Raven Strike d-13

by Dale Brown

  “I have a meeting tonight.”

  “I thought you might. Caroline is in the den, doing her homework.”

  “She gave us some hints on cooking,” whispered Teri.

  “You weren’t going to tell,” said Zen, mock scolding his daughter. He pretended to chase after her as she ran off laughing.

  “She’s in a good mood,” said Breanna.

  “Glad to see you home. As am I.”

  Zen spun around and went back to the kitchen. Their stove was regular height, which limited his access to the front burners only. He had a small pot of sauce there; to check it, he removed it from the burner and held it over his lap to stir. It wasn’t the safest arrangement, but Breanna had learned long ago not to say anything.

  He put it back and opened the oven.

  “Mmmm-mmmm. I think it’s ready,” he said, wheeling around to the refrigerator.

  “Jeff, about yesterday…”

  “Apologizing for not playing hooky?”

  “I shouldn’t have run out like that. I know.”

  “That’s OK. It at least got me prepared for your stonewalling the committee.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Word is, my favorite President told the CIA director to inspect military bases in Alaska for the next three weeks. His schedule is full.”

  “I doubt anything like that happened.”

  “It’s all right. At least I know where to deliver your subpoena.”

  “Jeff, you’re not going to subpoena me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have no involvement—”

  She stopped short. She meant that she had no involvement in the original Raven program, not in recovering it. But she realized now that she looked foolish — and like a liar.

  “I was joking,” he said, though his voice was suddenly very serious.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t forget who you are,” he added.

  “I do know who I am.”

  “Yeah. So do I.”

  “What’s that mean?” She pressed her lips together, angry — not at him, but at herself for lying.

  “Dinner’s ready,” said Zen loudly. He took a thick towel from the center island and put it on his lap, then pulled the lasagna from the oven. “Come and get it!” he yelled, wheeling himself toward the table.

  * * *

  Zen ate quickly. He was running a little late; ordinarily he would have caught something at the park, but he’d wanted to make sure he stayed and talked to Breanna.

  It hadn’t gone quite as well as he planned, but at least the ice had been broken. Somewhat.

  Hopefully this was just bs and would blow over quickly.

  In the meantime, he was looking forward to the game. He drove over to his district office and picked up a friend, Simeon Bautista, a former SEAL who occasionally did some bodyguard work for him. Then he went over to the hospital, where Stoner and Dr. Esrang were waiting inside the lobby.

  “Mark, Doc, hey guys,” said Zen, wheeling over to them with a flourish. “This is my buddy Simeon — he watches over me sometimes to make sure I don’t get into a fight with Dodger fans.” Zen winked at Stoner, who simply stared back. Esrang nodded. Zen saw the two hospital security people eyeing them nervously. “We ready?”

  “I think we’re good,” said Esrang, leading the way to the van.

  Truth be told, Zen would have preferred that the psychiatrist stayed home. It wasn’t that he was in the way, or even a particularly bad companion. But it added a therapeutic flavor to the outing that made things less comfortable than he wanted. It was bad enough that the doctor had insisted on a bodyguard. Simeon at least was low key and affable, though not overly talkative — a perfect combination, Zen thought. The problem was, if Stoner really went on a rampage, it would take a dozen Simeons and an M1A1 tank to subdue him.

  The traffic was light and they made it to the game with nearly a half hour to spare. It was a sparse crowd, even though they were playing the Dodgers. In fact, a good portion of the crowd seemed to be L.A. transplants, with more than a spattering of Dodger blue around them.

  “Want something to eat, Mark?” Zen asked. “Hot dog?”

  “Hot dog?”

  Zen took the question as a yes. “One or two?”

  Stoner held up his hand, showing two fingers.

  This was really a good idea, thought Zen, calling the vendor over.

  * * *

  There were thousands of faces, each one potentially a threat.

  Stoner looked at each one, studying them. The habit was ingrained, part of him, who he was.

  There was another part, too. Deeper maybe.

  He continued looking, memorizing each face. He hadn’t seen any of them before.

  “Here.” Zen handed him the hot dogs.

  A hot dog. Frankfurter. Red Hot.

  Had he had these? They seemed familiar.

  He had. He liked them. It was a long time ago. Before.

  “You want mustard or ketchup?” said Zen.

  “Ketchup?” asked Stoner.

  “Ketchup!” yelled Zen to the man pulling the food from the box.

  This was all familiar. The man with the box, with the hot dogs — did he have a gun?

  Stoner braced, his body ready to react. His muscles tightened, his breathing became almost shallow.

  The man took something from his pocket.

  Tiny packets of ketchup, which Stoner knew he would do. Somehow, he knew. The pattern was familiar, yet new.

  He began to eat.

  “Good?” asked Zen.

  “Different,” said Stoner.

  “Better than hospital food, huh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Zen laughed.

  “The food isn’t bad,” said Stoner.

  “Honest?”

  He turned to Zen, pondering why he would ask that question. As he did, his eye caught something moving above. He cringed, right arm flying up.

  “What?” asked Zen.

  A small aircraft circled above. Stoner focused on it. It had a camera in the nose, two small engines, no pilot. A UAV drone.

  “It’s a police department UAV,” said Zen.

  “It’s watching us.”

  “Not us, the stadium. Checking out the crowd for security,” explained Zen. “All right?”

  Stoner looked at it, watching the pattern it made. He focused his eyes on the camera. It scanned the crowd, moving back and forth, back and forth.

  “What do you see?” Zen asked.

  “There’s a camera in the nose, inside the dome.”

  “You can see that in the dark?”

  “Of course.”

  “Like Superman — X-ray eyes.”

  The first doctors had called him Superman. He knew that wasn’t true — he was more like a freak, a robot created from human flesh, created to do some bastard’s dirty work.

  A robot like the plane?

  He glanced back toward the sky, watching it circle.

  “All right,” he said finally. He turned to Zen. “When does this ball game begin?”

  “Five minutes,” said Zen, rising. “Right after the National Anthem.”

  Chapter 12

  Southeast Washington, D.C.

  Amara sat in the kitchen while Ken worked over the laptop, studying the program for hours, punching keys and mumbling to himself. He put his face right next to the screen as he worked, his nose nearly touching it. Amara wondered if he would be sucked inside if he hit the wrong key.

  “I see,” said Ken finally.

  He rose and picked up the laptop. Unplugging it but keeping it on and open, he walked back toward the stairs. Amara followed him down into the darkness.

  Ken flipped a light switch at the bottom of the stairs. The basement flooded with light so strong Amara’s eyes stung. He shaded them as he trailed Ken over toward an ancient, round oil burner. There was a door just beyond it, secured with a padlock and a chain. Ken undid the locks, then pulled open the door and step
ped into a primitive wine cellar. Shelves lined the left wall; two large wooden barrels sat on pedestals just beyond them. Dust and spiderwebs were everywhere.

  A sheet of heavy, clear plastic hung from the ceiling just past the second barrel. Ken pulled at the sheet, revealing a seam. Amara followed him through, passing into a twenty-by-thirty-foot work space lined with gleaming new toolboxes, a large workbench, and commercial steel shelving. There were a number of high- and low-tech tools — a pair of computers, an oscilloscope, a metal drill press. In the middle of the floor sat a small UAV, engines fore and aft on the fuselage, wings detached from its body and standing upright against the bare cinder-block wall.

  Ken knelt down and opened the laptop, staring at the screen before pushing it to one side. He rose and went to the workbench.

  “I need solder,” he said, rummaging through a set of trays.

  These were the first words Ken had spoken to him in hours, and they filled Amara with an almost giddy enthusiasm.

  “So the program will help you,” said Amara.

  “Can I trust you to buy solder? Do you know what it is?”

  “Of course,” said Amara.

  “It’s too late to get it now,” said Ken, his voice scolding, as if it were Amara’s idea in the first place. “Get us something to eat. Buy a pizza and bring it here. There’s a store on the corner.”

  “Pizza?”

  “You know what pizza is, don’t you?”

  “I know what pizza is.”

  “Go. Lock the front door behind you. Ring the bell twice, wait, then once and twice more. If you don’t follow that pattern, I won’t let you in.”

  * * *

  Despite his jet lag and the way he had been treated, Amara felt a burst of energy after he locked the front door and trotted down the steps. He walked with a brisk, almost jogging pace for about half the block, pushed along by a sense of mission — not the pizza, but of doing something useful.

  Amara did not, in his heart, hate America or Americans. On the contrary, he liked much about the country where he had studied. And he had found that most Americans he came in contact with were helpful and even on occasion kind.

  The fact that he’d been sent on a mission that would hurt Americans did not, somehow, connect with that feeling. It existed in an entirely different realm. He didn’t have to rationalize that Americans were fighting against what the Brotherhood stood for; he simply saw his mission separate from his experiences with and feelings for real Americans. He was like a professional sports player who could play ferociously against another team, and yet at the end of it think nothing of shaking and even hugging his opponents.

  The heat in the pizza parlor was overwhelming. It was moist and pungent, an oregano-scented sauna.

  “Hey,” said the man behind the counter. He was a white man with a child’s face and a belly two sizes too large for the rest of his body. “Help ya?”

  “Pizza. To go.”

  “Cheese?”

  It had been quite a while since Amara had eaten pizza. But the safest answer was yes.

  “Yes,” he told the man.

  “Large or small?”

  “Large,” said Amara, guessing.

  “What da ya want wid that?” said the man, punching a cash register. “Soda?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  The man pointed to a trio of coolers at the side. There were a variety of sodas and other drinks; the last was filled with beers.

  He took a water for Ken — he couldn’t imagine he would drink anything else — then, giving in to temptation, pulled open the beer cooler and took a Coors.

  “Gotta drink the beer here,” said the man behind the counter.

  Amara didn’t understand.

  “I can only sell it to serve,” said the man. “OK? So if you want it…”

  He shrugged, as if his meaning was obvious.

  “OK,” said Amara. “I’ll drink here.”

  Just as well — Ken might take the ban on alcohol far more seriously than he did.

  “Thirteen fifty,” said the man, ringing up the bill. “Pizza’ll be done twelve minutes.”

  Amara fished into his pocket and pulled out two twenties. He handed one to the man, took his change, then sat down with his beer.

  It tasted like water with algae in it. But he drank it anyway. He didn’t realize he was gulping until he was more than halfway through.

  Two teenage girls came in, texting on their cell phones as they walked to the counter. Amara remembered that he hadn’t called to say he had arrived.

  He got up, leaving the drink, and went outside.

  His finger paused over the quick-dial combination.

  Two rings, then he went directly to voice mail.

  “I am here. It is very hopeful,” he said in Arabic.

  After he hung up, he turned quickly to make sure he hadn’t been overheard. Using Arabic had been a mistake — he should have made the call in English.

  It was nothing to worry about now. Amara went back inside to wait for his pizza and finish his beer.

  Chapter 13

  Ethiopia

  Nuri watched the sky, waiting as the shadow descended. By the time he could make out the parachute, the SEAL harnessed into it was only a few feet from the ground. The sailor walked into his landing, then began gathering his chute. He had it squared away by the time Nuri arrived.

  “Hey, Navy,” said Nuri.

  “You’re Jupiter?” answered the SEAL.

  “Yeah.” Nuri thought the code word was funny, and gave a little self-deprecating laugh.

  The man retrieved a small ballistics case from his kit. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks. The command post is that large building up there on the left,” said Nuri. “Someone’ll find you food and arrange for a pickup.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Nuri started away.

  “Tell me, if you don’t mind — what exactly is it that I just brought you? They rushed me special here from Italy and flew me on my jetliner. I never seen such a fuss.”

  “Bottle of vodka,” said Nuri.

  * * *

  The Russian was just finishing his dinner when Nuri entered the tent. A small card table had been placed in the middle. The guards had removed his hand restraints, but were watching him carefully from the side.

  “You can wait outside,” Nuri told them. He put down the case and pulled out the empty chair.

  “How was dinner?” he asked Kimko in English.

  “All right.”

  “You prefer English or Russian?”

  “Your Russian is horrible.”

  “Ready to talk?”

  “I have said everything necessary to say.”

  “I think you have a lot to say.”

  Kimko smiled and shook his head. “Nuri, you are young yet. You do not know how this game is played.”

  “No?”

  Kimko laughed. “You waste your time. You are Mr. Nice Guy. Before, when you threaten me with the gun — that was more effective. Then you feed me. Mistake. You should make me wait. Hunger pains do much.”

  Nuri reached down and opened the case. He removed the two glasses from the cushioned interior and set them down. Then he took the bottle of vodka and opened it.

  Kimko said nothing.

  “I know all about you, Milos. You have no secrets.”

  Nuri put a finger’s worth of the liquid into the one closest to him. MY-PID was recording the session through a video bug planted in the far corner of the walls near the ceiling; it analyzed the Russian’s facial features and what physiological data it could deduce about how he was reacting to Nuri’s interrogation tactics. It gave Nuri a running update on the data as it watched.

  But he didn’t need MY-PID to tell him that Kimko really wanted the vodka.

  Nuri picked up the glass and swirled it: it was all very dramatic and over the top, but he had a captive audience, and hamming it up only helped.

  “I know you work for SVG,” he told Kimko. “I k
now who your supervisors are. I know every stop in your career. I know how you got shafted. Because your boss wanted to sleep with your wife. It was an injustice. They screwed you. You should be a supervisor by now. Or a rich man. A very rich man.”

  Nuri took a small sip from the glass. He hated vodka.

  “I can help you,” he continued. “With my help, you can get out of Africa. I can help get you promoted. I can make you rich. And most of all, I can help you get revenge.”

  Kimko’s pupils dilated ever so slightly; Nuri didn’t need MY-PID’s nudge to tell him he had just scored big. He paused, hoping Kimko would talk, but he didn’t.

  “You can talk to me, and I can help you a lot,” said Nuri. “You don’t like being assigned to Africa. That’s clear. I can give you information that will get you out. And no one will know where it came from. Except you and me.”

  “You are more clever than I thought.”

  “No. I just have all the cards. But I can share.” Nuri gestured at the bottle. “Why not use them to get yourself out of this shit hole.”

  “It is a shit hole,” agreed Kimko.

  “Talk to me about the UAV. Who else knows about it? Who wants it?”

  “You claim to know everything and you don’t know that?”

  As an intelligence agent, Kimko presumably knew the basic interrogation technique called for starting with questions one knew the answer to, so the subject’s truthfulness could be tested. He was parrying, trying on his side of the table to determine what Nuri really knew.

  Nuri changed direction.

  “Tell me about Li Han. Why would SVG want to deal with him? The man is a criminal. Despicable. A sociopath.”

  “We all have our faults,” said Kimko dryly.

  “What’s yours?” Nuri took another sip from the glass.

  “I have many, many faults,” said Kimko, casting his eyes downward.

  “I can help you get out of here,” said Nuri. “You don’t want to be here. It’s a rat hole.”

  “You’re here.”

  “Oh, I get to leave.” Nuri laughed. “They just sent me back for you. Who are you selling to? Sudan First? They’re psychotic.”

  Kimko shook his head.

  Nuri tried a different tack. “Who do you think was your competition to buy the UAV?” he asked. “Was it the Iranian?”