Strike Zone (36 page)

Starship felt the small robot spinning to its left before he actually lost the U/MF; whatever sixth sense it was that helped him fly the plane knew he was down.

The last feed from the cam in the Flighthawk's nose showed the Osprey just a few yards off. The frame froze, as if the tiny aircraft wanted to show that its death had not been in vain.

“Nail the motherfuckers in the boat,” Starship told Kick. “I'm outta the game.”

On the Ground in Kaohisiung
0021

B
OSTON'S VISOR PORTRAYED
the interior of the building in a ghostly gray. A door sat at the far end of the room, leading to a hallway. There was an office at the end outside the range of the helmets' low-power radar; two guards were holed up there, marked in the small sitrep view in the lower left-hand corner of the screen supplied by the Flighthawk sensors. The guard icons blinked steadily, indicating the view had not been updated in more than thirty seconds.

Sergeant Liu moved ahead stealthily. Boston saw a shadow in the hall and steadied his taser at the doorway.

“One coming,” he told Liu.

“Wait,” said the team leader, his voice so low Boston could hardly hear it. “We want both.”

The Taiwanese guard appeared in the doorway, holding an M-16. Boston steadied his weapon, watching the man peer through the dark room. He seemed to know they were there somehow. Boston decided he could take no chances, and fired his weapon. The doorway burned blue and the guard fell to the ground. Liu dove through the doorway from the side, spinning left in the direction of the offices where the guards had been earlier. As he did, the sitrep updated itself as the Flighthawk flew overhead once more.

“Other guard's still in the office,” Boston told Liu.

“Yeah,” hissed the team leader, and Boston belatedly realized that Liu was now close enough for his helmet-borne radar to pick up the guard.

By the time Boston reached the hallway, Liu was next to the doorway. He reached inside his fogsuit and took out a small tube that looked a bit like an old-fashioned folding carpenter's ruler. He unfolded it, hooking a wire into one end and then pushing it around the corner.

The near-infrared view was capable of greater detail than the radar, and had the advantage of not giving off a detectable radio wave. Liu configured the feed so it could be shared by the team members; a small window at the right of Boston's visor opened and both men saw the guard inside, huddled behind a desk at the left of the room.

A Minimi machine gun sat on one side of the desktop; the guard was pounding a computer keyboard, possibly erasing information. The computer had obviously been hardened against electromagnetic pulses somehow.

“Flash-bang?” whispered Boston.

Too close to the door to risk speaking, Liu fisted a yes signal and Boston reached below his fogsuit for the grenade. He thumbed off the tape as he slipped forward, crawling along the floor and then sliding the grenade into the room.

Time altered its shape in the scant seconds before the grenade went off. Boston felt Liu move, then stop; things flew into fast-forward as the grenade flashed.

“In,” said Liu, but by the time the word settled into Boston's skull, the guard at the computer was falling backward, zapped by the discharge of Liu's taser.

Boston ran to the computer.

“No. Check for explosives,” said Liu. “I have the computer.”

Boston clicked the bottom of his helmet visor, selecting a sniffer mode optimized for explosive materials such as C-4. The unit got two significant hits back in the main part of the building; the computer ID'd them as five-hundred pound bombs.

There ought to be more explosives, Boston thought—I'm not even picking up what would be used for the nuke.

“Boston,” said a controller back at Dream Command. “If you guys are secure, we need you to use Probe I so we can locate the nuke. We haven't caught it yet.”

Boston stepped out of his fogsuit and pulled out the probe, an ultra-sensitive ion detector that looked like a long wand from a vacuum cleaner and weighed a little more than three pounds. By the time he had the device out and working, Liu had slapped a special modem on the parallel port of the computer and began sending the contents of its hard drive back to Dreamland.

Boston walked slowly through the hall, passing his arm back and forth. The readings were being relayed directly back to Dreamland for analysis through his Smart Helmet system; he had no idea what the unit was picking up, only that his own Geiger counter had not detected radiation serious enough to warn him away.

Large metal-working machines dominated the left side of the room. Wooden boxes and other items were lined neatly on the other wall; most of the middle was empty.

“How we looking?” Boston asked the Dreamland people as he walked toward the area where the explosives sensor had found the two bombs. They were packed into slatted wooden crates, the sort that were used to ship vegetables back in the States. Boston thought these might be the nukes, but in fact they were a bit too small and filled with conventional explosives.

Sergeant Liu joined him when he was about three-fourths done.

“Marines are down,” Liu told him. “We have to finish the sweep before they can come in. Find anything?”

“I don't know.”

“They'll tell you. Keep at it. I'm going to go back up to the rooms in the front, make sure the data transfer is working. You okay?”

Boston nodded and kept moving forward with the probe.

Aboard
Penn
0021

S
TARSHIP PULLED OFF
his control helmet and stared at the white screen at the top of his station. He could see from the sitrep at the bottom of the screen that the Osprey was landing.

He rubbed his eyes, trying to get them to refocus and adjust to the darkened flight deck. Finally, he pulled on his headset.

“Shit. You did that on purpose?”

Kick.

Was that a legitimate question, or was he being an asshole?

Both, thought Starship, even though he knew he was being unfair.

“Yeah, on purpose. Otherwise they'd've gotten squashed,” he said.

“I got the boat,” said Kick. “Sank the motherfucker.”

“Good.”

“You saved them,” said Kick.

“I did,” said Starship.

Kick said something to someone on the ground. Starship undid his restraints, stood up, flexed his back and legs, then sat back down. He clicked the
radio into Zen's frequency to tell him what had happened.

“I heard already,” said Zen before he got two words out of his mouth. “Good going. Watch Kick.”

Starship grunted, then reached to change the resolution on his main screen. A shiver shook his upper body. His throat was dry, and he felt a thirst more powerful than any he'd ever felt before.

“Looking good,” he told Kick. “Looking good.”

On the Ground in Kaohisiung
0029

T
HE GOOD NEWS
was that the rest of the site was secure, with the Marines now arriving and holding positions around the perimeter. A computer shielded against electromagnetic pulses had been captured and was feeding itself to Dream Command.

The bad news was that preliminary data said there was no bomb here. They'd have to conduct a painstaking and no doubt time-consuming search, and hope that the local authorities took their time responding to the alarms that were now sounding about gunfire and explosions around the harbor.

But Danny had a more pressing problem to deal with: The man they had missed in the hallway earlier had barricaded himself inside a men's room. He was armed with at least two machine guns—Belgian Minimis, compact 5.56mm machine guns known to American troops as M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, or SAWs.

Egg and Danny watched him from around the
corner of the closed door, thanks to the helmet radar. The image was sharp enough for Danny to see that the machine guns were special short-barrel versions equipped with belt feeds contained in compact boxes ahead of the trigger area. The box could hold a hundred bullets.

“He doesn't have a NOD,” said Egg. A NOD or “night optical device,” also known as night goggles, amplified available light or used the infrared spectrum to allow the wearer to see in the dark. “If we could get that door down, we could get in.”

“Too risky,” said Danny. “Those bullets can go through that wall like butter. Easier.”

While they were wearing body armor, a hundred shots at very close range were bound to find something soft sooner or later. At this point, it was better to go a little slow rather than take any unnecessary risk.

Danny switched his helmet's com device to loudspeaker, and repeated the Mandarin word for surrender Dream Command had given him.

There was no response.

The language specialist at Dream Command suggested they tell the man he was under arrest, and gave him the phrase, which was rather long. Danny tried it.

“Didn't work, Coach.”

“Try Cantonese.”

“Give me the words.”

To Danny, the phrase sounded nearly identical to the Mandarin: “Nay in joy bee ku boh”—
néī yīn jōi bēi kùi bō.

His pronunciation may not have been precise, and he couldn't quite master the up-and-down bounce of the tonal language, but the captain did a good enough job to get an answer: A dozen slugs from the Minimi splattered through the hallway.

“You had the wrong tense,” said the translator. “That was
You have been arrested.”

“Forget about it,” said Danny.

“Let's just fucking take the bastard out,” said Egg. “Demo the door.”

“No. You got a flash-bang?” said Danny. “Let's see if we can make him use up his ammo.”

Egg rolled the stun grenade down the hallway, hunkering down as the loud bang and flash filled the corridor. The Taiwanese guard immediately began to fire his weapon; if he didn't go through the entire box of slugs, he came pretty close. Danny waited until he stopped firing, then told Bison to toss another grenade. It bounced, rolled a bit, and then went off. Another fusillade of gunfire filled the hall.

Danny trained his taser on the doorway, expecting that the man would run out into the hall, tired of being toyed with. But the guard showed admirable restraint.

“Let's smoke him out,” said Egg. “I'll go down and pop a smoke grenade in.”

“Not yet,” said Danny, fingering his own stun grenade. He set it, then underhanded it down the hall.

The grenade boomed and flashed, but this time the guard did nothing.

“Figured it out,” said Danny.

“Or he's out of ammo.”

Danny put the visor in radar mode and went down the hall, half walking, half crouching. The man was still there, still staring at the door. Danny took out the telescoping IR viewer, angling to get an idea of what was left of the door. The center had been shot out, but the frame and lower portion remained intact.

The man inside began firing again. Danny fell back as a slew of 5.56mm bullets laced up the corridor, the last few only inches away.

No one would blame him now for saying the hell with the damn nonlethal crap. One conventional grenade—he had two—and the SOB and his stinking machine guns would be history.

But he had his orders.

“We're going to use a variation of your plan,” Danny told Egg. “Post a flash-bang. When it goes off, I'll toss in a smoke grenade. Nail the motherfucker with the tasers when he comes out.”

“You going down that close?”

“Bullet holes show where he can reach.”

“Damn, Cap. Be careful he doesn't shoot your hand off.”

“Yeah,” said Danny. “Let's go.”

The grenade rolled down to the end of the hall. Danny pushed his head down, waiting. The helmet took some of the loud impact away, but the charge was still unsettling; he swung up and popped the grenade into the hole, slipping and losing his balance as he did.

A shadow moved behind the doorway.

Danny saw the barrel of the Minimi inches away.

He pressed the trigger on his taser just as the first bullet flew from the Belgian-made gun. Something
smacked him hard against the leg—then everything went blue, and he smelled fire.

“Shit, shit,” Egg cursed, running up. He fired his taser at the door two, three times without a target.

“He's down, he's down,” said Danny, seeing on his visor that his shot had knocked the Taiwanese guard back into the room. “I'm all right. Chill.”

 

B
Y THE TIME
Stoner got in with the Marines, the technical experts back at Dreamland had finished a preliminary analysis of Building Two. Aided by the data on the computer as well as their physical analysis, they had no doubt that one or two devices had been stored and probably assembled here.

They also had no doubt that the devices were no longer in the building.

The next logical place on the site was Building One, and Stoner sent a team inside with their rad meters and a video cam. But even before the feeds from their gear started back through the mobile transmitters, Stoner had climbed to the top of the administrative building, trying to figure out where else on the site the bomb might be.

“How you doing?” asked Danny Freah, clambering up behind him.

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah. I'm going to let Zen and Colonel Bastian know what's going on.”

Stoner folded his arms, thinking.

“I say we stop that ship right away.”

Dreamland Command Center
14 September 1997
0935

J
ENNIFER JOINED THE
others in the command center after pulling an all-nighter working with the computer team on a Trojan horse virus to take over the ghost clone's control system. Jennifer was convinced that the best bet was to simply block the communications, then try to insert some of the commands they'd intercepted. The problem was, they couldn't be sure what those commands were, which meant they might succeed in stopping the clone from doing what its masters wanted, but not be able to have the clone do what
they
wanted.