by Dale Brown
Stoner said nothing when he entered. Zen wheeled about halfway into the room, waiting until his friend finished a set. Stoner, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, weighed about 240 pounds, nearly all of it muscle.
“Working with the dumbbells today?” said Zen.
Stoner got up from the bench and went to a weight rack on the far side of the room. He took out another set of dumbbells and began doing a military press.
“Enough weight for you?” asked Zen.
He hated that he was reduced to ridiculous comments, but he couldn’t think of much else to say. Stoner worked in silence, pushing the weights up with steady, flawless efficiency. These were the heaviest set of weights in the room, and he knocked off thirty reps without a problem. He was sweating, but that might have been due to the heat — the place felt like a sauna.
“I can stay for breakfast if you want,” said Zen. “Give me an excuse to blow off a committee meeting.”
No answer. Stoner put down the weights, then went back to the bench and started on a set of sitting curls. His face remained the same: no sign of stress.
“Nationals are doing well. They won last night,” said Zen. “They’ll be back home soon. Maybe we can take in a game.”
“Baseball?” asked Stoner.
“Yeah. You want to go to a game?”
Instead of responding, Stoner went back to his workout. During his treatment in Eastern Europe, he had been essentially brainwashed, his personality and memory replaced with an almost robotic consciousness. His old self or at least some semblance of it remained, but exactly how much, no one could say.
Zen had managed only a handful of conversations with him since he’d been here. Stoner hadn’t said more than a dozen words in each. But that was more than he’d said to anyone else.
Stoner did two more circuits, pumping the iron without visible fatigue. As he finished a set of standing presses, he glanced over at Zen.
The look in his eye frightened Zen. For a split second he thought Stoner was going to toss one of the dumbbells at his head.
He didn’t. He just glared at him, then pumped through another twenty reps.
“Man, you’re in good shape,” said Zen as Stoner racked the weights.
Stoner turned to him. “Need heavier weights. Too easy.”
“Did you ask the doctors?”
Stoner pulled his hood over his head.
“I can try and get more for you,” said Zen. “What weight?”
“Big disks,” said Stoner. “I need more.”
He started walking toward the door next to the rack.
“Feel like having breakfast?” Zen asked.
“No,” said Stoner. “Gonna shower.”
“OK,” said Zen. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then, maybe.”
Stoner said nothing. Zen watched him walk down the hall, turning right into his room.
“I’ve already ordered more weights,” said Esrang when Zen met him outside. “We didn’t want to give him too much at first, in case he decided to use them as weapons.”
“You still think he’s dangerous?”
Esrang pitched his head to one side, gesturing with his shoulders. He was one of the world’s experts on the effects of steroids and other drugs on the human brain, but he often pointed out that this meant he knew that he didn’t know enough.
Zen glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”
Zen smiled. It was a nice thing for the doctor to say, but they both knew it wasn’t necessarily true.
Chapter 13
Southeastern Sudan
Li Han watched as the aircraft was lifted into the back of the pickup truck. It was a lot lighter than he’d expected; three men could easily handle it.
It would fetch a decent amount of money. The design was unique, the materials, even the onboard flight control computer, which had considerably more processing and memory chips than Li Han expected — the right buyer would pay a good price.
The question was finding the right buyer. The best price would come from his former countrymen, though there was no way he could deal with them.
The Russians were one possibility. The French were another. The Iranians, but his last dealings with them had turned sour.
The biggest payday might actually come from the Americans, who would want their equipment back.
Maybe they could make a deal.
He needed to find a place to examine it more carefully, and think. That meant going north, away from the area controlled by the Brotherhood. They would only complicate things.
The Brother holding the forward end of the aircraft slipped as they were placing it into the bed of the pickup. The fuselage fell hard against the truck.
“Careful, you idiots!” yelled Li Han in Chinese.
He ran over to the plane. It didn’t appear to be damaged, at least not any worse than it had been.
“Come,” he said, switching to English. “We need to be away from here before the satellite appears.”
* * *
Melissa was a mile and a half from the transponder when the signal went from a steady beep to a more urgent bleat.
The aircraft was being moved.
She squeezed the throttle on the motorcycle, hunkering down against the handlebars as its speed jumped. A second later she realized that was a mistake. Backing off the gas, she pulled her GPS out from her jacket pocket and got her bearings.
The transponder was in a valley roughly parallel to the one she was riding through. Both ran east to west. According to the map, a road that intersected both valleys lay two miles ahead. She could go to that intersection and wait.
Unless whoever had the UAV turned north rather than staying on the road. There were at least two trails running off the valley in that direction before the intersection. And sure enough, the signal soon indicated that the UAV was moving farther away.
It was starting to get light. Melissa went up the connecting road and stayed on it, speeding roughly parallel to whoever was taking the UAV away. They were about a mile and a half away, but the trail and road ran away from each other, her path going due north while the other gradually tailing eastward.
Finally she stopped and examined the map on the GPS to try and guess where they were going. The trail wound through a series of settlements, intersected with several unpaved roads, and finally ended at what passed for a super highway here, a double-lane asphalt paved road that ran to Duka, a small town that sat on a flat plain at the eastern foot of the mountains. She slipped the GPS back into her pocket. Who had the UAV? Mao Man?
She hoped not. The fact that it was being taken north argued against it: the Brothers’ stronghold was well to the south, where she assumed he’d been heading when attacked. He had only come this far north to arrange for a meeting with weapons suppliers.
Most likely either a government patrol spotted the wreckage and decided to take it, or some local farmer found it and decided to take it to the authorities and claim a reward.
Either could be easily bought off. A hundred dollars here would bring a family luxury for a year.
Melissa slipped the bike out of neutral and began following the signal once more.
* * *
Li Han felt his eyes starting to close as they zigzagged through the hills. He’d been up now for nearly thirty-six hours straight, long even for him.
Shaking himself, he sat upright in the cab of the truck, then rolled down the window, sticking his head out into the wind. He could sleep in Duka. He’d used a building there to house some explosives about a year and a half before; it was sure to be still unoccupied. And though the town was controlled by two different rebel groups, neither would bear him any malice, especially if he promised fresh weapons and ammunition as he had the last time.
But he had to stay alert until he reached the small city. The army occasionally sent patrols through the area. It was unlikely that they would meet any at night, but if th
ey did, the soldiers would assume they were rebels and immediately open fire.
One of the men in the back of the pickup began banging on the roof of the cab. The driver slowed, then spoke to him through his window.
“What?” asked Li Han in English.
“Following. A motorbike follows,” said the driver.
A motorcycle?
Li Han twisted around, trying to see. It was too dark, and the hulk of the UAV blocked most of his view.
It wouldn’t be the army. More like one of the many rebel groups that contested the area.
“Shoot them!” yelled Li Han. He turned back to the driver. “Tell them in the back to shoot them. Don’t stop! Drive faster. Faster!”
* * *
Melissa knew she was pressing it, pulling closer and closer to the truck. But it was alone, and while there were definitely men in the back, none seemed armed or particularly hostile. If she caught up, she could work out a deal.
A poke of white light from the back of the truck told her she’d miscalculated. They did have weapons, and they weren’t in the mood to bargain.
Melissa raised her submachine gun and fired back. The barrel of the MP-5 pushed up from the recoil harder than she’d anticipated, and the shots flew wild over the truck. She tucked the weapon tighter against her side. The road rose, then veered to the right; she shifted her weight, trying not to slow down around the curve. Tilting back, she saw the truck square ahead of her, fat between her handlebars and no more than thirty yards away.
She pressed her finger against the trigger. As she fired, the front of the bike began to turn to her right.
Starting to lose her balance, Melissa let go of the gun and grabbed the handlebar. But it was too late — she went over in a tumble, rolling around in the dust as a hail of bullets from the truck passed overhead.
Chapter 14
Room 4, CIA Headquarters Campus
Jonathon Reid sat at the large conference table, staring at the gray wall in front of him. He was alone in the high-tech headquarters and command center.
The top of the wall began to glow blue.
“Open com channel to Ms. Stockard,” he said softly.
The rectangular window appeared in the middle of the wall. It expanded, widening until it covered about a third of the space. The outer portion of the wall darkened from gray to black. The interior window, meanwhile, turned deep blue, then morphed into an image of Breanna Stockard in a secure conference room in Dreamland.
She was alone, and she was frowning.
“Breanna,” said Reid. “Good morning again.”
“Jonathon, what’s really going out there in Africa?”
“I told you everything the director told me.”
“Nuri says there’s a lot more to the project than we’re being told.”
“I don’t doubt he’s right.”
“And?”
Reid said nothing. The Raven program was clearly an assassination mission, and clearly it involved top secret technology that the Agency had developed outside of its normal channels. But Harker hadn’t spelled any of this out; he had merely said the UAV must be recovered. All Reid had were guesses and suppositions, not facts.
“Jonathon, you’re not saying anything.”
“I know, Breanna. I don’t have more facts than I’ve shared.”
“Listen, the only way this is going to work is if we’re completely honest with each other.”
Reid nodded.
“Well?” prompted Breanna.
“Clearly, this is a CIA project that’s highly secret, and they don’t want to tell us any of the details,” he said. “And they haven’t.”
“I got that.”
Breanna and Reid had gotten along fairly well since the program began, despite the vast differences in the institutions they reported to, their backgrounds, and their ages. Cooperation between the military and the CIA was not always ideal in any event, and on a program such as Whiplash and the related MY-PID initiative, there was bound to be even greater conflict. But so far they had largely steered clear of the usual suspicions, let alone the attempts at empire building and turf wars that typically marred joint projects. Partly this was because they had so far kept the operation — and its staffing — to an absolute minimum. But it also had to do with their personal relationships. Reid, much older than Breanna, liked and admired her in an almost fatherly way, and she clearly respected him, often treating him with professional deference.
Not now, though. Right now she was angry with him, believing he was holding back.
“I can only guess at what they’re doing,” Reid told her. “I have no facts. I know exactly what you’re thinking, but they’ve put up barriers, and I can’t just simply whisk them away with a wave of my hand.”
“We need to know exactly what’s going on,” Breanna told him.
“Beyond what we already know? Why? We have to recover the UAV. It’s already been located.”
“What we don’t know may bite us.”
“Granted.”
“God, Jonathon, you’ve got to press them for more information.”
“I have.”
“Then I will.”
“I don’t know that that will work,” said Reid. “I have a call in to the director. I am trying.”
Reid could already guess what Herm Edmund was going to say — this is on a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know.
“Jonathon, I’ve always been up front with you,” said Breanna.
“And I’m being up front with you. It’s a UAV, it’s obviously an assassination program, though they’re not even saying that. Not to me, anyway.”
“If one of our people gets hurt because of something we should have known—”
“I feel exactly the same way.”
The window folded in on itself abruptly. Breanna had killed the transmission.
Reid sat back in his chair. One of the rock bed requirements of being a good CIA officer was that you stopped asking questions at a certain point. You stopped probing for information when it became clear you were not entitled to that information. Because knowing it might in fact endanger an operation, and the Agency.
On the other hand…
“Computer, show me the personnel file for Reginald Harker,” said Reid. “Same with Melissa Ilse. Unrestricted authorization Jonathon Reid. Access all databases and perform a cross-Agency search for those individuals, and all references to Raven. Discover related operations and references, with a confidence value of ten percent or above.”
“Working,” replied the computer.
Chapter 15
Southeastern Sudan
Melissa rolled in the dirt as the motorbike flew out from under her. She threw her arms up, trying to protect her face as the rear wheel spun toward her. A storm of pebbles splattered against her hands as the wheel caught in a rut; the bike tumbled back in the other direction.
Her shoulder hit a boulder at the side of the ditch. Her arm jolted from its socket and an intense wave of pain enveloped her body. Her head seemed to swim away from her.
My shoulder, she thought. Dislocated. Something torn.
I need the gun.
Get the gun.
Melissa pushed herself to her belly. Her eyes closed tight with the pain.
For a moment she thought she was still wearing the night goggles, and feared that the glass had embedded in her eyes, that she was blind. She reached with her left hand to pull them off, then realized she hadn’t had them on.
There was dirt in her eyes, but she could see.
Get the gun!
Her right arm hung off her body as she pushed herself to her knees. The bike was a few yards away, on the other side of the road. But where was her gun?
Melissa crawled onto the hard-packed dirt road, looking for the MP-5, then shifted her weight to rise to her knees. The pain seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, throwing off her balance.
Another wave of dizziness hit her as she got to her feet.
Th
e gun! The gun!
Melissa turned back in the direction she’d taken. She started to trot, then saw a black object just off the shoulder on her left. After a few steps she realized it was just a shadow in the rocks. She stopped, turned to the right, and saw the gun lying in the middle of the road.
* * *
“The motorcycle has stopped following us,” the driver told Li Han.
Li Han twisted in the seat, looking behind them. The men in the back were clutching onto the wrecked aircraft, holding on for dear life as the truck flew over the washboard road.
One of the men leaned over the cab and yelled at the driver through his window.
“They fired at us,” said the driver. “One of our men is hurt.”
“How many were there?” asked Li Han.
“Two, maybe three. But they’re gone now. Amara says that we kill both. In the dark, hard to tell.”
Li Han considered going back to check the bodies. It might be useful to know which band they were with. The fact that they had motorcycles was unusual — perhaps they were future customers.
“The Brother needs a doctor,” said the driver. “He was hit in the chest.”
“Tell them to put a compress on,” said Li Han.
The driver didn’t understand. Li Han decided not to explain; they’d figure it out on their own eventually.
“Turn around,” he told the driver. “Let’s go find out who they were.”
“Turn around?”
“Yes, a U-turn.”
“There may be more.”
“I doubt it,” said Li Han. “Let’s go see.”
Chapter 16
Western Ethiopia
“Colonel Freah?”
Danny looked over at the door to the building as Damian Jordan came outside. The sun was not quite at the horizon; gray twilight filtered over the base, making it look like a pixilated photograph pulled from a newspaper.
“What’s up?”
“Melissa is on the radio. She’s located the UAV. I figured you wanted to talk to her.”