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  © SCENES OF A KILL ©

  Within microseconds, Rod had seen the attack and recognized it for what it was: an assassination attempt. He vaulted from the car into the road and landed in a crouch, spinning to face a motorcycle. Rod reached out and steel- cored fingers bit into the driver's helmet, puncturing the fiberglass. He yanked hard and flipped the motorcyclist off the back of the bike, neck broken by the impact.

  Another motorcycle had been holding back. Its driver gunned the engine and it hurtled up from the rear, the rider crouched low as he leveled his gun at Rod. The robot's senses detected the bullets as they snapped past, registering position, velocity, and trajectory.

  Rod whirled as something slammed into his left arm. He had been keeping an automatic tally of the enemies and thought that all were accounted for. But then two 9mm rounds had just struck him in the left arm, blows that tore cloth and synthetic plastic skin. He tracked the path of the rounds back to an FBI agent with an Uzi.

  CYBERNARC

  ROBERT CAIN

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book,”

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  HarperPaperbacks A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

  10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Copyright © 1991 by HarperCollinsPublishers All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollinsPublishers, 10 East 53rd Street,

  New York, N.Y. 10022.

  Cover illustration by Rick Nemo

  First printing: August 1991

  Printed in the United States of America

  HarperPaperbacks and colophon are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers

  10 987654321

  PROLOGUE

  THEY CALLED HIM ROD.

  He did not understand that the name was derived from the name of the Rand Corporation project that had created him. Indeed, it could not be said that he understood anything at all, at least, not in the human sense.

  Rod was not human.

  Not yet.

  Vision check, a voice said in his head. Focus.

  Grid lines superimposed themselves on his unblinking view of Lab One. The words DIAGNOSTIC MODE: VISUAL winked on at the periphery of his vision, not for his benefit but for that of the human technicians who were now seeing through his camera eyes. A man’s face appeared for a moment, close up and distorted by the wide-angle effect. A hand blotted out the lab panorama as the technician made a minute adjustment to the locking ring behind Rod’s left eye. The image blurred, then sharpened.

  "Focus okay,” his own voice replied as face and hand pulled back. It was baritone, male, and perfectly human.

  Telescopic, the voice in his head ordered.

  Crosshairs replaced the focus grid. The scene shifted as a human controller turned Rod’s head and raised it, centering his view on three Rand scientists standing on the far side of the lab. They were watching themselves on a large wall screen that displayed what Rod saw.

  With a tiny whirr, the image expanded, numerals indicating range, focal length, and magnification flickering at the lower right. The scene zoomed in on the figure of Dr. Heather McDaniels, closing in first on her upper body, then on her left breast, finally focusing on the faintly shadowed outline of her nipple where it pressed against her blouse.

  Enhance.

  Wrinkles in the shiny white fabric sharpened. The shadow darkened, stretching the contrast and delineating the nipple.

  "Very funny, Greg,” McDaniels’s voice said sharply. The image blurred and changed as she moved. "Juvenile, but very funny.”

  "Telescopic enhancement satisfactory,” Rod said matter-of-factly. Though he sensed irritation in McDaniels’s voice and could read through his thermal sensors the slight increase in skin temperature on her face and throat, the meaning of her words was lost to him.

  Nor did he understand the laughs from several of the men in the room. Greg Irvin chuckled. "Way to go, Rod. You’re getting more human every day!”

  "Wait until he has a gun in his hand,” another voice said. "Then we’ll see how human he is.”

  Rod had not heard that voice before, but the probability exceeded seventy percent that the newcomer was the man who had checked in through RAMROD security ninety-two minutes earlier. Rod accessed the file from personnel, letting the data flicker through his awareness. Christopher C. Drake. U.S. Navy SEAL lieutenant, active duty, temporary attached duty to RAMROD, seconded from Joint Special Operations Command with security clearance Blue Five, service number . . .

  "You don’t think Rod can perform as advertised, Lieutenant?” James Weston, the head of Project RAMROD, stepped into view. With him was a man in navy dress blues whose face matched the ID photo in Chris Drake’s file.

  "Aw, come on, Mr. Weston,” Drake replied. "It takes a hell of a lot more than a science-fiction writer’s nightmare to function in combat! How do you teach a machine to pick up a gun, pick out the bad guys from the good guys, aim—”

  "Hell, just recognizing a gun is a challenge for an AI program,” Weston said. "But you’re thinking of Apple IIs or a SuperCray. Rod here doesn’t process information like that.”

  "Terrific. You still can’t make a soldier, not like that. You have to grow him, with discipline, training, and one hell of a lot of experience!”

  Weston laughed. "And that, Lieutenant Drake, is precisely why we sent for you. You have the experience our friend here needs.”

  Rod recognized the expression on Drake’s face as a frown but did not understand why it was there.

  With scarcely a stir in the ferns or rotting vegetation to mark their cautious movements, the raiders lay on the mountain’s jungle-covered slope, watching. Wearing camouflage fatigues and floppy-brimmed, jungle boonie hats, their faces and hands smeared with green, they were all but invisible against shadows growing rapidly blacker as the early-evening light faded from the sky.

  Five of the six raiders crouching in the darkness were U.S. Navy SEALs, HALOed into their mountain- valley DZ early that morning. They weren’t supposed to be there, of course. Their silenced weapons, combat dress, and equipment had all been carefully sanitized so that the State Department and the Pentagon could deny that the raiders had any connection at all with the elite military covert operations team.

  The sixth man, a field agent assigned by the DEA attache in Bogota, had met them at the DZ and led them to the jungle OP overlooking their objective.

  The site gave them a clear line of sight over the south wall of a sprawling country estate. The main house was a two-story, U-shaped mansion of white stucco with red tiled roofing. By the east wing, where pool and patio, overlooked by a railed, second-floor wooden deck, nestled among flowers and ornamental hedges, dozens of people gathered, the women in pastel gowns, the men in formal white or black tuxedos. Party lanterns and the shimmering reflections from the pool’s underwater lights gave the assembly a festive air.

  The estate grounds, from the coast road to the ten- meter cliff above the Caribbean surf, were completely surrounded by a three-meter wall. Paramilitary types wearing fatigues and carrying assault rifles checked each carload of guests as they turned off the coast road and approached the main gate. More guests were arriving minute by minute, many in expensive-looking cars with the low-slung
manner that suggested heavy armor.

  Eight hundred meters to the south, the SEALs watched and recorded the scene. Lieutenant Christopher Drake lay on his belly and peered through the covering vegetation, the earphone of a radio headset pressed against one ear. A few meters to the right, MM/2 Kaminski sighted through the eyepiece of a tripod-mounted starlight camera, while RN/3 Timmons crouched nearby at the terminal of the team’s satellite ground station. The AN/TSC-124’s dish antenna was already unfolded and aligned with a MILSTAR satellite in the sky some eleven degrees south of the zenith and slightly to the west. Two more SEALs were out of sight in the jungle, providing flank security.

  "C’mon .. . c’mon .. Lieutenant Drake could hear nothing but dead air over the headphone. There were no transmissions at all on the assigned frequency. "Where the hell’s your spook, Esposito?”

  "Be cool,” responded the camo-clad man lying at Drake’s side. He squinted through the eyepiece of a starlight scope. "He’s here. Trust me.”

  Drake scowled, the expression masked by darkness and the camo paint on his face. "Trust me.” Right.

  He detested the bureaucratic infighting that characterized multidepartmental operations. He didn’t know Esposito, and on an op like this he wasn’t ready to trust him with anything more demanding than opening a can of beer. Damn it, the man wasn’t even a SEAL!

  According to the mission briefings, snowdrop was supposed to provide a communications relay for a DEA undercover agent, code-named "Gator,” among the party’s guests. Unfortunately, the whole op had the familiar air of a poorly conceived, spur-of-the-moment brainstorm by some desk-jockeying suit back in Washington. It looked to Drake like he had been yanked from his billet in Project RAMROD for no better reason than that the Drug Enforcement Administration had given Emilio Esposito the courtesy rank of lieutenant, and Drake’s superiors were unwilling to have one of their teams commanded by a non-SEAL officer.

  La Fortaleza Salazar. That was what the estate below the SEAL OP was called. One of several homes owned by the patriarch of the powerful Salazar family, the mansion and grounds were small by the standards of Colombia’s wealthy elite, but it embraced several dozen choice acres along the coastline a few miles east of Santa Marta. An airfield complete with warehouses and a 1,200-meter landing strip had been constructed a kilometer farther to the east.

  During the daytime, the vista must be spectacular.

  Jungle and tangled tropical vegetation predominated along the coast; only forty-five kilometers to the south Bolivia’s two highest peaks, eternally snow-clad Colon and Bolivar, reached an elevation of almost 5,800 meters. And to the north lay the azure waters of the Caribbean.

  The region was also one of the country’s most dangerous. Colombia’s north coast had long been prime marijuana-growing country, but during the past ten years cannabis had given way to the far more profitable coca leaf. The coast from Santa Marta to Rio Hacha was all but owned outright by the drug lords who constituted Colombia’s second, secret government.

  Operation snowdrop had been conceived as a combined effort by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, working under the umbrella of Group Seven, the President’s special antinarcotics advisory task force. During the past several years, there’d been a number of such covert insertions by U.S. combat teams into Colombia and other South American countries. The w. r on drugs was coming to a boil, and the American combatants, the DEA and JSOC among them, were finding themselves in greater and greater need of precise and up-to-date intelligence.

  Suddenly Drake heard a click in his earpiece, then a burst of static. "Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom,” a muffled voice said. "This is Gator. Hope you boys’re out there and got your ears on.”

  "Got him!” Drake adjusted the gain on the receiver. "He’s transmitting.”

  The signal was weak but clear. Gator was wearing a tiny radio transmitter wired into his bridgework. The range of the device was sharply limited—a few dozen meters—but a more powerful transceiver and microminiaturized power pack had been built into an expensive-looking fountain pen. Gator was supposed to plant the pen somewhere on the estate grounds where the SEALs in the hills to the south would have it in their line of sight. So long as the DEA agent was within range of the pen, the SEALs would be able to listen in on what he heard, as well as pick up his running, underbreath commentary.

  "Just dropped the pen in the potted palms,” Gator continued. "If you’re where you’re supposed to be, you should have a good signal.”

  At his side, Esposito stiffened, then adjusted the zoom on his LI scope. "I see him. By the door to the patio.”

  "Friend of yours?” Drake asked. He signaled to Timmons, who flicked a switch on the AN/TSC terminal. Gator’s words would be heard and recorded by the SIGINT boys back at Fort Meade.

  Esposito shook his head. "No. Never met him. He’s been undercover here quite a while, getting in solid with the Salazars. He was the one who alerted Washington that this drug-lord summit was going down.” Most of the bosses of Colombia’s drug cartels were expected to be here tonight. No one knew what the meet was about, exactly, but the DEA wanted a photographic record of the party and its guests. And Gator would be on hand to provide a running commentary through the bug in his teeth. He was present as a guest of his very good friend, Jose Gonzalo Salazar-Aria.

  According to the mission briefing, Jose Salazar, nicknamed El Tiburon, "The Shark,” was one of the kingpins of the Colombian cocaine trade. His uncle, Roberto Augusto Salazar-Mendoza, was the aging patriarch of the Salazar clan and the owner of the seacoast estate.

  Esposito shifted in the darkness. "I can’t get a clear view,” he whispered.

  Drake heard the rustle of vegetation as the DEA agent changed positions. Silly bastard, he thought. God help them all if this amateur gave the SEALs away. Fortunately, the night sounds of the jungle—a cacophony of keeking, chirruping, and peeping from frogs and insects—enveloped them, as much a part of their cover as the black vegetation around them. He ignored the man and concentrated on Gator’s transmission.

  "Okay, boys and girls,” the undercover agent was saying. The words were slurred and indistinct, the result of his having to mumble under his breath. Drake had to strain to distinguish them. "I’m on the patio now. Looks like a Who’s Who of the local cartels. I’m standing about twenty feet from El Padrino, Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Yellow shirt, heavy mustache. Over there helping himself to the buffet is Roberto Augusto Salazar. Old, dignified-looking guy with white hair.

  "Good God, there’s Don Fabio himself. Fabio Ochoa, godfather of the whole damned Ochoa clan . . . he’s the guy who looks like a walking ton of lard talking to Roberto. Something about Ochoa’s string of horses.

  "Shit! Hold it a sec. Company coming.”

  "Senor Patino!” a new voice interrupted. "Como esta?”

  Drake spoke fluent Spanish, one of the reasons he’d been pulled for snowdrop. Felix Patino, he knew, was Gator’s cover name with the Colombian drug lords.

  "Senor Garcia!” Gator said, the words suddenly loud and sharp, almost shouted in the SEAL’s ear as the agent spoke aloud for the first time. "Estoy bien. Que pasa?

  "We need to talk,” Garcia said. "Now. Inside, with your permission, senor?”

  Kaminski looked up from his camera. "They’re going back inside.”

  "Signal’s still clear,” Drake said. The miniature transmitter would have pretty fair penetration inside the house, so long as Gator didn’t wander too far from the fountain-pen relay on the patio.

  "Well, Felix,” a new voice said over the bug, this time in English. "Time for your amusing charade to end.”

  "Jose?” Gator’s voice sounded strained. "Hey, man! What’s with all the guns?”

  "Que? ” another voice asked. Evidently not everyone in the room spoke English. "Que pasa, Senor Salazar?” "This pig works undercover for the DEA,” Jose Salazar replied in Spanish. "Take him.”

  "Hey, man!” Gator’s voice cracked. "Hey, no
. . . Listen! Who gave you that undercover shit, Jose? It ain’t true!”

  "Save your breath, Felix ... or whatever your real name is. And don’t expect help from your friends in the jungle. We know about them as well.”

  "I don’t know what you’re talking about, man!” The voice was shrill now. "I’m no spy! You invited me here!”

  "I’m told he has a small radio concealed in his teeth,” Salazar said. "Eduardo? Why don’t we see if we can find it? The butt of your rifle should do nicely.” "No! Please, no—’’There was a sickening crunch, followed by a burst of static.

  "Shit!” Drake whipped the headset off. "Time to abort! Damn it, where’s Esposito.”

  The DEA agent reappeared out of the darkness. "What is it? What happened?”

  "We’re burned, Lieutenant!” Drake unslung his silenced Uzi subgun and jerked the bolt back, chambering a round. "From the sound of things they’ve already called in the cavalry!” He pressed the earplug of the small personal communicator he wore under his boonie hat and adjusted the lip mike. "Flanker!” he called. "This is Drop Leader. You got any movement out there?”

  "Nada, L-T,” the voice of MM/2 Kleinfelder replied in his ear. "Not a thing.”

  "All right. You and Franklin, pack it in. We’re aborting.”

  He raised an LI scope to his eyes and scanned the hacienda grounds. The sentries were continuing their rounds as though nothing had happened. But there could be a patrol out in the jungle somewhere.