Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“It means stay still.”

From almost a mile away Abramov was watching, his nerves rattled by his near-death experiences in the shot-up transport helo and the minefield. He could barely move, so tightly stuffed was his battle uniform and backpack with three different currencies and a back brace belt he’d personally ordered to be altered so that it would carry a bag of ten big-candy-bar-sized ingots of gold.

“A walking bank,” the crew of Nureyev’s tank had called him as they’d fished him out of the minefield.

“What’s the American doing?” Abramov demanded angrily, standing atop the tank next to its cupola with two other bonus-hungry terrorists. Abramov was using the cupola to brace himself, his legs and arms still spasming in reaction to his having had to stand perfectly still and then bear his own weight and that of the gold while dangling from the huge 125 mm gun.

“General Abramov!” called out the tank’s radio operator. “Our crew in Tank 1 has been badly mauled. Only one survivor. He’s withdrawing to H-block.”

“What for?” Abramov snarled. “There’s nothing left for him there. Doesn’t he know what the Cobras did? They’ve destroyed H-block; it’s burning. Computers and everything. Gone!”

“Sir,” Nureyev cut in, “the American must be telling the boy to take off his jacket. Why is he making the boy—”

“Shut up!” ordered Abramov, the weight of his binoculars straining his wrists. “The boy’s in my employ. His guardian’s a big customer of ours — paid half your wages. This Freeman bastard must be suspicious.”

“Looks like he is telling the kid to turn around,” said Nureyev.

Despite his nervous state, or perhaps because of it, Abramov gave a short, guttural laugh. “He suspects the blue-eyed boy. Thinks he might be wired with explosives.”

“Is he?” Nureyev dared to ask. He, as well as his crew, were exhausted by the ever-present threat of being taken out like the others at the beginning of the U.S. raid. “He hasn’t got a bomb belt on,” said Nureyev, watching through his binoculars and still waiting for Abramov’s confirmation of whether or not the boy was wired. “Maybe a grenade?” proffered Nureyev.

“No,” Abramov said, having to lower his binoculars, hands atremble. “But he’s Freeman’s death warrant.”

Freeman glimpsed movement, side right. It was Melissa Thomas coming closer, still in Russian garb, but wearing her American helmet. Hunched over from the weight of the clothing, she looked like a crone. The boy started with fright when he saw her, the suddenness of her appearance rather than her Russian uniform and American helmet surprising him.

“Now take off your pants,” Freeman told the boy slowly.

“But mister, I wish to tell I am not Russian soldier. I am no soldier. I am only twelve years—”

“Be quiet!” snapped Freeman. “Take them off!”

The boy first took off his boots, then the trousers, revealing khaki cotton long johns.

“I am cold,” he complained.

“So am I,” the legendary general told him. “Everybody’s cold. Now take off your long johns.”

“General!” said Thomas. “I hear aircraft—”

She was right. There were three of them. Two were less loud than the other, which seemed slower and was out of sight above the gray three-thousand-foot-high stratus. Night was almost upon them, and the man, Melissa saw, purportedly this boy’s father, was still visible by the Jinlin but becoming more difficult to see in the fast-descending dusk.

“Joint Strike Fighters,” Freeman answered, without turning toward her, watching the boy taking off his underwear and shivering. Melissa didn’t avert her eyes. She’d been trained not to, not after the number of marines lost in Iraq to innocent-looking children who had wandered up to U.S. soldiers with a smile and a “Hi, Mac!” then blown themselves and the marines to pieces.

The blue-eyed boy had no grenades tucked into the crotch of his long johns. He was shivering violently. The rule was not to let them speak, to “chat you up,” as the Brits called it, chat you up all friendly and innocent and then the grenade.

“All right,” Freeman said. “Put your long johns on and pull your jacket and trousers inside out. Pockets as well. And pat them down so I can see.”

To help the boy understand, Freeman, still holding his AK-74 in his right hand, patted his left leg with his left hand, miming what he wanted the boy to do. The kid seemed smart enough, older than his young, blue-eyed innocence would suggest.

Melissa Thomas saw the first two planes, black specks beneath the gray stratus, the thunder and speed of their passing so fast she had only a few seconds to see they were in fact two American Joint Strike Fighters; the third plane, the one the JSFs were obviously protecting, sounded higher and was still hidden by the clouds of stratus, its drone much heavier and slower than the low-level scream of the two JSFs.

Freeman hadn’t seen the planes, “total focus,” as he used to tell Aussie and Co., being the necessity of the moment. Freeman still felt there was something weird. Yes, they’d seen the road track when they landed, and he himself had told the MEU force on Yorktown they might see the occasional rice farmer who spent the winters huddled in the hamlets around the lake, using bundled dried reeds collected during the summer for fuel, but he was cautious nevertheless.

“All right,” said Freeman, pointing down at the boy’s pile of inside-out clothes. “Put your hands up, like this — spread fingers — and walk back from the clothes.”

“Sir,” said Melissa Thomas, “he’s going to die of chill.”

“He’ll die of dynamite if he’s got a stick or two sown into that quilting,” though the general could see that none of the quilted segments was big enough to conceal a stick of dynamite. But you could kill a man with much less. Melissa Thomas had heard just how meticulous the elite forces, such as the SAS, SEALs, Spetsnaz, and Freeman’s SpecFor were. And she’d heard the story about Aussie and the “woman” with the baby. Freeman was quickly but gingerly feeling the quilted clothing, fur cap, and then the boy’s boots, upending and smacking them. Det cord could by itself cripple and maim.

“Sir,” said Thomas. “There’s a container coming down.”

It wasn’t one of the small ones holding white infrared X cloths but was much larger, about twice the size of a forty-five-gallon drum, under a full-size chute. Freeman figured, correctly, that this was all being coordinated by McCain ’s Signals Exploitation Space via satellite. They’d homed in on the points of the X that Melissa Thomas had spread out, and had now given the big plane, which sounded like a Herk, the X’s exact GPS address.

Freeman’s concentration on the boy and the indistinct man down by the Jinlin truck didn’t falter for a second. The general didn’t even look in the direction of the descending chute. But as he began patting down the boy’s quilted trousers he could see the peasant by the truck was standing motionless. Why wouldn’t the father be over here by now to see what’s going on? the general asked himself. His son had been made to strip and still he hadn’t moved? But the general could not feel any explosive or triggering device or any unusual heaviness as he lifted the jacket and pants up to gauge their weight. They felt just about right.

“Okay,” he told the boy, pointing down at the clothes. “Put those back on.”

“Okay?” said the boy.

“Yes, it’s okay.”

“You help my father now?”

“Yes.” Freeman turned to Melissa Thomas, who was watching the big canister float down, keeping the scope eye of her M40A1 on Abramov’s unmoving tank. The tank’s crew was no doubt wondering what to do now that there were two state-of-the-art MANPAD-invulnerable Joint Strike Fighters in the area, with tank-busting rockets and cannon.