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.
“Run away to fight another day,” Saladin said with a wistful smile, lighting an unfiltered cigarette as if he’d just wandered off a goddamn golf course with a scratch round on his card.
“Fight?” Caparina said, glancing back at them. “You two have no earthly idea. I got a peek behind the curtain.”
“Tell me what you saw,” Harry said, leaning forward and putting his hand on her shoulder. “I need to check in. I need to know what we’re up against before I call Washington.”
“Tell them you’ve seen the future of warfare, Harry Brock.”
“Yeah? And what future is that, Caparina?”
“Robots, Harry.”
51
PRAIRIE, TEXAS
I love you, too, Sugarplum,” Daisy had said to her husband, marking her place in the old family bible with a sprig of bluebonnet wild-flower. She was talking on the phone, sitting on his side of the sagging double bed. She’d come in the bedroom for something when the phone by the bed had rung. She couldn’t remember why, what she’d been looking for in here, but she’d brought her bible with her.
She must have been thinking about her husband. How nervous he must be giving a speech in front of all those important people tomorrow. Standing at the bedroom window, watching the night fall, but seeing in her mind all those worry lines around his eyes.
That’s right when the phone rang, and sure enough it was Franklin.
One of those spooky coincidences. Serendipity, they called it. Not serendipity exactly, but something kin to that.
She’d leaned back against his soft pillow and listened to him worrying silently at the other end of the line. They had a bad connection, almost like he was calling from a cell phone. Which was silly, because he wouldn’t own one. Wouldn’t have one in the house.
“Franklin? You still there?”
“Yep. I’m here.”
“Who’s that yelling in the background?”
“Nice lady whose phone I borrowed. I guess I should give it back now.”
“All right, but you just stop worrying, okay? Go on back to the hotel and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s your big day. Especially with those tapes June got on video. I’m sure this Zamora fella is just a whole bunch of hot air. Just like the ones tried to scare us last time. And the time before that. All hat and no gun.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But please just do like I said, Daisy. Lock all the doors and windows and wait by the phone till the cruiser I called in gets out there. Okay?”
“I wish you hadn’t done that. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself. You know that.”
