Last Man Standing

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Drake turned to the others.

“It’s nothing but a show of force, I guess. They’re subduing the local authorities, letting this tournament play out as much as possible. Twenty four hours is rather ambitious, but they don’t even need that. Still, we do need help.” His eyes fixed on Crouch.

“I already explained who you need. The single element controlling this entire area is surveillance monitoring.”

Drake nodded. “Karin would have to take on Coyote’s geek, head to head, and she’d have to win. To do that, she’d have to be at the top of her game.” He shook his head.

Mai held up a hand. “She can do it. Give her the chance to step up.”

Drake didn’t have to explain what Karin Blake had lost recently.

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Alicia said into the silence. “We four can’t go. We’re tagged.”

Crouch chewed his lip. “I could get beyond the net, make the call, and return.”

“Wait.” Drake eyed him properly for the first time. “You’re not tagged?”

Crouch almost smiled. “There’s a reason I became leader of the Ninth Division, Drake.” He tapped his skull. “Smarts.”

“Coyote and her goons don’t know you’re here?”

Crouch nodded. “The only reason I didn’t bring the British Army is because I knew Coyote would have set her tripwires and traps. I wanted to test the lie of the land first.”

“Of course. Are you still as well connected as I remember?”

Crouch betrayed no emotion. “All the way to the top, my friend.”

Drake knew the leader of the British Army’s most successful covert operation’s team wasn’t referring to the Prime Minister. His influences ran a little higher, to the places where clouds obscured most people’s view. He reeled off contact numbers for Karin and Komodo and, as a precaution, for the remainder of the team back in DC.

“Karin should still be in Leeds,” he said. “Do you have a facility with a rait good computer?”

Crouch raised an eyebrow. “Rait good? I realize we’re in your home county, Drake, but less of the lingo.”

Drake smiled a little, still unsure how to address his old boss of bosses. The situation was both awkward and a little delicate. Deep down, Drake was and always would be a soldier and Crouch was his superior. But now, not only was Drake a civilian, but so was Crouch. For the moment at least.

Alicia had no such qualms. “Okay, so the Crouchster hits up Karin, gets her on the job, and we carry on offing the bad guys. Sounds like a plan to me. What are you all waiting for?”

Michael Crouch moved away at pace. Alone, he ran the plan through his mind once again, reaffirming just how important the success of this particular mission was. Lives depended on him reaching Karin Blake, both civilian and military. He was aware of the girl’s recent losses, but knew enough about her involvement in the SPEAR team’s exploits that he trusted her to step up to the task at hand.

Crouch stuck to the back alleys, a detailed plan of Sunnyvale lodged in his mind. The destruction of the Ninth Division still stunned him, making even everyday decisions that much harder and causing him to doubt himself for the first time in decades. The field of action was just what he needed.

Toward the end of the alley a merc awaited. Crouch hugged the shadows, scanning the ground for debris that might give him away if he stood on it, and moving only when the motion would not be seen. He stayed low, outside the merc’s natural line of sight. As he crept closer he saw the bored look on the man’s face, the weapon cradled low, the Bluetooth headset flashing at his right ear.

It might be useful to commandeer one of the comms.

Not for long, he reasoned. Coyote and her captain would have some kind of protocol worked out. But even five minutes might yield some precious information. Crouch considered the man in front of him. He’d heard the saying: Mercs don’t get old; and, in his way, had instantly understood every nuance of it. Mercs had no country, no home, no people back home that depended on them. This made their cause infinitely weaker. A soldier could bite back on his true origin when times got tough, whilst a merc? What could he bite back on?

A roll of bank notes.

Truth was, Crouch reflected, mercs rarely grew old enough to retire.

He darted forward, tackling the man’s gun-toting arm first, bending it around his back until he heard the snap. With a whirl he managed to stick out a fist and stifle his victim’s scream whilst at the same time bending his other wrist until it broke. Crouch finished with a savage strike to the forehead, using the man’s own gun, and crouched low, testing the air.

Nothing moved. A television blared through a partly open upstairs window. A cat rustled by. Crouch took the weapon and the Bluetooth earpiece and proceeded across a main road then down the side of a closed supermarket. The two-minute dash put him briefly in the open, but it was still the safest way to the fields beyond the town. As Crouch reached the rear of the supermarket he paused, catching the smell of smoke drifting on the wind.

He listened, senses attuned.

Though he couldn’t hear them or see them, he certainly smelled and discerned their nasty little habit. It had given them away. Plumes of smoke belched from a dark corner, among the supermarket’s recycling bins. Crouch wondered if the men had been stationed there or were taking a spontaneous break. Either way, it mattered not. If he wanted to continue at pace he’d have to get rid of them.

He tapped the earpiece, muttered several garbled words and then said clearly, “… moving away from the supermarket… help.”

Questions came back. Crouch ignored them. If the mercs had any discipline whatsoever they would check out the communication, possibly assuming one of their number was either compromised or under attack. The men back at their field office would need answers. Crouch waited. Within seconds the invisible men behind the recycling bins melted out of the shadows and proceeded boldly across the rear parking area and into the street. They looked both ways. Nothing stirred.

Except for Crouch, who crept among shadows, trying hard to keep his own discipline and not make an example of these shoddy men. A dozen far better than they had been gunned down during the attack on the Division. A dozen that he’d personally handpicked and trained, men and women that were just, fair and skilled, proud to be at their posts. Their losses could never be recouped.

It hurt Crouch deep inside. The pain felt as if the marrow was being stripped from his bones; a pure physical agony. It made him stop at the edge of the first field; it made him sink to his knees. Did he blame himself?

Of course. Shelly Cohen had set out to make a fool of him, and she’d succeeded. In fact, she’d succeeded so well that she’d destroyed his whole organization. Most of all, she’d succeeded so well he already knew that he was out of the British Armed Forces and their security games the moment the first bullet had been fired.

Burdened and bent, he nevertheless laid his own yoke aside and rose to the task. The field was dark, and led to one even darker. A number of land mines had been hinted at, but Crouch knew it was fair to say that if such an atrocity were true, they’d have been laid closer to main egress roads and points of strategic entry.

He wasn’t looking for a road or an escape route. He was looking for a signal.

Another field and a high hedge stood in his way. The final field was heavily rutted and smelled of recently turned earth. At last, after twenty minutes of scrambling, the signal flashed up strong on his cell display. He’d reached the edge of Coyote’s net.

Crouch tapped in Karin Blake’s number, listening to the beeps as the call tried to connect. The night was cool out here, exposed to the scathing winds; the vast patchwork skies arching above like the roof of some great gladiator dome. The silence that lay over these rugged fields was unbroken, millennia-strong, but nothing more than a deception. Everywhere the struggle continued unabated, unsolved.

Crouch stayed low as the call was answered by a woman’s voice.

“Karin? My name is Michael Crouch. Have you heard of me?”

A moment of silence, and then, “I’ve heard the name, but how do I know you are who you say you are?”

Crouch reeled off a favorite Dinorock quote of Drake’s, and Mano Kinimaka’s phone number. He also brought her up to speed on the events of the tourney. Karin’s silence attested to her shock.

After a moment another voice joined them. “What do you need?”

“I take it you are Komodo? Good. This game they have going is dependent on one thing alone — their ability to control their environment. At the moment they are doing it well — they’re prepared. We need to disrupt that advantage.”

“How?”

“Take their cyber superiority away from them. Once we have that we own them.”

“Sir,” Komodo said respectfully. “I get you. But this ‘game’, as you call it. This is Coyote’s challenge. This is her laying down the gauntlet. If we end it too soon won’t she just pop up somewhere else, in a month or a year, and make things even harder?”

Crouch agreed, in essence. “Not the point,” he said. “We have civilians involved. Local authorities held captive. The threat of brutal force. Even if we feared this woman might slit our throats in our beds a fortnight from now, we should still act to stop this.”

“Of course. What’s the plan?”

Crouch was about to go over Karin’s role but a moment of doubt stopped him. A leader for decades, his competency was currently in question. Who the hell was he to ask this tormented woman to put herself on the line again?

“It’s me, isn’t it?” She spoke up into the void. “You want me to take down Coyote’s network. Damn…”

“Do you think you can do it?” Crouch ventured.

“I guess. Do you have any idea how good their circuit boy is?”

Crouch narrowed his eyes. “Their what?”

“Circuit boy. Circuit girl. It’s what we hackers used to call ourselves back in the day…” she paused. “Maybe still do. Who knows?”

“No ID,” Crouch affirmed. “But the guy must be good. If not for what he’s already achieved then because Coyote chose him. In itself, that is a bold endorsement.”

“Sure,” Karin said blandly. “Are they… are they in trouble?”

“None more than usual. But they appear to be happy enough. Drake for one finds it easier to fight an axe-wielding madman than fight through the crowds at Meadowhall.”

“Yeah, I can’t see any of them shopping at the mall.”

Crouch took all the emotion out of his voice. “The night will be a long one. Will you do it?”

Karin sighed. “Of course. Of course I’ll help them. All of them, even Alicia and Smyth, are my life now. We’re family.”

Crouch didn’t dare speak for a moment. The girl had lost her parents, her brother, but still continued to speak of family so strongly. It made him hate his own weakness.

Eventually, he gave her an address in Leeds and a high-priority password.

“Go now. This will probably be our last communication until this all pans out. Hit ‘em hard, Karin, and take no prisoners.”

“You have my word.”