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The Mexican wondered if this obvious intelligence leak at Gama the man was speaking of was the reason he’d been instructed to deal directly with Cyrus instead of his contact at the operations center, and he thought this likely, as well.
So, he reasoned, perhaps Cyrus had sent him here to spy on the man in the house, with no idea that Zakharova and Gentry would appear.
If the man in the house was a threat to the operation, and two of the visitors were already targets of Cyrus, then he assumed it would be no time before he’d be ordered to deploy the lethal Hornet drones, even though he hadn’t a clue how to operate them once launched.
Just then, a window appeared on his screen. Deploy Greyhound units One One and One Two.
Two of the three large pallets. Precise geographic coordinates followed.
Then a second message came. Deploy Hornet units Nine Seven, Nine Eight, and Nine Nine.
These three were hunter/killer hexacopters.
Contreras called out to Raul, and the man appeared at his shoulder in the darkened cabin of the small cargo plane. The wrangler rose from his desk, and together the two men worked quickly to prepare the devices for deployment, leaning against the fuselage as the aircraft banked back to the west.
The loadmaster checked the tether and the parachute on each payload, then lowered the rear cargo ramp again, and the two of them waited for the call from the pilot that they were clear to drop.
Soon the two large palletized cases rolled down the ramp and out into the night, and a moment later he heaved all three of the folded hexacopters, one at a time, behind them. He made the sign of the cross, then rushed back to his monitors to continue watching the windows of the estate through the ISR feed to his laptop, curious as hell about what was inside those two massive cases that had just slid out the rear of the Cessna.
THIRTY-ONE
The conversation in the second-story great room of the hacienda continued; Fitzroy asked Tudor if he could be present for the contact between Tudor and his asset in Singapore and Tudor agreed, stressing again that he would be the one to turn over any intelligence to British authorities, and Fitzroy needed to keep his end of the bargain and put him in contact with Gentry.
Sir Donald then asked Tudor how he communicated with the cutout.
“Direct message on Signal,” Tudor said. “Every time.”
“You’ve never met with anyone? Spoken on the phone with them?”
“No. Not how they operate.” Tudor added, “My asset at the operations center in Singapore told me she was getting her orders from a director there in the building, Scandinavian chap, and he was speaking with someone called Cyrus. Initially, she said, there were fifteen targeted killings planned, but the number seemed to be going up each day. She got cold feet when it became obvious to her they were working with China.” Tudor added, “She’s not a fan of the Chinese, apparently.”
Fitzroy nodded gravely. “Everything that we suspected was going on.” He asked, “If you had to guess, who do you think this Cyrus is?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say Cyrus is not one person. I’d say it was a building in Shanghai or Beijing staffed by dozens of PRC intelligence officers. Maybe hundreds. All running this game like a global chessboard. It’s too big for any one person, or anything less than a major state actor.”
Fitzroy pondered this a moment, but before he could say anything, Tudor added, “I’ve done work with the Chinese before. But little things. Tracking down dissidents abroad for them, eliminating reporters or spies.” He ran his fingers through his gray hair. “But from what my asset at the operations center tells me, and from what you are telling me now, this is some big bloody balance-of-power-shifting situation, and I don’t want to help the Chinese with that.”
“Good man,” Fitzroy said.
•••
Just over one kilometer to the west of the hacienda, at the edge of an otherwise empty gated parking lot next to a fenced-in garbage dump, a large black rectangular device weighing 180 pounds sat on the ground next to a tall Spanish bayonet plant with its sharp leaves blowing in the wind. The housing the device had arrived at the site in had popped open, and the parachute that had been attached to the top of the housing had been jettisoned upon touchdown, before the sheer canvas blew a few dozen meters farther inland, wrapping itself in brush.
There wasn’t a soul around this remote location for hundreds of meters in any direction, so no one saw or heard when a trio of green LEDs illuminated on the top of the device and a cooling fan inside began to audibly spin as advanced onboard computers came to life.
The black barrel of a squat rifle protruded from a fixed turret at the top of the machine, and the quick sound of a round being chambered far exceeded the noise of the cooling fans. This SPUR, or Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle, fired the powerful 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor cartridge from a fifty-round internal magazine. It was semiautomatic, capable of eighteen rounds a minute of output, and had an effective range of nearly 1,200 meters.
A pair of thin antennae, only ten inches high and covered in rubber, rose from the rear section of the device with a soft buzz, and then a second later the machine itself began to rise from its protective packaging. It lifted off the ground on four legs, each one with a ball joint on the side of the rectangular body of the machine, and a second articulating joint halfway down the leg.
The feet of the machine were rubberized over the metal. Thirty hydraulic actuators served as the robot’s muscles; it had the general body mechanics of a large dog, and the two forward-facing cameras were set up like eyes at the front of the rectangular device, although other cameras were also housed on the sides and rear to give it 360-degree awareness.
Moments after the robot stood, it ran a full systems check; a boom arm on the top of the device behind the turret rose and then spun through its full range of motion, its mechanical gripper opening and closing in a function test.
The device here in the parking lot was a fifth-generation quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle or Q-UGV. A waterproof all-terrain machine, it was one of the most advanced and capable weaponized ground robots in the world, able to reach speeds of twenty-five kilometers per hour and to travel more than fifteen kilometers on a single charge.
Its exoskeleton was protected by Kevlar armor, making it resistant to smaller-caliber weapons.
And while this particular ground vehicle, Greyhound One One, was preparing itself for battle, just sixty meters to the south, Greyhound One Two rose on its four legs, lifting itself out of the muck and green sludge of a shallow fetid swamp.
