The Omicron Kill - An Omega Thriller (Omega Series Book 11) Page 16

  Njal said, “You were right. They have come early for the hunt.”

  “And they’ve brought reinforcements.”

  “The Land Rover.”

  “This changes things.”

  “How?”

  I spoke fast. “We have about five minutes. You position yourself on the slope above the gate. They are going to have to stop while the first gate is opened. Four grenades, hit the Range Rovers first, then you spray them with automatic fire.

  “Meanwhile, I carry out the plan we already discussed, but as well as taking out Nu and Omicron, you will be providing a distraction while I get over the wall. Then we close in and wipe them out.”

  He sighed, then nodded. “You keep changing the plan, man. It’s freaking me out.”

  “We’ll talk about it later. Now let’s do it. We’re on the clock. Go!”

  He crouch-ran back to the cover of the trees and I scrambled down the slope toward the fence. I ran, stumbled, fell, scrambled and ran some more. I wasn’t as worried about being heard as I was about being late. There was a hill and a forest between me and the two patrols and they were not likely to hear me. But if I was late with the charges, Njal would be in trouble. Serious trouble.

  I reached the bottom of the hill and fell flat on my belly. I was fifty yards from the perimeter fence and through it I could see the barbed wire and the wall. I lay still and listened. There was only the distant barking of the dogs, still searching for us in the failing light. I grabbed the five charges I had prepared earlier, a pound and a quarter of C4 stuffed into each of five plastic water bottles, with remote detonators patched into my cell phone.

  I ran. I had no time to be fancy or skillful. I wedged a bottle into the mesh beside each of the mainstays. It took me a whole minute to complete the whole thing and then run like crazy back to the cover of the trees. I wasn’t seen. I pulled out my cell and laid it on the ground, ready to detonate. Then I pulled the HK grenade launcher from my shoulder, loaded a grenade, took a deep breath and pressed OK. The detonation was like a smack in the face. It’s not like the movies. There is no rich, slow, rumbling fireball. It’s a loud smack, and then a plume of smoke and dust. But before that happened, I had fired the grenade.

  I had not been able to shape or position the charges, so I had no idea which way the fence was going to fall. The grenade took care of that. It crashed into the central mainstay near the top and exploded, hurling the fence back. A shower of electric sparks and crackles ripped the air at either end, and then the whole structure started to sag and fold in on itself. I watched it fall back across the barbed wire and settle gently against the wall, and again, I ran.

  As I ran I could hear the staccato rattle of automatic fire punctuated by exploding grenades. I leapt onto the fence and started to scramble up toward the top of the wall, pulling the 416 from my shoulder as I went. The fence began to give and slip as I approached the top. I jumped, made the wall, hauled myself over and let myself drop down on the other side. I hit the ground, rolled and ran to the corner of the prefab. I was aware that the explosions had stopped. The gunfire had reached a crescendo a few seconds earlier, but now it had also stopped. There was only silence.

  I peered around the corner at the dusty yard. All I could see was the back of the villa. I crawled on my belly to the next corner. Now I could see the unguarded door of the barracks, and sharp to my left, the door of what I assumed was the lab. Nothing else, nobody else.

  Then I heard the rumble of diesel engines. My gut was pierced by a hot stab of fear, not for myself, but because if the trucks were moving, it meant Njal had not destroyed them, and that would only have happened if he had been captured, or if he was dead.

  They came around each side of the villa: the two military Jeeps, the two Range Rovers and the land Rover, fanning out so there was nowhere to go. And behind them, what looked at a glance like twenty to thirty soldiers were following at a run. I was completely surrounded, penned in on three sides with an eight foot wall behind me. A strange certainty settled on me, that Njal was dead, and here, today, was where I was going to die too. The realization came with a kind of peace. My only regret was that I had not finished Omega before I died.

  Then I remembered something Jim Redbeard had said to me, laughing, quoting some Norse god: Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated by the Norn long ago!

  So, time to die.

  I bellowed like some demented creature, scrambled to my feet and charged, spraying the trucks and the soldiers with automatic fire as I went. In my ears I could hear a mad voice howling, “Odin!” and dimly realized it was me. As the trucks rocked, windows shattered and soldiers ducked and scattered, running for cover, a flash of clarity told me what I had to do. I turned, blasted the lock on the prefab and hurled myself at the door. It burst inward and I rolled as the outside of the building was struck by a hail of fire. Above me, the windows imploded and glass sprayed under the torrent of burning lead.

  Then there were shouts and the shooting stopped. I scrambled to the nearest of the shattered windows and peered out.

  The trucks had come to a halt forming a makeshift barrier. The men were either sheltering behind them or lying flat on the ground, their weapons trained on the building where I was hiding. For a moment nothing happened. Then there was movement. The far door of one of the Range Rovers opened and a man got out. I couldn’t make out any detail. Doors slammed and he was joined by another man from the other Range Rover. I saw Zapata and figured the other two were Gonzalez and Ochoa. There was some talking, more movement of people and two men came through the gap between two of the trucks. One of them was the tall, lanky figure of Njal. I smiled. So much for my intuition. So much for time to die. His hands were bound behind his back and his face was bruised, but it was also defiant, and, above all, he was alive.

  The man behind him was tall, strongly built and dressed in military fatigues. He had the bearing of brass and I recognized him as General Francisco Ochoa. This was Omicron. For an insane fraction of a second I thought about shooting him in the head, but then the image of Sergeant Bradley, the gigantic Kiwi who had mentored me and guided me in the Regiment, came into my mind, scowling at me: “Choose your battles, and never pick a fight you can’t fuckin’ win. We leave the fuckin’ suicide missions to the ragheads, right? We prefer to come home alive… sir.”

  Come home alive. That was looking like a tall order.

  Then Ochoa had a pistol in his hand and was pointing it at Njal’s head. I felt sick and lined Ochoa up. If we died today, he was coming with us. I shouted: “Shoot him and you’re next, Ochoa! And I have nineteen pounds of C4 here, that I will detonate in this lab. So think hard about what you do next.”

  He looked over his shoulder at where Zapata was standing with Gonzalez. He said something and they all laughed. Then he turned back and shouted to me.

  “No need for nobody to die today! We know who you are, Mr. Walker. All you godda do is come out with your hands up and we send you home.”

  I laughed. “What?”

  “You didn’t get the memo, huh?” There was more laughter. “The war is over, Walker. We all friends now. You didn’t know, so I’m gonna forget what has happened here today. You come out, you and your pal here go home, and I never wanna see your face again in Mexico. That’s the deal. Let’s not make it any more complicated than it needs to be.”

  My head was reeling. Questions crowded in from every side. I spoke without thinking, shouting to him, “How the hell do you know who I am?”

  “Come on, Lacklan! Who do you think you are up against? We ain’t playin’ games here! Come on out. You are my guests. We have some dinner, a glass of wine, you sleep in a comfortable bed tonight, and we send you home in the morning.”

  I could see Zapata and Gonzalez still grinning behind him.

  “You’re out of your mind, Ochoa! How stupid do you think I am?”

  He laughed out lou
d. “Pretty stupid! Stupid enough to take on Omega! That’s real stupid, Lacklan. But ask yourself: I have about forty guns here, most of them assault rifles, I got grenades, I got two Range Rovers and a Land Rover, two Jeeps, and you are one man. So you ask yourself, do I really need to negotiate with you? If I storm you right now, you gonna die in five minutes. So why am I tryin’ to persuade you to come out peacefully? Ask yourself.”

  “Because you want to preserve what is in this damned lab, that’s why, Ochoa, and you know that if you attack, I am going to blow this place to hell.”

  “Not so. You got a powerful friend, Lacklan. He wants you alive.”

  I told myself he was trying to fuck with my mind and shouted, “Screw you, Ochoa! The war is over when Omega is finished! I came here for you and Xi and Nu, and I will take you down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll die trying!”

  He sighed. “You will do neither, Lacklan. You are powerless.”

  He turned and said something to one of the grunts, who ran over to the Land Rover, climbed in and fired up the engine. He turned the truck and reversed it to where Ochoa was standing, so it had its back angled toward me. Ochoa then dragged Njal over to the truck, and uncuffed him.

  “OK, have it your own way. You got your pal into this situation, Lacklan. You caused him a lot of trouble because of your obsession. Now you’re gonna cost him his life. He is gonna die of thirst, or worse, of suffocation. You ever watch anyone die like that, Lacklan? Is a horrible way to die.” He yanked Njal’s arm up and cuffed it to the corner of the roof rack. Then he took a second set of cuffs from his belt and manacled Njal’s other wrist to the other corner of the rack, so he was effectively crucified.

  Ochoa turned toward me and pointed at Njal. “In that position, he is gonna be in crippling agony in his arms, in about ten minutes. In fifteen minutes he’s gonna be crying like a baby girl. It’s gonna take him two or three days to die of thirst. He might die of suffocation before that. Either way, you gonna have to sit there and watch him die in agony. But all you gotta do to stop it, is come and have some dinner with us. We answer your questions. You ask what you like. And your friend too. The war is over, Lacklan. Don’t kill your friend for no reason.”

  Njal spoke for the first time since he’d been dragged in. He raised his voice and shouted, “Lacklan! What the fuck are you waiting for? Shoot the motherfucker! And the other two over there! Do the job!”

  He was right. It was what I should do. It was what I had come here to do. Three clean shots. Then spray the troops and if I was still alive, detonate the C4 and do as much damage as I could to the prefab. The job was the imperative. We were soldiers. We were expendable. We expected to die.

  But I wasn’t going to do it. Today was not our day.

  Ochoa shrugged. He turned away and said something in Spanish. Four soldiers ran and took up positions around the square. The other troops began to fall back and Zapata and Gonzalez started making their way toward the villa. Ochoa followed, and called to me over his shoulder.

  “Try to release your friend and my men have orders to shoot him, not you, him. This is the result of your obsession!”

  This last he shouted as he disappeared around the side of the house.

  I looked at Njal. With his arms in that position, as exhaustion set in, his back and chest would quickly go into spasm. Suffocation could follow anytime within a couple of hours or a couple of days. It depended on the person. It was one of the most painful deaths known to man. With dehydration added into the deal, he would be in hell long before he died. But if I tried to release him, they’d shoot him, and there was no way I could take them out first.

  My only option was to surrender to Ochoa. I didn’t buy his bullshit about the war being over. I didn’t know what his game was, but I knew for sure what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t peace and brotherly love. Neither did I buy the suggestion that Ben was alive and looking out for me. I could tell by the way Njal was standing and moving his back and arms that the cramps were already starting. I had to do something, and I had to do it fast. But what?

  Then I looked behind me.

  EIGHTEEN

  The light from the spots outside filtered in through the broken windows, casting twisted shadows and partially illuminating the interior of the prefab. It was like something from a science fiction movie. It was a vast, hangar-like building, maybe eighty feet across and at least fifty feet deep. Mostly it was open space, but at the back and to the sides there were cubicles, some only fifteen or twenty feet square, others considerably bigger.

  There were benches. Some were clear, others contained computer terminals and still others were littered with what looked like electronic equipment. Whatever this was, it was not a cocaine processing plant.

  I glanced out the window. Nothing was happening. I moved into the hangar and started to explore. Most of what I saw meant nothing to me. There were dozens of workstations, many of which had clipboards beside them with annotations which I could not read. Most of the annotations referred to PT 1 through PT 5, but there was no indication of what the PTs were.

  All the workstations had computer terminals, and these seemed to be connected by a network of cables duct taped to the floor, leading to a single bank of hard drives which I eventually found housed in a small room in back of the building. It took up the whole of one wall fifteen feet across, to a height of nine or ten feet. The capacity must have been immeasurable.

  Clearly this computer had not been networked with the main Omega computer I had destroyed in Brussels. That of itself was interesting, and suggestive of what Jim had said about Omicron. This operation was independent: independent of Omega, but within Omega.

  I took my cell from my pocket and photographed and filmed what I could see, plus all the annotations I could find. I tried switching on some of the terminals, but could not get past the password request.

  Then, in the dim light filtering through the windows, I became aware of a series of doors along the right hand wall, furthest from the entrance. I moved over to them and found them locked. I blew out the first lock with the Maxim and stepped inside. It was pitch dark, but there was a noise. It was a rhythmic noise, like slow, heavy breathing, but it wasn’t like organic breathing, it was somehow artificial. I felt by the door and found a switch. I flipped it and the room was flooded with light.

  It was about fifty feet long and fifteen or twenty feet across, taking up the whole side of the building. The walls were white and the lights were stark and harsh. The entirety of the back wall was taken up by five glass boxes positioned at waist height on white, steel stands. Each stand had a word and a number stenciled on it. The nearest said: Prototype 1, the next was Prototype 2, and so on until Prototype 5 at the end. These, then, were PTs 1 through 5.

  Beside each stand with its corresponding glass box was a stack of electronic equipment, including what appeared to be monitors connected to a pump, or a number of pumps. Cables and tubes inserted into the glass boxes, and from there were connected to brains.

  My head swam and I felt suddenly sick. I stepped out of the room, found a dark corner and vomited. I gave myself a minute, then returned to the room and forced myself to examine each one.

  Each one was different.

  The first was too small to be human. It was slightly bigger than a large grapefruit and was not divided into two hemispheres. I became aware that it seemed to be contained within some kind of plastic cling-film. It was moist and seemed to pulse gently.

  The next two were slightly bigger and looked like pictures I had seen of human brains, only like the first, they were not split into two parts. I wondered if they were simian.

  The fourth was huge, bigger than a human brain, but the fifth was unmistakably human. As I looked at these prototypes, my skin went cold and I realized what I was looking at. I had seen another part of this same research at the John Richard Erickson Institute, the night I’d killed Senator McFarlane’s husband. But there, they had not removed the brains from their subjects. They had opened up
their skulls and carried out their experiments, but they had left the brains inside their tortured, harrowed subjects, and closed them up again afterwards. I had wondered then, what exactly the research was for. Now I knew. They were trying to make cyborgs.

  The voice startled me. I had not heard anyone approach. It was a sweet, feminine voice. It said, “They are not in pain.”

  I turned. There was a young woman, maybe in her late twenties, standing in the doorway. She was one of the group of what Njal had called nerds. She said, “They don’t suffer. You need a body to suffer. Anxiety, fear, loneliness… They are all organic. You need a body…”

  I spoke without thinking. “And a soul.”

  “What?”

  “To be human,” I said. “You need a soul in order to be human.”

  She shrugged. “I’m a scientist. I don’t know about souls. I do know that these brains were going to die, and we saved them. Now they are part of something greater.”

  “Really?”

  She pointed to PT 1. “This was Chucho. He was Xi’s Labrador. He had leishmaniasis. Out here, that is fatal for a dog.”

  “You’re a member of Omega?”

  She shook her head. “I am nowhere near rich enough. But I believe in their vision, in the project. I want to be a part of the New Eden when the time comes.” She gave a small, pretty laugh. “That might be sooner than we expected. Did you read the latest IPCC report?” I had a bizarre sense of being at some kind of cocktail party discussing current affairs and the latest exhibits from the Brains Trust. She saw my expression and pointed at PT 2. “That was Chita, a chimp who was injured in Africa. We flew her out here when they notified us. Next to her is Odo, he was a gorilla, shot illegally by hunters. The big one there…” She smiled. “That is Mogli, an Indian elephant. People don’t realize how smart they are. They’re smarter than dolphins. Of all the animal kingdom, they are the closest to humans in intelligence and self-awareness. Did you know that?”