Special Operative Charlie-Alpha

"Killing a president is harder than it looks." The black-suited man spoke clearly but it sounded as if it were almost a conspiratorial whisper as he shared with the other black-suited men seated around the table.

"It must be done," said his colleague across from him. "There can be no mistake and no witnesses. This man cannot be our president as he is a clear and present danger to all we stand for and the security of our nation."

"Then we should use the gnats and Special Operative Charlie- Alpha, call name SOCA. He has never failed to complete a mission. We can get this done without collateral damage and blame it on Iran. We will say that they did it as revenge for our attacks on their nuclear program," the first man replied. There were nods around the table and the decision was made.

SOCA reflected that the president's love of the limelight was to be his undoing. He loved to speak to a crowd, to hold them in his hands and have them laughing and crying at his command. Whitehouse insiders spoke of how he would rehearse his speeches in front of the mirror and then play them back to himself multiple times afterward, seeing what jokes had worked and checking his connection with the audience. He was a bit of a narcissist if the truth be told. Positively this meant he was not beholden to many of the power brokers of Washington politics but so also it meant that his decisions were often hard to read and that unpredictability made him a hard man for many to trust. SOCA had voted for the president, preferring him to the alternative, though that would not stop the execution. The 'Men in Black' did not like unpredictable presidents. Today the president would address a crowd in Florida, his favorite state and just thirty miles away from his private home.

The stadium had been chosen for its security, snipers surrounded the site and secret service men buzzed around him. There was a high stone wall of a large church tower at his back and the raised wooden stand from which the president would speak looked out over the field in which the crowd would gather. Fixed seating stands covered the other three sides of the location. Nobody could get in or out of the place without being noticed.

SOCA wore a camouflaged stealth-enabled exo skeleton. His real name was Kenn but he had long forgotten why that might matter. He came from a military family, his mother died in a car crash and his father was a casualty of war. He'd joined up directly from school, served in the Marines, the Seals and then as a Special Operative for the clandestine "Men in Black." The Black Ops group he worked for now paid astronomical wages by military standards but their operations were all off the books. There was a degree of excitement, an opportunity to travel, meet interesting people, then kill them. So how could he resist? He was a hero, by military standards, and possibly the most successful covert operative of all time, especially since his equipment upgrades. He did not know when he lost sight of who he was as a human being, but it didn't seem important anymore, there was only the job, and getting it done was all he had to worry about. He had been on too many missions, to too many dangerous places, and obeyed the most odious of orders. Whatever was left of his soul was an insubstantial smudge on a character emptied of all humanity. He blended into the wall of the church behind the president. He was about thirty feet above the ground and had fastened himself to the stones there. This gave him a view of the podium where the president would speak. He had been hanging there for thirty-six hours, his suit was a self-contained environment for him to eat, sleep, and even defecate without odors or sounds betraying his position. To the secret service men who had scanned the building he just looked like a part of the wall and they had passed under him twice as they had run their checks of the site.

Strapped around his right boot was a box containing the gnats. When the time came he just had to press a button to release them in the direction of the president. They were programmed to hug the wall, move down to the ground, pass under the stand behind the president and then rise at the last moment through the gaps between the steps to hit their target. He would direct the gnats with an ultraviolet pointer invisible to the naked eye but visible in the special goggles fitted into his suit. The gnats would fasten themselves onto the president and he would explode into a million vaporized pieces before his audience. In the chaos that followed the plan was to climb around the church tower to its side wall, his stealth capabilities still enabled, using prepared footholds and then make his escape across a few roofs before arriving at a safe house where he would wait until night came to slip away. His exoskeleton would fit into a briefcase-sized bag to be tossed in the back of a parked car by the safe house. The exoskeleton suit would both protect him from the blast and hide him from the audience. The gnats should be invisible to the cameras that surrounded the site and his release point had been chosen with that in mind. The gnats would be destroyed by the blast leaving no trace.

SOCA relaxed, everything was in place. He directed some food through a tube and switched on a movie while he waited. No sound could be heard nor did any light emissions betray his position. When the movie ended he switched to night mode and slept where he hung out waiting for tomorrow.

The crowd filled the stadium their excitement expressed in the laughter and chatter of thousands of people. The stand behind the president also filled up. There were children and some very attractive young women. SOCA smiled to himself. The only person who would die today would be the president. The technology of his suit and the small size of the gnats would make the deed forensically invisible. Only the trace elements of the explosive Triacetone Triperoxide would be visible after the event. This was highly unstable but the route to the podium had been preprogrammed to be at a slow pace and only the last part of their flight required an acceleration to dangerous levels. Even if they went off slightly too early the president would be killed. The preprogramming and use of the UV pointer made the direction strategy invulnerable to the ECM technologies on-site and flexible enough to hit the president even if he moved around the stage. The direction of the pointer was manually controlled by SOCA from his vantage point on the wall.

Over the next hour, loud music blazed and the excitement continued to build until the president finally arrived, mounting the stage. SOCA waited for the speech to begin and for the president to settle into a position before preparing the gnats for deployment. He switched on his UV pointer, directed it at the president and readied himself to push the button on his left wrist that would launch the attack. But suddenly he noticed that red laser dots were directed at his suit. The Secret Service snipers deployed on the site could see him and opened fire. Despite his suit, the concussive force of multiple bullets against his exoskeleton was a challenge to his hold on the wall though the force of the bullets was distributed into the wall rather than his body.

He heard the crowd start to scream. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. The president glanced behind himself with a puzzled look as Secret Service men ran to cover him with their bodies. SOCA realized that someone had fitted the snipers with UV detectors and his position was therefore exposed by his use of the pointer. This was non-standard and he wondered at who might have given that directive. He could continue with the attack but he would not escape if he did and the plot and its backers would be exposed. The 'Men in Black' would have to find another way to kill the president. With a shrug, he realized he had no way to complete the mission. He deleted the preprogrammed setting on his left wrist, opened a flap on his suit near his chest with his left hand, pointing the UV light into the cavity with the same hand and then with his right hand clicked the button on his wrist that released the gnats. They swarmed out of his boot, up his leg, and then inside his suit through the opening that he had created. Moments later there was an enormous explosion as SOCA evaporated into a cloud of dust.

Notes ▼

CONTEST:

FORUM

The Science Fiction Short Story Contest  (18+) A contest inspired by the serious need for more good sci-fi #2140378 by BlackAdder

W/C: 1507
PROMPT: Future War
Kenn motioned to his right, pointing toward the ridge. "There."

Hundreds upon hundreds of drones followed his gesture, swarming like a dark cloud of high-speed, deadly gnats, toward the gun emplacement. Micro-drones were the latest preferred demolition technology: more accurate than missiles, and much harder to shoot down at range. Some of the more recent emplacements were built with fire towers against just this kind of threat - but not the one ahead. It went down in a cascade of explosions as the swarm hit, leaving nothing but a blackened scar upon the landscape.

But this was no movie, and Kenn wasn't waiting around to watch his handiwork. Retribution was coming quickly, in the form of a dozen hunter-killers. Another swarm of gnats went flying toward them, but not before they launched their shells. A thick cloud of debris filled his vision, and only the markers on his display guided his footsteps. But in the age of exo-skeletal armor, a miss was as good as a mile. He felt more than heard the reverberations of passing through the pock-marked landscape, as his helmet's noise cancellation capability was top-rate. A quick dash through the concrete and rebar brought him to the stealth shuttle and relative safety.

As he slid into the high-G restraints, a voice informed him that all targets had been destroyed. The mission was complete: one more nuclear enrichment facility was down, and democracy had won another day. All that remained to be seen was what Iran would do about it.

Prompt: Future War
Fallout may claim that, "War never changes," but living in the world of modern marvels and horrors, others might remind us that "the only constant is change." And there is evidence that was is changing faster now than ever before, with drones, hypersonic weapons, and AI playing an ever-increasing role. It is hard to remember now that Fukuyama once claimed that we have reached "the end of history," a time of peace when liberalism and a global order with peace among great powers had no serious contenders, but it is a safe bet that war has not ended - and that humanity will, chastened by the consequences of its power, survive it. So I ask this month: what is worth fighting for? How will we go about it? And how will we live with the consequences? Will we make a cartoon or action movie of violence as in space opera, a gritty horror show, or as in the series "Fallout," a bit of both?