Predator One (2 page)

When it did, the machine he’d managed kept running.

Running.

Running.

Bills were paid, paychecks cut, employee benefits seen to. Equipment and supplies were regularly purchased and shipped. Tier upon tier of lower-level management kept everything
greased and tuned. The great destructive machine functioned as it always had, even though there was no one at the controls anymore. The designers, the creators, the planners were gone. The worst-case contingency had, in fact, come to pass. None of them were in prison, none were in flight.

They were dead.

All but one.

And there was barely enough of the last one to even call “human.” Just a burned
and crippled lump of diseased flesh hooked to devices that breathed and excreted and pumped for him.

The organizational machine did not falter. It never so much as hiccupped.

Pharos had managed it too well to allow mistakes.

It ran and ran.

And ran.

Primed and ready.

Ticking like a bomb.

Ticking.

Ticking.

Ticking down to boom.

Chapter Four

The Resort

208 Nautical Miles West of Chile

October 12, 10:13
P.M.

“Clear,” said Top, and the others echoed it.

“Clear,” I agreed.

We were in a field of tall grass near the rocky coast of an island off the coast of Chile. Just far enough off the coast so that it rested in international waters. Way, way outside any claim of American sovereignty. Technically you could do almost
anything out here and get away with it.

There were exceptions, of course. You couldn’t build a nuke. You couldn’t set up a lab to create doomsday pathogens. NATO would frown on it. UN peacekeepers might crash your party.

But that left a bunch of things you could do. Start a space program. Develop drugs of all kinds that could be sold to countries that don’t regulate that stuff. Set up the world’s
biggest meth lab. Engage in illegal cloning. Build a sweatshop and use slave labor to make brand-name sneakers. Participate in the global sex trade. Establish a totalitarian dictatorship and oppress your own people. Stuff like that. Stuff that doesn’t generate enough political backlash to make the superpowers feel they have to act. After all, as they see it, defending oil wells and keeping their
fellow nations from becoming nuclear powers have always been far more important than freeing the twenty-plus million people who currently live as slaves here in the twenty-first century.

The whole world is bug-fuck nuts. Don’t try to make sense of it or you’ll hurt yourself.

Sadly, none of those things were the reason the four of us fell out of that airplane. We were not hunting mad scientists
with the next superweapon. We weren’t here to liberate the oppressed or overthrow a murderous dictator. That would have been much more fun. We might have even been able to get a grudging go-ahead nod from Washington. It would have made good press, and there are always elections coming up.

No.

This island was owned, through dozens and dozens of arcane removes, by a private corporation that was
actually a front for Uncle Sam.

Or, at least, a seedy, jackass nephew of Uncle Sam.

This place was a prison.

Think Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and then lower your expectations. Go farther down the crapper. Remove all traces of sanity, compassion, common decency, and humanity. Then double that, and you have this place.

They called it the Resort.

Not sure if that was done as a joke or as cover. Either
way, it made me want to hurt whoever came up with the name.

The Resort.

The island was three miles long, two wide, and most of it was nearly impassable volcanic hills, dense rain-forest growth, noisy parrots, and every son-of-a-bitching biting insect known to the fossil record.

We were seventy yards inland on the east side, having come in on the angle our computer models picked as the one with
the worst visibility for security. The terrain to the west would have frightened a mountain goat, and foot patrols were infrequent. There were tower posts with motion sensors, but Bug made short work of those. He used MindReader to hack the feeds, created a forty-minute loop, and, as soon as we were within a thousand yards of touchdown, fed the loop into the system. Their security guys were essentially
watching a DVR’d version of a quiet night. Bug did the same with the motion sensors and thermal scans. Bug loves this stuff. He’s better at it than anyone, and it’s a very, very good thing that he’s on our side.

Even so, we moved with great caution.

“Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, using the combat call signs for me and Mr. Church. “Down and safe.”

“Proceed,” said Church’s voice. We were on a team
channel, each of us with an earbud tuned to the mission channel. “Good hunting.”

“Hooah,” murmured Top and Bunny. Top’s full handle was First Sergeant Bradley Sims, former Army Rangers. His call sign was Sergeant Rock. Bunny was an ex-marine by the name of Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit. Real name. His father is a bit of a prankish asshole. We all called him Bunny except on a mission, and then
he was Green Giant.

Sam Imura was Ronin.

Bug was Bug. He was monitoring the security room, so he’d give us a heads-up if they tumbled to our presence.

“Everything’s copacetic,” he said in our ears. “Two guards on duty. They’re talking football.”

“Foot patrols?” I asked.

“Sending you their locations, Cowboy,” he said, and immediately one lens of my goggles showed a soldier walking a perimeter
line. This faded back to a white dot on a satellite map of the compound. We had markers on every warm body on this island.

Nice.

Top, Bunny, and Sam are all experienced operators. Each of them could lead any team of first-chair shooters anywhere in the world. The fact that they were my team, key players of Echo Team, always gave me confidence. They didn’t need to be told what to do. We had rehearsed
this mission fifty times, with the other members of Echo throwing all kinds of variables at us. We had it down, we knew our jobs, and we went about it like professionals.

And, yes, that still means we knew that things could, and often did, go wrong. If you do this kind of thing for a living, you accept that as part of the mission planning. You’re never locked into one way of doing things. Reaction
and response is every bit as important as intelligence and planning.

Like four ghosts, we left the grassy field and moved into the foothills of broken volcanic rock, following a path picked for us by a geodetic-survey software program. The easiest safe path. The path that wouldn’t burn us out. Safety takes time, so we moved only as quickly as common sense allowed.

I saw an armadillo waddle into
a hole, and I stepped around it, not wanting to disturb the animal. A few minutes later a chinchilla shot out from in front of Top, and he very nearly put a hot round into it.

“Fucking thing wants to be dead,” he muttered.

Farther up the mountain slope a vicu
ñ
a raised its ugly head and watched us go past, munching on a midnight snack of green leaves. Bunny stopped for a moment and stared eye
to eye with it. The animal didn’t move except to continue its slow mastication of tamarugo leaves.

Bunny blew it a kiss, and we moved on.

It took an hour to go one mile inland. Serious rocks. A lot of caution.

We fanned out to preselected spots and considered the compound.

There was a fence, which was no problem. There were guards on patrol. That was problematic. We weren’t here to kill anyone.

Absolutely no one.

Let me tell you why.

We were here to break one of the world’s worst terrorists out of a secret prison.

But it was a prison run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Chapter Five

The Resort

208 Nautical Miles West of Chile

October 12, 10:17
P.M.

Sam Imura faded off to the north and vanished. He had two rifles slung over his back. Aside from his usual sniper rifle, he had one retrofitted to fire tranquilizer darts at ultrahigh rates of speed. The tranqs would drop anyone in their tracks. The darts could do some damage, but nothing that wouldn’t heal.
They were filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine mixed with a mild psychotropic. No one who wakes up from it is a reliable witness for anything within a couple of hours before or after being juiced. It has a long technical name. We call it “horsey.” So, whoever got darted with horsey would waft off to la-la land and probably dream of sexy rainbow-striped unicorns. Something
like that. Haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard stories.

I nodded to Top and Bunny, and they peeled off to the south, then split up to go over the fence at two different points. I went more or less straight in.

As I ran low and fast toward the fence, I removed a device approximately the size of a deck of playing cards. One of the wonderful little gadgets developed by Doctor Hu’s science supernerds.
Just as Bug inserted a video loop into the cameras, this more or less did the same thing for the juice in the electrified fence. Bunny and Top each had one, and on my word we simultaneously held them toward the metal chain links. Strong magnets jumped them from our rubber-tipped gloves and attached them to the metal. There was a microsecond of static and then a meter display on our glasses
told us that we had a controlled gap in the electricity. The delay lasted thirty seconds. We were up and over in ten. Then the units overheated and fell off. Dead. The electricity on the fence resumed its normal flow.

Nice.

Inside the compound, in the security room, all that would show would be a single, momentary blip. The kind that happens if a small bird gets fried. Happens all the time.

The three big birds were already inside.

That was phase 1.

Sam was high up a tree with his rifle ready, cold eyes searching for targets through a nightscope.

“Talk to me, Bug,” I said very quietly. When you don’t want to be heard, you speak quietly. If you whisper, the sibilant
S
sounds carry.

“Cowboy,” he responded, “there’s a two-man patrol sixty-two feet to your … no, wait—they’re down.”

And almost as an after-echo, I heard Sam quietly say, “Got ’em.”

“Another one on your two o’clock,” Bug advised. “He’s walking the inside of the fence.”

“Mine,” said Bunny.

On the small display inside the glasses, I saw one white dot moving at a slow walk and then a yellow dot coming at him from behind. After a moment, the yellow dot moved off and the white dot did not. I hoped Bunny hadn’t
dented the guy too badly. Bunny is six and a half feet tall and can bench-press one or both of the Dakotas depending on whether he’s really trying.

“Got movement by the first building,” said Top.

I moved quickly across the trimmed lawn toward a vantage point beside a parked jeep. From there I could see the buildings. I switched from night vision to my own eyes because there was a row of lights
mounted just below the roof level. I kept the glasses on, though, because they still fed the intel and data to me. The compound had three structures on it. The first building was a combination barracks, mess hall, and rec room for the sixteen soldiers and nine technical staff members here on the island. To the right and slightly behind that was the main building, which was a two-story blockhouse
that we figured for labs and administration. Then to the right of that, set apart and surrounded by a second electrified fence, was a ten-cell miniprison. Because the wall of an extinct volcano backed up against the compound, there was only a need for two guard towers, and we’d chosen angles of approach that kept us off their menu.

I couldn’t see the target Top was closing in on, but then I saw
a white dot detach itself from the tracery that gave us the floor plan of the buildings. Must have been someone leaning against a wall. He moved out into the lawn, and I saw that his pace went from slow hesitation to a quick walk.

“Careful, Sergeant Rock,” I warned, “he may have spotted you.”

There was a moment of silence before Top answered. “Yeah, he did,” he said. “But I noticed him first.”

On my screen his yellow dot moved smoothly away from another unmoving white one.

Four down.

That still left twelve soldiers and the nine techs.

“Ronin,” I said, “what about those towers.”

“Gimme a sec,” he murmured. There was no sound, no crack of a rifle. His weapon was a highly specialized, max-pressure air gun. “One down.” Two seconds later he said, “Two down.”

“You are one spooky fuck,”
said Bunny.

“They don’t pay the man to be nice, Farm Boy,” said Top. “Cut the chatter.”

I said, “Go to phase two.”

Top and Bunny headed toward the barracks making maximum use of cover. I peeled off toward the lab building. Even though this was a covert and illegal base, it was run with military efficiency. Vehicles were parked in their appropriate slots, the grass had been mown, the trees were
pruned back from the fence, and all the doors, as I found out, were locked.

No problem.

There were lights on in the lab building despite the hour. That would mean the main door alarms wouldn’t be active. Only the break-in security would be armed. The keycard reader beside the front door was state-of-the-art, and all the little lights burned red. Not that it mattered, because I had my full junior
James Bond kit with me. In the DMS we have a whole different take on what “state-of-the-art” actually means.

I produced another gizmo from a thigh pocket of my BDUs. This one was small and had an adhesive strip on the back. I peeled it off and stuck it to the underside of the card reader. It went to work immediately, hacking into the reader using the full intrusive oomph of MindReader. Our computer
system is unique and very dangerous. It has two primary functions. First, it’s a superintrusion system that can enter and interpret any other system and then rewrite the target software so that there is absolutely no record of the hack. The second thing it does is look for patterns. Codes are a kind of pattern, and key codes are merely mathematical patterns stored on magnetic strips. Joe Ordinary
gets stymied by them. A computer that can hack NASA or the Chinese Ghost Net? Not so much.