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Wren seemed to ponder the question. “Yeah, something like that.”
“He’s got some big AI shit that he’s going to give to the Chinese so they can defeat the U.S.?”
Wren laughed at this. “Not even close. Is that what America thinks? That’s bloody mad.”
“Then what?”
“Something so much bigger than that. We really would love to have you on board. We need humans in all this. Me…Kimmie…the engineers and technicians here…possibly even you. We will come out on the right side of the inevitable revolution that’s right around the corner. Don’t be a fool, mate. This only ends one of two ways. You join us, or you die.”
“I’m a fool? Worshiping the dude who buys ten-thousand-dollar tennis shoes makes you look like a fool, asshole.”
“Ouch.” Wren said it with a smile. “We have work to do on you yet. Don’t worry. I, myself, was a slow adopter, but I finally saw the light. You will, too.”
The guards moved forward, took Zack by the arm, and then the service elevator doors, doors that had appeared to be sealed, opened.
Zack looked at Wren questioningly, but the Englishman only smiled and said, “Bloody magic.”
The Cuban guards pulled him inside; two of the bots entered, as well, and then the doors closed, leaving Wren behind. Zack began to descend lower into the building.
SIXTY
GloboLogis Express flight 30 was an aircraft charted by a nongovernmental aid organization that delivered relief supplies to Cuba and other Caribbean islands for those affected by Hurricane Emily, a Cat 3 that had slammed into the region a year before.
This particular Saab 340 turboprop had made the hop to Cuba over two hundred times in the past year, not only to Havana but also to other provinces impacted on the island.
The NGO chartering the aircraft was not a CIA front, per se, but rather a partnership had developed between the Agency and the organization whereby the Saab 340 had, on occasion, slipped personnel and materiel into the communist island.
But never more than one or two people at a time.
At one thirty a.m., flight 30 landed at José Martí International. After touchdown it slowed, and then the pilot turned off the runway on the western end of the airfield and entered a taxiway that took the turboprop to within less than one hundred feet from the fence line.
The hatch opened on the port side of the aircraft, away from the terminal, and the aircraft began to turn onto the taxiway that would take it back to the east.
And then the aircraft came to a complete stop on the taxiway.
Twenty seconds later it began rolling again; the controllers in the tower hadn’t noticed the brief halt out of their view, and by the time the Saab 340 made it to its allotted spot on the ramp, the hatch had been resealed by one of the aircraft’s loadmasters.
The aircraft would refuel, a flight plan to the southern town of Cienfuegos would be filed with the airport here with a departure at eight a.m., and the crew would get some rest.
•••
By the time the cargo plane was chocked at the ramp by the ground crew, two hundred yards away, eighteen members of the CIA Special Activities Center Ground Branch began dropping down from an eight-foot fence into impossibly dense foliage. Once they were down, they scooped up the eighteen huge duffels they’d heaved over, then began pushing deep into a grove of West Indian walnut trees, their way ahead lit with the faintest of the red settings on the Streamlight tactical headlamps they wore on their sweat-covered foreheads.
The men of teams Alpha Mike, Bravo Zulu, and Papa Quebec ranged in age from thirty-three to fifty-three, they all slung their heavy Eberlestock packs laden with gear, and they wore civilian clothing: long-sleeve shirts and thick cotton, nylon, and spandex pants.
Each man carried an M250 light machine gun cinched tight to their backs by their slings.
The M250 was brand-new; it fired the big 6.8-millimeter cartridge, and none of these guys would have chosen this weapon if their only concern had been the two-mile hump to the target, because it was bigger and heavier than their normal weapons. But everyone was well aware they might be up against bullet-resistant LAWs tonight, and just as Gentry had suggested to Travers about the AK-47, a bigger, more energetic bullet might do more damage to machinery than a smaller, zippier round.
Again, though, the downside to the M250 was the size. At fourteen pounds unloaded, plus the four 100-round canvas magazines each man carried, the movement through the trees and brush was slow going.
Their weapons had optics and flashlights, but they weren’t equipped with suppressors simply to shorten the length of the weapons, since it was decided by all that eighteen operators engaging rifle-toting robots with machine guns wouldn’t exactly be stealthy, even with silencers.
In the men’s packs they carried SIG Sauer pistols and flash bang and fragmentation grenades, and four of the men ported enough Composition Four explosives to blow up a three-story building.
The teams stomped steadily through the underbrush, and after five minutes they’d made it a number of yards into the dense vegetation, and here the leader of Alpha Mike halted all three teams and pulled out his sat phone.
Larry Repult, aka Mike Actual, was the senior Ground Branch officer in the group, so when they moved together, he was in command.
