John Barnes - Directive 51

In the bright sun, they all flipped on shades automatically; Bolton took shotgun in the hazmat Hummer, leaving Bambi next to Mensche.

Carlucci pulled out fast. “Mensche, best route? We need to get onto Imperial south and west of exit 12A, with—”

“Fifteen down to El Cajon, over to 54th Street, south to Imperial, hang a right,” the agent said quietly. “You don’t think there’s going to be anybody blocking alternate routes?”

“Sounds like they’re improvising. They didn’t actually ambush the DN-7—the Mexican commander got a tip-off from a traffic cam and had already end-run the crowd, he’d have gotten away clean but they lost five out of six tires in one big spinout. The mob up on the 805 saw that and ran down and surrounded them.” Carlucci’s eyes never left the road, a good thing at the speed he was driving.

“Anyway,” he added, “the mob can’t really get at them—they’ve got twenty-millimeters on robot turrets, so by way of explaining ‘stand back,’ they shredded a couple of parked cars—but we’ve got to go get them out. Just now, Mexican troops in uniform are having a hard time talking to Americans, especially Americans who think they’re bringing in Ysabel Roth to personally lead the looting and burning.”

They hurtled down the empty freeway, dodging between wrecks and abandoned cars. “This thing has a tank of antiseptic and sprays a mist of it on the tires as we go,” Carlucci explained, “just in case anyone is wondering if I’m trying to kill us all. Siren and light, you think?”

Bolton said, “If they’re going to shoot at us, they’ll do it with or without the sirens, eh? Give ’em a fair shot at doing the right thing.”

Carlucci turned on the noisemakers. Approaching the crowd at a sedate twenty miles per hour or so, they allowed everyone plenty of time to consider.

“We got this,” Mensche said. “Lot of folks doing the old slow fade, they want to be at the back of the crowd when we tell them to clear out.”

A space opened around the armored personnel carrier as people drifted back into alleys, or behind cars, a mob that all wanted to be bystanders—out of the situation but not so far they couldn’t see it.

The DN-7 looked like most APCs since World War II; the triple auto-turrets on top, only ten centimeters high, were remote-controlled, so that the operator watched through cameras and aimed and fired without being exposed to enemy fire. Fly-eye bubbles in the center of the roof and on all the corners meant there would be no blind spots, and the turrets were far enough out to sweep anywhere from next to the wheels to dead overhead. The black and brown glop on the road showed where the DN-7’s foam-cored tires, invulnerable to bullets, had succumbed to the biotes.

“Bold Hammer One, this is Bold Hammer Four, I have you visually and I’m approaching behind the crowd surrounding you,” Carlucci said. I guess we’re Operation Bold Hammer, Bambi thought.

“Bold Hammer Four, this is Bold Hammer One, I copy.” The accent was slight; federales in Sinaloa worked so often with their American counterparts that most were fluently bilingual.

“How you doing in there, Lieutenant?” Carlucci asked.

“Not bad. No injuries. If we could move we’d be fine.”

“What’s the situation with Bold Hammer Two and Three?”

“Could be an hour till they get here.”

“Does the passenger understand that if she tries to run in any direction except into our vehicle, that mob will kill her?”

“Yes, Bold Hammer Four, she understands that. She’s terrified. Let me see if she’s willing to try the transfer.” During the long pause, Carlucci worked the loudspeaker, telling people to go home, explaining that he was the FBI, that they were going to take the prisoner into custody, that it was vital for her to be captured alive and unharmed for interrogation. He reminded everyone that Mexico had been hit hard by Daybreak, too, and that “on this issue we are allies and shoulder to shoulder; this is no way to treat a friend and an ally.” Over and over, he urged everyone to head for home.

The DN-7 had armored extensions around its main troop door that could reach out to the Hummer, but Murphy’s Law dictated that the door would be on the far side. Making a virtue out of necessity, Carlucci drove the Hummer in a slow circle around the DN-7, twice, as if just trying to clear the crowd; more of them faded away, leaving the street almost empty except for a few stragglers.

“Not much of a mob, now,” Bolton observed. “Back to being pain-in-the-ass civilians.”

“That’s the way I prefer them,” Mensche said.

As he finished the second circuit, Carlucci said, “Mensche, I’m going to match your door up to their troop door; the extensions will slam out at you, then you open. Drag Roth in if she isn’t moving fast enough. Castro, try to look friendly and welcoming—as freaked as Roth must be by now, she might bolt in the direction of a woman who looks sympathetic.”

As the armored extensions thudded against the body of the Hummer, Mensche flung the doors outward, and the troop door retracted vertically. Two masked GAFEs in uniform threw a small woman in a baggy green coverall forward; Mensche caught her and turned in his seat, dragging her across his lap. Bambi pulled her the rest of the way in by the shoulders; Mensche slammed the door and shouted “Go!”

They had covered four blocks when the left front tire blew; Carlucci said, “Sniper, hardware store—” before a hole appeared in the windshield and he barked as a slug hit him on the Kevlar vest. He crouched low and zagged into a side street to the left; Bolton and Mensche had lowered their windows and returned fire; Bambi was lying across Roth to protect her.

Another shot clanged harshly off the rear fender.

“Just one shooter I think,” Bolton reported, “and he’s running. Give it a block and hope the rims hold out.”

“They’re supposed to.”

In a residential street, they stopped and Bolton and Bambi jumped out to look at the situation.

The spare was dripping off its rim; it looked like lumpy chocolate pudding. “It was exposed to the biotes and it wasn’t being sprayed with antiseptic.”

“Yeah, the spray for the tires was so the car wouldn’t spread germs—not because anyone ever thought anything would eat it.” Bolton folded out a spray gadget from the roof, sprayed the pavement, stood on it, and wetted himself all over.

Bambi followed his example. “I’d just like someone to know that I’m probably destroying the last good Italian suit I’m ever going to wear.”

Bolton snorted. “I started out in fire and bombs, where you buy the cheapest suit you can ’cause you’re always buying new ones. This thing’s all poly; it’ll probably rot off me by nightfall.”

Every tire on the cars on the street was rotted and flat, but knocking on doors, Bambi found an older lady willing to donate the apparently unharmed spare from a pickup parked in her garage.

They finally returned to the FBI office on Aero Drive four hours after setting out; the Mexican troops got there almost immediately after, having walked the whole way. Only two more of the ten expected observers for the interrogation had arrived; both were local.

Carlucci said, “I vote for showers and food all around; there’s lunchmeat and bread in the fridge, and we might as well eat it since god knows how long the power will stay on. Ms. Roth?”

The girl looked up, dazed; she had said nothing other than that she wasn’t in pain and didn’t need water, on the whole trip in. “Yeah,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What I wanted to ask,” he said gently, “is if you’d like to clean up. I understand you’re a vegetarian; I’m afraid all we have is a tub of coleslaw and some bottled water, and every shop I’ve seen on the trip had a sign saying ‘No more food.’ But you might feel better if you ate something. You do realize you’re safer here than you would be anywhere else?”