Act of Revenge

Flash forward

The planes were Russian — and Russia wasn’t on their side, not today, not any day.

Johansen grabbed the handset to talk with the team in the field. Chelsea, Johnny, and the others needed to get to safety — now.

How ironic: they’d gotten past the most ferocious murderers on the planet and now were endangered by bozos who couldn’t find their target city without a map from the CIA.

32 Real time

Johnny Givens fell out of the helicopter, his balance thrown off by fatigue and a sudden shift in the wind that rocked the chopper backward. He pushed right when he should have gone left, then caught himself, jerking back like a wide receiver running a square-in. Grit kicked up by the helicopter’s blades sprayed across his path as Johnny ran toward the rendezvous point some fifty yards ahead.

Something flared ahead.

“Incoming!” yelled the team leader over the team radio.

Johnny pushed harder, increasing his speed. More flares.

OK, hit the dirt.

He slid to the ground, then pulled the small multi-control unit from the thigh pocket on his right pants leg. The flexible organic LEDs unfurled, revealing a screen. Johnny pressed his right thumb on it, bringing the device to life.

“Bird 1, view,” said Johnny, talking to a Smart Metal UAV overhead.

A view of the battlefield snapped onto the screen.

“Identify fire.”

A grid appeared over the image. A red circle flashed on one of the squares to the right.

“Share data,” commanded Johnny. “Destiny, take out the enemy unit in Grid 1-D.”

Destiny — a rebuilt Global Hawk Block 30 outfitted with GBU-53/B small diameter bombs — took the target from the smaller drone. Within seconds, a single small-diameter bomb fell from the aircraft.

“Stand by for explosion,” Johnny warned the rest of the team.

A second later, a mushroom of smoke bloomed at the eastern end of the target area. The gunfire stopped.

“We’re clear!” yelled Johnny, scrambling to his feet.

Chelsea Goodman had a stitch in her ribs and had twisted her ankle slightly when she got out of the helicopter, but there was no turning back now, no quitting.

You volunteered. Suck it up!

Her dad’s voice.

She reached the rendezvous point and tapped Fred Rosen, the CIA paramilitary officer in charge, then moved next to the tail gunner.

“You’re late,” said Rosen over the radio. “Thought we’d have to do this without you, little girl.”

She couldn’t think of a comeback.

They lined up on the house. Johnny was supposed to stay back with the second group, controlling the drones and communicating with the support units. But three members of the first group had been taken out by the earlier gunfire, and so he handed the control unit over to Chelsea and took a position behind the second breacher.

This was the most dangerous part of the assault. They’d lost any possibility of strategic surprise — the shooting surely woke up the house’s inhabitants — and while one could argue that they had tactical surprise in their favor, since they were determining when to make their entrance, in truth, any advantage was razor thin.

Johnny readied his gun. Smashing your way into a house produced an enormous adrenaline flow, but in some ways that energy was the enemy. You had to stay within yourself, act exactly as you’d been trained to act.

“Three — two—”

Boom!

“Go!” shouted Rosen as the charge on the door blew off the lock.

In the next second, the breacher shouldered the door out of his way, bursting inside as a pair of flash-bang grenades paralyzed the jihadist in the front hall.

The second man through shot the jihadist in the head.

Johnny ran past, following the lead man to the staircase. They knew from the Nightbird UAV that there were two more terrorists upstairs, and their “jackpot”—a hostage with information they needed.

Bullets spit down the stairs.

“Shit!” screamed the lead man, flattening himself against the wall.

Johnny took a small, spherical mech from his pocket and flung it up the stairs. It bounced off the wall and came to rest on the landing. Tapping his control unit, Johnny connected to the “ball,” viewing the image synthesized from its embedded IR and optical cameras.

“Three guys at the end of the hallway,” said Johnny.

“Which one’s Jackpot?” asked Rosen.

“Can’t tell.”

“Taser them all. Can’t risk killing Jackpot.”

“They all have guns,” said Johnny. “Something’s not right here.”

“Taser them all.”

Johnny reached to his back and undid the Velcro straps holding the Taser shotgun to his tac vest. Looking something like a Remington 870 with a drum magazine and a 1950s Buck Rogers Day-Glo yellow back end, the Taser fired a small web of electric charges. Get hit anywhere on your body and the charge put you down within microseconds. It could work through clothes as well, though not as dependably.

Which was why he aimed for the face.

Johnny got off a shot before he was hit. He fired twice more, then rolled back, dazed — a round had hit his vest near his shoulder. Though the ceramic plate stopped the bullet and absorbed a good deal of the impact, the blow nonetheless sent a shock through his body. It was as if someone had flipped an on-off switch, temporarily paralyzing his systems. He gasped for air as if he’d lost his breath.

The other members of the team scrambled past him. The three men at the end of the hallway were all down, disabled by the Taser rounds Johnny and the leader had fired.

“Get the hypos in them, cuff ’em,” shouted the leader. “Let’s go! Let’s go.”

By the time Johnny got to his feet, the men were trussed and being dragged into one of the rooms. Johnny got up and tapped the man who was guarding the stairs.

“I got this,” Johnny said, releasing him to help the others in the room.

Gunfire stoked up outside.

“We need that resistance cleared so the chopper can come in!” said someone over the team radio.

Chelsea swept her hand over the screen, commanding a refresh. For some reason the infrared camera on the Nightbird UAV had stopped working.

“Chopper is inbound!” boomed the voice of the team leader over the radio. “We need that resistance suppressed!”

That was her job — command Destiny to bomb the positions. But without the help of the other UAV, she had to manually calculate the targets: Destiny was a dumb bird, incapable of selecting targets on its own.

She couldn’t see the enemy, but she knew the gunfire was coming from positions some five hundred yards away, behind trees and possibly a stone wall. So what she had to do was time two attacks — one as the helicopter came in, then a second as it took off.

She looked at the grid on the screen and mentally calculated their position against the enemy’s.

We have to move back. We’re supposed to be farther away.

What’s the backup position? Delta or Beta?

Shit!

She keyed her mike. “Team, move to pickup point, pickup point…”

Why was her brain freezing on this, of all things?

“Move to Delta,” said Rosen over the radio. “Prepare for evac.”

Chelsea tapped the right side of the screen, opening the window that showed the pickup helicopter’s com section. A double tap sent an audible message over the encrypted line directing it to Delta.

The helicopter’s pilot acknowledged. He was two minutes away.

Chelsea went back to the grid and designated the target area for Destiny, directing a line barrage of attacks with half its remaining missiles.

“Launch attack in thirty,” she told it. “Attack in thirty seconds.”

She turned toward where the gunfire was coming from and waited.

Red flared in plumes of black against the gray distance. The air popped.

Got him!

Chelsea felt herself being pulled to her feet.

“Hey!” yelled one of her teammates. “You gotta get to the exfil! Here’s the chopper!”

Though he was the last one out of the house, Johnny had to pace himself as he ran, consciously holding himself back so he wouldn’t pass the others. His legs were just that—his legs, completely part of him, exactly as his “real” ones had been before the accident. The only difference was, these were about ten times stronger, considerably faster, and not prone to cramping, tiring, or even getting a mosquito bite.

Not that they were better. They were just… his.

The helicopter appeared in a whirl of dust and dirt. Johnny turned quickly, making sure they weren’t followed.

Something moved in the shadows to his right. He stopped. The night glasses were powerful enough to illuminate even a mouse at a hundred yards, but they couldn’t see through solid objects, and his vision was blocked by a wall. He waited a few seconds, unsure if he’d actually seen anything or if it had all been a figment of his imagination.

“Chopper! Chopper!” yelled the team leader. “Count off!”

The others were getting aboard, calling out a number as they got inside.

Johnny waited, covering the others, scanning the shadows. It was his turn to go, past his turn.

Nothing was there.

Go!

He leveled his gun and fired in the direction of the house. He kept firing, emptying the magazine as he walked backward to the chopper. Someone grabbed him, pulling.

“In!”

Johnny turned and threw himself across the deck of the helicopter as it swept sideways and swung into the sky. Chelsea was next to him.

“Hey!” he yelled to her. “Thanks.”

In the next moment there was a flash, then a rumble.

They’d been hit by a surface-to-air missile.

33

Johansen shook his head.

“All right,” he shouted, tapping his clipboard against his leg as he walked around the “crash” site. “Exercise over. Everybody up.”

One by one, the “dead” rose.

“I think I would have survived the crash,” quipped Charles “Manson” Burgoyne.

“Recovery vehicles are that way,” said Johansen. “Breakfast and debrief in twenty.”

“I want some serious coffee,” said Johnny.

“I’d rather a beer,” said Burgoyne.

Johnny didn’t realize how hungry he was until he went back for thirds, chowing down on the excellent prime rib. He hadn’t eaten like this since coming to Arizona to train.

Actually, he hadn’t eaten like this in years. The CIA knew how to put out a spread.

He stayed away from the beer, refilling his coffee cup. Walking back from the buffet table, he noticed Chelsea sitting by herself. She’d changed and showered, and was huddled over a cup of coffee.

“Hey,” he told her, walking over. “This place taken?”

She looked up glumly, then shrugged.

“What’s up?” he asked, putting down his plate.

“I fucked up.”

“How?”

“I couldn’t figure out where to aim the suppressing fire.”

“You took out the first wave,” Johnny told her. “That missile that got us came from the hill, outside of the landing zone.”

“I didn’t see them.”

“They made it so we couldn’t succeed,” said Johnny. “We had shit like this at the Bureau. You see the team getting cocky, so you put them in their place. Relax. We kicked ass.”

Johnny reached over gingerly and patted her on the back. Chelsea bristled, and he pulled his hand away.

She’d been very standoffish the entire time they’d been training, avoiding him even.

He told himself it was a male-female thing — she had to appear tough and went out of her way to do it. There was only one other woman on the team, Krista Weather, a former Air Force pararescuer or PJ, and even he realized the atmosphere was pretty macho.

Or maybe this was too much for her. The training sessions were pretty damn extreme, beyond even those he’d been through in the Army or the FBI.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Perfect,” said Chelsea, rising with her coffee cup. “Just need a refill.”

Johnny noted silently that it was more than half-full.

All her life, Chelsea had been among the best, if not the best, at everything she did. Even field hockey, at least on her high school team.

But now, here, she felt like a failure. She’d screwed up and gotten them all killed.

She’d directed the second attack back at the wall, rather than looking for a wide scan from the backup bird, a surveillance drone supplied by the Air Force. She could have — should have — done that. She knew the procedure. She’d practiced.

In a few minutes, once they did the debrief, everyone was going to know.

Was that what bothered her the most — her ego? Everyone knowing she was capable of screwing up?

No, it was the hesitation itself, the way her brain hadn’t worked properly. Her brain hadn’t worked properly the entire time they’d been training.

Maybe she shouldn’t have volunteered in the first place. This was a hell of a lot harder than she’d expected.

Give up?

Weak. Weakling.

I’m not weak. I’m small, tiny compared to most of these guys. But I’m not weak.

Chelsea topped off her coffee cup and glanced over at Johnny. She was embarrassed to go back over.

Why?

Because he knew how vulnerable she really was. He knew she was mostly bluster and bullshit. He’d seen her vulnerable. And that wasn’t who she wanted to be.

“All right,” said Johansen, walking to the front. “Everyone full? Ready for a nap?”

One or two of the team members laughed. Everyone else had had their sense of humor pounded out of them on the range.

“This was designed as an impossible exercise,” said Johansen. “We kept throwing problems at you, left and right, trying to screw you up. And you held up well. So, good. But there’s always room for improvement.”

Johansen took a step forward as a screen lowered at the front of the room. He began talking about contingencies and communications, “the two C’s.”

He was big on axioms.

Why the hell did I volunteer for this? Chelsea asked herself for the millionth time. Who the hell do I think I am?

34

Massina checked his watch. They were roughly five minutes from landing. Time for one more call, maybe two.

He had at least ten important ones to make.

He decided to go with the first one on the list. It was Jimmy Gorman.

Probably not all that important, he thought, punching the number to redial. But it was too late to hang up.

“Louis, is this you?” boomed Gorman’s voice.

“It’s me, Jimmy. What’s up?”

“The governor is hoping to have dinner with you.”

“Are you his social secretary now?”

“I should be so lucky. All that free food? No, he asked me to set it up. He loved your speech. Loves it. Raving about it. Wants to get you to run for office.”

“That is never going to happen,” said Massina.

“Gotta keep him happy. He’ll take away the tax credits on your building if you don’t keep him happy.”

“I received no tax credits for that building.” It was a point of honor for him, and even the hint touched a nerve. “We get no special treatment from the government and we want none.”

“Joking, joking. Relax. Check your schedule and get back to me. I guarantee he’ll be there.”

Massina hung up before Gorman could continue.

The screen in front of him showed the next call he should make, with a note from his assistant: Charlie Rose re. show. Loved what you said at event. Wants to talk personally.

That would be a long call, no? He looked at the next name on the list — a business associate from Colorado interested in a joint venture.

That would be an even longer call.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the steward. “We’re about to land. We lose the satellite on approach.”

“Thank you.” Massina flipped over to his message board, running through it quickly. His assistant had just sent a laundry list of things that he needed to do:

The screen blinked, and an icon appeared, indicating their communications link had just been jammed.

“Off the grid,” he said to himself, turning off the laptop. “Thank God.”

Massina was at the door before Telakus and Chevy Mangro stirred from their seats; they’d slept nearly the entire flight — a small down payment on nearly a month’s work of sleep deprivation.

A pair of Jeep Wrangler Unlimiteds drove up to the Gulfstream’s ladder. Johansen hopped out of the first one, moving with a spry energy that he’d never demonstrated in Boston or D.C. Shaded by a baseball cap, his tanned face looked twenty years younger. It was only when you stared that you saw the lines around his eyes.

“Welcome to Never-Never Land,” Johansen said. “How was your flight?”

“Fine.”

“Not as luxurious as you’re used to, I guess,” said Johansen.

“I fly commercial.”

“Is that wise from a security point of view?”

Massina shrugged. In truth it probably wasn’t, at least according to Bozzone, but he reasoned that there were security risks no matter what.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for your cell phones and any other electronic devices,” said Johansen.

“I left them in the plane,” said Massina. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Telakus and Chevy had complied. They nodded.

“Good. Let’s get to it.”

Johansen got back behind the wheel; Massina sat next to him, and they drove alone to the “Bunkhouse”—a low-slung building nearly ten miles away that functioned as the facility’s nerve center. Dirt furled up behind them as they drove, Johansen managing a good clip on the hardscrabble trail. An occasional building intruded on the view, which otherwise ran for miles to a row of white-capped mountains that looked to be holding up the sky. Neither man spoke until Massina asked Johansen how Johnny and Chelsea were.

“Very well,” said Johansen. “She’s tough. Stoic. I like that.”

“Chelsea,” said Massina.

“Yup. She’s a hell of a girl.”

“I wouldn’t call her a girl,” said Massina.

“They’re all girls and boys to me,” confessed Johansen.

“Johnny?” asked Massina.

“He’s a natural. But I expected that with his résumé. This was all about team building,” added Johansen. “I wanted them involved because I want them to work with the others smoothly. She won’t be in danger,” he added. “Chelsea will be behind the lines. We won’t take chances.”

“Of course not,” said Massina, though they both knew that was a lie.

35

The knife was crusted with dirt, its edge dull. Even so, Ghadab immediately realized its worth.

He picked up the one next to it on the table.

“How much?” he asked the man.

“Two hundred Syrian pounds.”

“You use the infidels’ money?”

“The government has decreed it lawful,” said the merchant quickly. “If you have our holy currency, of course I would prefer that.”

“And if I have euros?” asked Ghadab.

“I’m sorry, brother,” said the man, looking him over quickly. “I will not be able to help you.”

“Are there places where they can be exchanged?”

“I would not want to deal with anyone who is a barbarian,” said the man. “I’m sure it’s not your intention to sin, and I mean no insult, but the law must be followed.”

So perfect an answer he had surely rehearsed it, thought Ghadab. He picked up the knife he really wanted. “How much for this one?”

“A hundred thousand pounds.”

A hundred thousand pounds would be roughly a hundred euros. Given the quality and age of the blade, it was a bargain, but Ghadab sensed he could get it for far less.

“It’s very old and has to be sharpened,” he told the man.

“Let me tell you about this knife, brother,” said the merchant. “It is a khanjar. It is very special. Used for ceremonies. Oh, an ancient blade — imagine the great men who held this in their hand. Their honor flows to you. Should you buy it, of course.”

“Really? This knife?”

“Do you not know the style? It is distinctive.” The merchant continued, giving him some basic information about how the curved blade would cut, then embellishing this particular one with a story of how it was passed down from a former Iraqi prince.

“How did it make it across the border?” asked Ghadab. He suspected the story had been fabricated, but it was a good tale.

“Ah, how does anything cross a border?” said the man. “I’m told it came across with a tribesman in the last war with the infidels, sold for the price of three meals.”

“I’ll give you three meals for it, then,” said Ghadab.

“I am not as desperate as the tribesman.”

A bit more haggling, and they reached a good price — fifty thousand Syrian pounds. Ghadab took it across the bazaar and found a man to clean and sharpen it while he watched. Two small jewels were missing just above the hilt, and the gold at the top of the dog-bone-shaped handle was worn off, but the curved blade was pristine, strong, well-tempered, and now razor sharp. The weapon was weighted perfectly; it felt like a claw in his hand, one he’d been born with.

He carried it back to his temporary home above the restaurant. Shadaa was waiting for him when he arrived, standing near the door exactly as he had left her that morning, wearing an abaya and hijab, the black robe too long so that it folded on the ground, and her head fully covered, even though they were inside.

“Master,” she said.

“Do not call me that!”

“But—”

Darkness enveloped him. He swung his hand up, the knife blade cutting the air with a loud whoosh. Ghadab took a step toward the girl, whose body seemed to shrivel before him.

Rage filled every corner of the room. Ghadab drew his arm back, ready to strike with the knife. The girl closed her eyes. Her lips moved in prayer.

Something pulled his arm back. The blackness turned to gray, and for a moment there was nothing in the universe but Ghadab and the girl given to him as a slave.

He could do whatever he wanted and no one would fault him.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said.

She stopped mumbling her prayer and opened her eyes.

“Go ahead,” he prompted. “Where were you born?”

“Mosul. Iraq.”

“Your tribe?”

“Jubar,” she said. “But we are Sunni, my family.”

Jubar was a large tribe, and a good portion Shia, as she intimated. He considered quizzing her on her beliefs — clearly she expected he would have some doubts, given the way she answered — but her eyes, rimmed with tears, convinced him she was sincere.

“Why were you made a slave?” he asked.

“My father and brother fought against the Caliphate. It is my great shame.”

“Were they brave men?”

She hesitated. “They were.”

“Misguided,” prompted Ghadab.

She didn’t answer. That stubbornness impressed him — she was loyal to her family, a good trait, even in one whose family had sinned.

“I can please you,” she offered.

Ghadab laughed. “I don’t want to be pleased. I’m going to give you back to the African.”

She fell to her knees as if in slow motion. He could guess why — the African would think that she had displeased Ghadab in some way. At best, she would be whipped severely and passed on to another warrior. At worst, death, with unimaginable pain.

Better to slit her throat himself; it would be more merciful.

Ghadab looked at the knife in his hand. “Do you know what this is?”

She didn’t answer. He stepped toward her and put the blade to her chin — gently. With a light touch, he pushed her head up to look at him.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked again.

“A knife.”

“Not just a knife. The curved blade?”

She shuddered.

“My grandfather ten generations ago was a prince,” Ghadab told her. He closed his eyes and saw the prince riding his stallion across the sands. The image, though borrowed from American cinema, was true to history; Ghadab’s ancestor had led his people against the Portuguese in a failed uprising.

He was brave, but premature; he did not understand the prophecies as Ghadab did.

Tears leaked from the girl’s eyes, though she struggled not to sob. Ghadab edged the blade against her neck, pressing very gently, rocking it back and forth.

So easy to snatch her life.

He withdrew the knife.

“I am going to rest,” he told her. “Make sure no one enters.”

36

Besides fresh intelligence on Ghadab and Daesh, Massina had brought along a few more “goodies”—tools he thought would prove useful for Johansen in his operation. Among them were lightweight bulletproof vests constructed of a carbon-boron compound the engineers dubbed “Bubble Wrap.” The nickname was obvious: the inserts, which took the place of traditional ceramic plates in standard armor, looked exactly like the sort of stuff you wrapped delicate china in before giving it to FedEx.

“It’ll take a fifty-caliber round to pop them,” Chevy quipped, showing them off to the two dozen members of the unit Johansen had assembled. Most were ex-military men recruited as paramilitary operatives by the CIA; all were on contract through a third-party company rather than being regular Agency employees.

Plausible deniability if things went to hell.

“The force will knock you down,” continued Chevy, “and it’ll hurt like a sonofabitch, but you’ll live.”

Sweater thin, the vest was a spin-off from a survivable demolitions mech; Massina brought two of those along as well. Except for the material they were made of, they looked very much like standard bomb-disposal bots — six-wheeled critters with three arms, each optimized for a different task. One arm featured a soldering iron tip on the “finger” of one of the arms; field tests by the Army on an earlier model had suggested this would help the mechs modify bomb wiring to destroy the bomb in place using the bomb’s own circuitry.

Far more versatile, though somewhat less durable, was “Peter”—officially RBT PJT 23-A, a bot with autonomous intelligence that Chelsea had led the development on. Unlike purpose-built robots, Peter could be given an assignment—“rescue the little girl from that burning building”—and then decide on his own how to proceed. Though it looked like a walking Erector set — it had four appendages that functioned as legs or arms, depending on the situation — Peter was far closer to humans in his capabilities than any anthropomorphic competitor.

In the Smart Metal lexicon, mechs and bots differed in that the former were designed for a specific task and generally had limited native intelligence; the latter were more versatile and, at least to some degree, autonomous. But the line between them constantly shifted and blurred, and the terms were becoming interchangeable even within the company.

UAVs were the aerial equivalent of the bots and mechs. Besides the ones that had been used in the morning exercise — Destiny, Hum, and Nightbird — Smart Metal had provided an aircraft small enough to be hidden in the palm of a hand. Made of metal, it looked like a boxy, twin-tailed paper airplane, with a micro-sized engine and a small propeller at the rear of the stubby body. Powered by a battery and launched with a heave, it could stay aloft for a little over ten minutes and was designed to provide immediate tactical video, relayed to a personal or central link. They called it “Stubby”—these were engineers, not poets.

The CIA had its own goodies, including the Tasers or “Nerf guns.” Johansen would also “borrow” feeds from military assets already in theater — which basically meant Global Hawks, the large UAVs that functioned as spy planes. The team would use a new com system tweaked by Massina’s engineers to seamlessly interface with transmissions and feeds in a variety of formats. They had also tweaked a portable Arabic translator, making it small enough to fit into an earbud.

Briefing nearly done, Johansen asked Massina to take the floor.

“I just want you all to know how much we appreciate what you’re doing,” he said. “All of Boston is behind you. Godspeed.”

This is a strange place I’ve reached, Massina thought as the audience applauded. Not one I could have imagined a year ago.

“You ready?” Johnny asked Chelsea as she rose.

“I’m just going to go to bed.”

“I meant for tomorrow. For everything.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“I’m pretty excited,” he told her. “I feel like we’re really doing something.”

She looked at him as if he’d just spoken in tongues and couldn’t decipher his meaning.

“I’m going to get some rest,” she said. “You should, too.”

“Come out with us,” he said. “We’re going into town.”

“Thanks. But no.” She squeezed his forearm gently, then walked away.

Massina followed Johansen down a hallway whose rough stone walls wore the marks of the machine that had bored them. The CIA officer stopped in front of a closed door and put his palm on a glass plate near the handle. A numbered keyboard appeared when he removed his hand; he punched a code and the door slid open, revealing a paneled lounge that would not have been out of place in a fancy hotel. An elaborate bar made of maple and exotic inlays stood along one wall. Tables covered with thick white tablecloths stood at intervals around the room.

“Looks like a nightclub,” said Massina.

“We needed a place to entertain the VIPs,” said Johansen apologetically, leading Massina to the bar. He reached down and retrieved a bottle of Aberlour Scotch.

“None for me,” said Massina.

“Hungry?”

“No thanks.”

Johansen filled a highball glass halfway. “We really appreciate your help,” he told Massina, swirling the liquor gently. “Everything.”

“We’ll help in any way we can.”

Johansen savored a sip.

“Your unit tracking Ghadab,” he said pointedly. “I thought you were shutting that down.”

“We are.”

“Because we don’t want him knowing what we’re up to.”

“I understand. I want to help you get this bastard,” added Massina. “I’ll do anything I can.”

“You’ve done a lot. More than enough.”

“We can do more.”

“Some people in the Agency—” Johansen stopped short, then took another sip of the Scotch.

“Some people what?”

“You’ve been very outspoken.” Johansen was making an effort to keep his voice neutral; Massina felt patronized. “I think it would be better if you just took a step back.”

“Why?”

“Just… you shouldn’t be out front on this. Take it down a notch. Two notches,” added Johansen. “Seriously, anything you say — maybe it jeopardizes the mission on the ground.”

“How?”

“Back here. It’s complicated.” Johansen drained the glass.

“You want me to shut up?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“How would you put it?”

“Your appearances in the media — they draw attention. You don’t want that.”

“That’s true. I don’t.” Massina rose.

“Sure you won’t have a drink?”

“Positive. I have to go.”

Chelsea answered the door in her sweats.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Massina said.

“Just studying my Arabic.” She held up a tablet. “Masa’ alkhayrsmall.”

“Good evening to you. But you’re slurring a bit.”

“You speak Arabic?”

“A few words. Business.”

“‘Udkhul. Come on in.”

The room was about the size of a typical business-class hotel room, with similar amenities. There were two upholstered chairs on the far end. Chelsea took one, Massina the other.

“I wanted to make sure you were OK,” said Massina.

“OK? Sure.”

“You can back out. Opt out. No problem.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I just want you to know I’m completely behind you, whatever you do,” he said. “I know this is dangerous.”

“Did Yuri put you up to this?”

“Not at all.”

“You don’t think I can handle it?”

“No. I just… want to make sure.”

Massina couldn’t find the right words. What were they?

I don’t want you hurt.

“I’m going to be way behind the lines.” Chelsea’s tone was insistent, as if she were announcing that the project she was working on would work, despite early results suggesting the opposite.

“OK. Good.” Massina reached into his pocket. “I brought you something. A watch.”

It was a Timex knockoff, its main attributes being the ability to show the time in two different time zones and its price: under twenty bucks.

“It doesn’t just tell the time,” said Massina. “There’s a locator in it. If you’re ever in trouble, remove the thin plastic at the back. Put it somewhere on your skin. It’ll send us a beacon. We’ll use it to locate you.”

“It’s a transmitter?”

“No, it’s passive. I don’t have the resources to outfit your entire team,” added Massina. “I’m giving Johnny one, too. If you’re in trouble, alert us. I’ll move heaven and earth to get to you.”

Neither one of them spoke for a moment, Chelsea looking at the watch, Massina looking at her. The watch contained a rare isotope that could be detected by a commercial mining satellite; removing the film created an electric charge from the skin strong enough to activate a molecular switch that released the shielding. The isotope was ridiculously expensive, and the satellite’s services — only leasable for a full year — exorbitant, but the real roadblock to building more was the switch: it had to be constructed in a specialized lab and took a little more than a week to align properly. Massina had hoped to outfit all of Yuri’s team, but there simply hadn’t been time.

“Thanks, boss.” Chelsea rose from the chair and hugged him. “Thank you.”

There were only two bars in the nearest town. Massina found Johnny and his friends in the first one he checked.

“Hey, boss,” said Johnny loudly. He had to shout to be heard over the blaring country music. “This is my boss,” he announced to the others at the table. “Louis Massina.”

“Looks like you’re all ready for another round,” said Massina. “I’ll get it.”

Johnny came over to the bar with him.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” Massina told him as they waited for the drinks. “And give you something.”

He handed him a watch. “If you get in trouble, pull the vinyl backing off. We’ll find you.”

“Do I want to know how it works?” asked Johnny.

Massina laughed. “Probably not. I don’t have the resources to outfit your entire team,” he added. “But both you and Chelsea have one. So…” Unsure what else to say, Massina dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. “I have to get back to the plane.”

“You don’t want a drink?” asked Johnny as he started to leave.

“I have to get back. Stay safe.”

37

The pounding on the door was so loud it sounded like peals of thunder. Chelsea cowered on the bed, knowing that any moment the locks would give way.

It didn’t happen this way.

This must be a dream.

The terrorist barged through the door. Chelsea tried to get up but couldn’t. Arms and legs pinned to the bed, she saw him leaning over, climbing atop her.

Wake up! Wake up!

She screamed, and in that moment the nightmare evaporated.

Alone in the room, embarrassed, Chelsea sat up and curled her arms around her chest. She listened for a long minute, afraid someone had heard her. But there was nothing.

It was only a little after nine at night. Most of the team was probably still out drinking.

“Should have gone with Johnny,” she said to the empty room. “Should have gone.”

Her sweatshirt was soaked with sweat and needed to be changed. She slipped out of bed, pulling the shirt over her head as she walked to the dresser. As she bent down she remembered she’d already packed; all her clothes except what she was wearing and what she’d wear tomorrow were in the duffel bag by the door.

Naked, she crawled back under the covers, willing herself back to sleep.

38

Two weeks into their planning sessions, Ghadab sensed that his team had become complacent, even lazy. Ghadab himself had done the hard work two years before, planting deep agents, arranging for young devotees to infiltrate college programs, getting everyone in place. There was much left to do — security routines to be investigated, money to be moved, sleeper cells to be reactivated — but his team here seemed nonchalant, unfocused. They argued among themselves over petty things. Worse, several were spending inordinate hours at the cafés in town. So far as he knew, none were violating the law — if he had even suspected any of drinking alcohol, punishment would have been swift and final. But they lacked the discipline a successful operation required.

And so he planned an exercise in a desert village a few miles south of Dar al’Abid as Sud. Perched on the lowest slope of the mountains, the handful of buildings were grouped around what in ancient times was probably a river, but now was just an indentation in the scrubland. Government troops had recently moved through the village, setting up outposts along the highway to the east, between the settlement and Palmyra. It was roughly eighty miles away from his bunker, if they could have traveled in a straight line.

That, of course, wasn’t possible.

His men assembled at one in the morning, woken personally by Ghadab.

“We are having an adventure,” he told the few who dared ask why they were being summoned.

They boarded four pickups commandeered from local citizens. Using Caliphate vehicles would have entailed a requisition and unnecessary questions and even possibly interference, and Ghadab had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with such trivialities. It was far easier to walk up to the owner in the market and tell him that the truck would be returned in a few days, with a full tank of gas as payment.

No one argued. He didn’t even have to show his gun, though one or two did glance at his knife — he’d bought a fine sheath for the khanjar and hung it from his belt.

They drove on the highway for an hour, following Ghadab, before he veered off five miles short of the government checkpoint. He drove another ten miles southwest over the desert, doing his best to avoid the worst of the dunes and pits as he followed his instincts and a GPS unit he’d bought at the bazaar. The dim light revealed a succession of landmarks he’d memorized the night before; finally, he came to a wide, flat plain with loose sand and stopped.

The rest of his team gathered in a semicircle around him.

“The village of Hum lies in that direction,” he told them as they got out of the trucks, “ten miles. It is filled with apostates and nonbelievers. They are Shia, and they welcomed the blasphemer’s army. We will show them what happens to such sinners. Here is a map of the place.”

Ghadab unfolded a paper image of the place from Google Earth that he had printed earlier. A pumping station sat at one end of the village; before the war it had supplied water for the modest farms on the southern end of town. “How do we punish these apostates? What are the steps?”

“We cut these power lines first,” said Idi the Sudanese. “We take over the police station and secure their weapons.”

“Strike the pumping station at the same moment,” said Ahmed. He was new to the team, a student from Egypt, but very promising: he had recruited two suicide bombers in Cairo before being called. “But we don’t have enough explosives.”

“This is a farming area, and there are not enough explosives?” prompted Ghadab.

The question sparked the group. They had been thinking in simple terms — cut power, blow up the obvious symbols of corruption. But now they began to think creatively, to see the possibilities, to appreciate the destruction they could inflict. He sat back quietly as they spoke back and forth, until at last they had an outline of a mission.

“I think it is an excellent plan,” he said. “But the proof is in the doing. So let it be done.”

39

Ten years before, T’aq Ur had been a small but prosperous village on the Euphrates, dominated by Kurds but very much a part of Syria. The people who lived there, Sunni Muslims mostly, grew a variety of vegetables in the river-irrigated fields. There were pomegranate trees, olive groves, apricots. The most prosperous had goats, primarily for their own or their neighbors’ tables. The meat was slaughtered by the local butcher in accordance with practices well over a thousand years old; the farming itself was only slightly more advanced. The tiny town was a place time had forgotten.

But the dictator had not. And in the early days of the revolution, he remembered that a politician who had been born there had once opposed him. The Syrian army shelled the town for a week before coming to pick through the remains.

Then came waves of rebels, some backed by Turkey, some part of ISIS. They took the village after two weeks of sieges. A counterattack by the Syrian government failed. The Russians came and bombed, ineffectively, since most of what was left by that time was rubble. A Syrian platoon backed by Iranian regulars managed to gain a foothold, only to be driven out by a Turkish-backed rebel group that numbered no more than two dozen men. The stones changed hands once or twice again, but by that time, the only inhabitants of T’aq Ur were mosquitoes. Even they soon quit the place — there wasn’t enough fresh blood to live on.

The Kurds arrived in January, setting up an outpost with American help. The troops moved on within days, pushing their front farther south. T’aq Ur was finally completely free — and completely empty.

The lack of people was exactly why Johansen had chosen it as his base of operations. They were a good distance from Palmyra — roughly a seventy-minute drive across the desert — but within range of the devices that would help find Ghadab. His teams could stage from here without fear of interference or being attacked by surprise. If they needed help, the Kurds were nearby.

His headquarters was in a bunker complex the Israelis claimed had been part of Syria’s clandestine nuclear program. There had been six buildings at one time; one was about the size of a small U.S. elementary school. This was now a pile of rubble; besides the bricks, it contained a number of unexploded artillery shells. The next largest building was a barracks designed to hold about a hundred soldiers. It, too, was wrecked, but it had a usable basement, and it was in the basement that Johansen set up shop.

They moved in at night. The basement was cleared easily enough, with the help of Peter and the two mechs programmed for lifting. While it was dusty and filled with spiders and even a few snakes, the walls and ceiling were sturdy, and there was plenty of room for sleeping bags. Partitions were stretched between the piers that held up the building.

They slept in the space closest to the stairs: if the roof collapsed, they’d have the best chance of getting out from there. The next night they cleared more of the building, reinforced the ceiling, then divided the area into living and working quarters.

Prep work nearly done, Johansen sent out patrols in pickups to get a feel for the area. Everyone wore nondescript fatigues; if anyone checked the labels, they’d find they came from China. As much gear as possible had been sourced from outside the U.S.; even the vehicles that had taken them there were Japanese.

Not that the charade would fool anyone.

The agency would use Massina’s newly minted public profile as an antiterror firebrand to imply he was behind it all: a self-made billionaire unleashing a private army to revenge his city.

There were precedents, most notably the mission launched by Ross Perot to rescue his people kidnapped by Iran in the late ’70s. The media would have a field day drawing parallels between the two men.

Johansen had lied about the Agency wanting Massina to take a lower profile. As far as they were concerned, the louder the better. He, on the other hand, worried the inventor was making himself too much of a target.

Johansen couldn’t worry about that now. There were too many other things to fret about.

Chelsea spent the day organizing her work area, setting up the control units. When the sun set, she went outside and put the bomb mechs to work clearing the artillery shells from the wreckage around them. Each shell had to be carried into the desert a mile away and quietly rendered inert. Which was a bit of a bummer — all those explosives would have made a good-sized boom.

It took longer than she expected. She had to call it quits at sunrise with about half the job still undone.

“Half day, huh?” joked Johnny as she closed down the units.

“Yeah, I’m a slacker,” she told him. “Calling it quits at twenty hours. What are you doing?”

“Patrol.”

“Good luck.”

He looked pretty good in his long Arab shirt and baggy pants, Chelsea thought as she went downstairs. Very movie-star-like. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, he was on respirators and in a drug-induced coma, legs gone, chest full of blood.

A half hour later, Johnny joined Turk and Christian and set out south in a pickup, aiming to launch a UAV over their target area. Turk — a former SEAL who looked like an Arab, though he was born in Indiana — was at the wheel; Christian, who despite his name was a first-generation Muslim immigrant from Kurdistan, rode shotgun in the back. Johnny handled coms, in contact with the base via supplied video feeds and old-fashioned radio. While they had brought helmets that could do the same, to a man the team considered the helmets too cumbersome to use except in an actual assault. Wearing them now would make it obvious that they weren’t a patrol of Daesh soldiers — which was what they hoped to pass for, at least from a distance.

After they had driven for about a half hour, they stopped to launch a Hum. With the two battery-powered engines running full-out, Johnny ran with the aircraft across a flat stretch of sand until he felt it trying to lift from his grip. Putting his head down, he increased his speed, then threw it like a javelin. The UAV tucked right, then swooped back level and began soaring, climbing slowing into the night. The sound from its electric motors faded quickly; by the time it reached 1,200 feet, it was both impossible to see or hear in the night sky.

Johnny hopped back into the pickup. He had preprogrammed the little bird to fly a figure-eight pattern above the truck, acting as a scout.

“There’s a checkpoint near the road to our east,” Johnny told Turk, showing him the screen. “Five miles.”

They tucked east, then south, skirting a small settlement to reach a ridge two miles due northeast of Palmyra where they could survey the city and surrounding area easily.

A pair of highways intersected near the tip of the city, making it an important crossroads. The highways themselves were barely that: they accommodated a single lane of traffic in each direction, and though paved, it was hard to tell in places because of the sand that typically covered the pavement. An airport once used by the Syrian air force sat like a dog’s tail at the southeast corner of the city. The runways were too cratered for use by planes, but the Daesh forces had about two platoons’ worth of men stationed in barracks there. A brackish, seasonal marsh folded against the edge of an ancient lake bed at the opposite end of the city; a smaller, similarly dead lake sat nearby.

Daesh troops were scattered at intervals around Palmyra’s boundaries. Turk mapped out a path between them and set off on foot, leaving Johnny and Christian with the truck. He walked around the back of the hill to a dried creek bed, using that to get within fifty yards of a building on the city boundary. He was just about to climb over a wall into the backyard when Johnny spotted movement on a nearby rooftop.

“Seventy meters to your left, two guys on that house,” he told Turk.

Turk dropped behind the wall. Johnny watched the two figures kneel near the bricks that marked the edge of the roof. They were looking in Turk’s direction, but didn’t seem to be able to pick him out of the shadows.

“They see me?” asked Turk.

“Hard to tell.” A moment later, one of the men began spraying his AK-47 in Turk’s general direction. He ran through the entire magazine before stopping. The firing was erratic, but near enough to Turk to make it clear he’d heard or seen something.

“Shit,” muttered Turk.

“Yeah. We got lights.”

“Patrol?”

“Maybe — pickup coming from the center of town. One of our guys is on the phone.”

“I’m gonna back out.”

“Stay low.” Johnny turned to Christian, who was watching the feed over his shoulder. “Maybe we should do a diversion.”

“Nah. He gets out without being seen, Daesh writes this off as two guys with overactive imaginations.”

Turk crawled three hundred yards to a dirt road, changed direction slightly, and then half crawled, half ran, back in their direction. By that time a patrol had arrived. They did a perfunctory search, barely looking over the wall before heading back and returning to their post in a building near the city center.

A half hour later, sure that they hadn’t been detected, Johnny recovered the UAV and the three Americans headed back to their base.

40

It began with a car bomb in the market area an hour and a half after sunrise. The brothers used too many explosives, but that was hardly a drawback: Ghadab grinned as he watched a woman a block away pitched into the air by the explosion.

She wasn’t wearing a head covering when the bomb exploded. Clearly, God had seen her and directed her demise.

The explosion set off an alarm at police headquarters. Three of the four officers on duty were cut down as they rushed from the building. The fourth came out with his hands up.

He was taken to Ghadab, who was supervising the raid from a roof across the street. Without bothering to question him, Ghadab slit the man’s throat. Blood fanned the air purple-red before he even pulled the knife away.

The ravages of war had reduced the population to barely over two hundred, the majority women and children. Shouting and firing their Kalashnikovs as they went door to door, Ghadab’s men rousted thirty-three males, all but two or three over the age of fifty or under the age of fifteen, to an empty lot in the shadow of the old storage tanks near the center of town.

“What a pathetic collection,” Ghadab told Yuge the Iraqi. “Not one of them could fight for the Caliphate.”

“That one there, the fat one,” said Yuge, who’d begun interrogating the captives as they were brought over. “He claims to have fought for us.”

“What is he doing in the city, then?”

“He says he is a spy, with information for the Commander.”

“Bring him to me.”

Yuge grabbed the man by the shirt and dragged him to Ghadab. His white shirt and pants had been soaked with sweat; dirt caked on them like mud. A coil of fat above his sagging shoulders supported his head.

“Who are you?” demanded Ghadab.

“Ari, son of Rhaddad,” said the man, as if he expected Ghadab to have heard of him.

“What are you doing in this village?”

“I am preparing for the brothers,” claimed the man. “The infidels are all around. They are planning to strike Palmyra.”

“When?”

“Soon. Very soon.”

Ghadab took hold of the man’s arm and dragged him toward the others, who were watching to see what would happen.

“Tell me,” Ghadab shouted. “Is this man a true believer?”

No one answered. Ghadab took his knife from his belt.

“Tell me,” Ghadab shouted, pointing his knife at a gray-haired prisoner. “Is this man a true believer?”

The man began to shake, but didn’t speak.

“I’ve seen him drink,” said another man.

Ghadab let go of Ari and walked to the man who’d spoken. He pointed his khanjar at his face.

“When?” demanded Ghadab.

“After the Daesh were driven out.”

“You swear this?”

“May God strike me down.”

Ghadab walked back to the fat man.

“The man there says you are a liar,” Ghadab told him.

“With God as my witness, I swear on my children and all that is right—”

His sentence ended in a sputter and cough, his windpipe and throat slit by the fat part of Ghadab’s knife.

“To lie before God is a sin punishable by death,” bellowed Ghadab, turning back to the others. “Who will join the Caliphate?”

It was foolish to resist, and yet the crowd was not unanimous. Only half volunteered, all but two arguably too young to be accepted.

“Put them in the truck,” Ghadab told Yuge.

Yuge and two other men herded them to a pickup they had commandeered. It wasn’t hard; the men went eagerly, thankful to be spared.

Ghadab looked over the others.

“None of you will fight?” he asked.

“Please,” said one of the men. “We have been in our share of battles. We are worn from the fighting. All of us.” He gathered up his long shirt and held it up to reveal a scar on his belly. “The dictator’s troops gave me this scar.”

Ghadab leaned over and with his knife touched the top of the jagged purple gouge on the man’s pelvis.

“You fought on the government’s side?” asked Ghadab.

“I fought against the corrupt dictator,” answered the man.

“I have worse scars,” said Ghadab.

He pushed the knife tip against the wound. To his surprise, the old man remained stoic even as the tip liberated a trickle of blood the pure color of a poppy whose leaves had just burst open.

“Enough,” said Ghadab. And with that he slashed the knife horizontally against the man’s midsection, so hard that the old man folded to the ground. Ghadab knelt and slit the man’s throat, bringing him a quick death — a mercy. The smell of blood intoxicated him and he lingered for a moment, absorbing it.

By the time he rose, the rest of the captives lay on the ground, shot by his men. In the distance, he heard gunfire — the “volunteers” in the truck had all been killed.

“Burn the buildings,” he said. “You can take what women are suitable as slaves. Kill the rest.”

41

With Chelsea gone, Borya had little to do. No one would tell her where her boss and mentor had gone — very likely no one knew — but gossip pointed toward a project that would avenge the Boston attacks. Naturally, Borya wanted in. But no one was going to let a teenage intern get involved in such a thing.

Barely a barrier for her.

Smart Metal’s work computers were tied to a “sterile system”—there was no access to the outside world, one of the more basic precautions that the company used to protect against viruses and espionage. They did, however, have computers that could access the internet without access to the company’s internal system. One day, soon after Chelsea left, Borya decided to use one to find out all she could about the terrorists who had attacked her city. Her first sessions were Google searches primarily, and a lot of reading. From there, she began trolling chat rooms where ISIS supporters hung out, then explored so-called “dark sites” hidden from normal web searches and used for transferring propaganda and untraceable communications.

She found some pretty disgusting stuff. It was fascinating to see how the perverts thought.

This wasn’t what the external links were supposed to be used for, and when she reported to work after school one day and found Bozzone waiting for her in the lab, she knew she was in trouble.

Not that she let on.

“Hey, Beef,” she said, greeting the security chief like an old friend. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Mr. Massina wants to see you.”

“Awesome.”

Borya was an old hand at getting in trouble; she visited the principal’s office at her Catholic school so often the receptionist had nicknamed a chair “Borya’s throne.” But this was different. She loved working at Smart Metal, and the tone in Bozzone’s voice made it clear that she wasn’t being summoned to see Mr. Massina because he had a birthday present for her. But she feigned indifference, slinging her backpack over a shoulder and following Bozzone to the elevator.

“Think the rain will stop in time for the Red Sox game?” Borya asked.

Bozzone turned his head, raised his eyebrow slightly, but said nothing. Deposited in Massina’s outer office, Borya had no time to settle on a strategy as the secretary waved her right in. Massina was at his desk, staring at his computer, chin in one hand, pen in the other.

Was it the right or the left that was fake? She couldn’t remember.

“Ahhhh, Ms. Tolevi.” Massina frowned. “Have a seat.”

“Hey, boss.” Her voice squeaked. She tried clearing her throat, but suddenly her mouth and everything in it felt drier than sandpaper.

“I see that you’ve been doing some extracurricular work on my time,” he said.

Extracurricular?

That’s it! I can claim it’s for a school assignment.

“I notice that you’ve been doing some research on Daesh,” continued Massina. “ISIS.”

“I want to kill those bastards,” she blurted.

“As do we all,” said Massina grimly. “Who told you to do it?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

It was a way out: offer up the name of someone who’d said it was OK. But that was ratting out someone, which would be against her code.

More important, there was no one to rat out.

“I did it myself.”

“And you found something interesting?”

“Not yet.”

“What did you find?” Massina asked.

“They use anonymous servers and some repeaters, like routing things through Ukraine and the Checkers Republic.”

“Czech.”

“That’s what I meant.” Borya felt her face flush. That was a stupid mistake — she knew what the damn country’s name was.

Checkers. Duh!

“There are chat rooms, and they encrypt stuff,” she said quickly. “Like there are a couple of personalities on there that might be interesting to follow through and see.”

“You’re just free-forming?” asked Massina.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re doing all this on your own, without an agenda. Just talking.”

“I want to find out what I can.”

“That’s a good attitude.”

Maybe I’m not going to get fired.

“Smart Metal computers are for work projects only,” said Massina, once again stern. “For various reasons. Including your safety. Even if that weren’t the case, provoking these people, even getting your identity known to them — it’s very, very dangerous. These people are killers.”

“I know that. B-but—”

“There really can be no buts. Is that clear?”

She nodded reluctantly.

“Does your father know about this?”

“No.”

“You’re to explain everything you’ve done in detail to Mr. Bozzone. And that’s it. Understood?”

“I guess.”

“That is not the right answer.” Massina rose from his desk, angry. “Do not engage these people,” he added. “Understood?”

“OK,” she said meekly.

Massina sensed that he had scared her, but he also realized she wouldn’t stay scared for very long. She was too curious, too adventurous, and she had grown up with a father who was both a spy and a borderline mobster. So when Bozzone came to ask how things went, Massina simply shrugged.

“She’ll stay off for a few days, maybe.”

“As long as she doesn’t use our computers,” said Bozzone.

“I’m not worried about the computers.”

“Neither group that tried tracking her was ISIS.”

“Not yet.”

Two different hacker outfits had tried to trace Borya and the system she was using, launching crude probes on the off-site servers used for the “public” internet computers. Bozzone’s people had, in turn, tracked them to Asian operations, where ISIS had no known connections.

“I’ll watch her,” said Bozzone, with the tone of an older brother being assigned to babysit a younger sibling. “We’ve locked out the sites and her chat functions.”

“I’m sure she’ll look for a way around them,” said Massina. “Keep her safe.”

“I’ll do my best. But—”

“No buts on this,” said Massina. “Make sure it happens.”

42

Chelsea studied the image from the Nightbird UAV circling above Palmyra. Flying at 15,000 feet, the aircraft was mapping every magnetic field in the ISIS-held city. Every motor, every current, was measured and recorded by the aircraft’s powerful sensors. Once the data was gathered, simple filters would identify different motor types, showing the likely locations of computers, for example, or air conditioners — both likely markers of high-ranking Daesh commanders.

“Which one of these is the prison?” asked Johansen, standing over her and trying to make sense of the splotch-covered map.

Chelsea zoomed out and overlaid the display on the afternoon’s satellite image.

“Here,” she said, pointing to a square at the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

“Nothing there?”

“One computer,” she told him, checking the data quickly.

“They’re not using it as a headquarters?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

The regime had emptied the prison some months before, then blown up most of the buildings with crude barrel bombs. But two buildings remained intact, and Johansen’s original intelligence had indicated it was being used as a headquarters.

“Doesn’t match what you’re looking for,” said Chelsea. “Unless Ghadab doesn’t use computers.”

“They all use computers,” insisted Johansen. “They’re pretty modern for people who want to send the world back to the Stone Ages. What about the school?”

Chelsea recentered the image, focusing on a two-story building on the western side of town now used as the operational headquarters of the local ISIS commander.

“Lots,” said Chelsea. “Twelve in the scan, and the bird isn’t done.”

“Good.”

They could blow up the school with the touch of a button — the Destiny drone was orbiting a short distance away. But it was at best a secondary target — unless Ghadab was inside.

“Here’s a site that wasn’t mapped,” said Chelsea, moving the image farther south. “It’s a house. There are at least twenty computers there, and three good-sized air conditioners. Look.”

“Is there an internet connection?”

“Can’t tell. But there’s a cable line. You can see where it goes underground.”

“Put it on the list to watch.”

“Already have.”

The UAV had found clusters of six or seven computers in three other buildings that had not been ID’d for surveillance by the CIA. Two were at small businesses on the western end of the city, closest to the ancient ruins. The last was within a hundred yards of the wall where Turk had been when he spooked the guards.

“There’s a bunker up here that you had marked as abandoned,” Chelsea added, showing him a location several miles north of the city. “Six computers there, printers. Everything on standby, though. The power profiles are low coming in, so I’m extrapolating.”

“Not being used?”

“No.”

“Put it on the list anyway.”

“Already did.”

“The list is getting pretty long,” said Johansen. “Sometimes I think we’d be better off leveling the whole city.”

While Chelsea was ferreting out potential targets, five three-man teams were crossing the desert south, preparing to plant a web of video and ELINT bugs around the city.

Two teams would enter the city on the western highway with commercial traffic after morning prayers; there were generally a half-dozen trucks entering at that time, and the guards tended to be blasé. The infiltrators were the best Arabic speakers in the group, and to a man, looked as if they’d been born in Syria. Their targets were buildings near the city boundary.

Two other teams would enter from the fields to the south, disguised as farmworkers going home for a noonday meal. Their targets were outside the main area of the city, less heavily traveled; they, too, were competent Arabic speakers, though two had papers identifying them as foreign workers as a cover for their looks.

The fifth team, which included Johnny Givens, would plant bugs in the most heavily trafficked and dangerous part of the city. Their mission was not only the riskiest, but it also had to be completed before the others: besides the bugs, they were planting boosters that were needed to transmit data from the other sensors. Without the boosters in place, the other bugs couldn’t be turned on. The mission was so risky it would be done by bots under cover of darkness.

They chose an abandoned archaeological dig at the city outskirts as their command post. Sitting on the lee side of a hill, the digs were seventy-five yards from a former Syrian army compound. That, too, was abandoned, except for a Daesh military commander and his family. En route to the main objectives, one of the bots would plant a bug to cover the home as well. Black-shirt patrols ran at roughly two-hour intervals around the city each night; the bots’ incursion and route was planned accordingly.

At some point in the war, a flight of Russian aircraft had launched a bombing raid against the city with spectacular results: they had managed to miss every one of their half-dozen targets. Most of their bombs had landed on vacant land near the excavations. Johnny and the others parked their truck in one of the craters, lugging their gear to a knoll at the edge of the archaeological site.

They launched a Hum. Christian trotted to a second hill on their eastern flank, commanding the roadway from the city; Turk and Johnny got the robots ready for their mission.

Nicknamed “koalas,” the bots had been preprogrammed with GPS and satellite data. About a fifth of the size of their namesakes, each unit had twelve legs, six on top and six on the bottom. The legs had three small toes with claws that could grip and enable them to climb — like actual koalas.

“How do you know if they’re right side up?” asked Turk.

“I don’t,” answered Johnny.

They had to wait through a lengthy startup routine. One of the units did not respond to the test. Johnny replaced it — he had two backups — then launched each unit individually with verbal commands. One after the other they marched off, kicking up a trail of dust.

“Out little army,” said Turk as Johnny sat down in front of the control unit. His tone was somewhere between a sneer and admiration.

Their small size and legs made the bots hard to see, but it also limited how fast they could go; 2.5 mph was their top speed. To reach the city where their targets were, they needed to first cross about a thousand yards’ worth of open terrain, enter and traverse the empty compound, turn into an alley, and cross the back of another yard before reaching the streets. Stopping periodically to consider data from the Hum and a Nightbird controlled by Chelsea back at the base, it took nearly twenty minutes for the lead bot to reach the compound. The units seemed overly cautious to Johnny, but short of taking over each one individually, there was nothing he could do.

The bots split up as they approached a row of houses on the other side of the empty compound, beginning to scatter as they sought out their targets. The houses were occupied; several had people sleeping on the roofs, common in the warm Syrian nights. The bots slowed precipitously as they neared the houses, stopping whenever any of the sleeping bodies moved.

“We’re way behind schedule,” said Turk. “At this rate we ain’t gonna make it. By a lot. You gotta speed us up.”

“The only thing I can do is remove the safety protocol,” said Johnny.

“What’ll that do?”

“They won’t stop and update their data.”

“Do it.”

“Yeah.”

No longer pausing or worrying about being seen, the koalas moved ahead on the last routes they had programmed. They still weren’t very fast, but at least they were no longer stopping every few seconds.

“I’m hearing a truck,” said Christian a few minutes later. “Coming out of the traffic circle in our direction.”

“Yeah, OK, I’m looking at it,” said Johnny, staring at the Hum’s video screen. “Couple of pickups.”

“Patrol?” asked Christian.

“Early for that,” said Turk.

Johnny watched the vehicles continue toward the traffic circle near the ruins where Christian was perched. The intersection was in an odd place, a remnant of an earlier traffic pattern now shunted by the decision two decades before to route the highway farther east.

“The trucks are going south,” said Johnny.

“Three guys in the back of the lead,” said Christian, watching through the nightscope of his rifle. “All awake.”

“Something new,” sneered Turk.

The lead truck drove south toward the center of town — and their target buildings. Johnny started to relax — then saw that instead of following, the second vehicle turned right, then took a quick left directly in the path of four koalas. Before he could order the bots to retreat, the truck was on them. It missed the two bots closest to the corner, but caught the other two midway across the road.

You gotta be kidding me! Murphy’s Law, right?

No, my dumb decision.

Stunned, Johnny stared at the overhead image for a few seconds before switching to manual control on K4, one of the koalas that had been hit. The bot responded with a diagnostic signal indicating that it had lost mobility. K6 gave him the same code.

All of the other bots were still active. Cursing himself, Johnny put them back into cautious mode. Each immediately stopped and reassessed their surroundings and path.

“We lost two bots,” he told Turk.

“Shit. What do we do?”

“We can have units pick them up on the way back,” said Johnny. “The question is how to get video bugs into the two spots they’re going to miss.”

There was only one backup, and it couldn’t carry all the bugs they had to place. And there wouldn’t be enough time to recharge one of the bots when it returned — that took an hour and a half, which would surely take them past dawn.

Johnny dialed into the secure com link to confer with Chelsea about possibly moving some of the bugs so they wouldn’t need to place as many. She suggested a couple of changes, but the most they could lose were two bugs.

While they were talking, one of the pickups circled back toward the koalas. This time, with their protocols back in place, the units scurried for safety.

Scurry being a relative term.

The vehicle zoomed past the buildings, continuing north toward the traffic circle. It drove north through a large residential area, then headed past a mostly abandoned slum of shacks and refugee housing, speeding to a pair of ruined buildings just short of the hills north of town, a good two and a half miles from the highway. Two figures got out, then disappeared in the rubble. The truck immediately backed out and started for Palmyra.

“Chelsea, you see that?” Johnny asked over the radio. “There’s a bunker there.”

“We’re working on it. We spotted it earlier.”

“That’s near the road we were taking out.”

“We’ll give you a new route.”

“Roger that.”

Johnny decided to send his lone reserve koala — K10—to the farthest video spot, then use the first returning unit to plant the last bug by swapping out the battery from the disabled unit. That was harder than he thought — after struggling with the connectors, he had to reboot and reprogram the unit by putting it into “base memory,” feed the GPS target coordinates one at a time, and then go through a series of diagnostic checks with Chelsea’s help. They’d just finished when she told him that Johansen wanted to talk.

“If you have a moment,” she added, joking.

The light note reminded him of home. It was jarring.

“That bunker in the desert,” said Johansen. “You think you can plant a video bug on the roof?”

“Maybe.”

“Good.”

The line snapped off before Johnny could discuss the logistics. There was a clear view of the road from the ruins; no way they could get in there. A hill to the west would give them cover, but even so, the last quarter mile was wide-open; anyone outside could easily see them, and have an even easier shot.

“We’ll be spotted easily,” said Turk. “Look — there’s a video camera. I’m guessing there are others. Can we scavenge the batteries from the dead units?”

“They’re pretty crushed,” said Johnny. “We can’t count on them.”

“No way we get across to the bunker without being seen. I’ll talk to Johansen.”

“No, I have an idea,” said Johnny. “We’ll hold back K3 with the battery from the malfunctioning bot. We’ll use that.”

“So how do we get the other bugs in place here?”

“I say we put it there ourselves.” He held up the screen. “Clear run if we go now.”

43

Ghadab was too energized to sleep after the operation at Hum, and so after dropping off most of his men, he returned to the bunker. Success would breed success — his people had tasted blood, and would plan and recruit with new vigor.

There were three possibilities of targets, all stupendous. He would cripple a city, do so much damage that the infidels would have to come, and Armageddon would begin.

Which city? Rome, the most impressive.

Boston kept intruding in his thoughts, egotistical, boasting Boston. The mayor, the policeman who claimed to have sent ten martyrs to their reward.

The rich man, Massina.

Ghadab paced up and down the bunker’s center hall. There were many things to do, things that only he should handle: travel arrangements for his scouts, weapons, money. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.

The woman slipped into his thoughts surreptitiously.

He had not had sex with her. Shadaa’s body was pleasing, and it was within his right as a fighter to take her — God’s just reward. But something held him back, something beyond his religious beliefs.

He was pure. But so was she — something in the way she presented herself to him, how she bowed her head in submission.

“Enough,” he said aloud, urging himself back to work. He went to his office and began jotting down his orders to send his scouts to their various assignments.

But even as wrote, his thoughts drifted.

Maybe I’ll go back to the restaurant when I’m done. I should check on the girl to make sure no harm has come to her.

44

Johnny and Turk had just reached the wall of the abandoned compound when Johansen hailed them on the radio with a string of expletives.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Planting the last bugs,” said Turk.

“It’s too risky. Send the bot and forget the bunker.”

“We’ll be in and out in ten minutes,” said Johnny. “Relax.”

They scrambled over the wall and dropped into an alley between the compound buildings. Viewed from the koalas’ cameras, the alley had looked as wide as a highway. But Johnny scraped his shoulders as he followed Turk to the central courtyard. They stopped, checking with Christian to make sure it was clear, then sprinted across to the west wall. Johnny vaulted over like a gymnast. He ran up the street, waiting for Turk in the shadows near the corner.

Turk was huffing when he caught up. “Got the rope?” he managed.

“Yeah. Give me sixty seconds, then come.”

Johnny crossed the street, bolting to the side of a two-story building. He leaped, arms up, and grabbed the metal edge of the roof. But the edging was too thin — he couldn’t get a grip.

His legs took the shock easily but the stumps above them reverberated with the impact, sending it through his body. He took a breath, stepped back, and sprang upward again. This time he willed himself higher and managed to get his right elbow on the roof. Then he levered himself over the edge.

Johnny pulled the rope out of his ruck and tossed it down, anchoring Turk as he climbed up. Turk was halfway up when Christian warned that the patrol was approaching their street.

“Next building,” said Johnny when he got up. They jumped over and ran to the lip, a low wall just high enough to keep them from being seen from the ground. Once the patrol passed, they could plant the bugs on the corners and leave.

“Damn,” muttered Christian over the radio.

That’s not good, thought Johnny.

In the command bunker nearly one hundred miles away, Chelsea watched the Daesh patrol stop near the building where Johnny and Turk were hiding.

What had they seen?

She zoomed on Johnny, flat on the roof. There was no way the patrol could have seen him, and yet, there they were, all three men getting out of the truck.

Oh, God, she thought. Don’t let them spot him.

Johnny heard voices over the rumble of the truck engine below. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the video bug, slid the tiny switch to activate it, then slowly edged to the corner.

“What are you doing?” whispered Turk.

“Planting the bug.”

“Wait—”

“If we have to take them down—”

“No, listen. They don’t know we’re here,” added Turk.

Johnny held his breath. The men were talking. He hadn’t turned his translator on, but he could tell Turk was right — the voices were relaxed.

“They’re saying how much they hate their commander,” explained Turk. “They’re peeing on the steps where he’ll have to walk tomorrow.”

There was laughter below. A few minutes later, the men were gone.

45

“This is the best gaming laptop, period,” declared the salesman.

Massina couldn’t hold back a smile as the kid, barely into his twenties, waxed poetic about the laptop. “Better than Alienware?”

“Another awesome machine. But this is better.”

“It’s the one you own?”

“My laptop is a couple of years old,” confessed the clerk. “And, uh, I couldn’t afford either of these.”

“You get a commission on sales?”

“Yes, well—”

“I’ll take it. And that coupon for Battlefield.”

The salesman’s face lit up. “Your grandson will be very pleased.”

“Grandson? It’s for me.”

An hour and a half later, Massina had three new laptops, each from a different store. He went to a Starbucks, bought a coffee, and set about creating a series of phony identities. He spread them liberally over the web, opening social media accounts and visiting chat rooms, establishing a different background for each. Then he accessed one of the chat rooms Borya had discovered.

He’d told Johansen that Smart Metal would no longer probe Daesh. But he’d said nothing about doing it himself.

“God, what a lot of rubbish,” he muttered, scrolling through one of the conversations. He was looking for a user named GigaMan who accessed the site through a Kosovo provider who, among other things, supplied email addresses to Daesh gunrunners ID’d by Chiang.

GigaMan wasn’t active. Massina posted a few comments, cursing the others as dupes and idiots. This got him a handful of negative responses, but for the most part, he was simply ignored. He tried calling out GigaMan, mentioning him in one of the posts. But he got no response. After about a half hour, he signed out under the name he’d used, then went back in, using an anonymous server service and a different identity.

Nothing.

By then it was past midnight, and the store was about to close. Massina was the last one left.

“Tomorrow,” he said, closing down his computer. “We’ll find you tomorrow.”

46

Bugs planted, Johnny and Turk headed to the Daesh commander’s compound. In less than five minutes, Johnny had shimmied up the telephone pole at the side of the compound, pointed the bugs at the nearest window, and climbed down. Ten minutes later, they were heading north toward the bunker.

“Truck on the road ahead,” warned Chelsea. “There’s a turnoff on your right about a quarter mile. Take that and you can go north without being seen.”

Johnny checked the route. It was longer and rougher, if safer.

“They’re getting paranoid,” Christian said. “Worrying too much. And we’re only just starting.”

They followed directions anyway, treading along shallow ruts to a wavy line at the base of a ridge. There was no moon, and in the dim starlight the terrain looked unearthly; Johnny felt as if he were on another planet, far out in the solar system.

He fought against a wave of fatigue. They still had work to do; he couldn’t afford to relax. He shook himself, stretched, tried to find his concentration as he surveyed the landscape ahead.

The hills seemed to separate as they got closer, and Christian was able to find a pass east without consulting the satellite image. A thick layer of dirt slowed them as they got through, but beyond that they had firm ground and the outlines of a road. Christian drove with a lead foot; Johnny couldn’t see the speedometer but he guessed they were hitting close to a hundred miles an hour.

“We need to stop a mile ahead,” he told Christian, checking their position on the GPS grid. “We’ll be a half mile east of the target.”

“Done deal. Tell me when we’re close.”

47

Ghadab managed to complete the itineraries before his concentration finally gave way. He locked down his computer and left the bunker, nodding to the lone guard as he walked out to wait for his car.

The vehicle was a concession to the African, who was right about the distance to the city — it was too far to walk on any but the most leisurely days. But he insisted it stay back in Palmyra: it would be easily spotted from above, drawing attention to the bunker.

The night was warm but not unpleasant; Ghadab examined the landscape, admiring how far it stretched, knowing that the vastness could only have been created by the one true God, whose word had been revealed by the Prophet, blessed be his name.

Shadaa snuck into his thoughts. She would be waiting for him at the door. She would help him undress, and then he would have her undress herself.

She was beautiful, and she was his, his entirely. His body ached for the gentleness of a woman’s hand.

The sound of an engine rose over the desert. The car coming for him traveled without lights, and it took a moment to pick out its shadow against the terrain.

Soon I will rest, he thought, waiting for it to arrive.

48

Chelsea watched the screen as the vehicle left.

“There’s still at least one person inside the bunker,” she told Johnny.

“Understood.”

“Don’t take unnecessary risks.”

A foolish thing to say, she realized: the entire mission was a risk, and there was no way to know where the dividing line was between necessary and unnecessary.

Krista, sitting next to her, waved Johansen over. She was monitoring communication as well as liaising with the Air Force pilots supplying the Global Hawk feeds.

“Russian planes flying toward Palmyra,” she said. “Su-27s. Air Force AWACS tracking them.”

“Where’s the Destiny drone?” Johansen asked. Even though they were outfitted for ground strikes, the Russian planes were potent air combat fighters and would have no trouble destroying a UAV.

“Grid Two.”

“Bring it farther north, away from them.”

“Nightbird?” asked Johansen.

“Two klicks north of the bunker.”

“Take it low so the Russians miss it,” Johansen told Chelsea.

“Right.”

Chelsea put the aircraft into a sharp descent, finally leveling into a figure eight at ninety feet above ground level.

“Are those Su-27s still coming?” she asked Krista.

“No change. Ten miles.”

Chelsea brought the UAV down to fifty feet.

“Russians are turning,” said Krista. “Stand by.”

The aircraft headed in the direction of an arms depot southwest of the city: a depot U.S. intelligence said had been emptied two days before.

Not that they were going to tell the Russians now.

“Clear,” said Krista.

Chelsea waited two more minutes, making sure that the planes were gone, then pushed the UAV into a rapid climb.

“Johnny, can we get a sitrep?” she asked.

“Bug is placed. We’re leaving.”

Thank God!

“Good, copy,” she said, suppressing her relief. “See you at home.”

49

Shadaa was waiting for Ghadab when he returned. It was exactly as he had foreseen. She eased his shirt off and undid his pants. She stepped back and at his gesture removed her own clothes. She looked at the floor, ashamed of her own beauty.

“Here,” he told her. And he took her to bed.

Ghadab slept as he had never slept before, through the rest of the night, well into the next day. He missed his prayers. When he woke, he found Shadaa by the door, standing where she always stood, watching him.

God’s Wrath sat up slowly, unsure what to say.

There was a knock on the door.

“Who is it?” he snapped.

“Brother, we must talk,” said the African. “Downstairs.”

Ghadab started to get out of bed, then realized he was naked. He looked over at Shadaa, who was watching him expectantly.

“Turn,” he said, signaling with his finger.

She turned toward the wall. He got out of bed and pulled on his clothes.

“Have you eaten?”

She shook her head.

“Wait for me. I will be up presently.”

The restaurant was empty, save for the African and a waiter. Two cups of sweet Turkish coffee waited at the table.

“Take your coffee,” the African said, rising. “We will be more comfortable outside.”

Ghadab followed, understanding that the African’s real purpose was to avoid the waiter’s ears.

“You carried out an exercise,” said the African, leaning against the wall. Songbirds with a nest nearby warbled at each other, marking their territory in song.

“My crew needed a reminder of why they were fighting,” said Ghadab.

“Our situation here is complicated. That makes your situation complicated as well.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You are a hero to some and a threat to others.” The African sipped his coffee. “Everything you do is watched.”

Neither spoke for a few moments.

“Thank you for your warning,” Ghadab said finally. He started to rise.

“The Caliph wishes to see you in Raqqa, the day after tomorrow,” said the African. “You have no option. You must go.”

“Of course I would go.”

“By yourself.”

“I would not think otherwise.”

“Enjoy the day.”

“As God has given it to us,” said Ghadab.

50

“This bunker was abandoned before the war,” said Johansen, his laser pointer circling it on the map. “Now there are computers there. Men come in and out, taken up from Palmyra by drivers.”

The slide advanced to a diagram. “We’re getting a U2 with side-penetrating radar to do an overflight. This is a schematic from a bunker with a similar profile. It’s not huge, but it would be perfect for a planning cell, if that’s where Ghadab is holed up.”

“When do we go in?” asked Turk.

“When we know he’s there.” He looked over at Chelsea.

“If he goes in,” she said, “the video will catch him. It has a good view.”

“In the meantime, we have some possible sightings in the city,” continued Johansen. “This may or may not be Ghadab.”

He clicked through a sequence of shots taken by the sensors and the UAVs. There were only two partial images of a face. The recognition system believed it was him — but with only a 40 percent level of surety, not enough to order an attack.

“He’s gone in and out of this building,” said Johansen, showing an overhead of a restaurant surrounded by a park. “The Arab name is ‘the inn in the park.’ Which as you can see, pretty much describes what it is.”

Johansen’s orders did not specifically direct him to kill Ghadab. In fact, even in conversation, no one had actually told him to assassinate the man. It was just understood.

But the more he studied the situation, the more he fantasized about taking Ghadab alive: bring the prick back and make him stand trial. Make a real example out of him. Show the world what the face of terror really looked like.

Revenge was simpler, but this wasn’t about revenge. This was about war, and a difficult one at that.

War required moments of moral clarity and public demonstration of those morals. Killing Ghadab in secrecy — as the U.S. had done with a number of other terrorists — would do neither. The nihilist cancer had to be exposed, and not just to Americans. Too many people saw the conflict as just a reaction by medievalists against modernity, or a civil war in Islam. But ISIS aimed at the complete annihilation of mankind. The Daesh leadership aimed to establish a “caliphate” not because they wanted to dominate the Middle East, but because they saw it as the necessary step to the end days.

That had to be exposed. Because sooner or later, the cancer would spread far enough to infect someone with access to nuclear weapons.

The cancer had to be attacked very violently, and the world needed to understand why. It needed to see what it was up against.

People didn’t want to know, Johansen realized. They didn’t want to face it. But if he brought Ghadab back, put him on trial, got him to spit out his vile wishes: at that point, there would be no avoiding the truth.

Taking Ghadab alive was a long shot. Johansen hadn’t decided he would even try. But maybe he would. Maybe.

When the briefing ended, Chelsea went outside to get some air. Johnny surprised her, calling to her from below just as she reached the top of the steps. “Where you going?”

“Just walking.”

“Want company?”

“Sure.”

The temperature had dropped more than twenty degrees from the middle of the day, and while that still left it well over seventy, Chelsea felt a little cold. She folded her arms across her chest, stretching as she walked.

The darkness around the bunker was complete; rubble and bomb craters notwithstanding, there was no way of knowing there was a war on.

“Think that’s him?” asked Johnny. “The guy at that inn.”

“Absolutely. Forty percent is very conservative.”

“He didn’t go to the bunker.”

“Not yet. Or maybe that’s not where it is.”

“The inn?”

“No computers.”

“How are you holding up?” Johnny asked.

Surprised by the question, Chelsea examined Johnny’s face. Did he think she was falling apart?

I’m not scared.

I don’t even think about what happened to me in Boston now.

“I’m good. My job’s easy,” she said. “How about you? How are your legs?”

“Bionic.”

Chelsea sensed that Johnny wanted to talk, but she wasn’t sure how to prompt him. Maybe he was having trouble with the mission.

Just because they’re men, doesn’t mean they have no emotions. Johnny lost his legs — talk about a traumatic event. How is he dealing with it?

Can he deal with it?

“I saw you jump up on that roof the other day,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m pretty good at jumping.”

The back of her hand brushed his.

I know you’ve been through a lot…

Do you dream of having your legs?

Is this all too much some days?

Do you have hope for the future?

Do you miss your legs?

Before Chelsea could think of a way to ask Johnny how he really was, they were interrupted by Krista Weather.

“Chelsea, Johansen wants to see you,” she called, walking toward them. “Some sort of com problem they hope you can fix.”

“And on my day off,” joked Chelsea.

For a moment she thought Johnny might grab her hand — she hoped he would — but he just stood perfectly still as she pivoted and began to trot back to the bunker.

51

“Why are they persecuting me? Have they become concerned with worldly power? It’s the only explanation. The operatives we need are ready to strike — they have been there for years, recruited, bred, raised, trained. If we don’t use them, why are they there? The council — they’re blind. No. No, they’ve fallen away from the true belief. They have been seduced by power. They’ve forgotten prophecy. They’re apostates. Very close. Very, very close.”

Ghadab continued to rant. Nominally, he was talking to Shadaa, who was walking a few feet behind him, but in reality his only audience was himself and the sand around him. He’d driven out to the barbarians’ ruins to be alone with his thoughts — to rant, really, to rail against the idiocy and venality of the council.

They had turned against him. Not all of them, but several. He didn’t know exactly who, though he had theories.

Even the African was wavering. No one could be trusted.

Upon taking control of Palmyra, the Islamic State had destroyed many of the ancient buildings outside the modern city, toppling monuments that blasphemed against the one true God. Piles of rubble and swatches of a few structures remained, a reminder of how slowly history crawled, even toward the inevitable.

Ghadab walked to the columns of the tetrapylon. The sun was low on the horizon, sinking toward night; its rays burned red in the frames of bleached columns.

A sign: the apocalypse was close.

Ghadab glanced at Shadaa, struggling amid the huge stones to climb near him. As the sun highlighted the curves of her body, he realized how great her beauty was.

A revelation from God, surely, a hint of the glory that awaited him in Paradise.

“Come,” he told her, turning back. “It is time to return.”

Up in his room, Ghadab brooded. If the council was against him, there was little he could do besides appealing to the Caliph.

Allow me to carry out an attack against one of the plants, destroy one of their cities, and grant me the honor of martyrdom.

Surely the Caliph could not refuse.

The jealousy of the council was detestable, and surely fueled by an informer.

The African?

No. They went back too far.

Ghadab took the khanjar from the dresser. It felt solid in his hand, an extension of his arm.

What should he do with the woman?

She stared at him, unmoving.

“Are you a spy?” he asked.

She said nothing.

He stepped toward her, knife first. “Why have you spied on me?”

“I am not a spy. I am yours.”

He put the blade to her neck. A trickle of blood appeared.

“Beg for your life!” he demanded.

“My life is your life,” she said, her voice soft but her tone firm. “It is yours to do with as you please. This is written. This is what must be done. My fate.”

“Your fate!”

But even as he screamed the words, Ghadab pulled back his knife. He knew she was not capable of betraying him. And he was not capable of killing her.

Hours later, after he had lain with her, Ghadab rose and swiftly dressed. He was ready to go to Raqqa and restore the Caliph’s favor.

“Good night,” he whispered at the door. “Do not despair. I will return.”

Shadaa stirred but did not wake. Ghadab paused, tempted to linger, but duty won out.

“I will be back,” he whispered, closing the door.

52

The bunker was easy to watch and relatively easy to hit; Johansen had no trouble mapping out a plan. The only problem: Ghadab wasn’t there.

The video bug covering the bunker entrance gave them an excellent view of everyone coming and going; Ghadab wasn’t among them. The man they thought was Ghadab — the computer had now increased its confidence level to 58 percent — had left the hotel a few hours before but not shown up there. Or anywhere.

“You’re positive he left?” Johansen asked Chelsea as she worked the monitors.

“That’s him.”

“Did he go to the council buildings?” asked Rosen, watching with them.

“No,” said Chelsea, “we have good views.”

“Maybe he’s back in the hotel,” suggested Johansen. “Went in through the park.” They had limited coverage of the rear.

“Go back to that bunker sequence around seventeen hundred,” said Rosen. “Maybe he’s one of them.”

Chelsea clicked up the two shadowy images of men entering the bunker around 1700. Their faces were obscured by dark hoods. The system could not ID them.

“I don’t think so,” said Chelsea. “Their bio identifiers don’t match. They’re heavier.”

“Not by much.”

Chelsea pulled up Ghadab’s profile data and laid it out in the biometric grid against the other two men. All three were about the same height, but the computer estimated that Ghadab weighed five and eight pounds less than the other subjects.

“That’s nothing,” said Rosen. “Five pounds? And it’s guessing from the clothes.”

“The computer is good at this. It assesses a lot more than just the weight. How he walks, how he moves — look, it’s not a match.”

“It doesn’t say they’re not him,” interrupted Johansen. “It just says it can’t make a definite match.”

“That means it’s not a match,” said Chelsea. “It’s just being scientific.”

“But it doesn’t say that.”

Chelsea leaned back in exasperation. It was difficult to explain to a nonscientist the way the algorithms worked. Technically, he was correct — the computer was saying that it couldn’t be sure. But the bar was set extremely high — way higher than a person would set it.

“He never wears a hood like that,” Chelsea told Johansen. “He doesn’t dress like that. The clothes don’t match.”

“Maybe he’s disguised,” said Rosen.

“You can’t disguise the way you walk.”

“Maybe we have the wrong guy,” said Rosen. “Maybe we’ve misidentified one of the people inside already.”

“No.” Chelsea bent over her keyboard. The surveillance system used the inputs from the video bugs planted around town as well as overhead images and electronic intel to keep track of designated individuals. The bugs did not cover the entire city, so people could slip off their net, as Ghadab had. “I have another idea,” she said. “What if we concentrate on the woman? The one who was with him in the ruins?”

“OK,” said Johansen. “Where is she?”

“She went out to the market,” said Chelsea. “She came back a little while ago.”

“Maybe we should grab her,” suggested Rosen.

“I doubt he tells her anything,” said Johansen. “She’s just his whore.”

“You never know,” said Rosen.

“Show me the hotel, would you?” asked Johansen.

Chelsea put the image on the far-right monitor. Johansen leaned so close she thought he was going to put his nose on the panel.

“Can I see the map?” he asked. “Where it is?”

Johansen studied the map. “We don’t have the back?”

“This is the only view.” Chelsea selected an image from a bug planted several blocks away. The rear was obscured by trees and vegetation. “The hotel wasn’t a target.”

“We can go in there and look for him,” suggested Rosen.

“Too risky unless we know he’s there,” said Johansen. “An operation will tip everyone off. Keep tabs on her. He’ll come back eventually. If he’s not already inside.”

“What if he doesn’t come back?” asked Rosen. “We have only forty-eight hours before the batteries in the bugs start to fail.”

“The hotel’s risky,” said Johansen. “There are guards at the entrance. We have to assume they’re inside as well. We’d have to hit it pretty loud. Once we do that, the operation’s over. They’ll know we’re here. So we really only have one shot.”

“We need to bug the hotel,” said Rosen.

“That’s too risky.”

“We can bug her,” suggested Chelsea. “Or put a tracker on her.”

“That’ll be even harder than bugging her room,” said Johansen.

“We could do it in the market. Have a UAV follow the tracker. We can watch her wherever she goes.”

“Yeah,” said Rosen. “Easier than grabbing her. We track her in the city. Odds are she takes us right to him.”

“Hmmm,” said Johansen.

GPS trackers had a variety of applications; in their simplest forms, they helped trucking companies keep track of their vehicles, and phone owners find their phones. In most cases, the trackers were relatively large and sent out a signal that could be detected.

The CIA, working with a private company (not Smart Metal), had constructed a tracker that had all of the advantages of the standard units, without most of the drawbacks. First of all, they were tiny, barely the size of a jewelry bead. They emitted no signal; instead, they were tracked by a series of transponders — think of the antitheft devices that would set off an alarm in an electronics store.

Plant one of those on the woman, and she would take them to Ghadab.

Maybe. Or maybe she’d just stay in the hotel.

Going inside the hotel was risky as hell. The market was easier.

Still risky, though.

Which chance to take?

“All right,” Johansen told them. “I’ll work something up.”

53

Johansen’s plan was simple in outline:

A team would enter the city from the south and wait as Krista Weather joined the women coming from the north to work just before dawn. She would make her way to the marketplace, wait for Ghadab’s woman, then put a tracking device on her burka.

It was an easy plan — until Krista tumbled down a ravine at the side of the road moments after arriving at her hiding place north of the city.

Chelsea watched the accident unfold on a feed from a Nightbird they’d launched to shadow the operation. She ran and got Johansen, who’d gone to grab some rest.

“That’s what I get for taking a nap.” He sat at the console, shaking his head. “Scrub,” he said over the radio. “Bring her back. Everybody back.”

Turk argued that one of the men could take her place.

“The market is segregated. You can’t risk getting close to a woman with the Daesh enforcers,” said Johansen. “Just come home.”

“I can go,” said Chelsea.

Johansen shook his head. “Your Arabic’s not that good.”

“It’s better than half their slaves’.”

“Too great a risk.”

“It’s no more of a risk for me than it was for Krista,” said Chelsea. “In and out.”

“In and out.”

“This whole mission was dangerous,” said Chelsea. “We want to get this bastard, and this is our best chance to do it. Otherwise, you’re just going to bomb the bunker and be done with it.”

Johansen made up his mind and changed it at least a hundred times in the next thirty seconds.

He’d promised Chelsea would stay behind the lines, and so far he’d kept that promise. But that was a personal thing and shouldn’t, couldn’t, override the mission.

And it wasn’t necessarily that dangerous. As long as they got her to the outskirts of the city before daybreak, she would have no trouble getting in.

They could post teams to watch over her, just as with Krista.

In and out.

In, yes. But she’d have to wait until Ghadab’s woman appeared.

The marker was encased in an artificial seedpod designed to look like a seed from Uncarina grandidieri—a hitchhiker seed with thin spikes that was considered among the most annoying to remove in the world. Dropped on the back of her dress toward the hem, it would be almost unnoticeable.

Did they really need to track her to find Ghadab?

“You have to let me go,” said Chelsea. “I came to get the bastard who hurt my city. I’m the only one here who these guys attacked personally. I deserve this chance.”

“You don’t deserve to die.”

“I’m not going to.”

Yes or no?

Yes or no?

“Get dressed,” Johansen said finally. “Stay in radio contact the whole time. I give the OK to move into town; I give the OK to go to the market. You don’t do anything without my say-so.”

“Agreed.”

54

An hour after he started his nightly session — this time at a Starbucks in Acton — Massina’s laptop was infected with several dozen new viruses.

Decent start.

Clicking on every possible link and accepting every possible download, Massina hoped one of his invented personalities would “catch” something that could be linked to Ghadab’s organization by tracking back through the servers they used to get to him. But while four of the viruses were advanced enough that Norton couldn’t detect them, they turned out to be linked to Russian gangs, not Daesh.

So he went back to trying to call GigaMan out by name in the chat rooms.

No luck.

Massina turned to card shops, poking around to see if he could find a customer list or anything that might overlap with Daesh’s financial network. The terrorists used stolen credit cards to fund some of their operations; Massina hoped he might find a link back to a legitimate Bitcoin account, which he could then trace. He bought a few thousand cards stolen in batches from Americans and western Europeans, then used a homemade tool to track the sellers to a server in Kosovo. Armed with that information, he used different credentials to purchase a “confidential” site from the server’s owners. But he made a rookie mistake: he used one of the credit cards he’d just bought.

A skull-and-crossbones symbol flashed onto his screen, declaring him a fraudster and saying the sale did not go through.

Takes one to know one, he thought. It was his bad: he should have suspected a close relationship between the server owners and the card shop.

Massina backed out. He’d have to try again, this time using Bitcoin to pay.

He was debating whether to try again that night or not when a message popped on the screen from the tracking app. Among those who had visited one of his phony Facebook pages was a user allegedly from Romania — a user whose trail included servers Borya had associated with GigaMan.

Too many for sheer coincidence.

Massina went up to the counter and ordered a venti cappuccino — this was going to take a lot of caffeine.

55

Somewhere along the dark, winding road north of the city, doubt tiptoed into Chelsea’s mind, shaking her resolve. Emotion gave way to logic, and logic was freighted with reasons it wouldn’t work. Logic suggested things that would go wrong.

She wouldn’t find the woman, she wouldn’t get the tracker to stick, she’d be caught.

Try as she might to tamp it down, her fear grew with every mile. Sitting in the back of the pickup truck with Johnny, Chelsea stared out the window, hoping he wouldn’t notice her anxiety.

“Pretty night, huh?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“We’re almost there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s funny. This is Daesh territory but there are no fences, no front like in a war.”

“It is a war.”

“Yeah, but without real boundaries,” he insisted. “Civilians move back and forth all the time.”

“Unless we’re caught.”

“You worried?”

“I’m fine. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

He patted her on the shoulder. It wasn’t sexual, but there was electricity nonetheless.

“Gonna be a piece of cake,” said Johnny.

“I know.” She patted his leg. “I got it.”

Chelsea left her hand on his knee. It was the most mundane thing, but it calmed her.

The truck slowed abruptly. She pulled her scarf up, adjusting it so the earpiece that was attached to the fabric sat perfectly over her ear. Her translator was off, but she would turn it on when they started into town.

“Everyone out of the truck,” said Rosen from the front. “Quick!”

Chelsea grabbed the door handle and pushed out, following the others as they ran toward a nearby hill. She heard a sound behind her from above — a jet in the distance. Two.

“What the hell’s going on?” she asked, dropping next to the others next to the base of a pygmy tree about twenty yards from the truck.

“Russian fighters,” explained Rosen. He’d been on the radio with Krista and had gotten a warning. “They’re coming south.”

Chelsea stared at the sky, looking for a shadow or a streak. Lightning flashed to the south and the ground shook; the jets had dropped their bombs.

Chelsea expected more flashes, a fireball, but there was nothing. According to Krista, who’d taken her place, broken leg and all, at the monitors, the Russians had dropped bombs in the southwest quadrant of the city, hitting exactly nothing.

“Why didn’t they bomb the airport where most of the ISIS troops are?” asked Chelsea.

“Because they’re Russian,” said Krista.

A half hour later, Chelsea joined a procession of women trudging toward the city center from the slums in the northwest corner of Palmyra. Turk and Christian had come up north, joining Johnny as a close-in surveillance team. Johnny and Turk were about fifty yards behind her, walking with a small group of men; Christian was back with the truck, watching what was going on with the help of a Hum UAV.

Most of the walkers were day laborers, a mix of refugees who had wandered into the area and lost the energy to go elsewhere. They lived in a potpourri of shacks and lean-tos constructed around the ruins of residential buildings destroyed during the government’s first siege. They wore stoic expressions, masks of resignation against the day’s coming insults and depravity.

Work was scarce, and payment was in scrip worthless outside of town, and not particularly valuable inside. Most of the women would go home worse off than they had come, exhausted, worn down a little further. The men, though, were in even rougher shape: all were old or maimed or both, as anyone near fighting age was expected to join Daesh. Johnny’s arm was in a sling and his jaw bandaged — conveniently making it hard to talk — as if he had been battered in a recent battle. Turk’s hair and beard were dyed gray, his leg wrapped and braced; he walked with the aid of a cane. Yet even if their ailments had been real, they would have been the fittest of the group.

The path to town flanked what had once been a fancy soccer field. Sports were officially banned, but there were youths on the fake grass of the pitch, kicking balls back and forth. A few old cars, missing various parts scavenged for others in working order, were parked in a neat row where the grandstand had once stood. One or two men stood at the edge of the field, smoking cigarettes. Given the Caliphate’s prohibitions against smoking, this most likely meant that they were not Daesh, though it was never safe to guess.

A checkpoint manned by a solitary Daesh soldier in his early teens blocked the path at the far end. The youth leaned against a Toyota pickup, one hand on the AK-47 slung from his shoulder. He wore a black uniform two or three sizes too big; they looked like pajamas on him. The boy frowned at the women, but did nothing; they were too old and too worn for him to bother with.

Chelsea drifted into the half of the crowd turning toward the market area. Vans and small trucks were parked haphazardly on the sidewalk; a few were delivering goods; others were selling or setting up to do so. In most cases their wares were pathetically small — the best-stocked merchant could offer only a half box of vegetables. Prices were set by a local Daesh council, which, in theory, kept them within reach, but added to the scarcity by making it not worth the risk for many merchants to brave government forces west and south to bring goods in.

Chelsea walked around the market area. While she’d studied the overhead images and the view from the bugs, it was far different in person. After a few turns, she walked down the street to an open grove at the edge of the bazaar. She was not alone; in fact, the grove was crowded with women gossiping and watching children, waiting for a favorite store to open or a specific merchant to arrive, or just hoping to pass the time. Children played in the dirt between the trees. Others squatted in the shade, staring at the world with eyes made blank by the fear that what they had seen in the past would soon be done to them.

“You’re looking good,” said Christian over the radio. “Our girl just left the hotel.”

“Mmmm,” said Chelsea, clamping her teeth tight against the fear-induced bile rising in her throat.

“Just stay where you are,” added Christian. “I’ll let you know when she’s close.”

56

The bombing attack by the Russians worried Johansen not because the aircraft presented an immediate danger to his operation, but because it portended a change in strategy that might force him to pull the plug.

Over the past few months, the Russian air force had stopped attacking Daesh sites, concentrating on rebels closer to Damascus, where the puppet dictator was holed up. An attack here might just be a random “hey, we’re still here” thing. Or maybe it heralded a new push by the Syrian army, and its Iranian and Lebanese mercenaries.

The latest briefings noted some troop movements in the area, but he wasn’t concerned until he saw a set of IR images that showed a half-dozen Land Rovers had moved overnight into positions fifteen to twenty miles south of the city. Though not identified, Johansen knew from experience the trucks would belong to Hezbollah commandos, scouting for positions the Syrians could use for their heavy artillery.

The Syrians always used artillery at the start of an assault; they had been known to bombard a city for weeks on end before moving in. Their big guns were currently parked in depots only two hours from Palmyra.

Johansen dialed into the intel net to get the latest assessment of Russian bombing targets. The assessment was a CIA “product”; the Russians refused to share their target list ahead of time with the U.S. Palmyra did not appear on the list. But a note added that the Russians had flown new refueling and UAV assets into the southern quadrant — something they would do if they were planning a major assault.

Johansen could call the Russian staff liaison and ask if activity was planned in the sector. He might even get a truthful answer. But doing so would tell the Russians he was planning an operation.

Tell the Russians, and you told the Syrians. Tell the Syrians, and Daesh would know within the hour.

“The girl’s about a block from the market,” said Krista, sitting at the console on the other end of the command room. Johansen heard the wince in her voice: they’d taped her ankle and given her crutches but no painkillers; she needed a clear head to work the com gear. “Chelsea’s ready.”

57

Chelsea ducked her head as she slipped out of the shade, eyes blinded by the sun. A hum rose from the street as she walked past the buildings: cars and trucks rode up and down the road, one of two major highways that ran through town. Women milled around the storefronts and tables, even those that were bare or closed.

Her language translator whispered in her ear as it picked up snippets of nearby conversation:

This must be what LSD is like, she thought. A babble of voices in your head, scattering your own thoughts and simply adding to your confusion if you try to focus on any one of them.

A man lurched in front of her.

“Ladayna alkhudar alkhus,” he said.

“We have greens,” whispered the translator.

“Yawm ghad,” she answered. “Tomorrow.”

She spoke the phrase perfectly, but the man gave her a confused look.

“We have lettuce greens you will want to buy,” he insisted. “Very rare. Gone tomorrow.”

Chelsea turned, looking in the direction the man was pointing. The storefront was empty.

“No,” she told him.

He raised his hand, moving it toward hers. Fearing he was going to pull her inside but not wanting to draw too much attention to herself, she took a step back and raised her hand.

“Leave me, brother,” she said sternly in Arabic. “God be with you.”

The man froze, then put up his hands, waving them and stepping back. She hurried on.

“What was that?” asked Christian, who’d heard the exchange.

“Nothing,” she said under her breath, not sure herself.

Johnny felt his heart begin to race. He picked up his pace, walking quickly in case the man went after her. But instead, the merchant ducked back into the doorway.

“I’m trying to sell greens,” said the man, speaking to no one and everyone. “I have a good deal. They are rare.”

Johnny crossed the street, closing to within a few yards of Chelsea. Men were only allowed here during the morning if they had some business, but his fake wounds would make it appear as if he were a Daesh soldier, and it was therefore unlikely he’d be questioned by anyone other than an ISIS soldier.

Daesh troops came through the district at least every half hour during the day, ostensibly enforcing the laws of dress and conduct; more often they were simply shaking down the locals for whatever contraband they could take. Christian was watching for them on the UAV.

A man leaning against a doorway held up a cigarette to Johnny. Though cigarettes were theoretically outlawed, many men smoked them openly on the street, and even the Daesh enforcers didn’t go out of their way to reprimand people about them — unless they were confiscating them for their own use.

Johnny shook his head and pointed to the bandages, then gesturing with his hand as a thank-you.

He turned back to look for Chelsea. In the time it took to shake his head and look apologetic, she had disappeared.

Chelsea turned the corner and quickened her pace, trying to put some distance between herself and two women who seemed to be following her. She could hear the clip-clop of their shoes as they turned down the alley behind her.

Women enforcers?

Chelsea had a pistol strapped to her leg beneath her dress. Closer was the knife in her pocket. She pushed her hand between the folds of her robe and took hold of the hilt.

“Wawaqf,” said one of the women. “Stop.”

Chelsea kept walking.

“Sister, stop,” repeated one of the women.

A man appeared at the other end of the little street she’d turned onto. The passage was narrow, little more than an alley: a good place for a trap.

“Sister!” yelled one of the women.

Chelsea spun. “Madha?” she said harshly. “What do you want?”

“That man, was he bothering you?” asked the woman who had been calling out to her. She was nearly a foot taller than Chelsea and at least twice as wide.

“Was he trying to attack you?” asked the other woman, pulling her veil away from her mouth. Her voice was gentle.

“No,” she said. “He had vegetables.”

The taller woman frowned. Chelsea glanced over her shoulder toward the man who’d come up the alley. She pulled her veil closer, as if worried about her modesty.

“Don’t be ashamed, sister,” said the younger woman. “There are perverts and sinners everywhere.”

Act frightened, Chelsea told herself. Not hard to do.

The man passed them. Chelsea watched him and saw Johnny appear at the far end of the alley, walking swiftly in her direction.

“Thank you,” Chelsea told the women. She wanted to say she was OK, but couldn’t find the words and didn’t trust the suggestions the translator was giving her for conversation.

“Are you certain you are OK?” asked the taller woman.

“Fine, yes,” said Chelsea. “Thank you.”

Johnny kept his pace steady as he walked past the two women. When he came to the street, he crossed, then turned back on the sidewalk to make sure they hadn’t followed.

Chelsea was walking down the block.

“What did they want?” he whispered as he passed.

“They’re some sort of women’s patrol or something. They asked about the guy who bothered me.”

He kept walking. When he reached the corner, he turned and put his hand to his ear to use the radio. “They said something about your accent. They thought you were from Lebanon.”

“Good.”

“Target is just turning onto the block.”

“I’m going.”

Ghadab’s slave was a few inches taller than Chelsea and a good forty pounds heavier, though that was hard to judge from the bulky clothes and long veil. She walked with her head down, arms close to her body, modest or timid; it was hard to tell.

“You’re on her,” said Christian as she fell in behind the woman.

Chelsea took the bead in her fingers, getting ready.

The woman paused at a cart where they were selling oranges and lemons. Chelsea sidled up next to her, picked up a lemon, and as she did, dropped the bug from her hand. It rolled down the side of the woman’s dress, catching below her hip.

Done.

Chelsea was about to turn away when the woman abruptly moved back from the cart and blocked her way.

“Min ’ant?” asked Ghadab’s woman. “Who are you?”

Chelsea put up her hand. “No.”

The woman said something else but between the speed of her voice and its accent, the translator was baffled; it gave no translation. Chelsea started to leave, then noticed the two women who’d accosted her earlier staring a few feet away.

“I was a stolen one,” said Chelsea, using the phrasing she’d memorized. It meant that she was a slave, now assigned to someone; it was dangerous to associate with her. “You must not speak to me.”

Ghadab’s woman nodded. “My name is Shadaa.”

“Baidda,” said Chelsea. She saw sympathy in the other woman’s eyes — she was talking to a fellow slave, another woman who might be disposed of in a week or a day or an hour.

Until that moment, Chelsea had felt nothing for the woman. Now she felt a surge of pity.

“Goodbye,” she said gently. She moved to the next cart, pretending to look at the tomatoes. They were large and ripe, a rare find, but prohibitively expensive.

Chelsea looked over and saw the women talking to Shadaa. She shook her head and moved over to another stand.

“The bug’s not moving,” whispered Christian.

Shit, thought Chelsea. Realizing it must have fallen to the ground, she walked over to retrieve it. As she got closer, her way was blocked by a sudden gaggle of girls. By the time they passed, Shadaa was no longer in sight.

Chelsea scooped up the bug. Its spiky arms had been crushed by someone’s feet.

“Bug fell off,” whispered Chelsea. “Which way did she go?”

58

“We have a lot of traffic on the Russian commo lines,” Krista told Johansen. “The air force AWACS just sent an alert that they have a full squadron of fighter bombers heading for the runway at Latakia. Su-35s.”

The Su-35 was an updated attack version of the Su-27. As Russia’s most advanced aircraft in the conflict, it had a starring role in the intervention: the Russians used it for the biggest battles. If the planes were coming this way, a full-on ground assault against Palmyra would surely follow.

Sure enough, there was a dust cloud near the Syrian artillery camp. They were on the move.

59

Chelsea made her way through the crowd as quickly as she could without running, aiming to cut Shadaa off as she walked home. Sweat rolled down her collar, soaking through the light underlayers. The heavy robe made her feel as if she was encased in a sauna.

“She’s a block away, coming toward you,” said Christian.

Chelsea stopped. She was alone on the street, save for a lone man at the other end.

Turk.

Johnny was nearby, too, a half block away, out of sight.

Guardian angels. But what good were angels in the bowels of hell?

Chelsea adjusted her scarf and then started walking again, back to Shadaa as she passed.

“Oh,” she said loudly. “You.”

The Arabic flowed from her mouth. Shadaa stopped and turned, confused.

“You,” said the woman, echoing her thoughts. “Do you live near here?”

It took a few seconds for Chelsea to process the translation and the suggested phrase, “next block: kutlat almuqbil.” That wasn’t a safe answer — what if she wanted to go with her there? — so Chelsea simply shrugged.

“You are a slave,” said Shadaa.

Chelsea couldn’t think of an appropriate answer quickly enough. But in this case confusion was just as appropriate.

“Come, we are sisters,” said Shadaa, taking her arm.

“What the fuck’s going on?” asked Turk over the radio.

“She asked if she was a slave,” said Christian.

“I’m about fifty yards behind them,” said Johnny. “I’m going to get closer.”

Johnny leaned forward as he walked. He saw the women cross the street. Shadaa, taller than Chelsea, had clamped her arms around Chelsea’s and bulled ahead. She was talking: Johnny could hear her through Chelsea’s open mic, but he couldn’t understand the Arabic without turning his translator on.

“Johnny, ease up,” said Christian. “Ghadab’s girl is telling her they’re sisters and that she’s going to help her. But you’re spooking her. She thinks you’re going to molest them because they’re slaves. That’s why she clamped on to Chelsea. She just told her to run when she gives the signal.”

“Let’s just take her down,” said Johnny.

“Chill. Chelsea’s fine.”

“I’m two blocks away,” said Turk.

Johnny stopped and turned toward the street. There were no cars; he crossed.

“It might be a ruse,” Johnny told Turk. “I don’t trust this.”

“No, she’s talking about being a slave. Dump your jacket for a different look.”

“All right,” he said, still reluctant.

A Daesh pickup truck with a teenager hanging on to the machine gun mounted in the back roared past Chelsea and Shadaa as they turned onto the street with the hotel. The kid bounced up and down, swinging the gun and grinning like a three-year-old on a merry-go-round. Dust billowed behind the truck as it flew down the street and turned.

“What’s going on?” Chelsea asked.

It was an Arabic phrase she had practiced quite a bit, but Shadaa seemed confused.

“Where are you from?” Shadaa asked.

“Somalia.” Chelsea lowered her eyes, as if admitting this was an act of shame.

“You’re Christian?”

The translation was slow, and the device offered no possible responses.

Chelsea shook her head.

“Does he beat you?” asked Shadaa.

Chelsea froze.

Shadaa interpreted that as a yes. “Come with me and I will get you some food.”

Johnny came up the block just in time to see Chelsea going into the hotel.

“She’s going in,” said Christian over the radio. “Hot damn.”

Johnny continued up the street. He was about ten yards from the entrance when one of the two guards stepped out and, with his submachine gun, motioned him away.

Johnny crossed the street. The guards were well equipped: rather than the ubiquitous AKs, they wielded MP5 submachine guns. The weapons suggested a higher degree of competence, or at least investment.

Johnny walked about twenty yards past the restaurant entrance before crossing back. They were still watching.

Turk was waiting around the corner.

“Get a look at those goons?” he asked Johnny.

“I saw them.” Johnny frowned. “You have a fix on where Chelsea is in the building?” he asked Christian.

“She said something about tables — must be a dining room. Stand by; I gotta talk to Yuri.”

Johnny folded his arms. Before the war, this had been a fashionable block. It was still something of an oasis — if you ignored the shrapnel marks on the low walls and the crater at the side of the street.

“Johansen says the Syrians are gearing up for an attack,” said Christian. “Russian planes are on the way.”

“Tell Chelsea to plant the damn bug and get out of there,” said Johnny.

“Relax,” said Christian. “She’s doing fine. I moved our pickups into the city,” he added, referring to the trucks with backup team members in case anything went wrong. “Destiny is above; we can get out anytime we want. Let her do her thing. I’m listening and she’s doing fine.” He paused, then added, “Russian planes are about zero-five away.”

Chelsea tried to think of how to get to Ghadab’s room. She needed strategy, words.

Go to the restroom, use the translator.

“You don’t speak very good Arabic,” said Shadaa. They were alone at the edge of the dining area’s patio — distant from help.

“I don’t,” admitted Chelsea.

“What do you speak?”

“Somali,” said Chelsea.

Shadaa reached to Chelsea’s face. She brushed her cheek gently, then lifted her scarf back. Chelsea reached to stop her, but it was too late; the cloth fell back, taking its earpiece with it. The piece would automatically shut off when the veil was back, so there was no chance of it being detected, but now Chelsea didn’t even have the rudimentary translator to help.

“I don’t know Somali,” said Shadaa. “Français?”

Chelsea shook her head.

“English?” asked Shadaa.

“A some,” said Chelsea haltingly. “A some I can talk.”

“You mean, ‘I can speak a little.’”

“This.”

A shriek from the street interrupted them. It was an odd, unexpected sound that morphed and changed, beginning like the whistle from an old tin toy. It lengthened, becoming a woman’s scream.

In the next moment, there was a loud crack and the ground rumbled from an explosion.

“Bombs!” said Shadaa, speaking once more in Arabic. “Come with me. Quickly.”

The ground rumbled again, this time violently enough to fell several chairs. Chelsea had a hard time staying on her feet as she followed Shadaa into the hotel’s dining room.

The room went dark before they were midway across. Another explosion, this one so close that it shook the ground sideways, sent Chelsea to the ground face-first. She struggled to her knees, then her feet, wincing and then coughing with the plaster dust shaken from the ceiling.

Shadaa lay a few feet away.

“‘Ayn?” asked Chelsea, helping her up. “Where?”

Shadaa blinked, dazed.

“Room?” said Chelsea in Arabic, then English. “Your room? To go? Safe?”

The ground shook again. Shadaa took Chelsea’s hand and led her from the dining room to the basement stairwell. There were sirens in the distance, and the heavy ra-thump of antiaircraft fire.

With the electricity off, the stairs were dark, the basement impossibly so. Shadaa walked with her hands out, feeling her way until she came to a wall. She collapsed against it, sinking to the dirt floor. Chelsea did the same.

The bombing continued for another minute and a half, the explosions moving away. As they waited, Chelsea reached into her pocket and took out the bug, slipping it onto the hem of Shadaa’s dress.

It was time to leave; she’d pressed her luck too far already.

“Yjb ‘an ‘adhhab,” she said, rising. She slurred her words to hide the flaws in her pronunciation. “Must go.”

Shadaa surprised her by jumping to her feet. “With me,” she told Chelsea, grabbing Chelsea’s hand and starting for the stairs.

They stopped at the top of the stairs. Chelsea glanced toward the door.

Run?

Run!

“This way,” said Shadaa, pointing down the hall.

Is that where Ghadab is?

She should leave; she knew she should leave. But this was too good an opportunity.

“Yes,” she told Shadaa. “With you I am.”

60

GigaMan was not, Massina learned to his surprise, a single person. Instead, the identity belonged to three different users, the most prominent of whom had a home base — if you could call it that — in southern Turkey. The other users were based in Germany and Albania. They all shared the same botnet and servers based in Morocco and Ankara, and occasionally were online at the same time.

Their credentials proved remarkably easy to steal, thanks to a photo Massina had surreptitiously included in the root directory of one of his computers: inspected by their botnet’s virus, it back-infected its attacker; within an hour Massina made the botnet his own.

“Prime GigaMan” had contacts throughout the Middle East. The one that interested Massina was in Fallujah, an Iraqi city under Daesh control. The contact used a web provider in Croatia to post comments on a website devoted to a youth football league — soccer to an American — in England. The posts appeared to be innocuous, mostly scores and credits to players for goals and assists.

But why would someone from Croatia with a difficult-to-track pedigree do that?

It took a little bit of experimenting, but Massina eventually realized that the numbers, when strung together, yielded web addresses. These pages were filled with seemingly meaningless gibberish — encryptions, he was sure. But to decipher them required more firepower than he had in a laptop.

He decided, in the end, to tell the CIA what he had. That meant talking to Demi Ascoldi, who was filling in for Johansen.

He asked if she could meet him in the Box; she countered with a restaurant.

A sure sign that she wasn’t taking him seriously. But he acquiesced. She was on time, at least.

“You’ll find this useful,” he told her, pushing a flash drive across the table as she sat down. “It lists contacts of your subject and some of the people who work with him. They use state-level encryption stolen from Turkey. We’ve left it intact.”

Ascoldi frowned. “Is this why you called?”

“I get conflicting signals from your agency,” said Massina. He hadn’t expected her to do jumping jacks in gratitude, but neither had he expected an antagonistic response. “You want my help, you use my people, but when I do help—”

“Some things are better left to the professionals, Mr. Massina.” She rose. “Thank you for lunch.”

He didn’t bother pointing out that they hadn’t eaten.

Bozzone met Massina outside on the sidewalk.

“Go well?” asked Bozzone.

“Better than I expected,” replied Massina sarcastically.

61

Johnny and Turk ran toward the hotel entrance, hoping that the guards would be inside. But they remained at their posts, crouched under the awning.

“Can we take shelter?” asked Turk.

The answer was a burst from one of the guard’s weapons — fortunately, into the air.

Turk and Johnny retreated back down the block.

“Let’s go in through the park,” yelled Turk.

The bombs and missiles were aimed at the southern end of town a mile away, close enough to break windows and unsettle the ground. Johnny barely kept his balance as he ran behind Turk.

Someone with a machine gun began firing from a nearby roof.

“That’s a waste of bullets,” said Turk, stopping at the gate to the park.

The gate was chained, but there was plenty of slack. Johnny slipped through easily; Turk had to squeeze.

“Gotta lay off the beer.”

They walked a few yards along the perimeter wall, stopping when they saw the low wall at the rear of the patio.

“Christian, any guards back here?” asked Turk.

“Not in view.”

“Where’s Chelsea?” asked Johnny.

There was no answer.

“Christian, you there?” asked Turk. He waited a moment, then asked again.

When there was still no answer, Turk switched frequencies to call the command bunker directly. There was no acknowledgment.

“Probably our relay unit got hit,” suggested Johnny.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get Chelsea out,” said Johnny.

He started toward the rear of the hotel.

“Whoa, go slow,” said Turk.

“We gotta get her out.”

“She’s not in trouble right now. We don’t want to blow it.”

“Who says she’s not in trouble?”

“Relax. Let’s take this one step at a time.”

“I’m not a relaxing kind of person,” said Johnny. But he knelt back down, waiting to see what plan Turk came up with.

62

Krista pounded the console.

“That’s not going to get the coms back,” said Johansen.

“Why do the Russians always screw everything up?”

“That’s what they do,” said Johansen. “Keep the drones out of the way if they come back.”

“Yup.”

Outside, Kevin Banks had almost finished prepping the UAV that would take the place of the ground dish knocked out by the Russian bombing. Using the UAV had two major disadvantages: it had a smaller bandwidth, which meant less information in real time, and it was easy to detect, as it had to fly over the city.

Johansen stared at the control handset.

“Problem?” asked Banks.

“Forgot the password,” Johansen confessed.

Banks took a step, but Johansen’s fingers took over, remembering the sequence by rote. The plane beeped with an acknowledgment. From there it was easy — a voice command told it to preflight according to its standard checklist; another got it in the air.

They watched the aircraft flutter away, unsteady in the wind.

“The way things are going, I thought it would crash,” said Banks as it finally straightened out.

“Bite your tongue,” Johansen told him.

63

The muscles in Chelsea’s neck tightened as she walked up the stairs behind Shadaa.

Now I’m scared. I can admit it.

Worse than Ukraine.

I should have been more scared in Ukraine. That’s the advantage of being naive.

She gave herself a silent pep talk, not with words but with feints of emotion, a push to be brave without spelling it out:

Johnny and Turk… out there… ready…

The knife beneath my pocket if I need it…

If he is here…

Hope he is here…

She wanted Ghadab to be there. She wanted to be the one to shoot him.

Which she could do, would do, even though they hadn’t even discussed the possibility.

Take the chance!

Shadaa slowed her pace at the landing, then turned to walk down the hall.

Almost there.

Walk. Push everything out of your mind.

Shadaa stopped in front of a door.

His room?

Chelsea involuntarily blinked as Shadaa opened the door.

I should have my gun in my hand.

“My master is very important,” said Shadaa, using English as she stepped into the room.

Empty.

Not here!

Damn!

Chelsea fought against the disappointment.

Time to leave.

“I go,” she said.

“I don’t think so.” Shadaa turned around to face her, a pistol in her hand.

The Russian bombardment had ended; a thick cloud of black smoke rose from the southern side of the city. There were sirens in the distance; here, everything was quiet.

“We go in and have a peek,” said Turk. “Someone comes, we say we’re looking for volunteers to fight the fires.”

It was thin cover, but Johnny didn’t argue.

Before they could start for the wall, a man appeared on the rear patio from the building. He had an MP5. Another came out behind him.

“Wait?” asked Turk.

“No. We need to get her out.”

Turk rose. “Guy on the right’s mine.”

“I know you are a spy,” Shadaa told Chelsea in English. “Get inside.”

“No spy.”

“Who do you work for? The council? I doubt it. The Americans? Turkey?”

“No spy. Somalia.”

“Stand against the wall.”

Chelsea moved slowly, trying to relax her muscles, trying to remember the exercises — they had done this in training, this exact scenario, an attacker coming behind you with a gun. The Krav Maga instructor was bigger, stronger, ready to fire.

Toooch… toocch.

Gunshots, below, not here.

Chelsea saw Shadaa jerking around, looking toward the door at the sound of the bullets.

What happened next was reflex, hammered into her by weeks of training with the team.

Pivoting on her left foot, she swung her elbow with all her might into her captor’s side, then punched up with her right fist, aiming for Shadaa’s chin. Shadaa, taken off guard, fell back; Chelsea’s fist hit her neck instead.

Then it was about anger and fear, but mostly anger.

Chelsea threw herself at the other woman, crashing her against the wall. She wanted to knock the gun from Shadaa’s hand but couldn’t see it. Instead she pushed her against the wall, grinding her shoulder and wedging her legs, springing into her.

A sharp elbow to her rib caught Chelsea by surprise. As she started to fall, she grabbed the other woman by the throat with her left hand and together they tumbled over, spinning onto the floor. Chelsea went down on her back, pinned by the larger woman’s weight.

Shadaa had lost the pistol, but instead of trying to retrieve it, she squirmed around, punching Chelsea in the face. Chelsea twisted and the next blow missed.

Knife! Knife!

Chelsea struggled to get up but her feet tangled in the long dress. Shadaa grabbed her right shoulder and pulled her down, trying to twist her over so she could strike her face. Chelsea’s fingers groped in her pocket, searching for the hilt of her weapon. Shadaa, knee on the floor for leverage, jerked Chelsea backwards, lifting her slightly, angling into a body slam the way a wrestler would.

The blow nearly knocked Chelsea out. She flailed with the knife, jabbing through her dress. Shadaa lifted her again, aiming to smash her hard against the floor, but instead she collapsed, stung by the slashing pain that tore up her side.

Chelsea looked into her face. Shadaa’s eyes crossed.

Chelsea plunged the knife into her enemy’s stomach.

Harder! Harder!

Johnny beat Turk to the patio, pivoting over the short wall with a quick jump. He grabbed the MP5 from the man he’d slain, pulling the strap off the dead body with a sharp yank. Blood burbled from the man’s forehead, spreading across the stones like spilled ink, more purple than red.

“Inside,” said Turk, coming up behind him.

They left the bodies there, rushing through the large, empty dining room.

Johnny halted, swiveling his head right and left to make sure she wasn’t there. He fought the urge to call her name — it would only put her in more danger.

“Stairs are back this way,” prompted Turk. “Come on.”

It was only with the last blow that Chelsea remembered she was plunging her knife into a human being. By then, Shadaa was long dead, her blood everywhere, spurting and oozing and leaking, soaking into the carpet and floorboards.

Fifty blows with the knife. So much anger.

Was it gone now?

Chelsea got up. Blood covered the knife and her hand, already sticky. The smell was pungent, similar to the smell of a field-gutted deer in the hot sun, if you’d smeared yourself with the blood and gizzards.

The door sprung open. Chelsea whirled, knife out.

“You OK?” Johnny Givens filled the doorway, one of the guard’s MP5 in his hands. “You OK?”

64

“Coms coming back online,” Krista told Johansen. “But it looks like we’ve lost a few of the video bugs.”

“Government center?” asked Johansen.

“Still working. No damage to the buildings. Leave it to the Russians to miss anything important.”

Johansen looked at the screen showing a live feed from an Air Force Global Hawk coming south to get a better view of the attack. A Russian fighter to the west challenged the UAV by turning on its target radar. The American pilot ignored it: what was a little petty harassment between hostile almost-allies?

The Russians had hit the south side of Palmyra — an indication of where the Syrians and their allies were planning their assault. They had also bombed the airport — a first. But aside from putting two good-sized craters in the already unusable runway, the Russians had done little damage.

“Air Force says Syrian helicopters taking off from Damascus,” said Krista. “The attack’s coming soon.”

“You have coms with Christian yet?”

“Negative.”

“Keep trying. It’s time to get everyone the hell out of there, and us, too.”

65

Ghadab had no patience for waiting, and despite the great respect he owed the Caliph, he could not keep himself from pacing back and forth inside the mosque. An aide had been assigned to him, ostensibly to see to his needs; the young man was more a guard assigned to monitor him. He was too skinny to do much more than that, though the radio he held in his hand would undoubtedly bring a phalanx of guards if Ghadab tried to do something so unworthy as to burst into the consultation chamber at the far end of the prayer hall.

All morning long, different delegations, advisers, commanders, messengers had come and gone. The hall was filled with them, and many others roamed outside, awaiting an audience. The crowd included a few old acquaintances, but to a man they had greeted Ghadab with barely a nod. It seemed word of the council’s displeasure had spread.

Unable to focus, his thoughts flew in different directions: plans for different attacks, the idiocy of the Americans, the coming apocalypse, Shadaa.

She kept intruding.

He remembered the weight of her body against him, the curve of her side, the way she felt beneath him…

He forced himself to think of his mission. Nearly everything was in place; the students had been infiltrated two years before and needed only to be activated. All that waited was settling on a target. Rome, Amsterdam, America again… Boston…

Ghadab walked the length of the hall, then back. His minder stayed at his elbow.

“Ask your radio how much time,” he said to the young man. “Find me when you have an answer. I will be outside.”

The young man’s brow knitted, but Ghadab didn’t wait to hear his protests.

The mosque was constructed on a stone platform; a gentle slope ran to the walls, which separated the holy grounds from the street. Men clustered in groups all across the yard. The only thing they all had in common were the AK-47s dangling haphazardly from their shoulder straps. There were young and old, traditionally dressed, combat clothes, and a few in Western-style suits.

A man in a black military uniform ran up from the street and went straight into the mosque. Ghadab thought nothing of it until another followed a minute later.

“What’s going on?” Ghadab asked his minder.

“You are on the schedule. Soon—”

“No. The messengers?” He gestured toward a third, just running up from the street.

A few feet away, one of the brothers was listening intently to his mobile. Ghadab turned from him and saw that several others were doing the same.

“Something is going on,” he told the minder. “Find out.”

Ghadab walked over to a man in a camo uniform whose phone was pressed to his ear. He was an older man, his beard mostly gray; he bloused his uniform pants at the top of his high, paratrooper-style boots.

“Commander,” said Ghadab, “what is going on?”

The man frowned at him.

“I am Ghadab min Allah.”

“I know who you are. The apostates have launched an attack on Palmyra.”

“Palmyra?”

Without another word, Ghadab started for the main gate. He needed to get back to the city.

“Brother, where are you going?” asked his minder, struggling to keep up as he cut through the crowd.

“Palmyra,” said Ghadab. “They are under attack.”

“You have business here.”

Ghadab halted abruptly. “Is the Caliph ready for me?”

“He has much business at the moment,” said the minder. “Later—”

“Tell the Caliph I will return when I am sure his city has been adequately defended,” said Ghadab, setting off for his jeep.

66

Chelsea stared at the blood pooling around Shadaa’s body. She felt no guilt or remorse, nor elation or even relief.

She felt nothing, emotion a null set.

“You all right?” asked Johnny, gripping her biceps.

Johnny?

“Come on. The city’s under attack. We gotta go.”

Across the room, Turk ransacked the dresser.

“Time to go!” repeated Johnny.

Chelsea moved in a gray-tinted daze. It was like Boston, after the attack. She’d gone home and sat in the shower for an hour until her skin felt as it had when she was a child and spent the entire day in salt water.

Someone shouted below. Chelsea dropped to her knee in the middle of the doorway and took the pistol from her calf holster. A Daesh guard rounded the corner from the stairs in the hall. She fired, aiming for the face in case he wore a vest.

Her first bullet went through his mouth, the second above his nose.

Another man came up behind him. Something exploded in her ear.

Johnny was behind her, firing an MP5. The second guard went down.

“We are out of here, now!” shouted Johnny.

“I have coms,” said Turk, touching his ear. “The extract team is outside.”

A second wave of Russian planes approached the city, once more aiming at the southeastern quarters. The Daesh commanders realized this was a prelude to an assault and scrambled men into their positions.

A stream of vehicles passed the building as Chelsea, Johnny, and Turk ran to the hotel’s front entrance. Chelsea, head still foggy, ran between the two men, sure that if she stopped even for a moment she would fall into a hole she could not see.

“Here we go!” yelled Johnny, swerving into the street.

A pickup truck stopped a few yards away. Another veered close.

“In, in, in!”

Chelsea felt herself being lifted up into the truck bed.

“Mind the gun,” said Turk.

“Out of here, let’s go.” Johnny leaped in behind her. “Keep your head down,” he added, putting his hand on her head.

Her head bounced against the hard metal floor as the vehicle sped down the road. There was gunfire in the distance, the explosions, most muffled, a few loud enough to make her tremble.

She smelled blood, the girl’s blood.

They drove for ten minutes. Someone in the truck fired off a few rounds from an AK, but Chelsea didn’t look to see who it was. Only when they were outside of the city, heading back toward the staging point where they’d originally left the truck, did Johnny tell her it was OK to get up.

“The Syrians are launching an assault,” he told her. “Their artillery will be in range within the hour. They have troops behind that.”

“Ghadab,” said Chelsea. “He wasn’t in the hotel.”

“He has to be at the bunker,” said Johnny. “They’ll get him when they attack. They’re setting up now.”

“We should help them.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” said Johnny. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

67

From a long-term strategic view, the Syrian assault on Daesh at Palmyra was excellent news. Whether the government took the city or not, the attacks would drain terrorist resources, tax their infrastructure, and damage their ability to conduct operations outside of the area.

Johansen wasn’t particularly interested in the long view at the moment. The attacks were screwing up his operation. He’d lost about half of his surveillance net, and between that and the attacks, operating inside the city was no longer viable.

None of this would matter if Ghadab was in the bunker. But that seemed unlikely. There were six men there, none of whom bore any resemblance.

Still, they’d hit it for the intel: maybe something inside would tell them where he was.

Then they’d wipe it out with Option B: an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle, or more specifically, the BLU-116 2,000-pound penetration bomb it carried. The so-called “bunker buster” would be guided into the bunker by a laser designator wielded by Johansen’s team. Nothing inside would survive the blast.

He could go to Option B now if he chose.

“Bunker team wants to know if they have the go-ahead to attack,” Krista told him.

“I want them to wait for the teams coming up from Palmyra,” he told her. “The bunker will be on alert.”

“Christian just radioed that they’re ten minutes away.”

“Good.” Johansen studied Krista. She looked extremely tired, worn by pain as well as fatigue.

Their only casualty so far.

He could just go with the bunker buster. Everyone would be safe.

But the mission would be a bust. No one would blame him — the Russians had screwed everything up — but he would know they’d failed.

They might fail yet. And lose people. What would he say at their funerals?

“Tell them they’re clear once the rest of the teams are in place for backup,” Johansen said. “Tell them Godspeed and we’re with them all the way.”

68

Chelsea’s head cleared by the time they joined the team at the bunker. She followed Johnny and the others as they reported to Rosen, who was in charge of the attack.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked him.

“Nothing. You’ve done a lot.” He stared at the side of her dress, covered with blood. “That yours?”

“No, I’m fine. I’ll work the bots.”

“It’s all right. Bobby’s on that. The bomb mechs go in after the TOW missiles.”

“You know they won’t see through the dust, right?”

“It’ll clear.”

“I thought of something quicker.”

Rosen frowned. “When?”

“Just now.”

“You gonna share?”

“I will. But I doubt anybody but me can fix it so it works.”

This time he shook his head. But instead of telling her to get back in the truck, he called over to Bobby.

“Get with Taylor on the second team,” he told him. “Chelsea’s gonna take over for you. No sense giving a genius only half a day’s work.”

They called the man with the TOW missile “Swift,” either as a tribute to his intelligence or a cut on his slow-running times. Whichever it was, he was just as impatient as anyone else.

“We going in today, or tomorrow?” he asked Johnny, who was standing next to him and monitoring the radio.

Johnny shrugged. He’d launched two Hums, and the Nighthawk was now overhead; they had plenty of visual on the bunker, and plenty of firepower, between their own weapons and the Destiny UAV.

“Sixty seconds,” said Johnny, relaying Rosen’s call. He glanced over his shoulder at Chelsea. Cross-legged on the ground between the rocks, she had a laptop on either leg.

She raised her thumb.

Nothing stops that girl.

Two mechs crept out from behind the nearby rocks. They were going in after the TOW missile to detect any booby traps. Peter, their multipurpose bot, sprung up on its legs nearby. He would go in ahead of the assault team, providing real-time video and audio.

“Do it!” said Rosen. “Showtime!”

On Chelsea’s monitor, it looked like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon with the Road Runner bursting through the painted hole on the canyon wall.

The first TOW missile hit the outer door. A second, fired from a position to Chelsea’s right, hit a few seconds later.

She ignored the temptation to look up from the screen. The mechs, held back to escape the blast, scurried toward the bunker entrance.

“Did we make it?” asked Johnny.

“Stand by.” Chelsea moved her finger on the control board, clicking the button that allowed her to speak directly to Peter. “Move into position.”

Chelsea had reprogrammed the sensor array Peter ordinarily used to check the depth of ravines or other depressions before trying to cross, turning it into a kind of forward radar.

It wasn’t perfect, but it told her what she needed to know.

“The inside barrier is still intact,” said Chelsea. “We need another hit.”

The missile took off a fraction of a second later, bursting from the launcher with the sound of a very large can of shaken soda being opened. This was followed by a noise resembling the ignition of a thousand bottle rockets. The winglets extended and the rocket’s main engines flared.

Then there was the explosion, barely muffled by the surrounding rock.

“We’re through!” said Chelsea as Peter’s distance marker jumped.

“People?” asked Rosen.

“Not that I see.”

“Gas the place,” said the commander, ordering the launch of CS grenades.

Chelsea switched her command line to the mechs, sending them in to check for explosives. Neither of them could see through the smoke, so she had them crawl against the walls. The sniffer didn’t need to see to detect intact explosives.

They had expected the soldiers to come out of the entrance and put up a fight, but so far that hadn’t happened. Nor had they discovered a back door — the Nightbird had a clear view of the ground for several miles, and the computer would alert her if it detected a human heat signature suddenly popping up.

“OK, Peter, it’s all you,” said Chelsea, tapping the button on the bot’s control screen. “Go find out what’s happening inside.”

The little bot walked into the billowing smoke. One of its arms had been replaced with a stun gun; two of the others had CS gas canisters. Two more bomb-disposal mechs followed. These had been modified to carry CS gas in large, tool-case-sized boxes; if Peter encountered any resistance, they would move forward and detonate the gas.

Peter was the one making the decision because they couldn’t count on communicating with it once it went inside the bunker; a pair of L turns formed a baffle that could hinder full communication. To get around this, Chelsea had prepared their last bomb mech to act as a relay station. She sent it off now, aiming to park itself at the end of the first turn.

Peter’s video feed was all smoke. Something loomed in the middle.

A man. He quickly fell to the ground; Peter had downed him with a zap of his Taser.

“One down. Not Ghadab,” said Chelsea, studying a freeze-frame of the terrorist.

“Just for your information we have a new flight of Russian jets inbound,” said Krista over the radio. “It’s flying a more northern vector than the others.”

“Is it targeting the bunker?” asked Chelsea.

“No way of knowing. But it is flying in your general direction.”

“We’re going in,” said Rosen.

“Give the bot a chance,” replied Chelsea. “The gas still has to clear through their ventilation system.”

“No time. Set off whatever CS you’ve got left.”

Chelsea picked up the control unit for Peter and hit the preset to take over manual control.

The unit didn’t acknowledge. Instead, a message popped up on the screen:

“Shit.” Chelsea hit the key again. “If I’m close enough for video I should be close enough—”

The video screen blanked. The unit was out of range for all communications, its transmissions blocked by the zigzag of the bunker layout and the thick walls. It was completely on its own.

Johnny pulled the helmet down over his ears, then snapped the collar in place so that he would be hermetically sealed from the gas-filled interior of the Daesh bunker. His breathing was loud in his ears, nearly drowning out the radio.

“I’m out of communication with Peter,” said Chelsea, broadcasting to the entire team. “We won’t have a link until I can get the com mech inside. It’ll take another minute at least.”

Johnny switched on the display in the lower-right corner, which he’d preset to get the feed from Peter. It was blank.

“Be careful,” she added.

Her voice wobbled, her worry exposed.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re good,” said Johnny, rushing to join the others.

Shorty, their best door buster, was in the lead, followed by Spider. Turk, now the senior man on the team, had been slotted in as the third man in the assault team. Johnny was right behind him. Christian was tail gunner on Team One, designated to stay at the entrance. They had another team in reserve, not only to back them up but also to run down “squirters” if there turned out to be a rear entrance they hadn’t detected.

They ran from the hill toward the entrance, passing the small bomb mech that was to enter as a com link.

“Do it, Shorty,” said Turk as they reached the entrance.

Johnny took a deep breath and held it as he plunged inside. There was a flash of light, then an explosive glow in the fog accompanied by a boom — Shorty had passed through the double L and tossed a flash-bang grenade down the long corridor that ran through the main part of the enemy bunker.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Everyone was yelling; everyone was saying the same thing:

Go! Go! Go!

Johnny moved to cover the hall as the assaulter in front of him entered the room nearest the entrance. Even with the enhanced optics embedded in the helmet, it was difficult to see because of the gas and dust in the hallway. He switched to infrared, which was little better.

Someone started firing a gun.

“Who’s shooting?” asked Turk. “Who’s firing?”

The gunfire stopped. Johnny’s preset screen flashed on — Peter was ahead, standing at the end of the hall.

A body lay in front of it, a gun nearby.

“Tango down near the bot at the far end of the hall,” said Johnny. He moved up to the next doorway, pausing to wait for the next pair of paras to take the room.

“Ghadab?” asked Turk.

“Too far to see.”

“He’s down?”

“Yeah. Gun’s on the ground, a few feet away. The bot Tasered him.”

“Get the room.”

Another flash-bang announced that Shorty and Spider were going in. Johnny moved up again, sliding to a knee as he saw a blur near the bot. This time there was a flash as Peter’s Taser charge went off. The man went down.

“Another down,” said Johnny. “They’re in a room at the back.”

“Stick to the plan,” said Turk. “Johnny, hold position.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Flash — bam.

“We got two prisoners. Incapacitated,” said Shorty, working through the third room. “They’re having trouble breathing. No threat. No weapons. Tying them.”

Outside the bunker, Chelsea cringed every time a flash-bang exploded. Hearing the explosions through the radio and in person gave them an odd, surreal tone, extending them into a strange, overlapping echo.

The mech with the com link finally got far enough into the bunker to pick up and relay Peter’s feed. Peter was standing near the last room of the bunker.

Two team members ran up past the bot and entered the room. There was another prolonged bang and a flash on the screen.

“Moving ahead,” she heard Johnny say. Then a shadow loomed in front of him at the end of the hall. He started falling back; a split second later she heard a loud bang — he’d been shot.

By the time Johnny realized the blur in the hallway had a gun, he was already falling backward, knocked off his feet by a slug fired at close range. The bullet didn’t penetrate his armor, but the impact hurt like hell, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

Bullets sailed a few inches from his body, ricocheting off the walls. He tried to curl up and turn over to protect himself, but his limbs wouldn’t move. Something dinged his right leg, then his left, twice.

A team member ran past, above him, shouting something. There was a flash and a bang — they entered the last room. Gunfire, and then nothing but a hollow echo in his ears.

Turk knelt over him. “You OK, bud?”

“Yeah.”

“You got hit in the chest, point-blank. And the legs,” Turk added, looking at his torn-up pants. “Ripped up.”

“As long as they’re still there,” said Johnny. “Help me up.”

“Let’s get you outside to Docky.”

Docky — aka David “Doc” Martin — was the team medic.

“It’s just gonna be a really bad bruise,” said Johnny.

“Not your legs.”

“I’ll trade them in.”

Johnny pulled off his helmet as soon as he cleared the door. The fresh air was like an adrenaline shot.

Chelsea ran to him and began pulling him back.

“Get behind the rocks,” she said.

“The bots.”

“Peter can take care of himself.”

“Me, too,” insisted Johnny. But she wouldn’t let go until they were behind the rocks. He sat down and pulled off his vest to inspect the damage.

Skin intact. Purple, but intact.

The others started dragging out the captured terrorists. They’d taken three alive; each had been given a strong dose of sodium pentothal inside the bunker, rendering them more or less inert.

Four others were dead, including the man who had shot Johnny.

“I have to get the bots packed up,” Chelsea told Johnny, “then help retrieve the computers and such. You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” he said. “Real good.”

“Pretty bruise you got,” she said.

“Naw, just a birthmark,” he said.

It hurt to laugh, but he did so anyway.

69

The Russians were going after Palmyra hard. They had two more flights of fighter bombers heading in the general direction. Meanwhile, the Syrians were almost ready with their artillery.

So, the $64,000 question: Would they attack Johansen’s people at the bunker? Or when they were on the way home?

He couldn’t take the chance.

Johansen picked up the satellite phone he’d set aside to use only for contacting the Russians. He hesitated, then hit the quick-dial combination.

A voice in Russian told him to leave a message.

“We have an operation north of Palmyra,” he said in English. “We’re evacuating the area now. We need to exchange clearance IDs. Use the red circuit.”

Useless. They aren’t going to call, ever.

He hung up and looked over at Krista. “Tell the Air Force to scramble Option B. Fuckers.”

70

Johnny wheezed with every breath.

“Nothing broken,” said Docky. “But it will hurt like shit. You want morphine?”

“Don’t need it,” insisted Johnny. He wanted to keep his head as clear as possible.

Rosen bent down to check on him. “You OK?”

“Yeah. Just bruised.”

“Handle the phones?”

“I can do coms, sure.”

Still a little woozy, Johnny followed the team leader to the trucks. With the bunker secured, the team was carting out everything they could. Rosen wanted to supervise, but with Chelsea inside examining the terrorists’ computers, someone had to handle the communications and keep watch on the UAV screens.

“Ghadab?” asked Johnny.

Rosen shook his head.

Johnny put on the headset. He stared at the video from the Hum overhead, orienting himself — his brain felt as if it were still working in slow motion, and it took him several seconds to sort out where he was on the ground. The terrain around them was clear; the terrorists had not alerted anyone to the attack, or if they had, no help was on the way.

Johnny switched over to the Nightbird screen, which showed a wider view. Palmyra was at the bottom of the screen, a collection of shadows and flares as night came on — the Syrians had begun to shell it.

“Alpha Seven?” said Krista over the control frequency.

“This is Johnny,” he answered. “Rosen is in the bunker. What’s up?”

“We want you to take shelter,” she told him.

“Shelter where?”

Johansen broke in. “There’s a wave of Russian attack aircraft, Su-24s, about to hit Palmyra,” said Johansen. “That’s the second wave — the first came north after dropping their bombs. They just shot up a truck on the road. They must be looking for targets of opportunity — and you’re all they’ll see.”

“What do you want us to do?” asked Johnny.

“Get in the bunker. All of you.”

“What if they bomb that?”

“Better to be in the bunker than in the open. You have two minutes.”

Inside the bunker, Chelsea finished inventorying the terrorists’ computer equipment. None of it was special; the CPUs could have been purchased at any Walmart. The modems had boxes next to them, which Chelsea assumed were used for encryption, but otherwise there was nothing here that would look particularly out of place in a home office. After having the mechs check for explosives, they cut the power cords, severing the connections with the backup power supplies, and began carting the gear out. It was possible, maybe even likely, that they had already erased the hard drives, but Chelsea was fairly confident that data could be recovered as long as the drives remained physically intact.

Peter had been hit by several bullets; one had wiped out his radio connection. There was also damage to his IR sensor. None of the damage, though, explained why the bot had failed to neutralize the terrorist who shot Johnny. Its autonomous programming should have done that.

“Peter, give me a quick diagnostic read on AI section memory and logic circuits,” she told it.

“Memory optimum. Logic… no problem detected.”

“Let’s go outside,” she told it.

The bot turned and began walking down the hall. Chelsea followed it out, walking with it in the direction of the truck.

Johnny met her a few yards from the entrance.

“Where’s your headset?” he asked.

“I took it off while I was working with Peter. There’s something wrong with his AI. He should have protected you but—”

“Come on! Back inside,” he told her.

“What’s going on?”

“Russian planes. They’re shooting up everything. They’re close — hear them?”

“But—”

“Inside!” yelled Rosen, running up.

“I need to get Peter.”

“Inside!” he yelled, grabbing her.

“Peter!”

Chelsea’s shout was drowned out by the sound of gunfire as one of the Su-24s began shooting at the ground.