Naz pushed himself up in his seat and peered through the windscreen, his weapon clanking against the glossy black of the dashboard. He cleared his throat noisily, wound the passenger window down and spat out into the rain. ‘I can see all the way to the airfield, Sergeant,’ he replied, ‘and, with all due respect, I don’t see shit.’

‘Maybe there’s a glitch in the monitoring systems,’ Monk muttered, turning the wheel to pull in at the roadside. ‘Call the tower for confirmation. We can wait here till we get the go-ahead.’

‘Confirmation?’ Naz’s expression was incredulous. ‘With all due respect, Sergeant, there’s nothing on the road and I also know you ain’t blind. We need to keep going.’

That was the problem right there, thought Monk; Naz didn’t understand the necessity of sticking to the rules. ‘If the systems says there’s an accident up ahead, then the regulations say we don’t move until told otherwise.’

‘Then the regulations are fucked, Sergeant.’

‘We stay here,’ Monk snapped. ‘Whatever’s up there could be carrying hazardous materials or some other poisonous shit. Search and rescue’ll be here in another couple of minutes, anyway.’

Naz twisted around in his seat to look at him more directly. ‘Look out that window, up ahead of the APC. I know it’s raining, but it ain’t raining that heavily. Between here and the airfield, do you see anything?’

Monk had to admit the road ahead looked empty all the way. He glared at Naz, then reluctantly opened the mike to Rosewood, in the APC, and ordered him to drive up ahead. He watched as the carrier pulled back out into the road and accelerated away.

Despite what he’d said about a glitch, Monk knew the ASI’s mapping satellites were near as damn infallible. If they said there was something blocking the road up ahead, then there was something definitely blocking the road. No surprise if an ex-jailbird grunt like Naz was too dumb to understand that, and yet, as he watched the APC retreat into the distance, Monk couldn’t ignore a growing sense of unease.

It wasn’t like the Mexical ’jacking crews worked this far east, after all. In fact the ASI extended their security envelope far beyond the CTC mass-transit facility, and their present convoy was well within the hundred-kilometre exclusion zone. There were only two tightly controlled air corridors, along with aerial spotter drones programmed to hunt out anyone hiding in the swamps and bayous who shouldn’t be there. Monk himself spent three days a week in charge of a manned ground patrol.

He assuaged his nervousness by checking his armour, layers of Kevlar alternating with artificial spider-silk that could absorb the impact from any number of high-calibre rounds.

Naz muttered something under his breath, clicked his Cobra’s safety off and cracked open the passenger-side door.