Zone War Read online

  Zone War

  John Conroe

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 John Conroe

  Smashwords edition.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  The Demon Accords:

  God Touched

  Demon Driven

  Brutal Asset

  Black Frost

  Duel Nature

  Fallen Stars

  Executable

  Forced Ascent

  College Arcane

  God Hammer

  Rogues

  Snake Eyes

  Winterfall

  Summer Reign

  The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume 1

  The Demon Accords Compendium Volume 2

  Zone War series:

  Zone War

  Borough of Bones (coming Spring, 2019)

  Cover art by Gareth Otton.

  Chapter 1

  “And now for today’s edition of Zone War. Viewers are warned that this presentation may include sudden images of extreme graphic violence, including death. This production is unscripted and carried live in unedited format for an authentic viewing experience. Under no circumstances should any viewer attempt to enter the Manhattan Drone Zone without explicit authorization by the Department of Zone Defense Exclusion Authority. All of the salvage and bounty personnel depicted are duly licensed and trained professionals. There are no amateurs in Zone War, and Flottercot Productions is not liable for any injuries or deaths incurred by viewers of this program. In other words, do not try this yourself.”

  Of course I had to cross the living room at that exact moment, my bowl of ice cream balanced on my work tablet. I had timed my foray into the kitchen with exacting precision, determined to be in and out in under two minutes, which was the amount of time till that blasted show started. The rest of my family was huddled around the viewing wall in anticipation of the daily showing of what was currently the most popular reality show in the world. Not being able to find the ice cream scoop had foiled my plan.

  The screen melted from the skyline background with floating words to a live feed showing bouncing footage of one of downtown Manhattan’s deserted streets, husks of cars littered about, a stoplight lying on the road. The sun was out and the camera mounted on the outside of the Light Armored Vehicle was broadcasting a clear, high-def picture, even if it was shaky from the vehicle’s ride.

  Catching the opening scene was my first piece of bad luck. The second was Monique catching sight of me in the corner of her eye. “Hey, AJ’s here. You gonna watch it with us this time? Or hide in your room?”

  “I’m going to work in my room, little sister, so that we can get paid for what I brought out yesterday,” I said.

  The little sister part was ill-advised on my part, as it was guaranteed to trigger her twin’s temper. Gabby whipped around on the couch and glared at me. “Oh, is big brother busy saving the day?”

  Fourteen-year-old girls should come with the same kind of hazardous warning labels used for explosives and poisons. I’d rather face the Zone any day than get drawn into a verbal war with my lethal little sisters, who fire off words faster than a Russian Wolf anti-personnel drone fires flechettes.

  “Gabby, enough. Ajaya’s work is important to this family and you know it. All of our BUIs together aren’t enough to support us, even with your father’s death benefit,” my mother said, shutting down the more volatile of the twins. Then she turned my way. “And you, Ajaya Edward Gurung, how many times have I warned you about arrogance?”

  “I wasn’t being arrogant, Mom. I was making the point that I have other things to do besides watch that crap, especially when I can see it in person any day I want—if I want to take the risk of being near them,” I said, moderating my tone.

  Behind my mother, the terrible twins both raised their hands and enacted individual ceremonial displays of the middle finger. Monique chose to pull off the imaginary top of her middle finger lipstick and apply a liberal dose to her lips, while Gabrielle blew into her thumb to inflate her own middle digit.

  My eyes flicked their way and then back to my mother, whose face had taken on her stoic look. The one where she tries not to crumble for fear of my weekly forays into what was regularly described by the Zone War narrator as the most dangerous place on Earth.

  And it was. Take the island of Manhattan, release over twenty-five thousand highly advanced Russian, Chinese, and Indian autonomous war drones in a single stunning act of terrorism, and let simmer for ten years. The result was the one borough of New York City that was completely devoid of human inhabitants and whose artificially intelligent denizens aggressively kept it that way.

  It was estimated that over three hundred and seventy-two thousand people lost their lives in the first week of the Manhattan Attack. Another twenty-three thousand died during the second week, as rescue operations and military units counterattacked. Only a crazy fast response by US special operations ready reaction teams, in coordination with New York National Guard, FBI, NYPD, and a whole alphabet of other federal groups, kept the drones from escaping into the other four boroughs. The whole world almost died as an enraged America brought the doomsday clock to 11:59:59, saved by uncharacteristic transparency on the part of Russia, India, and China, who all stepped up to provide assistance and data about their drone weapon systems and particularly against the terrorists.

  Ten years later, the terrorists who were responsible, the Gaia Group, were completely obliterated, hunted with a chilling ruthlessness by a fiercely unified United States. The borough island, however, was still a no-man’s-land. And a rich one at that.

  Everyone in Manhattan either fled or died in not much more than a few days’ time. One of the wealthiest communities on Earth became empty so fast that countless riches, both literal and information-based, were left lying around for anyone to pick up. Anyone who could get safely past the lethal new owners, that is. Hence Zone War, a show that followed five salvage teams as they braved the Zone on a regular basis to kill drones and pull out abandoned riches. The Zone was also the source of my income, the money that kept my family afloat after Wall Street crashed, was abandoned, then relocated piecemeal to backup sites around the East Coast. The massive worldwide recession that followed dwarfed all others before it. Ten years later, the world economy was just now starting to see the sprouts of fiscal recovery. Yes, we all received the Basic Universal Income checks that were paid out to all Americans, but that wasn’t enough to do more than cover bare necessities, as Mom had said.

  Zone War was a huge success, a show that followed the flashiest and noisiest salvage teams. And none of them made more noise than Johnson Recovery.

  “Oh, Ajaya, there is your girl,” Aama said from her spot between my sisters. My father’s mother is quite the romantic. Both of my sisters turned and gave me their best smirks. I ignored them, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ignore the monitor. Onscreen, the camera had switched to the face of the LAV driver. The blonde, blue-eyed Scandinavian goddess of the drone hunt, Astrid Johnson.

  The youngest member of Johnson Recovery, a.k.a. Team Johnson, Astrid was the principal LAV driver but also filled the role of overwatch sharpshooter when more than two of the team deployed from their armored vehicle. A beautiful, smart, and very tough girl, she was hugely popular across the nation and probably most of the globe, a role model for girls and an object of fantasy for guys of all ages. I’ve known her since we were both ten.

  Only
her oldest brother, JJ, was as popular. Tall, muscular, and bold, JJ was the JR point man for ground deployments, and his media nickname was Thor, possibly because of the big sledgehammer he used to break into buildings, possibly because of his blond good looks. Women sure seemed to dig him.

  You had to give him his due. Even with full body armor, he took enormous risks every time he stepped foot on Manhattan soil, mostly due to his father’s preferred approach to things—drive fast and loud, shoot everything in sight, and then haul ass back out at extreme speed. Right on cue, the camera view switched to show JJ crouching with his father, Brad, just behind the driver’s seat.

  Brad Johnson, or Colonel Brad Johnson, was ex-US Army. He’d started his career in tanks, then moved into a Stryker Brigade Combat Team, and never looked back. He and the rest of his family were in Manhattan, visiting an old military friend, on the night the drones were released. They escaped, as did their host family. Drone Night was a life-changing event for anyone who survived it and Brad Johnson was as effected as anyone—maybe more so. Within a year, Brad had quit the military and the Johnsons had relocated to Brooklyn. Brad started Zone salvage work, even as the military was still permanently blockading the island. He started work with his military friend, an ex-British SAS sniper named Baburam Gurung—my father. Eventually they had a falling out over work methods and went their separate ways.

  I turned away from the show and walked out of the room, down the hall, and into my bedroom, which is also my office. Time to make some money.

  Chapter 2

  “Status?” I asked.

  “Current bids on items one through ten, twelve, and fourteen are all below reserve level,” my personal AI reported. “Items eleven, thirteen, and fifteen have been purchased for the Buy Now price.”

  “Time left on remaining items?”

  “Fourteen hours and seven minutes.”

  There are almost as many ways to make money in the Zone as there are ways to die. Almost. The most common is salvage. The New York State court system ruled that anything found and recovered inside the exclusion zone was the property of the finder. Federal Circuit court cases backed that decision. Finders keepers was the law of the Zone. And Manhattan was chock full of stuff to find: from cash, gems, jewelry, art, furniture, fashion items and electronics, to corporate secrets and proprietary information on stand-alone computer systems, all abandoned in the Attack.

  The Johnson family had proven to be experts at monetizing the Zone. Initially, Brad and my father had brought out cash that they recovered from stores and banks. Nowadays, the JR team just went in hell bent for leather, raided an art gallery, jeweler’s, or even an haute fashion store, and bulled their way back out. Only licensed recovery agents were allowed onto the island, but the Johnsons also acted as guides, highly paid ones, for rich people who wanted to experience shooting a Chinese Raptor drone or firing a .50 caliber anti-material rifle into a Tiger ground unit. Then there were the massive studio fees paid to the on-air talent that made Zone War the top show on the globe. Yes, the other teams contributed to the popularity, but the attractive Scandinavian war family was top draw. If you don’t believe me, just count the ads you see some or all of them in. Hocking everything from the latest workout clothes to Astrid’s own line of makeup for combat, to JJ’s signature basketball shoes.

  As wealthy as they had become, the JR Team’s approach to salvage left a lot to be desired, especially if you wanted a really tricky recovery, like, say, corporate intellectual property left on the twenty-second floor of a downtown high rise. Their bull-in-a-china shop approach stirred up every drone in a half-mile radius, leaving them with just a handful of minutes to extract their valuables before the sheer numbers would overwhelm even their heavily armored vehicles.

  That’s where I came in. Gurung Extraction had a sterling reputation for bringing back hard-to-recover items. That’s because I’m stealthy AF. Slip in and slip out. Part training by my sniper dad and part tech magic of my own design. The things I was selling on the Zone-ite auction site were just extra, mostly jewelry, that I found along my way. We also had the beginnings of a pretty good family bank account going, the result of stashing any and all cash picked up during my Zone travels. That was going to pay the twins’ way through college. But the real money came from specific recovery missions.

  “You have three new queries for services.”

  “Summarize, please.” For some reason, I was always polite with AI. Most people weren’t. It just seemed right somehow.

  “One is a request for choice items of sports memorabilia housed in a private collection in the Upper West Side, the second for recovery of legal papers from a personal residence, and the third is a corporate query for proprietary software in a Wall Street trading office.”

  “Triage, please.”

  “The corporate request is the only one that meets or exceeds your risk-reward minimum offer. The sports request is not remotely rewarding enough, and the stated offer for the legal papers is far below the corporate query. Additionally, there is a time-adjusted bonus for the recovery of the computer records.”

  “Display.”

  The one blank wall in my room lit up with the email including two financial numbers, the main offer and the bonus, each of which were large enough to make me set my ice cream aside. Somebody really wanted their algorithms. Which immediately begged the question as to why now—ten years later? Actually reading the email all the way through answered that question, or at least provided an answer.

  “—Zone recovery rates of success have not been deemed sufficient until now to attempt salvage,” I read out loud. “Somebody’s been paying attention to Gurung Extraction,” I mused. The corporate name on the email was something called the Zeus Global Finance Corporation.

  “Correct. ISP addresses assigned to Zeus Global Finance began viewing the Gurung Extraction website two weeks ago. Additional bot searches on the web have left sufficient evidence to indicate a relatively deep review of Gurung assignments to date.”

  I thought about the offer, then reread the few details of the extraction that were listed.

  “Did Zeus Global have an office on Wall Street?”

  “Negative. However, the Zeus website lists two corporate executive officers who were employed by a different firm, now defunct, that did have offices near Wall Street ten years ago.”

  The wall view changed to list the two officers as the Chief Investment Officer and Chief Financial Officer, complete with pictures, as well as a side-by-side map of lower Manhattan with a building highlighted in yellow, located on Broadway about a block from Wall Street.

  “Add in known salvage team activity for today’s date and tomorrow,” I instructed.

  The map on the wall suddenly showed three new highlights in red, green, and blue respectively. There were currently five teams on Zone Wars, and one of the government’s stipulations regarding the show was complete disclosure of each team’s daily location plans. Independent salvage people, like myself, did not have to disclose any information other than designating our chosen Zone entry point and our intended egress site. Proposed trip duration was also collected, but that was just so the Zone Defense people could alert our primary contacts if we went overdue. That was it. Nobody would be coming in after us if we didn’t come out on our own.

  During its four years of production, Zone War had followed a total of twelve teams. Seven of them had either died or quit the business during that time. The actual number of salvage people lost in the Zone was currently at one hundred and sixty-two. The survival rate was so low that the production company only occasionally picked new teams and only from people with several years of experience.

  Myself, I had close to eight years of experience, most of it with my father. After Brad and JJ Johnson, I was probably the most experienced salvager out there. Flottercot Productions had approached me exactly three times to be on the show, once a year for three years running, but much to the dismay of my sisters, I had turned them down all three time
s. No way was I allowing a drone camera to follow me around, giving away all my secrets, and there wasn’t a camera team anywhere that could survive accompanying me, even if I was to ever give permission. I personally doubted any of them were stupid enough to try. My longevity in the world’s deadliest job was directly due to my highly personalized approach and my very customized technology.

  “Inform the sender that I agree to attempt the extraction. Strike any guarantee clauses and disclosure amendments,” I instructed my AI.

  “Done,” it replied.

  “Okay, now we need to get down to planning.”

  My father was huge on planning. Massive time was spent on every aspect of a recovery before we ever set foot in the Zone, no detail too small. I could quote every drone’s specifications forward and backward by the time I was twelve. Nowadays, two years after his death, I have an exhaustive data bank of information built up in my AI’s drives. My planning is still just as thorough, just generally a whole lot faster.