No one deserves to die like that.
Hell Breaks Loose
Lincoln stands in the shadows under the trees, back to a tree trunk, perfectly still, his pistol in his right hand, watching the sentinel as it returns up the ravine, passing over their position. He’s impatient, eager to move on. But he holds his position. They all do. No one moves—but the sentinel must have detected something because it circles back.
“Shit,” Rohan whispers over comms.
“Alarm’s going off up top,” Chris says.
“Don’t move,” Lincoln breathes. “The gun barrel is still locked. It hasn’t got a target yet.”
It’s possible the onboard AI issued an alert when it noted a change in the terrain caused by the camo blankets.
Chris says, “The enemy has decided that was a false alarm. True is in position.”
“Roger.”
The sentinel moves away, but instead of heading up the ravine, it goes back down again.
Chris adds, “Be aware that Miles is with True.”
“What?” Lincoln demands in a whisper. “What the everlasting fuck?”
“Save it,” Chris says. “We’ve got aberrant behavior in the sentinel. It’s circling, coming back for another pass. We need to launch. Clear those copters so I can get them in the air.”
Nothing to do but do it. “Let’s go, Rohan.”
They both move. Lincoln steps into the open, then stoops to carefully lift away the camo blanket. As soon as it clears, the rotors hum, each set winding up into a circle of blurred motion. The starburst takes off straight up and, as it does, its gun barrel swivels. Behind him, Felice starts shooting. She’s not the only one.
Tamara has preloaded both Roach and the starburst drones with multiple instruction sets. One of these sets uses map locations and biometrics in a two-factor confirmation to delineate human targets. The team is white-listed and so is Shaw Walker. There are also instructions for distinguishing children and noncombatants.
The drawback of this instruction set is that running the biometric identification procedure before every shot is slow, even on a human scale. In the frantic chaos of battle, the enemy can pull a trigger before an AI achieves a kill decision. It’s a parallel to the situation in traffic, where aggressive human behavior puts a properly schooled AI at a disadvantage. Tamara is unwilling to let that happen. She has seen what is under the anti-surveillance canopy—the cameras on True’s MARC visor captured it. She is certain there are no women and children present. There are only torturers.
Her breathing is ragged but her hands are steady as she revises the instructions so that Roach and the two copters can operate at a faster rate. The new rule requires only an initial biometric identification. Known elements to be tracked on an active battle map.
Lincoln draws his pistol as the starburst rises into the air. It’s darting and rocking in an evasive behavior as it immediately takes enemy fire. A bullet impacts one rotor. The parts shower down around Lincoln, but the controlling AI compensates for the damage, rebalancing the load on the seven rotors that remain, even as it shifts the gun barrel to target the sentinel.
The two machines trade shots as they rise higher and higher into the air, whirling and dancing and dodging around one another in a manic duel that shares the frantic grace of a flight of mating insects. They’re moving too fast for Lincoln to get off even a single shot at the sentinel, but if they’re doing any damage to each other, he can’t see it. The buzz and whine and crackle of stray bullets tears across the ravine in every direction.
He’s peripherally aware that their second copter has darted away, up the ravine and toward the house, to join Roach in the first wave of the attack—the machine wave.
Eight seconds, maybe nine have elapsed since launch. He turns to check on Felice, remembering the sound of her pistol going off. He finds her hunched over, one arm pressed against her breast and her hand coiled into a fist as she staggers toward him, still carrying her pistol in her other hand.
“Hey! Are you okay?” He grabs her shoulder with his artificial hand, just as a flurry of shooting erupts from the direction of the house.
She straightens up, looking that way. Past teeth clenched in pain, she says, “Bruised ribs, I think. Not broken.” Her arm lowers to reveal two spent bullets embedded in the left shoulder of her vest.
“Jesus,” he whispers. “Sit down.”
“Never mind that. You go. I’ll follow. Don’t leave True up there alone.”
He hears the firefight at the house intensify, punctuated now by the screams of maddened men.
True is on her knees, bent almost to the ground, gloved hand pressed to her forehead, fighting back against the dark gravity of Nungsan and the certainty that she has been here before, seen all this before, lived it and relived it so many times in dreams and not once able to make a difference.
Ah, Diego!
This time, it’s not a dream.
In her glimpse beneath the canopy she counted eight Al-Furat soldiers. Rihab was one. He wasn’t carrying a weapon that she could see. Two of the men were armed with video cameras. All the others held assault rifles either slung over their shoulders or casually in the crook of an arm. There might be more soldiers in the house. She doesn’t care.
She eases up to look again.
The canopy shades a nearly level, unpaved pad strewn with grit and pebbles. Three dirty white goats are lying down beneath it, close to the house. Shaw is staked on the ground at the center of the pad, face up. A U-shaped steel rod has been pounded into the ground over his ankles to hold his feet in place. A second rod arches over his neck, and a spike has been driven through the palm of his right hand, pinning his arm at an angle to his body. His left hand, the hand crippled in Burma, is still tied to his vest the way she left it, to stabilize his wounded shoulder.
His face and shoulders and the surrounding ground are wet. It’s just water, she tells herself. She wants to believe that. Water poured in his face to frighten him, to get him to talk. But she smells the reek of gasoline. A red-orange container, identical to the one in the bumper rack, is stowed beside the house. She hears a conversation, strangely clear to her mind despite her rudimentary Arabic:
Someone will see the smoke.
Let them see it. We were never here.
Shaw must be listening, too. She feels sure he understands them, that he is aware of what is about to happen. Impossibly aware, given his condition, but the knowledge is apparent in the taut arch of his back, the quick sharp breaths that make his chest rise and fall, the fixed, maddened stare of his eyes focused on the brilliant perforations in the canopy.
She remembers Daniel speaking of Nungsan and the syringe used to inject Diego with a stimulant to ensure he was awake for his execution, and to make him seem stronger than he was.
Shaw’s strength is not in doubt. He is a fortress, locked up tight. He makes no plea, no threat. He asks no favors. He allows not even a groan of pain. Waiting.
At this point no one even needs to strike a match. Gasoline is highly volatile. Its fumes are heavier than air. They hug the ground and spread. All it will take is a crackle of static electricity or a spark thrown by a ricocheting bullet to ignite a flash fire.
It is surely too late to change the outcome.
Right?
She sees that one of the Al-Furat men—she realizes it is nineteen-year-old Rihab—has a fireplace lighter in his hand, the kind with a trigger and a long tube to direct the flame. He walks toward Shaw, barking instructions at the camera crew, but it seems to True that his fierceness is an act. As she aims the Triple-Y, centering its sight on Rihab’s skull, she understands that he is afraid of what’s coming. He doesn’t really want to do it. But for him, as for all of them, there is no backing out.