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Judicious plastic surgery had altered Ann Alkina’s facial structure enough to fool biometric sensors, and the human eye. While the Eden Plague healed any wound, it was not terribly fussy as long as what it helped regenerate functioned. Thus, the problem of misaligned bones healing into crippling shapes.
However, this two-edged sword also allowed easy restructuring; the commercial elective plastic surgery industry boomed even in these tight economic times. So Ann was confident she could be put back the way she was, more or less. Perhaps with a bit narrower nose, and her earlobes had always bothered her...
She wondered if the alterations had even been necessary, but then remembered that her natural face was probably in intelligence databases all over the world. If she was captured...better not to be known as a senior black operative.
She brought her mind back to business as the AN-225 heavy cargo jet landed at Bykovo Airport, Russia. Brutal deceleration slammed her into the restraints inside the people pod she occupied. One of a score of perforated aluminum boxes, it contained her and seven others of her team. In total, one hundred sixty Direct Action operatives rode like cattle in cages in the belly of the flying beast.
Twenty kilometers from the MKAD ring road circling Moscow, forty from the city center, Bykovo did not service commercial passengers. Rather, a great deal of cargo and a limited amount of government traffic passed through it, avoiding the congestion of Domodedovo to the southwest, perfect for Alkina’s purposes.
Once the largest jet Russia ever produced had turned to taxi, she signaled for the nanocommandos to unbuckle, perform final preps, and gear up. Within the tight spaces, each in turn filed out into the narrow corridor between the immobilized crates, lined up to use the facilities pods, and then rotated back to begin taking out and putting on their kit.
Alkina watched as her people donned fitted armor and harnesses festooned with weapons and the accoutrements of war. This wasn’t going to be a traditional special op with a small team of commandos, Guns of Navarone style. This mission more resembled a full-up raid on an important objective, like Operation Claymore, a several-hundred-man World War Two British operation against the German-held Lofoten Islands of Norway.
All the eggs in one basket, she thought with a shudder. The weakest link in the op was this flying museum they rode in. Though refurbished by the best Australian aircraft engineers, it was still an outdated bucket of steel – yes, steel in many cases, not even aluminum – and it would have to fly them out as well.
As in most special operations, the later they were detected, the better off they would be. In a perfect world the extraction team would be long gone with the packages before their enemies even got organized.
As the lumbering vehicle came to a halt and the interior lights came on, she yelled, “Once your kit is on, strap in again.” Everyone finished their final prep and then pulled their quick-release harnesses around them again, waiting for their next ride.
The giant nose and tail both whined upward on hydraulics, and the smells of jet fuel and the stink of pollution wafted inward on the humid Russian night breeze. A moment later, two heavy haulers backed up to the plane, one at each opening. The aircrew popped the fittings on the lockdown points and attached a winch cable to each line of ten pods.
Slowly, like two ungainly trains leaving a station in opposite directions, the rows of cages were pulled onto the flatbed trucks. First, five were manhandled onto one side of each trailer, then the other five, so each set of ten rested in two rows with their egress doors facing outward. Heavy industrial strapping cinched them into place, and within minutes the two haulers set out for the M5 freeway, heading into Moscow.
Accompanied by four SUVs filled with Russian mercenary-insurgents – well paid and well motivated – the “special cargo” sped along through the night, heading for the exclusive Barvikha and Skolkovo luxury villages on the outskirts of Moscow.
Legions of equally well-paid policemen thanked their good fortune to be assigned there, protecting the wealthy and elite. There, the families of the Russian oligarchy remained in a pampered prison, hostage to their puppet ministers’ good behavior. Most of the senior government functionaries, attended by their Shadow cyborg minders, retired there every evening by helicopter to spend time with their families.
This was Alkina’s target.
Up to sixteen ministers, thirty-two Shadow Men. Even cyborgs needed rest, so one of each team of two remained awake observing his or her principal, while one slept or exercised nearby. This much Direct Action’s penetration of the Septagon organization had discovered, but there were still many holes in their intelligence, making this a high-risk mission all around.
Complicating it further were the multiple overlapping objectives General Nguyen had assigned her. Teams of ten nanocommandos with weaponry specialized against the cyborgs would attempt to neutralize the Shadows and, if possible, capture them for rendition to the Australian laboratories. If such was impossible, then they would be destroyed.
By doing so, Alkina hoped to rescue the entire senior Russian government in one night of mayhem. However, if it all went wrong, killing all of the available ministers and their families was a reasonable fallback position.
And then there was her Final Option, hidden beneath her feet and that of the other section leader: the smallest nuclear weapons the engineers could build. She dearly hoped that would not be necessary, for she was looking forward to many long years of utterly voluntary bondage to her lover and master.
So as the wheels rumbled and bounced over badly maintained Russian roads, Ann Alkina prepared herself for wholesale death and destruction, hopefully someone else’s.
Keying her helmet HUD, she reviewed her latest intel from the encrypted satellite downlink Direct Action had commandeered. Piggybacking off one of the Russian communication birds, it allowed for near-real-time comms with General Nguyen in the rear, if she wanted it. She did not expect to call him until the op was either finished or blown, but the capability comforted her anyway.
It appeared the American Salmi operation was a go to begin in an hour, simultaneous with her own. While she knew about theirs, the Yanks did not know about hers, or if they did, she prayed to all the spirits of her people that their operational security was tight. Leaky OPSEC was a surefire way to blow a mission.
Such temporal coordination was essential. Human nature being what it was – and she was fairly certain humans made the big decisions for these cyborgs – as soon as one alarm sounded, all related facilities would go to highest alert. She’d much sooner hit them before that happened. If it came down to it, she would rather strike first and shift the risk onto the American op. The Yanks already had functioning cybernetic operatives, and she presumed they knew a lot about how to take enemy cyborgs down, while the Aussies were operating with a lot of guesswork and experimental technologies.
Odds were, many of her nanocommanos would die tonight.
The latest intel summary and situation report told her that everything was quiet. For over a week now the political arena had been stalemated, with no new initiatives from the Free Communities, the Americans themselves, or the Neutral States Assembly. The latter always moved slowly and carefully, dominated by the groupthink Euro-socialists. The other two had deliberately avoided rocking the boat in hopes of lulling their opponents into a false sense of security.
Flipping up her HUD visor, Alkina swept her eyes around the tiny compartment. She and the other seven stood nearly nose to nose, facing inward. If not for the myriad holes in the containers it would be stuffy. It reminded her of the Nebraska hijack mission so long ago, where she had endured almost a week bottled up inside a tiny submersible, sharing the breath and body stink of her comrades.
If I could handle that, she thought, I can easily handle this. They’d only been in these crates for some twenty hours, and had been afforded breaks on the long flight.
Nothing to it.
Her HUD comm crackled, then the voice of one of the insurgents spoke in her ear in Russian. She’d learned enough of the language for this mission, and some of the locals had a similar facility with English. They’d get by. In this case, the word was simple: they were approaching the two enclaves, custom-built playgrounds of this nation’s elite – the Beverly Hills and Bel Air of Moscow.
Because the towns rested about ten kilometers apart, the two trucks diverged as they approached, each accompanied by two SUVs full of locals to smooth the way. If bribery did not suffice, they would kill any stray police or military that got in their way, if they could. If something they couldn’t handle popped up, eighty heavily armed nanocommandos could leap from their compartments at a moment’s notice.
If that wasn’t enough, they were all screwed.
A few minutes later they slowed and approached a checkpoint into the exclusive zone of Skolkovo. The plan included forged delivery paperwork and called for a routine bribe for the guards to expedite – not too large, not too small. Just business, to grease the wheels for a nighttime delivery of what seemed to be automotive parts for the high-end sports cars and luxury sedans the inhabitants of the exclusive zones drove. The hour was not at all unusual; many truckers drove at night to avoid traffic slowdowns on the clogged and crumbling Russian road system.
Two tense minutes and they eased through. Apparently the locals had been successful. Alkina murmured into her comm, confirming that the other truck had also penetrated its target, Barvikha.
Two Trojan Horses in place, she thought. Seizing Troy would be the easy part, she hoped. With contingency plan upon contingency plan, she was as certain as she could be that they would accomplish at least their minimum objectives.
Getting away would be the rub.
The truck rumbled to a stop, and the locals gave her the all clear. Alkina held them in place for a minute, until the other section of eighty reported ready, then she gave the go code.
Ten gates eased open and eighty commandos leaped lightly to the ground, to form into eight groups of ten in the back lot of the warehouse to which they supposedly delivered. It made a good, secluded rally point, into which none of the privileged denizens were likely to wander.
From here they would move on foot. Seven squads hurried off immediately, following the invisible trails their HUDs showed them, using undetectable 3D mapping recognition software. They could always switch to encrypted GPS if necessary, but this method was more secure.
Alkina held the last squad, her own, for a moment. She watched as the locals, eight hard men, hopped out of the SUVs and raised the backs. Opening the cases there, they broke out modern suppressed AKs and RPGs, and put on body armor. Their only job was to secure and defend the vehicles. If they couldn’t, the nanocommandos would have to escape and evade on their own back to the airfield.
Or they would die in place if necessary.
That would be a horrible waste of human materiel. More than half of Direct Action’s highly trained nanocommandos were taking part in this operation. While anyone could get an injection of nanites to increase speed and strength, the expertise to put those advantages to use was just as difficult to inculcate as ever. No shortcuts to elite status had ever been found, and probably never would be.
Though these Shadow cyborgs seemed a close substitute.
They all knew how vital the mission was, and none of them wanted to let her down. Or General Nguyen, or Australia for that matter. Napoleon had once said, “The moral is to the physical as three is to one,” and in battle after battle this principle had been validated.
Once the locals took their places, she told Ritter, her team second, to lead on. She hefted her modified Armorshock grenade launcher and followed as they moved.
And they moved. HUDs provided predicted pathways and “saw” through buildings using the 3D modeling of highly detailed satellite imagery preloaded into their databases. The virtual picture each viewed was overlaid upon the actual picture, as if they existed within a synthesized video-game-and-real-world hybrid.
Over the back fence the team bounded like a herd of gazelles clearing a wall, then they jumped atop the next warehouse. Running lightly along its roof, they hit the far parapet and leaped blind along their HUDs predicted ballistic paths, to land on the lower roof of a multilevel, multistory shopping building.
Their next leap took them in a line upward to seize and climb an external structural member, a rib projecting from the vertical glass surface of the exclusive stack of shops. High-end goods, luggage and furniture and even automobiles could be seen as they passed the sixth floor to roll onto the roof. From the other side, the ten could look down upon their target.
The grounds of a mansion lay spread out below, across a wide boulevard. With classical Euro-Russian architecture in a nineteenth-century style, its well-lit gardens and high wrought iron fences gave it a fairytale look, a rich man’s Disneyland that epitomized the extreme contrasts between the nation’s rich and poor. Looking down, Alkina could sympathize with the misguided Bolshevik revolutionaries who believed their rebellion would usher in a worker’s paradise rather than an age of brutal repression.
But without a middle class – in fact, by turning the “bourgeoisie” into scapegoats rather than allies, the new Soviet system had merely solidified the two-class dichotomy. The Reds executed the aristocrats and replaced them with the oligarchy of the Communist Party. The serfs and peasants they turned into factory workers and collective farmers, a distinction without a difference in their lives of grinding poverty.
Despite thirty-plus million dead in World War Two, forced industrialization and the acquisition of nuclear weapons, little really had changed. The powerful acquired more power, the rich got richer, and the working class kept working.
Where is this indignation coming from? Alkina wondered as Ritter called out orders to the team. She had seldom thought much about politics and history, up until Nguyen Tran Pham had illuminated her life. Now, to please him, she read and absorbed as much knowledge as she could, desiring to make herself indispensible.
And desired.
She found that she genuinely believed the Australian system, and the Free Communities of which it was a part, was a better proposition for everyone living there. All were richer and freer, even in the midst of a wartime economy, and if it wasn’t perfect, at least it was a hell of a lot better than this.
She found herself proud of it.
“Ready cables,” Ritter said over the comm. Her motions automatic, she hand-loaded a special cartridge in the grenade launcher and fired it into the flat roof at her feet. It sliced through the metal and tar surface, lodging deep in the wood beneath before its barbs caught and held it fast.
Hooking a thin roll of line to its eye, she attached the spool to another cartridge and loaded it. Aiming carefully, she waited for the signal.
