Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Carmody needed to hurry. The castle was falling apart around him. And Kali was down there. Waiting.

Grabbing the mace’s outthrust shaft with both hands, he jammed its head deeper into the guy’s thigh, pushing hard, putting all his weight into it. Lazlo screamed and thrashed, his face contorted with pain. Fat tears sprang from his eyes.

Carmody let go of the shaft, reaching down to his sidearm holster for the Sig. The operator squirmed, his eyes widening as the gun spat three well-placed .40 caliber rounds into his good leg. They tore into his uniform pants and destroyed the left knee with an eruption of blood and bone fragments. Lazlo screamed again, and then slid limply down to the balcony floor in a sitting position, propped against the rail, his legs splayed in the widening pool of blood.

Carmody lowered the barrel of the Sig to the operator’s shoulder, pushed it in, and triggered another burst. Lazlo screamed and bucked and thrashed, the back of his head slamming against the rail spindles. Carmody moved the gun to his right shoulder, dug it into the muscle, and fired again. Three rounds.

Lazlo again slammed backward against the balcony’s railing. His face contorted, he was gasping and moaning in agony. Blood splashed from both sides of his upper torso. The bullets had disintegrated both scapulae and fibulae. He no longer had ball-and-socket joints. Only flesh and gristle connected his arms to his torso. He had urinated in his pants.

Something crashed nearby. Carmody lowered the gun to Lazlo’s abdomen. He put three into it, aiming for the stomach and large intestine, deliberately missing his other major organs. The gut wounds would burn like fire inside him, but he would stay alive and conscious. Unless the balcony toppled from the wall or the ceiling came down on him first.

Lazlo had slid farther down the rail. His arms hung uselessly at his sides. Blood dripped and oozed from his middle.

“Yrrrnm,” he said. The words slurred and unintelligible. “Rbrrnnn.”

“Try again,” Carmody said. “Slower so I can understand you.”

Lazlo breathed through his gaping mouth. It was a wet sound, like liquid passing through a straw.

“Your...n-name,” he said. And coughed blood. “Orr... our ...fucking bargain.”

Carmody holstered the Sig and looked at him.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said and turned toward the stairs.

Kali was on her bike facing the balcony when he came racing down. She had lifted her visor.

“Get on,” she said. Her eyes were very still. “We have to hurry.”

He slid onto the bike behind her. The drones kept striking. The castle shook. Stone and mortar poured from the ceiling. One of the martial panels across the hall crashed down on the row of ancient arms underneath it. Swords and maces and shields and lances clattered across the floor. The drones kept striking, the explosions loud and palpable through the gaping holes in the walls and ceiling.

Thump-thump-thump, thump-thump.

The castle shook. Carmody flicked a glance over his shoulder at Clinia’s body. It was partly covered in ruin and dust. There were shards of stone in the blood that had poured from her ruptured flesh.

His promise had been good for nothing.

Kali revved the bike. Its power plant surged.

“Hold on,” she said.

Carmody’s hands on her hips, she opened up the throttle, and they shot out the wicket gate to the apron.

17

Castle Graguscu/The Initiation Well

Wheeler in the lead, Begai close behind him, they had slowly picked their way down the stairs of the well, for the most part in silence. There were nine landings, fifteen steps between each of them. The steps were winding, steep, and shallow, the landings barely wide enough for both men standing abreast. Every landing had a stone niche about four feet deep, every niche a rectangular LED wall sconce. Once upon a time, Wheeler guessed, they must have held torches or oil lamps.

He silently counted the steps and landings, an ingrained Delta habit that Carmody’s haunted-house run-throughs had reinforced . You wanted to be able to retrace an exit route if the lights quit and something happened to the night goggles. You drilled with and without equipment so you didn’t have to rely on it. So you didn’t use it as a crutch.

Thirty-five, forty, forty-five . Third landing.

The electric lights gave off a diffuse but adequate radiance, but it was slow, difficult going. Wheeler thought the dimensions of the treads were subtly wrong, their breadth, width, and height off, as if the staircase was designed for people with smaller strides and different gaits than modern men...or to present a deliberate challenge.

Fifty, fifty-five, sixty. Fourth landing.

The well was like a serpent’s throat. Coated with moss and moisture, its walls glistened with an oily slickness. The deeper the two men went, the more hemmed in and claustrophobic it felt. Their footsteps were flat and percussive, their echoes dying away much too quickly, as if smothered by the surrounding stone.

It took them several long minutes to reach the ninth and final landing. Wheeler stepped down onto it, waited for Begai to come alongside him.

“Notice anything?” he asked and took a deep breath.

At first he didn’t. Then it clicked with him. “There’s more air,” he said. “And it’s fresher.”

“Cleaner anyway,” Wheeler said. “There’s an air-washing system. Like in road tunnels. They cost a fortune.” He studied the well bottom with its weirdly out-of-place computer stations. “You think the Wolf takes these stairs down from the castle?”

“No way,” Begai said. He motioned to the ring of arches around the compass rose. “He probably uses those for entrances. Or some of them.”

Wheeler nodded. He slipped his Wally from its rig bag and held it out.

“Here,” he said. “You scan the doors in case somebody’s behind them. I’ll take the laptops, pull everything I can from the desktop computers.”

Begai took the unit from his hand. “Good luck. They’ve had plenty of time to wipe them clean.”

Wheeler couldn’t dispute that. But the contingency fell well within their game plan. Any data they got off the computers was a bonus. Their primary target was Zolcu. He was the big fish. The one Carmody wanted out of tonight. The one the deepfakes were supposed to have fooled him into believing was Petrovik.

“Doesn’t matter if they did a military spec scrub,” he said after a moment. “Unless they used a drive crusher—and maybe they did, who knows?—we’ll be able to get something off...”

Wheeler let the sentence trail. He’d heard a faint rumbling sound. Like thunder, but not exactly.

He angled his head to one side, listening.

More rumbles, then more. They came in bursts, seemingly from above. The bursts were rhythmic, the pauses between them sporadic.

Rmm-mm-mm rmm-mm-mm-mm-mm rmm-mm...

Begai was also listening now. “What do you suppose that is?” he said.

Wheeler frowned. Like thunder, but not exactly. He had no answer for him.

“We should finish our shit and get out of here,” he said and immediately started down the remaining fifteen stairs to the well bottom.

As Begai went to scan the archways with the TTWS, Wheeler hastened toward the computer stations in the middle of the compass rose. The rumbling hadn’t stopped. In fact, it seemed to be growing louder and steadier.

He drew a deep breath to calm his nerves and turned to the computers. The laptops went right into his backpack. But grabbing info from the desktop machines would require some finesse.

Wheeler took four gumstick cloud-drive transmitters from a rig bag, popped them into the machines one by one, and booted them up. The little solid-state devices would inject and install their drive-mirroring software in under a minute. If there were cellular-signal boosters down here—and he figured there had to be for the hackers to access the internet—the gumsticks would mirror the computers and send the copied data to a dedicated vault in Net Force’s cloud archive. Four months ago in Bucharest, Fox Team had used the same method to obtain the intel leading to this bizarre trick box of a castle.