“Sorry, sir,” the girlish voice said briskly. “No one’s allowed onto the flight line. No departures until the alert is cleared. No exceptions.”
Chapter 71
“These people are dying, you understand?” Lisa said sharply. “Every minute counts!”
“Sorry. Orders.”
“Who’s your superior officer?” Jesse demanded.
“Lieutenant Samuelson of -“
“I know Samuelson. Just a second.” I heard a squawk of radio static.
“You can use my phone,” the woman said helpfully.
“No, I can’t. Lines are down. Hello, Doctor? I need to talk to Lieutenant Samuelson, I need clearance to get our patients out of here.”
After a brief moment a warped voice responded, “I’m sorry. Can’t reach him. I can send a runner -“
“That could take twenty minutes! We don’t have time!”
“The lines are down. Most radio too. They hit the comm centre, I think they’re jamming our frequencies too, we’re lucky we’re having this conversation.” It was hard to tell, but I thought the voice had an accent. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just a second.” Jesse’s voice changed, he was talking to the woman again. “Listen. You haven’t gotten clearance because they slammed our comms, but we need to get these patients out of here right now, or they won’t make it. I’m sorry, soldier, but we’re cut off from the chain of command. You have to make a decision, and if you make the wrong one, these people will die.”
A moment later her uncertain voice said, “Let me check the lines.”
“I told you they’re down.”
“Let me check!” And a second later, scared now: “They’re down.”
Lisa said, her voice throbbing with what sounded like real emotion, “Listen. Please. The gas they used, they were at ground zero, we don’t even know what chemical it is yet and it’s eating their lungs like acid. We have to get them to the hyperbaric chamber in Kuwait, stat.”
“Up to you, soldier,” Jesse said grimly. “As your superior officer, I’m telling you your orders have changed. We don’t have time for confirmation. If you stop us here, these people will die.”
A very long moment passed.
“All right,” she decided. “Go ahead.”
I took a deep breath of pure oxygen as we rolled onwards. Then the ambulance stopped. The doors opened. Jesse and Lisa carried out Sophie’s stretcher first, then came back for me, and rolled me up into the battered Antonov plane that had brought us to the base.
“They’ll shoot us down,” Sophie objected, after the ramp closed.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jesse said. “This is a perfectly legitimate flight from a company that’s been running military cargo contracts for ten years. Or at least that’s what their flight-control computers will tell them.” He grinned. “Some people think of the US military as an obstacle. We think of it as a really dangerous but really awesome tool. Like Stormbringer as a Swiss Army knife.”
I had to grab for the wall to steady myself as the airplane rolled forward.
“A tool,” Sophie repeated disbelievingly.
“Are we beginning to see the possibilities here? Leverage, baby, asymmetry, that’s what Grassfire’s all about. Use the enemy’s strength and size against them. Trouble is, you can’t do it too often or they’ll start noticing. Like LoTek says, always be invisible. We’re pushing our luck pretty far here already. But I seriously doubt they’ll shoot us down.”
He was right: we flew off unmolested, and unescorted.
“Where are we going?” Sophie’s voice sounded strained, and not just from the howling engines that made it like trying to converse in a nightclub.
“Dubai.”
“What for?”
“Well, we were sort of hoping you might be able to help us save America and the leaders of the free world from the planet’s first drone army. I mean, since we went to the trouble of busting you out of the CIA jail on the major military base.” His grin seemed force. “Never a dull moment, right? The life of a repo man is always intense.”
Sophie considered. “And the Russians have the override sequence.”
I nodded miserably, feeling three inches tall.
“We have to figure they’ll work out how to defang it real soon,” Jesse said. “If they haven’t already.”
We all stared at Sophie, hoping for a hint of a shred of hope.
“It’s not your fault,” she told me. “They would have gotten it from you the hard way if they had to. At least this way you’re still in one piece.” It was true but didn’t make me feel any better. “Anyways it doesn’t really matter. The Russians are just the beginning of our problems.”
Those were not exactly the magical words I had wished for. “What do you mean by that?”
“Let me rest a little,” she said. “When we get there I’ll explain everything.”
Chapter 72
The UAE immigration officer stamped my Jason Kasperski passport without even looking at it. Minutes later we were in a taxi on an ultramodern highway, sweeping through raw desert back towards the Too-Much-Is-Not-Enough surreal cyberpunk skyline of Dubai, and then the dedicated causeway and private island of the Burj al-Arab. The building and grounds were so clean and perfect that they looked like part of an animated movie.
“This is your foxhole?” Sophie asked.
Jesse smiled. “If you gotta hide, hide in style.”
It seemed absurdly normal to be back; our raid on a military base in Afghanistan had been so intense and hallucinatory that anything else, including this seven-star hotel decorated mostly with solid gold, seemed positively quotidian.
Danielle met us at the door. “Sophia. Long time no see.” There were complicated undercurrents in her voice.
Sophie swallowed hard, her breath rasped in her lungs, I had never seen her so discomfited by anyone before. “Danielle,” she said faintly. “Hi.”
The two of them shook hands uncomfortably.
“If you’re all quite finished with the formal salutations,” LoTek’s acid voice said, “let me just remind you that the G8 meeting starts tomorrow. So I dearly hope your little shopping trip was worth it.” He stepped into the foyer and demanded of Sophie, “Well? Have you a masterstroke to save the day, or are we all well and truly fucked?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” She took a deep breath. “I was wrong about a lot of it. Let me sit down somewhere and I’ll explain.”
We took seats around the round mahogany table in the living room and waited anxiously while she tried to assemble her thoughts into a narrative.
Finally she said to Jesse, “See, I figured Kostopoulos and Colombia were Ortega on his own, I didn’t think you and Anya were connected. But when they asked us to go visit you I was pretty eager, because I’d found out about Grassfire and wanted to see what you were up to. I heard about Kostopoulos from Shadow and Octal. I never imagined we might get attacked in Colombia. In Haiti we just got lucky. Anya must not have known they were grabbing me, or she would have made sure we didn’t get away.”
“Haiti was Ortega on his own initiative,” I said. “Without telling the Russians.”
“Ah. That explains a lot.”
“Maybe to you,” I said bitterly. “Why? Why did you sell Axon to Ortega and everybody else?”
I left unasked: and why in my name, without telling me?
“Because I had to,” she said simply. “Because autonomous drones are an incredibly disruptive and unbelievably dangerous technology. You think what the Russians are doing today is bad? Think ahead. In ten years it’s going to seem quaint. We have to put a leash on drones before it’s too late. When I realized Axon was five years ahead of anyone else, I saw if I could spread it as widely as possible, to as many dangerous and violent groups as possible, lure them all into committing to it as their weapon system of choice, then I could use my leash to round them all up and keep them under control.”