Ted Bell - Spy

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I believe you’re trying to make me jealous. My ex-wife had many lovers before you, Mr. Brock.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother you much.”

“Maybe that’s because I view all of her lovers, such as you, not as a rival, but as a fellow sufferer.”

Harry grinned at him and cocked his gun. “Lock and load, Saladin,” he said, “We’re about to go find that loose woman of yours or die trying, I guess.”

As the tank neared the last third of the bridge, both men were relieved not to have seen Caparina’s charred corpse lying in the smoking ruins of the tank. And they were mildly shocked that no one had bothered to kill them yet.

“Drone aircraft formation,” Saladin said suddenly, “Get low as you can. Hug steel, Harry!”

“Shit,” Harry said, flattening himself as best he could in the cramped space between the fore and aft mudguards. Both of them were wearing jungle fatigues the same shade of camo as the battlebots were painted. Harry hoped that it afforded a small measure of visual protection. It all depended on how alert the operator flying the UAV was at this precise moment.

“No movement!” Harry said. “Don’t even blink!”

He watched three sleek silver craft bank and turn as they flew up the ravine directly toward them. He saw the telltale red tips at the ends of the wings and knew the goddamn things were armed with air-to-ground missiles. The drone squadron was now on a collision course headed straight for the bridge. All you could do was wait for a launch and watch one of those little red bastards home in on your dead ass.

Nothing of the kind happened.

The lead drone dipped its inverted-spoon nose at the last possible second. Harry held his breath as it streaked directly beneath the bridge with about six inches of clearance. The two flankers streaked across overhead, where they began a lazy turn, climbing to the south. Probably on a search circuit that would route them along the southern perimeter of Top’s compound, Harry thought.

If Top was on his game, which he surely was, he’d be scheduling these drone recon flights at odd hours, eliminating any predictability that would allow intruders inside unnoticed. The two intruders aboard the tank whipped their heads around and watched the lone silver bird dart and twist its way up the deep green ravine, finally disappearing around a rocky promontory and into heavy mist. When Hassan and Brock faced forward once more, the Troll was rumbling off the bridge and onto a wide apron of crushed sandstone.

“That was good,” Harry said, his eyes darting back and forth, looking for any movement in or around the seemingly abandoned pillbox fortification.

“Why?”

“Nobody sent that drone squad to take us out, or, believe me, it would have. That last flight was on routine patrol and the operator didn’t pick us up.”

“Asleep at the wheel.”

“We got lucky.”

“Better lucky than smart.”

The remote operations post had been well guarded. Now, it was pockmarked with bullet holes. It was a squat, ugly, rectangular sandstone building, bristling with damaged video cameras and mast antennas. Camouflaged, it also sat just far enough inside the green wall of jungle to be invisible from the air. Like the suspension bridge it guarded, it was disguised with a mat of leafy vines. This was not the camp’s main approach, Harry and Hassan figured, it didn’t look sufficiently fortified or important enough. God knew how many of these manned outposts lined this stretch of ravine.

But, in his gut, Harry knew they might have found a backdoor to the heart of darkness.

“The entrance to this pillbox is here at the rear,” he heard Hassan call out from behind the structure, and Harry went cautiously around back to check it out.

When he turned the corner, Hassan was sticking his boot under one of the three dead guards on the ground. He flipped him over. Harry checked out the other two. All were dressed in jungle fatigues. Each man had a single bullet hole in his forehead.

“What the hell?” Harry said.

“Caparina.”

“She did all this?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“It’s what she does best, Harry.”

“Holy shit. She’s still alive.”

“You’ll find her hard to kill. Let’s have a look inside.”

This small command post was a more sophisticated version of the operations shed they’d first found at the airstrip. The controller, dead no doubt of a bullet to the back of the head, was slumped forward at his monitor station before an array of flickering flat panel screens.

The center screen still carried a real time image of the bridge they’d just crossed. Another camera angle, mounted on the underside of the bridge, showed the tumult of the rapidly flowing river far below. The third monitor was broadcasting the view from the nose of a drone plane, probably the one they’d just seen, winding its way up the snaking ravine. The fourth was the interesting one. This camera, mounted on a Troll battlebot, was moving at a high rate of speed through the jungle. You could see it was headed toward some kind of low building at the end of a jungle trail.

That building looked extremely familiar.

Yeah. That robot tank was speeding toward the very building he and Hassan were currently inspecting.

Harry shouldered his Bizon and moved to door. “Let’s get outta here. Go take that little bastard out.”

“Harry, wait. It’s not a Troll. Look again at the monitor. Bottom right hand corner of the screen. What do you see?”

Harry squinted his eyes, looking carefully up at the monitor. “A piece of boot? Bouncing around on top of a footrest?”

“Yeah. Look familiar?”

“Hell, yeah. It’s Caparina’s boot. She’s coming back for us?”

“You’re a quick study,” Hassan said, rushing outside to greet his ex-wife, with Harry on his heels.

When Harry and Saladin stepped outside, they saw Caparina. But it wasn’t a Troll she was riding. Not at all. It wasn’t even a robot. It was a bizarre vehicle that resembled a lunar lander with four giant rubber wheels. It was driven by two carbon-bladed propellers mounted facing aft at the rear. Amphibious, probably. The thing was long and narrow so it could snake through jungle trails, Harry supposed. In addition to the video camera mounted on top of the heavy tubular roll cage, it had, Harry was surprised to see, a kind of steering wheel.

Caparina slid to a stop and smiled down at them from atop her centrally mounted buggy seat.

“I commandeered it,” she said before anyone could ask. “Called a Skeeter. Get up here! There are two seats on the back behind me. C’mon, jump! I’m only about one minute ahead of them!”

“Them?” Harry said, not liking the sound of that.

The two men scrambled aboard the vehicle and began to fasten the safety harnesses that secured them to the twin seats aft. Caparina had shed her rain jacket somewhere along the line. She had the sleeves of her mud-streaked white T-shirt bunched up over her sunburned biceps. The thin cotton shirt did little to hide her figure. Her face, too, had been war-painted with streaks of brown mud. She shoved the hand throttles forward and the buggy lurched forward. She fishtailed around the low building and raced out onto the bridge.

“Wait,” Harry shouted, “Where the hell do you think you’re going? We’ve got to find a way inside the central compound!”

“Not today, we don’t,” she said over her shoulder as they raced back across the bridge. “There are at least half a dozen assorted machines on my butt right now. The sun’s going down. They’ve got NV lenses that can see in the dark and we don’t.”

Harry didn’t like the word assorted, either, but he decided to keep his mouth shut for the time being. He was having a hard time getting the buckle on his seat harness fastened and there was going to be no way to stay inside this damned buggy without being strapped in.