Kenya – Spring, 2073
We were three days in country when the wannabe kidnappers found us.
I was in the back, trying to polish my camera lens with heavy breathing and the inside of my shirt. Garber was on point, his rifle tucked under a shoulder, the thing’s massive barrel jutting out at his back. There were others between us, but I didn’t know them, just some guides we’d picked up from a service in town. They chewed khat and fingered cigarettes while we trekked through the underbrush, just a five mile spat of growth surrounded by grass. We’d been told by the locals that if we wanted footage, this was the place to go. They also told us it was safer to just stick to filming around town.
For once, I almost wished we’d just listened to the local advice.
Garber was older, once a marine and currently on loan as my partner from the CIA. He often laughed at my accent, and said that “photo journalism don’t mean you go naked”. He always picked up a local weapon, whatever was popular in the region, when we went out on assignment. The old marine had been fired from his cover at the New York Times, back when they still printed papers, for returning fire at a riot instead of just bleeding, like a good boy, with his camera alone. Said he was acting “like some damn blogger”. To be honest, I think they over reacted, and noticed that their sacking him didn’t stop them from uploading the footage. It was a decent feed too, albeit a tad jumpy from recoil as he fired with one hand while recording with the other. He had good instincts, good humor, and never gave up on a scoop. I liked him, well enough, and watched his back.
There were no real weapons on me. I’m a horrible short under the best of circumstances, and stress adds little to steadying my aim. I stick to a camera, web stream capable and cell tablet backed. Sometimes I kept a knife on me as well – for camping, though, not fighting. I was carrying one then.
The guides stopped us about a half hour in the hike. Smoke break, again. Garber and I stopped along with them, wishing we could go a bit faster, but keeping our mouths shut. We weren’t paying these guys enough to really complain. Newsfeed expense accounts only take you so far, and we like to save wherever you can.
“Camera up, kid. We’ve got movement at your six o’clock.”
I really wish he’d just have said behind me. Military talk still wasn’t much of my strong suit, despite all the training back home in the Ministry bunkers. I turned when I got around to realizing what was his meaning. I didn’t see anything.
The guides were now quiet, had been for awhile. Their cigarettes were burned down, right to the filters, sending a nose curdling reek into the sun heated air. I still didn’t see anything, but Garber was leaning out to the side in that way of his, ready to drop down and swing his rifle by its strap into ready hands.
Someone started shooting, that boom boom boom of slow bore fire, touched off with cracks of something breaking the sound barrier by a slight margin. I dropped to the ground, rolling sideways and behind a scant bit of tree, glad that whoever out there wasn’t using anything of higher exit speed. The vest and kneepads I was wearing was pretty top notch, and should do fine with a few hits from their assorted weapons.
That’s one lesson you only need once to remember. Always invest in the best body armor.
Garber was working his way into his second clip by the time I managed to get a decent frame going. He was laying on his back, firing between upraised knees, rolling left or right at random occasions. Puffs of dirt and leaf sprayed up around him, but not much was accurate enough to give him any pause. One round smacked dead into a shin and pinged off into the brush. Garber grunted, but kept shooting, the hit already forgotten. That man always wore even more bullet cover than me.
The fire didn’t last too much longer than that. I doubt we hit anyone, but that wasn’t the point. Stand big enough, yell big enough, fight big enough, and most opportunists would turn and leave you alone, but not before giving you some great video.
That’s why we came here, to see just how thick these woods were with their kind. Kidnappers, people who’d found a new profession a generation ago snagging tourists from savanna cars and Serengeti hikes. You could ransom the average American for a few hundred thousand, more for a Chinese national after the economy boom. Garber and I, some old looking white bloke and his asian companion, must have looked like Christmas to them.
We left then, intending to come back the next day, this time bearing gifts we’d hope were enough for an interview. Bearing gifts, and carrying lots of large guns.
We didn’t though, getting a new news assignment once back at our hotel. A pocket carrier was down just off the coast of South Kenya. We were the closest reporters our News-feed had on the continent. They wanted us there by morning, doing prep-work and getting as much stock footage as we could. Expense fund upgrade incoming in the hour. The night-time anchor types would be there by evening to take over from there.
Garber just grunted and started packing his things. Orders are orders when they carried the check. The marine in that man never really died, no matter how long out of his country or service.
I was more worried about my other assignment, the one sure to be here now that something so big had just happened. I found it, waiting, on my second cell tablet, the one I keep hidden and can’t use without pass phrase and a blood sample. The screen booted up once I made the needed offerings. The message was curt, as they always were.
REPORT TO SOUTH KENYA
MAKE CONTACT WITH ASSET (PROCEDURE INCLOSED)
INVESTIGATE P. CARRIER DESTRUCTION
And then, something I by now was used to seeing, though never in advance of anything good happening. Always in advance, though, of some kind of my almost dying.
HEALTH INSURANCE – BETA UPGRADE: GRANTED
Fantastic.
Two
It really wasn’t too bad an assignment, so far as my track record went. But after being volunteered for an actual suicide mission, there really isn’t much more your government can do before one stops being surprised at her lack of gentility.
At 23:00, old us military time, a carrier group inside the Suez was smeared by something fast and big. Satalites on overwarch caught a big flash of light and one hell of a heat crop where the ships has been. The resulting tsunami was scheduled to make landfall in ___ within the next few hours. My job was to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Not many things that can make a show like that, not in the average arsenal at least. Sure, by now every pocket dictatorship’s got a closet nuke or two stashed away somewhere, but the boys before my time found the records for all those. Any contraband bomb would have left a yunique radiation smear that any physicist worth his salt and sallary could pin down to whoever needed killing next.
Thing is, all reports and scans of the sea’s newfound crator found no present radiation save for those bits leaking from the smashed ships and subs.
The Russians and Chinese had a few missiles that mix thermobaric with some concept of shaped compression, but even that was only good for damage below the half kiloton yield. Their nukes could do more, but like I said, no geigers were ticking in that neck of the water.
Only thing left was the US and their fabled K.I.S. system.
Have you ever seen one of those nasties tick off? All you really hear, if you’re facing the wrong way, is this screaching sound at first. Kind of like artillery dropping save ninety times larger. The rumble comes next, not a sound, but a rumble, a trembling squeeze you can feel starting at your feet before climbing to your throat.
Your ears don’t even pop till the soundwave arrives.
It’s loud. Impossibly loud, and that’s coming from a man who’s had an eardrum shedded by a pulse discharge from three steps away. You’d expect it to be a boom, like a bomb going off, but really hits you is this long roar, as if a tornado made lust to a recomissioned train.
Kinetic Impact from Space System. Laughable so far as acronyms go, but not one bit funny once you’ve seen the aftermath. Launchable in seconds. Disturbingly accurate. Eviromentally friendly, what with no fallout and all. The American’s love those things.
Which is why, I guess, someone decided to turn their own weapon against them. Home Office was giving us full support on this one. Personel files, equipment, even backing air support if we really needed it.
Like I said, not too bad an assignment. Still didn’t mean the bloody thing would be easy.
————————
We arrived in ___, Egypt about two hours before dawn. The sun wasn’t out, but the patches of bare earth peeking out from between cracked slabs of roadwork still remembered the light and its warmth. The air was dry, stilted, despite the ocean’s distance of ten or more clicks. I sneezed as a car launched puff of dust made its way up one nostril. God, I hate Africa.
Garber hopped out of the truck bed as if he’d managed a full night’s rest on the turbulent highway. Probably did, for all I knew. I’d seen the man sleep through a hotel shelling in South Zululand once. A rocky streatch of road was probably nothing much in his book.
I wished I’d been similarly blessed. I’d spent three of the last five with my head propped up against a corro-steel wheel bed, and my neck was screaming bloody mutiny every time I turned head. Our guides from earlier were smiling like jackals. We’d thrown in a bonus for driving us straight to the coast instead of home. I didn’t mind. They’d even given us reciepts, and the expense account existed for a reason.
Garber set off in search fo a hotel while I made my way to nearest wireless station. Satalite uplinks worked well enough, but they cost Mother a cold fortune and were easier to trace. Fine for short messages and terse order reports, but drawn out conversations weren’t usually bread and butter. Besides, I needed to check in with my other boss at the newsie post. Home Office may have my ehart and soul, but the news has my wallet snatched in a iron tightened grip.
Out editor liked the footage that Garber and I shot, though only just. Garbers barrel cam worked for over half the fight before giving out, and there was always market jumping for some combat nonfiction. The rest of our shots were mostly still frame 3Ds. Boring stuff, mostly, but a few captured the half hopeless quality of where we’d just been. The story itself was a rush job – just facts, poorly researched, and with a typo or five.
Nothing worth a pulitzer, but at least our pockets wouldn’t starve. Much.
My plow shouldered partner did significantly better. Journalists were incoming from all over, and almost half of the hotels we’d hoped for were already reserved while the rest were on the way to raising their prices to just short of disgusting. Garber, the scounger that he was, found what had to be the only shift manager without her ear or eye glued to a webfeed. She even gave us a discount because “she liked my face” as Garber later put it. Blessings seem to come in all sorts of shapes.
Our first interview was already scheduoled for five the next morning. We’d have liked talking to someone earlier, but the local government was still too on edge about the bombing off coast to give us any more than a “No comment”. In Arabic.
The one upside was that we now had free reign to check out the city and see if any Agency or Ministery contacts were holding any worth talk. Garber knew a few Egyptian officers from his old marine days, and I’d been given a list of names to meet with from the ministery when we were still in transit.
Our only hiccup happened shortly after moving in to our luck granted room. A polite knock sounded from the door as we finished dropping our shoulder duffels onto the twin beds. Garber looked through the peep hole, cursed a bit, and whispered “Cops.” before opening the door wide.
I couldn’t tell why he minded more than was usual. Journalists grew accustomed to being checked over by the authorities, and a good many of those we’d bumped against were significantly less gentile than post Spring-to-Fall Egyptians.
THe officer outside was a small fellow with a smile almost as broad as Garber’s shoulders. He shook both our hands and made smalltalk in passable english, but failed, or didn’t try, to conceil the way his eyes swept over our rooms every cranney. He was an old hand at the game of checking out foreigners, and it showed.
So much so that he barely paused after spotting Garber’s somewhat illegal handgun cocealed under his shirt with a shaped belly holster. The copper made a ‘tut tut’ sound with a tongue against teeth and confiscated the weapon with a stern father faced expression of reproach. He wrote Garber a receipt and said “It will wait you at station after you have propper papers.” We’d pick it up later with an apollogy and a bribe.
Garber slumped against the door in releif once that officer left the room. As a Marine he probably had someting even more deadly on his body, and he’d been pleased as princes that it hadn’d been noticed. I shook my head, grabbed my tablet, qued the list, and readied my camera for work.
Garber offered me a “Good luck.” as I eased the door closed. They were some of the last words I’d ever hear the man say.
————————-
The shuttle to Cairo was pretty damn posh. The ticket was cheap, the seats worn but clean, the trains arrived with split secon timing. What graffitti I saw was minor and obviously fresh, with old tags and slang washed over and scrubbed within days of being laid down. I settled into a car about midway down the train and zoomed my tablet on the fifth name of the list.
Trenton Abeyah, aka Voodoo, 14 years old, a half American orphan with a penchant for hacking. The Yanks would probably jail him or hire him, whichever was cheaper, but Crown Mother was fine with this one’s online transgressions. What’s more, he’d been an informer for our side a few times in the past, helping us knock down a few mobsters in the irish middle north who’d annoyed him in some way. If the US bombing of their own fleet hand been the work of roguje code, then this was the kid who’d know how and who. I’d been authorised to make an offer of eighty thousand quid in exhange for a nod in the right direction.
I arrived at the boy’s house on record, paid for by a long series of false identities, and found I was obviously not the first to have the same idea. The door was ajar, not kicked in but cracked, the lock chiped and shattered into usefullness in a way only compressed freeon could provide. Though I never traveled anywhere with a gun, I still knew that walking unannoundced into to strange people’s homes was a good way to be shot. I told myself that checking it out myself was a stupid idea, one liable to ge me killed or worse.
None of which stoped me from walking in regardness, but at least I could tell myself I thought about it first if I had time to think on my way to the hospital.
The lights were working, but the low hum coming from them told me they’d only recently been turned on. Someone had cut then restarted the power fairly recently in the past. Either that, or someone was here and looking arround themselves.
I tried very hard to breathe quietly.
There was trash on the ground, everyday things and wants and memories, smashed and tossed until they became no more than garbage. A framed picture lay a hands breadth from my foot, the photos of a family vacation flickering behind a spider’s work of cracks set into its surface. A football trophy, snapped into three parts, sat scattered in a corner, broken from where someone rudely shoved it from the shelf just above. A thick later of dust covered every surface and thing.
The flat’s computers, tablets, and wireless’s were gone, the spaces where they once stood looking lonely in their vacancy. Someone came looking, a long time ago, for whatever it was that this kid knew. I just had to hope they hadn’t found whatever that was.
four
Garber and I were scheduoled to meet up a few hours later, both to exchange notes and see what the other was finding. While he may have been one hell of a shot, a decent partner, and an ally on top, at the end of the day he wasn’t a Brit. True friendship would remain outside of the question because both of us had been well trained by our countries to betray all friends for home.
He said there was a cafe just south of ___ that he liked visiting sometimes and chose it as our designated meet. It was a nice place, open aired on the sidewalk, and missing all of those new flavors invented monthly over the last half century or so, and choosing to stay honest to thick tiny cups of incredibly strong brew. Not a single frappachino in sight – orange, moca, or otherwise. Refreshing, really. Which is probably why both he and I let out guards down enough for some bastard to take a shot at us.
I’d only just spotted Garber coming up from the restaurant’s southern approach when the first bullet hit him just shy of the left floating rib. His face looked as if in the middle of an oncoming yawn, somewhat strained and jutting forward as if his teeth were trying to stretch away from his skin. There was no blood, and the puff of dust that jumped from his shirt told me that the body armor he wore underneath had done it’s job.
The three bullets that followed changed that last fact pretty quickly.
I didn’t see him fall. I’m not sure anyone did as the street started panicing from his first grunt of impact. It had been decades since the government made examples of dissidents by assassinating them in the streets, but the people remembered and acted accordingly.
I ducked under my table and waited for a largish gaggle of tourists to run between me and the most likely angle of fire. One of them caught a round in the belly for my benefit as I ran at a crouch behind their shadow before stopping again with a doorway as my shield. Garber was still moving about five meters out, flat on his back, fingers trying to staunch the leaks springing out all over his body. He was shouting something at me and trying his best not to look in my actual direction. The damn jarhead was more worried about giving away my position than getting me to come over and help. I’d have called him a dunce if I weren’t already trying to think of a way to save him without being shot. In the end I just shouted “Fuck it!” and ran his way at a dead sprint.
Chips of concrete and wood panel sprung up at my feet and from the shops scattered around me. The sniper had a good enough eye, but his aim needed some work when it came to tracking moving targets. I didn’t hear any of the sharp cracks of an assault rifle or carbine, and the whole city would have heard if he’d been using one of those shoulder rail guns. The muzzle flashes of his rifle, sticking out of a storefront window halfway up the street, were barely visible as I dashed across the street. He had to be using some old fashioned bullets, gunpowder charged, and almost antique. Poorly equipped or a lad who’d done his damn homework. I didn’t die, so I’ll go with the former.
I grabbed Garber by the reinforced loop he always insisted on sowing into every shirt in his wardrobe. I called him paranoid before for having a drag collar in even his floral print shirts. Now I was just glad the thing hadn’t been shot off.
He was a heavy one, but somehow I managed to slide him behind a frozen ice stand without introducing my own insides to barrel warmed lead. He was till trying to tell me something, so I leaned closer as shells popped hoses and boxed napkins just over out heads. Garbers voice was small, his breathing stained, and I only deciphered a few words that came from his mouth.
“… in my front shirt pocket..”
I felt around his shirt till I found the bulge there, a matte black device that resembled a folding flare gun. Printed on its side in small white letters was a unit number and the words “K.I.S.S. Beacon Mk 5 – 1/6th kiloton yield”
God bless that goddamn marine.
A few months before, while slogging our way through some marsh, Garber told me about this clube he’d joined as a child. It never ranked high among his pass times, but the motto of those years stuck with him for the rest of his life.
Be prepared.
And so, as I cracked the seal labeled “Do Not Break” and aimed the KISS beacon downrange at the shooter’s standing cover, I couldn’t help but think that bringing a man made disaster to a gunfight was a good example of the above.
The device issued a stiff clack as I squeezed on the trigger. A brief glimmer of chrome was seen as the unit smacked into the shooter’s building and started pinging up data. At three seconds in, a control desk located in an AfriCom station started beeping incessantly for permission to proceed. A colonel gave a terse yes and the order went through.
In orbit, a tungsten rod, about half the size of a crowbar, detached from a satellite and created a link with the now active beacon. The signal on the ground whispered to the hunk of densely made metal as it plummeted down, down, down.
At thirty seconds in, our gunman paused his shooting for a while. Maybe he was waiting for me to show my head again, or reloading, or wondering what that growing whistle of sound was. All I know is that at thirty three seconds after KISS beacon launch, his building was hit by a projectile falling at flat 9 kilometers per second.
Needless to say, he wasn’t shooting anymore.
Ambulances arrived a few minutes after the impact stopped echoing over the city. All of the dust that had been kicked up into the air stung my eyes and made it pretty hard to see. I almost concussed a medic with a rock when he came out of nowhere and asked me to stand aside so he could look at my friend. I mumbled something noncommittal, backed away, and slipped down an alley once his back was turned. Protocol said to remain on scene when in country with one of our allies (it’s considered polite), but I couldn’t risk getting bogged down by the paperwork with my mission still unfinished.
I called the Home Office with an update from my wireless as I checked my back for a shadow. They told me good job, named a safe house for use, and ordered me to keep on with my assignment under one of my old Hong Kong covers.
They waited till after my mission to tell me that Garber didn’t make it.
five
Local police was on scene about an hour after the fight. By then the news of the carrier losses was common knowledge to most, and the attack on the whole was blamed on unknown terrorists. The US and British embasies kept their mouths shut for the time being, and negotiated back deals as payment for my unauthorised use of an Yankee KISS drop.
I think the Home Office let them use an airbase in return. Either that, or a space shuttle – I’ve never been sure.
Egyptian forensics found enough left of the man to put together a dna print and not much else. They had no idea who he was, but they weren’t us.
The shooter was a man named ___ al-____, a man with hankering for the old days where state sponsored terror was all of the rage. He’d been kicked out of the South Congalese army after assaulting an visiting AU lieutenant who chastised his boots, and had been jumping from fanatic cause to cause ever since. We’d last caught wind of him in a tent outside of Tikrit. He’d left a toothbrush there with enough material on it for a full genome map.
For the last decade he’d been hanging with a group known in English as the Untold Legion. Their specialty was timing online assaults to coincide with the bomb and bullet variety and they liked using kids as fighters. Kidnapping was by no means beyond their MO and half their ranks had their starts in one child army or another. They were notoriously light when it came to actual muscle and our analysts thought that maybe ___ al-____ had been trying to relieve them of the lack.
The Untold Legion had a safehouse in the ____ district of Cairo. They’d managed to stay under the local police radar but an informant last year had fingered the spot for immunity and a new life fishing gator in the US everglades.
Mercenaries were easy to purchase once I showed them a barcode proving governbment backing. A lot of people try to hire guns these days, but no one pays faster than the Great British Isles. Besides, it had been less than a day since I’d seen Garber stop lead. I told them to leave the kid gloves off and jumped in their van.
It’s an odd sensation sitting with trained men getting ready to go into war. In the last three years I’d been through enough to know that a copper, or soldier, or underworld goon always got the jitters before going into a fight. These guys, regardless of killing for a paycheck or not, were no different. One chewed gum that smelled like soap powder and chilli, another simply stared into empty space a few inches over my head. No one really talked, save to offer directions or ask for an extra flash or reload.
We pulled up hard and fast allong side the curb of the residential neighborhood. Some of the houses maintained the sandstone and brick look of centuries past, but most sported synthetic siding, runner lights, or slip doors. The place we were headed for was in the old fashoned style, its sandy exterior plain and unassuming to the eye.
My hearing were still sensitive from the KISS impact before, so the sound of the mercs blowing a hole in the side of the building made my ears ring even through my digital earplugs. There was shouting from inside, along with the bright flashes of stun grenades going off and the untraceable cough-snap of suppressed carbines spitting out mag driven bullets. I followed two seconds after the last man dived in. By then the killing was already over.
Computers were everywhere, most of them ruined, with chunks blown out by small arms fire and explosives. Bodies were collapsed on the floor and I almost sicked myself when I realised how young some of them were. Kids, none of them older than me, their eyes empty and blank staring up at ceiling fans, with archaic weapons dropped at their feet.
The survivors, all grown men, were lined up allong the wall. One of them was babbling away in Arabic while a hired gun recorded his confession with a tablet in one hand and his gun in the other. Those I hired without numb looks on their faces looked just as ill as I felt inside. Thing is, you can’t look intimidating while spitting out vomit, so I took a deep breath and marched deeper inside like I owned the whole place.
It didn’t take long. Even with my earbuds providing at a fragmented translation I was able to get him to tell us where young Mr. “Voodoo” had been hidden. They kept him in a closet with claymore rigged to the door as his company and gave him a computer whenever they wanted something to be bombed. He hit paydirt once he’d breached the US firewalls. KISS sported one of the most spophisticated defences in the history of computing itself, and this kid with a spooky handle cracked it in less than one month’s time.
It’d be laudable if only so many hadn’t died.
I led him down the stairs with a blanket draped over his shoulder. He coughed a bit, and squinted once we were within view of the sunlight streaming in from the ruined wall siding. One of my men for the day was passing the time by breaking a detainee’s arm. Voodoo looked like he wanted to give the mercenary a hand.
We got out of there with our new guests in tow before the police arrived. The Home Office paid the paid fighters a bonus for bringing so many “high value sources” back alive. My bosses never mentioned the kids that died. In think they assumed those bodies didn’t know anything of worth. Either that, of they’d been on the job for so long that they just didn’t care.
I shipped out of country on a chartered flight some time later using my own name. The carrier story died down within half a month, and my news organization was antsy to get me out of country quick after Garber bought it in that “unfortunate KISS strike.” They sent floweres to his funeral. I didn’t go.
I’d almost forgotten it all a year or more later when I recieved a postcard in my email inbox. The message was sent from a secure Home Office site, and the message was something worthless about the weather being dreary in the office back home. I was already prepairing to trash it as I got to the end.
The damn thing was signed, ‘With thanks, Voodoo.’
– mckinney
