Dale Brown - Act of War

“How long will it take to fix it?”

“I have no idea—maybe a couple days, maybe a week.”

“Take all the time you need,” Bolton interjected sourly. “Maybe we’ll get some work done around here for a change.”

“Button it, Carl,” Kelsey said. “All right, Jason, you and Ariadna can head on back.”

Jason nodded dejectedly. “Okay. There’s an Army Research Lab C-130 here from Fort Polk right now—I’ll just hitch a ride with them. I don’t want to stow the CID because of the break, so I’ll just walk it into the cargo bay.”

Kelsey nodded. This was the first real sign of emotion she had ever seen from Jason Richter—it should’ve come as no surprise to her, she thought, that he reserved his deepest feelings for a machine. “Sorry about your robot, Jason,” she said. “Get back as soon as you can. We’ll use CID Number Two as scheduled.” Jason nodded, shot Bolton an angry glare, which did nothing but increase the size of the smirk on his face, climbed back inside the robot, started it up, picked up his grenade-launcher backpack, and trotted back toward the task force base, moving a little awkwardly.

Bolton shook his head as he and Kelsey watched the robot run out of sight. “I thought that thing was more sophisticated than that,” he remarked.

“I thought it did pretty well—a lot better than a Humvee, dune buggy, or helicopter could,” Kelsey said. “But I’m glad we decided not to go with it right now. That should get us off the hook with Jefferson for us not wanting to use it, too.”

“It looks like a wounded raccoon hobbling away,” Bolton observed. “Maybe he won’t interfere with our training for a while.” He turned to speak with the commandos as they returned to the range controller’s pad. Kelsey watched the CID unit trot away for a few more moments. It did look rather pitiful. Richter’s pride and joy, brought down by a small grenade. This is not going to look good in front of the brass, she noted.

Back at the task force training area, Ariadna was shaking her head as she watched CID One trot up and saw Jason dismount. “I got the call from Doug,” Ariadna said. “I can’t believe you broke CID One.”

“It was an accident.”

“What were you doing in the middle of that training exercise?” Ari asked.

“I wanted to see how well I could find all the targets,” Jason said. “I was watching the GUOS downlinks the whole time and found a couple mines the task force didn’t.”

Ari shook her head, then stepped closer to Jason and asked, “Okay, J, what’s going on? Why did you go over there?”

Jason looked at his partner for a few moments, then shook his head and replied, “Because I was pissed they didn’t invite us out there for the first field test,” he said. “I wanted to show him that we don’t need all those dune buggies to do our job—CID can do everything they can do, and better.”

“That wasn’t a very smart move, doofus,” Ari said. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

“We’ve shown many times how impervious CID is to grenade and heavy weapons fire,” Jason said. “The tank falling on me was a lucky shot. I wasn’t worried.”

“You’re crazy, that’s why—you’re too stupid to be worried,” she replied, trying to keep her tone of voice lighthearted but serious at the same time. “Don’t do it again.”

“Yes, Mom. I’ll be careful.” Ari shot him an exasperated glance and began examining the damaged compartment. Jason’s cell phone rang, and he stepped away to answer it while Ari hooked up a portable monitoring unit and recharger from the Humvee. Jason made sure his special encryption routine was running before checking the caller ID readout and replying: “Kristen? How are you? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“I’m fine, Jason,” Kristen Skyy responded. He could hear a great deal of airplane noise in the background. “Listen, I have a hot lead, and we need to move as quickly as possible. I have a jet ready to take us to Brazil, but we have to leave this morning.”

“This morning?” Jason exclaimed. “I don’t know…”

“My source tells me he’s got a lock on one of GAMMA’s head guys,” Kristen said. “But they’ve been moving around every couple days. We need to be down there tonight. I got us a plane that can take us to Brazil in seven or eight hours. We’ll arrive at Clovis airport within the hour. My pilot says if we can leave in the next hour, we can be down at São Paulo shortly after sunset.”

Jason threw his mind into overdrive as he tried to work out the logistics. They barely had enough time. They had to grab as much supplies and ordnance as they could and go immediately. “I’ll be there, Kristen,” Jason said. “I’m not sure how I’ll manage it, but I’ll be there. Gotta go.” He hung up.

“It doesn’t look too bad, J,” Ariadna said as Jason went back to her. “Failed main hydraulic power pack. The secondary power pack picked up the slack.” She showed him a slightly damaged access panel on the robot’s back approximately where the left kidney would be. “The hydraulic lines look okay thank God, but the fiber-optic connector needs replacing. I think I might have the parts I need, but I need a good two or three hours.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I can fix a rainy day, as long as it’s in my lab, J,” she said confidently. “But in the field, reliably enough for combat? Maybe…probably…yes, I think so. I have to take apart the left data bus assembly to change the fiber-optic cable—that’s practically the whole left side’s electronics. It’s not difficult, just time-consuming work.”

“Do we have a spare?”

“Spare power pack—sure. Spare access door—no,” Ari replied. “Looks like the entire left edge of the panel is cracked—we won’t be able to secure it tightly. We don’t have any equipment for making repairs to composite structures here. I’ll need the material, a frame, an autoclave…”

“Can we secure it in place temporarily?”

“I think I might have some duct tape,” Ari quipped. “Why? You’re thinking about finishing the exercise with the rest of the task force?”

“That call was from Kristen,” Jason said. “She has information on that terrorist group GAMMA. They located one of its leaders, in São Paulo, Brazil…”

“Brazil?”

“They move around a lot, and her source says our only chance to grab him will be tonight.”

“Why don’t we get the FBI or the locals to do it?”

“Because it’s our job, Ari,” Jason said. “If Kristen knows where this guy is, maybe the locals do too, and he’s free because he’s working with the locals. We need to get down there.”

“Not with CID One. He’s down for repairs. You’ll have to take CID Two.”

“There’s no time to pull him out of the exercise,” Jason said. “We need to be airborne with all the gear we can take in less than an hour. Kristen is bringing a jet to Clovis to pick us up.”

“Are you sure about this, J?” Ariadna asked. “This may look like we’re stealing the CID unit. We could end up in prison for this…”

“And we could end up catching a major GAMMA commander and learning a lot about their next attack,” Jason said. “We’ve got to try it. We still have one good power pack. We can’t have everything perfect. I want to move on Kristen’s hot intel. Let’s do it. We’ll load our gear; tell the crew we’ll be ready to go in half an hour.”

“You want to take CID One into battle with just the secondary power pack?” Ariadna asked. “If that one goes out, CID One will turn into a sixteen-million-dollar lawn ornament.”

“We have to chance it,” Jason said. She still looked skeptical. “I’ll contact Jefferson. If he absolutely forbids us to go, we’ll stay. But we’ve got to get moving or we won’t have any options.”