Where Legal Eagles Dare: An Opco Boone Adventure
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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 herself. Schweiner collected himself. He was tense; on high alert — but calm.
Schweiner blinked to bring up the MIS radar feed in his HUD. The MIS feed 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 growled into the intercom. “You seein’ these, Bugsy?”
“On the MIS? Yaaah, boss, I’m seein’ ’em,” Bugsy was Brooklyn-tough. Schweiner dug his earthy attitude. “They’re just a couple of doc jocks, I think. All cool.”
Schweiner screwed in the scope and brought up a video feed. Sure enough: two negotiators were ambling distractedly around an execution memo. Youngsters. No threat at this distance, but Schweiner could tell it narked Bugsy all the same.
“Wanna clear them out, Schweiner?”
Schweiner shrugged. “Nah, we’re all good, Bugsy.”
“It’s no trouble. Seriously.” Bugsy had a wild streak. Most uniform bulls in legal ops did: the chief encouraged it. This was no reluctant performance of duty for Authorised Operating Officer Walter N. Buggs, M.B.A. (Insead). This was job satisfaction. “Ahh, hang it. Why the hell not?”
Bugsy’s ack-ack let rip — it lit up the GMSLA guy like a candle. Bugsy whooped. “SOX attest that my litte paisan! Ha-ha!”
Bugsy blammed out another — this one a lame-ass two-way confi — just for the hell of it. It was a weak round — not usually fatal at distance but it it was a true shot and caught the futures guy square on elections schedule. He squealed, turning circles while his escalation circuits crackled and burned. Three rotations, and they smoked out. The FIA jockster conked out and crashed face-down in the sand, little green flames licking at his annex.
“Yee-hah!”
Schweiner re-blinked up the MIS readout in his head-up display. It flatlined.
“That’ll do, Bugsy, you mad bastard,” Schweiner chuckled. “Confirmed kills. Chalk up the KPIs and let’s get those portfolios reassigned to Bucharest.”
“On it, boss.”
Bugsy called them in on the encrypted two-way comlink. He 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?”
“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: the coast is clear. Repeat: The coast is clear. We 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, this is Central Control: you are confirmed go for operation playbook.” The CB operator’s tone turned familar. “Rock that house, Schweiner, you crazy sum ’bitch. 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. 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. His 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, at all the memories he had of that beautiful settlement. These were his kin. His people. His life. Boone drank it in: the beauty. The tranquil traditions. The ancient beauty. The august institutions. The whole gamut of precedent. Ineffable. Imponderable. Indispensable.
And there, like some crazed Taliban, the convoy drilled relentlessly across the badlands, racing out to destroy it all — down to every last goddamn brick. His home.
“Boone? Boone! Do you read me?”
Boone looked at his wrist-comm.
“Boone! Respond as a priority!”
Boone waited a few seconds more. The convoy raced onwards. “Yeah, Chip?”
“Oh! Thank Christ, Boone. I thought we’d lost you. Now, listen —”
“Chip, you’re breaking up.”
“What?”
At that moment, the GC grokked it.
“Oh, no. No. No. Don’t do this to me Boo—”
“I do not copy that, sir. You are breaking up. I repeat, I am going in.”
“BOONE!”
“This is Staff Solicitor Opco Boone, signing out. I am switching to silent running. 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 babbling in his comlink. He cursed his attention span: at three-twenty knots he could hardly flip the comlink to silent now: the arm-shift required to just to reset his watch would bugger his trajectory and put him into ab aerodynamic stall or some kind of flat spin. He had to let it run. But Chip wouldn't let it go. The old guy was really busting his balls. Then Boone remembered: digital voice assistant. Thank God for chatbots. Boone’s DVA was a gas. “Hey, Denning,” — the bot chimed awake — “mute!”
A broad west country accent said “I’m sorry, Boone: I can't do that."
Boone bulleted at the trailer. 2000m and closing. “Denning, I need a range.”
Chip kept up the yogababble.
Denning gave out soundings. He counted down range, altitude and ground-speed. This was vital Intel.
Chip babbled over the top .
Boone bulleted. He couldn't make it out.
Denning intoned downrange coordinates.
Chip babbled something about parking warden duty.
Boone bulleted. 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.”
“Shit!” Boone yanked the cord. The chute bloomed. Boone jerked back and up. He flipped a backward 540, quick-released the canvas and dropped the last fifteen feet through empty space onto the cabin roof.
“What the hell was that?”
Schweiner froze.