Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

“Keep going! ” Mario shouted.

She veered left and sliced right, putting more distance between themselves and the ’hog. A second RPG landed behind them and exploded with a bright flash, but it was farther off its mark than the previous one. They braced for a third round, but it didn’t come. The rocket fire had stopped. The robot could no longer draw an accurate bead.

“What’s next?” Laura said.

“I’m not sure,” Mario said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Will it follow us?”

“I don’t think so. It’s too slow to catch up. It understands that.”

She drove through the darkness in her deliberate zigzag. Mario felt his weight shift this way and that.

“I lost Buttons,” she said after a minute. “I feel awful.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Laura.”

“I was opening the door, and he jumped.”

“When I didn’t see him, I kind of figured. But I’m pretty sure he’ll be okay.”

She was silent a moment. “You really think so?”

“I do,” Mario said. “Cats can take care of themselves.”

She nodded.

“I just hope—” She broke off abruptly, cocking her head to one side. “Mario, do you hear something?”

He listened. “Yeah. A buzzing...that what you mean?”

She nodded. “Like a helicopter,” she said. “I wonder if it means help is on the way.”

Mario listened some more but said nothing.

“Do you think it might?” Laura asked. “Mean we’re getting help, that is?”

Mario hesitated. It didn’t sound all that much like a helicopter to him. But he didn’t want to alarm her. “I’ll try to check it out when we can stop,” he said.

Laura was thinking that Mario’s vague response was kind of odd. Like he didn’t want to scare her. Which scared her a whole lot.

Doing her best not to show it, she rolled on across the wide, snowy field, orienting herself by the diffuse red glow above the horizon, headed west.

Five minutes earlier, Sergeant Julio Fernandez had driven his Puma 6x6 over the same snow-sheeted field and in the same westerly direction as the Jolt. Now he was stopped three hundred yards to the east of what once had been parade and assembly grounds for Romanian land troops. He sat carefully monitoring his display consoles, a sensor tower atop the vehicle’s hull transmitting multispectral images of the barracks to its cabin.

The visuals were clear and chilling.

Erected on about half an acre of land at the far end of the parade grounds, the building had been wider than it was long, with gray concrete walls, a flat tar-paper roof, and rows of square windows on each of its three stories. But the hedgehogs had left very little of it standing. The side walls had been blown outward and the roof collapsed inward. Fernandez saw flames dancing and leaping above their shattered remnants. Streamers of black smoke, flecked with red and orange, gushed from the broken front windows and rose skyward in sooty columns.

There were two hedgehogs in the yard—Spree and Nash according to their radio-frequency identification tags. A third ’hog was in back, out of visual range and represented by a graphic icon. All stood unmoving in the glow of outside light poles, CIA-era upgrades with flat, shoebox-shaped LED fixtures designed to give off a smooth, cool white radiance.

“Check out the ’hogs’ RFIDs,” he said, glancing around at Howard. “Spree’s over to the south. Nash is on the north side of the yard. Walt’s behind the building in the parking lot.”

“Where the bunker exits.”

Fernandez nodded. The small concrete maintenance shed at the far western end of the lot was a Romanian Army holdover. It stood about a hundred yards from the perimeter fence and had a steel door that could be opened with a simple key card issued to all official base personnel. He’d used it once or twice out of curiosity and guessed there were ten or fifteen metal steps inside leading down to the subsurface bomb shelter.

It would be Walt that normally passed the shed while making its rounds. Multiple times a day, in fact. So it made a certain kind of sense that the ’hog was back there guarding it right now. Which confirmed a little something about the bots’ current behavior.

“They’re sticking to their quadrants,” Fernandez said. “Interesting.”

Howard looked at him. “Fuck if I know what you’re talking about, Julio.”

Fernandez paused a second. “If you’re a hacker who seizes control of a system, you want total control. The ability to move the hogs anywhere on the board.” He shrugged. “That’s ideal.”

“And?”

“Seems to me they’re on leashes. Longer ones than we gave them, but leashes.”

“So you’re saying they’ve been duped ?”

“More like they’re delusional,” Fernandez said. “I’ll explain later. But I’m guessing they still think they’re guarding the perimeter.”

Howard inhaled. “Okay,” he said. “How’s that help us right now?”

“Short-term, it means we probably don’t have to worry about Earl coming up on our rear.” Fernandez pointed to the display. “It’s near the civilian Quonsets at the east end. More or less where it belongs.”

“And long-term?”

“It’ll be useful when we get to sorting out what’s happened here tonight. And when—”

“Sir?”

It was Wasserman. Urgency in his voice. Glancing back at him with a hand on his left earpiece.

Howard sat forward with a wince. His ribs felt like jagged glass. “What is it?”

“I have contact with the bunker,” he said.

“Who?”

“Captain Jeffries, sir. We have thirteen men and women down there. And some are in pretty bad shape.”

Back east across the field, outside the row of civilian Quonsets, Earl stood motionless in the snow. White flakes corkscrewed around it, formed a thin white skin on its metal surfaces, and filled in the tracks it had left between the huts like a connecting rope.

Still and silent, the hedgehog showed no sign of visible activity. But it continued to function without interruption.

As the JLTV carrying the two human threats inside sped off, it had received an algorithmic data transmission from the Monarch drone. A bit of malicious deep-learning code that fit neatly within the framework of its original programming.

The drone swarm was descending to protect the base.

George Bush Center, Langley

A short while after Howard had gotten off the phone with her, a pale and dismayed Carol Morse sat in her office preparing to make a difficult call of her own. She would have preferred taking some time to digest what the colonel reported but could not allow herself that luxury. The call could not be delayed. She was in all but title an adjunct to the Director of Net Force, Alex Michaels. Formally, she remained a CIA operations officer. But from Net Force’s inception as a cabinet-level cybersecurity arm, President Fucillo had wisely understood it would not be able to fulfill its mission as a siloed entity. She had worked closely with POTUS getting the organization off the ground and was given broad powers relating to its operational integration with the Company and every other mainstay law enforcement, intelligence, and military body.

Morse took a deep breath, gathering her thoughts. With the base under siege from its own robot sentries, and kamikaze drones incoming from Mihail Kogălniceanu, and over a dozen confirmed casualties so far, it appeared the Wolf was once again hitting them where it hurt...almost certainly uncoincidentally on the very night Janus had sent a team into his Satu Mare hideaway.

Scalpel was a so-called special-technique information-collection operation. A snatch-and-bag against the technologie vampiri , authorized pursuant to Executive Order 14301 issued by President Fucillo, which was an amendment to President George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13470, itself an amendment of a prior order signed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan.