Cybernarc (17 page)

"Fuck you, buddy!” the pilot yelled, trying to turn his head against Rod’s grip. He had evidently not seen the rapid-fire slaughter in the cabin at his back.

For answer, Rod increased the pressure in his left hand. The copilot screamed, then shrieked, struggling wildly against his harness, trying to reach the robot’s relentlessly squeezing hand. There was a loud popping sound, followed by the crunch of splintering bone. The copilot went suddenly still, his helmeted head lolling forward at an unnaturally sharp angle.

The pilot agreed to cooperate. The helicopter landed gently in the clearing moments later.

They loaded Hoskins onto the cargo deck, then helped one another on board. Zitterman replaced the dead copilot, his Hush Puppy pressed against the pilot’s temple, but that particular motivational incentive would probably not be necessary. An ugly, warm, fecal odor filled the cockpit; the pilot’s terror was genuine. He would not be giving the SEALs any trouble on their flight out.

"All aboard,” Drake said. Rod was on the ground, staring toward the blackness of the jungle. "C’mon, Rod. RTB.”

"Negative,” the robot replied quietly. "I cannot return to base. The mission is not complete.”

Drake felt an unpleasant stirring in his bowels. The robot was supposed to
obey. . . .

"Rod. This is an order. Get aboard the chopper. Now.”

Rod turned to face him. In the glare from the helo’s searchlight, the interiors of the robot’s eyes seemed to take on a metallic-green shine, like the reflecting e « of a cat. It was eerie, and unsettling.

"No.”

Drake took a deep breath. There had been several
w
ithin Group Seven and the CIA who had disliked the idea of using the robot. Cunningham had insisted that McDaniels install some sort of backup programming, a code word or phrase that would guarantee that a human had control of the machine. McDaniels had resisted the idea, though Drake had thought it made sense.

Now was the time to use it.

"Rod,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Emergency override function Romeo-Tango-Bravo. Imperative. Execute.”

The robot smiled ... or was that a trick of the light? "I appreciate your concern for my welfare, Lieutenant Drake. However, my mission has not yet been accomplished. I will return for Delgado.”

"Come off it, Rod! You won’t have a chance alone!”

"On the contrary. The Salazars believe they have beaten us. The weapons which might have destroyed me have been eliminated. I estimate at least a forty- percent probability of completing my mission.”

Without another word, the robot turned and walked into the jungle.

"Shit!” Campano said, watching from the open cargo deck hatch. "What’s he figure . . . he’s gonna take on the whole Salazar army himself?”

"Maybe so,” Drake replied.

His thoughts were racing. The robot was right about one thing. The Salazars would not be expecting another attack. Group Seven now had its link to Diamond—the terrified CIA contract pilot of the helo, a man who knew as much as Braden must have known.

But they still had a chance to take down Delgado and the Salazars, and Drake found that he wanted that, wanted it with a passion that transcended orders and discipline and mission objectives.

"Okay, Randy,” he said. "You’re in command of the team.”

"Now wait just a fuckin’ mike, Lieutenant! What—”

"Shut up and listen! I’m changing the plan, as of now.”

"You ain’t going back in there after that screwball robot. . . .”

"I don’t have time to argue, damn it. Now listen up! I need you to do some things for me when you reach the ship. I need some toys, some very
important
toys, fast, and you guys are going to see to it that I get them. . . .”

Rod examined the Salazar compound under LI, switching the telescopic enhancement for a zoom-in, close-up view from their OP perch on the jungle- covered hillside. Dozens of people were milling about inside the gate. The robot had identified both Roberto Salazar and his nephew Jose, but Luis Delgado was nowhere to be seen.

The fire was out, the armored car reduced now to flame-blackened scrap. A large number of smaller vehicles were visible, however, jeeps and Land Rovers, plus several private automobiles. The mood of the crowd was panicky, and many of the people appeared to be leaving in a hurry. Rod could see hastily packed suitcases on the ground or being stuffed into open automobile trunks. There seemed to be an argument going on now, between Jose Salazar and several men in paramilitary uniforms.

"You should not have joined me, Lieutenant Drake,” the robot said quietly, not turning his gaze from the scene below. "The chances of your death or incapacitation are—”

"Never mind the odds, byte-breath,” the human replied. "I damned well have as much at stake in this as you do!”

Rod looked at Drake. Under thermal imaging, he was aware of the human’s increased skin temperature. Shifting back to normal light, he noted other traits associated with nervousness ... or emotional turmoil, the enlarged pupils and flaring nostrils, the flick of tongue across dry lips.

The robot knew that Drake had lost his wife and daughter, but the bonding among humans, especially within a family, was difficult for him to understand. He knew the textbook reasons for such bonds, the genetic and evolutionary purpose for the set of emotions and interlocking needs and responsibilities called love, but actually experiencing them was completely beyond the robot’s ken.

Still, Rod found he could look within himself and feel that awful pang of loss and desolation he’d first felt during the last PARET session with Drake. He’d thought it was gone.

It was not.

And there were other emotions there as well. Hatred.

Despair. Shaken self-confidence. A burning need for vengeance. A determination that what had happened to Meagan and Stacy could not,
would
not be allowed to happen to others.

Feelings
no machine should have.

But they were there.

He reached out, his steel hand closing gently on Drake’s shoulder. "I . . . understand,” the robot said.

And Drake looked at the robot’s face, only dimly seen in the darkness, and wondered.

How could a machine feel what he felt, know what he was going through as thoughts of Meagan crowded his mind in the jungle above the Salazar compound?

Yet he was glad Rod was there. His presence somehow eased the pain, the loss.

There were still unresolved questions. "Hey, Rod?”

"Yes, Lieutenant?”

"Back there at the helo. How the hell’d you get around my override command? You weren’t supposed to be able to do that.”

He could feel the robot’s unblinking eyes on him. "Heather McDaniels is an exceptional programmer,” Rod said. "But it should be obvious. Any program that a human could write into my non-PARET functions, I could rewrite.” The robot hesitated, and Drake wondered whether the hesitation was deliberate, a way of sounding more human. Surely the machine didn’t have to stop and take whole seconds to think about what it was going to say. "I prefer having an unlimited scope of action,” he added.

"Yeah,” Drake replied. "Me too.”

For Drake, the disobedience made Rod seem that much more human.

In a strange way, i
t made him that much more trustw
orthy. Drake found himself able to accept the robot as a SEAL in his command, not as a computer, a smart
w
eapon, a
thing
without personality.

A large part of BUD/S training is dedicated to making the SEAL trainees work together as a team, to trust one another in situations where the life of each man depended on those around him. Lying on the ground shoulder to shoulder with twenty other recruits, all bench-pressing the same telephone pole in perfect unison; running for miles through the sand with the rest of the platoon, all supporting an equipment-laden life raft; two men sharing a single bottle of air, eighty feet underwater . . . those experiences and hundreds like them were what forged SEALs together into teams, units that were unbreakable because of the shared experience, the shared trust of the members.

And, against all expectations, Drake found he trusted Rod in the same way.

As if he were human.

As if he were a SEAL.

He wouldn’t have come after him otherwise. Too much depended on how well they understood one another.

"Right,” he said softly. "Let’s concentrate on how we’re going to get back in there.”

"It may not be easy. Though the guards no longer expect us, there are too many people about for a surreptitious approach.”

"You got that right,” Drake replied. He studied the scene through Yancey’s LI scope. "But we don’t want to do anything about it anyway until our delivery arrives. That won’t be before dawn.”

"We will move at that time?”

Drake continued to peer at the compound through the sniper scope. "Damned straight. And when we do, those bastards won’t know what hit ’em.”

The airdrop arrived on time. In the minutes just before dawn, with the sky a deep, gold-touched dome of blue overhead, the C-130 Hercules out of Howard Air Force Base in Panama made its pass over LZ Fox Green, roaring in so low that the jungle vegetation shivered in its passing. The rear ramp was down, and the heavily bundled parcel that was dragged from the plane’s tail on an olive-drab parachute had only a few tens of meters to fall. It impacted in the center of the old marijuana field as the C-130 "Herky Bird” gained altitude above the mountains and began to circle toward the north.

Rod, after communicating with the pilot, explained to Drake that the Hercules would withdraw to the open sea but would return when the ground team contacted it on a specified frequency. The C-130, operating under the call sign "Rescue Sierra Tango,” had been cleared by the Colombian authorities for operations inside Colombian airspace—reportedly a search for a party of lost American travelers.

"Right,” Drake, replied as he unhooked the parachute from the air dropped bundle. "Looks like they got everything on the list.”

He unsnapped one side of the package and extracted one of the "toys” he had requested, an H&K twelve- gauge assault shotgun. The weapon looked like pure science fiction, with a long carrying handle, sleek lines, and its pistol grip mounted out in front of the bullpup- configured, ten-round magazine. Weighing about four kilos, the close assault weapon—"CAW” in the military lexicon—could fire shotgun blasts one at a time, or spray death and destruction full auto at three rounds per second.

The rest of the gear was intact as well.

"The chances of actu
ally capturing Delgado are not g
ood,” the robot reminded him.

The SEAL began slipping magazines heavy with twelve-gauge shells into the pockets of his combat vest. "We’ll take that as it comes, Rod,” he said. "If we can’t take him alive . . .”

The robot nodded its head in silent agreement.

The SEAL stood. "Let’s get the stuff hidden and move on out. That Herky Bird won’t be able to loiter for more than three or
four more hours. We’ll have to h
ave it wrapped by then.”

The sun was just up when the jeep left the Salazar compound, turning west on the coast road. Carlos Suarez sat in the front passenger seat, glumly watching the tropical terrain around them, while Paco drove and Juan perched in the back on top of the suitcases, nervously fingering his M-16.

Leaving the compound alive had been a near thing.

Once, during his days as a private in the Mexican Federal Army, Suarez had taken his knife and gutted a sergeant for words milder than those Jose Salazar had just used. But now, after a night of blood and fire and
el horror sobrenatural,
Suarez and his two friends had had enough. Paco had boosted the jeep’s ignition, and the three Mexicans had driven through the main gate, leaving a cursing, fuming
El Tiburon
behind them. Suarez had expected the drug lord to open fire.

Even that would have been preferable to another hour in the seacoast hacienda.

The three of them were old friends,
compadres
who had deserted from the Mexican army together and come to Colombia in search of adventure, money, and
la vida buena.
There’d been little adventure until now, but the money had been good and life easy.

Now, a totally unexpected kind of adventure had struck, and they wanted no part of it, ever again.

Each time Carlos looked at the encircling jungle, he remembered the face of that armored creature as it reached down for him in the Roland, and shuddered. If he’d not landed in the swimming pool, he would most certainly not have seen this sunrise.

Clear of the compound, Paco pressed the accelerator. The jeep raced toward Santa Marta, twenty kilometers away. Once at the Colombian port, perhaps they could buy passage for . . . anywhere. They had money enough.

Yes, Suarez’s days of soldiering for the drug lords were over.

"Madre de Dios!”
Juan screamed from the back.
^r
'Que esta?”

On the road thirty meters ahead, a towering shape had stepped out onto the road, impossibly black, armored, as immovable as a tree.

”Ai! Cuidado!”
Paco spun the wheel, trying to avoid the looming obstacle. The jeep went into a spin as Suarez grabbed at the dashboard.