The ESC, or Electronic Systems Center, based at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, was in charge of developing and testing the air force’s command and control, communications, computer, and intelligence systems. Its location was not ideal for Barrett’s needs, but it would give him more than enough access to the information he would require.
Even more than that, it was the only base in the air force that had more officers than enlisted men, and it housed some of the finest minds in the US. Ripe recruiting grounds for the colonel and his friends.
As the colonel contemplated the assignment, the general waffled on. He made sure that the colonel knew he would be receiving a very large favor, and that the general was a very generous man for giving it to him.
The colonel nodded until his neck hurt, and thanked the general enough to tan his nose, but he didn’t push hard for it. He let the general make the final call, and once he did, the interview finally came to an end.
OK, thought the colonel, time to move house.
The Agent that was Shahim Al Khazar laughed to himself at the paltry force that had been assigned to the mission. To say that these men were inadequate to the task of effectively making an attempt on the prime minister’s life would have been a gross understatement. The twenty-six men were nearly all new recruits, the remainder being once-great warriors, now too blind, too slow, or too fanatically insane to be of use to the cleric who had dispatched them.
In the days since his orders had been handed down to him Agent Shahim had requested that the AIs convene his peers for a Council. When they had met in the virtual void they had discussed at length what he should do. While there was no doubt he could accomplish the mission, even with the poor tools he had been given, the thought of destabilizing his nation’s government at this early stage in their time here had been far from ideal.
But neither could he return to the mountains unsuccessful, for he would be an outcast. The remaining option, killing the cleric that had ordered the attack, was also fraught with risks and uncertain outcomes, the only certainty being that it would gain him a reputation for disloyalty, not ideal, by any means. No, taking the mission had been the lesser of three evils. And so he had accepted, feigning stoic bravery in the face of what the cleric assumed was certain death, or worse, capture and ignominy.
Once in the capital city, Shahim had fought the urge to simply forge onward and get it done. Instead he had maintained the guise of needing this sham of a team, and after two days of improvised strategizing and planning with them, Shahim had laid out an empty husk of an attack plan for his men to follow, knowing full well the futility of everyone’s part in it but his own.
With orders set, they had left their staging base, a disused warehouse in the old part of Islamabad, an hour ago. Shahim had ordered several of the most useless of the older warriors to stay behind, seeing that they would actually limit the already minimal efficacy of the team he had.
He had then split his remaining force into three groups. The majority of his forces had been concentrated into two groups that would attack the main gates of the prime minister’s compound. Their mission had been clear, distract the bulk of the guards, and take down the transformers powering the deadly electrified razorwire that capped the wall around the remainder of the complex.
Now he sat, waiting in silence, in an old battered Morris Minor they had stolen earlier that day. He had taken three men with him to form the third, much smaller force. He would not need them, but it would have seemed strange for him to go alone.
Down the street from them he could see where the neighborhood’s residential buildings ended, and beyond them the road that ran along this side of the compound. The area on the other side of the road had been cleared of trees to remove any cover for attackers on the thirty feet or so between the road and the perimeter wall, its top proverbially sizzling with the electric razorwire that the two main teams were supposed to disable.
The sound of sputtering, angry gunfire sprang to life in the distance. The AI overhead informed him that both attacks on the main gates were now in full swing, and Shahim started the car’s engine, his face set as he pressed down hard on the throttle.
The old car accelerated slowly but steadily over the two hundred yards to the wall. Overhead, the satellite was monitoring traffic and told him it was all clear, but the three men he was with did not know that, and they started to shift in their seats nervously as they approached the junction, unable to see either way on the road ahead because of the buildings lining their street.
Bursting out from the side road, their relief was only momentary as they crossed the main avenue unharmed. Now doing thirty miles an hour, they quickly covered the short, open patch of grass between the road and the wall. We are not slowing, they all thought, why are we not slowing? One man managed to release a scream as they flew headlong into the reinforced barrier wall.
This should deal with these incompetents, thought Shahim, as he locked his phenomenally strong arms and legs and braced for impact. The man in the front passenger seat of the car had not worn a seat belt, as there wasn’t one for him to wear in the old junker, and he flew straight through the front windscreen, shattering the glass and his skull as he went. His journey was short, ending a moment later as he connected with the thick concrete wall that had so effectively stopped the car.
Even as his head and upper body splattered into the wall, the heads of the two men in the back were forcibly wrenched forward under the stress of the seat belts they had been slightly more fortunate to have. The one who had been behind the front passenger’s seat suffered severe but not fatal chest and neck injuries as the force whiplashed through him, but the one behind Shahim shot forward into the seemingly brick wall of the driver’s inhumanly strong shoulders and neck. Shahim’s head did not even move as the other man’s cracked open on the back of it, his skull shattering and crumpling against the Agent’s like a melon colliding with a cannonball.
The car’s rear wheels were still spinning in air, not half a second after the impact, as the man’s crushed face began falling away from the back of Shahim’s head. The very instant Shahim felt the momentum shift, energies in the car settling, he released his left hand’s grip on the wheel, itself bent back under the pressure, and slammed his elbow into the driver’s door. Wrenched it from its hinges, the door was sent flying away from the car. Shahim’s hands flashed up to grasp the car’s roof with vice like strength, he then pistoned his thighs, launching himself up and out of the side of the car, and onto the roof in one fluid motion.
Shahim’s feet were already landing on the car’s roof as its wheels finally came to rest. He was about to set off when, moaning, the car’s rear passenger stumbled from the open door on the other side of the car. Ah well, the Agent thought, the ‘freedom fighter’ would be of one more use to him. Stepping over the car’s roof, he picked the bewildered man up by the back of his neck.
“Congratulations, martyr, you can be the final show that this team struggled for the cause.”
And with that, he braced his legs, and with one thrust of his arm propelled the man bodily up into the air to land on the charged fence that ran along the wall’s top.
The man shouted as he flew through the air, insensible at the way he had been manhandled so easily by the superhuman below. But his shout turned to a short, blood-curdling scream as he landed on the curled razorwire, its knife-sharp blades cutting into his outstretched hands and delivering the might of the fence’s charge straight into his burning veins.
The last of his doomed team now limply twitched and shook on the wall above Shahim, but he wasted no more time on them. Bending his legs slightly, he leapt easily over the wall and the dead man on top of it, landing with a tuck and role on the other side. He could already hear approaching guards, and from his ever-vigilant satellite’s view he could see each team of soldiers as they converged on the site of the car’s impact, their speed increased now that the alarm from the fence had been triggered.
No worry. Moving with quick, silent steps, dotted with sudden ducks behind bushes and leaps into tree branches, he avoided each group of men in turn, getting steadily closer to the main complex.
Meanwhile, the AI above was monitoring the radio traffic of the frantic guards, and informed him that the prime minister and his family had been moved to the bunker under the north wing of the building. It was on the other side of the compound from Shahim’s position, but that shouldn’t pose too big a problem.
Maneuvering to the nearest side of the large main building, he braced his legs once more and took a giant leap up and onto the flat roof of the main building. He would not go through or around. It was much easier to go over.
The roof was dotted with riflemen and one of them was stunned to see Shahim’s determined face rise suddenly up out of the panicked night. Shahim had seen the guard waiting on the roof from the satellite image that was being relayed to him by the AI, and, in mid-flight he was already reaching down and drawing one of the twelve-inch hunting knives he had strapped to his calves. He landed in another roll to minimize the noise of the impact, just past the shocked guard, and immediately turned into the sights of the guard’s rifle. As the stunned man began to squeeze his trigger, the long, sharp blade of the heavy knife drove straight through his forehead, the force of it repelling the instantly dead guard backward toward the side of the building.
Shahim, still grasping its hilt, wrenched backward viciously, the motion pulling the blade free, and dragging the body of the guard away from its impending, noisy fall to the ground, to crumple, instead, quietly on to the roof where it had stood moments before.
It would, no doubt, have been easier and quicker to use one of his built-in weapons systems to burn a neat hole through one of the man’s eye sockets, but such a strange injury might have aroused unnecessary suspicion, and using the sonic punch when in midair would have thrown him back just as hard as it would have hit the soldier. No, primitive instruments would be preferable for now, until the intensity of events forced him to use more deadly tools.
* * *
The prime minister of Pakistan was incredulous. An attack? Were they mad? He had nearly four hundred men stationed in the compound as part of his personal guard, and more at a nearby barracks. Certainly, it had been attempted before, but all it had ever accomplished was the needless death of the few insurgents stupid enough to try it, and the loss of several of his brave guards.
He frowned at the captain of his guard for having dragged him and his family down to the bunker for what was, no doubt, another futile attack, and then turned to his wife and children, smiling reassuringly as he explained that there was nothing to worry about.
The sound of two of the rooftop guards hitting the top of the bunker after a forty-foot fall was little more than a series of dull thuds, but it nonetheless knocked the reassuring smile from his face.
The guard complement that had joined the prime minister and his family in the room spun around and trained their machine guns on the door. Forming two rows, the front one kneeling, they aimed ten powerful assault rifles at the fifteen-inch-thick steel portal while their captain called to his counterpart outside the door for an update.
“The guards at the gates report all insurgents dead, sir, but some must have made it into the compound. Two guards have just been thrown from the roof. We are sending a team to … wait, you there, one of the fallen guards appears to have survived … go help that man, fetch a medic … wait, he is getting up … dear Allah, what is happe …” gunshots could be heard through the radio, then the guard on the other end shouted: “Die, You Bastard, Why Won’t You Die?!” then the radio went dead, a few more shots still just audible through the thick walls.
The firing stopped.
“Captain!” shouted the prime minister. “What is happening out there? What is happening?” the children were crying now, huddling by their mother, but their father was focused on the door.
“Prime Minister, the door is over a foot thick and can only be opened from the inside.” The captain was clearly deeply shaken, but he had a procedure. “We will wait until the garrison arrives from the barracks. They have a code word to confirm they have control of the compound, only when I hear it will I open the door. They cannot get through this door, sir.” The captain’s voice waivered, but he was firm, his training centering him and holding him steady.
Shahim could, probably, have wrenched the door free, but the massive structure’s formidable tensile strength might have strained even his phenomenal muscles. Even if he could, though, it would have left even more evidence that this was not the work of insurgents.
No, brute force was not the primary method of the advanced team, despite the massacre he had just wrought on the really quite brave guards. Nonetheless, in preparation for what was to come next, he rolled out the Tactical Contact Weapons Complement from behind his left eye, its menacing needles emerging from the eye socket as stepped up to the door.
Back inside, behind what they thought was an impregnable door, the radio came to life again.
The voice was familiar, an exact duplicate of the captain’s now dead colleague on the outside, it said, “Captain, the insurgents have been suppressed, we have control over the compound and all sectors report secure. Also, the East Gate reports that the rest of the garrison has arrived and is manning the walls. You may open the door, code word ‘alshahad75.’”
The captain hesitated, but he had known that voice for the over thirteen years, and the code word was, of course, correct. He turned and smiled weakly at the prime minister, “All is well, sir, the threat is over,” and he turned back, ignoring a nagging sense of dread inside him, and pulled the lever to release the monumental door’s locking mechanism.
His only reprieve was that he would never know what he had done. Brandishing both his twelve-inch blades, Shahim flashed through the opening gap moments later into the long room. Before he even realized what was happening, the captain’s head had been severed completely from his body.