James Swallow: Icarus Effect

Skyler's car halted and Anna was first out. Her other concerns were forgotten in a heartbeat. She was working now, her eyes scanning the street and the buildings, passing over the windows of the terraced houses with speed and care. She heard the SUV halt, heard the doors opening.

The senator was out and walking forward, Laker and the Belltower bodyguard flanking her. Dansky came up, a smile on his face, extending a hand.

When she scanned the street a second time, that was the moment when Anna Kelso felt a twist in the depths of her gut. It was an immediate, visceral reaction, and she couldn't quantify it at first. She glanced in Ryan's direction. He was looking at her with a questioning expression.

Something rang a wrong note in Anna's thoughts. She'd taken in the whole of the street scene, parsed it in a moment, just like they had taught her-and something did not fit. Across the diagonal of Q Street, a silver Motokun sedan sat low on its shocks, as if it were too heavily loaded. The windows were opaque, and unbidden, Anna's hand slipped back under her jacket through force of habit.

She caught Byrne's gaze and he saw where she was looking; the younger agent's enhanced optics had a T-wave scanner that could peer through light cover. He peered at the Motokun and the sudden change on his face told her she was right.

"Tangos-!" Byrne's voice was suddenly lost in a roar of engine noise, and the sedan bolted forward from the opposite curb, tires screeching as the vehicle sped over the asphalt.

Anna's gun was clearing its holster as the silver sedan slammed into the back end of the town car and spun it about, ramming it up onto the sidewalk and into the line of planters ringing the restaurant's open-air terrace. The sedan's doors burst open and there were four hulking figures in black combat gear boiling out into the daylight. Each of them had a churning smoke bomb in his hand, and they threw them as one, lines of thick gray haze arcing up over the roadway.

Anna heard screaming coming from behind her, the clatter of tables being turned over and glass shattering as the restaurant's customers panicked and ran; and then she heard another sound, the familiar flat report of a grenade launcher.

She never saw the shell hit. One second she was bringing up her Mustang to bear, and in the next the hood of the limousine distorted and threw itself upward as an orange fireball consumed the front third of the vehicle.

A hot wall of gasoline-stink backwash hit Anna Kelso head-on and blew her into the lines of iron planters.

Inside her head, she could hear Ryan crying for help.

The Grey Range-Queensland-Australia

The veetol moved low and fast over the foothills, skimming the trees with barely a half-meter's clearance between the landing skids and the barren branches of the canopy. Dawn was still two hours away and the grim, moonless night drew in what little noise came from the tilt rotors at the veetol's wingtips, flattening the sound. No illumination emanated from the boxy aircraft; behind a blank, windowless canopy, the pilot guided the veetol by multiple sensor inputs from video feeds, laser-ranging returns, and a global satellite tracking system that delivered moment-by-moment data on the landscape flashing past beneath. Passing below any radar detection threshold, the aircraft rose and fell with the nap of the earth, closing inexorably on its target.

The map provided to Strike Team Six floated in the air above the metal floor of the flyer's cargo bay, projected from a holographic imager held steady in Ben Saxon's hand. He turned it slightly so he could study the patterns of the guard towers ringing the insurgent camp. Saxon had a habit of pulling at his short, unkempt beard whenever he was deep in thought, and he did it now, peering into the glowing red wire frame as if the virtual would give him some sudden new insight into the mission.

"Five minutes out, boss," said Pete Kano, nudging him in the ribs, pitching his voice to be heard over the steady thrum of the rotors. Saxon nodded, glancing at his second in command. They were a study in contrasts; the African was tall and deceptively wiry in build, big enough that he never looked comfortable inside the cramped confines of a transport helo or APC, while Saxon was stocky and of average height. Where

Kano might have been an athlete, Saxon resembled a street fighter-but there was no other man he would have wanted to stand with him on a mission as difficult as this one.

Saxon had been running Strike Six for Belltower Associates Incorporated for a little over two years now, and Kano was the only man who had stayed with him for all that time. Where Saxon had been recruited directly from the British Army's Special Air Service, Kano had "liberated" himself from a Namibian crime lord's war band after a Belltower battalion had wiped out his former boss's drug-running network. The rest of the team had similarly diverse origins, men and women gathered up from national armies, police forces, criminal groups, all of them drawn in by steady pay and high rates of danger money from the largest private army in the world.

Saxon wasn't one to shy away from the word "mercenary." It was what he was, what he did for a living; calling himself a "military contractor" made it sound softer, somehow-and Ben Saxon liked the grit of the real thing. It was the main reason he had walked into Belltower's offices on the very same day the armed forces of His Majesty's Crown had told him that his services were no longer required; the idea of a life on civvie street just simply did not register with him. He liked it here in the thick; it felt right.

As the mission clock display hovering in the corner of Saxon's eye line dropped to the four-minute mark, Kano gave the nod to the rest of the crew, and together they ran through their final weapons and equipment checks. Saxon hefted the weight of the Steiner-Bisley FR-27 assault rifle slung across his chest and double-checked that the ammunition carousel was locked in place, the safety catch set. Eyes closed, he ran his fingers down the grenades and gear packs clipped to his webbing vest, mentally ticking them off one by one. Then, he blink-triggered the diagnostic subroutine for his augmentations; the legs and the arm, the optics, the feed-forward system, reflex jack, all of it. A line of green dots superimposed on his vision told him he was at full operational status.

He drew a breath. "All right, boys and girls. Get ready. Everyone, take your jabs now. I don't want any of you getting the shakes or coughing up blood in the middle of this." He pulled a rod-shaped injector pen from a pocket and waggled it at them. A line of frowns and grim nods greeted him, and his team mirrored his action as he dosed himself in the wrist of his one meat arm. The injector nipped at the flesh and he felt a brief, cool rush through his veins; the drug load inside the pen was a cocktail of battlefield medicines-pan-spectral antigens supposedly strong enough to counter any standard combat toxins, antimalaria meds, and a light measure of stims, all topped off with a dose of high-strength neuropozyne. The nu-poz was a necessary evil for anyone with a body full of augmentations. Without it, normal human cellular function would eventually coat any implant tech with scar tissue and corrupt the interface between meat and metal; Saxon had seen the results of it, the jitters and the pain that could turn even the toughest cog-head into a palsied wreck.

He took a moment to have a sip of tepid water from a canteen on his belt and swilled it around his mouth. They'd been in the Australian theater now for more than six weeks, and Saxon could not get used to the dusty taste the country put at the back of his throat. He glanced at Sam

Duarte, the most recent addition to Strike Six, a former gangbanger from the barrios of South America. Covered in complex street thug iconography, he looked less like a soldier and more like a stickup man-but Duarte had proven himself a lot better than just a street-corner gunsel after the team had been caught in an ambush out at Coober Pedy.