The “yolks” were clusters of clay and stone buildings that were like miniature citadels, about a half mile apart. Analyzing intelligence data relating to the terrorist organization, MY-PID had decided the cluster to the northeast was the most likely command post; most radio transmissions seemed to have originated from that area, and the satellite images showed more human traffic there.
Studying the same data, Danny concluded the opposite. The Brothers were undoubtedly aware that they were being monitored, if only by the Sudanese authorities; they would do everything in their power to throw them off. So he decided his first attack would be aimed at what was supposedly the less important “yolk,” with action at the other cluster intended simply to hold the enemy in place.
At first, anyway.
Danny rendezvoused with the Marine commanders in an abandoned oil field about ten miles north of the Brothers’ camp fifteen minutes after communications had been cut. The small village near the field was abandoned about a year before, after the wells went dry; they had polluted the groundwater long before that, making the place virtually uninhabitable by anyone who didn’t have a reason to be there.
Nuri and Hera, who would liaison with the Marine platoons, came as well, as did Melissa and Flash, who was filling in for Boston as Danny’s chief enlisted officer.
Danny arrived a few minutes early, and was on the ground waiting when the Marine Osprey skimmed in over the flat terrain, flying so low its wheels could have touched the ground had they been extended. The aircraft maneuvered so it was behind a set of derelict derricks, then landed neatly thirty yards from the Whiplash bird.
“Colonel Freah, helluvapleashuretameetya,” said the first man off the helicopter, Captain Joey Pierce. The officer in charge of the two platoons, Pierce had a Midwest accent but ran his words together quicker than someone from New York; Danny, whose ex-wife had come from New York, had trouble parsing the syllables into actual sentences.
It took him about ten minutes to sketch out the basic plan, emphasizing that the situation would be fluid from its inception.
“My people will hit the interior of the compound at 2300,” Danny told the captain. “We need you to tie down the main part of the Brothers’ force with an attack in this area here, and a feint at the main gate first.” He pointed to two areas on the southern side of the camp. “We need them to think that the main attack is occurring there. Once they’re committed to defending that area, we’ll come in.”
“Won’t they just reverse course and attack you?” asked Pierce.
“They won’t be able to,” said Danny.
“Colonel, with all due respect.” Pierce pointed to the map. “Looks pretty open to me.”
“It won’t be,” said Danny. “And whatever your forces do, absolutely do not pursue them inside the camp. For your own protection.”
“Our protection?”
Danny nodded solemnly. “We’ll hook into your communications just prior to the assault. Flash has a rundown on the emergency procedures, and what we’ll do if there’s a hurry-up—if things happen before the planned assault time.”
Danny glanced at Nuri when Flash had finished.
“Did you want to add anything?” he asked the CIA officer.
“Just that Colonel Freah isn’t kidding when he says don’t pursue,” said Nuri.
Hera felt the slightest twinge of jealousy as she caught the CIA officer Melissa Ilse glancing at Danny. There was something about the way she looked at him that bothered her. She felt almost protective of the colonel.
“What look are you talking about?” Nuri asked her as they trotted toward the Marine Osprey to head back to the platoon staging area. Since MY-PID wasn’t available to the Marines, Nuri and Hera would stay with them during the assault.
“Just a look,” said Hera.
“Danny would never ever hook up with her,” said Nuri flatly. “Ilse is bad news. No way.”
Men, thought Hera. Always clueless.
Chapter 2
Washington, D.C. suburbs
Breanna took one last look at her daughter sleeping in the bed, then gently closed the door and slipped down the hallway.
It was just past 5:00 A.M.; even her early rising husband wouldn’t be out of bed for another twenty minutes or so.
She grabbed the coffeepot and filled her steel insulated commuting cup. Then she went out to her car in the garage as quietly as possible, opened the door and headed for work.
If everything went well in Africa, the controversy would more or less blow over. Edmund could go before the Intelligence Committee and explain that Raven had crashed and had then been recovered.
He’d be out of a job shortly thereafter, but that wasn’t her concern.
The question was, what would happen to Raven?
As Breanna saw it, there were two possibilities: it could be abandoned, or it could be handed over to the Office of Special Technology.
Surely it wouldn’t be abandoned.
She cleared security at the main gate of the CIA headquarters complex, then drove to a lot about two hundred years from the Room 4 building. The building itself had no parking, even though there was ample room around it; it was one more way of confusing the ever more invasive satellite eyes and other data gatherers employed.
Downstairs, Breanna was surprised by the smell of strong coffee. Only one person made the coffee so strong that it could be smelled outside the electrostatic walls: Ray Rubeo.
Sure enough, she found the scientist himself sitting at the table in their main conference room with Jonathon Reid.
“Ray, what a surprise,” she said.
Rubeo accepted a peck on the cheek with his customary stiffness. “I thought I might be useful,” he said.
“Ray has been examining the Raven software,” said Reid. “Which our colleagues so reluctantly made available. I didn’t think you would mind.”
“No, it’s all right.”
“It is an extremely powerful core, with a great number of flaws,” said Rubeo. “One of which is the fact that they’re using a temporary interface.”
Rubeo waved his hand over the table and tapped down with his right thumb. This opened a panel on the wall at the far side of the room, changing the wall surface into a projection screen.
“Coding display one,” Rubeo told the computer.
A slide appeared. It was a “dump” of computer code.
“It was written in C++,” said Rubeo. “Inexplicably.”
“The point being that anyone can interpret it,” said Reid.
“Yes,” said Rubeo, drawing out the word.
Not anyone, thought Breanna—she certainly couldn’t. But the point was, anyone with a reasonable knowledge of programming could.
“I would guess that they did this for two reasons,” said Rubeo. “The first being that they didn’t want to risk the actual program. This is somewhat isolated from the core modules that make up the actual Raven program. The second is that they did it for expediency; this part of the program was developed very quickly. I would guess within a matter of weeks. Perhaps even less.”
“Why so fast?” Breanna asked.
Rubeo touched his earlobe, where he had a gold post earring. It was an old habit, usually signaling he wanted to make some difficult pronouncement.
“Politics,” suggested Reid before Rubeo could speak. “The timing suggests that Reginald Harker was interested in becoming head of the DIA. If he had successfully taken out a high priority target like Li Han, he would have had an excellent leg up.”
“Harker broke the law and risked a top secret development program so he could get a better job?” said Breanna.
Reid didn’t answer.
“Using this command module may have been seen as a safeguard,” said Rubeo. “It certainly isn’t as robust and manageable as I would imagine a mature interface is. Still, the core program must be recovered. If the Russian operative is able to make it from the camp—”
“He won’t,” said Breanna.
&
nbsp; Chapter 3
Washington, D.C. suburbs
Zen woke even grumpier than usual, surprised and yet not surprised that Breanna had already slipped out to work.
At least the coffee was still warm. He bustled about, getting Teri breakfast, then shaving and dressing himself. He left Caroline sleeping in the guest room and headed out, Teri riding shotgun in the backseat. After dropping her off at school, he swung over and picked up his aide, Jay, then went to the hospital, where Stoner was already in physical therapy when he arrived.
“Did you sleep at all?” Zen asked, wheeling himself into the exercise room.
“I’m good.”
Stoner pushed a set of free weights over his chest. He was lifting five hundred pounds, by Zen’s reckoning, and didn’t seem to be straining.
“Are we going to the game tonight?” asked Stoner. His tone was genuinely enthusiastic—the first time Zen remembered him sounding that way since he’d been rescued.
“Yeah, if you want.”
“I do.”
Zen watched Stoner pump the weights. He reached twenty, then put the weights down easily on the stands.
“I wish I could do it that easy,” said Zen.
“Then you’d have to take the whole package. Headaches, not really knowing who you are. Not trusting your body.”
“I know a little bit about that.”
Stoner nodded.
“The doctor says some of what they did to me might help you,” said Stoner.
“Me?”
“Is that why you’re hanging around?”
“You mean my legs?”
“Exactly.”
The enthusiasm had been replaced by something else—anger.
“No,” said Zen. “I’ve been down that road. A lot. They’ve done a lot of things trying to help me to walk again. None of them worked, Mark. This is what I am. This where I am. It’s just the way it is.”
“That’s too bad,” said Stoner.
The silence was more awkward than even Stoner’s question.
“I come to see you because we’re friends,” said Zen, trying to fill it. “You saved Breanna, remember?”
“Yeah,” he said after a very long pause. Zen wondered if he really did.
“And we were friends before,” said Zen. “Remember that?”
“Vaguely,” said Stoner.
“And . . .” Zen hesitated. “I was . . . sorry I couldn’t protect you and the others in that helicopter. I always felt . . . as if I should have done something more. I should have gone against orders and figured something out. Whatever. Something . . .”
Stoner looked at him for what seemed an eternity. “It’s OK,” he said finally. “I understand.”
Then he went back to pumping more iron. Zen glanced at his watch. He had to leave.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.
“I’ll be ready.”
He did remember. Everything.
Mark Stoner sat on the edge of the weight bench, thinking about dying, remembering how it had all happened.
It wasn’t Zen’s fault at all. Zen wasn’t anywhere near at the time. Even if he had been, there was no guarantee he could have done anything. None.
He himself had accepted the risks. That was the nature of the job.
Zen had risked his life to get him back here alive. They were more than even, the way those things worked.
It was good to have a friend.
He rose and took two more plates from the rack, slipping them on the bar one at a time.
It would be good to go to the game. Baseball was a good thing.
Even if the hot dogs gave him heartburn.
Chapter 4
Southeastern Sudan
The Brothers were called to prayer as the sun set, joining Muslims around the world in turning toward Mecca to fulfill the requirements of their faith.
Just as the prayer was ending, a trio of small rockets arced over the advanced lookout posts and struck the guard posts at the main entrance. A split second later a half-dozen more struck the gutted bus used as the gate, obliterating it.
The rockets looked like Russian-made Grads. Which they were. Mostly.
Ordinary Grads were extremely simple weapons, mass-produced and exported around the word, including to Hezbollah, which used them against Israel. As originally designed, they sat in a tube and were fired. In the original version, the tubes were massed together and mounted on the back of a truck.
These three rockets were fired from tubes on the ground. But their rear sections included stabilizers and steering gear that made them considerably more accurate than the originals. The mechanisms were interlaced with explosives, which meant they disintegrated when they landed.
The real alteration was in the nose, where the explosive used an aluminum alloy mixed with a more common plastic explosive base to produce an explosive power some eleven times more destructive than the original warheads.
A tenth missile—this one unguided—flew a few feet farther, landing harmlessly on the roadway behind the post. The charge in it was stock, or at least appeared so. It failed to ignite properly, fuming but not exploding. This in fact was its intent: evidence for anyone who had a chance to see it that the attack had been launched by a rival group.
A dozen men died instantly. The other fighters in the camp reacted with indignation, grabbing their rifles and rushing to defend the camp and avenge the insult to their beliefs. They were met with a hail of gunfire from the Marines, who had spent the past two hours creeping up the hills into position. At roughly the same moment, another dozen rockets were fired at two sniper posts and four gun positions overlooking the camp. The sniper positions were essentially depressions in the rocks, and firing so many missiles at them was arguably overkill; the resulting explosions caused small landslides, not only obliterating the men there but turning the positions into exposed ravines that could no longer be used for defense.
Even as the dust from the rocket strikes was settling, the first mortar shells began raining down on the positions. These were standard-issue, Marine Corps high explosive M720 rounds, armed with M734 Multioption fuses set for near surface burst—not fancy, especially compared to the weapons Whiplash was deploying, but extremely effective. Fired from a range of roughly 3,000 meters, the rounds exploded behind the first wave of enemy troops, then walked inward toward the defenses, in effect sweeping the enemy toward the front line.
Danny had a bird’s-eye view of the explosions as they rocked the southern side of the camp. He and the rest of the Whiplash team had jumped from the back of an Osprey moments before the first rockets were launched. All were wearing glide suits, which allowed them to guide their free fall into precise routes specified by the GPS module in their smart helmets.
In contrast to the noisy action at the “front” of the camp, the Whiplash team’s descent was entirely silent and, in the dark, practically invisible.
“Target area,” Danny told the helmet. The view changed to a square roughly fifty by twenty meters at the eastern end of the cluster he was assaulting. A red box appeared around two shadows at the left side of the box—armed men who might present trouble. They had just manned a bunkered security post.
“ICS, target and eliminate enemy in designated box A3,” Danny said, this time talking through MY-PID to the integrated combat system aboard the AB-2C that had joined Whiplash for the operation.
The AB-2C was a specially modified version of the B-2A, prepared under Office of Special Technology supervision as part of the Air Force program to investigate replacements for the AC-130. The AB-2C was essentially just a test bed for the weapon system; it was very likely that the final design would be completely automated. But in the meantime, the two men and one woman aboard as crew relished the chance to show what they and their aircraft could do.
Unlike her conventional gunship forebears, the modified stealth bomber carried no howitzers or cannons. Instead, there were two laser weapons in what had been the Spirit’s bomb bay. Descendan
ts of the Firestrike weapon first developed by Northrop Grumman, the lasers were capable of sending a directed beam of just over 100 kW into a target.
The forward laser of the AB-2C burned holes in the skulls of the two mujahideen manning the post in a matter of milliseconds. The crew then sought other targets, concentrating first on the prepositioned machine guns, cooking off their ammunition so they couldn’t be used against the Marines.
Meanwhile, Danny did one last check of the target area and the descending squad before manually deploying his parachute. Though not absolutely necessary, the chute allowed for a softer, surer landing—and not coincidentally, was a hell of a lot easier on his knees.
“I’m in,” said Sugar, landing just to his left on the roof of the building in the center of the targeted compound.
Danny touched down a few seconds later. He quick-released his chute gear and sprinted toward the rooftop defense position. Sugar had already secured it, ramming what looked like a small stopper in the mouth of the machine gun in place there.
“Fire in the hole!” she yelled, somewhat dramatically.
Danny turned away as the charge in the stopper ignited. The blast ripped back the barrel of the gun, rendering it impotent. The sound was lost in the crescendo of the attack near the front gate.
“Let’s go inside,” said Danny as the other two members of his fire team reached the roof.
Melissa was thrown against her restraints as the Osprey pitched hard to get on a new course, avoiding the MC-17 swooping in low over the compound. As the black cargo aircraft came in, two large containers trundled down the interior rail system to the rear bay doors. The large rectangular boxes looked like smaller versions of the shipping containers that carried so much freight around the world. Long droguelike parachutes deployed as the boxes left the aircraft, slowing their descent just enough to allow the cushioned bottoms to properly absorb the blow from the fall.
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