Where Legal Eagles Dare: An Opco Boone Adventure

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As a blood-red sun dipped to the the rim of the world, three silhouettes watched the procession thunder across the desert miles below them. An eighteen-wheeler operations battletruck, flanked by a pair of COO picket gunships, kicked up a wide pillar of dust. It billowed and hung over the desert for miles behind. A thin track snaked away from the convoy. It ran ten flat miles through desiccated scrubland to a low-lying, dusty settlement. The encampment was ringed by a network of towers.

And so it is written.

On the ridge, the tallest figure stood in the centre, shrouded by billowing canvas. The outriders either side straddled dirt bikes.

Presently, the observation towers flashed coordinated pulses of light: three long, three short, three long.

The central figure said, “That’s it. That’s the signal. It is time.”

“Are you sure, Opco?” said the left-hand rider.

“Yes, Algy, I’m sure: S. O. S.”

“But, boss, that’s ‘dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash’.”

“Right.”

“But that says, ‘O. S. O’.”

“It’s encrypted. Now go.”

The riders kicked over their engines, gunned the gas and cleared the peak: one to the left, one to the right. They scrambled down the scree.

Still on the ridge, Eagle Squadron Leader Opco Boone, LL.B, took a step towards the cliff-edge.

***

Senior Operations Officer Heinrich Kurzweil fixed his gimlet eye on the horizon. The rig was handling real nice. Sweet ride, he thought. But with seventy tons of state-of-the-art ultra-modernist mano-tech under the hood, you’d expect that. This baby practically drove itself.

Kurzweil was tense; on high alert — but calm. He blinked to bring up the MIS feed in his head-up display. It swept a sixty-five degree field, left and right. The RAG indicators read green across the board: optimal — just a couple of minor blips, 300 yards out, at 40 degrees from true.

Kurzweil picked up the intercom. “You seein’ these, Bugsy?”

“On the MIS? The bogeys? Yeah, boss, I’m seein’ ’em,” Bugsy was Brooklyn-tough. Kurzweil dug his earthy attitude. “A couple of doc jocks, I think. All cool.”

Kurzweil screwed in the ESPER scope and brought up a video feed. Sure enough: two negotiators lumbering awkwardly around an execution memo. Youngsters. No real threat at this distance, but Kurzweil knew it narked Bugsy, all the same.

“Want me to clear ’em out, Kurzweil?”

Kurzweil shrugged. “We’re all good, aren’t we, Bugsy?”

“Well, according to policy 230823.913 revision nine, they count as hostiles. It’s no trouble, boss-man. Seriously.” Bugsy loved to throw the book. He had a wild streak — hell, most uniform bulls in legal ops did: the chief double-oh encouraged it. But this was no reluctant policy compliance matter for Operating Officer Cadet Walter N. Buggs, M.B.A. (Insead). This was job satisfaction. “C’mon: It’s in the service catalog, Kurtzy.” Bugsy was pleading now.

“Ahh, hang it, Bugs. Why the hell not? Go on: light ’em up.”

Bugsy’s ack-ack let rip — the GMSLA guy went up like a Roman candle.

Bugsy whooped. “SOX attest that my little paisan! Ha-ha!”

Bugsy blammed out a second: a lame-ass two-way confi flare. It was a weak round — not usually fatal at such a distance but enough to pacify a lightweight aggressor. But Bugsy was a true shot. He caught the futures guy square on an ops schedule. He squealed. He turned tight circles. His escalation circuits crackled, popped and smoked out. The jockster conked out and crashed, face-down in the sand, little green flames licking around his his annex.

“Yee-hah!” Bugsy’s turret retracted.

Kurzweil re-blinked up the MIS readout in his head-up display for SME activity. Beautiful: flatline.

“That’ll do, Bugsy, you mad bastard,” Kurzweil chuckled. “Confirmed kills. Chalk up the KPIs and let’s get those portfolios reassigned to Bucharest, toot-sweet.”

“On it, boss.”

Bugsy called them into to C double-oh on the encrypted two-way comlink. He rocked the sing-song ham radio chit-chat idiom: “CapCom, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner filing our hourly stakeholder check-in, do you copy, over?”

Cadet Maxine Blitzer staffed the mic at the double-oh HQ. She was a regular scone-doer, so they kept her away from active engagement. The Capsule Command role suited her well. “KPI-Delta-One-Niner, this is CapCom: we read you loud and clear, Bugsy-boy. Go ahead, over.”

A static burst shook the set. Bugsy punched in. “CapCom, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner: top of the morning to you, Blitzy. We are reporting the coast is clear. Repeat: The coast is clear.”

“Ten-four, Bugsy. You seeing any action?”

“Roger that, Blitz. We just cleared out a couple of junior jockers— stats to follow. We are fully operationalised and all systems go. We are requesting clearance to deploy Operation Playbook.”

“Stand by, KPI-Delta-One-Niner.” There was a pause while Blitzer ran a launch status check.

“KPI-Delta-One-Niner, you are confirmed go for Operation Playbook,” Blitzer’s tone turned familiar. “Rock that house, Kurzweil, you crazy sumbitch. CapCom — out.”

Kurzweil punched in. “That’s an A.O.K., Blitzer, my man. We are gunning in for final approach. We’ll be home by five: put those beers on ice. This KPI-Delta-One-Niner — over and out.”

Kurzweil checked the clock. They were making good time. The payload was primed. Speed was steady. There would be dogfights later; let’s keep the gang loose for now.

“O.K., Bugsy. Stand down and accelerate. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Kurzweil stomped on metal.

Bugsy gunned the wagon.

The semi’s foghorn screamed.

The convoy kicked up a desert plume.

Fifteen klicks down the line, the peaceable settlement at Lissingdown was oblivious while upon it, the hounds of hell descended.

***

The Eagle Squad leader stood high on the mountain promontory, seven klicks west and 4,000 metres up, Boone observed the rising plume on the desert floor. He didn’t need his telegraphic scope to watch: These morons were clear as day. Their MIS signature lit up half the goddamn sky. Taking them down would be simple pleasure.

Boone barked into his wrist-comm. “All right, Chip, I’m going in.”

Static crackled.

The GC came on the line. Her voice was nasal, uptight: more even than usual. “Now listen here, Boone. No funny stuff, this time. I mean it. We have to play this by the book. Do you hear?”

Boone growled. “Playing it by the book is the goddamn problem, Chipper, and you know it.”

“Jesus, Boone. When will you learn? This storm is coming, whether we like it or not. It’s coming. We just have to deal with it. We can get through this. But we have to be aligned.”

Boone looked up from the wrist-comm. He regarded the great expanse beneath him, yawning away to the horizon. A curlicue of smoke, tainted pink in the dying sunset, rose above Lissingdown. For a moment, he smiled at the brilliantine recollections of his life in that wonderful settlement. He drank in the beauty. These were his kin. His people. His life. His home. These were his tranquil traditions. The ancient solemnity. The august institutions. The whole gamut of precedent. Imponderable. Indispensable. All of it was his. And they were surrendering. They were lying down and taking it. As these death machines advanced, he saw their collective futures dangling above the abyss, hanging by a single golden thread. He knew it: he was that golden thread.

“There is too much at stake, Chip”.

“Nonsense. We’ve charged up the ineffability shields. We’ve flooded the prolixity ditches. We’re confident they’ll hold.”

“You think so?”

“They will if we hang together, Boone.” The General Counsel’s tone softened. “We need you back here, Opco.”

Boone exhaled. Could she not see what was coming? From up here, as this convoy of wreckers drilled relentlessly across the badlands at the settlement, like some crazed Taliban, propelled by demented organisational theory, it was crystal clear: unless they did something, Lissingdown was doomed. This was a mobile apocalypse, on a direct vector for the heart of the settlement, thundering across the desert. It would destroy the civilisation — everything it stood for — down to every last goddamn brick.

Did Chip just expect him to stand there while the double-ohs ran over them?

“Not while there’s breath in me,” Boone said.

***

Kurzweil flipped through the payload. He primed the risk taxonomy. He unclipped the spend ratio metrics. He flooded the Gantt generator. The HUD registered the Lissingdown outer perimeter defence systems, a thousand metres yonder. Convolution fields were arcing and humming, muffling the signals across the frequency spectrum.

Shit was about to get real.

***

Flags flapped on the Col. The wind was getting up. Perfect conditions. The wrist-com crackled.

“Boone? Boone! Do you read me?”

Boone looked down: the comlink channel was still open.

“Boone! Respond as a priority!”

Boone waited a few seconds more. The convoy raced onwards. “Yeah, Chip?”

“Oh! Thank Christ you’re still there, Boone — I thought we’d lost you. Now, listen —”

“Chip, you’re breaking up.”

“What?”

At that moment, the Chipster grokked it.

“Oh, no. No. No. Don’t do this to me Boone —”

“I do not copy that, sir. You are breaking up. I repeat, I am going in.”

“BOONE!”

“This is Staff Solicitor Opco Boone, switching to silent running and signing out. All comms will now go dark. I will report again at 2100 hours.”

“GODDAMN IT B—”

Boone stood on the cliff edge. As he snapped it down, the sun caught his visor for an instant and flashed a beam down into the valley. If Operating Officer Kurzweil caught the sparkle through his windscreen, ten klicks, away it didn't register in the progress of that train of destruction.

Opco Boone knew the time had come. He inched to the cliff-edge. A brisk thermal whistled up the couloir.

Boone flipped off the safety catch on his wingsuit, caught the buffet, and dived.

***

Kurzweil flipped the rig onto auto and started to tool up. The rig steered itself.

Kurzweil took a moment to take in the grandeur of the desert. The windscreen gave a rich panorama. The mountains swept up to a vertical, levelling off to a table four thousand metres above the valley floor. They rose like — like — well, like Olympus above the Serengeti.

High up on the gipfel the setting sun picked out a halo of the eagles circling the summit. Suddenly, one wing-morphed and dropped. Kurzweil double-took: That is one absolute unit of a hunting bird — some monstrous condor. At this remove, the majestic predator seemed to drift so serenely down from the crest, but Kurzweil knew it was dropping like a bullet towards some hapless creature on the valley floor.

Wonder who. “Poor bastard,” Kurzweil murmured, slipping into Kevlar body-armour in preparation for his own upcoming fire-fight. He wondered whereabouts on the plain the unfortunate animal was. It occurred that anything bigger than a rabbit should should show up on the dash.

Kurzweil checked the HUD: the RAG system still flat-lined.

He checked the LIDAR feed. Zilch.

He ESPER-zoomed. Nix.

He flipped to heat-sensor mode and cranked that up to max res. Zipster.

“Huh,” he said to himself. “Big bird going to be bad disappointed.” He yanked on his battle-gloves, snapped the latex and slid back into the cockpit. Over the CB, Bugsy was rocking out to Billy Joel.

***

Boone tilted down and tweaked the airflow over the leading edge. He trimmed his pitch. The roll and yaw were good. He rocked the gaze heuristic and kept the angle of approach constant. He targeted a zone above and ahead of the rig.

Chip still babbled in his comlink. Dammit. He cursed his own error: he left the link back to GCHQ open when he jumped. It was too late to do anything about that: at three-twenty knots he could hardly flip it to silent now: any arm-shift would bugger his trajectory and put him into an aerodynamic stall or some kind of flat spin. He had to let the GC run. But she wouldn’t let it go. The old girl was really busting his balls.

Boone was zooming. The ambient buffetting was off the charts. The suit was shaking like a bastard. The GC was yakking like a rabbit. Boone kept the rig bottom left in the viewfinder. “Steady ... steady ...”

The suit’s digital voice assistant kicked in his earpiece. The DVA was a gas: it had a west-country drawl. Boone spent hours customising it. “GROUNDSPEED READOUT: 145 KNOTS ACROSS THE GROUND.”

Boone bulleted onwards at the trailer. Two thousand metres and closing. The shaking was immense.

Chip kept up the disciplinary threat babble.

“Denning, give me a range to target.”

The DVA counted down range, altitude and ground-speed: vital intel.

Boone hit two hundred. He bulleted onwards.

Chip yapped out parking ticket duty warnings.

Denning intoned downrange coordinates.

Boone made two-twenty across the ground. He bulleted onwards. The rig loomed real close now.

Chip ran out of sanctimonious material and went quiet. Boone caught the tail end of Denning’s read out. “ ... impact target T-minus four seconds.”

“Okay double-oh douches — let’s be having you.” Boone yanked the ripcord. The brake-chute bloomed. Boone jerked back and up. He flipped a backwards 540. He quick-released the canvas straps and dropped the last fifteen feet through empty space. He cracked a three-point knee-down hero land on the cabin roof.

***

“What the hell was that?”

Kurzweil froze. He blinked up the head-up display. Clear.