Raven Strike d-13

by Dale Brown

“They won’t know.”

  The two bodyguards climbed on the trunk; Danny rolled the windows down so they could hold on, then backed into a U-turn to get to the clinic.

  * * *

  Marie Bloom was not the naive do-gooder that Melissa had taken her for at first. On the contrary, Bloom was a steely and wily woman who started questioning her as soon as Nuri and Danny had left.

  “What spy agency do you work for?” she asked, getting straight to the point.

  “I’m not a spy,” Melissa told her.

  “Lupo didn’t just find you on the street,” she said. “You’re an American. You’re with the CIA.”

  “I am an American,” Melissa said. She fidgeted in the office chair. It was a small room; if she held out her arms, she could almost touch both walls. “I was in Kruk last week. There were problems in one of the camps. I had… trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?” asked Bloom. Her voice was borderline derisive. She leaned against the bare table she used as a desk; it doubled as an examining table for infants.

  “There were problems with one of the supervisors,” said Melissa. “He tried… let’s say he pushed me around.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I took care of it.”

  Bloom frowned, and reached for Melissa’s shoulder. She jerked back instinctively.

  “I know it’s hurt. Let me see it,” said Bloom.

  Melissa leaned forward reluctantly.

  “Take off your shirt,” directed Bloom.

  Wincing, Melissa unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it back on her shoulders, exposing the massive bruise.

  “You dislocated it,” said Bloom, probing gently at the edges.

  “I put it back in place.”

  “Yourself?”

  “I had help.”

  “He pulled it from the socket?”

  Melissa didn’t answer.

  “I would bet there’s tearing,” said Bloom. “The rotator cuff—”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Melissa. “Someone is going to meet me. We’ll go to the capital and I’ll go home.”

  She pulled her shirt back into place. She didn’t think Bloom fully believed her story, but the injury was certainly authentic, and it made everything else at least somewhat plausible. In general, that was all people needed — an excuse to find something believable.

  “What are you taking for it?” asked Bloom.

  “Aspirin.” She shook her head. “I’m OK.”

  “We have hydrocodone.”

  “No. You’ll need them for real patients.”

  “As if you’re not hurt? You think you’re more stoic than the next person?”

  “I saw a hell of a lot worse at Kruk.”

  Bloom gathered a stethoscope, a thermometer, and gloves from a basket at the left side of the desk. “How do you know Gerard?”

  “I have no idea who he is.”

  “Lupo?”

  Melissa shook her head. “He was a convenient ride. I needed to go. It sounded like a good solution.”

  “You travel with people you don’t know?” said Bloom, her voice once more harsh. “That’s very dangerous.”

  “One of my supervisors said he could be trusted. He’s a criminal, I know,” added Melissa. “But he didn’t try to hurt me.”

  “How much did you pay him?”

  “When my friend comes, I’ll give him a hundred dollars.”

  “You have it?”

  “My friend will have it. I don’t.”

  “I hope your friend has a gun,” said Bloom. “Several.”

  Melissa rose and started to follow Bloom out of the office. As she opened the door, they heard gunfire in the distance. Bloom tensed.

  “What’s going on?” asked Melissa.

  “I don’t know.” She turned around and went to the cabinet behind Melissa. Reaching inside, she took out a pistol — an older Walther automatic. She put it in her belt under her lab coat. “Get ready for anything.”

  * * *

  Danny drove the car to the clinic’s front door, scattering a flock of birds pecking at the dirt. A thin man in a white T-shirt coming out of the building jumped back, fear in his eyes as Danny slammed on the brakes. The two men on the back leaped down and pulled open the doors, helping the wounded out of the car.

  Except for the soft purr of the engine, it was eerily silent. Danny picked up a woman who had been shot in the arm and carried her inside. She was a limp rag, passed out from the loss of blood but at least breathing.

  That was more than he could say for the man they’d lain across the backseat. Danny stopped the two guards as they picked him up and moved him out of the car. He put his finger on the man’s pulse and shook his head.

  They carried him in anyway.

  The last person in the car was a young boy, unconscious but with a good pulse and steady breathing. Six or seven large splinters of wood were stuck in his face; small trickles of blood ran down across his chin and neck to his clothes. There was a stain on his pants where he’d wet himself, and another — this one caked blood, near his knee.

  Danny picked him up, cradling him in his arms as he walked him inside the clinic. The reception room had become an emergency triage unit, with the patients spread out in the center of the floor. The people who’d been inside already stood at the far end, occasionally stealing glances at the wounded, but mostly trying to look anywhere else. Danny wanted to talk to Melissa, but she was tending one of the wounded, and he worried that going to her now would blow her cover, or his.

  One of the men he’d come with tapped his shoulder, indicating that they should go back. Danny followed him silently. He glanced at the little boy as he left, hoping to give him some sign of encouragement. But the boy’s eyes were still closed. Danny wondered if the kid would ever overcome the real wounds of the day.

  * * *

  “The Chinese man put him up to this,” Nuri told Gerard as they surveyed the ruined pavilion. “Where is he?”

  “I’ll kill him,” said Gerard. His glassy stare had been replaced by one even more frightening; his eyes were almost literally bulging from his sockets. Two veins pulsed in his neck.

  “I’ll pay good money for him,” said Nuri calmly. “I know people who will pay us if we give him to them alive.”

  “I kill him.”

  “He’s worth more to me. To us. More alive.”

  “Why would you save a murderer?”

  The Mercedes rounded the corner, Gerard’s men hanging out the windows. Nuri went over to help the last of the wounded get in. Gerard stopped him as he bent to an old man.

  “He’s not hurt,” said Gerard gruffly.

  “He’s holding his side.” The man wasn’t bleeding but seemed in obvious pain. “We have to get him in the car and take them to your clinic.”

  “No, they will find their own way,” said Gerard. “You must take me to my house in the hills.”

  “I have other places to go.”

  “Take me,” demanded Gerard.

  The bodyguards bristled.

  “What about the wounded?” asked Nuri.

  “If you are my friend,” said Gerard, “you will help me, not them.”

  “Get in the car,” said Nuri, deciding it was the wisest thing to do.

  Chapter 27

  Duka

  It had gone to hell so quickly that Kimko couldn’t process all that had happened. But the basics were clear enough: Girma had shot up the center of town, killing or wounding at least a half-dozen people, all allied with Meur-tse Meur-tskk. There was certain to be a lot more fighting.

  Kimko might have viewed the conflict as good for business if he hadn’t been mixed up in the middle of it.

  His best plan, he thought, was to get away as quickly as possible. But Girma didn’t look ready to let him leave.

  “You will see our great victory,” Girma told him as the Range Rover sped across the desert to the foothills where Sudan the Almighty First Liberation had a fortress. “We will crush our en
emies.”

  “You will need more ammunition. I can fetch it.”

  “We are fine. After the battle.”

  “Not before? Are you sure?”

  “You will admire our mortars in action.”

  “What are you going to do with mortars?”

  “We will fight. We will destroy our enemy.”

  “You can’t attack them in the city.”

  “Don’t tell me how to fight!” screamed Girma. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out more khat leaves, thrusting them into his mouth.

  * * *

  Li Han studied the laptop screen, looking at the coding he had retrieved from the UAV’s brain. With the proper connection — and power from the batteries — getting in was easy.

  Relatively.

  The control interface was written in a variation C++. If he’d been back in his lab in Shanghai, accessing the underlying code would be trivial; he’d have any number of tools and a large number of computers to help him. But here, all he had was a laptop with less memory than the UAV’s brain.

  The interface was designed to be easily accessed. Li Han managed to get a full dump of the program despite the fact that he couldn’t get past the encrypted password, preventing access to the interface itself. He could see the logic of how it worked, though he couldn’t yet access the commands. Until he managed that, he wouldn’t be able to fully understand what he was looking at.

  He might be able to replace the encrypted code section with his own revision, recompile and run the program. The problem was, he didn’t have the tools. His Toshiba laptop, upgraded with the latest processor and a trunkload of memory, was state of the art and could easily run a suite of debuggers and other tools. But he didn’t have them.

  He could get the tools from any number of places online — Shanghai University would be his top choice, as he had a full set of broken passwords and knew the system intimately. But he assumed the Americans were tracking his satellite phone, so tethering the laptop to it would be as good as telling them where he was.

  He noticed Amara staring at him.

  “You’re interested in what I’m doing?” asked Li Han, amused.

  Amara shrugged.

  “Do you know how to work these?” Li Han pointed at the laptop.

  “I can work a computer.”

  At best, you can handle e-mail and Web surfing, thought Li Han. But the boy had potential. He could be trained.

  At least to a degree.

  “The UAV has a brain. I’m trying to tap into it,” said Li Han. “The program is written in a fairly common language. I think that’s only the interface. They encrypted part of the underlying assembly language, but it uses this chip.” He pointed at the encryption circuitry on the circuit board. “See, they were worried about someone breaking through the transmission, not physical security. So I can use what I know about the chip myself. I emulate it. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “Your program breaks the code.”

  “Something like that,” said Li Han. Amara had missed a few steps, but that was the gist. “I need an Internet connection. I need to access some documents. Technical documents — I don’t remember how some of these things work.”

  Lying slightly made the explanation simple.

  “I don’t know if there are Internets here,” said Amara.

  “If I had a sat phone, I could make my own connection,” said Li Han. “But it would have to be one that the Americans couldn’t trace to me. Or to you. You know how they are watching.”

  There was a commotion upstairs. One of the brothers called down to Amara and told him that a small boy had run up to the house and was knocking furiously on the door.

  Li Han went upstairs. When they let the boy in, he collapsed just across the threshold, tears streaming from his face as he unleashed a long paragraph of words.

  “There has been fighting,” explained Amara. “The two groups.”

  “That’s inconvenient.”

  “People have been killed,” said Amara. “We should be ready to leave.”

  “Where do you suggest we go?”

  Amara didn’t answer.

  “We stay here for now,” answered Li Han. “Ask the boy if he knows what a satellite phone is. Tell him I’ll pay for one — twice as much as I did for the wire.”

  Chapter 28

  Washington, D.C.

  Dan Todd thrust a glass into Jonathon Reid’s hand as soon as Reid walked into his private den in the White House residence.

  “Taste it,” demanded Todd.

  “What is it?”

  “Bourbon. Taste it.”

  Reid sniffed dubiously at the glass. The color was a very dark amber, and the liquid had the consistency of gear oil.

  “What do you smell?” Todd asked.

  “Cigarette smoke.”

  “Ha!” Todd was a chain-smoker, and the room smelled of Marlboros. “Try it. It’s supposed to be a hundred and three years old.”

  Reid took a very small sip from the glass.

  “Well?” asked Todd.

  “Hmmm,” said Reid.

  “One hundred and three year old bourbon,” continued the President’s husband. “Allegedly.”

  He laughed, then downed a shot.

  “Smooth,” said Todd. “This is what you get when the governor of Kentucky is trying to curry favor with the President. Of course, what he doesn’t realize is that the President doesn’t like bourbon.”

  “But her husband does.”

  “True. But if there’s one person in the world who has no influence with the President, it’s her husband.” Todd took another sip. “Maybe it is a hundred years old. It’s certainly dark enough. But how would I really know?”

  “You don’t,” said Reid.

  “Absolutely — but then we take much on face value. So what do you need to see her about?”

  “I’m sorry to use you like this.”

  “Nonsense, Jonathon — you’re not sorry to use me at all.”

  “It has to do with the Agency.”

  “Well, I figured that.”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Absolutely not.” Todd laughed. “She’ll poke her head in around ten. Let’s see how much money I can take from you in head-to-head poker before then.”

  * * *

  They had a twenty-five cent per hand limit, but Reid had still lost over five dollars by the time the President came by to see what her husband was up to.

  Dan excused himself when the President came in, claiming he was going to raid the kitchen.

  “I stumbled on something you probably don’t know about,” Reid told the President as soon as they were alone. “It’s possible that you do. But one way or the other, I think you should.”

  Reid briefed her quickly, hitting the main points: illegal assassination, secretly developed UAV, potentially uncontrollable artificial intelligence program.

  If she knew about any of it, it didn’t show on her face.

  “I’m not going to insult you, Jonathon, by asking if you’re sure of all this,” she said when he was done.

  “I am sure of it, Chris.”

  She nodded. “Who else knows?”

  Reid assumed that she was in fact asking whether Breanna Stockard’s husband knew.

  “Ms. Stockard is aware of most of what I’ve told you. She is in charge of the recovery. I don’t believe she’ll share any of the information with her husband.”

  A faint smile came to the President’s lips.

  “Zen and I are getting along fairly well these days, all things considered,” said Ms. Todd. “It’s not him I’m worried about.”

  “Of course. As far as I can tell, the information has been very tightly controlled in-house. But I simply don’t know for sure. They’re not exactly sharing.”

  “What’s the status of your operation to recover the plane?”

  “We’ve traced it to a village, and we’re trying to get it back. We had one operation already, b
ut unfortunately our information was incomplete and the UAV wasn’t there.”

  “I see. Even when we get it back,” added the President, “there’s a much bigger problem here. Isn’t there?”

  “Exactly. That’s why I wanted you to know.”

  Chapter 29

  Duka

  The larceny of the local youth was astounding. A half hour after Amara told the boy he needed a satellite phone, he had three. None of them had the proper circuitry to be tethered to his laptop, but that wasn’t critical — Li Han simply removed their ID circuitry for use in his own. He was online within the hour.

  He lost the connection with Shanghai some forty minutes later, but that was just as well — there was always the possibility of being detected if he remained on for too long. And the next set of operations could be done entirely with the laptop.

  The battery was edging downward. The power was off and there was no indication when it would be on again. He’d need to get it recharged at one of the houses that used a generator.

  Unless one of the children could steal one of those as well. No doubt they could.

  Li Han moved his finger across the touch pad, then gave it a soft double tap.

  And then, almost against his expectations if not his best hopes, the command screen for the UAV appeared.

  Or at least what should have been the command screen appeared. It looked more like a database entry screen.

  And half of it was filled with a photo of his face.

  He leaned away, trying to make sense of the screen. What was this? The architecture of the program made it clear this should be the command module, and yet how could it be?

  It was the command screen, if the logo at the top in thirty-six point Helvetica bold type was to be taken at face value.

  How would this run a UAV? Li Han knew that the aircraft was flying itself when it came to simple flight commands, but he expected this section to contain an interface to a ground station.

  The left side of the screen had location data at the top: a line with GPS coordinates that appeared to be in Africa, undoubtedly where he had been when the drone went down. Below that were the words SUBJECT CONFIRMED.