by Dale Brown
Then he saw one of the bots trundling up in their direction.
With a stream of curses, he plunged ahead, lunging toward the first man in the group. He leapt up, throwing himself into the middle of the knot as they reached the fence line. Alerted by the bracelet on his wrist, the bot halted its targeting sequence, fearing friendly fire.
Unfortunately, Nuri’s momentum took him and the Marine he landed on full force into the virtual fence. His head felt as if it had exploded, then went numb. Every joint in his body vibrated. He fell to the ground, head still within the field, writhing in pain. He tried to push himself back but could not. His legs and arms flopping helplessly up and down, he tried to talk but could not.
Because the fence was nonlethal, MY-PID’s safety protocols did not allow it to turn the device on or off. It did, however, send an alert to Danny, who dropped back from his assault team and ran down to the fence line. By the time he got in range to see what was happening, the Marines had found their own solution — they pulverized the two devices closest to Nuri, destroying the current.
Not knowing exactly what had happened, Danny assumed Nuri had somehow forgotten about the device. Shaking his head, he told the corpsman to see to him and other two men who’d been paralyzed, then had the rest of the Marines follow him.
Chapter 5
Washington, D.C.
“Come to order! Come to order!” demanded Senator Barrington, the Intelligence Committee chairman.
Ernst practically foamed at the mouth, but he did stop speaking.
“Now,” said Barrington, slamming his gavel down once more for good measure, “we will have a vote on the motion to hold the CIA director in contempt of this committee—”
“And the President,” said Ernst.
“We will not subpoena the President.”
“The President is the one we need to hear from. We should subpoena her. Drag her in here in chains, if necessary.”
Zen had had enough.
“Why do you keep hammering on that?” he said. “What the hell good is it going to do?”
“We have to go on record—”
“Gentlemen!” Barrington once more handled the gavel with feeling. Zen wondered if his arm was becoming numb. “You will address the chair. Senator Stockard, you have the floor.”
Zen cleared his throat. “Everyone knows that the administration and I have not always agreed on everything. In this case, however, I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt — temporarily. If we vote to send a subpoena, it’s going to get ridiculous headlines and be blown up by the media,” continued Zen. He knew that was actually Ernst’s goal, but hoped the rest of his colleagues would listen to reason. “This whole thing is going to become a political football that has nothing to do with the Agency or Raven, whatever it is.”
“As if you don’t know,” said Ernst.
Zen ignored him. “Mr. Chairman, if our goal here is actually to get information, rather than embarrassing the administration and maybe interfering with the country’s pursuit—”
“What pursuit?” yelled Ernst.
Barrington pounded on the table.
“I move to end discussion and vote,” said Zen, realizing it was hopeless.
The motion carried quickly, the senators anxious to get out of the chamber. Zen was the only one opposed.
Chapter 6
Southeastern Sudan
Danny ran through the rubble of the ruined one-story building, leaping across the battered stones just in time to join the team assaulting the second house. By now the gunfire had nearly stopped, with only a few gunmen at the far western stretch of the camp defenses continuing to fire. But MY-PID detected heat signatures inside several of the buildings in the last citadel, and the crazy-quilt nature of the complex meant they had to move slowly. The computer tagged and followed each individual enemy as best it could, feeding a raw tally to Danny upon request — it knew of at least five individuals inside the building they were going into, and at least two more in the adjacent one, which shared a wall and almost certainly a doorway.
They found the first two individuals bleeding out in the hallway, gut-shot by earlier fire. Neither had long to live; the team members pulled away their weapons, trussed their arms for safety, then carried them outside the building. Danny watched as the two men laid one of the enemy soldiers down gently.
The gesture struck him as odd and yet touching at the same time — the gravely wounded enemies had been trying to kill the Whiplash troopers just a few minutes ago, and were now being treated with a remarkable and even incongruent sense of dignity and care. In his experience, the acid of battle usually eroded any impulse toward caring for an enemy; he had seen many men simply kill people terminally wounded as they passed. He wondered if either trooper could have explained what they did. Most likely they would have said only that they were getting the men out of the way, and would have been at a loss to say why they hadn’t simply dumped them on the ground. It was all unconscious action, an expression of how they lived rather than how they thought.
Danny caught up with the team clearing the last room in the building. The procedure was repetitive to the point of being industrial: mechanical gestures with their hands, a sweep of eyes, the call of “Clear.”
“Room is clear!” yelled Flash.
An explosion shook the building. MY-PID immediately warned that the right side of the structure appeared ready to collapse.
“Back up! Back up!” yelled Danny, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room.
There was gunfire, then another explosion. Danny grabbed hold of the trooper in front of him and pulled him back.
“Out! Out!” he yelled, and then stepped up to the next man, pulling him back, and then the next.
The floor rumbled. Flash and Nolan appeared in front of him, backing their way out.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” yelled Danny as the building began to fall around them.
The dust blocked his helmet’s infrared vision, shrouding him in darkness. He put his hand out and touched the back of one of his troopers — it was impossible to tell at the moment which — and nudged him, moving with him as the wall to the right sheared downward. Something hit Danny in the back and he tumbled forward, bowling the other man over. He pushed up, throwing off a beam, then realized he was outside. The upper floor of the building had almost literally disintegrated, spewing its remains in the air. The assault team began sounding off; MY-PID reported that all were accounted for.
The Marines who’d come up with Danny from the front gate began helping clear the debris. The air around them was still clouded with dust, but the far side of the citadel was clear enough for both the bots and the laser ship above to make out a dozen targets trying to escape. Within moments the twelve were dead.
MY-PID reported that it could not find any heat signatures within the building complex.
“There were computers and metal in that room,” Flash told Danny, pointing to the collapsed debris. “I think the aircraft were in there.”
“Let’s get digging.”
* * *
“They’re putting up their hands,” said Shorty. “They want to surrender.”
Melissa looked at the screen. There were four men, one of whom was almost certainly the Russian — MY-PID identified him as clean-shaven and wearing western clothes.
He had a duffel bag.
“Cease fire,” said Shorty over the Osprey radio, though the pilots already had. “What do you think, ma’am?”
Her orders were to recover the UAV brain intact if possible. That potentially conflicted with what Danny had told her — they would kill the Russian.
Which took precedence?
Did it matter? She couldn’t kill the man in cold blood. Not even Danny would have done that.
The Russian would be valuable — they could get a lot of intelligence out of him if he really was an expert.
“Let’s get down there and take them,” she told the trooper.
* *
*
The MC-17 swooped down over the camp and dropped its third and last container into the area just south of the cluster of buildings. This one contained two bots, which were somewhat larger than the others. They looked like downsized construction vehicles: one had a clamshell, the other a crane arm with various attachments.
Unlike the gun bots, which were powered by small hydrogen fuel cells, these ran on turbo diesel engines. They lacked innate intelligence; team members controlled them via a set of remote controls. While more powerful, they were not much different than the devices used back home at small construction sites to handle jobs where traditional-sized earthmovers and cranes were either overkill or too big to fit on a work site.
Two troopers checked them out, started them up, then walked them over toward Danny and Flash, who were already pulling some of the debris away.
It took about ten minutes before they could see the outline of the room. In fact there was an aircraft there — MY-PID ID’ed the wing of a Predator. With a little more digging, Danny could make out other parts of the aircraft and a tabletop with diagnostic tools.
He suddenly got a strange feeling — not so much a premonition as déjà vu.
“Everybody back!” he yelled. “Back!”
Flash looked up at him. “Boss?”
“Back!” Danny demanded. “Controllers, you too.”
After the team retreated to the outskirts of the ruins, Danny changed the video feed in his screen to the crane’s.
“I can pull the wing straight up, Colonel,” said the man operating the bot.
“Go for it.”
Danny watched as the crane’s claws grasped the wing and pulled upward. There was a flash. An explosion shook the ruins, bringing down the parts of the building that hadn’t fallen earlier.
“How’d you know?” asked Flash as the dust settled.
“It looked familiar,” said Danny.
* * *
Melissa went out last, trotting behind the Whiplash team members as they surrounded the four men. The vest and helmet she’d donned were heavy and foreign; while the team members compared them favorably to the traditional body armor, they felt constricting to her. Sweat poured down her temples, and her arms were awash with it.
“Put down any weapons,” Melissa said in Arabic.
When no one moved, she realized she’d forgotten to switch her com system into loudspeaker mode. Her mind blanked and she couldn’t remember how to do it. Finally, Melissa flipped up her visor and yelled the words.
The men held their arms out to their sides.
“Separate!” she ordered. “Move apart or we will fire.”
They slowly began stepping aside. Two of the team members walked toward the man farthest to the right. The Osprey circled ahead, the thump of its rotors vibrating against the hard ground and nearby hills. Melissa felt her heart racing and tried to calm it.
Suddenly, one of the men began running toward her.
Why? she wondered.
Then she knew.
“Bomb!”
* * *
Danny saw the flash in his visor screen as he switched back to check on the escapees.
All he saw was white in the center of black. It seemed like forever before the camera on the Osprey supplying the feed readjusted.
There was a team member down.
Melissa.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “Shorty? Shorty!”
“We have one man down,” said the trooper. “Another minor injury. All of the prisoners are dead.”
“What the hell happened?” demanded Danny.
“He had a vest, and explosives in a knapsack. We have high-tech parts in a bag.”
“What’s Melissa’s status?”
“Breathing. Losing a lot of blood.”
“Evac her the hell out of there.”
“We’re working on it, Colonel. We’re working on it.”
Chapter 7
Room 4
Jonathon Reid pushed his chair away from the table and rose. He felt as if he’d taken a breath of fresh air for the first time in weeks.
“The electronics match,” he said. “We’ve got it. Thank God.”
“I’m always amazed at how much God is blamed for what humans do,” said Ray Rubeo.
Reid stifled a smirk. He hadn’t known the scientist even believed in God.
“They’ll all be back in Ethiopia inside an hour,” Breanna said. “Three wounded, including the CIA officer. Light casualties, considering.”
Reid nodded. It was an absurdly low casualty rate, given what had been at stake.
There was a certain poetic justice in the fact that the person who’d been most seriously wounded was the one attached to the program. It was an extremely uncharitable thought. Yet that’s what he felt.
He also felt it would have been far more satisfying if it was Harker who’d been wounded.
“Ilse has lost a lot of blood,” said Breanna, who as usual seemed to be reading his mind. “But her vitals are stable. She took some shrapnel in the face. That’s probably the most serious. The cut in her neck didn’t reach the artery. I’m pretty sure she’ll live.”
Reid nodded. The other two injuries were Marines. Both were bullet wounds, one in the arm and one in the leg.
“As soon as all our people are out, the Tomahawks will finish off the camp buildings,” said Breanna. “It’ll be wiped out completely.”
“Do you want to tell the President, or should I?”
“You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll stay here until they’re all on the ground.”
Walking to his office, Reid realized that, if he wished, he could hint that the Russian involvement in the entire affair seemed less than coincidental. It could easily be made to seem part of a conspiracy to purposely “lose” American technology, without actually appearing criminal about it. A case could easily be constructed that pointed the finger at Harker.
Easily.
But Reid would not do that. He knew the facts. And even though he wished Harker ill, he would not bend the truth to harm him.
It occurred to Reid as he sat down at his desk that Harker might actually be in line to take over Edmund’s job. If that were the case…
No, Reid told himself, I must act responsibly. No conspiracy theories, no hints, just the facts.
He picked up the phone and called the White House.
* * *
“You’re awful quiet,” Breanna said to Rubeo as they watched the first Osprey take off.
“Yes,” he said, in his long drawn-out way.
“Is there a problem?” she asked.
“We have the hardware,” said Rubeo.
“And?”
“One never knows.”
Chapter 8
Ethiopia
Danny hopped out of the Osprey as it settled down, sprinting toward the building that had been turned into a temporary clinic. Two Navy doctors and a small team of corpsmen were flown in prior to the strike to tend to the wounded.
A corpsman met him at the door.
“How are my people?” asked Danny, stepping into the large room.
“All stable, Colonel. We’re just getting ready to evac to Germany.”
Four stretchers and a host of medical equipment were spread out in the room. One of the patients was sitting on a chair, arm in a sling. Another was sitting up on his bed. The medical people were clustered around the third, lying prone on the table.
“How’s Melissa?” asked Danny.
“Serious but stable,” said one of the doctors near her. He came over to Danny. “She’ll make it. Your people did excellent work. Excellent.”
“Can she talk?”
The doctor grimaced. “She’s unconscious. Her face is fairly bashed up. She’ll need plastic surgery. Maybe a lot.”
Danny walked over to the stretcher. Melissa’s face was bundled in bandages.
Her face. Her beautiful face.
“Transport is ready!” yelled the corpsman. “
They’re waiting for us!”
“Let’s move it!” said the doctor.
Danny stepped back and watched as they took her and the others out.
“Don’t let her die, God,” he prayed quietly. “And let her be the person she was before all of this.”
Chapter 9
The White House
Christine Mary Todd took the news like she took most news — calmly, without noticeable emotion. She thanked Jonathon Reid, not only for helping make the mission a success, but for having had the fortitude to bring the matter to her attention despite what she guessed was considerable personal anguish and, undoubtedly, backlash from the intelligence community.
She hung up the phone, then called Blitz and Bozzone in to see her.
Waiting for them, she took a sip of tea — lukewarm, but welcome nonetheless — and tried to stretch her legs in the small office. The Intelligence Committee vote was deeply unfortunate; it made it difficult for her to send Edmund over to talk to them without seeming to give in. The political nuances of weakening her image could easily come back to haunt her in the future.
But now that Raven was safely in their hands, she had no problem giving the committee the information. In fact, handled properly, it could help fend off another episode like this one.
How exactly could she deal with this?
Perhaps she could persuade the committee to pull back on the subpoena. But they seemed to be in no mood to do so, not given the vote. Only Zen Stockard had stood against them.
She went back to the phone. “Give me Senator Stockard’s office.”
Bozzone came in while she was waiting on the phone. Todd motioned for him to sit down.
Zen’s appointment secretary said he was on the Senate floor, which made it impossible to talk to him immediately.
“I’d like to speak with him personally,” Todd told her. “When do you think he would have a hole in his schedule?”
“For you, he would always be available, Ms. President. But um, uh—”