Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“How you doin’?” Ramon asked the guard through the chain-link fence. The man, with bushy black eyebrows and deep-set brown eyes, was wearing a cheap, civilian-made security-firm uniform festooned with shoulder patches and crimson epaulettes, no doubt meant to intimidate the locals. He looked grumpy and immediately suspicious, but Ramon took no notice, as if he hadn’t seen the man’s unwelcoming frown. “Hi, I’m Lieutenant Ramon. We’re here to see your director.” Ramon took a letter from his pocket and held it up close to his eyes, inclining the paper in the moonlight. “A Doctor—” Ramon’s forehead creased in concentration, as if he were trying to read a name on the envelope.

All he needed was a moment or two of confusion, the security guard to cease pacing up and down inside the chain-link fence. But the guard, much shorter than Ramon had first guessed, kept moving right to left behind the wire, taking no notice of the proffered letter of authorization, looking instead beyond Ramon and the sergeant at the eleven other men. He put up his hand, signaling “stop,” and began walking away from the fence toward the shoreline hut, at which point Ramon, heart in his mouth, called out, “Hey, standard procedure, man. Check my ID first.”

The man paused, looked back, and saw that Ramon was holding a striped ID card against the fence, a fence which Ramon knew was normally linked to motion sensors but the latter, Intel had told him, had been disengaged because of so many false alerts, set off by roaming dogs. Sometimes the alarms were tripped by falcons, which occasionally mistook the ground sensors for rodents.

The guard walked back to the fence and, taking out his flashlight, peered at the striped ID card.

Ramon’s sergeant held up his ID card as well. The guard glanced from one to the other, and it was obvious to the lieutenant that the guard didn’t recognize either but that his pride was demanding he examine the ID cards as if he knew what he was doing. Ramon hoped Intel was right about the copper shielding thwarting any communication with the barge or hut.

The guard came closer to the fence and stood still, examining the cards. The sergeant shot him point-blank through a diamond-shaped space in the chain-link fence, the spit of the Heckler Koch 9 mm sidearm barely making a sound. The guard fell backward, thudding to the ground.

In seconds, the tired-looking soldiers standing around with their mountain bikes were galvanized into action.

Within another five seconds, Ramon, kneeling by the chain-link fence, combat gloves on, extracted what looked like the leg of a small camera’s tripod from his MOLLE. It was a one-inch-diameter telescoping extension claw rod with three retractable fishhook talons on it that could be used in this case to hook the dead guard’s clothing and drag him closer to the fence. There Ramon pulled out his keys, the stench of the dead guard’s involuntarily defecation heavy in the air.

The twelve were through the gate, each of the six two-man teams knowing precisely where to go and what to do and that they had less than ten minutes before local police could be expected to be alerted and arrive. With noise suppressors on their M-16s, Heckler Koch submachine guns, and sidearms, there should be little noise. And Intel had told them that there should be relatively few people: four science graduate students in the onshore hut, six scientists on the offshore barge. The four students in the shore hut, all male, took no notice of the door opening, probably expecting visitors from the barge. All four were shot quickly, silently, at point-blank range by two of Ramon’s sidearm specialists. Ramon’s job, with his sergeant and four others, was to make straight for the rigid inflatable, its presence confirmed by the MAV, tied up on the far side of the fifty-foot-long jetty.

Ramon, his sergeant, and the four-man backup team ran toward the wharf, Ramon praying that every one of the six scientists would be inside the barge, a hope stoked by the fact that even though it had been a relatively hot day, the temperature had plummeted as soon as the sun had died, and working conditions now were much more pleasant. But what if one of the scientists were to stroll out for a minute for a cigarette or to relieve himself? Intel had told him there were no facilities on the barge other than an unhandy portable chemical toilet. This meant there was a risk of somebody suddenly wanting to run ashore in the rigid inflatable, which would screw up everybody’s timing.

Ramon’s squad had reached the jetty and were in the inflatable in seconds, their training, the seemingly endless repetition, paying off. In a few seconds the RIB, emitting a whiff of diesel, was away from the wharf, its outboard initially sounding to the lieutenant like the rip of a light machine gun but only because, apart from the deep throb of a compressor, there was no other noise on the shoreline. In fact, the outboard engine was remarkably quiet, purring along after the initial burp. It was too good, too smooth, to last, thought Ramon. Something must be about to happen. Murphy’s Law. The RIB had just nudged into one of the rubber tires that served as a bump rail girding the barge when a door opened. A skewed rectangle of light flooded out onto the black deck, silhouetting Ramon, his sergeant, and the four other men in the RIB sharply against the moonlit lake. The scientist let out a cry. Ramon and the sergeant fired and the man pitched forward, crashing against a spool of cable on the black grit-grip deck. Moving quickly through the acrid smell of cordite into the barge’s housing, they burst in to find five startled scientists. Two men in stained white lab coats were bending over a map of the lake, while a woman in a spotless lab coat sat at the mainframe. A second woman, extraordinarily thin, was busy reloading the printer, while a man in his fifties in stain-blotched white coveralls, his balding head and eyeglasses catching the light from the swivel-mounted monitor screen above his computer terminal, looked at them in astonishment.

“Who za hell are you?” demanded the bald man imperiously.

Ramon slammed his gloved fist into the man’s face, sending the scientist reeling back past the screaming woman, the scientist crashing into a door three feet behind him and falling down amid a pile of stacked printer paper.

“The Flow-In-Flight file!” demanded Ramon, as the older man, now lying in shock and bleeding from his teeth, gasped, looking down at his bloodstained hand and at his four companions for help. The four were frozen in fear.

“The Flow-In-Flight file!” Ramon repeated, only more forcefully this time. “I want it. On screen— now !” He brought his Heckler Koch MP5 submachine gun level with the woman, dark-haired and probably in her midtwenties. “Bring it up!” Ramon told her.

She shook her head, a definite no. Ramon shot her, the man bleeding on the floor yelling, “Nein! Nein!” The other three scientists, in their late twenties or early thirties, were aghast, faces turning waxen in fright.

“Bring it UP !” Ramon said once again. “You started this war. We’ll finish it!”

The two male scientists to the left of the computer, and the woman behind them, looked at one another in shock, as if they didn’t understand. There was a moment of indecision.

The sergeant glanced anxiously at his watch. Five minutes left before local police could be expected to arrive if any of the staff on the barge or in the onshore data hut had had time to punch an alarm Intel hadn’t known about. Ramon fired again, this time at one of the men leaning against the mainframe. It was a head shot, Ramon not wanting to damage the computer. The scientist slid down, his face a stare of utter astonishment. He was bleeding profusely from the back of the head, his two companions huddling together now against the mainframe as if it might give them protection.