The Seventh Angel (44 page)

Peters had three of the latches released. He had only one more to go, but it didn’t look or sound like he was up to finishing the job.

The Sailor wasn’t talking at all now. His breathing had become an irregular rhythm of strangled groans.

Ann looked up at Boats. The sky in the East was still growing brighter, and the big Sailor was becoming easier to see by the minute.

“
That’s enough,” she said. “Peters can’t do it. We’ve got to pull him out of the water.”

“
Yeah,” Boats said solemnly. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

He nodded to the two Sailors holding the swimmer’s tending line. “Standby to heave around.”

A muffled exclamation came over the headphones. The words, if they
were
actually words, were totally incomprehensible. But the tone of voice carried an unmistakable note of triumph.

Ann turned back toward the water, her eyes scanning rapidly until they located Peters and Mouse. The access cover on the robot’s spine was open, and Mouse was no longer circling. Peters had released the final latch, and hit the emergency kill switch.

“
Good job,” Ann said quietly. She looked up at Boats. “Let’s lower the hook, and get them
both
up on deck.”

* * *

Ann sat in her stateroom an hour later, drinking crappy Navy coffee and uploading Mouse’s error logs to her laptop. Mouse was safely strapped to the boat deck, and the ship was headed south at high speed, trying to distance itself from unfriendly territory before the sun was too far above the horizon.

The swimmer, Peters, had been half-led/half-carried toward some place called
sickbay
. Ann wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded Navy enough to arouse her instinctive skepticism.

Then again, maybe the sickbay thing wasn’t as iffy as it sounded. Sheldon probably knew all about it. She’d ask him later. Right now, she needed to figure out what had gone wrong with her baby.

A soft bleep informed her that the upload was complete. She wiggled her fingers to limber them up, and reached for the computer keys.

The situational response algorithms in Mouse’s core program were written in
ARIX
, Norton’s proprietary programming language. Like many adaptive computer languages, ARIX had a built-in parser for translating error codes into an easily-understood English-based syntax.

Ann didn’t need the parser. She was perfectly comfortable reading the codes in their native hexadecimal.

She located the most recent time index, the last error recorded before the robot had been powered down. The hexadecimal code read, “46 41 55 4C 54 30 30,” which translated as,
FAULT 00
.

That wasn’t exactly a surprise. FAULT 00 indicated a critical error that Mouse couldn’t identify. It was a catch-all error designation, common for complex machines in the prototype stages. That particular fault would appear less and less often, as Mouse’s self-diagnostic capabilities were redesigned and improved over time.

The previous time index showed the same hex code, as did the time index before that, and the one before that, and the one before
that
…

Ann scrolled through several screens of recorded time indexes, seeing hex code 46 41 55 4C 54 30 30 repeated again, and again, and again. The fault—whatever it was—had obviously occurred several hours earlier. She had to work backwards through a few thousand repetitive error codes to locate the triggering event.

After paging through a seemingly endless number of screens, all completely identical except for the time indexes, Ann finally spotted what she was looking for. The triggering event had occurred almost exactly five and a half hours into Mouse’s search mission.

Prior to the occurrence of the fault, every time index read, “54 52 41 4E 53 49 54.” That was the hex code for
TRANSIT
. Mouse had been operating in normal search/transit mode, carrying out his search plan without errors or problems.

At the five and a half hour mark, the instant before the error had been triggered, the hex code had changed to 43 4F 4E 54 41 43 54, for a single processing cycle, followed by hex code 4D 49 53 53 49 4F 4E.

Ann’s heart froze as she stared at the screen. The two strings of characters seemed to stand out more brightly than anything else in the jumble of letters and numerals on the laptop display.

Ann swallowed, and closed her eyes, trying to change those two error codes by force of will. She must have looked at the screen wrong. Her eyes were getting tired. Because those codes couldn’t be right. They
couldn’t
be.

She opened her eyes. The codes were still there, staring at her out of the laptop screen like a pair of accusing eyes.

Ann tried not to think about what they meant, but her brain performed the translation automatically. The first code translated as
CONTACT
. The second translated as
MISSION
.

She slammed the lid of the laptop closed. Damn it. Damn it, damn it,
damn
it!

Mouse had done his job. He had found the submarine. And then, when the robot had attempted to shift from transit mode into mission mode, he’d run into the same software glitch that Ann had been wrestling with for weeks. Right in the middle of the mode shift, his software had faulted and then triggered his emergency maintenance subroutine.

He’d been close enough to complete the mission, and instead, he’d turned away and returned to his launching coordinates.

How had that happened? Ann had written a software patch, to bypass that very problem. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t it worked?

She opened the lid of the laptop, backed out of the error logs, and loaded the program modules she had written to prepare Mouse for this mission.

It took her only a few seconds to find the address in the program where the patch should have been installed. It wasn’t there.

Oh god! How had that happened? Had she forgotten to install the patch? She couldn’t have. There was just no way.

But she
had
forgotten. She’d been so cocky, so sure that she had done everything perfectly. And she had somehow forgotten a critical step. Maybe even
the
critical step.

This whole mess with the missile submarine could have been over by now, if she’d done her job. But she’d forgotten.

Or
had
she? What if it hadn’t been an accident? Or rather, what if she’d
wanted
to forget? Was that possible?

She didn’t like these Navy people. That wasn’t exactly a secret. And she didn’t want to be party to killing the crew of that submarine. That wasn’t a secret either.

Maybe she had made some subconscious decision to screw this up. She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel that way. But how would she know? How could she be sure?

What if this had been their one chance to get the sub? And she had screwed it up.

She closed the laptop again. What the hell was she going to do now?

3
^RD
EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL COMPANY

ICE PACK - SOUTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

0752 hours (7:52 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The U.S. Marine Corps CH-53D helicopter was flying low—the pilot hugging the ice, trying to blend his aircraft into the ground clutter to minimize detection by hostile radar.

Aft of the cockpit, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong and the three other Marines assigned to his EOD response element occupied only a small corner of the helicopter’s 30-foot-long cargo/troop compartment. The team’s detection gear and disruption equipment took up more room than the team itself, but the big compartment was still nearly as empty as the icy terrain they were flying above.

Gunny Armstrong looked over his team. Hicks and Travers were sleeping. Staff Sergeant Myers was peering out through one of the starboard windows. They were good Marines, all three of them. They were trained, and motivated, and damned good at their jobs. Gunny was proud to have them under his command.

He turned to look out of his own window. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said. He spoke at a normal volume, and his voice was lost against the howl of the helicopter’s turbines and the chop of the rotors. He was talking to himself, anyway. No one was
supposed
to hear. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said again. “It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna fucking work.”

He tugged the folds of his neck gator into a more comfortable position, and hauled the zipper of his ECWCS parka up another few notches. The parka, like the rest of Gunny’s Marine Corps issue survival gear, was part of the 2nd generation Extended Cold Weather Clothing System. And—like all the other ECWCS gear—it was patterned in the leafy greens, browns, and tans of the woodland camouflage scheme. There was supposed to be a white outer garment, for operations in snowy environments, but the Supply Sergeant had checked the wrong block on the requisition form, and they’d gotten a shipment of meat thermometers or something stupid like that.

So much for that camouflage shit. In their pretty green suits, Gunny and his fellow EOD techs were going to stand out against the ice and snow like a bulldozer in a bathtub. If anybody came looking for them, they’d be screwed. Of course, there was a good chance that they were screwed anyway.

Through the scratched Plexiglas window, the ice below was nearly a blur, sliding under the belly of the aircraft at 190 miles per hour. This entire mission was a blur. The whole thing had been thrown together at the last minute, with almost no preparation. And that was a good way to get Marines killed.

The plan called for the chopper to insert the team, and then turn south and head for the open sea, where it could refuel with one of the destroyers operating over the horizon. According to intel, the Op-Area was crawling with MiGs, and the CH-53 had a radar cross-section the size of a barn. Moving the aircraft to a standoff position made good tactical sense, but Gunny Armstrong didn’t like the idea of having his Marines stranded on the ice.

If the mission went sour, their options for rapid emergency evac were basically zero. Not that the ancient 53 was much of an evac platform anyway. The damned thing was older than Gunny’s father. It leaked, and rattled, and shook so hard that it wobbled your teeth. If this job was really as important as battalion was making it out to be, why hadn’t somebody called up one of the V-22s instead of this flying relic?

His only satisfaction lay in the knowledge that Master Sergeant Pike and Response Element One weren’t riding any better. They were at the western end of the Op-Area, flying in a CH-53 just as rickety as this old piece of crap, toward the Alfa and Bravo sites.

Gunny’s people, Response Element Two, had been assigned to the Charlie and Delta sites, at the eastern end of the Op-Area. Element One and Element Two had both been directed to work from north-to-south, disarming the northern sites first, and then moving down to handle the southern sites. The longer the disarming efforts dragged on, the more risk there was of being spotted by hostile forces.

In theory, by getting the most distant sites out of the way first, the teams would put themselves closer to evac if anything went wrong in the second half of the mission. It wasn’t much of a theory in Gunny’s book, since the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be any greater in the second half of the operation than it was in the first half. But that was the sort of half-bright thinking that the rear echelon types were famous for.

Nobody was calling this a suicide mission, but that’s what it was starting to smell like. His team of Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs had been assigned to locate and disarm multiple pre-positioned explosives packages of unknown size, strength, and configuration. They had no idea of what these packages might look like, no idea of how sensitive they might be to intrusion or tampering, and only rough estimates of their locations. To put the icing on the cake, they’d be working in near-arctic conditions, under a sky dominated by hostile air cover.

If
that
wasn’t brilliant tactical planning, Gunny didn’t know what was. He grunted. Some genius back at G3 needed to have his ass kicked for dreaming up a goat rodeo like this. If they got out of this alive, Gunny might just have to go look up the idiot in question, and kick down the door to his fucking office.

The idea made the Marine grin—a cold and feral expression, with no trace of humor in it. He was nearly ready for the purge now. Nearly annoyed enough, and worried enough, and frustrated enough for the final piece of his emotional preparation.

The
purge
had been Colonel Ziegler’s term, back when Gunny Armstrong had been a punk Pfc. with the 11th MEU in Iraq.

“
You don’t start a patrol when you’ve got to take a dump,” Colonel Z had said. “You hit the head
before
you hit the trail. You get all the shit out of your body, so it doesn’t slow you down.”

“
Well you’ve got to do the same thing for your
brain
,” the colonel had said. “You can’t go into combat with a bunch of unnecessary shit clogging up your brain. You’ve got to offload it. You’ve got to
purge
it. You’ve got to call up all of your doubts and angers ahead of time. Think about it. Stew over it. Get
mad
about it. And then
get rid of it
. Let it go, just like taking a dump. So when the time comes to be a Marine, you’ve got nothing else on your mind but being a Marine.”