Reflexive Fire - 01 (10 page)

Nine

Zhou Jinbao was the first to respond to the wanted ad on
zhantai.com
, but from the looks of three other teenagers he had already seen dropping USB drives around the district, he certainly wasn't the last.  He often took odd jobs he found advertised online.  Once he'd scored a high paying interpreter job, getting hired by a British business consultant who needed someone last minute.  With a booming economy, China was now the largest English-speaking nation in the world, and Zhou was a part of that majority.

   Strolling through the park, he took a moment to watch a group of pretty girls giggle at something as they passed a cellular phone around, laughing at something on the screen.

   He didn't know what he had put on the USB drives he was placing around the business district and didn't care.  He also didn't care why his directions were to place them around one specific building, inside if he was able.

   Straightening the brim of his baseball cap, he moved on.  Girls were scary sometimes.

   After he had responded to the help wanted ad, his new employer had dropped a tidy sum of money into his Paypal account before instructing him to use it to go buy a dozen of the portable USB drives.  With that completed, he was then emailed a folder of digital content to load onto each drive.  Finally, he was to leave them for any random passerby to find near the Bao Corporate Building in the new district, Pudong.

   Once he got back to his parents' apartment he'd report in.  When his virtual boss was satisfied, he would be paid the rest of his wage.

   Pushing through the glass doors and into the lobby of the Bao building, he ran right up to the front desk.

   “Holy shit,” he exclaimed in English.  “I need to piss right now!”

   Several Bao employees looked on nervously as the security guard stood to his feet.

   “We don't have any public restroom here.  Head on out.”

   “C'mon,” Zhou pleaded.  “I have to piss.  You want me to go right here on your desk?”

   The security guard shook his head, muttering something about the kid's family lineage under his breath.

   “Make it fast.”

   Zhou turned towards the restroom, smiling.

   He made double for dropping the tainted drives inside the building itself.

   Senior Vice President of Human Resource Management Henry Lu exhaled as his bladder began to empty itself.  Another all nighter.  Entertaining clients.  Entertaining the ladies.  Hell, yeah.

   Looking down as he buttoned up, Lu noticed something on the tile, resting next to his shoe.  Grunting, he bent down and picked up the USB drive.  Walking out of the bathroom, he slipped it into his pocket, promptly forgetting about picking it up in the first place.

   Three hours later, Lu sat at his work station browsing internet porn.  He dreamed of someday traveling to America.  That was where the women had the big cow tits like in the streaming videos he sat around watching all day.  The thought reminded him about the USB drive he had found.

   His cousin worked in computer repairs out of a small shop in another part of Shanghai.  He'd told him all kinds of crazy stories.  People would bring in their laptops to get them fixed, and he would find all sorts of wild pictures.  Bored housewives playing with themselves.  Teenage girls sending pictures to their high school sweetheart.  Maybe he'd get lucky, too.

   Looking back and forth, he saw that the coast was still clear and stuck the USB drive into his computer.  There were strict policies against using your own data storage devices at work.  The executives worried about employees selling corporate information to rivals.  But what the hell did they expect them to do all day?

   Clicking his cursor across the computer screen, he opened up the drive and scrolled through several pictorials.  Boring.  Straight Gonzo.  Kid's stuff.

   Yanking out the USB drive, he chucked it into the garbage can under his desk.

   Senior Vice President of Human Resource Management Henry Lu had no idea what had booted up on his computer the moment he opened the drive.

   “Son of a bitch.”

   “Are you through yet?”

   “It's not me,” Adam reiterated.  “I got this kid in Sacramento hacking into the system.”

   “How much longer is it going to take him to crack it?”

   “That's it,” Adam said, running a hand over his bald head.  “He's in.”

   “About time,” Deckard said.

   He was on his third cup of coffee.

   “What do we have here?”

   Adam's hands flashed across the keyboard, sifting through the information on the Bao Corporation's server farm.  The keyloggers and other bugs that Deckard had installed in the Samruk office in Astana had quickly uncovered a connection between them and the firm in Shanghai.  Unfortunately, they had had no way of cracking through the Chinese firewall until now.

   All it had taken was a custom designed computer virus loaded onto some USB drives.  Hire a couple kids on the Chinese version of Craig's List and let momentum, along with human nature, take care of the rest.

   “Looks like a bill of sale,” Deckard said, as he examined the data as it was projected onto the wall.  “Phosphoramidites for nucleotides, A, G, C, and T.”

   “Let's see here, we got capping reagents and deblock.  No way could they have a level four facility in the middle of a major city.  The Chinese Government would never approve of it.”

   “I don't think this is a Chinese Government operation.  What else is in these files?”

   “Look at this,” Adam said, opening another document, more data now flooding in from Shanghai.  “Several units labeled A BAS 3900.  Any ideas?”

   “Yeah, we had to be trained up on how to recognize components of Weapons of Mass Destruction when I worked for the government.  That thing is a DNA synthesizer.”

   The unit was only about the size of a large computer printer, but in the wrong hands it could reap levels of damage to society that defense planners still hadn't really wrapped their minds around.  With a DNA synthesizer and the chemical components that had also been ordered, someone who knew what he was doing could download gene code right off the internet and build any specific DNA molecule the user wanted from scratch.

   A Pandora's Box.

   This particular model could be hooked up to a laptop from which a computer script writer could program the DNA synthesizer to build whatever he wanted.  A simple bacteria harmful to humans would be fairly easy to construct.  Once the bacteria was created, the user could use a gene gun to infect agricultural products.  The newly constructed DNA would be attached to gold particles and blasted into the crops where it would enter the cytoplasm of the target cells.

   A step up from that would be for a biochemist and a computer programmer to build an entire virus from scratch.

   “Whatever this is about,” Deckard said, shaking his head.  “It's biological.”

   His thought was interrupted by the fax machine in the corner of the intel office kicking on.

   “You got your hacker buddy in California faxing us documents as well?” Deckard asked, as paper got sucked off the tray and into the machine.

   “Nope.”

   Getting up from his chair, Deckard threw his empty coffee cup into the trash and picked up the still warm papers out of the fax machine.

   “Holy shit,” he stuttered, flipping through the documents.

   “What is it?”

   “Our first field trip.”

Ten

The MH-47 helicopters screamed through the night, the dull black finish on their fuselage blending seamlessly with the dark skyline.

   The twin rotor blades cut through the air as they flew nap-of-the-earth, following the contour lines of the mountains as they rose and fell just a dozen meters above the surface, the pilots flying by instruments and night vision goggles.

   In the belly of the six rotary wing aircraft, the passengers sat on the cold floor, front to back, loaded down with rifles, machine guns, ammunition, and grenades.  The aircraft were completely blacked out, no one dozing off, due to a combination of pre-combat jitters and motion sickness as the helicopters rocked up and down.

   The flight to the first combat outpost for refueling had been uneventful; now they were in a combat zone where pilots were subject to fire from surface-to-air weapons and small arms fire from guerrilla fighters from a dozen different factions vying for control over the rugged landscape below.

   Door gunners on each side of the MH-47s leaned out into the cool night air, hands never leaving the minigun handles.  Thousands of rounds were chained up and loaded through a feed chute leading to the internal magazine.  A separate chute led down and out of the aircraft to eject links and hot brass.

   As the foothills and mountains passed by, they spotted only the occasional walled compound, each family household an actual fortress with thirty foot walls and guard towers.  There were no visible signs of life, no light amplified even through their image intensifying goggles.  It was much too early for morning fires to be lit to warm the first kettle of chai, and electricity had yet to reach within fifty miles on their operational area.

   Crew chiefs listened to their headsets as the mission commander in the lead helicopter put his men on notice.  They clapped their hands to get the attention of their helicopter's occupants, letting them know that they were five minutes out.

   Stretching arms and legs, the commandos pitched and yawed back and forth as the transport birds banked, taking evasive maneuvers and leaving nothing to chance.  Using the side of the helicopter or each other for support, they pushed themselves up on a knee, preparing to move at a moment's notice, even as they were thrown about the aircraft.

   The anticipation built as the rotors began to change their pitch.  Some were nervous, afraid of the unknown.  Others were eager to get on the ground because they had had to urinate for the last three hours.  A few relished the opportunity for combat but would never speak of it.

   Rapidly bleeding altitude, the black helicopters flared over a wadi that hadn't seen water in generations.  The washout was created by ancient seasonal rains, creating the only area resembling a suitable landing zone for kilometers. 

   No one had been available to reconnoiter or secure the drop zone ahead of time, but during the hasty mission planning, the ground force commander had assured the senior pilots that in the event they couldn't land, due to unstable soil or rocky terrain, that his men would simply jump off the back ramp, dropping the final ten feet to the ground.

   Leveling out, the pilots began to hover down to the ground.  Coming in strung out in a file across the length of the wadi with valley walls rising on each side in pitch darkness required a degree of precision that the aviators had trained their entire lives for.

   Closer to the ground, the combined power of twelve sets of rotors kicked up a cloud of dust that almost instantly browned out the pilots.  Looking below, the gunners continued to guide them down to the ground as the rotor blades chopped at the dust cloud, creating sparks of light that could be seen in the green glow of their night vision goggles.

   Gently, the wheels under the belly of the helicopters made contact with the surface of the wadi.  Hearing the news from the gunners and getting the okay from the pilots, the crew chiefs gave the order to disembark.

   As one, the commandos rose to their feet and stormed down the ramp and into a twisting sandstorm.  The dust swirled like a miniature tornado around the troops as they fanned out to security positions, hefting machine guns and mortar tubes with them.

   Taking a knee and facing out, the troops were stung as sand beat at their exposed necks and faces.  The line of MH-47s lifted off, hovering straight up and into the air before their noses dipped down, charging forward.

   With the transport aircraft disappearing into the night, the commandos were left in the moonscape of Afghanistan in an eerie silence.

   Platoon sergeants began giving orders in hushed voices, their men organizing into their squads, preparing themselves for movement.

   It was going to be a long walk.

   Fahran unrolled his mat, aiming it west towards Mecca, and began to pray alongside his peers, two young men he had grown up with in Kandahar.  Learning by rote in the
madrassas
held little interest for the teenagers, and employment was easy to come by for someone as young and able as they were.

   The boys performed the
salaat
as their fathers and father's fathers had, going back farther into antiquity then anyone could remember.  Their words came from impassioned hearts that beat strongly in their chests, forming words long since committed to memory.

   None of the boys heard the suppressed gunshots.  The steel core bullets sought them out in the night, drilling them in the back of their heads, one each, ending the call to prayer.  A dozen Kazakh mercenaries advanced forward, quickly securing the area as several Americans appeared carrying the silenced VSS rifles that had dispatched the small guard contingent.

   The Kazakhs surrounded a hole in the ground and peered below, having no idea where the bottom was but hearing the rush of water below.  One of their comrades dug into his pack and produced a steel wire caving ladder.  Tethering the caving ladder off to a nearby boulder, they dropped it down the hole, the ladder uncoiling and splashing at the bottom.

   Deckard moved forward while slinging his VSS rifle.  Making a circular motion above his head, he pointed to the ground where the three bodies lay cooling themselves under moonlight.  The mortar section moved forward, the first gun team setting in their base plate.  In a few minutes the entire mortar section would be up and ready for fire missions.

   Gripping the cold steel rungs of the caving ladder, Deckard took the lead, lowering himself down into the darkness.  The
karez
was actually an ancient irrigation system dug below the water table that carried water to fields for agriculture, some of them dozens of kilometers away, in this case about ten klicks to the nearest village.

   Hand over hand he descended, the air growing cooler below as the sound of the underground stream grew louder.  His boots reached into the water, his feet feeling the frigid water seep in as he released himself and dropped into the thigh deep water.

    Nearly slipping, he braced himself on the sides of the canal.  Flipping down his night vision goggles, Deckard activated the infrared flashlight built into them to create some ambient light for the NVG tube to amplify. 

   Seeing nothing but cold water and cold earth walls, he looked up and gave two IR flashes, letting the team know that it was clear.  Moving forward, he made some space, hearing the first squad carefully coming down the ladder behind him.

   It was an opening gambit, one he preferred to a frontal assault that was guaranteed to end in a hundred percent causalities.

   With the VSS compact assault rifle tucked into the pocket of his shoulder, Deckard edged down the waterway, struggling to see what lay ahead through the green tint of his night vision goggles.  Taking point, he could hear the lead squad of Kazakhs gently sloshing through the water behind him.

   It had been less than twenty-four hours since he had snatched the Operations Order off of the fax machine at his battalion's headquarters.

   They had no warning or hint of it coming through his private channels, the hacks and bugs planted in the Samruk corporate offices.  He wasn't even given the courtesy of a warning order to allow him to plan.  But as he stalked down the dark tunnel, the former soldier knew that was, in fact, the plan from the beginning.  Beta testing.  Was Samruk combat ready, and was Deckard prepared to lead them into combat?  The eleventh hour Op Order was designed to add more stress and urgency onto what was already an extremely challenging company level mission.

   US Air Force C17 transport aircraft from Bagram had landed in Astana within hours.  Most of the planning had to be done en route.

   Using a pace count by keeping track of each time his left foot touched the slippery surface of the underground aqueduct, he knew he had already traveled four hundred meters.  By the looks of the imagery he had studied at Bagram Airfield, the
karez
continued for kilometers.  Hopefully they would find what he was looking for before traveling that far.

   The only good news was that it would be extremely difficult to set anti-personnel mines in such fast moving water.

   Listening carefully, he could tell the Kazakh mercenaries were falling behind.  It wasn't entirely their fault; with minimal equipment there were not enough night vision systems to go around.  At the moment there were no circumstances where he would allow visible lights to be used since they could compromise the entire operation.

   Backtracking, he found the point man for the Kazakh squad and physically placed the commando's hand on the back of his desert fatigue shirt, ensuring that he had a tight grasp before continuing.  The rest of the squad had a safety line that was tied around each soldier's waist, so there should be no further breaks on contact.

   He had no one to blame but himself.  Limited timetable aside, the planning and execution had been rushed to the point that he was leading the main element of the operation, a job normally belonging to a squad or platoon leader.

   Proceeding slowly, all of his senses were strained to their limits.  Maintaining a high level of alertness was a requirement in an environment this unforgiving.  Subterranean combat was about the most dangerous thing Deckard could imagine, next to other enclosed tubular assaults such as a hostage rescue on an airliner or passenger train.

   Eyes and ears detecting nothing in the darkness other than his own breathing and racing heartbeat, he picked up the pace slightly, leading the mercenaries forward.  After counting off an additional six hundred meters, Deckard's hand ran off the side of the
karez
where the wall had been scooped out, creating a landing.

   Reaching back, he released the Kazakh's hand and moved forward, the muzzle of his rifle tracking back and forth.  Deckard stepped up and out of the water, onto the earth platform, scanning for targets.  The ground was worn, indicating that the area was well traveled, however, no other signs of life were present.

   Cursing under his breath, he wondered if his gamble had been a waste of time, foreplay before the inevitable.

   Backtracking for the lead Kazakh, he helped him and the rest of the squad up onto the platform, whispering in Russian for them to establish a security perimeter.  The Samruk mercenaries watched down the unexplored end of the tunnel while the rest of the platoon filed onto the landing. 

   Allowing red lens flashlights, they began searching the carved out portion of the
karez
.  Footprints were quickly found.  The faint tread of the type of sandals Afghans favored could be seen across the dirt floor.  A couple observant Kazakhs turned up shell casings but thankfully no booby traps so far.  Looking around, Deckard spotted a pool of water at the far end of the chamber.

   “What's the deal boss,” Frank said, coming up alongside him.

   “Did your squad unroll the commo wire down here yet?”

   “Yeah, they got the spool right behind us.”

   Sure enough Deckard could see one of the Kazakhs with his red light out, carrying a giant spool of WD-1A communication wire.  It served the dual purpose of acting as a guideline for the mercenaries to move back and forth through the tunnels, as well as providing a way for them to talk to the mortar section back on the surface.

   “Connect the field telephone and make sure that mortars are up.”