Shadow Watch

FOUR

Clearing the perimeter fence by a hundred meters, Manuel dropped his gear bag on a tether and continued his descent into the compound. He was aware of his teammates floating in behind him, aware of the ground rushing up.

Now he pulled his left toggle to turn into the slight westerly wind, trimmed more altitude, waited until he felt the bag land below him with a thump, and hit the quick-release snap to disengage it. An instant later, he drew both toggles evenly down to his waist to flare the chute. It collapsed in on itself, spilling air.

He landed softly on the balls of his feet.

His chin low to his chest, Manuel let himself move forward in a kind of loose-legged trot, remaining upright, checking his momentum as he separated himself from the canopy. The others, meanwhile, had come rustling to the ground on either side of him. Most of them were also on their feet, but one or two had dropped a little harder, tumbling onto their backs and sides in fluid parachute landing falls.

And then they were up and slipping free of their harnesses. They hurried to recover their bags and collect the equipment inside them — grenades, plastic explosive charges, and upgraded FAMAS rifles like those that would be used by the extraction team. Exchanging their jump helmets and goggles for combat helmets with optical display units, they donned dark special-purpose visors, coupled the electronic gunsights on their rifles to the helmet-mounted displays, lowered their monocular eyepieces, and then stealthily moved out at their leader’s command, splitting into three groups of four.

If the information they had obtained was correct, it would only be seconds, at most minutes, before their presence was detected.

Along with other things of vital interest to their employer, that information would be well tested as the night ran its course.

The employees at the facility mostly called them “hedgehogs.”

Rollie Thibodeau, who headed the night security detail, preferred the term “li’l bastards,” grumbling that the way they responded to certain situations resembled human behavior a bit too closely for comfort. But Rollie was technophobic to an extreme degree, and being a Louisiana Cajun, felt an inborn obligation to be both voluble and contrary.

Still, when he was in a generous mood, he would acknowledge their value by adding that they were “smart li’l bastards.”

In fact, the mobile security robots weren’t very bright at all, possessing the approximate intelligence of the beetles and other insects that hedgehogs of the living, mammalian variety preferred to dine upon. And while they could function as surrogates for human beings in performing a host of physical tasks, scientific experts of an Asimovean bent would have contended it was improper, or at the very least imprecise, to even define them as robots, since they were incapable of autonomous thought and action, slaved to remote computers, and ultimately monitored and controlled by human guards.

True robots, these experts might assert, would have the ability to make independent decisions and act upon them without any help from their creators, and were perhaps twenty or thirty years from actual development. What existed now, and what laymen wrongly considered to be robots, were actually robotlike machines.

These conflicting definitions aside, the hedgehogs were versatile, sophisticated gadgets that had been put to effective use patrolling the four-thousand-acre ISS manufacturing compound in Mato Grosso do Sul. Through a rather complicated agreement with the Brazilian government and a half-dozen other countries involved in the space station’s construction, UpLink International had managed to win administrative and managerial control of the plant, simultaneously assuming blanket responsibility for its protection — something the Brazilian negotiators had been finagled into thinking was an expensive concession on UpLink’s part, but which had actually pleased Roger Gordian and his security chief, Pete Nimec, to no end. If their experience operating in transitional and politically unstable nations had taught them anything, it was that nobody could look out for them as well as they could look out for themselves.

The hedgehogs unarguably made looking out for themselves easier. “R2D2 on steroids” is how Thibodeau described them, and in its own way that was an apt representation. Their omnidirectional color video cameras were encased in rounded turrets atop vertical racks or “necks,” giving them a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance that many female staffers found cute — as did quite a few of the plant’s male employees, though rarely by open admission. Mounted on tracked 6x6 drive platforms, they were quick, quiet, and capable of maneuvering across everything from narrow corridors and stairwells to rugged, heavily obstacled outdoor terrain. Products of UpLink’s own R&D, they boasted a wide range of proprietary hardware-and-software-based systems. Their hazard/intruder detection array included broad-spectrum gas, smoke, temperature, optical flame, microwave radar, vehicular sonar, passive infrared, seismic, and ambient light sensors. Their clawed, retractable gripper arms were strong enough to lift twenty-five-pound objects and precise enough to pick the smallest coins up off the ground.

Nor were the hedgehogs limited to merely sounding the alarm should they find something amiss. They were, rather, midnight riders and first-wave militia rolled into one, ready to neutralize threats ranging from chemical fires to trespassers on command. Packed aboard their chassis were fluid cannons that could unleash highpressure jets of water, polymer superglues, and anti-traction superlubricants; 12-gauge sidewinder shotguns loaded with disabling aerosol cartridges; laser-dazzler and visual stimulus and illusion banks; and other fruits of UpLink’s ambitious nonlethal weapons program.

There were a total of six hedgehogs at the Brazilian compound, four posted near the borders of its approximately rectangular grounds, an additional pair safeguarding its central buildings. Each of the ground patrols encompassed an entire perimeter line and a parallel sector reaching inward for one hundred meters, and each mechanical sentry on that beat had been given a nickname whose first initial corresponded with the first letter of the direction it covered: Ned toured the northern perimeter, Sammy the compound’s south side, Ed its eastern margin, Wally its western. The two indoor sentries were Felix and Oscar, assigned to the factory and office complexes respectively. On average, a hedgehog would patrol for eight to ten hours at a stretch before having to recharge its nickel-cadmium batteries at one of the docking stations along its route, with more frequent pauses in the event of an increased task load.

And so they went about their rounds, smooth-running and tireless, responding to an anomalous motion here, an unusual variation in temperature there, investigating whatever seemed not to belong, relaying a stream of environmental data to monitoring stations attended by their human supervisors, and alerting them to any sign of danger or unauthorized entry along the fenced-in margins of the compound.

An invasion from above, however, was another matter altogether.

The hedgehog was midway through its third tour of the facility’s western quadrant when its infrared sensors picked up a wavelength reading of twelve to fourteen microns — the distinctive heat signature of a human being — some fifty yards in front of it.

The robot paused, tracking the emission source, but it had quickly backed out of sensor range.

Its computers triangulating the object’s line of movement to project its likely path of retreat, the hedgehog gave chase, slinging across the rocky soil on its all-terrain carrier.

Suddenly another source of human IR emissions appeared, this one behind the hedgehog.

Then a third on its right, and a fourth on the left.

The robot stopped again, boxed in. Its various turret sensors needed just an instant to perform a sweep extending for fifty meters in a full circle. At the same time, its infrared illuminator was casting a light field that enabled its night video equipment to scan for images in the pitch darkness.

Again the four anomalous radiation sources dashed into and out of range, still surrounding the robot, their pattern of motion keeping them roughly equidistant from it.

Its logical systems correlating the input from its probes, the hedgehog had definitively classified the circling objects as human entities and potential threats. But very much by design, its programming did not include any options for dealing with them.

Instead, it was transmitting the processed data to its monitoring site via an encrypted radio channel, leaving its flesh-and-blood handlers to decide what to do next.

“What’s up with Wally?” Jezoirski said. “You see how he’s sniffing around?”

“Yeah,” Delure replied with concern. “And I don’t like it a bit.”

Beside them, Cody, the senior man in the room, leaned pensively over his surveillance monitors and said nothing.

At their monitoring station in the bowels of the Brazilian ISS compound, the guards were studying a complex bank of dials, controls, and electronic displays that placed them at the informational heart of its security network. All three wore the indigo uniforms and newly issued shoulder patches — these depicting a broadsword surrounded by stylized satellite bandwidth lines — of UpLink’s global intelligence and threat countermeasure force, dubbed Sword as a reference to the legend of the Gordian knot, which Alexander the Great was supposed to have undone with a swift and decisive stroke of his blade. It was a method analogous to Roger Gordian’s no-nonsense approach to crisis management, making for some interesting word play, and forming the direct basis of the section name.

Jezoirski slid forward in his chair, his features limned by the pale green radiance of an infrared video display, his eyes on the IR meter directly beneath it.

“Shit,” he said. “Look at that heat emission. Somebody’s definitely out th—”

Jezoirski broke off midsentence as a warning indicator lit up on the panel. He glanced over at Delure, who took hurried note of this development and then pointed back at the video screen.

Green-on-green images flashed across the monitor — a group of human figures moving around the security robot, alternately closing in and backing away.

Cody thought of bloodhounds harrying their prey. But why would those sons of bitches play tag with the ’hog? The robots’ main effectiveness lay in their early alert and standoff capabilities against a perimeter attack. Their purpose was to buy time until human reinforcements arrived, to repel or delay an intrusion attempt while it was in progress. Their purpose was not to engage in close skirmishing once the grounds were already compromised. At that stage getting past them would be easy, and crippling or taking them out just slightly more difficult.

His forehead crunched with tension, he scanned the radar imagery in front of him. On screen, the hedgehog and the men surrounding it showed up as color-coded shapes positioned against a set of grid lines and numerical coordinates.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jezoirski said. “There’s nothing to show the outer fence was breached—”

“We can worry about that later.” Cody was already reaching for the phone as he broke his silence. “Key the ’hogs for full gamut intruder suppression. I’m getting Thibodeau on the horn.”

On Jezoirski’s radioed command, Wally hit them with a barrage of light and sound.

Its first optical counterstrike was a burst from the neodymium-YAG laser projector on its turret. To the four men around the robot, it seemed almost as if a small nova had ignited at ground level, momentarily filling the night with diamond-edged brilliance.

They scattered rapidly, fanning out over several yards — but the flash was something for which they had come prepared. They had known that a laser pulse could temporarily impair the vision or burn out the retina, dazzle or blind, depending on its power, intensity, and length. They had also known that the weapons used by Sword’s robotic defenders were calibrated to produce no lasting damage. And they had worn dark filters on their visors to shield them from the brightness, correctly betting this would make its effects tolerable.

The hedgehog’s sensory assault, however, was about to kick into overdrive. The laser flash had barely faded in the air when a group of red-and-blue halogen lights on Wally’s main equipment case began to strobe in a preprogrammed sequence, its pattern and frequency closely matching that of normal human brain waves. At precisely the same instant, the robot’s acoustic generator had begun transmitting 100-decibel soundwaves at a controlled rate of ten cycles per second. It was a resonance the invaders seemed to feel more than actually hear, a sour, abrasive humming that remained just below the level of audibility, working its way deep into their bodies, swelling thickly in their stomachs and intestines.

Each directed-energy weapon worked on the same principle, targeting specific areas within the human body, coupling the spectrum of its emission to characteristic waveforms within those areas, and manipulating them by hyperstimulation. The flashing lights attacked the visual receptors of the hindbrain, triggering a storm of electrical activity akin to the sort that occurred during a sudden attack of epilepsy. The acoustic generator had multiple targets — the inner ear, where abnormal vibrations of the fluid within its semicircular canals would throw the sense of balance into upheaval, and the soft organs of the abdomen, where similar vibrations would lead to convulsions of pain and nausea.

The combined effect of these measures overtook the invaders at once, scrambling their senses and motor functions, confusing and sickening them, provoking a hallucinatory and physically wrenching disconnection from their surroundings. Shaking, gagging, and retching, they staggered in confused, purposeless circles. One of them dropped onto his back, his bladder releasing, grotesque herky-jerky spasms running through his limbs. Another sank to his knees, clutched his heaving stomach, and vomited.

Partially overcome, Manuel knew he had bare moments in which to act. Forcing his legs to remain steady underneath him, he turned in what he thought was the hedgehog’s direction, clenched his eyes against its strobing lights, raised his FAMAS rifle, and pumped a 20mm HE round from its grenade launcher attachment. It was a crude, inaccurate use of an extraordinarily refined weapon, but it achieved its desired results. The shell struck the ’hog’s carrier scant yards from where he stood, detonating with an explosive flash.

Manuel dove to the ground as the concussion swept over him, waited a second or two, then got back to his feet and dusted himself off. A quick look around revealed that one member of his band had been killed in the blast, his flesh and clothing shredded by flying shrapnel. He himself had an open gash above the elbow. But the robot was wreckage. It leaned sideways on the burning remains of a rubber track, smoke and flames spitting from its mangled carrier. He could smell the odor of its fused wiring.

Wreckage.

He saw his remaining teammates struggling to regain their equilibrium, allowed them a few moments to recover, then hurried to gather them to his side. There was no time to linger over their single casualty.

“Vaya aqui!” he hissed. “Come on, we still have work to do.”

Much as Rollie Thibodeau loved his job at UpLink, much as he felt it was an important job, he hated how its hours screwed up his biological clock, turned his daily routine inside out, and cramped his lifestyle in more ways than he could have stated.

Take sex, or the lack of it, for one thing. Where would he find a woman who’d be in amorous sync with his schedule, falling into bed with the sunrise, emerging after sunset like a vampire? Take sleep for another. This was Brazil, land of bronzed bodies and the fio dental. How could he get any rest with the tropical daylight pressing against his window blinds, tantalizing him with its warmth, reminding him of the long, gorgeously romantic afternoons dancing past? Take, for a third example, something as important to a man as eating. Could cheerfulness truly be expected of him when his meals were fouled up beyond description? It was rotten enough being a hundred miles from the nearest city and having to subsist on the bland, unseasoned fare they served in the commissary. Rotten even when those tasteless dishes were hot out of the kitchen. But consuming them after they’d sat in a refrigerator for half a day, and then been warmed over in a microwave, was a gross indignity. And the hours at which one was forced to eat when working the night shift, calous ve, the hours were nothing short of unspeakable!

Thibodeau sat in his small but tidy office in a sublevel of the ISS compound’s main headquarters building, staring down at the plate of overcooked beef and watery, reconstituted mashed potatoes on his desk with a kind of savage contempt. It was slightly past eight P.M., and a new kid on his shift by the name of McFarlane had just strolled in with the meal, holding a dish for himself as well, looking as if he could hardly wait to get back to his post and dig into it… something that had so annoyed Thibodeau, he’d been unable to even feign appreciation as he dismissed the youngster, which left him feeling still worse for having rudely punished the messenger for the message.

Well, he would just have to make it up to him later. Explain that even the most upbeat person in the world could have his disposition ruined by two years of eating lunch at eight o‘clock at night, and a repulsive approximation of dinner between midnight and three in the morning. Breakfast alone provided a modicum of satisfaction, and only because the prep cooks would arrive for work around six o’clock, giving him an opportunity to send for some fresh eggs or waffles before the end of his shift, and thus eat at least one relatively decent meal at a relatively sane hour.

“Lord, thank you for our fuckin’ daily slop,” Thibodeau muttered in his thick Cajun accent.

His features glum, he was about to reach for his knife and fork when the phone at his elbow shrilled. He glanced over at it, saw the redline light blinking, and promptly snatched up the handset.

Other than for training drills, the extension had never been used during his term at the facility.

“Yes?” he said.

The man on the line was Cody from the monitoring station.

“Sir, there’s been a penetration.”

“Where?” Thibodeau sat up straight, his culinary woes forgotten.

“The western quadrant.” Cody’s voice was edged with tension. “Wally detected several intruders. Thing I don’t understand, we aren’t seeing any damage along the fence. No sign perimeter integrity’s been violated.”

“You sic the li‘l bastard on ’em?”

“Affirmative. We actuated its VSI banks and acoustic cannon, but…” A hesitant pause. “Sir, Wally’s gone off-line. It doesn’t look good.”

Thibodeau breathed. He’d insisted a thousand times that the ’hogs couldn’t be trusted. The hell of it was, he’d never once wanted to be proven right.

“You hear from Henderson and Travers at the gate?”

“We’ve been trying to radio them and there’s been no response.”

“Christ,” Thibodeau said. “Send some men out right away. I also want a full detail around the plant and warehouse buildings. Seal ’em up tight, hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Thibodeau paused to collect his thoughts, gripping the receiver in his fist. He was anxious to get into the monitoring room and see what was happening for himself. But first he wanted to be sure he was covering all his bases.

“We better have us some air support ready,” he said after a moment. “Laissez les bons temps rouler.”

“What was that, sir?”

Thibodeau rose from his seat. “Tell the chopper pilots to fasten their goddamn seat belts, out.”

Manuel crouched behind the gate, his arm throbbing, the sleeve of his jumpsuit warm and moist where he’d been injured. His rapid movement had worsened the bleeding, but the sentry robot’s destruction was certain to draw security personnel to the area, and any holdup would increase the risk of capture. He’d have to attend to the wound later.

Making an effort to ignore his pain, he took a triangular slice of C4 explosive from his gear bag, peeled off its outer foil, and molded it carefully around the bottom of the gatepost. Next he extracted a twelve-inch segment of Primadet cord, one end of which was connected to an aluminum blasting cap, the other to a battery-powered timer about the size and shape of a marker pen. He inserted the end with the blasting cap into the saddle charge and set the timer’s simple dial mechanism for a five-minute delay. When he pulled the safety pin holding it in place, the arrow on the dial would start to turn, initiating the detonation sequence — but he couldn’t do that until his teammates finished wiring together the charges they had already planted on supports along the fence. The thin orange detonating cord would set off the linked charges almost instantaneously, and he intended to be well away from the area before that happened.

He settled down to wait. Several yards to his left a light shone in the guard booth’s broken window. The single wall he could see from his position was spattered with blood. A limp, upflung arm rested against it above the spot where one of the lifeless guards had fallen.

Manuel looked away from the booth, moving his gaze out along the perimeter fence to where the others were at their tasks, dark blurs against the deeper darkness. Blowing a gap in the fence hadn’t been his own idea. The watchmen on duty would have known the gate’s electronic access codes, and he’d proposed they be captured and made to unlock it at gunpoint. But Kuhl had formulated a minute-by-minute plan and wanted them killed before the jump team’s arrival. With the robot and guards in the compound’s western sector eliminated, he had reasoned there would be a surveillance lapse until backup security units could arrive. This would give Manuel’s group an opening to set their explosives while Teams Orange and Yellow carried out their end of the plan.

Manuel hadn’t argued. It was Kuhl’s role to make the final calls, and his to carry them out.

Now Manuel saw one of the other jumpers come scurrying up toward the gate, a length of ’det cord winding out behind him. Not a moment too soon, he thought. His wound was large and ugly, the torn flesh imbedded with sharp fragments of metal. He would need to take care of it soon.

He inhaled to clear his head, then took the cord from his teammate and inserted it into the charge he’d just primed.

“Bueno, Juan,” he said. “Where is Marco?”

“Coming,” Juan said. He gestured toward Manuel’s arm. “You all right?”

Manuel looked at him.

“Yes, all right,” he said. He willed himself not to stumble as he rose to his feet. “Radio Tomas and the others. Let them know we’re through here. Then I pull the pin.”

In the center of the compound, three levels underground, Thibodeau rushed through the monitor room’s entrance to find Jezoirski, Cody, and Delure agitatedly studying their displays.

“What the hell’s goin’ on?” he said, noting their flustered expressions.

Delure swiveled his chair around to look at him.

“Sir, it’s Ned… the ’hog’s detected a group of intruders in its sector. Could be the same ones we saw at the western perimeter, there’s no way to tell.”

Thibodeau eyed the screen and made a low, apprehensive sound in his throat. He cared less about whether these were the same trespassers Wally had encountered than how they had gotten into the compound without initiating any perimeter alarms, and what the purpose of their intrusion might be. A man who relied heavily on instinct, he saw a pattern and tempo to their movements that took him back to his days as a Long Range Recon Patrolman with the 101st Air Cav in Southeast Asia, awakening suspicions that were almost too crazy to share.

But he could not ignore the guideposts of his own experience, and commanding a LRRP unit out of Camp Eagle had taught him plenty. Outrageous as it seemed at first blush, what was happening had all the earmarks of an airborne insertion. That would account for the intruders’ seeming ability to materialize out of nowhere, and also explain their otherwise mystifying cat-and-mouse game with Wally. They hadn’t taken on the ’hog because they needed to, but because they’d wanted to, as if their aim was to put the goddamned contraption through its paces.

Thibodeau pictured the confused expressions he’d seen on the faces of the men around him when he’d come bolting into the room — expressions that must have perfectly mirrored his own. He felt sure those looks would have given tremendous pleasure to the unwanted visitors rushing around out there at the installation’s margins. Certainly he’d have enjoyed that sort of thing on his runs through the jungle between 1969 and 1970. The slicks would swing down low over the trees wherever they saw pockets of North Vietnamese and quickly insert their LRRP teams, who would plunge into the brush seeking out targets of opportunity, causing disruption and confusion for the enemy. Faire la chasse.

“Can you give me a better fix on those bastards?” he said.

Delure fingered a button on his console to superimpose a digitized map over the radar image they’d been viewing.

“How’s that?”

“Good, good, now bring it in closer.”

Delure hit another button and zoomed the image. Thibodeau saw geographical features of the compound’s western grounds enlarge and clarify around the blips of light, indicating the intruders’ position.

“A non.” He pointed at a curving blue line on-screen. “Take a look at where they are.”

Delure gaped up at him. “Near the west drive. That’s the quickest route from our motor vehicle pool to the perimeter.”

Thibodeau nodded.

“Get the ‘hog on their asses, an’ this time hit ’em with something stronger than fancy lights,” he said. “Our chase cars gon’ be on that road any minute!”

The anti-vehicular mines they had set were simply but cleverly camouflaged, wrapped in tar paper to blend in with the pavement. By day they would have been difficult for a driver to spot. At night they would be completely invisible.

Moments after they left the access road to rejoin their teammates, Tomas and Raul heard a low whirring sound close by to the right. They were turning to investigate, their FAMAS rifles at the ready, when the security robot sped nimbly up on them, a tubular apparatus on its side swiveling in their direction, liquid issuing from its nozzle in a pressurized stream.

Neither man got to trigger his weapon before the polymer superlubricant fanned over them, drenching them at first, and then abruptly solidifying in a thin layer over their skin, combat garb, and the ground under their boots.

Raul’s immediate thought was that they had been sprayed with a disabling foam, but he quickly realized this substance was something very different — more like dry ice in the way it hardened, except scarcely cooler than the air around him. Indeed, it was almost as if the fluid had altered his physical state rather than its own, as if every part of him that it touched had metamorphosed into smooth, slick glass. All at once he couldn’t hold onto his rifle. The more he tried, the more slippery his grip became. His eyes widening in alarm and incomprehension, he watched the weapon leap from his hands, snapping out the cable that joined it to his helmet display like a hooked fish at the end of a line, then dangling almost ludicrously from his helmet. He snatched at it, his fingers making wild grabs at its stock and barrel, but it slid out from between them and dropped near his feet.

He was bending to recover it when the soles of his boots lost their traction and his legs went skating out from under him.

The ground came up hard against his back, knocking the wind from his lungs. He attempted to scramble upright, and only flopped onto his side. Tried again and slid back down. The grass beneath him was stiff and slippery. His clothes were as unbending as molded plastic. His skin was brittle and much too tight. Out of the comer of his eye he saw Tomas skidding about on his stomach in the same helpless, flailing manner that he was, looking weirdly like a man trying to swim across solid ice.

He screamed then, his mind hurtling over the edge of fear to full-blown panic, screamed at the top of his lungs, and was still crying out when the security cars dispatched by Thibodeau came racing up the access road behind them.

The same road where, moments ago, the two invaders had planted their mines.

The three dark-blue quick-response cars beat their air support out of the gate by several minutes — partly because their drivers had been closer to the motor pool than the chopper pilots were to the helipad, and partly because the Skyhawk copters had longer crank times than the armored Mercedes 300 SE sedans, which sprang to life with the turn of an ignition key.

The drivers knew going into their pursuit that the lag would be a problem. Their chopper-automobile teams were equipped with integrated thermal tracking systems that allowed them to accurately pinpoint the location of their quarry, accomplishing this by means of a microwave video link between the Skyhawks’ pod-mounted surveillance equipment and receivers on the chase cars’ dashboards. But without the aerial transmissions from the helicopters, the men in the cars were relying on nothing more sophisticated than their headlights to spot the intruders.

Tragically, they also lost any chance of being forewarned about the concealed mines awaiting them on the access road.

There were two men in the first car besides the driver, one seated next to him, another in the rear. Neither passenger ever knew what hit him. The driver did see an almost unnoticeable dark patch on the roadway about three yards before the mine came up on him, and thinking it was a bump or pothole, tried to swing around it. But the high speed at which he was traveling made that almost impossible.

The mine went off with a booming explosion as the edge of his left tire rolled over it. The Mercedes shot up into air, its front end bucking higher than the rear. While its armor-plated chassis had been designed to withstand a direct and sustained small-arms assault, its undercarriage was vulnerable to the blast of orange flame that went tearing into it, instantly killing all three of its occupants. A second later the vehicle came down on its right side and rolled crazily forward on two wheels before tumbling onto its roof, fire jetting from its shattered windshield.

His eyes large with shock and horror, the driver of the second vehicle pumped his brake furiously, swerved sideways, and went shooting past the ruined vehicle, coming close enough to see the charred, blistered remains of a face amid the flames in its rear window. Then his tires tripped a second mine and there was another roaring explosion. The last thing he heard as his vehicle was blown apart was the sound of his terrified scream mingling with those of his passengers.

Scarcely a dozen yards behind him, the third car’s driver succeeded where the others hadn’t. Chunks of metal and blasted pavement raking his hood, he wrenched his steering wheel sharply to the left, jolting off the road and onto the bordering lawn, his tires spinning up clots of soil and grass. With precious extra seconds to react, the man at the wheel of the last car veered in the opposite direction, also screeching to a halt in time to avoid sudden death.

In the darkness beyond the road, two members of Orange Team lay in silent hiding. Both intruders had moved off slightly ahead of their companions after sowing the road with mines, managing to outpace the northern perimeter’s security robot and stay well beyond its surveillance range.

They lingered where they were for several moments, peering at the conflagration through their night-vision glasses, watching the dazed survivors of the ambush stagger from their cars. Then a fresh explosion shook the compound to the west, sending a ragged wedge of fire into the sky.

Blue Team’s success violently confirmed, the two men retreated into the shadows. Their trap had been sprung, but they were not yet finished here tonight.

The final stage of the operation was about to get under way.

Kuhl stared ahead into the explosion’s glare and imagined its shock waves sending ripples through the hearts of his opposition. He had planned tonight’s mission carefully, overseen its every detail, and his preparation was bringing its dividends in results.

Now he heard a tearing metallic sound like some inhuman cry of agony, and saw a crumpled section of the perimeter fence launch into the air and then plunge earthward in a shower of sparks and debris.

It was time.

Kuhl turned to his driver and instructed him to give the signal to mobilize. He nodded in response, and flicked his headlights and taillights on and off once.

The driver at his rear did the same, and then the driver behind him, the signal rapidly making its way down the line of jeeps.

Their engines coming to life, they began rolling toward the fire and thunder of the blasts, the way into the installation open before them.

His face chalk-white, Thibodeau passed the radio headset back to Delure with an unsteady hand. Even underground, the detonations around the compound had been audible as muffled thuds, the last and most powerful of them shaking the walls as if there had been an earthquake. But it was not until after they’d heard from the ambushed quick-response team — or what was left of it, God help those poor boys — that he had started to tremble. Now, in the ominous silence that had followed the blasts, he realized only a supreme effort of will would make that trembling stop.

Thus far they, whoever they might be, had outmaneuvered and outthought him. Been ahead of him at every stage. And that couldn’t be allowed to continue.

He meshed his hands behind his back and paced the room, his teeth clenched, struggling to exert control over himself.

What was happening out there? And what was he going to do about it?

He figured the best way to start answering those questions, or trying to answer them, was by reviewing what he already knew — bad as it all was. The west gate was down, the most direct route there blocked by the fiery wreckage of his own chase vehicles. A group of heavily armed, well-trained men had penetrated the installation and were now rampant within its borders. And they had proven themselves capable of ruthless murder as well as sabotage.

He didn’t yet know the size of their force. Nor could he know their ultimate goal. But it was a sure thing their plans extended beyond scattered attacks at the periphery of the compound.

No matter what they wanted, it would be in the core manufacturing and storage areas. Possibly even the living quarters — there were some very important members of the ISS scientific team on the facility. He had already ordered these areas sealed up tight, but did he have the manpower to maintain that seal against a concentrated strike?

Thibodeau stopped pacing and laid a hand on Delure’s shoulder.

“How many people we got protecting the buildings?” he asked.

“Fifteen, twenty, sir.”

“That’d be our full day and night details. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir. With the exception of the men in the cars and choppers. And whoever’s off base.”

Thibodeau nodded. A handful of Sword operatives and other staffers preferred the long daily commute from Cuiabá to the isolation of living on the compound.

He was silent a moment, his jaw tight. Ahead of me all’a way, those devils, while I been dancing like a turkey on hot coals.

He suddenly released Delure’s arm, strode over to a steel supply cabinet across the room, and extracted a Zylon ballistic vest from inside it.

“You boys hold the fort down here,” he said, and slipped into the vest. “I’m goin’ topside.”

The jeeps stopped briefly about ten meters after passing through the gap in the fence. Little blazing islands of debris were spread over the grass around them, casting dashes of light and shadow across the faces of their occupants.

The remnants of Blue Team and Orange Team were waiting there as arranged. They scurried into the vehicles.

Manuel climbed into Kuhl’s jeep without assistance, but not without difficulty. He could hear droplets of his own blood splashing the rear seat as he settled into it beside Antonio.

“You performed well,” Kuhl said. He sat perfectly still in front.

Manuel leaned against the backrest, breathing hard. It felt as if a thousand white-hot needles had been jabbed into his arm. “Marco was killed. Two men from Orange Team had to be left behind.”

Kuhl remained motionless.

“Losses must be expected,” he said tonelessly.

Then he sliced his hand in the air and the jeep started to move again, the others following in close procession. The first thing Ed Graham thought when he spotted the jeeps from his Skyhawk chopper was that the sight reminded him of his many years as an LAPD pilot. His second thought was that the first thought was an odd and scary comment on modem American society, given how once upon a time it would have been the Hollywood sign and Mann’s Chinese Theater that were symbolic of Los Angeles, not maybe twenty men riding around in full combat gear.

His third thought, which followed within a heartbeat, was that he had better stop thinking and start acting toot-sweet, because he was right now looking down at a major shitload of trouble.

“Christ, we got us a helluva situation,” said the man seated at his right, almost yelling to be heard above the loud whop of the rotors. He reached for his communications handset. “Better radio for an assist and then shine the welcome light on our guests.”

Ed nodded, his hands working the sticks. Mitch Winter was the best copilot on the installation. They thought alike and got along well, which made partnering together easy.

He took the bird down lower as Mitch sent his message out to base and the rest of their fleet. A hundred feet beneath them, the jeeps had come to an abrupt halt, their drivers and passengers craning their heads back, staring directly up at the Skyhawk.

Peering out his bubble window, Ed briefly released the cyclic and hit the chopper’s Starburst SX-5 searchlight. At the same time Mitch touched a button on his comm unit to shift from radio to public-address mode.

The searchlight’s 15-million candlepower beam washed over the men in the convoy, its stark illumination transfixing them, turning night into brilliant noonday.

Ed glanced at Mitch. “Okay, all yours.”

Mitch nodded and raised the control mike to his lips. “Stay where you are and—”

“—drop your weapons!”

Bathed in merciless light from above, Kuhl thrust his head out his open window and looked back down his row of jeeps, shielding his eyes with one hand. The command booming from the helicopter’s PA had been unequivocal. His response would be equally straightforward.

“Open fire,” he shouted. “Ahora!”

The four members of Yellow Team had approached to within a few yards of the building, darting from one position of concealment to the next like specters in the night. Their probings had led them to conclude that their primary objective was too heavily guarded to be achieved, but they had been prepared with flexible alternatives and the one ahead of them looked much more vulnerable.

Pausing behind a maintenance shed to check their weapons, they heard the burp of automatic gunfire from off near the west gate, and then the overlying sounds of cars and helicopters converging on the area.

It might for all intents and purposes have been a prearranged cue.

Moving as one, they slipped toward their target.

Bullets rattling against his underfuselage, Graham shoved forward on the cyclic and added collective to pull pitch. The cockpit’s lightweight boron shielding had literally saved his ass, but he wasn’t about to press his luck by taking any more direct hits. Not without being able to return fire owing to Brazilian restrictions against Sword’s fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft being fitted for attack capabilities. Muito obrigado to whoever came up with that one.

As the Skyhawk banked into a steep climb, he glanced out his windscreen and quickly noted the firepower his attackers were bringing to bear. Neither the rifles nor the HMDs to which they were connected looked like anything he’d ever seen before.

“I’m sticking around till you get a shot of those lunatics out to the chase teams, Mitch,” he shouted, nodding toward the television screen on their console. “I don’t want anybody being surprised by their hardware.”

Mitch returned his nod and reached for the video controls. Gripping the sticks hard, Graham figure-eighted back toward the jeeps to get his nose pod aligned for a good camera angle — and then some of the gunmen abruptly jumped from their vehicles and began darting for cover.

There was, he observed, a considerable amount available to them, mainly crawler cranes, bulldozers, excavators, wheeled compactors, and other heavy equipment that had been rolled into the area for construction of some new buildings. They were big and stationary, their sheer size making them ideal places to hide behind.

Graham continued to orbit the scene in a weaving pattern. Out beyond the bulking machinery he saw the radial web of access routes that led in toward the installation’s hub, and turning his gaze northward, spotted the burning ruins of two chase cars on the main roadway from the motor pool. An emergency rescue vehicle and additional cars had pulled up nearby. A number of security men were walking up and down the road with long-handled mine sweepers, while others milled around the wreckage in a desperate attempt to extinguish the flames and locate survivors.

Then he saw what had sent the invaders scrambling. Their roof lights flashing, two quick-response squads were speeding toward them on secondary access roads, one on the left, the other on the right, each three-car group escorted by a Skyhawk. They would be on top of the jeep convoy within seconds.

“We sending down pictures yet?” he asked, glancing at Mitch.

Mitch nodded again and gestured at the television screen. It showed a detailed IR image of the gunmen in one of the jeeps.

“Nice shot, real nice,” Graham said. “Now let’s pray the guys on the ground are seeing them clear as we are.”

The pictures were just fine, coming through on the monitors of the chase cars and helicopters exactly as they appeared to Graham and Winter in the air. Moreover, the information relayed by those pictures proved invaluable to the QR squads, giving them an instantaneous heads-up on the number of invaders they would be facing, the positions they held, and the type of weapons they were carrying.

The guns in particular looked formidable, but the men in the cars took some comfort from their own specially modified firearms. The Variable Velocity Rifle System, or VVRS, was an M16 chambered for 5.56mm dual-purpose sabot rounds and fitted with a vented barrel and rotating hand guard. A twist of the hand guard would widen or narrow the vents, increasing or decreasing the amount of blowback gas within the barrel, and thus the velocity at which the rounds were discharged. At a low velocity, the padded plastic sabots would remain around the bullets and cushion their deadly impact. At a high velocity, they would peel apart like shed cocoons, and the bruiser ammunition would turn lethal.

There was little question about whether to use deadly force in the mind of QR squad leader Dan Carlysle as he came up on the convoy’s left flank. The men scrambling from the jeeps had killed without hesitation. Their weapons presented an obvious mortal threat. It had to be met with a willingness to respond in kind.

Still, Carlysle wanted explicit authorization if at all possible. Some political elements in Brazil were already upset by UpLink’s powerful security presence, and would be further incited by a small war occurring on their soil. While Carlysle was ready to make an on-the-spot decision, he was aware of the diplomatic mess that might follow and preferred getting a nod from his immediate higher-up.

Tearing along in the forward chase car, he reached for his dash microphone and hailed Thibodeau on the radio.

“You do what you gotta, Dan, hear me? We catch heat from the locals, soit, we’ll deal with that later.”

“Yes, sir. Over.”

Thibodeau clipped his radio back onto his belt, lit up a cigarette, and smoked in silence. Far out at the western edge of the compound he could hear a percussive exchange of gunfire, tires screeching, and more overlapping volleys punctuated by loud explosions. Christ, the whole thing was insane. He had not in his wildest imaginings expected to find himself in an engagement of this magnitude outside of the military. Nor did he relish giving orders and instructions from a distance, sending others into action rather than participating in it himself. But tonight the full responsibility of command had fallen upon his shoulders.

Still, he wished he didn’t have to hear that hellish clamor.

He dragged on his cigarette, standing outside a cluster of five low-rise concrete buildings that housed the installation’s key personnel and their families — each four stories high with between eight and ten apartments per floor, lodging a combined total of 237 men, women, and children. Thibodeau had concentrated his manpower around them in the likelihood the invaders had kidnaping or hostage taking as their goal… which was not to say there weren’t other probabilities to consider. Theft of the multimillion-dollar ISS components on base — or their design blueprints — might be an equally powerful motive for the raid, but safeguarding human lives was his foremost concern regardless.

He stood there and thought, tobacco smoke streaming slowly out his nose. Caught shorthanded, he was trying his best to manage the situation and make optimum use of his resources. Toward these ends, all non-security personnel had been restricted to their apartments for the duration of the crisis. Over two thirds of his available operatives had assembled around the residential complex, enclosing it in a defensive ring. He could see them on patrol now, and was confident they would hang tough against any attack.

However, it worried him deeply that bolstering his strength here had required shifting people away from the industrial section of the compound. The detail charged with its protection was too small in number, too thinly dispersed around a large area — a weakness that could be easily exploited by determined raiders with surprise on their side. He continued to know almost nothing about them, but what might they know about the layout of the installation? The strength, tactics, and priorities of his force? From the time they’d first appeared, his opposition had led the dance while he’d reeled and stumbled trying to keep up.

What might they know? Considering the damage they’d already inflicted, it seemed the answer was too much. Could they have used that knowledge to manipulate his decisions?

Thibodeau thought about that a moment, his heart pounding. Mon Dieu, were they dancing him right into quicksand?

His inspection of the scene suddenly concluded, he snapped his half-finished cigarette to the ground and started off toward the warehouse and factory buildings.

Taking cover behind a jeep, Antonio balanced his Barrett.50 across its hood and aimed down its reticulated scope at the lead chase car. With the car coming straight at him, he had made a split-second decision to shoot for one of its front tires, thinking it would be an easier target than the driver, whose head was ducked low behind the windshield.

He pulled the trigger. There was a crack as the gun stock recoiled against his shoulder, then a popping out-rush of air as the tire exploded in a storm of flying rubber. The car’s front end bounced down, then up, then down. But although it slowed a little, it barely veered off course — to Antonio’s utter surprise.

Its wheels holding to the middle of the road, the car kept moving dead-on toward the convoy of jeeps.

Carlysle was racing up on the jeep pulled crosswise ahead of him when he saw the twinkle of partially suppressed muzzle flash above its hood, heard a gunshot, and then was jolted hard in his seat as a bullet blew his right front tire to shreds.

Clenching the steering wheel, he resisted the impulse to slam on his brakes, and instead tapped the pedal lightly and repeatedly with his toe. The car bounced another couple of times and tried slewing toward the right, but he held on tightly and kept it under control. In a moment he got the feel of the runflat roller that had been emplaced within the tire and was now in contact with the road, ragged bits of rubber flapping around it, its shock-absorbent elastomer surface preventing the wheel rim from being damaged, stabilizing the car, and allowing him to keep moving almost as if the shot had never been fired and his tire was still intact.

As the invaders opened up on them, the QR squads reacted according to well-rehearsed tactical procedures. Carlysle’s trio of cars broke sharply to the left and stopped aslant the road, their wheels turned outward. The other group cut to the right shoulder of the access-way on which they were approaching and halted with their tires at a similarly extreme angle. Then the men in both squads poured out the sides of their cars, using their open doors and outturned wheels for protection.

Carlysle had no sooner gotten into a crouch behind his door than bullets came ripping into it from several different directions at once. The man who’d been riding shotgun with him, a recent transfer from the Malaysian ground station named Ron Newell, returned fire, aiming toward the spot where he’d seen the slender outline of a rifle angling out from behind a mobile crane, and then flattening against the car just as more gunfire studded its armored surface.

Squatting beside him, Carlysle thrust the barrel of his VVRS weapon around his door and squeezed out a long volley. He couldn’t help but wonder when their remote comer of Brazil had turned into Dodge City.

He looked over at Newell, saw that he hadn’t been hit, and gave him a thumbs-up to indicate he was also doing okay. Then there was another burst of incoming, followed by a bright flash in the darkness, and a whistling noise that rapidly got closer and louder. An instant later some kind of explosive projectile smashed into the chase car to Carlysle’s right, detonating with a bright rush of flame, crunching in the flank of the Mercedes as if it were the side of a tin box.

Carlysle stayed put, his ears ringing from the blast. The situation had to change, and change ASAP. He would not let his men remain pinned down behind their vehicles, where they were sitting ducks for whatever was being hurled at them by an enemy that could draw an accurate bead without breaking cover.

His right hand around his pistol grip, he reached into the car with his left and snatched his dashboard microphone off its hook, pressing one of the mike’s control buttons as he eyed the video screen above it. The invaders’ advanced night-vision equipment was formidable, but he and his men had something else going in their favor. Something that could prove even more advantageous if used to its best capacity.

They had the Skyhawks.

In the copilot’s seat of his circling chopper, Winter lowered his handset and turned toward Graham. Carlysle had just broken contact after sending up his request over a ground-to-air channel.

“We need to peel the blankets back from over those fuckers’ heads, give our guys downstairs a better fix on where they’re shooting from,” he said above the roar of the blades.

Graham gave him a look. “If we go any lower, it’ll be hard to avoid the ground fire.”

Winter made a face that said he knew.

Graham shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. Then: “Here’s how I want it done.”

How Graham wanted it done was for his chopper and one of the others at the scene to pull in tight over the invaders and provide closeups of their positions, while the third aircraft continued making passes from a greater height, beaming down wide-angle images. The picture-in-picture options on the QR cars’ monitors would enable all three video feeds to be seen simultaneously, giving the chase squads a composite view of the fire zone.

It was, as Graham and Winter had acknowledged, a risky plan. Submachine guns burst up at the two Skyhawks the instant they dropped in altitude. Steeling himself, Graham slipped between two huge earthmoving vehicles where some of the invaders had taken cover. Bullets sprayed his fuselage as he swept over them, rattling against it like gravel.

Graham steadied the bird and hovered. To his right, he saw the second descending Skyhawk come under heavy fire. Never a religious man, he was surprised to find himself muttering a silent prayer on behalf of its crew.

His fingers moist around the sticks, Graham hung over the attackers for several more seconds, his camera transmitting its information to the mobile receivers. Then he throttled into high gear and leapfrogged off toward another group of invaders, hoping he’d given the ground units what they needed.

The guard was sprawled on his stomach, his face turned sideways so one cheek was in the dirt. His name tag read BRYCE. He had been stabbed from behind, the knife driven in below the shoulder blades and then upward and across into the soft organs. There were tiny bubbles of blood and saliva in the comer of his mouth, and they glistened in the revealing output of Thibodeau’s flashlight.

Thibodeau knelt beside him and touched the pulse points on his wrist and neck, but felt nothing. Dead. Like the two other guards he had discovered around the corner of the building. In their case a gun, or guns, had been used. Probably, Thibodeau thought, the shots had attracted Bryce’s attention. His position suggested he had been rounding the side of the building to investigate when his killer came up and sank the knife into his back.

Thibodeau turned his flash onto the warehouse’s loading dock, and was not surprised to find its door half raised. Countless dollars had been spent on providing security for the installation — the ’hogs alone cost hundreds of thousands — but their placement had been largely intended to detect outside intruders, and in any event, no system was without gaps. While this section of the warehouse complex held important spare parts for the ISS’s laboratory racks, it was not among the handful of restricted storage or R&D areas. The level of security clearance needed to gain access was minimal. An employee swipe card taken off one of the dead guards would have been all it took.

Rising from the body, Thibodeau stepped over to the partially open door. He would need to call for assistance, but it would take at least five minutes for the nearest men to arrive, possibly as long as ten. If he waited, what sort of damage might the intruders do in the meantime?

Hesitant, a sick taste in his mouth, Thibodeau glanced again at the corpse on the ground. Bryce. He had a smooth, clean-shaven face and hair the color of wheat, and was maybe twenty-five years old. Barely more than a kid. He’d been new on the job and Thibodeau hadn’t known him too well. Never would now.

Thibodeau stood there outside the warehouse entrance and looked at him. The foam of oxygenated blood on his lips was the kind that came brewing up from the lungs with a deep stab wound. His scrubbed features were still contorted with the agony of his final moments. The killer had been savage and pitiless.

Frowning unconsciously, Thibodeau shined his flashlight through the partially open door, pushed it further up, and stepped into the darkened space beyond.

“We’ve got ten, twelve of them behind that big half-track crane on the near left, about half as many using the ’dozers for cover, a couple more—”

Momentarily releasing the “talk” button of his radio, Carlysle held his breath as a stream of ammunition babbled noisily in his direction, striking the outer flank of his car. Thus far his plan was working, the chase squads’ aerial support providing a visual lock on their opponents’ positions. Those chopper pilots, opening themselves up to direct fire, putting their lives in jeopardy… if he hadn’t been busy trying to keep his own skin from acquiring any unwanted holes, he’d have been singing their praises to the sun, moon, and stars. But maybe there would be a chance to express his gratitude later.

He lifted the radio back up to his mouth, taking advantage of a lull in the fire to get his orders out.

“—a couple more scattered behind that mound of dug-up soil over to the left. The rest are still clustered between the jeeps,” he shouted. “My squad’s the shortest distance from that crane, and I think we can swing around back of it pretty quick. I’m going to need Squads Two and Three to go up on the bulldozers. Stick to the right of the road…”

Less than thirty seconds later, his instructions completed, Carlysle signed off and led his team from the protection of their chase car, running hard toward his self-assigned target.

Thibodeau hastened through the dimness of the corridor, rifle across his chest, eyes moving alertly from side to side. His old jungle recon instincts had kicked in like voltage, heightening every sense.

Seconds ago he had called for backup, sending the message out wide so it would be squawked by his ground patrols as well as Cody’s team in the monitoring station. Then he’d moved on ahead without waiting for a reply. It might be somebody would be available to help, it might be they wouldn’t, but there was no way he could wait around to find out.

He’d made his need clear; the rest was out of his hands.

He turned a bend in the corridor, another, a third, and then stopped abruptly where it forked off in opposite directions. There was still no sign of the men he was trailing. But the path he’d followed had been the only one running from the loading dock. Up until this point. The hallway on the right would take him onto the main floor of the storage bay, the one on his left to a freight elevator that, as he recalled, rose to a catwalk that spanned the bay about halfway up toward its ceiling.

Which would the invaders have taken? A little while back he’d have figured it was fifty-fifty they’d have gone either way. But the evidence was that they had not stumbled upon this place by chance, that they’d known in advance how to gain access and had a specific goal in mind. And if they were familiar with the building’s layout, it stood to reason they would head straight for the storage bay, where ISS elements were actually kept and maintained.

Okay, then, he thought. Odds were they had gone down the right-hand corridor. But did that mean he ought to do the same? He was one against several… exactly how many he didn’t know. It would be suicidal to plunge headlong into the thick of things. The principles of engagement ought to be the same here as in any battle. While they had numbers in their favor, the edge would go to whoever held the high ground.

Thibodeau stood there another second or two, feeling constricted in the narrow sterility of the corridor. Then he hefted his weapon, his mind made up.

Turning left, he rushed toward the elevator.

Carlysle had approached the mobile crane from its left side and gotten within about three yards of it, the rest of the squad close at his heels, when he thrust his hand out and signaled them to stop behind a pile of bulldozed earth and pebbles. He wanted to take one last look at the invaders before commencing his attack.

The high-intensity lights from the choppers showed a half-dozen of them spread out behind the crawler’s ringer, a sort of metal apron used to balance its weight when the boom was telescoped upward. This huge configuration was like a circular wall that gave the invaders excellent cover — but the flip side was that it also impeded their field of view and hampered their ability to follow the chase squad’s movements. Even the electronic imaging devices on their weapons were of little use unless the guns were pointed directly over or around the ringer’s edge. The instant one of them lowered his weapon he was blind, whereas the chase squads had their helicopters in continuous radio contact, reporting on the raiding party’s positions, tracking them minute by minute.

Carlysle had made the most of the opposition’s handicap, leading his team across exposed stretches of ground in short, rapid sprints. But their job was to take the invaders, and to accomplish that they would have to break from hiding and open themselves up to fire. There was no way to avoid it.

Now he waved his hand briskly in the air to get his men moving again. They raised their weapons and buttonhooked around to where the invaders were huddled behind the ringer.

By the time the invaders realized they were under attack Carlysle’s men were almost on top of them, dashing up from behind, their VVRS rifles chattering in their hands. Two of the invaders went down instantly, surprised expressions on their faces. Then the remaining four returned fire with their own guns. Carlysle saw Newell fall to his right, his leg covered in blood. Pivoting toward the shooter, he squeezed a burst from his weapon that knocked him backward off his feet. Another invader swung his rifle up at Carlysle in retaliation, but was hit by one of Carlysle’s men before he could trigger a shot. Moaning and clutching his bloody middle, he rolled onto his side and drew himself into a tight ball.

The remaining two tried making a run for it. Carlysle swung his weapon in their direction and tilted its muzzle toward the ground and fired a short burst at their heels.

“Hold it!” he shouted in Spanish. That was a tongue they were certain to understand regardless of where on the continent they were from, the lingua franca all regional Sword ops were instructed to use when addressing an unidentified hostile. “Both of you, drop your guns and get down on your bellies!”

They stopped running but stayed on their feet, holding onto the rifles.

Carlysle fired into the ground behind them again, spraying up dirt.

“On your bellies, you sons of bitches!” he said. “Now!”

This time they listened and went down, hands behind their helmets. A moment later Carlysle and his men kicked their guns aside, twisted their arms behind their backs, and got them flex-cuffed.

Carlysle ran over to Newell and crouched to check out his leg wound.

“Lay still,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

Newell looked up at him, managed a nod.

Carlysle took a breath.

It felt as if it was the first one he’d had in a while.

The payload storage bay was an enormous space enclosing three elevated work platforms of sizable dimensions, as well as an interconnected assembly of catwalks, bridge cranes, and other types of metal rigging designed to ease the movement and transfer of equipment between these platforms. Rows of large office windows looked down upon the vaulting room on two sides. A beehive of corridors, elevator shafts, tunnels, and stairwells not only linked it to the rest of the warehouse and manufacturing complex, but also to different buildings within the ISS compound.

After eliminating the guards outside the warehouse — stealing up on them had been simplicity itself — Yellow Team had entered through its loading dock, raced through several winding passageways, and finally pushed through a set of double doors that gave into the storage bay, where the team’s designated leader, Heitor, planned to drop their satchel charges. Each of the two black canvas bags contained fifteen pounds of TNT, enough high explosive to bring down the steel beam supports underneath the work platforms, the space station hardware on top of them, and quite possibly the walls of the room around them.

It was much more than the saboteurs had thought they would be able to accomplish. Surely not even Kuhl had expected them to get this far into the compound, Heitor mused.

Now he hastened to one of the platforms, slipped a satchel charge off his shoulder, and placed it at the foot of a tall support post. Both timer pencils he was using had been preset to a ten-minute delay, an acceptable opening in which to get out before the blast. Silent and vigilant, their weapons held ready across their bodies, his teammates stood watch behind him in the central aisle. The vast room around them was dark except for the few widely spaced fluorescents normally left on after the close of daily operations.

Crouching at the foot of the support, Heitor removed the timer pin to initiate the detonation sequence. Then he quickly went to the next platform and dropped his other charge.

It was just as he pulled the second pin that Thibodeau stepped from an elevator onto one of the flying catwalks and, looking out over the expansive floor of the storage bay, was shocked to discover what was happening below.

“Thibodeau’s backup is on the way,” Delure said. “I pulled four men from the office complex, another six off other details.”

“How long before they reach him?” Cody asked from his station.

“Could be as long as ten minutes for some of them.”

“Not good enough,” Cody said. He produced a harsh sigh and turned to Jezoirski. “What about Felix? How fast can we bring him to Thibodeau?”

“Give me a sec to call up a floor plan of the building.” Jezoirski tapped his keyboard, scanned the screen in front of him. “ ’Hog’s in the Level 5 propulsion lab—”

“How fast?”

Jezoirski studied the schematic, then lifted his face. “There’s a connecting walkway between the research and warehouse complexes. We can move him straight along this corridor right here to the elevator, then down three levels to the walkway,” he said, plotting a course across the screen with his finger. “From there it might need a minute, maybe a minute and a half to reach the warehouse, another couple to get down to the payload storage bay.”

“That’s at least six minutes.”

Jezoirski nodded. “Best we can do.”

“Suppose we’ll have to live with it then,” Cody said. Sweat glistened in the furrow above his lip. “All right, let’s hurry up and get the ’hog rolling.”

The earthmovers were parked near a ditch they had scooped out of the ground, and had offered solid cover to the invaders until the helicopters marked their positions. As they came under intense fire from a chase squad now, the group of invaders scurried down into the ditch, where they pressed up against its sides and began shooting over its stony rim.

The Skyhawks stuck to them like the predatory birds that were their namesakes, one nailing the tracked vehicles with its SX-5 searchlight, the other shining its light directly into the trench.

“Nest’s ready to be cleaned out,” the chopper pilot above the ditch radioed the ground team.

“Roger, we’re on it,” its leader replied.

He turned the barrel vents of his rifle to their closed setting and ordered his squad to move.

The chopper pilot stayed on the horn to guide their advance, and continue reporting on the position of the invaders. As he hovered over the bowl-shaped ditch, the incandescent brilliance and swirling gun smoke inside it gave the eerie illusion that he was peering down into a lava pit filled with almost a dozen trapped human beings.

But the situation below was such that the distance between illusion and reality rapidly closed. The chase squad attacked in a flanking rush, looping around the dozers and front-end loaders to hose the ditch with their guns. Although return fire was heavy, they had the cold confidence of men who had stolen the offensive and gained a maneuverability their opposition had lost. Surrounded, their FAMAS weapons’ targeting systems overloaded by the unsparing glare of the searchlights, the invaders had in fact run themselves into a trap.

One of them tumbled down the side of the trench, soil and pebbles spitting up around him. A second rose to trigger an explosive round, but was slammed off his feet by a blaze of fire.

A third sprang up and looked briefly as if he might attempt a suicidal charge over the rim… but then he backed off, tossed his weapon aside, and dropped facedown onto the bottom of the ditch in surrender, his hands stretched above his head.

The chopper pilot watched another invader follow suit and disarm, then another, then the rest seemingly all at once. A moment later the chase squad’s leader gave the hand signal to suspend fire, followed by a thumbs-up to the pilot.

He smiled and returned the gesture. His searchlight would make it impossible for those on the ground to see it, but what the hell.

Disengaging his auto-hover control, he skipped off to another spot where he might be needed, the other chopper close behind.

Thibodeau would never know what caught the attention of the invader standing lookout on the warehouse floor — the slight movement of his fingers when he raised the gas pressure in his rifle barrel, the click of the hand guard as it locked into its new setting, or maybe something else completely.

In the end the only thing that mattered was the invader’s bullet, and the damage it did to him.

For Thibodeau, it all happened in what his combat buddies used to call slow time. There was the surprising realization that he’d been spotted as the invader’s weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough… should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to resist him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly.

And then there was a loud crack from below, and something walloped him on the right side, and he felt heat spread through his stomach and went crumpling onto the floor of the catwalk as time resumed its normal speed like a train jolting from the station.

Thibodeau tried to get up, but his body was all deadweight, somehow apart from him. He lay half on his belly, looked down at himself, and saw that his vest hadn’t been penetrated, that the hit was nothing but a fluke, the trajectory of the bullet having carried it up into the space between the bottom of the vest and his stomach, some goddamned nasty bit of gris-gris. And now here he was, blood draining out of him to the floor’s treaded runner, filling the spaces between the treads, flowing down along them in thin scarlet streams — when had he ever stepped on Satan’s tail to earn this one?

He heard the crash of footfalls, managed to lift his cheek off the floor so he could see more than the blood and the railing in front of him.

The man who’d shot him was clambering up the metal risers to the catwalk, a second invader right behind him. The two of them coming to finish him off.

Furiously wishing to God that he knew where he’d dropped his rifle, Thibodeau turned his head downward and saw to his amazement that was it still in his right hand, his fingers clutched around the grip, its barrel jacket pressed almost vertically against his side.

He dropped his cheek to the floor again, dropped it into a pool of his own blood, no longer able to keep it up. He was funneling all his willpower into getting the hand to move. He told it to move, begged it to move, and when it failed to respond silently began cursing it, demanding that it quit giving him bullshit, insisting angrily that it could fuck with him later on, could fall right off his shoulder if that was how it had to be, but that right now it was going to obey him and raise the goddamned rifle.

Thibodeau heard himself take a racking breath. He could see the invaders in their black helmets and uniforms, getting closer, pounding up the stairs.

Come on, you bastard, he thought. Come on.

And then suddenly his arm was coming up, dragging the gun with it, dragging it through his spilled blood, getting its barrel under the railing and pointed down at the stairs.

He triggered the rifle and felt it rattle against his body, spraying the stairs with rounds. The invaders almost collided with each other as they halted in their tracks and shot back with their own weapons. Bullets whizzed over Thibodeau’s head, tocking like hailstones against the projecting edge of the catwalk and the wall behind him. Recovered from their surprise at being fired upon, seeing that Thibodeau was badly wounded, the two invaders were coming at him once again, crouching, their guns stuttering as they began climbing the stairs. A third man, meanwhile, had opened fire from the aisle below.

Thibodeau pumped out another burst, but knew he was weakening, knew his clip would be empty soon, knew he was nearly finished.

Laissez les bons temps rouler—wasn’t that what he’d told Cody earlier? Let the good times roll, roll on to the very last, take me rolling down nice and easy, amen, God, amen, he thought half deliriously.

And fired again at the invaders with the remainder of his strength and ammunition, braced for what he was certain would be the final moments of his life.

“Thibodeau’s down,” Delure said. “Christ, we’ve got to do something.”

“Give me the ’hog’s position,” Cody replied. He was staring at pictures being sent by ceiling-mounted surveillance cameras in the payload storage bay. Now under the remote control of the monitoring room, their feeds normally appeared on a television screen every ten minutes in a rotational sequence that included feeds from other medium- and high-security buildings, and that should have been automatically overridden in the event of a trespass, with the system tripping an alarm and locking its visuals upon the area that had been breached. But the cameras’ regular transmissions had been neglected as the attack at the compound’s periphery gathered momentum, and the invaders had apparently gained entry to the warehouse through authorized means, defeating the override.

It was a lapse whose consequences had become terribly clear to Cody’s team in the past several minutes.

Jezoirski was looking closely at the hedgehog’s video transmissions. “Felix is at the warehouse… about thirty feet down the corridor it’ll bear left, take another elevator down to the storage bay….”

“You said that means, what, another minute until it’s actually on that catwalk?”

Jezoirski nodded. “That’s my estimate, yeah.”

“Thibodeau might not last that long,” Delure said. “I’m telling you, Cody, he needs our help right now.”

“Our orders are to sit tight.”

“But we can’t just sit here and watch them kill him.”

“Listen to me, goddamn it!” Cody snapped. He was sweating profusely now, the moisture dripping down over his lips. “We’d never make it to the warehouse before the ’hog and the backup team. You want to help Thibodeau, keep your eyes on those screens, and be ready to tell that robot what to do when it reaches him!”

Kuhl crouched behind his vehicle, the sounds of gunfire surrounding him, helicopters whirring overhead. His expression was rigid with thought, almost brooding, as if he were oblivious to it all.

In fact he was keenly attuned to his situation, his mind distilling and evaluating its every aspect. Up until now the mission had been a success. His men had met almost every objective set out for them, and in some cases done better than expected. But the stage at which events could be orchestrated was past, and sustaining further losses was unacceptable. It was necessary to recognize that the balance had shifted toward his opposition. If he continued, his force might be so badly weakened it would be unable to retreat. And he was not one to bait chance.

He turned to his driver, who was huddled beside him. “We’re pulling out,” he said, and motioned toward the jeep. “Radio the others to let them know.”

Manuel was sitting on the ground nearby, leaning back against the door of the vehicle. His untreated wound had sapped him and he was breathing in short, labored gasps.

“We can’t.” He nodded toward the interior of the compound. “Yellow Team is still in there.”

“They knew the risks,” Kuhl said. “We’ve waited as long as we can.”

Manuel slid himself up along the side of the door, wincing with the effort.

“They haven’t had enough time,” he croaked.

“I’ve given my order. You can stay behind, if you wish.” There was anger in Kuhl’s eyes. “Decide quickly.”

Manuel looked at him for a long moment, bent his head to stare at the ground, then slowly looked back at him with resignation.

“I’ll need some help getting into the jeep,” he said at last.

Outside the warehouse complex, a group of ten Sword ops raced on foot toward the service door through which Thibodeau had pursued the invaders. The team was composed of men who had been pulled from dispositions around the compound’s residential and office buildings.

They came to where the murdered guard lay on the ground, stopped, gazed down at him. The knife wound in his back was still bleeding out.

One of them mouthed an oath, his right hand making the sign of the cross on his forehead and chest.

“Bryce,” he said. “Ah, shit, poor guy.”

Another member of the ad hoc team grabbed his arm.

“No use standing here,” he said.

The two of them looked at each other. The first man started to say something in response, but then simply cleared his throat and nodded.

Turning from the body, they ran into the open service door, the rest of the team pouring into the warehouse behind them.

Thibodeau could feel the world slipping away. He was trying to hold onto it, trying desperately, but it was loose and runny around the edges, made of soft taffy, and out beyond where it waned off into formlessness, he could sense a black mass waiting to swallow it all up. He knew what was happening to him, no brain flash needed on that score. It was blood loss, it was traumatic shock, it was how it felt to be dying from a large-caliber bullet hole in your gut. The world was slipping away, and though he would have preferred it didn’t, the choice didn’t seem to be within his making.

Thibodeau breathed hard through his mouth, coughed. It was a thick, liquidy sound that admittedly frightened him a little, and the air felt cold entering his lungs, but there wasn’t much pain, and things seemed to get more distinct afterward. He saw the two invaders who’d been shooting at him emerge from the blurred comers of his vision, one behind the other, hurrying up the stairs to the catwalk. He had held them off as long as he could, firing his gun until its magazine was exhausted. Now he wasn’t even sure whether or not the weapon was still in his hand.

The invader who had led the way up was standing over him, pointing his rifle straight down at his head.

Thibodeau took another breath, managed to lift his cheek off the catwalk’s bloody runner. Its grooves had marked his cheek with smears of his own blood.

“Get it done,” he said weakly.

The invader stood over him. If he had any expression beneath his face mask, Thibodeau had no way of knowing what it might be.

“Come on,” Thibodeau said. “Get it done.”

And still standing there looking down at him, the invader lowered the rifle’s bore to his temple.

Felix rolled out onto the catwalk from the same elevator Thibodeau had taken minutes earlier.

High above the payload storage bay, the ’hog went swiftly toward him, its navigational sonar mapping its surroundings in layered echo patterns.

This was a built-in redundancy to prevent accidental collision, for Jezoirski now wielded full command of its operation from the monitoring room. Having donned virtual-reality glasses, he could see three-dimensional graphic representations of everything the ’hog “saw” with its optical array. At the same time, the joystick controls on his console were now directing its robotic mobility systems, allowing him to guide and determine its every turn and action.

Biting his lips, Jezoirski rushed the ’hog over the catwalk. Like a sorcerer possessing an entity from afar — using technology instead of talismans, and algorithms instead of incantations — he had extended himself into the hedgehog’s physical space and was, in effect, in two locations at once.

Felix glided around a curve, its wheels whispering softly, the immense room’s recessed fluorescents reflecting twinkles of pale blue light off the poker-chip sensors on its turret.

Then, all at once, it came to a halt.

Was brought to a halt.

Panic sweeping through him like a whiteout blizzard, wiping all his training from his mind, Jezoirski had frozen at the remote controls. A hundred feet above him in another building, yet right in front of his eyes, Rollie Thibodeau was about to die.

And Jezoirski suddenly didn’t know what to do about it.

“What’s wrong?” Cody asked.

Jezoirski’s heart bumped in his chest. His eyes were wide under the VR wraparounds.

He gripped Felix’s controls, blinded by indecision, knowing his slightest error or miscalculation would mean Thibodeau’s end.

“I asked what the hell’s wrong with you!” Cody repeated beside him. His voice trembled with stress.

Jezoirski inhaled, felt his muscles unclamp. Cody’s demanding, excited tone had jolted him from his momentary paralysis.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he muttered quickly, as much to himself as his superior.

Taking another breath through gritted teeth, he resumed working the controls.

Thibodeau’s glazed eyes widened with surprise as Felix came speeding toward him from the right, its wheels swishing over the catwalk’s runner, its gripper arm extending straight out in front of it.

Startled by the sound of its advance, the invader standing over Thibodeau whirled toward the ‘hog, bringing his rifle up from Thibodeau’s head. But the ’hog’s side-mounted shotgun discharged with a belch of smoke and flame while he was still bringing the rifle around to fire at it.

The invader spun back against rail of the catwalk, his rifle flying from his hands. The advancing robot tracked his movement, angled its gun, and fired another shot at nearly point-blank range, hitting him hard enough to lift him off his feet. Shrieking and clutching at the air, the invader went sailing over the guardrail and plummeted to the floor of the storage bay, his body landing with a heavy crash.

The roar of its shotgun still echoing in the air, Felix hurtled toward the second invader, who triggered his own weapon, spraying the ’hog with a short burst of automatic fire. But he’d been unable to recover from his surprise in time to position himself for his shots, and only one or two nicked Felix’s carrier, the rest going completely astray, ricocheting off the wall and catwalk.

He did not get a chance to unleash another volley. The hog’s gripper claw shot out just as he was taking aim, snatched his leg below the knee, and clamped down with several hundred pounds of force.

His trouser leg suddenly wet with blood, the invader screamed and tried to twist away, but Felix’s hold was unyielding. Screaming in pain, his rifle clattering from his hands, he bent and wrapped his fingers around the robotic arm, struggling in vain to tear it loose.

Watching blearily from inches away, Thibodeau saw him sink onto one knee, then heard the bones of his opposite leg splinter with a sickening crunch under the relentless pressure of the gripper claw. His screams growing in shrillness, the invader continued to pull at the arm as the robot resumed its advance, shoving him implacably backward, out of reach of his fallen weapon.

Sonsabitchin’ contraption’s good for somethin’ after all, Thibodeau thought, then let his head slump to the floor again, no longer able to keep it up.

His field of vision contracting to a small, fuzzy circle, he lay there motionless, the side of his face against the floor. He was vaguely aware of footsteps far below him, a lot of them. Someone shouted — first in Spanish, then English. He heard a fusillade of gunfire.

Before he even had time to wonder what any of it meant, Thibodeau’s eyes rolled back under their lids, and he ceased to be aware of anything at all.

As the Sword ops bolted into the payload storage bay, they heard two reverberating shotgun blasts over their heads, and then saw a man in a black cammo suit fall from one of the catwalks, screaming and flailing as he dropped to the floor to their left, slamming down with a hard thud, then neither screaming nor moving anymore. An instant later there was a chop of automatic fire in the air high above them. Looking up, they spotted another dark form on the catwalk, this one suddenly folding to his knees as a hedgehog launched at him across the catwalk, its gripper arm rapidly whipping out to snatch him like the foreleg of a preying mantis. Several of the ops saw a third man sprawled on the catwalk behind the ’hog, and noticing his Sword uniform, realized instantly it must be Thibodeau.

But before they could react to this sight, a third figure in black sprang from a crouch below a towering work platform up ahead, leaving an object behind on the floor near one of its supports. All of them were experienced enough to know it was a satchel charge — and they could see two more in plain view below other platforms.

“Stay right where you are!” one of the ops shouted, raising his weapon.

The man wasn’t inclined to listen to his warning, regardless of the language. He raised his gun and swung it toward the group of Sword ops.

The response from the Sword op who had called out to him was immediate and conclusive. Bullets spurted from his gun, cutting the invader down before he could fire a single round.

Lowering his barrel, the op sprinted past the invader to the platform support, knelt over the satchel charge, and rapidly assessed its threat. He was no demolitions expert, but it looked like it was on a simple timer pencil and fuze configuration… although looks could be deceptive. There could, he knew, be internal wiring that would detonate the explosives if he tried yanking out the fuze, or other types of booby traps totally unfamiliar to him. Yet the timer’s pin was nowhere in sight, and it only had a couple of minutes left on it, leaving him with no chance to move the bomb or call for help—

He hesitated briefly, feeling his body tighten. Then, gritting his teeth, he pinched the fuze between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a hard pull.

A moment later he took a deep breath, and then another, thanking God that the bomb hadn’t gone off in his hands, that he and everyone around him were still there, still there and not blown to bits.

Which did not yet mean they were in the clear, he quickly reminded himself.

“This one’s out of commission, we better get on to the others!” he shouted. “Let’s hurry!”

Back in the driver’s seat of his chase car, Carlysle looked out his windshield at the fleeing group of invaders and swore aloud. Less than a minute ago, their jeep had sped through the gap in the perimeter fence and he had followed on their tail.

The problem was that he wasn’t at all certain he ought to be doing that.

He tried to think it through even while gunning his engine, pushing to close the distance between them.

Having sent Newell for medical treatment and dispatched their prisoners to a holding area with one of the other units, his squad had been returning to their car when they saw the invaders hasten back into their own vehicle, pull it around in a screeching circle, and whip toward the fence. As the men who by chance were closest to them, Carlysle’s team had launched off in pursuit… but the jeep had been passing through the fence before Carlysle even got behind the wheel, giving it a good head start.

What troubled him was a simple question of authority. UpLink’s host government had sanctioned the emplacement of an independent security force on the ISS compound, period. It was not prepared to have that force move about at will, engaging in what amounted to a small war. Carlysle was sensitive to that, and because he was a disciplined professional, could not close his eyes to the boundaries of his license to operate. If there had been no prisoners taken on the compound to hopefully yield information about the motives and objectives behind their raid, he might have been inclined to push those bounds and carry on the pursuit, calling in the Skyhawks for aerial support. But there were, and it was hard to justify going forward knowing the repercussions that might be expected as a consequence.

He gripped the wheel, his eyes on the taillights ahead of him. Stop or go, what was it going to be? With Thibodeau not answering his radio, the decision was his to make.

Producing another string of curses, he shifted his foot to his brake pedal and eased it down. The chase car lurched to a halt over the bumpy road.

“Never mind that bunch, we’re going back,” he said to the man beside him. “There’s a whole lot of pieces that need picking up at the facility, and nobody but us to do it.”

Its engine throbbing, Kuhl’s jeep shot through the gap in the fence at full horsepower, reversing the path it had taken into the compound.

Kuhl turned in the front passenger seat and saw the twin points of headlights in the darkness behind him. But they were a good distance away, and that distance seemed to be growing. Still, he wanted to keep his eyes on them.

The jeep plunged ahead into the jungle, bouncing over the road, vines and branches lashing its windshield, leaving behind long, drippy swipes of moisture. Soon the unbroken tunnel of vegetation around it was screening out the sky.

Kuhl watched the headlights steadily, convinced they were indeed becoming further off. Why might that be so? he asked himself. Certainly their position beside the jeep had given Kuhl and his three companions a jump on the security teams, who had dispersed from their own vehicles during the firefight. But that only accounted for his head start, not the absence of any concerted and determined pursuit. And what of the helicopters? Why hadn’t they been sent after him?

A faint smile touched his lips. Even flight had its lessons, and it struck him that he’d just gained another bit of understanding about UpLink’s vulnerabilities, limitations, and the dynamics of its relationship with the Brazilians.

It was knowledge he would have to carefully digest along with the rest of what he’d learned tonight.

Knowledge that was bound to be very useful as the next phase of the game commenced.