Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

The group gathered around the monitor. The colonel’s image looked photographically real.

Foxy was shaking his head. “Fuck me…”

Hoov ran his fingers through his close-cropped blond hair. “They must be using motion-capture. An actor on a green-screen or something. Sampled the colonel’s voice patterns. They use this type of tech to do virtual pop stars in Japan, but I’ve never seen it this real. It’s…” His voice trailed off.

“This is some seriously sophisticated shit, boss. And they’re inside our satellite network?”

Odin stared at the screen. “We need to assume whoever’s behind this is deeper in the system than we are. It also means they know where we are. The satellite uplink would have confirmed that.”

Hoov was checking radar images on one of his screens. “The feed from NORAD doesn’t show anything around us for fifty miles.”

Foxy shook his head. “But why would you trust it?”

Hoov swiveled in his chair. “For the moment they think we believed the colonel’s message, Odin. They’ll be expecting us to return to Bragg.”

“We’d never reach the base.”

Foxy sat back down on the sofa arm. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Ripper and Tin Man entered the room and Foxy nodded to them. “Keep an eye on those perimeter alarms.”

Ripper scowled in irritation. “What’d the colonel say?”

“The colonel’s a goddamned cartoon. Keep an eye on the sensors.”

As they exited with confused expressions, one of the ravens flew atop a tall bookshelf and plucked up a large, squirming beetle from a dark corner. The bird then flew down and perched on the lampshade next to McKinney. It held the beetle in its beak, legs still wriggling.

Foxy regarded the bird. “Good one, Huginn.”

McKinney did a double-take on the insect.

Huginn cocked its head at her but did not start eating the huge black beetle in its mouth.

“What have you got there?”

Foxy looked up from the laptop screen again. “Dinner, look’s like.”

McKinney tried to approach the bird, but it walked to the other edge of the lampshade. She caught her breath. “Hang on a second.”

Odin turned to face her. “What is it?”

“It’s a South American flower beetle-its territory ends four thousand miles south of here.” She plucked it from the raven’s beak. Huginn didn’t put up too much fuss. She examined the beetle as its wings beat furiously to escape. But McKinney was an old hand at handling live insects. The others gathered around her, and she pointed at what appeared to be a large third eye in the center of its head. “How did it get here?”

Odin leaned close to it.

“Someone get me a knife…”

McKinney moved over to the bar, as Foxy started rooting around through drawers.

“Get me some tweezers and a couple pins if you can find them.”

“Right.” He handed her a loose razor blade he found in a utility drawer and kept searching. McKinney held up the huge beetle to the light as Odin sat on the barstool next to her.

It was immediately apparent that the bug had been “altered.” McKinney pointed with the razor blade tip at two plastic objects underneath each wing. “I’ve seen this before.”

“What do you mean you’ve seen it before? Where?”

“At an entomology conference a couple years ago. These are tiny generators, capturing the wing movement to power microelectronics.”

Odin looked incredulous.

“It wasn’t classified-it was brain research. They were looking for a research grant.”

Foxy handed her several sewing needles in a mug and a pair of tweezers.

“Thanks.” She put the razor blade down and grabbed a needle-sticking it straight through the beetle’s brain, killing it, as she anchored the beetle to the bar top. Though dead, the insect’s legs were still scrabbling at the wood.

“Hard core, Professor.”

“We’ll see…” She then took the razor blade and started dissecting the beetle, peeling back the carapace to get at the brain. Almost immediately, she noticed fine fiber-optic threads leading from a tiny camera lens into an electronic device the size of a grain of rice. She used the tweezers to tease it away from the brain and up into the light.

It looked like a tiny CCTV camera and antenna assembly, with Asian characters printed on it.

Odin studied it. “We’re through the looking glass, people.”

“Chinese.”

Odin pushed away from the bar. “That’s just the camera’s manufacturer, Foxy.”

McKinney nodded. “The conference presentation was on ‘brain-jacking.’ They insert the transmitter directly into the insect’s brain-adding it at the larval stage so the insect grows around it. They leverage an existing nervous system to make a remote-controlled minidrone out of a living thing. All you do is activate the neurons that handle flying, turning, crawling, whatever, and the bug’s own nervous system handles the rest. We all thought the guy was sick. Apparently he found a receptive audience in the military.”

Odin took the camera from her and held it up to the light, then he ripped the antenna out. He looked around. “There’s no telling how many more of those things there are in here.”

Odin tossed the thing on the floor and crushed it under his boot. “This site is blown. We need to evac immediately. What’s down at the airstrip?”

Foxy answered. “MD500 chopper and a Cessna Grand Caravan.”

“In cover?”

“The Cessna’s in the hangar.”

“Fueled up?”

He nodded. “Wing tanks too.”

“All right. Hoov…”

Hoov swiveled on his chair. “Yeah?”

“Destroy the uplink equipment and prepare to move out.”

“You got-”

There was a series of deep thwack s as holes appeared in the heavy drapes and fist-sized divots blasted out of Hoov’s chest. Then half of his head blasted apart, spraying McKinney and the sofa with gore. Hoov’s body pitched forward, upending the coffee table.

“Sniper!”

McKinney was dimly aware of shouting and people hitting the floor around her as the world seemed to constrict to a tiny focal point on her shoes-which were covered in blood. Hoov’s quivering body lay at her feet. She stared at the interior of his skull, even now coursing with blood that pooled across the floor. Blood was also oozing from several other holes in Hoov’s chest, turning his entire blue Ancile polo shirt maroon.

That’s when someone grabbed her bodily by the shoulders and hauled her over the back of the sofa. She didn’t even feel the hard impact on the floor, but it must have brought her back to her senses. She looked up to see bullet holes systematically drilling into the foreheads of every human portrait and photograph on the wall that faced the covered window. Glass and splintered wood ricocheted around the room as bullet holes appeared with the speed and precision of a sewing machine. Two flat-panel monitors with the colonel’s face displayed on them also got hit dead center, blasting apart.

“Stay down!” Whoever had grabbed McKinney was dragging her. She felt Odin’s beard scratching her face as he pulled her behind the bar. His arm was as hard as a baseball bat, and he had a. 45 tactical pistol in his other hand.

Someone shouted, “Sniper, Black, Alpha, Two!”

Odin responded in a booming voice. “Automated sniper station. Probably synth-app radar-stay away from perimeter walls!”

Foxy’s voice. “Hoov’s gone, Odin.”

“I know.”

A voice called out from the foyer. “Odin! Boomerang says the shots came from two locations near the center ridgeline. Plunging fire from six hundred and eighty-three meters and six hundred and twenty meters out.”