Where Legal Eagles Dare: An Opco Boone Adventure
|
The Adventures of Opco Boone, Legal Ace™
|
The eighteen-wheeler rumbled on through the desert, flanked by a pair of COO gunships.
Senior Operations Officer Heinrich Schweiner set his jaw, his gimlet eye fixed on the horizon. Right now, 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.
Schweiner 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.
Schweiner picked up the intercom. “You seein’ these, Bugsy?”
“On the MIS? Yeah, boss, I’m seein’ ’em,” Bugsy was Brooklyn-tough. Schweiner dug his earthy attitude. “A couple of doc jocks, I think. All cool.”
Schweiner 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 Schweiner knew it narked Bugsy, all the same.
“Want me to clear ’em out, Schweiner?”
Schweiner shrugged. “We’re all good, aren’t we, Bugsy?”
“According to policy 230823.913 revision nine they count has 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.
“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 candle. Bugsy whooped. “SOX attest that my litte 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 scare off mercenaries. But it was a true shot and caught the futures guy square on elections schedule. He squealed. He turned tight circles. His escalation circuits crackled, popped and burned 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.
Schweiner re-blinked up the MIS readout in his head-up display. Flatline.
“That’ll do, Bugsy, you mad bastard,” Schweiner 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. Bugsy rocked the sing-song ham radio chit-chat idiom. “Central control, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner filing our hourly stakeholder check-in, do you copy, over?”
Cadet Blitzer staffed the mic back at the double-oh HQ. “KPI-Delta-One-Niner, this is Central Control: we read you loud and clear, Bugsy. Go ahead, over.”
A static burst shook the set. Bugsy punched in. “Central Control, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner: Top of the morning Blitzer. 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 bogeys — stats to follow. We are fully operationalised and all systems go, Request go for playbook.”
“KPI-Delta-One-Niner, you are confirmed go for operation playbook.” Blitzer’s tone turned familiar. “Rock that house, Schweiner, you crazy sumbitch. Central Control — out.”
Schweiner 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 the beers on ice. This KPI-Delta-One-Niner — over and out.”
Schweiner 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.”
Schweiner 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 Lawyertown was oblivious while upon it, the hounds of hell descended.
High on the mountain promontory, Seven klicks to the left and 4,000m above of the oncoming rig, Boone observed the rising plume on the desert floor. He didn’t need his telegraphic scope to watch: These morons were coming on, 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 looked up from the wrist-comm. He regarded the great expanse, yawning away beneath him to the far horizon, where a curlicue of smoke bleached pink in the dying sunset rose above Lawyertown. For a moment, Boone smiled. He wallowed in brilliantine recollections of those wondrous times; that beautiful settlement. These were his kin. His people. His life. His home. Boone drank it in: the beauty. The tranquil traditions. The ancient beauty. The august institutions. The whole gamut of precedent. Ineffable. Imponderable. Indispensable.
And yet, there before him, this convoy of wreckers drilled relentlessly across the badlands like some crazed Taliban, propelled by demented organisational theory, racing out to destroy this great civilisation and everything it stood for — down to every last goddamn brick.
“Not while there’s breath in me,” he said.
The wrist-com crackled. “Boone? Boone! Do you read me?”
Boone looked at it.
“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 Schweiner 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.
Schweiner flipped the rig onto auto and started to tool up. The rig steered itself.
Schweiner 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. Schweiner 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 Schweiner knew it was dropping like a bullet towards some hapless creature on the valley floor.
Wonder who. “Poor bastard,” Schweiner 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.
Schweiner 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.
The wing-suit man pulled in his flaps, trimmed his jib and adjusted his pitch and yaw. He rocked the gaze heuristic and kept the angle of approach constant to be 20 meters ahead of the rig. The sun was behind him. It threw his shadow on the trailer: nice touch of serendipity. He riffed on dogs and crocodiles while the seconds ticked down.
Boone could hear Chip, still babbling in his comlink. Dammit. He cursed his own attention span: he had left the comlink back to GCHQ open. 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 into his earpiece. The DVA was a gas. It had a west-country drawl. Boone spent hours customising it. “GROUNDSPEED READOUT: 245 KNOTS ACROSS THE GROUND.”
“Hey, Denning, what’s cooking — ”
The bot chimed.
Boone bulleted at the trailer. 2000m and closing. The shaking was immense.
Chip kept up the yogababble.
“Denning, give me a range to target.”
Denning counted down range, altitude and ground-speed vital intel.
Boone bulleted. He hit three hundred.
Chip yapped out parking warden threats.
Denning intoned downrange coordinates.
Boone bulleted. Three-twenty across the ground. The rig loomed real close now.
Chip ran out of sanctimonious material. Boone caught the tail end of Denning’s read out. “ ... impact target T minus four seconds.”
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 hero land on the cabin roof.
“What the hell was that?”
Schweiner froze.