John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

“Your choice.”

While it was possible to manipulate the images from the laptop, it was far simpler for Venice to do it with her controls. The image moved to a section of the screen where the thirty-foot elevation would actually give them a view of four workers. In a single frame.

“I’m seeing children,” Harvey said. “Are you seeing children?”

“Turning you on?” Boxers jabbed.

“Fuck you.”

“Can it,” Jonathan snapped. He keyed his mike. “We’re seeing a workforce of kids, Mother Hen. Is that what you get from the big screen?”

“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” Venice said.

Jonathan took that as a yes.

“Okay, back off to a hundred feet again.” The children seemed to fall away into the screen, and they saw the southwestern corner of the factory. Jonathan touched a spot on the screen with the tip of a retracted ballpoint pen. “Let me see this building right here,” he said to Venice. “Get me to ten feet.”

As the image started to move, Boxers asked, “You want to see the thatched roof?”

“Exactly.” The building he was calling up was the only structure in the compound that had been built outside the jungle canopy. It was therefore easy to see construction details.

When the image stopped moving, and the software finished its resolution process, the picture of an open-sided hut was as clear as if it had been snapped by a visitor. As he’d expected, the roof was made of what appeared to be palm fronds. Admittedly, though, he didn’t know one plant from another.

“Why is the thatched roof important?” Harvey asked.

“Because they burn really good,” Boxers said.

Harvey’s jaw dropped a little. “What exactly are we planning to do?”

“Win against ridiculous odds,” Jonathan said. Then, to Venice: “Go ahead and pull out again and let me see the compound. Just enough altitude to give me all the buildings.”

“Are we looking for something in particular?” Venice asked.

“We’re looking for stores of gasoline,” he said. He’d keyed his mike for Venice, but the answer was intended as much for Harvey as for her. “Cocaine manufacturing is a bizarre process,” he went on. “If people knew how it was made, they’d never in a million years shove it up their nose. After they stomp on the leaves, they soak the shit in sulfuric acid for a while, and then after another step or two, there’s a long soak in gasoline. Up here, I figure they’ve got to have a pretty good supply.”

“Gasoline, eh?” Venice said in his ear. “You should have said something earlier. Watch this.” The image on the screen blinked as it refreshed, and then it turned from a picture as you’d normally see it to something more akin to a photographic negative. It jumped a couple more times. And then rotated.

Harvey asked, “What the hell is going on?”

“That’s Venice being Venice,” Boxers said.

Jonathan added, “You learn over time not to ask questions. It’s best just to sit still until she’s finished. She’s good enough with this computer shit that electrons are actually afraid of her.” In anticipation of the show that always accompanied one of Venice’s digital accomplishments, Jonathan unplugged his earpiece from the radio and ran the audio connection through the laptop’s speakers.

“Quit talking about Venice,” he said. “She can hear us all now.”

“Ha, ha, very funny,” she said.

They listened to the clatter of her computer keys as the image on the screen continued to shift and change colors. For the first part of this dizzying display, she trolled around the outline of the main building, zooming in and out of different quadrants. When one quadrant showed a yellow-orange aura, she said, “There it is.”

“There what is?” Jonathan asked.

“Just wait,” she said.

She zoomed away from the main building and then shifted to the others in the compound. Through the canopy, they appeared more as outlines than real images, but the footprints of the huts were plainly visible. The screen shifted from building to building, pausing for a second or two, and then moving on to the next. She zoomed out and then in, at what seemed to be random intervals, and finally, she paused at one hut, perhaps the smallest of them all. She zoomed in closer, and as she did, a similar yellow aura appeared on the screen.

“There’s your gasoline storage,” she said.

Boxers blurted out a laugh.

“You’ll tell us how you know this?” Jonathan asked. He didn’t for a moment question the accuracy-Venice was always right-he just wanted to know how she got there.

“Did you forget what SkysEye was designed to do?” she asked.

Then he saw it. He had in fact forgotten. “Petroleum research,” he said.

“Bingo. The program is designed to search for petroleum compounds. Don’t ask me how it does it-something about the light signature of vapors-but there you go.”

“I’ll be damned,” Harvey marveled.

“I told you she was good,” Jonathan said.

Venice continued, “That first yellow plume we saw was the gasoline in operation. I figured it would be easier to find when it was in use, and I figured that the big building was the actual factory. I just needed to see what it looked like in use, where vapor concentrations are high, so that I could look for it in storage, where vapors are more contained.”

“I’ll be double-damned,” Harvey said. “So, now that we know where it is, what are we going to do with it?”

Jonathan and Boxers exchanged glances, and together said, “Blow it up.”

Jonathan expanded, “We’re going to need a diversion to get our PC out of there in one piece. If we give the guards a choice of saving one kid or saving the whole compound, maybe we can catch a break.”

“Speaking of breaks,” Venice said. There was a sudden lightness in her tone. “Wait till you see this.” The screen blinked with another refreshed signal, and then they were looking at a clear image of the coca field again.

Not much seemed to have changed. The workers still toiled, and shadows were still sharp. It wasn’t until she started to zoom into the workers that Jonathan got that anticipatory quiver in his gut. Was it possible that she’d found Evan in the middle of the crowd?

The answer came when he got his first flash of white-blond hair. He pointed to the screen. “Holy shit, that’s him, isn’t it?”

The boy stood with a tall black man and another child. It was hard to tell from a still picture, but they appeared to be having a conversation. “Take me in as close as you can.”

Even as he said the words, he knew that he’d overstated. If Venice took the imagery in as close at it was capable of going, they’d be able to count the freckles on his shoulders. As it was, Venice understood his meaning and brought them in to within four or five feet.

“I see a white boy with long blond hair,” Boxers said. “Look at the sunburn on his shoulders. That’s someone not used to this much exposure. I give it a ninety-nine percent.”

Jonathan agreed. “I call that confirmation,” he said. “That makes us a go. Mother Hen, can you put a tag on him somehow and keep up with him?”

Silence.

“You still there?” Jonathan asked.

“I’m here,” she confirmed. “I just don’t know how to answer you. His heat signature is going to be just like everybody else’s. I can track him visually, but that gets to diminishing returns really quickly. After dark, he’ll be lost.”

“Screw it,” Boxers said. “We already know he’s there. Once we create a little chaos, we just search him out.”

“That’s a lot of chaos,” Jonathan said. “I don’t want to have to find a moving target if people start running around.”