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No, he was certain—Cyrus was not developed enough to be set free. It was still in a state of rapid change, and Hinton knew he needed to retain some control. Despite everything Hinton had said and done, despite his assurances over the years to Gareth Wren, the Chinese, his employees…Cyrus had turned into an unstable fucking beast. The way it picked targets on its mission to remove anyone who could stop it, killing some of Hinton’s closest friends, targeting people on the periphery, targeting the bloody CIA when a call to the Cuban police would have sufficed…it was showing its immaturity in dangerous ways.
Hinton had created Cyrus, had worked every single day for years on the program, had collaborated with a lot of people who Cyrus then killed to ensure their silence.
With Cyrus’s neural networks deepening by the minute, Anton believed his creation would eventually mature to a state of maximum efficiency, but it wasn’t there yet, and he didn’t know how bad it would get before it righted itself and only made decisions in the furtherance of its mission, a mission Hinton had programmed into the code.
The cart stopped at a lighted parking lot by a cluster of three stairways and three elevators. Hinton leapt out, watched as a driverless cart loaded with six Sentries left the lot in the direction of the shooting, and then he yelled to the driver of his vehicle, “Go back for Gareth.”
The Cuban spun his cart around and raced back up the tunnel while Hinton ran for the stairs, passing the last of the original sixteen Safe Sentries, who had just descended and headed off.
•••
One floor belowground in the SIGINT building, the massive assembly center was a hive of activity. In a space that had served during Soviet times as a hardened bunker that stored mobile equipment from around the 140-acre complex, sixty-four hexacopter drones already hovered in clusters of eight groups of eight halfway up to the fifteen-meter-high ceiling.
The weapons were online, waiting for instructions from Cyrus, but Cyrus was not ready to deploy them yet.
Robot arms running down the assembly line twirled and grabbed and lifted parts, putting them together with drills that tightened their bolts in an instant; conveyor robots moved the LAWs through the line, and at the end of the line near the massive bay doors that led to a ramp up to the ground-level northern side of the building, a group of ten humanoid robots attached batteries to both two-legged and four-legged machines that had just come off the line.
The weapons on board the bots were already loaded, and once the battery was installed on a device, a barcode reader attached to a workstation terminal was put close to a label on the device, buttons were pressed on the terminal, and the machine was animated. It took each one a minute or so to come online and wirelessly connect with Cyrus, but once it did, the programming of the onboard computers began taking orders.
After this, the LAWs were loaded with ammunition by more of Hinton’s unarmed humanoid robots.
The ground LAWs then fell into rows near the bay doors, while the drones hovered just above the ground units.
In the entire massive space, only eight human beings were present. A trio of technicians made sure the equipment was running smoothly, a fourth man worked in the Assembly Room monitoring the productivity of both factory lines, another man monitored the unarmed humanoid robots working in the assembly process, and three armed security officers had taken positions around the space.
Suddenly, two Greyhounds and eight Hornets converged, the drones flying just feet above the ground vehicles, and they all headed not for the closed bay doors leading to the outside but rather to a corridor leading to a stairwell off the assembly floor.
A Greyhound used its gripper to open the door, and then it held it open as the drones flew through. Both Greyhounds then followed them out the door, running at a speed to match the drones.
SIXTY-THREE
Mike Four was the breacher of Alpha Mike, one of the three Ground Branch teams that had landed at José Martí less than two hours earlier, and he lined the external access door on the ground floor of the SIGINT building with det cord, an explosive rope attached with a blasting cap.
But before he blew the steel door off its hinges, it flew open and a group of men armed with AKs appeared right in front of the CIA paramilitaries. Though the Americans hadn’t been expecting the rushing opposition, their guns were already up, and they shouted at the men in the doorway to lower their weapons.
It was mass confusion for a moment; the Cubans seemed like they’d been alerted to some sort of a general danger, but they hadn’t been expecting the CIA teams, and didn’t know who they were up against at first.
But this lasted only a couple of seconds. After a brief shouting match, one of the four men in view at the door raised his rifle, and several of the Agency operators opened up with suppressed gunfire from their pistols. Two of the Cubans ended up stumbling out onto the pavement by the door, and two more fell back inside, but men from Bravo Zulu flooded into the space behind the door and fired insurance shots, making sure these men stayed down.
The door led to a well-lit ground-floor corridor with doors on both sides. The men knew they’d made significant noise, even with the suppressed 9-millimeters, so they advanced as fast as possible, shifting effortlessly into six fire teams of three, with a team stacking up at each door, breaching, clearing, and then moving on.
As they neared a set of double doors, all the men slowed down, because a growing sound filled their electronic hearing protection.
Larry Repult, Mike One, heard it, too. “All halt.”
He looked ahead and determined that the sound was coming from behind the double doors, and it grew and grew by the second. It sounded like weed trimmers on steroids, and a lot of them.
“MGs!” he whispered, ordering his men to holster their handguns and then swing their big M250s around. The team was in the process of doing this when the doors burst open.
And then, Mike One shouted one more order. “Find cover!”
A four-legged robot had opened the door with its grabber arm, and now a swarm of drones began streaking towards the Americans.
•••
Zack, Court, Zoya, and Pace ran up the pedestrian tunnel towards the underground entrance to the SIGINT building, all guns trained forward.
Jim Pace, hampered by the day-old gunshot wound to his right shin, was a few steps behind, but only a few because the Ground Branch guys had cinched the dressing tight enough and given him boots that limited the mobility in his ankle, and he’d kept the ibuprofen flowing through him. Even this annoyed him, however, because he knew Hightower was many years older than he, and Zack was now leading the way.
