Brooke’s ears perked up. ‘Vegas?’ she muttered.
‘You’ll be leaving immediately. Lillian’s preparing a file for you with everything we know about Stokes. Plenty of juicy reading. So get to Logan ASAP and you can study up on him on your way out there. I don’t think I need to tell you that there’s a lot riding on this, Tommy.’
‘You can count on me.’
‘I knew I could. I’ll be in touch,’ Jason said, then ended the call.
34
‘For Christ’s sake, I could have invaded North Korea by now,’ Crawford said, glowering. ‘Are you ready yet?’ His eyes traced the fibre-optic cable from the PackBot’s rear to a large spool, which in turn patched into a suitcase-sized remote command unit, painted in desert camouflage. The unit’s unhinged hardshell cover was inset with a seventeen-inch LCD viewing screen; its base hosted a computer hard drive, keyboard and toggle controls. This space-age gadgetry was lost on Crawford. Results were the only thing he controlled. And it was high time to see some progress.
‘Almost there, sir,’ replied the bot’s technician — an attractive 28-year-old female with the sharp edges of a pageboy haircut sticking out below her helmet. Being a combat engineer, she was an expert with explosives, and was accustomed to using the bot to disarm or detonate roadside bombs and mines. But this was the first time she’d employed the gas-canister-firing apparatus, and she didn’t like the fact that Crawford was rushing things. ‘Just running the final diagnostics on the software utilities …’ She worked the keyboard and controls until the display synched with the bot’s onboard cameras. The live images panelled onscreen. She held her breath as the interface for the rotary firing mechanism came online. When no errors came back, she exhaled.
Below the mountain, Crawford surveyed the tight perimeter his marines had formed around the encampment. Everyone was on high alert after Sergeant Yaeger purported to spot an Arab watcher lurking in the high ground. Inside the MRAP, he had a pair of marines monitoring the surrounding hillsides and mountains with infrared scanners. For good measure, the airwaves were also being closely monitored for enemy chatter. An ambush could turn this whole operation into an even bigger quagmire, thought Crawford. Plus, if there were an enemy in wait, the darkness would prove a huge tactical advantage for them.
Crawford’s gaze shifted to Yaeger and his motley unit members, who were huddled around the bot’s technician watching the viewing screen. Cleverly dressed like nomadic desert dwellers, they had certainly fooled the enemy. But the fact that they had no affinity to a ‘uniform’ was deeply unsettling for Crawford. Damn chameleons, he swore inwardly.
Crawford’s appraising eyes settled for a long moment on the Kurd. Yaeger had yet to fully disclose what his sidekick had discovered during his earlier fact-finding mission. But the copilot who’d escorted the Kurd had plenty to say. He’d told Crawford about the brief visit to a restaurant in As Sulaymaniyah, which led to a second excursion to a mountaintop monastery near Iraq’s northeastern border. This confirmed for Crawford that Yaeger knew much more than he was letting on. And the implications were highly unnerving.
Where did Yaeger’s true allegiances lie? Crawford wondered. Undeniably, Global Security Corporation, Yaeger’s employer, was a huge ally for US counter-terrorism forces. The face of war was changing too quickly for federal defence agencies to adapt. Increasingly, outside firms were needed to fill the huge deficiency gaps in manpower and technology. GSC was nimble, amenable to risk, and heavily capitalized by the world’s wealthiest investors and industrialized economies (both of whom had the most to lose if terrorism ran amuck). Ironically, even Saudi and Kuwaiti oil money fed its coffers. As with any outside contractor, however, accountability was an issue, particularly when profit was the driving force.
Was Jason Yaeger an opportunist? If it came down to it, could he be bought? Or would his stubborn moral code simply get in the way and require Crawford to apply a more potent remedy to temper his growing disobedience?
Huffing impatiently, Crawford bent at the waist to inspect the bot’s rotary firing assembly loaded with miniature gas canister projectiles that contained a mixture of eye irritant and sedative. He always thought that fanciful talk of warfare without soldiers was hogwash — on a par with paperless offices, everlasting gobstoppers and wives who didn’t nag. Yet this thirty-pound motorized robot was about to perform a most perilous task that not long ago would have resulted in multiple human casualties. With remote drones patrolling the skies and unmanned fighter planes already in production, a new age of warfare was dawning.
All this technology, thought Crawford.
Yet as long as weak-minded politicians controlled the ‘utilities’ of the war machine, the terrorists would still thrive in the long run. Just like cockroaches, thought Crawford. The fact remained that war was never meant to be civil. Since the first humans attacked one another with stones, the goal of conflict had not changed. Survival was the objective. And history proved time and time again that diplomacy served only to blur the lines between the ‘victors’ and the ‘vanquished’.
The bot came online with a sudden jerk of its articulating arm, and Crawford gave a start.
‘Okay. We’re good to go,’ the combat engineer reported.
Crawford stepped back from the bot and stood next to Jason. ‘All right, Yaeger. It’s show time.’
Crawford and Jason knelt to either side of the combat engineer, intently watching the live transmissions coming back from the bot. On the command unit’s viewing screen, the tunnel branched off in both directions at a near perfect T.
‘Right or left?’ the engineer asked, bringing the bot to a stop at the end of the cave’s entry passage.
‘Go right,’ Crawford immediately blurted, before Jason could give it a thought.
Jason’s muscles went rigid, but he managed to hold back his tongue. He exchanged glances with Camel and Jam, who stood close by to feed fibre-optic cable from the spool. Camel’s jaw was grinding tobacco and his eyes were locked to Crawford’s skull. Jam was silently mouthing a string of obscenities. Hazo shared the sentiment, but chose to smile and shrug. And Meat was clenching and unclenching his fists, like a guy ready to brawl.
‘We don’t have time to take a vote,’ Crawford barked at the engineer.
Jason rolled his eyes and nodded to the engineer.
‘Okay,’ she replied hesistantly, sensing the tension. Pressing forward on the joystick control, she advanced the bot forward into the junction. Then she toggled right and the onscreen image rotated until the camera was directed down the tunnel branch. It was evident that this winding, craggy passage, approximately two metres wide according to the laser measurements coming back from the bot, had not been altered from its natural state. ‘Here we go.’
As the bot advanced beyond the dimly lit entry passage, rising and falling over the undulating ground, the light quickly melted away and the camera’s night vision automatically compensated for the darkness. On the command unit’s viewing screen, the live feeds transformed to green-tinted monochrome. The glowing airborne dust swirling in the camera made it seem like the bot was trapped inside a snow globe.
‘It’s quiet in there,’ the engineer said. She adjusted the volume slide control upwards. The only sounds coming over the audio feed were the bot’s low-humming gears and the crunching of gravel beneath its rotary tracks.
‘Too quiet,’ Crawford added.
‘God, that looks creepy,’ Jam muttered, craning his head to get a better view.