Deep Black

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.