CHAPTER 27

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Torgax.

“I know, right?” said Frell.

“You’re a sucker, you know that? A squish.”

“It’s true. What can I say?”

“An apology, for starters. For dragging me along with you.”

“Hold your breath.”

Torgax grunted. “Pretty sure this is Green Team,” he said, zooming in on the sniper and spotter setting up on a nearby rooftop.”

“Looks like it. Let me try to get an angle on the trucks.”

“All right.”

Frell had the flight controls, while Torgax worked the sensors. It was easier that way, as long as they had the hands to spare. With a few inputs on his tablet, Frell directed the drone into a gentle, sweeping turn toward the west. The trucks were parked in a narrow alley, an “urban canyon” running west to east and ending against another wall, so they could only be observed properly from above (which was next to useless) or from due west. Frell was hoping that with enough of an angle, he might be able to see in through the windshields. Torgax queued the drone’s sensors back to the point they had marked when the trucks had parked and then watched the buildings slide out of the way until the trucks came into view.

“Right there,” said Torgax. “Let me draw you a bearing line.” He plotted the aircraft’s location and a line from there to the truck. His artwork appeared on Frell’s tablet as well, and Frell directed the drone into a long, narrow racetrack pattern along that line, so that they would have long stretches of stable camera with a good view into the alley. “Perfect,” added Torgax as he saw the programmed flight pattern appear on his screen.

As the drone moved away, he zoomed in on the windshield of the lead truck. “Glare,” he said. “Thermal looks good. Let me try laser.” He activated a fine laser sensor, which began scanning the camera’s field of view, capturing a matrix of extremely precise distance measurements.

“You won’t have enough resolution for facial recognition,” said Frell. The laser’s beam divergence angle was very small, but he surmised that at this distance it would not be small enough to render the kind of detail they were looking for. The laser’s wavelength was such that most of it passed through glass in the manner of visible light, so once the system had accounted for refraction, it was able to build a three-dimensional model of that portion of the vehicle’s interior which it could reach from its present angle.

However, true to Frell’s guess, it only produced a general impression of two men wearing vests and helmets with goggles flipped up.

“Still, good tech. You can even see the goggles,” remarked Torgax. He took a particular thrill from any opportunity to play with the high-end gear.

“That is pretty great.”

“Whoa, hey! There! Glare just cleared.”

“Mark,” said Frell, marking the drone’s location on their tablets.

“And I’ve got a picture for you. Stand by.” Torgax took a snapshot from the drone’s camera and pushed it to Frell’s device.

“Oh, yeah. That’s Constantine for sure. So this is Green Team.”

“All right. I guess I can go back to sleep, then,” observed Torgax.

“Whatever, man.”

True to his word, Torgax lay back and closed his eyes. Frell left the drone on autopilot and took over control of its camera, reclining and making himself comfortable while he swept the area. “Another sniper team,” he said after some time.

“Good for them,” said Torgax. Constantine seemed like good people, as did the girl, Melody, and Constantine’s SOF unit seemed to be not complete trash. They were taking a considerable risk being here at all, and he was prepared to acknowledge that. However, he did not invest himself in the natives quite the way Frell did.

“And a third,” said Frell. “Nice.”

“Still don’t care. Wake me when Red team gets here.”

Frell chuckled. He bore Torgax no ill will for the latter’s indifference. Indeed, Torgax’s approach was probably the more professional. However, some empathy was essential on a mission like this. They enjoyed working together partially because of their differences. The attitudes they shared, though, were also crucial to their partnership. Both were excited for Red Team to show up; both enjoyed a good gunfight, and “smoke-checking” a few Task Force Royal personnel would give them some much needed relief on what had become a very stressful mission.

The morning passed, Torgax slept, and Frell let him lie until Ashiro showed up. “Blue Team, on the stage,” he said, rousing Torgax. “And be advised, we’ve had an aircraft circling the city for the last hour.

It just worked its orbit over this area. I think Red is on their way.”

“Excellent,” said Torgax, sitting up and collecting his things. “Green’s snipers?”

“ISR-savvy. Haven’t been spotted yet, far as I can tell.”

Frell watched, via his own drone feed, Ashiro’s crew go about preparing for the shoot, while Torgax began scanning the area from his vantage point, looking for any sign Red Team. After a few minutes, he found it.

“Here we go. Right under our noses.”

“What’cha got?” said Frell, chuckling inwardly at Torgax’s use of the idiom.

They were on separate rooftops, somewhat removed from one another, but both some distance to the south of the park, and they had a view to the south parking lot.

“Two vehicles. Just dismounted a woman with a dog. An actual dog, to be clear. Thermal and radar show both cars are full.”

“Sounds likely.”

“Marking it.” Torgax pressed a button, and his equipment performed a quick calculation, based on his known position, his direction and azimuth of regard, and the distance being reported by his built-in rangefinder. It plotted the location of the vehicles on his tablet and Frell’s, and Frell with a few taps snapped the drone’s camera to the mark.

“Contact,” Frell reported. “I’m padlock the vehicles. Can you keep an eye on Blue Team?”

“Yeah.” Torgax shifted his attention toward the distant park.

Frell kept half an eye on the cars via the drone’s camera feed while he pulled up the EM spectrum analyzer on his tablet. “Oh yeah. Lots of push-to-talk activity, on a couple of different channels,” he reported. “All encrypted. Everyone’s here. Hold on.” He picked up his rifle and rested it across his knee. He had mounted the directional “microphone” for his EM scanner on his rifle for precision, and it reported a spike on one of the two identified channels when he aimed it at the cars. “Red Team!” he said. “Welcome!”

“Excellent,” remarked Torgax again. “Keep ‘em locked up.”

“Oh yeah.”

They watched and waited.

“Nothing from Blue Team,” said Torgax. “They’ve set up to film, and posted a couple of guys for security, I guess. Cute.”

“Red Team is dropping another dismount. Ah, with a pack. Sniper, maybe?”

“God, I hope so.”

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Frell laughed. “Okay,” he continued, watching the overhead feed. “They’re moving on… and splitting up. Interesting. One’s going into the west lot. Parking. The other is going north. Trying to cover all the angles, I guess.”

“We’ll see. Which building did the sniper go in?”

“Not sure he’s a sniper, but here,” said Frell, marking the building on their tablets.

“Got it.”

“Can you see that from where you are?”

“The east parking lot, no, but I can see the upper floors of the building.”

“Okay. Can you watch that and Blue Team? I want to follow the sedan.”

“Got it.”

Frell locked the drone’s camera onto the sedan and followed it. In due time it rounded the north side of the park and deposited another passenger. “One more dismount, male, with dog. Now they’re heading back.”

“Roger. No sign of the sniper,” said Torgax.

“We don’t actually know he’s a sniper.”

“Whatever.”

Frell would have rolled his eyes, but he needed them in order to watch the sedan as it once again turned south, toward the park’s east lot. Eventually, it entered there. “Okay,” said Frell, “they’re reconsolidating. Dismounts… Looks like three, getting into the hatch-back.”

“Cool,” said Torgax. It was another colloquialism he had picked up from the Boss, and he had learned to use it in every possible inflection—in this case, absolutely dismissively. “I can’t see this sniper anywhere,” he added.

Frell lowered his tablet and shot Torgax a look, which of course the latter would not have been able to see through his helmet even if they had not been several city blocks apart.

“Anyway,” continued Frell, resuming his drone-fed vigil, “no movement. Looks like they’re just waiting.”

“Which means we’re all just waiting, now. You, me, Blue Team, Green, Red… everybody waiting on whatsername. The girl.”

“Melody.”

“Yes. The one you want to bed.”

“Oh, come on!” Frell snapped. “We’re on the job, here, man.”

“You’re right. My apologies.”

“Just go back to sleep, already. I’ll wake you up if anything interesting happens.”

“No, I’m good.”

“Just because I enjoy a little cultural exchange,” muttered Frell. “God.” They waited. They watched the others waiting. It was not very exciting.

Then Melody Ritter arrived.

“She’s here,” said Torgax, spotting her first as she made her way across snow toward Ashiro and his cameraman. “Coming from the south.”

“Visual,” said Frell. “All right, got the dog walker following her from the south, the female. Label Red One.”

“Roger,” said Torgax, watching through his rifle scope. “We’ll call the other one Red Two. He’s coming in now from the north.”

Frell shifted his drone’s camera back to east parking lot. “Now the rest of Red is dismounting… well, three of them, anyway. I can see a couple still in the car.”

“What’s Green doing?”

“Stand by.” Frell shifted his camera again, thanking good habits and good training that he had plotted each of these locations in his computer so that he could snap the camera to any one of them with a few taps of his finger. “They’re rolling.”

“All right. I’d say keep eyes on Red. Green’s gonna do what they’re gonna do.”

“Agreed.”

“They’re closing in on her,” continued Torgax, still watching through his weapon’s optics. “I think she’s ID’d the woman—She’s down. Melody just took a hit.”

“Red One?”

“No—Dog,” he interrupted himself. He activated his rifle’s trigger. His weapon jolted quietly, but its projectile cut through the air with immense speed, leaving a thunderous sonic crack and an ever so faint trail in its wake. The dog tumbled. “Dog’s down. No,” Torgax resumed, “the shot came from somewhere else. Green’s moving in. I’ll bet you it’s that sniper. Radar?”

“Stand by.” Frell was reviewing the data stream from the drone’s high-resolution air-to-ground radar, recorded at the moment Melody fell. “Yep, got a trail. Right to that same building.” The radar had detected a minute doppler shift in its reflections along an arc, from the building they had identified earlier to Melody’s chest. “I think I see which window. Moving in.” He drove the UAV into a dive and oriented it toward the suspect window. “Third floor.”

“Looking,” said Torgax, examining each window through his weapon’s optics. “I don’t even see a window open.”

“Got it. Second from the south on the west face. It’s just cracked open. Oh, man, he is way back in there. Painting.” Frell activated the laser scanner, and the drone began building a model of the interior of the room such as it could see through the window. Torgax, on his end, accepted a prompt to render the model as an AR overlay in his field of view. Using his exact location, and the drone’s, and extremely precise measurements of where each was looking and the distances involved, the system could draw icons and even three-dimensional objects as if they were out there in the world, fixed in space. Within moments, he could see (as if looking through the walls of the building) a basic impression of a man lying on a table inside the room in question.

“Can you get him?”

“I can see him. We’ll see if we can get penetration.” Torgax lined up his weapon on the man’s vital zone, his upper torso. The same systems which were able to locate and render augmented-reality iconography on his display likewise automated a great deal of the compensation for his weapon’s ballistics—not that there were many ballistic factors with this weapon, given the mindboggling speed of its projectiles and the relatively short distances involved. What they could not tell him—what he had to rely on experience to predict—was what the projectile would do when it encountered brick and mortar. Given the angle, it would likely only have to pass through one outer brick wall and one much softer interior wall. There would be some spall, but over the distances involved, at these speeds, the deflection of the penetrator would likely be minimal.

“Set.”

“Send it.”

Torgax fired.

“Wow,” said Frell, watching a thermal feed as a shotgun spray of hypersonic brick bits and metal struck the hidden sniper inside the apartment. “He’s down.”

Torgax swung his weapon back to the park. “Green is on site. I’ve got Red One and Two both down. The rest of Red is moving in. The girl is—”

“Alive,” said Frell. He could see her moving a little, and the drone’s radar had detected the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Deep and steady. It could not pick up her heartbeat due to the thick steel plate covering her ribs. “She’s armored.”

“Good thing. That must have been a hell of a thump, though.”

“Yeah. All right, I’m going in.”

“You’re what?” Torgax turned to look across the rooftops at Frell.

“Now or never, man,” Frell replied. “Say ‘no,’ or I’m going in.”

Torgax stared in Frell’s direction for a moment, and then he settled into his rifle again and switched it to fully automatic mode. “Fine,” he said. “Approved, but be careful. You know the suit won’t make you invisible in this light.”

“I’ll stick to the river. Drone hand-over,” he added. “You have full control.”

“I have control,” said Torgax, accepting the prompt which had popped up on his display.

“You have control. See you in a bit.”

“Mm,” muttered Torgax.

Frell snapped his own rifle to his back—powerful electromagnets there would hold it securely for him on the run—and then he ran.

Really putting the suit to work was a bit like opening the throttle on a supercar. It accelerated with shocking power, leaving foot-print dents in the polycarbonate roof of the building and a crack in the brick where Frell launched himself off the roof’s edge and across a narrow street, to the roof of the next building north. He barely managed two strides on that building before jumping again. The third building was the last. Off to his left on that same rooftop lay one of Green Team’s sniper/recon elements under a sheet of old construction tarpaulin. He did not bother to look to see if they noticed his passing; he was there and gone too quickly. The building slipped out from under him and he fell. His suit had no aerial propulsion, but its legs could absorb an impact at near terminal velocity, as long as he landed and rolled correctly, which he had well trained to do. Frell struck asphalt near the north side of the street and continued apace, launching himself like a rocket past the south parking lot and through the trees. Several passers-by—or rather, people whom he passed by, in a dim flash—cried out in surprise and confusion. To them, he knew, he would look like a shadow, detached from any surface, passing at incredible speed. He pushed off a tree to adjust his trajectory toward the river, and the entire tree shook as if struck by an invisible automobile.

He was moving so quickly that he almost failed to descend into small gully which contained the brook. His momentum carried him across it and he impacted the opposite bank before running down toward the water. He danced from one side to the other of the brook and then dug in as the bridge flitted over his head, bringing himself to a stop.

“You’re there,” said Torgax. As always, he could not precisely see his partner in the visible spectrum, but his suit’s other sensors and the telemetry provided by Frell’s suit over their shared data network allowed his display systems to render an impression of Frell in his actual location. “Bringing the drone down for a distraction.”

“Sounds good,” said Frell.

“Lot of guns in there, man. Be careful.”

Frell took a moment to review the drone feed, and then he began climbing up the embankment. With his suit, he could have simply leapt out of the creek-bed, but the situation on the field above looked a bit tense, and the last thing they needed was him landing in their midst like a meteor. The other thing this job required was a certain sense of style, a certain showmanship. One had to know how to make an entrance, and what entrance to make.

He could hear them, now. They had stopped shooting and had even stopped shouting at each other. His suit’s adaptive audio filters were picking up a conversation, and his display was showing a translation of it (as best his onboard computers could manage). He read the taunt, winced, and then heard the crack of Constantine’s rifle against Joe’s face. As he reached the top of the bank, the snowy lawn and the people on it came into view. Joe on his knees. Constantine over him. The little drone hovering there, drawing attention. He walked toward them, deactivating his refractive camouflage. All eyes turned his way, including Melody’s, which went saucer-large. Constantine immediately leveled a rifle, which did not surprise Frell. He stopped. He thought for one more moment about his options, and then he reached up and detached his helmet.

“Oh, come on—” said an exasperated Torgax in his ear, and then his helmet was off. For a very long time, it seemed, everyone was quiet, and no one moved. Then Constantine, still looking through his red dot sight at Frell, growled, “What the hell are you?”

Frell did not trust his own command of their language for this exchange. He had picked up some phrases and could manage basic conversation—he had more talent for it than Torgax, at any rate—but the computer still did a better job of translating and even of synthesizing intended inflections. He held up a hand, and then he touched a button on his forearm panel and spoke into the microphone under the mask which covered his mouth and nose. The computer translated and projected from a speaker:

“I’m an alien, obviously.”