He saw a tell-tale hazard symbol, a yellow triangle showing a stylized radio mast beaming out ripples of radiation, and understanding clicked into place. “This is a HERF gun.”
“It’s useless, that’s what it is.” Lucy looked up at the ceiling, listening for the drone’s return. “Unless you wanna microwave a burrito before we buy the farm. That thing’s a crowd control prototype, not for anti-aircraft fire!”
It was also all they had. “We need to get to the roof.” He thumbed the on-off switch. “High Energy Radio Frequencies, yeah? Enough of that shot at anything will cook it from the inside out. Even a drone.”
“You are going to get killed.”
He shook his head. “No, we are going to get killed when that drone spears us with a missile, so we may as well go out swinging.” He broke into a run and heard Lucy swear again as she came after him.
* * *
Marc emerged on to the roof of the building, blinking furiously in the bright sunshine. The HERF gun was large and cumbersome, banging against his chest as he dashed across the flat roof. He was aware of Lucy a few steps behind, panning around with her MP7.
Marc slipped and dropped to a clumsy halt at the eastern end of the building, on his knees behind the raised parapet. From here, he would have had a view of the entire New Day orphanage, had parts of it not been on fire or blown apart by missile impacts.
He raised the HERF gun to sight along the top of it, and became aware that the thing was humming gently to itself. Directly in his eye line was a warning panel reminding Marc that what he held in his hands was essentially the guts of a powerful magnetron, and that prolonged use of it was likely to blind him. Lucy’s earlier comment about heating food wasn’t entirely facetious; the same technology behind an ordinary microwave oven was also present in the HERF, but reconfigured and focused along very different lines. As a less-than-lethal combat option, the HERF worked best as a deterrent device, temporarily subjecting its targets to a painful “heat ray” effect that even body armor couldn’t attenuate. But against anything non-organic, the weapon’s track record was unpredictable at best.
“There!” Lucy shouted and pointed out to the south. The UCAV was starting in on its third pass, and from the angle of attack, it was clearly targeting the building they were standing on.
“One.” Marc began to count, bracing himself to draw a bead on the prow of the drone as it turned inbound. “Two.” He put his finger on the trigger switch and took a deep breath. “And three.”
There was no howl of tortured air, no showy bolt of energy that leaped from the dish-muzzle of the gun. Instead, Marc became aware of a hazy lensing effect that blurred his vision, and a deep, unpleasant oscillation inside the gun’s casing.
“What are you waiting for? Shoot!” Lucy shouted.
“I have. I am!” he snapped back, holding the weapon steady, his aim never shifting from the Avenger’s nose cone. It was still coming, swift and deadly. Marc kept the firing switch depressed, and past the count of five seconds a yellow light blinked on, warning him to release the button. He ignored it, continuing to ten seconds, twelve, fifteen.
The yellow light turned red, and the HERF gun’s humming grew loud and insistent.
* * *
“What are you waiting for?” demanded the Englishman. He prodded Teape in the shoulder. “Blow the building.”
But Teape was shaking his head. “This isn’t right.” He moved he mouse pointer, but the display on the main repeater screen had crashed, the tactical display frozen with the UCAV in a banking turn toward the point of missile release.
Grunewald and Ellis crowded around the secondary video monitor, which showed the gray-on-gray blur of the hillside flashing past beneath the Avenger’s fuselage. “No Hellfire launch,” said the mercenary.
“Looks like jamming,” said Teape. “Signal is breaking up. The drone isn’t answering commands.”
“Stormline are cutting us out,” said Grunewald. “The Americans must have severed the link.”
“No,” Teape shook his head. “This is on-site, we’re losing—” He fell silent as all the screens linking the Santa Cruz directly to Argonaut Two abruptly went dark.
Tommy grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get it back!” he snarled.
* * *
At twenty seconds, the HERF gun was uncomfortably hot and the plastic casing was in danger of burning the skin off Marc’s face. The UCAV seemed unaffected, its high-speed approach vector unchanged—but then it suddenly struck him how close the Avenger was to the walls of the compound. By now it was well inside the optimal release envelope for the AGMs, but still it hadn’t fired.
A whiff of acrid, burned-plastic stink filtered out of the HERF gun as he exceeded the experimental weapon’s safety margin and the device abruptly went dead. He almost threw it down, the palms of his hands red raw from surface searing.
“Look!” Lucy pointed. “Holy shit! That actually worked!”
Marc saw the drone’s nose dip as it passed over the outer wall, and the robot aircraft seemed to sag in mid-air, as if all the fight had gone out of it. Streamers of smoke issued out of vents in the Avenger’s fuselage where the drone had been coming straight at him, right into the apex of the HERF gun’s invisible beam.
The port wing rising in a too-late course correction, the drone went in toward the rubble-strewn road that led to the main building and the starboard wingtip clipped the edge of a water tower. With a screech of twisting metal, the drone was flipped around. It dived at the ground and dashed itself against the dirt with a thunderous roar. An explosion flared orange-red, throwing the burning fuselage back up into the air, turning it into a tumbling mass of fire.
A fleeting moment of elation at defeating the UCAV faded in Marc as he realized the wrecked machine was going to come crashing into the building.
“Run!”
He sprinted away from the edge of the roof just as the burning drone struck and a pair of Hellfires went off in the collision. One of the missiles was thrown free of the fireball and shot away into the sky on a wild trajectory, spiraling away into the mountainside miles distant. The other blew out the front quarter of the building and forced blazing drafts through the lower floor, turning everything into an inferno.
Marc felt the sickening lurch as supports crumbled and the building shook, slumping in on itself. The entire roof structure dropped two meters beneath his feet and great cracked sections of it tilted away behind him at sharp angles. Marc stumbled to his knees and twisted in time to see Lucy lose her footing and drop. Her boots couldn’t find purchase and she skidded down the slope of the broken roof, toward the fires below. He launched himself forward, snatching at her.
Lucy’s hand caught his sleeve and pulled hard, almost enough to drag him down with her. He fell flat, clinging to a section of air vent that showed something approaching stability, and for long, precarious seconds they both hung there. “Any … Anytime you’re ready…” he wheezed.
She used him like a climbing frame and pulled herself back from the edge, before the two of them rolled back on to the creaking roof and lay there, gasping for breath.
“Okay,” said Lucy, her throat raw with effort. “Let’s not do that again.”
* * *
“Stormline reports loss of signal from Argonaut Two.” Teape spoke in his usual monotone, his voice so bereft of affect it was almost robotic. “No confirmation on third weapon release.”
“They shot it down…” Ellis said, looking around the compartment at the blank screens. “How could that happen?” He looked at the Englishman. “This is the same punk from Etna, how is he capable of—”
Tommy wasn’t listening to him. He prodded Teape with a finger. “What did you do?”
“Not me,” Teape replied. “I just did what you said.” He pointed at the mouse. “Moved the clicker where you wanted it.”
The Englishman swore and for a moment it looked like he was going to punch Teape out of anger. But then he turned away and his glare found Grun
ewald, who stood watching the interchange. “Why didn’t you just put a bullet in that prick when you had him?”
Ellis answered for him. “Because we were told to deal with this problem discreetly.” He nodded at the blank screens. “Although that directive seems to have gone out the window since you turned up.”
“The compound suffered a sustained missile bombardment,” said the Swiss mercenary. “There’s no reason to assume the targets didn’t perish.”
“No reason to assume they did, either,” Tommy snarled back. He threw up his hands. “Bollocks. All right, we’ve done enough, wasted too much time on this already.” He shook his head. “Yanks’ll be pissed off about losing their toy, so we can’t let this connect back to the Combine.” He shot a look at Teape. “Close off the link to Stormline, wipe all this and put it in a fucking box. Khadir’s operation is where we’re supposed to be at. We concentrate on him from now on, stop wasting time and effort on distractions.”
“My thoughts exactly,” insisted Grunewald. At last, the Englishman was starting to see things his way.
Tommy closed the distance between them. “Find a local, get them out to the orphanage to check the site. That’ll put the lid on it.”
Ellis sniffed. “Someone is still going to have to talk to the higher-ups,” he said, fixing the Englishman with a sideways look. “Don’t envy you telling them you got no bodies.”
The other man glanced at Grunewald, indicating Ellis. “How do you stand the sound of this twat’s voice in your ear all the time?” Tommy snorted. “Listen, Dane is dead, or he’s not. And if he’s not, he’s still an international fugitive on about fifty different terrorist watch lists. So either way … He’s fucked.”
* * *
Marc found a crate full of empty soda bottles and dragged it into the shade before using it as a makeshift stool. He glanced around the sparse village, the first sign of civilization he and Lucy had found after striking out from the burning compound. He thought to begin with that the building shading him from the setting sun was some kind of garage, and it clearly did perform that function, with an oily old Skoda up on blocks inside. But it also seemed to serve as a sort of general store and café for the settlement as well. Across the way from him, a group of older Turkish men sat around a card table in plastic lawn chairs, alternating between sipping from cups of coffee and giving him unfriendly stares. He managed a weak smile and saluted them with the ice-lolly that Lucy had taken from the garage-store’s grumbling refrigerator. She handed a fold of hundred-dollar bills to the man in the mechanic’s overalls who met them on their arrival, and in return he offered bottles of water and the cooling popsicles. Marc sucked on the orange-flavored ice and stared morosely into the distance.
The two of them had barely made it off the crumbling roof, scrambling down a corroded fire escape before the building gave a final, howling moan and collapsed. Coated in dust and soot, they had little choice left but to abandon the compound and start walking. Lucy’s smartphone had been lost in the drone attack, and Marc’s was broken. He tried and failed to get a response from his laptop, wincing at the rattling that came from the device when he shook it.
So they walked in tired silence, with the sun falling toward the horizon behind them. The roads returned—such as they were—and Lucy spotted the nameless village as the hillside began to flatten out around them. Walking into the town proper set Marc thinking about a scene from a spaghetti western, as the two strangers were greeted with suspicion.
Marc glanced at the men again, and watched them talking about him. They had to have heard the drone, he thought, or at least the sounds of the explosions. And if this was the closest town to the New Day orphanage, these people had to know the men who worked there. Marc wondered how that would figure with him and Lucy. Was someone nearby already making a phone call, reporting back to an Al Sayf cell member or a Combine contact?
He was tired, and some part of him was telling him to pack up and run. Fatigue seemed to be winning the argument, though. He sat on the crate, feeling every ache in his body, crunching the ice between his teeth until only the stick was left.
Marc pulled the sliver of wood from his lips and studied it as Lucy emerged from the garage. “No joke,” he said, without thinking.
“Say what?”
He showed her. “No joke, see? When I was a kid, they used to print gags on lolly sticks. Why did the chicken cross the road? That kinda thing.”
“I know that one,” she said. “Because the poor feathered asshole was being chased by a drone.”
Marc gave a shrug. “I suppose comedy is less funny when it’s happening to you.” He tossed the stick into the gutter. “You find a working telephone?”
Lucy nodded. “They got a landline. Put a message in the Rubicon dead drop. Now we wait.” She jerked a thumb at the floor above the garage. “I rented us somewhere to crash. Cost us more than a night in the Ankara Hilton, but then I’m buying his silence.” She nodded at the coffee-drinking men, who had now been joined by the mechanic. “Theirs too.”
“I would really like a shower,” Marc noted.
“You really need one,” she replied, with a nod. “But sadly, they can only spare enough water for one of us, so you’re out of luck.” Marc hesitated, and before he could say more, Lucy went on. “And don’t ask if we can share. I know we both got shot at and all, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sleep with you.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” he retorted. “Bloody hell.”
Lucy sniggered, and he realized too late she had been making fun of him. “God, you Brits. You’re so easy to troll.”
“Hey,” Marc sighed. “You don’t get to do sarcasm. You’re an American, you people aren’t supposed to understand irony.”
“You’d be surprised.” She blew out a breath and fell silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, Lucy was staring off over the hillside. “So that was a trap back there. Not just the grenade, I mean. The whole place. Your lead from MI6.”
“Yeah.” Admitting it felt like a weight settling on him. “The Combine cleaned house, but they left the New Day info behind as a snare. I mean, I knew that was a possibility, but I never thought … I mean, a US Navy UCAV? I did not see that coming. In both the literal and figurative senses.”
“Look on the bright side,” she said. “We just torched a few million dollars’ worth of taxpayer’s money back there. Someone will have to carry the can for that. That’s blowback the Combine won’t like.”
Marc scowled. “I’m going to flinch every time a plane passes over from now on.”
“Them’s the breaks.” She yawned and worked a muscle in her shoulder. “It’s not a total bust, though. We’re alive, we got new intel. That’s a win, of sorts.”
“So we know that Al Sayf and the Combine were working some kind of angle out here,” Marc said, thinking aloud. “Not a pleasant set-up. Using a camp for war orphans as, what? A weapons dump? Training facility?”
“Both?” she offered.
Marc nodded at the grim possibility. He still had no idea how the orphanage connected to the Palomino or the Barcelona bombing, but he couldn’t escape the chilling certainty that those acts of terror had just been the opening shots. He thought about the horrors in the bloodstained basement and his lip twisted in disgust.
“I get one thing now,” said Lucy. “Solomon has been chasing this hard, and that place is the reason why.”
“The orphanage?”
She nodded. “I think … It’s personal for him.”
“What do you mean?” Marc lowered his voice. Lucy was bringing him into a confidence.
“You know what Rubicon is, but most people don’t know where it grew from. Solomon was a war orphan himself. Family wiped out during the civil war in Mozambique. You’ve seen those pictures of kids in knock-off Nikes and soccer shorts carrying assault rifles? You go back thirty years…” She let the statement hang.
Marc’s eyes narrowed. “He was a child soldier?”
“Think on that,” said Lucy. “And then maybe you get what he’s about.”
He nodded, taking it in. “Is that why you fell in with Rubicon?”
Lucy’s body language shifted immediately, and she leaned away from him, the brief moment of openness melting away. “I told you, he offered me a deal. And working for someone who wants to do the right thing is good for my karma.” She looked out over the hillside. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
She turned back to study him. “How’d you end up a techie? I mean, you got skills, that’s clear enough. You’re kind of random, but I’ve seen worse in the field. How come you’re not an agent?”
“Officer,” he corrected. “In Britain we call them field officers, not agents.” He knew Lucy was deliberately steering the conversation away from herself, but even as he saw that he was already falling into old patterns of explanation and denial. “I didn’t make the cut.” He sighed, and the next words came from nowhere. “I didn’t want the risk.”
“The safer bet, huh? I get that.”
Her tone touched a raw nerve. “You really don’t,” he shot back. “People don’t get it.” Marc shook his head. “It’s not about courage or weakness or anything like that. It’s about understanding yourself. I know my limitations.” Suddenly he was on his feet, scowling at her, the memories of dark sea and thunderous sky at the edges of his thoughts. “I never asked for this. I never wanted any of it to happen. I went right to the ragged edge once and that was enough for me. I don’t want to be here.”
“And yet, you are,” she said mildly, his anger rolling off her. Lucy stood up and turned to walk away. “Not dead yet, when by all rights you damn well should be. What does that tell you, Dane? Where’s your limit now?”
NINETEEN
With each step Marc took, the dust streamed off him in waves. He was walking into the teeth of the windstorm, the pressure of it pushing back as he advanced. He raised a hand in front of his face and his mouth opened in shock. The dust wasn’t sand, but particles of his flesh, tiny pieces of him being ablated away by the howling wind. His fingers were becoming translucent and glassy.
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