WAYNE COUNTY AIRPORT – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Vande followed the point man through the door into the hangar, kicking away the brittle, super-chilled fragments of the lock mechanism where they lay shattered on the ground. The team filed silently into the gloomy interior, directing left and right with jerks of the head and swift, sharp hand gestures.

She had her twinned semi-automatics out and at the ready, the long suppressors attached, the muzzles doubling the length of the silver pistols. Slipping behind a stack of oil drums, Vande chanced a quick look out across the hangar proper.

Clamps along the center of the idling jet were in the process of grasping a cargo module, drawing it up and into place beneath the fuselage. In a few moments, the aircraft would be ready to depart, and she guessed that Sheppard’s pilot would be unlikely to wait around for permission from air traffic control if the shooting started. She looked over her shoulder and nodded at the woman coming up behind her. “Lund,” she whispered, “prep the charge.”

“Copy.” Lund was a muscular Texan woman with bright eyes and an auburn buzz cut, and her primary role was as the squad’s anti-vehicle specialist. She carried a powerful mine template in her backpack with an overcharged EMP unit that had enough jolt to shut down a main battle tank. The plan was to get her close enough to knock out the cargo plane’s electronics before it could escape.

But even as Lund set the charge’s mechanism, Vande had the creeping, sixth-sense feeling that something was wrong. Long, hard-won field experience and raw gut instinct went a long way, and both were gnawing at her.

Despite surveillance getting a positive detection of Sheppard’s voiceprint inside the hangar, she saw no sign of the mercenary or any of his crew outside the aircraft. There were only the Detroit gangers, who milled around, on edge with their fingers on their triggers.

“Go, go, go!” Jarreau’s voice whispered in her ear and Vande launched forward as he spoke the last word, seeing other figures in black emerging from behind cover on the far side of the jet, moving to surround the criminals.

The gang members reacted with shock and fury, bringing up their guns as one.

“Police! Drop your weapons!” Vande shouted, instantly aiming at the first two targets in front of her. She let the aiming enhancer in her cyberoptics kick in, allowing it to lock on to both threats at the same time with no loss of accuracy.

The MCB ganger to her right turned an auto-shotgun her way, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Ah, go fu—”

Vande cut him off mid-speech with a single round that went through his left eye and blew out the back of his skull.

“Guns down or you die!” She heard Jarreau bellow the command to anyone who didn’t take Vande’s demonstration to heart, but his voice was drowned out as the cargo jet’s engines began to rev up.

Lund broke cover and sprinted for the flank of the big aircraft, dragging the EMP with her; she never got there.

A hatch behind the blunt nose of the jet clanked open and a ring of black gun muzzles emerged – a multi-barreled autocannon, already whining as it spun up to firing speed.

With a deep, tearing sound like sustained thunder, the cannon opened up on Lund and savagely cut her down. Brilliant streaks of crimson tracer lanced across the hangar’s interior, shredding anything in their path, blasting through the building’s sheet metal walls as if they were paper. The gun’s automatic tracking didn’t differentiate between Task Force members or MCBs – if it was moving, it was a target.

Other guns opened up in the melee as the gang members fired at every threat around them, and Vande’s colleagues defended themselves in kind. Suddenly the air inside the hangar was thick with cordite and hot metal.

She hurled herself back into the cover of the oil drums just as the cannon tracked her way, spraying heavy jacketed rounds at her heels that splintered the concrete floor. In just a few seconds, the entire operation had gone off the rails, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The cargo jet rocked forward on its fat wheels and rolled out into the darkness, the thrust from its engines adding a screaming gale to the unfolding chaos.

* * *

Jensen dragged the fallen man out of the line of fire, his hands gripping a tac vest that was already soaked through with blood. The Interpol agent was twitching, going into shock as spurts of fluid vented from his horrific wounds. No matter what kind of medical Sentinel implants the man had, he was going to bleed out in moments.

Ignoring the gunfire and howling engines from across the way, Jensen grabbed for the operative’s first aid pack and emptied out the contents on the tarmac. He grabbed a morphine syrette and shot the drug load into the man’s neck, then tossed it away, in favor of a thick injector bulb filled with a bio-foam compound. In a few seconds, the injector clogged the brutal wounds, buying the man the precious time he would need to survive.

The agent’s eyes fogged as he looked up at Jensen, before the pain dragged him away into unconsciousness.

Strobing lights washed over the pair of them and Jensen looked up, seeing the wings of the big cargo hauler sweep around as it pivoted on to the taxiway. The autocannon had fallen silent, but there was still a ferocious firefight in progress inside the hangar. Whatever hornet’s nest the TF29 squads had stepped into, they were caught there.

Jensen rocked on his heels, still feeling the leaden drag of the inhibitor on his augmentations. He couldn’t try the stun gun trick he used back in Alaska again; instead he went back to the bloodied, unconscious Interpol agent, searching for and finding the same cryo-spray aerosol the man’s teammates had used to break the hangar’s locks. Acting quickly, Jensen pressed the nozzle to the casing of the inhibitor bracelet and let a jet of super-cooled liquid nitrogen coat the metal. He flinched as the pain sensors in his augmented arm went off, knowing that he risked doing serious damage to the myomer muscles beneath the polycarbonate skin – but Vande had neglected to leave behind a key and Jensen had no other options.

After a moment, Jensen straightened, and struck his arm against the roll bar of a service jeep parked close by. The inhibitor’s power lights went out and it cracked in two. Shaking it off, he felt the surge of fresh input as all his augmentations began to cycle back to full operability. Reboot icons crowded the edge of his vision as the systems reactivated one by one. He shook his head to dismiss them. There wasn’t time for a steady, cautious restart.

The jet was receding with every passing moment as it headed toward takeoff position at the far end of the runway. On foot he would never catch it in time – and even though Jensen was now making this up as he went along, he followed his first impulse to climb into the parked service jeep and tear open the ignition cylinder. Twisting the ragged ends of the starter wires together, he stamped on the accelerator and the open-topped 4x4 lurched forward into a skidding start. Jensen hauled the jeep around in a turn so tight it almost put it on two wheels, and aimed it away from the hangar toward the retreating lights of the cargo jet.

* * *

Magnet was shouting and swearing at the mercs in the plane as they powered away and left the Motor City Bangers to be cut down by the force of so-called cops that had ghosted in from out of nowhere. Emptying his own gun at the men in black, he watched a dozen of his crew take hits that ended them, some from the new arrivals and more from the crazy blind-fire from the big cannon on the jet. That died off when the plane pulled away, but by then the firefight had well and truly erupted, and it wouldn’t end until one side was destroyed.

But who lived and who died among the MCBs was the last thing on Magnet’s mind in that moment. Right then and there, he didn’t care about any of them, he just wanted someone to vent his towering rage on. He wanted to make someone pay for the double-cross.

Staggering to the hangar doors, he saw the flash of headlights as a 4x4 revved up and kicked into gear, swerving across the asphalt to follow the jet.

Behind the wheel was a face that was burned into his memory – that bastard from the warehouse, the one who had tried to take him down on the roof. If there was a more fitting target for Magnet’s anger, he couldn’t think of it.

The gang leader threw away his empty weapon and broke into a run, his augs powering up as he triggered the illegal modification in his cybernetic arm. Magnet surged forward, reaching out with his gold-plated cyberarm.

* * *

Jensen saw movement from the corner of his eye as he hit the runway; then in the next second a human figure collided with the front of the jeep, and he almost lost control of the vehicle.

Clinging to the hood as they sped away from the hangar, the leader of the MCBs showed Jensen a feral snarl full of gold-plated teeth. His hand was fixed to the metal with buzzing electromagnetic pads on the palm, and belatedly Jensen realized how it was that ‘Magnet’ had become the criminal’s nickname.

He roared and his other fist came through the windshield, showering Jensen in pieces of glass. “I seen you!” Magnet shouted, dragging himself closer. “You gonna pay for messing with me!”

Jensen threw the jeep into a quick series of right-left-right swerves that sent them back and forth across the width of the runway, but Magnet wasn’t so easily dislodged. He slid his cybernetic hand off the hood and lurched at Jensen, snagging the frame of the broken windshield, rising up to swing a kick toward the other man’s head.

Jensen ducked, sensing a familiar tingle in his mastoid bone as his infolink belatedly rebooted. A heartbeat later, and he heard a voice echo through his skull.

“So you’re not dead,” began Pritchard. “Tracking you… at the airport? What’s going on, Jensen, you’ve been offline for hours—”

“Busy,” Jensen bit out the word as Magnet came at him, silencing the distraction. It was a risk taking one hand off the wheel at this speed, but there was no other way he could defend himself. Magnet landed a punch that lit fireworks behind his eyes and hauled back for a follow-up, but this time Jensen was ready and he blocked the blow by enveloping the gang leader’s flesh-and-blood fist in the artificial fingers of his polycarbonate hand. He gave Magnet’s arm a brutal twist, breaking the other man’s wrist.

Howling with pain, Magnet threw himself at Jensen in a desperate, wild attack as they closed in on the turning circle at the end of the runway. Up ahead, the cargo jet was coming about to line up for its departure run.

Jensen punched forward to meet Magnet’s assault, his arm blade extending as he landed the blow. The fractal-edged blade pierced the gang leader’s chest and throat, the shock slamming him back. Jensen stamped on the brakes and Magnet flew off the hood, ripping away the windshield frame still held in his augmented grip.

The dazzling glow of the cargo jet’s running lights flashed brightly as the aircraft’s engines rose in pitch once more, and with a rush of motion it came hurtling back up the runway toward the jeep. Jensen slammed the vehicle into gear and hauled it around, sliding away to the grassy border strip as the jet thundered past. Lying across the center of the runway, Magnet’s body disappeared under the central wheels of the aircraft and was crushed against the asphalt.

The jeep roared as Jensen threw it into high gear and raced after the jet. He had only moments to try and match pace with it. Once the cargo plane’s engines were cycled up to full thrust, nothing would stop it from climbing into the air.

“Pritchard!” he shouted, reopening the infolink as he guided the jeep into the jet’s turbulent slipstream.

“Oh, now you want my help with something?” snorted the hacker. “I’m in the airport monitors right now, I see you. What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

“Stop this thing!” he snapped. “Shut down the jet!”

“In the next twenty seconds? It’s tempest-hardened, EMP-shielded. I can’t hack that remotely with the gear at my disposal…”

The jeep’s wheels screeched as it bounced over the runway, and Jensen spotted the hatch on the prow reopen as the mercs on board rolled out the autocannon. Bright flares of tracer fire cut back toward him, a lucky shot cracking off the headlights.

“How do I stop it?”

Pritchard came back immediately. “The cargo pod! There’s an emergency ejection control on the flank, if you could reach it…”

Jensen spotted the black-and-yellow striped panel next to a series of handholds and locking points. It was close – but he would only get one shot at this.

Pushing the jeep as fast as it could go, he yanked the steering wheel to the right and cut under the cargo jet’s tail as the aircraft began to pull away. He didn’t allow himself to think of the speed or the insane risk of what he was doing, and instead Jensen lost himself in the pitch and moment of the act.

The jeep bumped the side of the jet and lost traction. A front tire split and the vehicle flipped into a roll – but by then Jensen had leapt the gap and slammed into the side of the cargo pod. Wishing he’d chosen the same mods to his cyberlimbs as Magnet, he hung on grimly as the jet crossed the takeoff threshold and the nose undercarriage began to lift away from the ground.

With all the force he could muster, Jensen punched the emergency release panel, ripping right through the mechanism. He tore out whatever circuitry he found inside, hoping that it would be enough. The screaming wind tore at him, the force of it trying to tear him free of the fuselage. Dimly, he sensed the heavily-laden aircraft clawing its way off the ground as it came in sight of the end of the lengthy runway.

Then there were a series of loud bangs, gunshot-sharp, as the clamps holding the cargo module in place abruptly released. The pod detached as the jet lifted and Jensen went with it. Suddenly relieved of its extra weight and mass, the cargo plane shot upward at a steep angle, its engines shrieking as the pilot struggled to regain control of it before it tipped into a lethal stall.

The pod dropped like a brick, falling twenty meters back to earth to land in the crash pan of dense sand beyond the end of the runway. Jensen let go as it went down, trusting his Icarus implant to stop him from being broken apart.

There was a blur of gold fire, a numbing series of painful shocks as he hit and caught air again, before – mercifully – everything went dark.

* * *

The next thing he remembered was someone slapping him across the face, and Jensen blinked back to awareness, unsteady and disoriented.

“There, see? He’s not dead.” Vande peered at him with an unreadable expression on her face, while at her side Jarreau stood watching Jensen under hooded eyes, his bulky night-vision goggles perched high up on his forehead.

Jensen was sitting up in the back of an ambulance, and the air inside the vehicle stank of blood and chemicals. Crammed in there with him on the other gurneys were three more members of Task Force 29, all of them with injuries of varying severity. A pale-faced paramedic worked silently on the agents, with a look on his face that said he was petrified by what was going on.

Jensen stiffened and got up, pushing past the others as he stepped out of the vehicle. There were warning indicators blinking in the corner of his vision, but his augs were still in working order, and he suddenly felt the driving need for a breath of fresh air.

“I told you to stay put,” Vande said to his back.

“Yeah.” Jensen shrugged. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

He looked around. There were regular cops and emergency crews all around, most of them glaring at the Task Force agents in an angry stand-off as Jarreau’s operatives forcibly kept them away from the fallen cargo module. As he watched, the squad’s big quad-engine cargo carrier VTOL came down from the sky on plumes of thrust, extruding thick cables from its belly, each one ending in a magnetic grapple plate. A pair of agents gathered them up and set to work clamping them to the cargo pod so it could be lifted off.

“You were almost killed chasing down that plane,” said Jarreau. “What the hell was going through your mind, man?”

“Adapt and react.” Jensen shrugged, searching his pockets for a cigarette and his lighter. “I get bore-sighted on things,” he admitted. “Focus on a target to the exclusion of everything else. It’s not one of my better qualities.”

Jarreau shot Vande a wry look. “I know someone like that.”

“You can’t smoke here,” Vande insisted. “There’s fuel—”

“So sue me.” He lit up and took a long drag. It helped.

Jarreau showed his teeth in a wide smile. “You gotta be fearless or stupid, Jensen. Still, we got a result and that’s better than nothing at all.”

“What about Sheppard and the jet?”

“Gone,” said Vande. “He’s no fool. When they lost the pod thanks to you, Sheppard’s crew cut their losses and fled for the Canadian border. There’s still a chance we might be able to catch them before they leave the country…” She trailed off, her grim tone showing how unlikely she thought that outcome was.

The VTOL took the weight of the cargo module, and with a whine of engines, it hauled it off the ground and into the air. Moving with ponderous slowness, the flyer carried the damaged pod away toward the east. Jensen took an involuntary step after it. “Where’s that going?”

“Headquarters in Lyon pulled some strings, called in a transporter rig from the Army,” Jarreau explained. “Mendel’s gonna drop it off. They’ll ferry it to a military base, and everything in that pod will be decommissioned and melted down for scrap.” His grin faded. “Shit. Headquarters will call this a win, but it don’t feel like one.” He nodded toward a line of body bags lying on the runway near the hangar, where MCB and Task Force dead lay side by side. “We paid for it.”

Jensen nodded. He knew full well how that felt, and he could see the need in the eyes of the two agents to get after the men responsible for the deaths of their comrades. But all too often payback had to take a backseat to the needs of the mission at hand. “So what happens now?”

“We’re packing up,” said Vande. “The barge crew are clearing out as we speak. I’m going to escort those damned augs personally, right into the furnace if I have to.” He heard the venom in her tone. “I am so done with this bloody city.”

“As for you… there’s about a dozen different state and federal charges you could be arrested for,” Jarreau told Jensen, “but I got enough paperwork as it is. So let’s say we’re all on the side of the angels and call it even here.”

Vande turned to walk away, then hesitated. “Franklin, the man I left with you… You saved his life back there when you could have just cut and run. That’s something.” Then she strode away, back toward the rest of the team.

“That’s the closest you’re going to get to a compliment from her,” noted Jarreau.

“And all I had to do was nearly kill myself.” Jensen took another draw on his cigarette. “How is Interpol gonna deal with all this?”

“I got a badge that says ‘Read This and Weep’ on it. I’ve done this before. We’ll piss off a lot of locals, but by tomorrow we’ll be nothing but a bad memory. Don’t worry, we’ll keep your name out of it.”

“Sorry about your men,” Jensen offered. “I know how it is.”

“Yeah, I read your jacket. You got the experience…” Jarreau nodded toward the runway, changing the subject. “And clearly, you have the skills. If you’re interested, Task Force 29 is always hiring.”

In spite of himself, Jensen gave a low chuckle. “Are you actually offering me a job?”

“We need people who can… adapt and react.”

An odd impulse Jensen couldn’t quite explain pushed at him to respond, but he fought it down. After a moment, he shook his head. “I’m still figuring some things out,” he added, and he realized there was more truth in those words than he expected.

Jarreau accepted that with a nod. “Your call, man. My advice? You’d best get outta here before one of your old DPD buddies recognizes you. I’m guessing they won’t look the other way.” The agent shouldered his rifle and set off after Vande.

Jensen ground out his cigarette on the asphalt and found his way toward the shadows.

* * *

Thorne sat back in the passenger seat of the rented Navig sedan and brushed a stray thread of hair out of her eyes. A cold sense of satisfaction welled up inside her. She had been proven right. From the start, her evaluation of this operation had been correct and now the dead lying on an airport runway proved it. Still, it was ashes in her mouth, just another reminder that her superiors would never truly respect the skills she brought to the game.

The inset screens displayed on her laptop monitor showed the exact opposite of what had been planned for. Instead of a quiet exfiltration from the city, a massed gun battle had drawn the attention of the police force, civilians and the media. And now the materials that she had been tasked to secure were in the hands of a group that Thorne had no direct control over. From most points of view, the operation would have been considered a failure.

But there were degrees of misfortune, levels of random chance that her masters were willing to accept – even encourage. What looked like chaos to an outsider was actually the end result of careful manipulation. Management, for want of a better word. It was, after all, the greatest skill Thorne’s masters possessed. To control the uncontrollable, to influence and guide the elements that appeared impossible to govern.

And now her recommendation – for the deployment of a covert operational unit rather than the use of local proxies – would play out. It had taken wasteful effort to reach this point, however, and she despised that.

Too many plans working within other plans, she told herself. All those old fools and their schemes. They never saw it from down here on the ground, and she knew they wouldn’t care even if they did. Her masters delighted in reminding their agents that they took the long view – but that was easy to do when one was looking down at the world from an ivory tower. For those who did their dirty work, it was often difficult to see anything beyond the immediate situation.

She glanced across the upper level of the parking garage where she had sequestered herself, looking across the freeway to the airport buildings clustered around the runways. Sirens reached her as more police units came racing toward the area, and she paused, thinking about her exit route. The Interpol team’s VTOL had passed over just a few moments before, and already its path was logged, considered and its final destination predicted.

She sifted through digital footage stolen from the airport’s multiple monitors. It had been difficult to remain in the network and stay undetected after things started to fall apart. At one point, she noted that there was a second intruder in the system, and Thorne had been forced to cloak her virtual presence with a shrouding subroutine to make certain she wasn’t discovered.

She quickly found what she was looking for. Images of the action on the runway, caught through a window by a distant security camera inside the main passenger terminal. The footage was grainy and difficult to read, but there were a couple of moments where the monitor had captured the impression of a man’s face behind the wheel of a speeding vehicle.

Leaning in, she studied the face for a long time, considering the lines of it blurred by pace, the dark shields over the eyes, the determined aspect.

“What makes you special?” The question slipped out of her, spoken aloud before she realized it. Frowning at herself, Thorne closed the lid of the laptop computer and turned away, reaching up to punch in a code on the encrypted transceiver module sitting on the dashboard.

As the device went through the process of making a connection, her gaze turned inward. By now, the scouring programs she had left in the Yukon Hotel’s security net had done their jobs. Aside from one inconvenient corpse, there would be no evidence that she had ever stayed there.

The transceiver beeped and she told it her name. Momentarily, a silky male voice made itself known. “As was predicted, the smuggler failed to extract the materials. Our optimal result did not occur.” The words seemed to come from all around her, but she knew that was merely an artifact of her implanted communications link. “Your assignment to facilitate the transfer remains incomplete.”

She resisted the urge to tell her masters that this was the very outcome she had warned them about. “The chance of a successful extraction was only thirty percent, but I am confident I can still secure the materials, if that remains the primary objective,” she stated. “For the record, there were added complications. Another active vector entered the scenario, the fugitive Adam—”

A sigh sounded across the distance, cutting her off. “That is not your concern. Naturally, there are multiple vectors in action at your current nexus. You are not the only asset in play.”

She frowned at that, but said nothing. More games, she told herself. Her next words were tight and emotionless. “I await instructions.” If they were treating her like an automaton, she would behave like one.

“The secondary option you suggested has been approved by the Council. Additional operatives have been deployed to Detroit and they will arrive within the hour. Rendezvous with them at Location Gamma and take field command of the group.” The voice in her head paused, taking a breath. “There is no more margin for error. If transfer of the Sarif materials cannot be achieved, our plans in Europe will be impeded, and we will be forced to seek alternative options. That is unacceptable. Are we clear?”

“Clear,” Thorne repeated. “I’ll report in when it’s done.”

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