Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Which meant his time estimate had fallen short by almost a minute. The ’hogs weren’t waiting for the Pumas. They were racing out to meet them.

“Colonel, Wass,” he said, “the rodeo’s started.”

Wasserman came scrambling back into his seat from the rear. On his shoulder was an M27 IAR light machine gun, an M320 blooper attached to the underbarrel in its modular mode. Once a Marine, always a Marine. That was how they did it.

Fernandez watched his screens. The ’hogs coming toward them were Spree and Nash. Spree zipping along in a straight line, Nash taking a slightly diagonal south-southwesterly path. Both heading for the border between the parade ground and open field.

“Activating FOG,” he said and hit the button. “We—”

Fernandez paused. He’d heard a subaudible hum run through the wagon’s interior as the unit powered up. But there was another sound, too. Outside. A loud, long, whining whistle.

“What’s that fucking noise?” Howard said.

Fernandez raised a hand without turning from his console. Howard stared at the back of his head. Julio was a ball-busting hipster but probably a goddamned genius...and a good soldier. It wasn’t his way to interrupt a commanding officer.

He waited. Fernandez nodded toward the screen in front of him.

“It’s the drones,” he said.

The fliers out of Mihail Kogălniceanu Airfield reached their precise destination at 2:30 a.m., after traveling almost two hundred miles from the scrub lot at the edge of the little-used military tarmac. Until that point, their collective behavior had been uniform and one-dimensional—birds of a feather.

But within the Monarch’s more sophisticated brain was a far more complex bundle of evolving algorithms. In the cold, dark sky above Janus Base, these were now unpacked and distributed through the flock’s group mind over a shared radio link.

The swarm of one hundred 3-D printed drones immediately divided into four smaller squadrons. Some flew this way, others that. Each squadron had a specialized task to perform within the overarching mission. Every drone within a squadron was capable of assessing and reassessing the circumstances needed to successfully execute the task, identifying likely threats and targets of opportunity on the ground, and then communicating its evaluations to the rest of its squadron so it could take action. Together the drones could suss things out with lethal autonomy and even divide into subgroups as needed to execute an objective.

At 2:41 a.m., the Monarch transmitted a separate set of algorithms to Earl the hedgehog, which had been acting as a beacon for the flock at the east end of the base. A subtle alteration to its programming, and it would become a loitering munition like the fliers—a kamikaze drone.

Within thirty seconds, Earl awoke from its seeming dormancy and started out across the ’Burbs toward the west side of the base.

At precisely 2:43 a.m., the drones struck.

The motor depot near the base camp’s southern perimeter was a two-acre rectangle sectioned off into three separate and distinct areas.

The largest was an outdoor parking lot filled with long, even rows of JLTVs, trucks, armored wagons, prime movers, forklifts, and an assortment of thirty support, utility, and personnel vehicles. Beside it was the next-largest section, a cluster of prefabricated metal garages, workshops, and storage sheds where repairs, modifications, and overhauls were performed on the installation’s entire motorized fleet. The smallest section was the adjacent refueling area, which contained two ten thousand–gallon aboveground diesel tanks, a partially buried twenty thousand–gallon storage tank for heating oil, and a large shed stacked with a dozen thousand-gallon plastic used oil barrels awaiting recycling or disposal. Connected to the depot by a short, radial access road was a recently completed vertiport for Raven and other rotary-wing craft. At its western edge, outside two maintenance hangars, was a big, cylindrical fifteen thousand–gallon surface tank of Jet A-1 aviation fuel.

All together the depot contained over a hundred fifty vehicles and seventy thousand stored gallons of highly combustible refined petroleum products.

At exactly 2:45 a.m., thirty explosive-bearing fixed-wing drones separated from the main flock, whirling down on the depot. Janus’s four hedgehogs had provided the fliers with up-to-the-minute data about the disposition of vehicles and storage containers. Sharing a single collaborative strike plan, they zeroed in on their various targets.

The first group struck at the two surface diesel tanks, detonating them with a roar that startled people out of bed sixty miles away in Bucharest. The underground heating-oil tank was next, ten drones twisting and turning down to destroy it with more flame and thunder. Within minutes the fuel tanks, waste-oil barrels, garages, hangars, sheds, and vehicles themselves were swallowed up in a huge, rising blister of flame. Within the burning structures, glass fused, and the water from emergency sprinklers vaporized.

Across the base, another subset of drones slammed into the trailer that had been serving as the post exchange store. Their detonations lifted it into the air, shattering windows, punching out walls, and leaving grocery items, clothes, and other assorted merchandise strewn across the snowy pavement.

Opposite the smoking ruin of headquarters, the old modular barracks in Janus Heights were blasted into scrap metal. Near the eastern perimeter, the row of Quonsets housing civilian employees went up in a fiery explosive chain. In the alley outside Laura Cruz’s hut, her flat-tired ten-speed bike and the freezer where she and Mario Perez had hidden were pounded into unrecognizable pieces of bent, crumpled junk. They flew high into the air and then rained down to the ground, glowing red hot as if blowtorched.

Somewhere nearby, a cat let out a plaintive, terrified cry.

The drones struck the fences, struck the guardhouses, struck the huge diesel generators used to back up the power supply delivered from a nearby Baneasa township.

At the western perimeter, the decimated new troop barracks might have been passed over as a mission already accomplished, but the four armored battlewagons heading toward its parade grounds drew the swarm’s instant attention...as did a lone JLTV speeding toward it from the northwest with two occupants, and the hedgehogs’ warning that more intruders were bunkered under the fallen building.

Fifty drones, the largest group to splinter off from the flock, bore swiftly toward the barracks to stop them. Their primary directive was the protection of Forward Operating Base Janus. To execute it, they would clean up its human infestation.

Laura Cruz was swinging south onto the transverse between the two fields when the drones began their run at the new barracks.

A shiver ran through her body. As a little girl in Caracas, living on the steep hills around the city center, she had often seen bats, hundreds of them, fluttering from the caves when they awoke at sundown. They would mingle, scatter, and mass like ink spots in oil, blotting out the sky.

The sight of the bats always made her stomach feel wormy. And what she saw through her upper windshield reminded her of it.

“Mario,” she said, “I’m scared.”

He looked at her. “For the record, I am, too,” he said. “But just a little.”

She smiled thinly.

“Stop the Jolt a second,” he said. “I want to take another look.”

She pulled to a halt. All around them the night shimmered with unnatural orange light. To their rear, the original troop barracks was lost to sight within an orange dome of flame. Far to the left, eastward, the row of Quonsets where she had lived for the past several months was ablaze. But the worst of it was ahead of them, where the fires were burning uncontrollably, filling the entire distance, lashing up over the motor depot and vertiport at the base’s edge.