Extinction Crisis

“Whatever you do, don’t get caught. It’s all well and good being an outlaw to do the right thing, but the French government doesn’t have much patience for outlaws,” Mittner warned.

“I promise not to kick their asses too badly,” McCarter replied.

Mittner handed the trio a small plate of almond croissants and three lattes. “On the house.”

“Thanks,” McCarter replied.

Hawkins took a bite of his pastry reluctantly, after remembering the condemnation Bertrand had given to Mittner’s cooking. He was surprised at the flavor and freshness of the croissant. “Where does Bertrand get off insulting his cooking?”

“Bertrand is on a budget, and he can’t justify spending money on Mittner’s good cooking, so he’s forced to eat the day-old baked goods,” Manning said. “Besides, if Mittner were to start making good stuff for the French agent hanging out at his shop, watching for arms deals, his supervisors would think that there was some form of collusion between them.”

McCarter took a sip of his latte. “Which there is, but the appearance of propriety makes up for a lot in terms of French collaboration.”

“Collaboration sounds pretty negative,” Hawkins noted.

“Not in this case,” McCarter said. “Mittner informed us directly that Bertrand was on our side. If we do happen to get nicked by the gendarmerie, we can call on him for a voucher. Though, if that does happen, we’re shit out of luck.”

“In other words, since we’re cheating, we better not get caught,” Hawkins mused.

“Precisely,” McCarter said. “We scored pretty well. I had Mittner pull a set of Steyr AUG A-3 rifles with Aimpoint scopes and a selection of alternate barrels. For side arms, we have SIG-Sauer SP-2022 pistols.”

“Ah. Plastic pistols with hammers.” Hawkins spoke up. “Why not a Heckler & Koch USP?”

“The French don’t like German guns,” McCarter said.

“But SIG-Sauer is…” Hawkins began.

“Once more, the image of propriety,” McCarter returned. “Plus, the SP-2022 is the new side arm of choice of French law enforcement. We can score ammunition and magazines easily if we have to.”

“Point taken,” Hawins affirmed.

“Now, we’ve got leads to check out,” McCarter continued.

“You’ve been getting updates from Barb?” Hawkins asked.

McCarter tapped his phone. “Of course. Plus, Gary used to do business with some chaps in France’s nuclear power security back when he owned his own company. We’ll tap them, as well.”

Hawkins looked at Manning. “Man, I wish they’d picked someone with more real world contacts than a silk jumper and ground pounder like me.”

“Don’t worry, son,” Manning replied. “Stick with us, and you’ll get a real education.”

Phoenix Force hit the streets to pick up their weapons.

A ARON K URTZMAN PINCHED THE flesh between his eyebrows, tired of looking into the depths of the Department of Energy database for signs of electronic penetration by hackers. Lyons had been adamant that there was the possibility that the infiltrator robot had also been capable of introducing either a tap on the DoE’s files or planted some form of logic bomb that would cause problems with the emergency protocols intended to prevent a hacker from endangering a nuclear power plant by remote control.

The threat of a hostile computer takeover was something that the Department of Energy was aware of since the old DARPA days of the Internet. Not only did the agency have on-call Nuclear Emergency Special Teams capable of countering terrorists like a national SWAT team, but they had electronic warfare and cybernetic infiltration experts on hand to keep the control apparatus of the nation’s nuclear power secure. Even then, Stony Man had to work with the DoE on multiple occasions against threats too great even for the NEST squads to deal with, such as the ninja-skilled Tigers of Justice or KGB-backed forces out to force meltdowns of reactors.

Kurtzman shot a glance to Huntington Wethers, who was at his workstation, his unblinking eyes focused on his monitor. “Hunt, did you notice any errant lines of code in the system?”

“None so far. I’m barely halfway through my search, however, Aaron,” Wethers replied. He gnawed on the stem of his pipe, not looking away from his monitor as he scanned the DoE operating system for any recent changes.

Kurtzman rubbed his forehead and rolled his wheelchair over to the coffeepot where Carmen Delahunt was mixing cold water with the freshly brewed chai tea she’d brought to the computer center. “Anything on the crispy critters that Lyons and the boys left behind in D.C.?”

“Not a thing. The explosion removed everything that could have identified them quickly. We’re stuck with DNA coding, and CODIS is nowhere near as fast as it appears to be on TV crime procedurals,” Delahunt answered. She took a sip of her tea and licked her lips.

“So, we’ve got at least three days before we can figure out if the dead perps are somehow in the DNA database,” Kurtzman murmured. He sighed. “By then, we could have a China syndrome incident four times over.”

“Which is why Carl and the boys are pounding the street and going through the likely goons who would have made a fake UPS truck,” Delahunt told him. “Sometimes, all we can do is pore over computer programs looking for kinky programming and viruses left behind. All the satellites and computerized search engines in the world aren’t going to replace shoe leather on a sidewalk and a shotgun in your fists doing the real work.”

“Nope,” Kurtzman said. “But don’t tell Barb that. She thinks we can do anything.” He paused to pour himself a mug of his high-octane sludge, then took a sip and sighed. “I’m going to see what Akira has on the French situation.”

“The new Directorates talk a big game about operational security, but Akira’s been tap-dancing through their systems pretty easily,” Delahunt said.

Kurtzman nodded. “It’s all that twitchiness in his reflexes. He’s too fast for their system to adapt to. Quick and low profile is the way things work best, at least when you’re in a hostile land.”

“The same applies to David, Gary and T.J.,” Delahunt noted. “They slipped into France, and now they’re gearing up with a nonstandard supplier. Akira’s doing his best to give them targets to look at, but mostly, it’s up to those three.”

“Once again, we’re batting cleanup and doing the boring work,” Kurtzman complained. “Any word from Cal and Rafe?”

“Nothing after they took out the probe team,” Delahunt explained. “Right now, they’re with Unit 777 looking over the infiltration robots, but considering how badly they damaged them, we’re not going to have too much success figuring out the origins of their components or who built them.”

“How badly damaged?” Kurtzman asked.

“Each took about 120 to 150 hits from rifle and handgun rounds,” Delahunt replied.

“That much?” Kurtzman exclaimed.

“That’s how long the robots kept shooting back,” Delahunt explained.

Kurtzman frowned. He remembered the faxed scans of the designs whipped up by Schwarz based on Lyons’s description of the robots. “Okay, that makes sense. It also makes them scarier. You’d need a heavy machine gun to take out one of those things.”

“Wouldn’t that be the point? You don’t want a soap bubble sent in. It takes a knock in a vent, and you’ve wasted the effort. Force four people to pour bullets into one robot, maybe even more, and you’ve tied up half a SWAT team,” Delahunt replied. “They probably have redundant communications, as well, making it harder to jam whatever signals are being directed toward them.”

“Encizo also noticed a UAV over the truck, correct?” Kurtzman asked.

“Extra complication,” Delahunt admitted. “Akira’s got a search running for missing UAVs in the area, but this might be some leftovers from the last missing bits from a U.S. military shipment to Egypt that Striker encountered.”

“I thought we tied up all of those loose ends,” Kurtzman groaned.

“You put a lot of military tech on the black market, you have to deal with trickles of it for years,” Delahunt grumbled.

“Well, at least we have records. I’ll see if we can find back-door commands to get into the UAV CPUs,” Kurtzman said. “There’s a possibility that they haven’t gone completely over to a new operating system to run the stolen birds.”

“Though if they’re good, they’ll have gone through and closed those loopholes,” Delahunt noted. “And they might well be the best. They found the DoE agent on their case.”

Kurtzman grimaced. “I’ll see what I can scrounge up. Maybe they’ve left a hole as bait for us. They’ll know that someone would be on their case in cyberspace. It’s a good bet they’ll want a shot at their competition.”

“So there’s a chance we might have to go on viral lockdown again?” Delahunt asked.