

Karr cranked onto the highway.

“You can shoot, right?” said Lia from the back. “I mean, you
are
a sniper.”

Dean turned to find Lia holding a submachine gun on him.

“Take it,” she said. “I know it’s a piece of shit. Just take it.”

“Nah. Solid gun,” said Karr. “Just old. Like Dean. He’s not a piece of shit.”

“Remains to be seen,” said Lia.

The gun looked like a shortened AK-74, with a folding metal stock and an expansion chamber on the muzzle to control the gases
when fired. It had a long banana-style clip and an oddly shaped flash hider.

“AKSU. Basically a sawed-off AK-74,” said Karr. “We have to go native. But it’ll do the job.”

Lia had a similar gun in her hand and was piling up clips from a hidden compartment in the truck bed.

“Uses a five-millimeter bullet,” continued Karr.

“Five-point-forty-five,” said Dean.

“Very good. You’ve fired it before?”

“I’ve handled AK-74s,” he said.

“Same thing except different.” Karr turned toward him and smiled. He actually seemed to be paying a little more attention
to the road now and turned his head back before adding, “Gun flies up more when you fire it than an AK-74. But it’s pretty
sweet.”

“I think I can handle it.”

“Hopefully, you won’t have to. We want to avoid it, actually.”

“Not to the point of getting killed,” said Lia. She finished stacking the clips, then handed six to Dean. The boxes held thirty
bullets apiece—a lot of lead considering they didn’t want to fire them. Dean put one each in his front pockets, then stuffed
the others in his pants.

“Smoke,” said Lia, handing him two small grenades.

“Flash-bangs would be better,” said Dean.

“Let
us
run the mission, baby-sitter.”

“We have flash-bangs,” said Karr. “You won’t need them. This is all about subtlety, Charlie. Subtlety. We’re not in Vietnam.”

Under other circumstances, Dean might have told him to go to hell—or he might have laughed at him. Karr sounded like the typical
know-it-all second lieutenant fresh from the States lecturing troops who’d been in the field taking shit for six months.

Dean shifted his clips around to get the grenades into his pockets. The vest did not contain pockets.

“Okay, boys and girls, show time,” said Karr, pulling the truck off the road. A tall fence topped by razor wire stood thirty
yards away; there was a second one just beyond it. Dean reached for the door.

“Hold on, cowboy. Put this on first,” said Karr, reaching to the glove compartment. He took out a small tangle of wires and
dropped it into Dean’s lap. Unraveling it, Dean found that there were ear buds and a mike that clipped to his shirt. A long
wire ran down from it, ending in a micro-plug.

“Where do I plug in?”

“Back of your pants, believe it or not,” said Karr. “Kind of a designer’s in-joke, I think.”

Dean fished around and found a small receptacle on the back side of the waistband.

“Hear me?” whispered Karr. His voice had a slightly tinny sound to it.

“Yeah.”

“It works through our satellite system, but you’re locked off from the Art Room. Sorry about that.” The NSA op reached down
to a panel in the door and took out what looked like a thick set of skier’s goggles. The sides were thick metal rather than
plastic, and they weighed two or three times as much as goggles.

“Starscope,” explained Karr. “Range is a little limited, but you can’t have everything.”

Dean slid it over his head, pulling the rubber strap at the back taut. The interior of the van looked like a gray, washed-out
video feed. The aperture adjusted automatically.

“The image won’t be as bright outside,” said Karr, who took out a similar set for himself. “They auto-adjust. The brains who
designed them probably thought we’d break them if we had a knob to fiddle with.”

“Are we going or what?” asked Lia over the com system.

“Keep your shirt on, Princess.” Karr held up his small computer for Dean, who had to slide the night visor off to see the
screen. “Lia’s point, I’m next, you’re tail. We go over the fence, avoid the minefield, move across, and get to the big shack.”
Karr traced the path with his finger, then clicked on the button in the lower left-hand side of the screen. Displays of the
layout of the facility flashed on, showing each member of the team as a green circle moving across the target area. “You’re
always in the back. You watch our butts.”

“There people in there?” Dean asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Karr. “They’re at the far end, though. I think we’re cool.”

“What do I do if they kill you?”

“That won’t happen,” said Lia, opening the rear of the van.

“Just remember, you’re paid to watch,” said Karr. “Come on. This is easy stuff compared to what you did in the Marines.”

“How do you know what I did in the Marines?”

“I keep telling you, Dean, I know everything there is to know about you.” Karr gave him a shoulder chuck and started away.

The way George Hadash had explained what he needed Dean to do, it had sounded more or less like glorified tourism. Dean had
realized, of course, that there was more to the situation than what Hadash was saying and that there was a possibility of
at least some danger. But until this moment he hadn’t actually considered how much danger there might be. He didn’t particularly
relish the idea of being shot at, much less dying in the Russian wilderness.

Fear began creeping up his back as he walked across the field. It felt like a small monkey, nails poking slightly as it curled
itself up on his shoulder. The ground was a little wet and Dean slid slightly with each footstep. The visor, though light,
sat awkwardly against his cheekbones. The assault gun had an oddly unbalanced feel, seemingly all in the stock. Dean pushed
it against his side, reaching up to his ear to adjust the com set.

“Keep your spread,” said Karr.

“No shit,” muttered Dean. He stopped, checked six, then crouched, trying to relax. The visor gave the sky a purple glow where
the clouds cracked to let the moonlight through. The sheds and warehouse looked like a shot used in a movie to set a scene.

A dark, foreboding scene.

Dean thought he heard a helicopter. He lifted out the ear bud to listen better, then realized it was just an odd effect of
the com device.

“Don’t fall asleep back there,” said Karr. “We’re at the wire.”

“Not charged,” said Lia, testing it for electric current.

“Go for it.”

Dean heard a soft clang of metal as she started to climb the fence. He stopped about five yards from Karr, then turned to
face the van. He didn’t look back until he heard Karr’s grunts going up the fence.

Lia was already inside the complex, probably at or even beyond the building closest to the fences. Karr pulled himself over
the razor wire—Lia had covered it with a blanket—and went down the other side so quickly Dean thought at first he’d fallen.

“Your turn, baby-sitter,” said Karr, after topping the second fence. “Keep in touch.”

The Kalashnikov swung as he climbed. Dean paused at the top of the fence, examining the blanket covering the wire. It was
made of a metal mesh and something similar to Teflon. He found he could grip the sharp wire strand through it without cutting
himself as he pulled himself over the fence.

The second fence, much lower, had three strands of barbed wire on the top. Lia had secured these with a pair of what looked
like carpenter’s C-clamps, flattening them down. Even though Dean was careful, he caught the side of his pants leg against
the barbs.

At the bottom of the fence, he checked his six once more and scanned forward and back along the fence line. Maybe their high-tech
gear was worth something, he realized; without it he would have been worried about the bulky shadow to the left, wondering
whether there was a gun emplacement there.

He left the fence for the back of the building, moving toward the spot Karr had shown on his handheld. The position gave him
a view of the yard beyond the structure as well as the approach to the fence and the field behind them. He crawled the last
few feet, peering around the corner from the bottom. The steel warehouse had been constructed on a large cement pad. The foundation
sagged about midway, and the warehouse wall hung down at a slight bow. There were some small floodlights at the front of the
building, aimed toward the side. Their oblong circles of light left more than two-thirds of the alleyway in the dark. Across
from the warehouse sat a brick wall that had once been part of another building; now it was just ruins. The back wall no longer
existed, but the front remained almost completely intact, with a large metal garage-type door and two windows that seemed,
at least in the night viewer, to have glass.

“More fuckin’ razor wire,” said Lia over the com set. “What the hell—do they make it here?”

“Eyes on the prize,” said Karr.

“Dogs!”

Dean could hear barks in the background, then a faint
whiffff.
There was a whine, another
whiffff.

“Shit,” cursed Lia. “What the hell—they couldn’t find them? Shit.”

“Eyes on the prize. I’m on your left.”

“Right, right—truck!”

Dean heard the vehicle and saw a pair of headlights moving well beyond the building. He moved up the alleyway to the front
of the warehouse building, but he still couldn’t see the truck. Karr and Lia exchanged a terse pair of curses, then stopped
transmitting. Dean pulled out one of the ear buds, listening for the truck. He heard the motor somewhere on his left, beyond
a row of squat shadows that had been drawn as one-story buildings on Karr’s handheld. Then he heard something else considerably
louder—the crackle of three or four automatic rifles working through their magazines.