“Better the cops than the Russians.”
“True. Shit,” LoTek said.
“What?” I demanded.
“I’m picking up a helicopter heading for the free-trade zone already. Not police. It’ll take probably fifteen minutes to scramble them. This one will be there in ten, maximum. Must be the Russians coming for their prize.”
There was nothing to say to that. I suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if there wasn’t enough air in my biohazard helmet. It took me two attempts to peel it off.
There was nothing we could do. The Russian helicopter would carry them away, unless we could somehow go up and stop them, and we couldn’t. They had guns and wouldn’t hesitate to use them. The only weapon we had was high explosive, useless under the circumstances.
I flung the helmet across the room in frustration. Its slipstream caught a piece of paper, which flew off a desk and floated gingerly down to the ground. Clean-room paper was made of a special material that didn’t flake. A childish corner of my wind wondered, irrelevantly, if you could still fold it into paper airplanes.
Paper airplanes.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey what?” Lisa asked.
“Hey, you moron,” I said, meaning myself, “this is a factory.”
Chapter 83
LoTek patched the video footage from the factory roof to our phones. The helipad was set amid a forest of air-conditioning ducts that looked like huge metallic examples of alien botany. Sophie and Jesse stood handcuffed near the giant X, escorted by two stone-faced thugs holding sleek handguns. Beside them Dmitri and Anya waited tensely.
I remembered Jesse picking cuffs in ten seconds flat to impress girls at parties back in our university days. I wondered if in all the recent mayhem he had had any opportunity to pick up a pick.
The clean-room elevator that had carried them up rose into a turret atop one corner of the concrete roof, right next to the helipad. Our freight elevator ascended to to a similar but larger extrusion about a hundred metres away. I hoped that was too far away for them to shoot with any accuracy.
Once we were inside and ready I pushed the CLOSE button. An engine hummed and the freight elevator’s double doors came together vertically, like the closing of a giant maw, leaving us surrounded by rusting steel lit by a single dim LED bulb. When I pushed UP the world jerked, and I nearly fell. I had to hold down the button to maintain our motion.
“It’s in the zone,” LoTek said, meaning the incoming escape helicopter and the Jebel Ali free-trade zone. “You’ll see it coming.”
Once at our apogee I pushed OPEN just long enough to create a thin horizontal crack. Desert air flowed in as I looked out at the six figures waiting by the helipad, and beyond, the cranes and lights of the construction site across the street, counterlit from below by the shimmering ambience of the emergency vehicles that now surrounded Greenwood Technologies. And beyond that – I squinted. Two of the more distant lights were in motion, approaching. The helicopter.
“OK.” I took a deep breath, and leaned on the OPEN button. “In the words of Jim Morrison, let’s try to set the night on fire.”
As the doors yawned open, the exterior light washed onto the drone launcher we had squeezed into the freight elevator. A drone perched on it, ready for dispatch. Five more hexagonal drone carriers sat stacked in a corner. We had learned that one advantage of hexes versus squares was that they were easier to roll.
Default Axon behaviour, when launched without any programmed objectives, was to rise to a moderate height and circle while waiting for radio commands. That did us no good, so I had popped open those drones’ control panels and used Lisa’s knife to perform brief and savage lobotomies, leaving them with a nervous system but no brain; dumb aircraft that would just fly forward until they hit something and exploded.
When the helicopter was close enough to hear its whopwhopwhop I pushed the START button on the readied drone. Its engine buzzed into life. Lisa, who had claimed the trigger position by virtue of enormously more experience shooting things, aimed it towards the incoming vehicle and made tiny adjustments.
Dmitri turned our way, noticed the open doors of our elevator, and cried some kind of warning. Too late. I couldn’t hear what he shouted; the howl of the drone engine inside the metal-walled elevator was deafening, and the resonating thwong! when Lisa launched it was even worse, like a drum sting at an incredibly loud rock concert.
The drone soared delicately out over the roof and into the night, like a huge paper airplane that happened to have the explosive power of a hundred pounds of TNT. I didn’t bother to follow its trajectory. Either it would hit or it wouldn’t. My job was to ready another drone. I was pulling it free from its hex case when the gunfire began.
I froze when I heard the first shots. Then a bullet ricocheted off the elevator walls with a triple c-c-clang!, and I abandoned the drone in favour of diving prone. Lisa, thinking more clearly than I, jumped over me to the control panel and punched the CLOSE button until the doors narrowed back to a slit.
We peered out. I felt like an archer in a medieval castle. The drone soared straight towards the target – but then the helicopter suddenly pulled back, away from the factory; its pilot must have seen the oncoming drone. The UAV wobbled in the rotor wash but kept going, out to the darkness of the Persian Gulf. I briefly wondered how far it would go. Conceivably it could reach Iran. I hoped it wouldn’t go down in an inhabited area, or start a war.
The Russians by the helipad watched us closely but didn’t advance. I wouldn’t have wanted to charge our improvised drone-crossbow either. The helicopter held its position too. Anya gesticulated angrily, waving at it to come.
“That flew perfectly straight.” Lisa sounded impressed. “But they’re too slow, they’ll see it coming.”
That struck me as a solvable problem. “LoTek,” I said.
“Present.”
“Can you kill the lights?”
“Which lights?” he asked.
“All of them.”
“Give me a minute.”
I used the time to mount the next drone on the launcher. Lisa opened the doors enough to allow it egress. No shots followed; either Dmitri and Anya hadn’t noticed or they were conserving ammunition. The helicopter began to swoop down to the helipad again, coming in low to present less of a target, moving cautiously.
“OK,” LoTek grunted into my ear, and the entire Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone went dark.
It felt almost like the carpet of the world had been snatched out from under me. Only the secondhand swirling lights of the emergency vehicles, and the helicopter’s running lights against the suddenly-dark sky, pierced the sudden all-encompassing darkness. The helicopter halted, hovering just above the construction zone across the street. A mistake: as soon as its lights were stable in the sky, Lisa launched the second drone. Again I winced at the sound.
I held my breath and watched, even though there was nothing to see: the dark gray drone was all but invisible in the night. No wonder they had managed to smuggle twelve thousand of them into the USA.
Then a bright light erupted inside the construction site. For an instant the helicopter was silhouetted in a gorgeous tableau of destruction. The drone had somehow hit one of the cranes, about a hundred feet below where the chopper hovered. It was catapulted violently upwards by the shockwave, and I held my breath, hoping – but its pilot retained control.
As the hot wave of desert air from the explosion washed across my face, the steel of the construction crane gave way, and its top half, including its cab, folded and fell away with an agonizing metal moan. Moments later a resounding crash echoed through the night.