Raven Strike

by Dale Brown; Jim DeFelice

  “You’re a salesman,” said Nuri. “Why would you want to buy the UAV?”

  “Who says that I am buying this thing?”

  “Come on. You were prepared to deal. But how did you know what you were buying?”

  “I was not going to deal. No buying.”

  “Li Han isn’t a buyer. He’s a seller. And a worker bee for whatever slimeball will stick a few million dollars into his account. Right? I’m surprised you would deal with him,” added Nuri. “Considering that he helped the Chechens.”

  Kimko raised his head.

  “You didn’t know? You guys don’t know that?” said Nuri. This part was easy—he wasn’t lying.

  “You’re a liar. You don’t know nothing. You’re a child.”

  “In 2012—the bomb in the Moscow Star Theater. Used an explosive initiated from a cell phone. That’s common. There was wire in the bomb with lettering. You traced it to Hong Kong. Our friend was there a few weeks before the bomb was built. There’s other evidence,” added Nuri, who had gotten all the background from MY-PID and its search of the files and data on Li Han. “Maybe I’ll give it to you, if it will help. Of course, if your boss knew that you were dealing with someone who helped the Chechens—that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. I guess it would depend on how the information came out. Who shaped it. We call that a slant in America.”

  “I had no deal,” said Kimko harshly. “I despise the man.”

  “Feelings and business are two different things,” said Nuri. He rose, leaving the bottle and glasses on the table. “I’ll be right back.”

  Kimko stared at the vodka.

  He was beyond starved for a drink.

  But if he reached for that bottle—where would it take him?

  He knew nothing of value. His contacts among the Africans were probably well known by this Nuri. As for the UAV, he had already told him everything he knew.

  Yet the American wanted more. Logically, that must mean they had not recovered it.

  He couldn’t help them on that score either.

  So really, as far as his duty was concerned, there was nothing preventing him from taking the bottle. There was nothing he could say that Moscow could object to.

  But that was the rub—Moscow wouldn’t believe he’d said nothing now. And clearly this Nuri had some sort of evidence to ruin him. True or concocted, it wouldn’t matter.

  He lowered his head to his hands.

  One drink. One drink.

  The smell of the vodka Nuri had poured in the glass permeated the tent. There was no way to resist.

  He pulled the glass over. Before he knew that he had lifted it, he’d drained it. His lips burned, his throat.

  He put the glass back on the table, defeated.

  “You can have more,” Nuri told Kimko, standing behind the chair. He felt bad for the Russian; he looked as if he had collapsed.

  “I can’t help you,” said Kimko, his voice subdued. “I had few arrangements. The Brothers have established supply lines with the Middle East, al Qaeda. We can’t compete. They’re friendly, of course, but they don’t buy. They get everything they need from bin Laden’s successors. I knew nothing about the Iranians. I assume it’s their Revolutionary Guard, but I know nothing.”

  “Tell me who you saw in Duka.”

  “First—I was supposed to call someone yesterday. I lost my phone. I need to call him. If I don’t, Moscow will know I’m missing.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s insignificant.”

  Nuri reached down and picked up the bottle. He filled the glass.

  “Come on,” said Nuri. “We have to help each other here.”

  “He’s an expert in UAVs. He needed to inspect the aircraft. They were sending him to find me. I need to talk to him. Or they’ll think I defected.”

  “We don’t want that,” said Nuri.

  The entire conversation lasted no more than sixty seconds.

  “There was fighting in the city,” Kimko said as soon as the other line was opened. “I’ve had to take shelter in Malan. The UAV must have been destroyed. I’m sorry that I didn’t meet you.”

  “I heard of your troubles and made other arrangements,” said the voice on the other end, before hanging up.

  A few seconds later MY-PID supplied the location of the other phone. It was in southeastern Sudan—the site of the Brothers of Sudan main camp, to be exact.

  Chapter 14

  Washington, D.C.

  Christine Mary Todd took a last spoonful of soup and got up from the table.

  “Working tonight?” said her husband. “I thought you had the evening off?”

  She made a face at him.

  “Tomorrow?” he asked.

  Todd sighed.

  “I was thinking we could sneak over to the stadium tomorrow night,” said her husband. “We haven’t used the box all year.”

  “Daniel, we were at a game two weeks ago.”

  “Oh. But that doesn’t count—you brought the House Speaker with you. And you know what I think of him.”

  “Your opinion is undoubtedly higher than mine,” said the President.

  Her husband smiled. It was true.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “This thing with Ernst.”

  “Oh, don’t let it bother you.” He reached out and touched her hand. “Take a little time off. We’ll have fun.”

  “The Nats always lose when I’m there.”

  “Because you don’t cheer enough.”

  “Well, I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “No, you’ll try.”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “All right.” She patted his shoulder. “I will try.”

  “Video in bed?” he told her. “Saving Private Ryan?”

  “I don’t know if you should wait up.”

  “If I don’t fall asleep.”

  “We’ve watched that video three times in the last two months.”

  “Good movie.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Oh, all right,” he said, overstating his concession. “We’ll watch The Golden Heiress.”

  She had been wanting to see that one for weeks. Obviously, he’d gotten the video already; he was just teasing her. She gave him a kiss.

  “Thank you, Daniel. You know I love you.”

  “And I love you,” he said, reaching up to kiss her back.

  Her husband’s gentle teasing put her in a good mood, but it didn’t last as far as the West Wing, where she was holding an emergency meeting on the Raven situation. The CIA director’s refusal to hop immediately over to the Hill and sing for his supper had predictable results—there were all sorts of rumors now about what he might be hiding.

  All of them wrong, fortunately.

  The one thing everyone got right was the supposition that Edmund’s stonewalling was coming at the President’s behest. Which naturally directed all of the vitriol in her direction.

  Todd spotted her chief of staff David Greenwich rocking back and forth on his feet as she approached the cabinet room. On good days he hummed a little song to himself while he waited. On bad days he hummed louder.

  The walls were practically vibrating with his off-key rendition of “Dancing in the Streets.” She assumed the selection was purposely ironic.

  “All present and accounted for,” said Greenwich, spotting her. Besides everyone who had been at the meeting the day before, Todd had added Secretary of State Alistair Newhaven. He had brought along the Undersecretary of State for Counter-Terrorism, Kevin McCloud, and a staff member who was an expert on the Sudan.

  “Edmund looks like he’s wearing a bulletproof vest,” added Greenwich.

  “I hope you’re joking.”

  “I am. But he does look quite a bit worse for wear. The others, so-so.”

  Todd let him open the door for her. She glanced at her Secret Service shadow, so unobtrusive she almost forgot he was there, then went in.

  “Very goo
d, I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “No gentlemen, don’t stand. Thank you for the thought.”

  She pulled out her own seat and sat.

  “All right. Where are we?”

  Breanna Stockard gave a summary of the search so far. There was nothing new on the Raven, but there was one ominous development.

  “A Russian operative arrived at the Sudan Brotherhood camp in southeastern Sudan a few hours ago,” said Breanna. “We believe he may be there to obtain the flight control portion of the aircraft. In fact, we have pretty good evidence that that is the case. Circumstantial.”

  “Are you sure?” said Edmund. He apparently hadn’t been briefed.

  “I literally heard about this in the car as I pulled up,” said Breanna. “We’re still checking everything out. The operative was headed for Duka, made some sort of contact the NSA picked up, and then drove to the Brotherhood instead. He’s an expert in UAVs. But we don’t know for certain that the aircraft is actually at the camp.”

  “We have to act on this,” said Edmund.

  “Assuming it’s real,” said Harker. His tone was odd—somewhere between genuine concern and sarcasm. Todd couldn’t tell which he intended.

  “What do you propose?” she asked.

  “That we go into the camp,” said Breanna. “We send Whiplash in. We get the computer. If it’s there.”

  “Do we have a plan?”

  “It’s being developed. They’ll be ready to move at nightfall.”

  “You’re proposing an attack on the Sudan Brotherhood?” asked Secretary of State Newhaven.

  “Yes,” said Breanna.

  “It’s a completely domestic organization,” said Newhaven. “They don’t even have connections with al Qaeda.”

  “That’s not entirely correct,” said Edmund. “They have gotten support from them. Arms and money. Even with bin Laden dead, the group is strong in Africa.”

  Newhaven turned to his expert, who, while admitting that the two groups were sympathetic to each other, said there was no hard evidence of anything more than that. The CIA and State Department experts then proceeded to bat around definitions and nuances.

  Todd glanced over at Jonathon Reid. Her old friend was silent, his eyes nearly closed. She knew the whole Raven affair disturbed him greatly; it was certainly costing him friends inside the Agency.

  “Jonathon, what are you thinking?” she asked finally.

  “I think whether there’s a connection there or not, there’s simply no choice,” Reid said. “This weapon is too dangerous to chance it falling into other hands. We need it back.”

  “I agree.” She turned back to the others. “I think the evidence is clear. They have contact and support from al Qaeda. If they’ve gotten support from al Qaeda, then they’re allies of al Qaeda. If they are allies with our enemies, they are our enemies. The fact that our action will inadvertently assist the Sudanese government is unfortunate, but in the end, coincidental. And acceptable. We will strike them and retrieve whatever we find at the camp.”

  Nuri’s call from Ethiopia with the new information had caught Breanna off-guard; she hadn’t had enough time to properly process it, barely discussing it even with Reid before the meeting. Striking the camp seemed like a no-brainer, an obvious decision. But as she sat across from the President and listened to the objections from the State Department experts, she realized the implications were enormous. The U.S. would in effect be taking sides with the Sudanese government against its rebels—but the U.S. did not support the Sudanese government in the least. On the contrary, there was more than ample proof that the government itself had ties with al Qaeda. If anyone should be attacked, it was them.

  Even assuming Raven was there and the attack went well, there were sure to be unforeseen diplomatic consequences, especially since the Russian agent would presumably have to be killed.

  “Why kill him?” asked Harker.

  Edmund frowned but said nothing. It was Reid who explained.

  “Risking a witness, even one who never actually got Raven in his hands, would be foolish.”

  Was the weapon worth risking war over, asked the Undersecretary of State. Especially with Russia?

  It was a philosophical question, since no one felt it would get that far. But Breanna had her own answer: it might very well be. Based on the information the CIA had reluctantly turned over, Ray Rubeo thought the program was every bit as dangerous as Reid had feared.

  Though Rubeo being Rubeo, he had added a host of caveats to his assessment, starting with the obvious fact that he hadn’t inspected the actual software, just some of the technical descriptions.

  The real villain was Harker, who’d decided to test the weapon without getting approval from anyone, except Edmund—or she assumed it was Edmund’s doing. You couldn’t actually tell in Washington. Edmund was generally defending his underling, or at least deflecting most of the flack. But that didn’t make him guilty—the President was going to be taking the flack for the tiff with the Intelligence Committee, and she certainly hadn’t approved the program.

  Or had she?

  Washington could be a maze of mirrors, each corridor a twisted path leading to a dead end.

  Were Edmund and Harker so wrong to test the weapon there? Whiplash, and Dreamland before it, had tested a legion of cutting-edge weaponry in dangerous situations. They’d lost their share of them as well.

  Breanna heard her father’s voice in her head:

  We didn’t spend all this money making these damn things to keep them on the shelf. We have to use them. We lose them, that’s the breaks. That’s the price of playing the game.

  “Swift action is what we need,” said Bozzone, the President’s personal counsel. “With the weapon secured, Director Edmund could go before the committee and tell them what happened.”

  “More or less,” said Blitz. “More less than more.”

  Under other circumstances, the line would have generated a laugh or two, or at least a nervous chuckle. Today it didn’t.

  “We say Raven was a secret UAV project being tested in the Sudan,” said Bozzone. “It crashed. We have it back.”

  “This is where we were yesterday,” said Blitz, referring to a private debate. “Once we start talking about it, they’ll ask why it’s special, they’ll ask about the assassination program, they’ll ask a dozen questions that he can’t answer truthfully, or at least not fully.”

  “And as I said yesterday, the best approach is simply to tell the whole story,” said Bozzone. “As long as the unit is back, there’s no problem. Even Ernst will keep that a secret. And if he doesn’t—well so what? As long as we have the UAV, then we’re the only ones who can deploy it.”

  “Acknowledging the existence of a weapon can have bad consequences,” said Reid.

  “Gentlemen, thank you,” said Todd, cutting them off. “We’ll make the decision on what will be disclosed when it needs to be made.” She looked around the table, then fixed her eyes on Breanna. “In the meantime, Ms. Stockard, Mr. Reid—have Whiplash recover the missing components. At all costs.”

  Chapter 15

  Duka

  Danny drifted between consciousness and sleep. He’d learned long ago to take advantage of the lulls to grab some rest—ten minutes here, a half hour there. They weren’t exactly power naps, but they were better than fighting the fatigue full-on. Tiny sips of energy.

  Random thoughts shot through his semiconscious mind. Who cared about the damn flight computer anyway? Couldn’t they just get the hell back home?

  He saw his ex-wife in their bedroom. It seemed so warm.

  She morphed into Melissa. That was better—much, much better.

  His ear set blared with an incoming call on the Whiplash circuit. He jerked back in the seat where he’d dozed off, pulling his mind back to full consciousness. The tent was empty.

  “This is Freah.”

  “Danny, this is Bree. Can you talk?”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “You’re authorized
to strike the Brotherhood. You are to secure the control unit to the UAV.”

  “All right. Can I use the Marines?”

  A small contingent of Marines had been detailed to provide security at the Ethiopia base at the start of the deployment, but Danny had left them on their assault ship in the Gulf of Aden, deciding he didn’t need them.

  “Yes. Draw whatever you need. But—you need to attack as quickly as possible.”

  “It won’t be until dark. There are a lot of people in that camp, Bree. In the area of two hundred fighters.”

  “Tonight, then. The Russian UAV expert is in the camp. He can’t get out.”

  She didn’t say “killed,” but that’s what she meant. That actually made things a lot easier.

  “All right,” said Danny. “We’ll be ready. One thing, Bree . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “You might think about bombing the camp if it’s that critical.”

  “We did think about it,” she told him. “There are too many caves to guarantee success. I know you’ll do your best.”

  Chapter 16

  Washington, D.C.

  The Nationals put on a hitting display in the bottom of the sixth, batting around for seven runs and sending the L.A. fans scurrying for the exits. Even the outs were loud—the last drove the Dodger right fielder against the fence, where he managed to hold on despite taking a wicked shot to the back.

  “That had to hurt, huh?” said Zen.

  “Not much,” said Stoner.

  “Not for you, maybe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just—you have a high pain threshold.” Zen wasn’t sure that Stoner fully appreciated how much stronger he had been made by the operations and drugs.

  “Oh.”

  The Nats brought in a rookie to mop up in the eighth inning. Zen noticed that Stoner tracked each ball as carefully as if he were a scientist trying to prove some new theory of motion.

  “The ball drops six to eight inches as it reaches the plate,” said Stoner after the second strikeout.

  “He’s got a hell of a curve, huh?”

  “It spins differently than the others.”