Chapter 11: Dead Man’s Switch [Part 2]

  [NEURAL NETWORK: SGT TOMAS GRAVES - SYNCHRONIZATION: NOVEMBER 14, 2065 - LOCATION: SOUTHERN BORDER SECTOR / "SALT DESERT"]

  The high-pitched ringing in my eardrums still hadn't faded. It was the physical echo of the tungsten projectile that had just pierced Arturo's face. But the silence of his death didn't last more than three seconds.

  The colossal carcass of the Antonov An-225 groaned. The petrified wood planks beneath my boots began to vibrate, first like a distant tremor, then as a localized earthquake. The roar of the hydrogen engines tore through the dry desert air outside. They weren't just coming; they were accelerating. I knew the border cartels' Modus Operandi well... Pure destruction.

  There was no time for mourning, philosophy, or hesitation. Grief is an analog luxury the market doesn't finance.

  I shoved the bottle of Macallan deep into the left pocket of my tactical overcoat. My right hand kept the revolver raised, a thin wisp of gray smoke smelling of gunpowder and superheated metal still drifting from the barrel. I pivoted, kicking Arturo's iron chair aside, and took long, heavy strides toward the freighter's door.

  I had less than thirty seconds before they swallowed the Aluminum Husk.

  The mathematics of a border ambush are simple: if you stand in the geometric center of the box, you die. The Cartel wouldn't ask questions. They would shoot to turn the plane into a blind sieve and then walk in to identify the targets. My only advantage was the choked terrain. The aluminum entrance plates were too narrow to allow more than one vehicle through at a time.

  I needed to be the bottleneck.

  I pulled the saltpeter-stained bandana from my neck and tied it over my nose and mouth. The air in there was about to become unbreathable. I ran the last five meters and silenced myself in the thick shadows on the right side of the fuselage, right behind the rusted plate serving as double doors. I pressed my back against the curved metal. The cold aluminum pierced through my jacket.

  With a fluid flick of the wrist, I unlocked the cylinder of my heavy revolver. The cylinder spun, stopping with a perfect mechanical click.

  Five bullets.

  Armor-piercing tungsten ammunition, designed to punch through combat drone engine blocks. An unfair overkill against human flesh, but perfect against highway scrap.

  The deafening crash swallowed the world.

  The blinding white light of the salt desert invaded the bar's gloom when the first armored truck didn't brake—it simply smashed through the two aluminum doors. The kinetic shock was absurd. The plates flew inward, tearing steel hinges as if they were plastic. The vehicle, a monster of hastily welded plates and chains wrapped around its tires, skidded onto the Antonov's wooden floor, spitting a colossal cloud of hydrogen vapor and crushed salt.

  The saline dust swallowed the light. Visibility dropped to zero in an instant.

  It wasn't what I wanted, but it was what I needed.

  The driver slammed on the brakes, the truck sliding through the bar and stopping inches from the zinc counter. Behind it, the heavy howl of two other trucks braking outside echoed.

  I didn't wait for the dust to settle. Where there is chaos, military training builds ladders.

  I stepped out of the shadows, moving in absolute silence through the white mist. The vehicle in front of me still grumbled, the V8 engine trembling beneath the armored hood. Two men were in the truck bed. I heard the distinctive click of cheap assault rifles being taken off safety. They were disoriented, pointing their weapons blindly into the dark.

  Step one. The blind spot.

  I approached the right side of the bed. The first coyote was a kid, no more than twenty years old, eyes wide, a nervous finger on the trigger. Before he could turn his neck in my direction, my left hand shot out like a whip. I grabbed his canvas tactical vest and yanked him brutally out of the vehicle.

  Gravity and inertia did the rest. The kid plummeted face-first onto the petrified planks with the sickening crack of breaking bone. He dropped the rifle, the air violently expelled from his lungs.

  The second man in the bed spun around, screaming something incomprehensible in a border dialect, and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash strobed the white mist. Bullets whizzed inches from my face, tearing into the aluminum walls behind me.

  I didn't blink. I didn't step back. I raised the revolver and fired a single time.

  The recoil battered my palm. The thunder of my caliber chewed up the noise of his rifle. The dense alloy hit the shooter's center of mass, punching through the cheap ceramic plate of his vest and throwing him out of the truck like a ragdoll.

  Four bullets.

  The driver's door was kicked open from the inside out. A massive man, arms covered in faded tattoos, jumped onto the wooden floor. He wielded a sawed-off shotgun.

  I was barely three meters away, but the dust made him myopic. He saw me as a blur, and the barrel of his weapon began to rise.

  Shooting him would be a tactical error. The truck was a barrier, but the other two outside were unloading their men. If I stood there trading shots in the middle of the room, I'd be flanked and dead within thirty seconds.

  I aimed my revolver thirty centimeters below the massive man's waist—straight at the V8 engine block, exposed beneath the vehicle's improvised iron grille. Tungsten is a stubborn alloy. It doesn't deform. It ignores the physics of dissipation.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Three bullets.

  The projectile punched through the grille, tore apart the engine block, severed the high-pressure line of the liquid hydrogen tank, and sparked blindly as it scraped against the rusted steel axle.

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  The reaction was apocalyptic.

  Pressurized hydrogen met oxygen and ignition in a fraction of a millisecond. The front of the truck detonated in an expansive, bluish fireball. The shockwave lifted me off the floor. I crossed my arms over my face and flew backward, my back colliding violently against the heavy zinc counter.

  The massive man wasn't so lucky. The explosion swallowed him from the bottom up before I could even see where his pieces went in the mist.

  The heatwave dried the sweat on my face instantly. The smell of burning flesh and ozone filled the air, replacing the salt. The Antonov's structural collapse alarm began to beep weakly somewhere on the ceiling.

  I spat blood—I had cut my mouth on impact. My ribs protested as I braced my hands against the zinc to stand up. The smoke was now thick, black, and oily. The plane's entrance was blocked by the truck's burning carcass.

  That solved my bottleneck problem. The game had just turned into pure infantry. Trench warfare in the dirt. Where I was born and raised.

  I checked my overcoat pocket. The Macallan bottle was intact. The envelope with the invitation was secure against my chest.

  Furious shouts echoed from the white light beyond the fire. The coyotes were regrouping, trying to flank the fuselage. I wasn't going to wait for them in the lounge.

  I ran in the opposite direction, plunging into the depths of the plane's dark carcass. The Aluminum Husk had a service hatch in the tail, a tear in the corroded metal. I slid across the wood, my elbows scraping the filthy floor, and kicked the metal hatch outward. The aggressive desert light pierced the darkness.

  I crawled out and rolled onto the white crust of the Salt Desert.

  The heat radiating from the ground refracted. To my left, about twenty meters away, my sand bike was anchored. But between me and the bike, the air shimmered.

  Two men were rounding the rear of the plane. They wore respirator masks with dirty filters and carried short submachine guns. They spotted me on the ground the instant I rose to one knee.

  The closest man didn't hesitate. He opened fire. Bullets chewed the saltpeter inches from my legs, kicking up tiny geysers of blinding white dust.

  I used the inertia of my own dive to carry the momentum, rolling sideways. My shoulder slammed hard against the Antonov's gigantic, rusted landing gear. I used the colossal, petrified rubber tire for cover. The material cracked as it absorbed a full burst from the enemy weapon.

  I took a deep breath, the hot air burning my lungs. The ringing in my ears gave way to focus. I stepped out of cover in a quick pivot. The first man was swapping magazines, believing his burst had pinned me down.

  I raised the revolver. One-handed, sights aligned with my right eye, shoulders relaxed.

  Shot.

  Two bullets.

  The tungsten projectile struck the filter of the man's mask and tore through his neck. He crumpled in absolute silence.

  The second coyote roared, held down the trigger, and charged at me, firing blindly, fueled by pure fury and chemical adrenaline. I didn't have time to hide. I lunged straight toward him.

  I cut his firing angle, sliding across the salt as if it were ice. By the time his knees bent to track my movement, I was already inside his weapon's guard.

  With my left hand, I swatted the boiling barrel of the submachine gun, forcing the stream of bullets upward. With my right, I used the solid base of my revolver as a hammer. I struck the side of his knee with the heavy steel. The bone cracked. The coyote went down, his cry of pain cut short by a frontal impact from my combat boot against his jaw.

  He was out before he hit the ground.

  Kneeling in the saltpeter, my back pressed against the rubber of the colossal tire once more, I did the math of my own funeral.

  Fifteen meters of open desert to my sand bike.

  Three remaining Cartel men closing the net.

  Two bullets in the cylinder.

  The black, oily smoke of burning hydrogen began to seep through the tears in the Antonov's fuselage, staining the white midday sky. The extermination squad leader didn't run in screaming. He was a veteran coyote, maybe ex-military. He gestured in silence. I heard the scrape of tactical boots on the ground. Two men began to flank the fuselage to my left, using the plane's paneling as a shield, ready to catch me in a crossfire.

  The leader walked to the right. He went straight for my bike and stopped behind it, resting his rifle on the leather seat, locking down my only escape route. He aimed right at the edge of the tire where I was hiding.

  Check. They had the pieces, the angles, and the absolute firepower. If I ran, the leader would gun me down. If I stayed, the two flankers would execute me in ten seconds.

  But tactical chess isn't about the amount of ammo. It's about reading the board better than the opponent. It's about reading the board and not just the pieces. And my board wasn't just sand. The Salt Desert wasn't harmless sodium chloride. It was a massive crust of raw saltpeter—potassium nitrate. A dangerous, natural oxidizer, just waiting for a trigger.

  I reached my left hand into the deep pocket of my overcoat and pulled out the heavy bottle of Macallan 2022. The amber liquid glowed under the scorching sun. Eighty thousand credits of ancient barley, and more importantly to me right now: pure, hyper-concentrated alcohol, completely free of corporate stabilizers.

  I tore the cork out with my teeth and spat it on the ground. With my free hand, I scraped my fingers hard against the desert crust, crumbling a thick handful of white saltpeter.

  I calculated the distance to the two men on my left. Seven meters. They were passing directly under the Antonov's exhaust ducts—corroded metal that was now glowing cherry-red, superheated by the colossal fire raging inside the carcass.

  I closed my eyes for a microsecond, visualizing the chain reaction.

  I raised my arm and threw the handful of saltpeter with all my might against the hot wind, creating a dense cloud of suspended white dust right above the two coyotes. A second later, I tossed the Scottish crystal in a perfect, silent arc straight at the glowing metal duct.

  As soon as the bottle left my hand, I dove to the ground and rolled to the right, breaking from the tire's cover, exposing myself entirely to the line of fire of the leader waiting by my bike.

  The leader smiled behind his dust mask. His finger squeezed the trigger.

  But chemistry swallowed his bullet.

  The crystal shattered against the superheated metal. The hyper-concentrated alcohol vaporized instantly. And it didn't just burn. The alcohol vapor met the saltpeter cloud I had just suspended in the air. The potassium nitrate injected a massive payload of oxygen into the ignition.

  The reaction was an improvised thermobaric bomb.

  It wasn't an ordinary fireball; it was a blindingly bright blue-and-white magnesium flash, followed by a vacuum boom that sucked the air out of a five-meter radius. The concussive wave fried the tactical visors of the two flankers and melted the acrylic into their faces, dropping them to the ground in pure agony.

  The leader, fifteen meters away pulling the trigger of his rifle, made the final mistake of his life: the human brain is hardwired to focus on sudden thermodynamic events. The colossal flash to his left forced his pupils to violently contract, blinding him momentarily. His rifle burst chewed up the saltpeter a meter from my hip, missing the target completely.

  Checkmate.

  I was already stabilized on one knee. My right arm perfectly extended. Breathing paused in the post-explosion vacuum.

  The gunshot ripped across the plain.

  One bullet.

  The tungsten crossed the fifteen meters and punched through the exact center of the leader's visor before his vision could return. The kinetic impact snapped his head back, and his body dropped heavily, staining the wheels of my bike dark red.

  The desert fell silent once more, save for the high-pitched hiss of superheated metal cooling down and the distant groans of the two coyotes on the ground, permanently neutralized.

  I lowered the barrel of the revolver. The smell of aged peat and Scottish oak mingled with the stench of burning meat and ozone. An expensive toast to cheap ghosts.

  I flipped open the weapon's cylinder with my thumb. The last intact tungsten casing gleamed in the solitary chamber. I snapped the cylinder shut with a flick against my leg.

  I walked with calculated steps toward my bike. I didn't look at the corpse sprawled against the front tire. I brushed the excess white dust off the seat and sat down. I unlocked the biometric ignition with my powder-stained glove, pulled up the anchor, and kicked up the kickstand. The engine let out a lethal, electric hum.

  I touched the chest of my overcoat. The manila envelope was still there. Medea's quantum bait.

  I took one last look at the Aluminum Husk, now a sarcophagus of flames and corporate secrets.

  "Arturo was right," I muttered to the corrosive wind, tasting the smoke on my tongue. "Fire and truth."

  I throttled the bike, leaving the thermobaric bonfire behind as the rear wheel tore through the saltpeter mirror, heading toward the city's horizon.