Rogue Forces

“Like I said, he’s smart. But the first time he breaks those things out, my task force will pounce on him.”

“What’s taking them so long? The robots were ten feet tall and as strong as tanks! He used them to kill the Russian president in his private residence and then used them to break into Camp David!”

“There’s only a handful of them out there, and from what I’ve been briefed they fold up and are pretty easy to conceal,” the president said. “But the main reason I think they haven’t is because McLanahan has some powerful friends that are helping deflect investigators away.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know…yet,” Gardner said. “Someone with political clout, influential enough to attract investors to buy the high-tech gadgets like that recon plane, and savvy enough on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon to get the government contracts and skirt around the technology export laws.”

“I think you should pull his contracts and send him packing. The man is dangerous.”

“He’s not bothering us, he’s doing a job in Iraq which allows me to pull the troops out of there faster—and I don’t want to wake up one morning to find one of those robots standing over me in my bedroom,” Gardner said. “Forget about McLanahan. Eventually he’ll screw up, and then we can take him down…quietly.”

JANDARMA PROVINCIAL HEADQUARTERS, VAN, REPUBLIC OF TURKEY

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING

The eastern regional headquarters of the internal security forces of Turkey, the Jandarma, was near Van Airport, southeast of the city and not far from Lake Van. The main headquarters complex consisted of four three-story buildings forming a square with a large courtyard, cafeteria, and seating area in the center. Across the parking lot to the northeast was a single square four-story building that housed the detention center. Southeast of headquarters were the barracks, training academy, athletic fields, and shooting ranges.

The headquarters building was situated right on Ipek Golu Avenue, the main thoroughfare connecting the city to the airport. Since the headquarters experienced so many drive-by attacks—usually just some rocks or garbage thrown at the building, but occasionally a pistol shot or Molotov cocktail aimed at a window—the sides of the complex facing the avenue to the northwest, Sumerbank Street to the southwest, and Ayak Street to the northeast were shielded by a ten-foot-high reinforced concrete wall, decorated with paintings and mosaics along with some anti-Jandarma grafitti. All of the windows on that side were made of bulletproof glass.

No such protective walls existed on the southeast side; the sounds of gunfire on the weapon ranges day and night, the constant presence of police and Jandarma trainees, and the long open distance between there and the main buildings meant that the perimeter was just a twelve-foot-tall illuminated reinforced chain-link fence topped with razor wire, patrolled by cameras and roving patrols in pickup trucks. The neighborhood around the complex was light industrial; the nearest residential area was an apartment complex four blocks away, occupied mostly by Jandarma officers, staff, and academy instructors.

The academy trained law enforcement officers from all over Turkey. Graduates were assigned to city or provincial police department assignments, or they stayed for further training to become Jandarma officers or took advanced classes in riot control, special weapons and tactics, bomb disposal, antiterrorist operations, intelligence, narcotics interdiction, and dozens of other specialties. The academy had a staff and faculty of one hundred and a resident student enrollment of about one thousand.

Along with gunfire from the weapon training ranges, another constant at the Jandarma complex in Van were protesters. The detention facility housed around five hundred prisoners, mostly suspected Kurdish insurgents, smugglers, and foreigners captured along the frontier regions. The facility was not a prison and was not designed for long-term incarceration, but at least one-fifth of the prisoners had been there for over a year, awaiting trial or deportation. Most of the protests were small—mothers or wives holding signs with the pictures of their loved ones, demanding justice—but some were larger, and a few had turned violent.

The demonstration that began that morning started out large and grew swiftly. A rumor had circulated that the Jandarma had captured Zilar Azzawi, the infamous Kurdish terrorist leader nicknamed the Hawk, and was torturing her for information.