Black Wolf

14

“Why Moldova?” Danny asked.

“I have no idea if it means anything,” Nuri told him as they debriefed the break-in over the secure sat phone. “He was looking at a lot of sites there. We’ll have a better idea in the morning, when MY-PID finishes churning through all the data. I just thought it was a little unusual. Moldova is not exactly the garden spot of the world. It’s not on the beaten path, that’s for sure.”

“It’s not,” agreed Danny.

“The guy loves porn,” continued Nuri. “And he’s an animal — he started screwing on the couch while I was there. I swear, I was ten feet away. Maybe closer. If they’d seen me, they probably would have asked me to join in.”

Nuri’s mention of Moldova brought back painful memories for Danny. A decade and a half before, Dreamland Whiplash had run an operation in neighboring Romania, helping rout guerrillas who were trying to disrupt a pipeline project. In the process, they’d helped rescue the country from a coup.

But they’d lost a key member of the team and a friend, CIA officer Mark Stoner. Danny could still remember getting the news.

They talked for a while more, about whether Flash should stay with Nuri or come to Kiev, about how many more people they’d need, about when to contact the local authorities.

Danny couldn’t focus on any of it. He kept thinking about Stoner.

He’d lost a lot of friends in the early part of his career, in Bosnia, and then with Dreamland. Later on in the Gulf and Afghanistan. It had been a luxury the last few years, not having to worry about forming friendships that could end all too suddenly.

“I’ll talk to you after we get the info dump,” said Nuri. “Figure out the next move then. In the meantime, I’m going to bed. You good?”

“Good.”

“You OK, Colonel?”

“I’m here,” answered Danny.

“Maybe you ought to get some rest, too,” said Nuri. “You sound a little tired.”

Danny glanced at his watch. It was five in the morning; no way was he getting back to sleep.

“I’m good,” he told Nuri. “Talk to you soon.”

15

Breanna overslept, and by the time she woke, Zen had already left to take Teri to school and then go to work.

Her body felt raw from the fight, as if it had been physical. She took a shower, feeling drained of blood, even trembling a little. Coffee helped get her awake, but it only reinforced the jitteriness. She left for work without checking the news or looking at her version of the morning briefing. Her BlackBerry had a dozen messages, but none were from Zen, so she didn’t bother opening them.

Breanna generally split her days between the Pentagon and Room 4. Today she was scheduled to spend her time at the Pentagon, where, among other things, she was supposed to make sure arrangements for the Tigershark demonstration test flight were set. But she headed to the CIA campus instead, anxious for an in-depth update on the operation.

And considering, in the back of her mind, what to tell Danny about the Wolves.

To her great surprise, she found Reid in the bunker. Not only did he spend the bulk of his time in his office in the main building, he was famously known as a late riser, often grumbling about meetings that began before 10:00 A.M.

“Extra strong this morning,” Breanna told the automated coffee unit. “Very strong.”

“You saw the e-mail?” Reid asked her as the coffee began to brew.

“No. I just had an instinct that something was up.”

Reid was an old-school CIA hand, both figuratively and literally. Sometimes it seemed to Breanna that he had been with the Agency back when it was the OSS.

“MY-PID has arranged all of the data from the mobster’s computer,” said Reid. “There’s one possible lead through a bank account. And some interesting connections. Most of the information on the drives pertains to his business interests. The FBI will be interested. And there’s plenty more for the Italian antimafia commission.”

“Let’s have a look.”

“Here.”

Reid turned to the wall, then told the computer to display the data summary. Several windows of information appeared, long lists of files arranged in treelike fashion. A window on the left showed correspondence between Moreno and other members of his organization, translating them from Italian as well as decrypting them. They indicated that he was having some conflicts with upper level associates, or fellow mob bosses. There was personal animosity and friction as well. Based on what Nuri had observed, that was more than understandable.

The profile the information drew was of a man whose empire was slipping away from him. If they were in America, the authorities might even attempt to pressure him and get him to turn against the rest of the mob. But the Italians didn’t work that way.

“He does seem to be losing his grip,” said Reid. “Which is perhaps another reason he didn’t use his own people for the strike in Berlin. In any event, the matter that concerns us is here, a pair of transactions that switched money from a Naples bank to Egypt, then to Russia.”

“Does that say three million dollars?” asked Breanna.

“They don’t come cheap,” said Reid. “But he can afford it.”

“Have you traced the accounts?”

“They were opened and closed the same day. The Russian bank has a branch in Moldova.”

“Hmmm.”

“I thought you’d find that interesting. I have a list of transactions on the day the money hit the Russian account. We have five different accounts where we think the money went, but the transfers aren’t recorded as transfers. Someone withdrew the money, in theory as cash, then placed it into these accounts. If that happened. Most likely it was only on paper. And we’re guessing at the match-ups, because the amounts don’t match exactly. There’s about ten thousand dollars missing.”

“Pocket money.”

“Maybe. Or just diddling with the numbers to throw off programs designed to look for suspicious transactions.”

“But it was done in Moldova?”

“Likely. Again, this could all be manipulated,” admitted Reid. “The records. I don’t trust the Russian banking system. It’s always been full of holes.”

“Where is the bank?”

“In the capital, Chisinau. It has some dealings with other Russian banks in Tighina. Tighina is a provincial capital, near the area under dispute with Russia. Good-sized city, at least for Moldova. Those banks are pretty small and don’t seem to have been involved. There’s a big dispute between that region and the rest of Moldova; no other banks deal with them — or with the Russians.”

“Other links?”

“Already looking for them.”

“I have to tell Danny.”

“That would make sense. There are a few other loose ends. The FBI agent Nuri took with him wants to use some of the information we developed on Moreno for her own case against him.”

Breanna nodded. They had been counting on the FBI to do just that. Anyone watching would think that Moreno, not the Wolves, was the focus of the investigation.

“Nuri also found this information. Oddly.”

A list of websites relating to Moldova came up.

“Was he planning to go there?”

“That might be a possibility,” said Reid. “They’re all recent — just the other day. After the murder.”

“Trying to see where his money went?”

Reid shrugged.

“Maybe he’s dissatisfied with the job,” he said. “Or maybe he’s looking to provide a bonus.”

“Was the break-in discovered?”

“Apparently not. Nuri had to drug a dog, but he covered that up. In any event, the mobster has been using the computer quite prolifically since he got up a few hours ago.”

“Since we’re in their system, maybe we can watch and see what happens,” said Breanna.

“We think more and more alike with each passing day,” said Reid.

“Scary.”

“Very.”

Breanna sat at her desk staring at an old photo of Mark Stoner for nearly a half hour before putting the call in to Danny.

Part of her hoped he wouldn’t pick up; she wanted to put off talking to him for as long as possible. The other part wanted to get past this as quickly as possible.

Danny answered on the first ring.

“Can you talk?” she asked.

“I’m at the hotel,” he told her. “It’s fine.”

“We have more information on the Wolves.” She heard her voice crack. “And I have — there’s something I didn’t give you earlier. Because — for a couple of reasons.”

“All right.”

Breanna took a deep breath.

“We think that the people involved with the Wolves have been altered — enhanced is the better word,” she said, correcting herself. She remembered her conversation with Zen the night before, how he had initially dismissed it all as science fiction nonsense. “It sounds incredible, but we think they’re the result of experiments — that their bodies have been genetically altered, with drugs and in some cases biomechanical devices.”

“They’re supermen?” said Danny.

“That would be an exaggeration. The sorts of enhancements we’re talking about, we think, would increase lung capacity, say, metabolic recovery rates. Strength might be increased through implants, bone replacements, or the exoskeleton devices, the things that you were involved in testing—”

“You mean the wing?” said Danny.

“Exactly.”

Dreamland had helped develop a device that allowed soldiers to literally fly across the battlefield. Called by various names — Rocketman was more popular than Wing, which was the Whiplash nickname — the gear was used by special operations troops for select missions. The research involved in constructing it had found a much wider application, affecting everything from parachutes to the jacks that helped ordies load bombs and missiles onto aircraft. A civilian company had used the technology to create one-man cranes and lifts, which it planned to introduce to the market in a few months.

“The truth is, we don’t have a lot of details,” continued Breanna. “We’re making guesses based on some eyewitness accounts which, as you know, aren’t always credible. But we have a video showing one of the Wolves moving with incredible speed while another puts his fist through the side of a car.”

“Wow.”

“The video is very sketchy. It’s some sort of laboratory piece. Very low resolution.”

“Not a sales brochure, huh?”

“Danny, this is serious. The sources are sensitive. Highest code word.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s something else. Something that affects us both.”

Breanna paused. Danny didn’t say anything, and the silence immediately struck her.

Does he know what I’m going to say? Has he somehow intuited it?

“I think — there’s some evidence,” she started, losing her steam, “that — one of the Wolves may be Mark Stoner.”

Danny still didn’t say anything.

“The— There’s a visual similarity in the video. I noticed it right away,” Breanna continued. “It’s eerie, if it’s a coincidence. It may be a coincidence. But…”

The phone line was so silent, Breanna almost wondered if she had lost the connection. But the computer would have told her if that was the case.

“The… there is other evidence,” she said. “I don’t know — it’s not conclusive, but here’s what it is. The killer on the assassination in China was drinking from a Coke bottle immediately before the murder. The Chinese gathered it and got a sample from it. They have saliva, and some drugs — he wasn’t drinking cola, it was some sort of maintenance drink we think, it had enzymes and amphetamine in it. In any event, the Chinese analysis of the DNA material has something like a seventy-three percent chance of matching Mark’s.”

The percentage had to do with the original sampling technique used in recording Stoner’s DNA in the 1990s, as well as the quality of the material the Chinese had collected and the process they used to analyze it. Breanna told Danny about the doubts some of the scientists had mentioned, and the arguments that placing an actual number on the odds of a direct match were difficult and misleading.

“Do you think it’s him?” asked Danny when she finished.

“I don’t know. I simply don’t know.”

“Wow.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. I–I wasn’t — I’m not sure that it’s him.”

“It’s all right Bree. I understand.”

She could have kissed him right then. She would have, if he were there. He was taking the news a lot better than she had when she first heard about the possibility of Stoner being alive.

“The Moldova connection,” Danny prompted. “What do you make of that?”

“That may be important,” she said. “I mean — it is where Mark was shot down. On the other hand, it could be a coincidence. It is a good place if you’re looking to have some quiet banking transactions.”

“I think I ought to look into it.”

“So do I.”

16

Danny Freah stared out the window of the Fokker 50–100 as the aircraft approached the airport at Chisinau. While Moldova shared a border with Ukraine and in some ways had a similar history, relations between the two countries were cool. Moldovans seemed to resent Ukrainians almost as much as they resented Russians. The flight he had taken was the only scheduled daily flight between the two countries. Even so, the aircraft was only half full, and its age indicated that the line wasn’t particularly profitable.

Danny tightened his seat belt for the landing. After so many years in military jets, the smooth, unhurried descent felt almost like a car ride. He waited as the plane left the runway for the taxi strip, then got up and grabbed his things as soon as he could see the small terminal in the window. He was the first one off, practically running for the open terminal door.

Relax, he told himself. Slow down. Nothing was going to be gained by haste.

The white-haired customs agent who checked his passport was impressed that he was an American. His English, though heavily accented, was very good.

“You’re here on business?” said the man.

“I have some appointments,” Danny told him.

“This is very good — you will like Moldova. A very good climate for making money. I studied in U.S. of A. myself.”

“Really?” said Danny.

“Nineteen seventy,” said the man proudly. “Amherst. But I returned. We always return to our home.”

“True.”

“A good place for business,” said the man, handing his passport back.

“Maybe you should open a business yourself,” suggested Danny.

“Too much to do,” said the man. He looked down at the floor, as if lamenting decisions he had made long ago. But then he immediately brightened. “Good luck to you.”

“Thanks,” said Danny.

Danny’s ostensible goal in Moldova was to visit the Russian bank branch in Chisinau, where he would plant some bugs and attempt to gather more information about accounts associated with the Wolves. But he also intended to check out the crash site. And to do that, he had to head north to Balti. He decided he’d get that out of the way first; not only was MY-PID still pulling together information on possible connections to the account, but Nuri and Flash were due to arrive in the morning; they could bug the banks as easily as he could.

Balti was something he preferred doing on his own.

His flight to Balti in the north, barely eighty miles by air, was in a brightly painted former Russian army helicopter. To get in, he and his fellow passenger had to squeeze past the copilot’s seat, buckling themselves into the tandem seats in the cabin. The engines whined ferociously as they took off, and the noise hardly abated as they flew, the cabin vibrating in sync with the three-bladed prop above.

The Balti International City Airport had a long runway, but was used so rarely there were no car rental or other amenities there. The terminal building was deserted and locked, and the grass around the infield of the airstrip overgrown.

Danny had arranged for a driver and car to take him to the bus station, where a small car rental shop promised to rent him a car. But the driver wasn’t there when he got off the plane. He called the company twice and got no answer; after a half hour he decided he had no choice but walk into town, a six or seven mile hike. He took his bag and started down the long concrete access road.

Weeds grew through the expansion cracks. Danny pulled his earphones from his pocket and connected to MY-PID, asking the computer if there were any other taxis in town.

There weren’t.

“There is a bus route along the highway to the airport,” advised the computer. “The next run is in three hours.”

“I can walk there in that time.”

Just then, a small red Renault came charging off the highway down the access ramp. Danny stopped, hoping it was the taxi. But it sped past.

Gotta be for me, thought Danny. He stood waiting. Five minutes passed. Ten. Finally, he started walking again.

He’d just reached the highway when the car sped up behind him, braking hard and just barely missing him though he was well off the road. A short, skinny man not far out of his teens leaned across the front seat and rolled down the window.

“You American, yes?”

“That’s right,” said Danny.

“I am your ride.”

“Where have you been?” Danny asked.

“Trouble,” said the driver, sliding back behind the wheel.

Danny opened the door, pushed up the seat and put his bag in the back. Then he got in next to the driver, who grabbed the gearshift and ground his way toward the highway. “This your first day?” Danny asked.

“Oh no — I drive since fourteen.”

“You’re older than that now, huh?”

“Twenty-two. Legal.” The driver grinned at him. “You like my English?”

“Better than my Moldovan,” said Danny. He could, of course, use the MY-PID to translate for him if he wanted.

“I learn Internet. School, too.”

“Great.”

The highway was straight and there were no other cars — a good thing, because not only did the driver keep his foot pressed to the gas, he treated the lane markings as if they were purely theoretical.

“So — you need bus?” said the driver.

“I have to rent a car.”

“Car?”

“Like Hertz,” said Danny. “Eurocar?”

The driver seemed confused.

“I’m picking up a car,” said Danny.

“No.”

“No?”

“When are you renting car?”

“Today. I made the reservation myself.”

“No car.”

“How do you know?”

“My name is Joe,” said the driver. He held out his hand. As he did, the car veered slightly but decidedly toward the shoulder.

Danny shook hands quickly. “The road,” he said, pointing.

The driver pulled them back toward the center of the pavement. He explained that his family owned the city’s largest gas station, which doubled as its largest, and only, car rental facility. And their two cars had been rented out three days before. Neither was due back for a week.

“You only have two cars?” Danny asked.

“Official, five,” said the driver. One had been wrecked months before and never repaired; the other two were waiting for repair parts.

“I have fix,” said the driver.

“You can fix one of the cars?”

“No — I drive.”

“I have a better idea,” said Danny, grabbing the dashboard as the driver turned off the highway, wheels screeching. “I’ll rent this car.”

“It’s my sister’s car,” said Joe.

“If she lends it to you, I’m sure she’ll rent it to me.”

“But then what will we have for a taxi?”

“Do you do that much taxi business?”

“We are the largest taxi service in all Balti.”

“Then missing one car isn’t going to be that big a deal.”

“We have only two,” said Joe. “One crashed, and two cannot get parts.”

“A hundred bucks for the day,” said Danny.

“One thousand. But we give you lunch, too. Biggest restaurant in Balti.”

Danny worked the price down to seven hundred dollars, with lunch and breakfast in the morning, assuming he was still in town. Joe also promised to give him a ride to the airport, no charge.

Whatever family member was cooking did a much better job at the stove than Joe did behind the wheel. Under other circumstances, Danny might even have stayed for dessert. But he had a lot to do before dark.

Besides the possible DNA match, there was circumstantial evidence of a link between the area where Stoner had crashed and Russian experiments with various physical “enhancements.”

The Soviet Union had run a sports clinic in a small town two miles away during the 1970s and early 1980s. The clinic had specialized in a number of techniques for athletic enhancement, including training in special aerobic chambers and rigorously supervised diets.

It hadn’t been secret — there were several stories about it in the Western media. It closed quietly sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, never officially linked to the controversies then swirling about steroids and various stimulant use, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to make a connection. Anyone looking back would conclude that while those techniques were never mentioned in the press coverage, they were surely being practiced there as well.

It was rumored to be the site of other experiments as well. MY-PID located an article in Le Monde published in 1987 about the site that stated there were a number of rumors that the plant was aiming at producing “super athletes” and was investigating “genetic techniques.” They weren’t detailed in the story, but the hints were tantalizing enough for Danny, who asked MY-PID if it could track down the writer.

He’d recently retired from the French newspaper. When Danny, driving in the car, called the number MY-PID had discovered, the man answered on the second ring. Danny told him he was working on a book about old Olympic stars and had come across the article.

A white lie compounded by exaggeration, but harmless all around.

Flattered to be contacted, the former reporter told Danny what he could remember of the trip to the facility, describing what looked to him like a horse farm that had been “gussied up” with a pair of massive gyms in the old barns. He’d seen perhaps fifty athletes altogether, and interviewed a dozen. All spoke in glowing terms of the various methods that were used.

“A lot of emphasis on mental techniques,” said the man, whose English was heavily accented but fluent. “Positive thinking, we called it at the time. Of course, now we know they were probably just using many steroids. It was part of the culture of deception. So many athletes ended up doing this. My report was in the very beginning of the time.”

“Do you remember when it closed?”

“I wouldn’t know. We were invited — it was while the Eastern Europeans were winning all those medals, you understand. People thought the success was something to do with the mind. A fantasy.”

“So they did it with drugs?”

“Steroids, certainly. Now I realize what I should have looked for. They claimed they took a vitamin regime. Of course. And positive thinking. Well, you believe what you want to believe, as you Americans would say.”

MY-PID couldn’t locate any records showing whether the facility was operating when the helicopter went down in 1998, though the Frenchman’s account made it seem likely that it had. As of now, satellite reconnaissance appeared to show that it had been abandoned.

Danny decided to check for himself.

He followed the computer’s directions, taking a slight detour from the highway that led to the crash site. Dotted with small farms and houses built two or three centuries before, the countryside seemed almost idyllic, more a backdrop for a movie than an actual place.

A small village sat two miles from the complex. Dominated by a small church that hugged the road, it was home to less than two hundred people. Aside from the church, its central business section held only a pair of buildings; between them they had five shops: a bakery, tobacco shop, small grocery, clothing store, and a store that sold odds and ends.

A few local residents stood outside the tobacconist, watching Danny as he passed. He smiled and waved, and was surprised to see them wave back.

A mile and a half out of town, he turned to the right to head toward the facility. An abandoned house stood above the intersection, its siding long gone and its boards a weathered gray. A horse stood in a rolling pasture on the left, quietly eating unmowed grass as Danny passed.

The double fence that surrounded the place during its heyday was mostly intact, though weeds twined themselves through the links. The gates were pushed back, still held in place by large chains, now rusted beyond use.

Danny drove up the hill into the complex, feeling as if he was being watched.

He was: a large hawk sat serenely on the cornice of the main building at the head of the driveway, its head nestled close to its chest. Its unblinking eyes followed him as he got out of the car and walked across the small parking lot to the building. The Le Monde story fresh in his mind, he walked to the large gym building on the right. This was a steel structure, more warehouse than traditional gym. It had large barnlike doors on the two sides facing the rest of the complex. Both were locked, as was a smaller steel door at the side.

Danny walked back along the building, looking for the other gym, which according to the story, sat catty-corner behind the first.

It had been razed, replaced by an empty field. There were no traces of it.

A set of old dormitory buildings sat at the very rear of the site. Danny went to the closest one. The door gave way as he put his hand on the latch.

He stepped into a small vestibule. There were posters on the wall, faded but still hanging perfectly in place. The words were in Russian. He activated the video camera on the MY-PID control unit and had the machine translate them for him:

“Train well!

Your attitude is your ally!

Think, then perform!

Whatever you dream, you will live.”

The vestibule opened into a corridor on the left; an open staircase was on the right. Danny walked down the corridor slowly. Small rooms lined the hallway. Some had doors, some not; all were open. There were no furnishings in any of the rooms, nothing in them but dust, a few old shades, and in one, rolled rug liners. The place had a musty smell, the scent of abandonment.

Upstairs it was the same. He went into one of the rooms and looked out the windows. He couldn’t quite imagine what it would have been like — a hundred jocks and their trainers, always running, working out, practicing their various sports.

Getting injections and God knew what else.

How did that relate to Stoner?

The athletes were just a cover for an experiment to create supermen?

And Stoner… became one of their experiments?

It didn’t sound plausible. What Danny saw instead was more benign — people trying to help him back into shape after being broken. The downside of steroids and other drugs wasn’t understood at the time.

Or maybe he was being too naive. Maybe the doctors knew exactly what they were doing.

But steroids weren’t evil. He’d known guys who took them back in the nineties. Amateur bodybuilders trying to get ahead. An almost pro wrestler hoping to get the “look” so he could land a job with WCW, back in the day. Not evil guys.

Did they help? He couldn’t even say. But it didn’t seem to hurt. He didn’t buy the “ ’roid rage” hysteria.

Maybe he just didn’t have the right information. And maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what they were doing here, as Breanna had implied.

But could Stoner have survived the crash? Not from what he saw. No way.

Danny went back outside. Walking through the grounds, he could tell without even referring to the Le Monde story that several other buildings had been removed, bulldozed without a trace.

The remarkable thing, he thought, was the lack of vandalism. Granted, the population in the surrounding area was small, but there must be kids somewhere, and he’d have thought at least the windows would have been tempting targets on a boring Saturday afternoon. He was tempted to put a rock through one himself, right now, just for the hell of it.

Going to his car, he caught a glint of light, a reflection of the sun sinking toward the nearby hills. Once again he had the sensation of being followed. But it was distant, and even MY-PID couldn’t detect anything. He stared for nearly ten minutes; unable to detect any movement, he got into the Renault and headed back for the main road.

Danny followed the road south to a slightly larger village about two miles away, driving through a bucolic countryside of rolling hills and farm fields. Small corners of the fields were cultivated, here and there. The idle land was a sign of the country’s current economic woes, where farmers couldn’t afford the money for seeds and new tractors, but from the distance, driving by, they only made the place more beautiful.

This area had been used by the rebels during Romania’s troubles. A good portion of the people here were ethnic Romanians, and in the wake of the Soviet collapse, there had been active attempts toward unifying the country with its neighbor. The Romanian rebels, however, were aligned with the Russians, who were at odds with the Moldovan government as well as the Romanians.

The politics were complicated, tangled in family relationships and issues that stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years. An American had no hope of untangling them, not even with MY-PID’s help, and Danny treaded lightly when he stopped at the police station and asked if he could speak to the police chief.

The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand — the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.

“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.

“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Danny. “A friend of mine died here fifteen years ago. I think he was buried here.”

“Your car stolen?”

“No, my car isn’t stolen.”

“A friend took your car?”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

Danny took out the MY-PID, telling the chief it was a translating computer. He struggled with the words at first, but the more he spoke, the easier the pronunciation became.

When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.

That confusion cleared, the chief invited Danny to dinner with him. Danny wanted to see the cemetery before nightfall, and with the sun on the horizon, tried to pass.

“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.

“But—”

“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”

“I—”

“Come, come. Not far.”

The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Danny agreed.

It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Danny explained why he had come — a friend of his had died in a helicopter crash some fifteen years before. He didn’t mention that he’d been working with the Romanian army, or even that he was an American, not knowing how those facts might be received.

“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”

“He was an American,” said Danny. “He was an advisor. Helping them.”

“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”

“Like brothers.”

“And brothers with America.”

“I hope so, yes.”

“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”

“Allies, brothers — whatever words.”

The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.

“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”

The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Danny couldn’t finish the entire shot in one gulp. This amused the chief, who refilled his glass.

“I was a young officer then,” he told Danny, leading him over to a pair of overstuffed chairs in the living room. His son came, too, standing by his father’s side and translating. “Fresh on the force. The state police. We were arranged differently — my supervisor was from another region. I came to the crash. It was a bog. Two miles from here.”

“I see.”

“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”

“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Danny.

“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon — it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think there were any survivors.”

“Would you know where they were taken?”

“The bodies? Buried.”

“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”

“One was. But the others stayed.”

“Why?” asked Danny.

The chief shook his head. Danny knew from the records MY-PID had found that three Romanian soldiers’ bodies had been repatriated within months of the end of the coup. But a combination of politics, ancestry — at least one of the soldiers’ families had come from this part of Moldova during the 1960s — and the difficulty of working with distant relatives had prevented all from being repatriated. The records were vague, but there were at least two soldiers still buried in Moldova.

“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Danny. “Could you give me directions?”

“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that dinner was ready. “Here, we will have another vodka before eating.”

It was dark by the time they were finished dinner. The police chief offered to let Danny stay at his house, but it was clear he would be displacing someone, probably the son. Danny begged off, and the chief recommended a small guest house run by a widow on the other side of town. As the town consisted of only six blocks, it was easy to reach, and Danny was sleeping by eight.

He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.

The chief insisted on running his blue emergency lights as they drove out to the swamp where the helicopter had crashed. It took less than ten minutes, a bumpy ride up and down a medium-sized hill into a narrow valley parted almost exactly in the middle by a meandering creek.

According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years — the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.

“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.

Danny stared at the area. He’d seen a number of helicopter crashes during his stints with Air Force special operations and Dreamland. He saw them all now, flickering through his head like ghosts combining into a single image: a Marine Whiskey Cobra merging with a mangled Blackhawk, half morphed into a Comanche test bed whose rotor was the only surviving part. Beneath them all were the pancaked remains of a flattened Chinook, the wounded passengers still crying for help.

Danny looked at the nearby woods and trees. The helo would have come in low, skimmed down when it was shot — the report said the chopper pilot was trying to attract the interceptors’ attention to help the others get away.

If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.

Would that make it survivable?

He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.

“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.

The police chief described the process — they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.

“Three?” asked Danny, making sure he understood. “Only three people?”

“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”

There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Danny didn’t correct the police chief. He said that tents had been set up near the road. They were brought in under the pretense of being an aid station to help the wounded, though it was far too late for that.

“Then what happened?” asked Danny.

“To the cemetery.”

Danny nodded. “Can we go there?”

“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”

The cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.

There were three dozen headstones, most pockmarked with centuries of wear. The bodies of the men found in the helicopter were together at the side, three marked by wooden crosses and one by a stone that lay flat against the ground.

“Once they were white,” said the chief, referring to the worn wood. “But given their age, they have done well.”

Standing over the graves, Danny felt the urge to say a prayer. He knelt and bowed his head, wishing the dead men peace.

“I hope you’re here, Mark,” he whispered to himself.

He stopped himself. It felt funny, praying that someone was dead.

17

It was a coincidence that Captain Turk Mako’s last name meant shark. But it was a chance occurrence that he liked to play up in casual conversation.

“The Shark flies the shark — gotta happen,” he’d say when telling people what he did.

Not that he told many people. The aircraft wasn’t actually top secret, but most of what it was used for was.

In a sense, Turk’s name wasn’t actually Mako. It had been shortened and Americanized, kind of, from Makolowejeski by his great-great-grandfather, who’d come from Poland in the 1930s, escaping the war. He’d been dead some years when Turk was born, but he’d left a set of taped recordings about his adventures, a revelation and inspiration to the young man when he discovered them in high school.

Most pilots are at least a little superstitious, even if ultimately they know it’s bunk. Turk, who had a lucky coin he kept in his pocket every flight, viewed the name change as something of a good omen. Great-great had been looking after him even before he was born.

The Shark that Turk Mako flew was the F–40 Tigershark II, the experimental aircraft owned by the Pentagon’s Technology Office, now being equipped with the Medusa control unit to work with the Sabre UAVs. It was the latest in a long line of experimental aircraft, a cutting-edge plane that would have looked right at home on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.

Technically, two previous aircraft had been called the Tigershark. The first was actually an informal name applied by the British to their versions of the P–40 Warhawk, after squadrons began painting sharks’ mouths on the nose. Fighting against the Japanese in China, Claire Lee Chenault’s Flying Tigers saw how good the paint looked and added teeth to their versions, helping to make the look famous.

Tigershark II’s direct namesake was the F–20, a lightweight, multirole aircraft developed by Northrop in the 1970s and early 1980s from the basic blueprint of the F–5E. It was incredibly nimble, capable of hitting Mach 2 and climbing to over 54,000 feet. It could take off in only 1,600 feet, a relatively short distance for a jet of that era, and the simplicity of its design made it easy to maintain — an important consideration for its intended target consumers, friendly American allies who might not have or want to spend the money for more expensive aircraft.

Though an excellent aircraft, the F–20 eventually succumbed to the realities of international weapons purchasing, where politics often overshadowed other considerations.

Like its predecessor, the new Tigershark was light, small, and fast. Very, very fast.

The airframe had essentially been built around the engine, a combination hypersonic pulse and ramjet that could take the sleek, needle-nosed plane to Mach 5. The engine also allowed it to operate around 135,000 feet. The wings came out in a triangular wedge, with faceted and angled fins on both sides.

The engine’s quad air scoop was located directly under the cabin area of the fuselage; rail guns were mounted on either side. The rail guns were directed energy weapons, firing small bursts of plasma at high speed. The bursts were roughly the equivalent of a 50-millimeter machine-gun bullet. Devastating to another aircraft, the weapon had several advantages over conventional machine guns, starting with the fact that its projectile, though as potent as missiles, were the size of 25mm bullets. Its effective range was just over twenty miles — well before the aircraft would be seen on radar.

The weapon did have some limitations. Only a dozen charges could be fired before it had to cool down and recycle, a process that took two minutes under ideal conditions. And with each firing, the gun literally tried to pull itself apart. Maintaining it in working order was, so far at least, very expensive.

Turk counted another negative to the weapon, though this was never mentioned by its builders. Great precision was needed to target a moving adversary, and the forces created as the weapon was fired made the Tigershark hard to control at all but top speed. These facts combined to dictate that the aircraft be flown entirely by the computer during the combat sequence. In other words, he had to hand the stick over to the silicon to take his shot.

He didn’t particularly like that. No computer was ever going to be as good as he was at flying. Ever.

Turk had joined the Air Force to fly. He was good at it — very good, he liked to think. He’d flown everything the service had given him — from F–16s to Flighthawks. In his not too humble opinion, he was the best. It irked him to give up the stick, even if he wasn’t literally standing back out of the way. But that was the way it was.

In a very real sense, he knew he was lucky to have a job where his seat was actually in a cockpit. All of the good young jocks were headed toward UAV programs now, a dramatic switch from just a few years ago. Unmanned planes were the Air Force’s future.

That sucked. There was nothing like the smell of rapidly evaporating jet fuel to get you moving in the morning, he thought. He took one last whiff and plugged up, snugging the Tigershark’s cockpit.

Time to rock and roll.

“Control to Tiger One, Tiger One, you read?” prompted the control tower.

“Copy, Control, strong read.”

“Status?”

Part of Turk wanted to give a real wise guy answer — maybe something like, “I feel like I gotta pee.” But the flight control computer at Dreamland that was talking to him had no sense of humor. In fact, the only thing in the universe that had less of a sense of humor was the flight control computer’s human boss, Major Samantha “Killjoy” Combs, who had promised to write him up if he goofed on the computer again. His joking around had frozen the system, grounding flights for over two hours.

Or so she claimed.

“Write me up?” he’d laughed. “I just discovered a flaw in your stupid computer program.”

“You caused two flight ranges to shut down.”

“Better we found the problem now rather than in battle,” said Turk.

“Captain.”

“Hey, make yourself happy. What are you gonna do, give me a parking ticket?”

Twenty minutes later his boss, Breanna Stockard, had called from D.C., telling him that if the three-star general commanding Dreamland complained about him again, he was going to be reassigned to clean toilets in the coldest part of Alaska.

So Turk was very straight today when dealing with the computer controller.

“Status is green,” said the pilot. “Awaiting clearance to take off.”

“Tiger One you are cleared to proceed on the filed flight plan. You are cleared for takeoff.”

The computer continued, giving him a rundown of the weather conditions. They were basically the same as they always were at Brown Lake: clear skies, unlimited visibility.

“Engines, military power,” said Turk, powering up from soft idle. The power plants — there were actually four of them, though they worked as an integrated unit — came on with a soft thud. The aircraft immediately began to shake. Turk worked his control surfaces quickly, getting green status lights on the right side of his visor. He could choose to use the LED screens on the aircraft — there was no glass canopy — but generally left that as a backup. His smart helmet could do everything the computer-controlled screen could, and was connected directly to the plane.

Turk checked through his instruments for his last takeoff checklist, meticulously looking at each indicator even though the computer would have alerted him if anything was out of spec. Then he took a long, deep breath, slowly emptying his lungs.

“Let’s go,” he told the plane, simultaneously reaching for the throttle.

And they were off.

All airplanes are built to fly. Engines on full and left completely on their own, their wings would gladly propel themselves through the air, straight and level, forever. Or at least until their fuel ran out.

The Tigershark didn’t just love to fly. It loved to accelerate. Its engines supplied more lift per pound than any other aircraft in the American inventory, which meant any other aircraft in the world. If the Tigershark were a person, it would be an Olympic-class sprinter — the Carl Lewis of the skies.

Speed is lift. Turk’s job was basically to manage that lift, using it to get from Point A to Point B and back again. To do that in the Tigershark, he had to think not just of Point A and B and all the subpoints in between, but Point C and D, and a little bit of E and F on either side of the wings. Because living at Mach 2.3, the aircraft’s normal cruise speed, entailed certain responsibilities.

Things happened relatively fast at that speed — more than twice as fast as they happened in most fighters. Turk had advanced radar and avionics systems that helped show him what else was around and likely to happen on any given vector, but as good as the computer was, it couldn’t really predict the future.

Not that he could, of course. But he did have a certain feel for it.

It wasn’t that the Tigershark couldn’t fly below the speed of sound. But the high-speed maneuvers it was capable of — the aircraft was designed to withstand over 18 g’s, a force that would crush its pilot in an old-style g-suit — required enormous flight energy.

It was a trade: the Tigershark gave the god of flight velocity and lift, and in return the god of flight let it make a 150-degree turn in the space a Piper would have used at something like a hundredth of the speed.

But the god of flight did not take IOUs — if the Tigershark was a few knots short, she was severely punished. High-speed stalls and spins were a fact of life in the Tigershark. Even after a year’s worth of flying it, Turk was required to practice dealing with them in a flight simulator twice a week.

The sessions were far more grueling than anything he encountered in the air, which was the point. He was good: he could deal with even the most unusual flight blip — his term — nearly as quickly as the plane’s flight command computer. But he still found the workouts taxing.

Today’s flight, by contrast, was a piece of cake. All he had to do was practice a few loops and rolls for the dog and pony show they were hosting in a few days.

Low pass on the runway. Zip-zip. Climb. Turn at the top. Dive and recover.

Enter Sabres, stage right.

Though they looked nothing alike, in many ways the Sabres were smaller versions of the Tigershark, capable of making very sharp maneuvers at high rates of speed. They didn’t have anywhere near the Tigershark’s top end, however; they would accelerate to roughly Mach 3, but used a great deal of fuel getting there. What they could do better than the Tigershark was fly slowly, all the way down to 100 knots at their service ceiling, which was roughly 68,000 feet. The secret was their wings, which could be extended — rolled out was a more descriptive and accurate term — turning them into high-altitude gliders. With solar cells embedded in their skin, the aircraft could power down their engines and loiter over an area for hours.

There were trade-offs. For one, the extended wings made it easy for properly configured radar to spot them. But all things considered, the Sabres were the most capable unmanned air vehicles or UAVs ever produced. They bore the same relationship to the Flighthawks — their immediate predecessors — as their namesake, the F–86 Sabre, bore to the P–38 Lightning.

Turk rocked the Tigershark through the opening maneuvers of his display routine, cranking the plane straight up as four Sabres rocked in from opposite directions. The little planes came up around him, crisscrossing as he climbed. It was very impressive from the ground — the planes looked as if they were a reverse fountain of water. In the cockpit, it was more than a little on the boring side: all Turk did was fly straight up, putting the nose of the aircraft through a blue guide circle on his screen supplied by Medusa, which was interfacing with the Tigershark’s flight computer.

An indicator in the right-hand corner of his screen began counting down his next maneuver. When it hit zero, he pushed right, diving between two of the Sabres. As he sliced downward, the little planes followed, crisscrossing as they flew.

A few more acrobatics and it was on to the simulated missile run. The Sabres dropped precision-guided bombs — small warheads of high explosive. These were 38 and 67- pound bombs, designed to destroy targets without causing a lot of collateral damage. They could blow up anything smaller than a main battle tank without a problem — as they demonstrated on a helpless Bradley.

Mission complete, it was back to the runway for a coordinated landing.

“Ground to Tigershark One, you’re looking very good,” said Colonel Harvey “Rocks” Johnson, coming on the radio just as Turk was about to tell control he was ready to land. “What’s your situation?”

“Tigershark is about to head back to the barn, Colonel.”

“I wonder if you could take that crisscross over the review stand again. The Sabres were a little sluggish.”

The colonel phrased it as a request, but Turk knew that Rocks would make his life difficult if he didn’t burp precisely on command.

“Tigershark weighed fuel out pretty carefully, Colonel.”

“My gauge says you have enough for a pass.”

Turk checked. The Tigershark’s instruments were duplicated on the ground. There was enough for a pass — but only just.

“Yeah, roger that. We’re lining it up.” Turk clicked off the radio mike. “Computer, Sabre Control Section: Sabres, follow-on for prebriefed maneuver A–1. Devolve from that to landing pattern Baker. Acknowledge.”

“Sabre Commander: Sabres Acknowledge,” said the computer. The commands appeared in his HUD.

Turk slid back to the starting point for the fly-by. The Sabres came around and executed their part of the show perfectly — just as they had earlier. Turk banked, called in to the tower to land, and got into position without any more interference from Rocks Johnson. The Sabres lined up behind him, aiming to fly over and then land.

He was less than 1,000 meters from touchdown when a proximity warning sounded in the cockpit. One of the Sabres was moving toward his tail at 500 knots.

“Sabres, knock it off, knock it off,” said Turk. In that same second he pulled the throttle down, killing his speed. The aircraft flattened, losing altitude precipitously. But the unending runway was created just for such emergencies. He came in hard and fast, but had acres in front of him; the Sabres jetted harmlessly overhead.

“What the hell just happened?” he yelled.

“Tigershark, abort landing,” said the computer controller, belatedly catching up to the emergency. “Abort. Abort.”

“Thanks,” muttered Turk, checking his instruments.

The knock-it-off command should have sent the Sabres into a predesignated safe orbit at 5,000 feet, southwest of the runway in a clear range. But the radar showed them circling above and approaching for a landing.

“Ground, what’s going on?” said Turk. On the ground the Tigershark was as vulnerable as a soccer mom minivan, slow and not very maneuverable. He moved off the marked runway toward the taxi area, unsure of where the Sabres were going — a very dangerous position.

“Ground, what the hell is going on?”

“We have control, we have control,” sputtered Johnson. “Get off the runway.”

“Yeah, no shit,” grumbled Turk over the open mike.

“The engineers think there was an error in one of the subroutines when they were landing,” Johnson told Turk when he reached him at the prep area. The crew had taken over the Tigershark and were giving her a postflight exam. “They think Medusa defaulted into the wrong pattern.”

“ ‘Think’ is not a reassuring word,” said Turk.

“That’s why we test this shit out, Captain. Your job is to help us work things out.”

“Maybe if I controlled the planes from Medusa, rather than handing them off to you—”

“The test protocol is set,” said Johnson, practically shouting.

“You don’t have to get angry with me, Colonel,” snapped Turk. “I’m not the one that fucked up.”

“Nobody fucked up here.”

“Bullshit — the Sabre flight computer almost killed me. It’s supposed to be hands-off to landing.”

“You should have watched where the hell you were.”

“What? What?”

“Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on?” said Al “Greasy Hands” Parsons, stepping in between them.

Johnson ignored Greasy Hands, pointing at Turk. “You remember you’re in the Air Force, mister,” he told him. “I don’t care who your boss is. At the end of the day, your butt is mine.”

Johnson stalked away.

“I swear to God, if you weren’t here, I woulda hit him,” said Turk.

“Then you’re lucky I was here,” said Greasy Hands. He laughed.

“Blaming me for that? What a bunch of bullshit.” Turk was still mad. His ears felt hot because of the blood rushing to them. “He almost killed me. He’s supposed to override manually immediately if there’s a problem. Not wait for me to call knock it off. Not then. Shit. I get hit on landing, that’s it.”

Greasy Hands was silent.

“Damn,” said Turk. He shook his head. It was typical Johnson: bluster and blame on everyone except for himself.

“Come on,” said Greasy Hands. “I’ll buy you a beer at Hole 19.”

Hole 19 was a club at Dreamland.

“I gotta finish the postflight brief,” said Turk.

“I’ll finish it with you.”

Turk smiled. Greasy Hands was old-school, a former chief master sergeant now working for the Office of Technology. He’d served at Dreamland for years. Now he was Breanna Stockard’s assistant, a kind of chief cook and bottle washer who solved high-priority problems. He was a grease monkey at heart, a tinkerer’s tinkerer who could probably have built the Tigershark in his garage if he wanted.

“I’m OK, Chief,” said Turk.

“I’d like to tag along.”

“All right, come on. Boring stuff, though.”

“Boring’s good in this business,” said Greasy Hands, patting him on the back.

18

The obvious next step was to disinter the bodies in the small cemetery and see if the records were wrong and one of them was Stoner’s.

Danny had no stomach for the job and was more than a little relieved when Reid said he would arrange for a CIA team to do it. He thanked the police chief and his son for their hospitality, buying them a late-morning breakfast at the town restaurant. Then he drove back to Balti, where he returned the Renault in exchange for a ride to the airport. The rickety old helicopter took him to Chisinau in forty nail-biting but uneventful minutes.

Nuri and Flash were waiting for him when he returned. They’d just come from the Russian bank, where they opened accounts with electronic access. They also scattered a dozen bugs around the place, all with video capacity. The bugs transmitted data to a receiving unit stashed in a garbage bin behind the building, and from there to the satellite network MY-PID used.

“Hey, boss,” said Flash. “Cool helo.”

“Don’t let the paint job fool you,” said Danny. “It rides like a washing machine with a switchblade for a rotor.”

“We have some leads,” said Nuri, leading them toward the car he’d rented. “Some better than others.”

The best involved a doctor who specialized in sports medicine, and was quoted in the Le Monde story. MY-PID had tracked him to a small clinic in the capital. There was only one problem: the clinic had closed ten years before. At that point the doctor had ceased to exist.

At least officially. But MY-PID had tracked bank accounts he’d used, connecting them to a mortgage on a house just outside the city limits. The mortgage had been taken out six months after the clinic closed — and paid off eighteen months later. The name on the mortgage was different, but the person was also a doctor: Dr. Andrei Ivanski.

MY-PID turned up little information on Ivanski. He was Moldovan, of Russian descent, according to certification papers. He had no active practice in the country.

Were they the same person?

Nuri thought they probably were. And, interestingly, the doctor also had an account at the Russian bank, though the records showed it hadn’t been used for nearly four years.

“He has a pretty nice house,” said Nuri. He showed Danny satellite pictures of it as they drove into town. “I want it under surveillance, get some more information, see if we can figure out what the doc is up to.”

“Maybe we should make an appointment and ask him,” suggested Danny. “Does he have a practice?”

“In town. But first we need background,” said Nuri. “We need to know what kind of questions to ask.”

“Ask him about steroids.”

“That’s the last question we ask,” said Nuri. “We don’t ask that until we’re reeling him in.”

“I don’t know if I’m buying this whole human engineering thing,” Danny told Nuri. “For one thing, I’m not convinced Stoner survived the crash. For another, I don’t see a connection with the sports place. It’s all pretty far-fetched.”

“Enhancement, not engineering,” said Nuri. “You don’t like the idea that Stoner was involved? Is that it?”

“I don’t have feelings one way or another.”

It was a lie, but Nuri didn’t call him on it.

“Look, Stoner was Agency,” Nuri told Danny. “I know he was your friend, but in some ways he’s like a brother I didn’t know. And I agree the whole thing is pretty far-fetched. But if they have a genetic test—”

“It’s not foolproof,” said Danny. “He may be in that cemetery.”

“We’ll know about the cemetery in a few days,” said Nuri. “In the meantime, these are our best leads. Until Kiev.”

19

The argument with his wife still felt a little raw as Zen wheeled himself into the congressional dining room, where he was planning to lobby a pair of congressmen on the companion bill to his scholarship measure. Both were from the opposing party, but he didn’t figure either would be a hard sell — they had large military installations in their districts, and one had a brother who was still on active duty with the Marines.

The ease of the assignment let his mind drift a bit, and he thought of the NATO meeting even as he came up to the table where the congressmen had already been seated.

“Senator, good to see you,” said Kevin Sullivan, an upstate New Yorker in his third term. He practically jumped out of his chair as he grabbed Zen’s hand.

His companion, Brian Daly, was more reserved. But it was Daly who began the conversation by mentioning that he’d talked about the bill with his brother in the Marines. His brother, a lieutenant colonel, had heartily endorsed it.

That was good enough for Daly.

“I think it’s a good idea, too,” said Sullivan. “I’m on board.”

“Great,” said Zen. “Let’s eat.”

“My brother remembers you from your Dreamland days,” said Daly as they waited for their lunches. “He was on a deployment in Iran when you were active.”

“Hell of a time,” said Zen.

“He said you guys were something else. You took out a laser site in broad daylight? Ballsy.”

“Your brother was probably in a lot more danger than I ever was,” said Zen. “The guys on the ground always had it worse. Hell, if I was in trouble, I could just fly away.”

That was more than a slight exaggeration — piloting the Flighthawks from the belly of a Megafortress, he couldn’t “just fly away” at all. He was completely at the mercy of whoever was piloting the big plane — or firing at it.

During the war between Pakistan and India, it had almost cost him his life. At one point, the plane in flames, he parachuted out with Breanna. They’d spent several days shipwrecked on an island.

Air-wrecked. Whatever.

Their lives had changed so much since then. It wasn’t just because they weren’t in the same line of work anymore either. They had different outlooks on things, different attitudes toward Teri and how to raise her. Different priorities with their jobs and lives.

So what did any of that have to do with their argument?

Nothing.

Was that what really bothered him, their growing apart?

They weren’t apart — they were just older, with more things to worry about.

“There was a rumor today on one of the blogs — Politico, I think — that you were headed to Kiev,” said Sullivan.

“I am,” said Zen, returning from his brief daydream. “Senator Osten’s going to be in the hospital awhile.”

“Oh yeah, how is he?” asked Sullivan.

“I talked to him yesterday. He was joking about all the things he’s not supposed to do now.”

“You wouldn’t figure him for a heart attack,” said Sullivan.

Actually, thought Zen, you would — he didn’t exercise, was more than a little overweight, and had a complicated family medical history. But it was the sort of polite comment people made in passing.

“Do you really think Ukraine should be part of NATO?” asked Daly, changing the subject.

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” said Zen. “What do you think?”

Daly was neutral; Sullivan was opposed, though only mildly. Both seemed worried about diluting NATO as a military force by adding relatively weak allies on the border of Russia. It was a reasonable argument, even if Zen disagreed. He wasn’t in much of a mood to get into a philosophical discussion of how to best offer a counterweight to Russia.

But Sullivan and Daly were.

“Russia is a diminished force,” said Sullivan. “A nonentity militarily.”

“That’s what worries me, to some extent,” said Daly. “When you’re beaten down is when you get dangerous.”

“They haven’t been beaten down.”

“They think they have. That’s what matters.” Daly turned to Zen. “I’d be careful at that summit,” he told him. “I’ve heard plenty of rumors that the Russians are out to disrupt it somehow.”

“I’ll be as careful as possible,” said Zen.

Sitting at a committee hearing two hours later, Zen decided he would be more than careful — he’d spend a little time at the shooting range before leaving, something he hadn’t done in a few months.

And he’d buy Breanna some flowers. That was also long overdue.

20

The doctor’s house was an American-style McMansion that would have looked right at home on Florida’s Gold Coast. In Chisinau it looked like something from outer space.

Three stories high, with lots of glass and stone, it lorded over the nearby houses, which would have looked large in any other context. Two parallel runs of spiked iron fencing surrounded the property. Eight feet high, the fence was a deterrent to trespassers, but not any more so than the dogs that roamed the interior. Unlike the one Nuri had encountered in Italy, these were rottweilers, and appeared to be trained guard dogs; they moved in twos with almost military discipline.

The dogs were more than enough to dissuade Nuri from sneaking in the way he had at Moreno’s, but in addition there were video cameras and infrared motion sensors all along the fence line. As Flash put it, the doctor did not want anyone making unannounced house calls.

So Nuri decided they would settle for NSA wiretaps, and in the meantime plant some video bugs in the neighbors’ yards in hopes of getting a picture.

Flash volunteered for the job. The game plan was straightforward: he’d rent a motorcycle, whiz up into the area, plant the bugs per Nuri’s directions, then head back to the hotel where they were staying. Danny would back him up in the rental car. Meanwhile, Nuri would access the accounts they had set up at the bank, giving MY-PID a route into the bank’s computers.

The first problem they encountered was with the motorcycle: they couldn’t find one to rent. Flash was ready to do the job on foot when he spotted an open bicycle shop on the way out of town. The owner wouldn’t rent anything, but was willing to part with an older ten-speed for fifty euros.

They put the bike in the trunk of a rented Dacia and drove out of the city toward the development just after dusk. The houses around the doctor’s were all relatively new, built within the last ten years. MY-PID’s scan of the property records listed several Russians with connections to Russian organized crime, but for the most part the homeowners were part of the small class of nouveau riche Moldovans who’d made money in various legitimate enterprises, the most popular of which was the pharmaceutical industry, which the Moldovan government had set out to encourage a number of years before.

Flash got out of the car about a half mile north of the doctor’s house. He took the bike they’d rented earlier from the trunk and began pedaling slowly through the neighborhood. Danny drove around until he found a spot where he could see most of the house with his night glasses.

“How’m I lookin’?” asked Flash.

“You’re good. Looks like there’s somebody in the second story of the house,” Danny told him. “Back room. Moving around.”

The glasses couldn’t see inside the building, but they were powerful enough to catch heat signatures close to the walls and windows. Danny scanned down the nearby streets. The only people outside were a block and a half away, working in a lit garden at the side of their yard.

“Car coming,” he said. “Mercedes up that street on your right.”

“OK.”

Flash slowed his pace as the car came to the intersection and turned past, then crossed the street and stopped near the fence of a yard diagonally across from the rear of the doctor’s house. Danny watched him take a video bug from his pocket and plant it on a slim tree that stood just outside the fence.

MY-PID sounded a tone over the radio system, telling them that the bug was working.

“Next,” said Flash, hopping back on his bike.

Danny drove down the block, circling around to lessen the odds of someone noticing him. Flash installed two more bugs and was halfway through the project when MY-PID announced that one of the garage doors in the doctor’s house was opening.

“You hear that?” Danny asked.

“Yeah. I’m just up the block.”

A Mercedes came out of the garage.

“Where do you think he’s going at this hour?” asked Flash.

“I’m going to find out,” Danny told him. “Can you finish that on your own?”

“Piece of cake.”

Danny doused his lights as he turned down the street parallel to the doctor’s house. The Mercedes appeared a few seconds later, driving down the hill in the direction of the city. Danny let him get a block ahead, then put his lights on and started to follow. Without a tracking device, he had to stay relatively close. It was Surveillance 101—a course he’d never taken. Once more he felt like a fish out of water, playing detective or spy when he’d been trained as a commando.

The Mercedes went six blocks on the main road, then turned in the direction of the city. But just as Danny started to accelerate, it veered off suddenly, taking a right on one of the side streets. Fearing that he’d been seen, he continued going straight, slowing down as much as he dared. He looked, but couldn’t see anything up the side street as he passed.

He went a block, then took a parallel street, hoping to circle back. The road ran for nearly a quarter mile before he found an intersection. He turned left when he reached the street the Mercedes had taken, calculating that the doctor had continued in that direction. But he ran into a dead end; he made a U-turn and headed back to the main road.

The Mercedes was nowhere to be found. Possibly it had pulled into one of the estates that flanked the road; Danny decided he’d take another look.

“Flash, how’s it going?” he asked.

“On the last one.”

“I lost him, but I want to run down some of these roads for a second and see if he turned in somewhere. I’ll meet you at that little gas station we passed on the way up.”

“Sounds good.”

Danny found a place to turn around. As he drove back down the road, he realized that two of the estates had guardhouses set back a bit from the road.

“MY-PID, identify property owners for the street I’m driving down,” he ordered.

The computer had already accessed and downloaded the city property records, and within moments was reading off a list of owners.

Danny stopped it when it got to the Russian government.

“Is that the ambassador’s residence?” he asked.

“Negative.”

“Who lives there?”

“Not listed. Correlating with other data… residence appears to be occupied by the assistant ambassador for business. Possible link to GRU.”

In other words — the spymaster for the Russian military lived there.

Or might.

Was that where the doctor had gone?

The house was undoubtedly under surveillance, and Danny didn’t want to risk drawing any more attention to himself than he already had. He went back out to the main street and noticed a fire hydrant near the curb directly across from the intersection. He pulled over, got one of the video bugs and set it under the hydrant’s plug. Back in the car, he made sure he had a view of the street, then went and picked up Flash.

By the time Danny and Flash returned to the hotel room, Nuri had pieced together more of the money trail, with the computer’s help. Breaking into the Russian bank records after accessing the system through the new account, MY-PID found that 200,000 euros had been wired from the Russian account into a Moldovan bank account just that morning. The money was withdrawn in the afternoon, apparently in cash.

He showed Danny the money trail on the screen of their secure laptop. MY-PID had an Excel-based account tool that not only gave account balances and transactions, but could compare transactions to others at the same bank in real time, looking for related moves in shadow accounts. The SEC would have killed for it.

“First thing in the morning,” said Nuri, “we get a look at their security cameras. We’ll review the video and find out who went in there.”

“You think they’ll just hand it over?” asked Flash.

“Sure — if we’re there to fix it.”

“How do you get around not speaking the language?” asked Danny.

“I have a hearing aid,” said Nuri. “I pretend I’m hard of hearing, and I use MY-PID. Used to do it in Africa all the time. Plus my Romanian is getting better. Same language.”

The computer continued to churn through various bank records, first looking for obvious connections like direct transfers, then gradually becoming more esoteric. It looked for accounts that had similar usage patterns, but the only thing it could identify was an account used by GazProm, the Russian energy company, which made large transfers to cover payroll. No other accounts had received large transfers from the Russian account, and the only transactions the Moldovan bank account had on record, aside from interest payments and fees, were cash withdrawals.

“They probably use other banks,” said Nuri. “This just happens to be the one account we found.”

“Or this is all the money they get.”

“Maybe,” admitted Nuri. “But Moreno paid a hell of a lot more than this.”

“Maybe their agent takes a cut.”

“Hefty cut.”

“Subject Mercedes sighted,” reported MY-PID.

Nuri hit the keys on the laptop and pulled up the image, which was beamed from the fire hydrant. The car turned left instead of right — away from the house.

“Love to bug the car,” said Nuri.

“Oughta bug the Russian spymaster’s house instead,” said Danny.

“Probably already is.”

Nuri looked up at Danny.

“Shit,” he said. Then he grabbed his sat phone to see if he was right.

21

“I didn’t mean to have an argument with you,” Zen told Breanna after they put Teri to bed.

“It’s OK,” said Breanna, sitting down on the couch. The flowers he’d bought were sitting on the coffee table.

“You’re under a lot of pressure at work. I know. It’s gotta be — it’s a difficult assignment.”

“Mmmmm.” She picked up a magazine and began leafing through it.

Zen recognized her mood. It was as if she was bruised all over, and touching her anywhere would hurt. Yet he felt compelled to do something, to reach across the distance between them.

“I had lunch with Daly and Sullivan today,” he said, searching his brain for some anecdote that might be even distantly funny. “The dynamic duo. Sullivan was eating this bacon cheeseburger. Didn’t he vote in favor of the fat tax last year?”

Breanna shrugged.

“I think he did. His party suggested it,” added Zen. “What are you reading?”

Breanna held it up so he could see the cover. Traditional Home.

“In the mood for some decorating?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“The hallway could use a new coat of paint.”

She didn’t answer.

“Remember when we painted the apartment?” he asked.

It was a preaccident memory, which put it in a special category, potentially touchy for either one of them. But it was also a happy memory, the two of them working together at a time when they were both very much in love — way beyond that, completely infatuated with each other, unable to get enough of each other’s words and bodies.

“Jeez — what was the color?” he said, growing nostalgic. “Peach or something? Mauve. Something that I would have never thought would be a good color.”

“You’re not really much on color.”

“I don’t have your color sense,” Zen admitted, trying to push through the small opening. “Not at all.”

Breanna put down the magazine.

“You’re still going to Kiev?”

“Well, yeah,” he said.

“I have to go to Brown Lake at the end of the week. Did you remember?”

Brown Lake Test Area was the Technology Office’s facility at Dreamland, part of the expanded complex there. Dreamland itself was an Air Force command; the Technology Office was both a contractor and a customer, and kept a small contingent at leased space there. Zen guessed she was going for the demonstration of one of her projects, though she kept the actual identity of the project itself secret, even from him.

“Sure,” he said, though in fact the date had slipped from his memory. “Are you taking Teri with you?”

“I can’t. You know that.”

“She can come with me, then,” he said.

“Jeff—”

“Actually, I had a thought about leaving a day or two early and stopping in Prague—”

“Prague?”

“There’s an air show. Teri’ll love it.”

“You can’t take her, Jeff.”

“Why can’t I?”

“She has school.”

“Ah, school.”

“It’s too dangerous — didn’t you hear anything I told you the other day?”

The last thing he would ever do was put his daughter in danger. The suggestion that Teri go with him was just a spur of the moment thought, something that just popped into his head. Had he thought about it, he might have rejected it himself. But Breanna’s sharp retort put him on the defensive.

“There’s going to be plenty of security in Kiev,” he said.

“That’s not the point.”

“Hey, it’s not a problem. She doesn’t have to go. Caroline can stay here.”

Caroline was Breanna’s niece, a college-age student who lived nearby and often babysat for them.

“I don’t know if she can,” said Breanna.

“Well then her mom can. You know there won’t be a problem.”

“I don’t know that at all.”

“Hey, I have an idea,” said Zen. “What if Caroline and Teri came with me to Prague, and stayed there while I went to Kiev? That would be great for Caroline, right? She’d love it. The art? Right up her alley. I’m going to call her right now.”

“You really want to take Teri out of school?”

“To visit Prague? In a heartbeat.”

“I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.” Breanna practically leapt off the couch, stalking past him to the kitchen.

Zen took a deep breath, struggling to keep his own anger in check. Prague wasn’t a bad idea at all — he’d only be away from the girls for a day and a half, at most. Caroline had gone with them to Hong Kong just the year before, spending two days alone with Teri while he and Breanna flew to Macau on a secret government mission for the State Department.

More like a secret junket, since it only consisted of having lunch with a hard-to-deal-with Chinese trade official, but that wasn’t the point. Caroline and Teri would be fine.

He rolled into the kitchen. Breanna had taken out the small tub of Ben & Jerry’s she kept in the freezer, and was eating it straight out of the carton.

“I’m not going to ask you about the Stoner operation,” said Zen.

“Good. You shouldn’t.”

“You think you can save him?”

Breanna stared at him.

“If it’s Stoner—” said Zen.

“I know who you’re talking about,” she said sharply.

“Are you going to try—”

“Don’t interfere, Jeff.”

“Did you tell Danny?”

Breanna pressed her lips together. He was sure from the reaction that she had, though he wouldn’t have been able to explain exactly what tipped him off.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know that it’s Stoner,” she said coldly.

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you fix him?”

“Jesus.”

“Can you?”

“I don’t know.” Breanna tossed her spoon into the sink, pulled out the garbage can from beneath the kitchen island and dropped the empty ice cream tub into it. Then she stormed out of the room.

“That went well,” Zen said to the empty kitchen.

22

The rain bit at his face as if it were acid. He pushed up the hill, ignoring the sideward slip of his feet on the slick pavement. He pushed to feel the burn in his thighs, the strain of a muscle — to get feeling, any feeling.

Pain was a strange condition. On the one hand it was always there, like the skin that covered his body, the thick clumps of hair, the scars. On the other hand, it was a sensation, something beyond the dull haze he moved through every day, the black swamp of his life. To feel the sharpness, the pressure and strain — it could be savored.

Was it pleasure?

He didn’t know pleasure. He knew where he was, he knew his duty.

The Black Wolf pushed up the hill, arms pumping now. He was breathing hard in the darkness. If there had been houses near the road, he would have woken anyone inside. He was making good time, at a strong pace — an Olympic pace.

Run, a voice told him. Run.

He crested the hill and turned to the left, entering a wide, expansive field. His feet found the dirt path by habit; it was too dark to see.

The rain increased. He didn’t like the water. He’d almost died in water — in many ways he had died in water, even though the doctors said the coldness had helped. He still hated water.

The farmhouse was just ahead. He increased his pace, pounding through the mud.

Five hundred meters from the house a light came on in the kitchen. The light, part of his security system, told him everything was OK.

The farm was secluded and out of the way, but in his business one didn’t take chances. Death was inevitable; every moment led you closer. The question was whether you might force some control over it. That was the aim of his security systems.

The Black Wolf ran full strength to the back door of the house. When he was five meters away, the latch unhooked. He reached down with his hand, swinging the door open on a dead trot.

He stopped abruptly on the threshold and closed the door behind him. Taking off his running shoes, he began peeling off the outer layers of his clothes, throwing them into the nearby washing machine. Stripped to his compression shorts, he went inside to the kitchen for a cup of coffee before hitting the shower.

There was a message on the cell phone he used for work. It was a text message advertising a restaurant in London. Anyone receiving or intercepting it would think it was a junk text. To the Black Wolf, it was anything but.

He poured himself the coffee, then opened his laptop. Booting up, he inserted a small satellite modem into the USB port. When the computer was ready, he opened a Web browser and surfed to Google. He typed in the name of the latest punk-rap band taking Europe by storm, TekDog.

Google gave six hundred pages of hits. He went to their official site, backed out to Google again, then went to the fourth fan site listed in the search results.

The site had photos and music and show listings. It also had a small section titled Nudes&Rumors.

He clicked on it, then scrolled to the third entry.

Heard on the street: band members planning new shows in France for next month. Details soonest.

Still in his underwear, the Black Wolf took his cell phone and called a number that began with a French country code.

“This is Wolf,” he said as the connection went through. He spoke in English.

“The old doctor has become a problem. It must be dealt with.”

“How soon?”

“Immediately. There have been inquiries. You should be cautious.”

“My treatments?”

“We have made other arrangements. We understand they are getting much closer together. That will not be a problem.”

“Good,” he said.

The sudden emotion he felt surprised him. It bordered on elation.

He closed the phone and went to take a shower.

23

Hera smiled at the museum guard as he came around the corner.

He didn’t smile back.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in Ukrainian. Hera didn’t speak Ukrainian, but his meaning was obvious.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“You are in a restricted area. What’s in your hand?”

She had been about to place the bug in the fire hose housing when she was interrupted. It was still in her hand, the door to the hose compartment open a few inches.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Your hand,” repeated the guard, grabbing her arm.

“Hera, dear, did you find the restroom? Oh!” McEwen appeared behind the guard. She was stooped over and looked even older than she was. “Hera?”

The guard turned, still holding Hera’s hand.

“What are you doing with my granddaughter?” asked McEwen in Ukrainian.

“She is trespassing down a restricted corridor.”

“A restricted corridor? In a museum?”

“This is not just a museum.”

McEwen walked close to him, practically touching his shirt, then pitched her head back to look into his face.

“I sent her to find the restroom,” she said. “Perhaps you could help us.”

The guard let go of Hera’s arm. She rubbed it — he’d clamped it so hard it hurt.

“That way. Out there,” he said, pointing.

“Are you married?” asked McEwen.

“Yes.”

“Too bad. My granddaughter is from America,” she added.

“You must go back. Get out of this corridor.”

“Of course, of course,” said McEwen. She put her hand to her side. “I do have a cramp.”

“A cramp?”

“Could you help me?” she asked. “Just walk me to the restroom.”

As the guard bent toward McEwen, Hera took a step to the side and put her hand against the wall, pushing the small video bug into the fire hose assembly, then closed the door. She caught up with McEwen and the guard just as they reached the main corridor.

“You must not come down here again,” warned the guard, pointing them toward the ladies’ room.

“No, no, of course.”

“You can make it?”

“My granddaughter will help.” McEwen smiled at him. “You are sure you are taken?”

“Thanks,” said Hera after he’d gone.

“Don’t mention it. I almost got you a date.”

“That would have been something.”

“Ukrainian men are very considerate,” said the older woman. “Don’t be so quick to judge. I thought your MY-PID system would warn you.”

“It did. Too late.”

McEwen smiled, and shook her head gently.

“What?” asked Hera.

“You put too much trust in electronics,” she said.

“MY-PID’s pretty useful.”

McEwen shrugged.

“You don’t think…?”

“By the time we see anything important, it’ll be too late,” said McEwen. “You can’t replace humans.”

“These don’t.”

“Human intelligence,” said McEwen, her tone almost one of incantation. “Should we look at some paintings?”

“I have one more to place.”

“Then we’ll start with the baroque.”

“The electronics don’t replace humans,” said Hera defensively as they walked into a gallery area. Now that she wasn’t acting, McEwen’s pace was strong, as swift as Hera’s. “They let us do more.”

“In some ways. Not in others. You have to be careful, Hera. You can’t let them be crutches. Sometimes you need a little old lady in the back of the alleyway to help you out.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“You don’t think he was cute?”

“His breath smelled like stale sardines.”

“That could be fixed.”

24

Communications from the Russian embassy were routinely monitored and translated, but the private homes of the leading members of the mission were not. Nuri had Reid put the request in; it wasn’t clear how long it would be before it was executed, let alone what it might yield.

Getting approval to bug the house itself — absolutely necessary in the case of a diplomat, Nuri knew — would take at least several days at best; by then the Kiev meeting would be over. He wasn’t sure it was worth the risk.

So for now their best bet was to concentrate on the doctor. They set up more video bugs in the area, enough so MY-PID could track his car to the main road. Then they rented two more cars, so they could wait in either direction to follow him. It wasn’t an ideal setup, but Nuri figured that it would give them a good chance at sticking a tracker on the doctor’s car. Once they had that, MY-PID would take over entirely, watching him as he moved around the city.

Danny, though, was getting impatient. Three more of his people — Sergeant Clar “Sugar” Keeb, Paulie Christen, and a tech specialist named Gregor Hennemann — were due to arrive in Kiev by nightfall to help McEwen and Hera. He knew he ought to get there himself, to make sure everything was set up. He also had to make the final call on whether to work with the NATO and local security. At the moment he was leaning toward doing so.

Sugar was a covert CIA op like Hera, though different from her in almost every way. A little older, with a much more easygoing personality, she had become something of a big sister to most of the newbies.

Christen was a surveillance and security expert who’d been recruited from the FBI right after the team’s first mission. While Danny and Boston had a great deal of experience in security, they hadn’t set up pure surveillance networks, and Danny thought the operation in Africa and Iran could have gone smoother with more help.

Hennemann was a technical whiz kid who’d come to Whiplash from the NSA. There wasn’t a computer in the world he couldn’t hack into or rewire. Neither Hennemann nor Christen were what was generally referred to as “shooters”—weapons-oriented team members. Danny would have to decide whether to bring more on, and when. He couldn’t make that assessment, or felt he couldn’t, from Chisinau.

Unless, of course, they caught the Wolves here.

“Hey, he’s coming at you,” said Nuri over the team radio. “You see him?”

Danny glanced in his mirror, waiting.

“He should be just about to you,” added Nuri.

A black Mercedes swept into view. Danny had to wait for two more cars to pass before he could get out, but the Mercedes was still in view.

“Heading toward the city on 581,” said Danny.

“I’ll be behind you in a few minutes,” said Nuri.

“Flash?” said Danny.

“I’m down on Stefan cel Mare, the big cross street.”

“Cut over.”

“Yeah, well, you should see the damn traffic down here. Looks like every car in the country is in front of me. They got some sort of construction going on, and a cop’s directing traffic.”

“Did you see his face?” Nuri asked.

“No,” said Danny. They still didn’t have an image.

The jam-up actually helped them. The doctor got bogged down in traffic a half mile from the city limits. He took a few turns through the side streets, but they were clogged as well.

Downtown, the doctor pulled into a lot near one of the larger buildings in the business district. Danny saw him get out of the car as he passed.

He was short and fat, bald — he didn’t have time to see the doctor’s face.

“Car’s in the big lot you’ll see on your left,” he told Flash, who was about a block behind him. “Get the tracker on it.”

“On my way.”

Danny went down the block, then turned down the side street. There was plenty of parking, so he pulled in. He got out of the car and trotted back to the building.

There were half a dozen people inside, waiting for the elevator. Danny glanced around — there was a man very close to the button panel, short and fat, bald. He was wearing brown pants.

Was it him?

He thought so, and yet he wasn’t positive. Several minutes had passed — the doctor could be upstairs already.

The doors opened. Danny had to push himself in, squeezing against a pair of middle-aged women who looked at him as if he were the devil. They said something in Moldovan that he didn’t understand. He smiled as if it were a compliment, though he guessed it was anything but.

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. A man got out. The two women got out on the seventh. Danny stepped to the side, watching the man he thought might be the doctor. The man stared at the doors, studiously avoiding his gaze.

It might be because I’m black, Danny realized. In America, the fact that he was black would hardly be noticeable, in most contexts anyway. But in Moldova, as in most Eastern European countries, people of African descent were relatively rare.

He took out the control unit for the MY-PID, looking at it as if setting up an app. He tilted it slightly, then pressed the button to activate the video camera. Turning to his right, he held the camera up, getting a good view of the man’s profile.

Most of the occupants emptied on the twelfth floor. Only he and the fat man remained as it continued upward. Danny realized he hadn’t pushed the button. He glanced at the panel; they were heading toward the twentieth floor.

He reached over and hit 23. Leaning back, he smiled at the man. He didn’t smile back.

The doors opened on the twentieth floor. Danny stepped back, watching the man leave.

“He got out on the twentieth floor,” he told the others, pulling the earphone back up and turning the MY-PID back onto active coms. “I have an image on the video.”

“All right. You sure that’s him?” asked Nuri.

“No.”

“No?”

“It took me too long to get into the building.”

“You want us inside?” asked Flash.

“Hang back,” said Danny, stepping out into the hallway as the elevator stopped. He found the stairs a few paces away and descended to the twentieth floor.

There was only one door in the hall, plain and brown. There was a list of names on a sign next to it.

Danny took out the MY-PID control unit and pointed the camera at the sign.

“What’s that say?” he asked.

“Dr. Acevda, Dr. Bolinski, Dr. Kulsch, Dr. Nudstrumov, Dr. Zvederick.”

“No Ivanski?”

“Rephrase question.”

“Is there an Ivanski?”

“Negative.”

“Check to see if there is any correlation between Ivanski and any of those doctors,” Danny told MY-PID. “In the meantime, tell me how to ask to make an appointment.”

The computer gave him the words. He repeated it twice but couldn’t get the pronunciation right.

“Danny, I can do it,” said Nuri from outside. “I’m almost there.”

“It’s all right,” said Danny. “I just want to see if we can get images of the doctors. There’s no sense you coming in, too. The fewer of us he sees right now, the better.”

The door opened into a reception room. Several men and women were scattered among a dozen and a half chairs lining the walls. A television sat in the corner but it was off. The receptionist’s desk was next to a closed door that led to the interior offices.

The woman asked in Moldovan if she could help him.

Danny started to ask for an appointment, but midway through the words failed him; he switched to English.

“I wanted to make a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “My throat.”

The woman asked him if he could speak any Moldovan. Danny pointed to his throat. She pointed at a seat, then picked up the phone and called someone inside.

The patients were middle-aged and older, most a lot older. Danny wondered if he could fake a sore throat. He tried a cough, wincing.

A few minutes later a nurse came through the door and walked over to him. Danny rose.

“You speak English, yes?” she said. Her accent was thick but the words understandable. She was in her early twenties, with an expression somewhere between concern and light annoyance. “How can we help you?”

“Yes, my throat hurts,” said Danny. “I was hoping—”

“This is a specialist clinic, for diseases of endocrines.”

“Endocrines?”

“Glands. Disorders with the metabolism,” said the nurse. “Diabetes, and things more complicated. I’m sorry, but for a sore throat we could only recommend cough drops.”

“I see.”

She put her hand to his forehead. She had to stretch to do it. Danny caught a slight scent of sweat.

“No fever,” she said.

“It’s just my throat.”

She frowned. “I can send you to another clinic. These doctors. Very good.”

“OK, thank you,” he said.

She went over to the desk and asked the receptionist for a card. Danny sat back in his seat, realizing he’d forgotten to plant a bug.

Spycraft 101, he reminded himself. Another course he’d skipped.

He was being watched. It wasn’t necessary to plant it here — he could do it in the hall where it would be less conspicuous.

“Go to these doctors,” said the nurse, returning. “There is a nurse who speaks English.”

“Thank you very much,” he said, taking the card.

25

The Black Wolf had considered this job many times. He hadn’t wished for it but sensed that someday it would come. And now it had.

He didn’t like Nudstrumov at all. In the beginning he was neutral, but over the years he had come to despise him. He had a certain haughty way of acting. Like the other day, when he kept him waiting. He had made it seem as if it was nothing, undeliberate, but the Black Wolf knew better. He knew.

He would take him leaving his office, going from the door to the car. It was easier than the house, where there would be some inconvenience getting in. The office, though, was all routine. Nudstrumov parked in the same place, left at the same time, always at ten past three. He was a most punctual man.

The Black Wolf chose his weapon — a Dragunov SVD-S with a folding butt, very common and untraceable. Technically not a sniper rifle, but he would be shooting from only across the street. The semiautomatic gun and its lead core bullets were extremely accurate.

He had already scoped the roof of the building across the street. Getting away would be as easy there as anywhere else.

It was all a matter of planning.

He checked his watch. It was past one. He had less than two hours to get into position.

26

Two doctors worked at the clinic on Thursdays. One was a woman. The other was a man in his sixties named Andrei Nudstrumov.

Nudstrumov had an extensive medical background that did not intersect with Dr. Ivanski’s at all. He had come to Romania from Russia five years before, applying for medical certification. His background was extensive and he was granted “all honors,” as the registering agency called it.

He was an endocrinologist. Ivanski had been a general practitioner.

Still, Nuri was sure the two men were the same. Danny remained unconvinced, even when the short fat man who’d driven the Mercedes didn’t come out of the clinic after an hour. In the meantime, MY-PID trolled across the Internet, picking up data on Nudstrumov. He’d used a credit card a few months before, not far from the town Danny had visited. He’d bought gas, eaten breakfast and dinner, and purchased merchandise, all in a small town about seven kilometers south of the town Danny had visited.

MY-PID then correlated that series of purchases to a somewhat similar set by a third man — or at least a third name. This man had been making regular visits to the area over the past seven years. The match was not perfect — there were a few additional charges in the mix — but several things immediately jumped out at Nuri as he looked at the pattern: the visits were only once a year, at the same time of year, and the card was only used for those visits.

The man’s name was Rustam Gorgov. According to the records, he owned property in the area — a large farm about two kilometers outside of town.

So why did he stay at a motel?

“Maybe he’s got his mother-in-law at the farm,” said Flash. “That would do it.”

Flash and Danny were sitting together in the front seat of the rented Dacia, five blocks east of the building where the clinic was. Flash’s car was parked right behind him. Nuri was several blocks away in the opposite direction. They were waiting to follow the doctor out of the clinic.

“You sure these are all the same person?” Danny asked Nuri.

“Of course not,” said Nuri. “But here’s what I think. Ivanski stayed in Moldova after the camp was closed. But he didn’t practice medicine, for whatever reason. At some point either he got antsy or needed money. He adopted Nudstrumov’s identity.”

“Or he was Nudstrumov, and living in Russia,” offered Danny.

“Exactly. He buys the property under the Moldovan name, but for some reason decides he can’t practice as Ivanski. He already had his credentials, but maybe it’s the connection to the place he didn’t want known. In any event, Ivanski more or less disappears, and we have Nudstrumov.”

“And Rustam Gorgov?” asked Danny.

“Totally fictitious — the computer hasn’t found any other data on him at all. I’m sure there’s more. We just haven’t found it.”

“Where’s the connection to the assassins?” asked Flash.

“We don’t know yet,” said Nuri. “That’s why we keep looking. But there’s definitely enough that’s suspicious.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to keep an affair quiet,” said Flash. “Or he’s a drug dealer on the side.”

“He may grow marijuana on that farm,” said Nuri. “It’s a cash crop in Moldova. We have to check it out.”

“Man, I wish we’d do something more than check things out,” said Flash. “I’m getting — stale, I guess.”

Danny turned and looked at Flash. Like him, Flash was action oriented — give him a clear-cut assignment, and he was good to go. This was far more nebulous — this was like wandering through a fog and hoping to come out on the other side. There was no clear-cut path to the right door.

God, he thought, we’re miles and miles away from getting a real handle on this.

“The doctor may take us to some other connection,” said Nuri. “We have to be a little patient.”

“The problem is time,” answered Danny.

“I can follow the leads here,” answered Nuri. “You can get back to Kiev.”

“We may do that.” Danny glanced at his watch. It was five to three. The doctor should be leaving soon.

Nuri checked the signal on the tracking device, to make sure it was working. The radio signal was being sent through a commercial GPS satellite system, and was accurate to within roughly a third of a meter. Adapted from a commercial design used to track trucks over the highway, the device worked extremely well in open areas. Inside cities it could be problematic, however, as the larger buildings and other obstacles occasionally shielded the signal.

Nuri was sure they were tantalizingly close to figuring this out. All they needed was one more strategic bit of information and they’d know where and who these guys were.

They might already have it. He had originally thought the doctor was an unlikely choice to be the leader of the assassin group, but the fact that he had at least two other aliases gave him some hope. Underlings, he reasoned, had no need for multiple names.

Nuri didn’t buy most of the speculation about the human experiments. He thought Stoner was probably involved, but wondered if the helicopter crash hadn’t somehow been arranged. That wasn’t something the Agency would be too ready to admit or even investigate — it implied that whatever intelligence they’d gathered in the Revolution operation — Danny’s name for it — had been tainted, fed to them by a double agent.

Stoner.

Maybe Stoner had felt the Agency was closing in. Maybe he just wanted a change of venue. Or occupation.

Becoming an assassin, Nuri thought — well, there was a money-making retirement option he had never thought of.

His watch beeped. It was 3:00 P.M.

At exactly 3:05, MY-PID announced that Dr. Nudstrumov was coming out of his clinic and heading toward the elevator.

“Bankers’ hours,” Flash told Danny. “See ya in a bit.”

Danny waited as Flash got out of the car, then put his signal on and checked the traffic. He pulled out behind a bright red Fiat and drove toward the building. He wanted to time it so he got there just as the doctor was getting into his car. But he’d been a little too anxious; he was a block away before Nudstrumov finally got into the elevator to go down to the lobby.

“I’m going to pull into the lot,” Danny told the others. “Flash, hang back.”

“Yeah, copy that.”

“Nuri?”

“Right.”

A panel truck turned into the lot just ahead of Danny, then stopped, waiting for a car that was pulling out. Danny stopped, still in the roadway. He glanced in his mirror anxiously — the last thing he wanted right now was a car accident.

The truck finally pulled ahead. Danny took his foot off the brake. The door to the building was on his right.

“Subject exiting building.”

There he was, just ahead on the right. He was short and rotund, not particularly distinguished looking. If you were Hollywood, he thought, and you were going to cast someone in the role of assassin mastermind, Dr. Nudstrumov wouldn’t be it.

Nudstrumov glanced over his shoulder as he began walking to his car. Danny got a glimpse of his face. He looked somewhat annoyed, not quite angry but not relaxed either.

The doctor kept walking, his chubby legs stroking quickly. A car on Danny’s left started to pull out into the aisle. Danny stopped, waiting for her to go — he’d pull in, then wait for the doctor to leave before following.

He looked back at the doctor. He was only a few meters from his car now. He had his keys in his left hand.

Suddenly the doctor seemed to spin to his left. Danny thought for a moment that he had recognized him through the car window somehow. Then in the next moment the right side of his forehead exploded, bursting into a red splatter of blood.

“Shit!” yelled Danny. “He’s been shot! Nudstrumov’s been shot!”

27

The first shot had been low, deadly but not instantaneous lethal. The second hit home perfectly, exploding Nudstrumov’s skull.

A thing of beauty.

But the Black Wolf knew he couldn’t stop to admire it. He had to move.

He pulled the rifle back, quickly folding the stock and dropping it into the box. He slapped it closed and picked it up. He already had his backpack on.

A person got out of the car across the street, near the lot where he’d shot the doctor. The Black Wolf saw him through the window from the corner of his eye.

He turned and focused.

A black man.

Familiar.

Familiar. He focused — narrowed his vision so the man was right next to him, features large in his brain.

He was very, very familiar. Yet he couldn’t quite identify him.

Why did he know him?

No time for that: Go! Go! Go!

28

Danny leapt out of the car. His first instinct was to run to Nudstrumov, even though he knew it was too late to help him. He took a step, then dove to the ground, belatedly realizing that he, too, would be in the killer’s sights.

Or could be.

The shot had come from across the street. There was another building — several.

One of the rooftops.

“Danny, what’s going on?” asked Nuri.

“Somebody just shot the doctor. They must have been across the street.”

Danny jumped to his feet and began running.

“Where? Where?”

“From the roof, maybe. It had to be a rifle — the shot came down from above, and it was pretty high-powered. There’s no one in the lot that could have shot him.”

Danny crossed the street. There was no one nearby or in the cars, and the shot had definitely come from above.

He reached inside his jacket for his Beretta, then thought better of it. If the police responded and saw a man with a gun, they’d jump to conclusions — and shoot before asking questions.

There were three buildings, all butting up against each other. All three were five-story buildings. There were storefronts on the ground floor, offices and apartments above.

Would there be a fire escape?

He walked quickly to the end of the block, turned, then began to trot. An alley ran behind the buildings. He turned down it.

“Danny, where are you?” asked Flash over the radio.

“I’m behind the buildings across the street. Just east of the lot.”

“I’m turning down the side street now,” said Flash. “I’ll be behind you.”

“Good.”

The alley was lined with garbage cans and old cars. There were balconies on the right, fire escapes on the left. Two children were playing soccer at the far end, banging the ball against a rusted chain-link fence.

Danny looked up to his left.

How long would it take a shooter to get down from the roof or one of the upper apartments?

A minute, maybe two, assuming he planned it right. And these guys always planned it right.

But where would he have gone? No one had passed him. The buildings on the right, though only three and two stories, were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. To get past them you’d have to go through them. Or maybe over them.

He turned so he had the back of the building in view and sidled in the direction of the kids. Any second, the killer could appear over the side.

Danny put his hand near his gun, ready, just in case.

“I need words to ask the children if they saw someone,” Danny told MY-PID.

The computer spat out a phrase. Danny yelled it to the kids, but they didn’t react, too consumed in their game.

A window flew open behind him. Danny spun, dropped to his knee.

A head popped out. Danny grabbed his gun.

But it was a woman, yelling at him.

“What’s she saying? Translate mode,” Danny told MY-PID.

“Unknown. Repeat.”

“Give me the Moldovan for ‘Did you see anything?’ ”

MY-PID gave him the proper phrase. Danny yelled it up. The woman yelled back again, once more indecipherable.

“The words are unclear,” said MY-PID. “The language is not Moldovan. It appears to be a Russian dialect, but too distant to hear.”

The woman pointed upward. As Danny followed her gesture, a car pulled into the far end of the alley. It was Flash.

“The police are on their way,” Nuri said over the radio.

Danny looked around. There was a fire escape a few meters to his right. “I’m going to check the roof.”

“I’ll get your car out of there,” Nuri said. “Don’t stay too long.”

Danny jumped up and grabbed the steel ladder to the bottom of the fire escape. He pulled it down, starting to climb even before it hit the stop. Flash, meanwhile, made a U-turn, then pulled around so it would be easier to get away.

Sirens wailed in the distance as Danny reached the edge of the roof. He stopped, pulled out his pistol, then went over, rolling over the low wall and spinning up, ready. But there was no one there.

He looked around the roof quickly. There was a mattress near the front edge.

“Danny — police are pulling in,” said Nuri. “Time to go.”

Danny ignored him, running to the front of the building. He wanted something — a shell casing, a soda bottle, a coffee cup.

Nothing except the mattress. He knelt on it and looked toward the doctor’s building.

Too much of an angle. The shooter would have been to his left somewhere.

“Danny!” shouted Nuri.

“I’m coming. Flash?”

“I’m here. Let’s move.”

Danny pulled out the MY-PID control unit and had it record a video of the roof. Then he raced over to the fire escape ladder and descended.

They saw the ambulance arriving as they drove past the building.

“Kinda late for that,” said Flash.

29

Moldova was seven hours ahead of Washington, and Breanna was just pulling into the Pentagon lot on her way to work when Reid called.

“There are some other developments in Moldova,” he told her. “We should review them together as soon as we get a chance.”

“I can meet you after lunch,” she told him.

“Earlier, would be better. There’s been a shooting.”

“Were we involved?”

“We saw it. The person who was killed may have been connected to the Wolves. They’re still sorting things out.”

“Can you get over to the Pentagon this morning?” Breanna asked.

“Name a time.”

Breanna told him to come whenever he could and her secretary would get her.

A half hour later she made a graceful exit from a phone conference with a contractor in Rhode Island working on a project for the Navy.

“Could you get me some coffee, MaryClaire, please?” Breanna asked as Reid came in. “I’m having a caffeine fit.”

Her secretary smiled. MaryClaire Bennett was an old Pentagon hand. While their first few days had been a bit rocky, she’d relaxed considerably since. Breanna had learned to trust her people sense, which was based on many years of experience with the different personalities in the building. She’d seen many axes buried along the way — most, as the saying went, in people’s backs.

“Mr. Reid?”

“I’ve had my quota for today, thank you.”

Reid pulled a seat in front of Breanna’s desk.

“Busy day?” he asked.

“We have an aircraft demonstration coming up,” she told him. “And I’m going to have to be away from the office for a few days. So I have to get a lot of the day-to-day things out of the way. You know how it goes.”

“Yes. When are you leaving?”

“Sunday night. I’ll be at Dreamland.”

“How long?”

“Until Tuesday night.”

“Back in time for the NATO conference.”

“Yes.”

MaryClaire knocked on the door and came in with the coffee.

“General Magnus is looking for you,” the secretary said. “I told him you were tied up. He asks that you call him when you can — shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. It’s about the plane.”

“OK.” Breanna took a sip of the coffee, trying to get her brain to switch gears as MaryClaire left. “So, I saw the bulletin. The doctor was shot?”

“Yes. It was a sniper. Danny thinks the shot came from across the street, a roof, though he couldn’t find any shells.”

Reid gave her some background on the shooting. The local police were investigating. The local news services had almost nothing to report.

“The doctor was using the name of Nudstrumov. We’ve found, or at least think we’ve found, another alias. Rustam Gorgov. Gorgov owns property in northeastern Moldova, not all that far from the former training camp. And the cemetery where Mark Stoner was supposedly buried.”

He had an update on that as well — an overnight check of the DNA on the corpses showed no match.

“We have to wait for the full report and the entire testing suite, which is more extensive,” said Nuri. “But there were no matches. One of the dead men would have been about Stoner’s age and size, for what that’s worth.”

Breanna nodded.

“They must realize we’re after them,” said Reid. “The doctor visited a Russian spymaster. Maybe that was what got him killed.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he was a bad risk. Maybe they don’t work for the Russians.”

“If they don’t, we won’t have anything to worry about,” said Breanna.

A faint smile appeared at the corner of Reid’s mouth. It was an ironic smile, the sort that indicated he thought she was being naive.

“What about the property?” Breanna asked.

Reid opened his briefcase and took out a set of satellite photos, along with a satellite map. MY-PID was still analyzing different data related to the property and the surrounding area — everything from its ownership to electric bills.

No concrete ties to the Wolves had been found. But a review of commercial satellite images over the past four years showed flashes of light that appeared to be weapons.

“Could be a training ground,” said Reid. “Or just a farmer doing nighttime poaching. I’ve already applied for a Global Hawk assignment so we can get a closer look. But I’d suggest we have Whiplash check it out as well. Discreetly. And from a safe distance.”

“Agreed.”

“The question is what we do if we think they’re in there,” said Breanna.

“That’s always been the problem. It would be one thing to catch them in the act. Here…”

“Do you think it’s time to call the White House?” asked Breanna, putting down her coffee.

“I think so. If we take any direct action, outside of protecting the NATO ministers, we’ll need a finding. If the group is as accomplished as we believe they are, anything we do would be bound to…” He paused, trying to find the right phrase. “It is bound to be complicated,” he added finally.

“All right. And they’re going to need more people,” said Breanna. “We should have them ready.”

Reid nodded. Then he asked the question she’d been dreading since they were first handed the assignment:

“What do you want them to do if it’s Stoner?”

“I think, unfortunately, if he resists, they have to kill him,” said Breanna, ignoring the lump in her throat. “There’s really no other choice.”

30

The text message the Black Wolf received a few hours after killing the doctor consisted of one word:

It was the message he received whenever a job was complete. The doctor was the same as the others, just one more on the list.

The man he’d seen, getting of the car. A black man. African.

Or American.

Did he know Americans?

He had lived before the crash. He had a whole past, but it was locked off from him, erased by whatever they had used to resurrect him, to rebuild him, to keep him going.

He didn’t want it back.

But who was that man?

He had other things to worry about. As much as he hated Nudstrumov, the doctor had readily supplied the serum he needed. Who would do that now?

They would. Or he would hunt them down. Maybe he should start on that now.

The Black Wolf’s cell phone beeped with a second message. It indicated a new website.

This one was German, a listing of art shows. There was a phone number he had to call, using a prepaid cell phone.

It was best not to make the call from the house. He went out to the barn and got his motorcycle.

He’d seen the black man somewhere. But where?

A half hour later, sitting at the top of a hill ten miles from the house, the Black Wolf made the call to the number in the listing.

“The assignment has changed,” said a computerized voice in English. “You will go to Prague. A new team is being prepared. Further instructions will be provided. Leave immediately.”

The Black Wolf looked down at the phone. He pressed the 1 digit to show that he understood. Then he hung up.

31

Rather than waiting for the morning and the iffy connections north, Danny, Nuri, and Flash took two cars and drove up in the direction of the farm. Given that his visit to the cemetery might have tipped someone off, Danny decided they would bypass the town where he’d stayed as well as the old athletic facility and cemetery. That meant a more circuitous route, swinging farther west before turning back toward the farm from the north.

Nuri and Flash took one car; Danny drove alone. He spent much of the ride brooding about Stoner and the past.

If things had gone differently following the mission, Dreamland itself could have sent a team to check the wreck. But Dreamland had been going through its own transition. Colonel Bastian was being replaced.

Dog wouldn’t have left Stoner behind if he could have helped it. He’d blow up half the world getting one of his people back home.

They didn’t make them like Colonel Bastian anymore. He was a balls-to-the-wall SOB to anyone that crossed him. If you were one of his, however, he didn’t just have your back, he had your soul. He didn’t command you, he cared about you. He made you a better soldier. And a better person.

Dog.

Danny felt his eyes welling up, thinking about his old commander, Breanna’s dad. He reached over and turned on the radio, hunting for some music to get his mind off the past.

Hell, Danny, you’re making me into some kind of cardboard saint. You know that’s not me.

Danny felt a shudder through his body. He knew the voice was just the product of his over-tired imagination, but he was so spooked he turned the radio off and drove in silence for the next two hours.

“Magnetic field, fifty meters,” said Nuri, reading the screen on the MY-PID unit. “Runs all along the far side of the stream.”

Danny focused the night glasses, then swept slowly along the creek. These were big glasses, the size of binoculars, and besides being able to pick up the thermal image of a mouse at two hundred yards, they could accept data from MY-PID, superimposing it to create what the scientists called an “enriched and interpreted image.”

Notes from the computer. Imagine what a school kid could do with that.

“Show magnetic field,” he told the computer.

A blue wall appeared on the other side of the stream. It stretched all the way to the road, a good kilometer away, and ran into the hills on the south. It encircled the entire farm. The perimeter measured nearly thirteen kilometers.

“It has to be some sort of detection field,” said Nuri.

“Like a force field?” asked Flash.

“It’s not going to zap us, if that’s what you mean,” said Nuri. “But I’d guess that anything that moves through it would be detected.”

“As long as it’s metal?” asked Flash.

“It may be pretty sensitive,” said Danny. “Anything that could conduct electricity could set it off. There’s something similar at Dreamland. You can’t breach it without it being detected.”

He slipped back from the trees. Someone had spent a lot of money to set up the perimeter.

Clearly, they had the right place. Or at least one of them.

The property consisted of three gently rolling hills, spread out over land that included two streams and bordered a third. Woods formed an inner ring around a border of open fields, an arrangement that Danny surmised was intentional — the woods would provide cover for defenders. Warned of anyone attempting to approach them, they could slip into the trees and pick them off as they came.

The next ring consisted of farm fields, nearly all idle. At the center were a number of farm buildings and one large house.

The house looked like a nineteenth-century Moldovan manor house, a three-story masonry structure with a sharply pitched roof. Two wings extended off the back, giving the building a U-shape. MY-PID calculated there was just over 8,000 square feet of space inside, not counting the basement.

There were three buildings a short distance away. One was an old barn, in an architectural style similar to the house. A six-bay garage sat next to it, at the end of the driveway. Flat-roofed and skinned with pale concrete stucco, it was somewhat newer, probably built sometime around World War II.

The third building was made of steel and didn’t look to be more than four or five years old. It reminded Danny of the gym he’d seen at the training center, though it would have fit nicely in any industrial park across the world. It was large, 92 feet by just over 280. You couldn’t quite get a football field inside, but it would be close.

It was also heated — the glasses showed that the exterior walls were warmer than the garage’s. The heat was uniform, and the walls apparently well-insulated enough to prevent the night glasses from picking up details from the interior.

Unusual for a warehouse, especially one that appeared empty.

A perfect place to set up a training exercise, Danny thought darkly. You could rehearse a dozen killings inside, run two or three teams and not have them bump into each other.

“No guards on the interior roads,” said Nuri, watching the feed on the laptop from a Predator V. The aircraft had flown from Germany, and would be assigned to Whiplash for as long as they needed it. A second was on its way; both would operate out of Ukraine. They were CIA assets, controlled from a site on Cyprus.

“Two video cameras in the front woods,” said Nuri. “They’re focusing on the road coming up to the house. And there’s a mine system.”

The Predator was reading electric currents as well as heat. The mines were wired; a belt ten meters wide surrounded the house. There were also patches in different areas where trees or bushes provided cover to approach the center of the compound.

“Parachute drop might work,” said Nuri. “Get right past the defenses.”

“We got to land on the roof?” asked Flash. There was the slightest tremor in his voice — though he had jumped often, Flash did not like parachuting. “If their ground defenses are that elaborate, you don’t think they’d have something to protect against airplanes?”

“You think they have SAMs in the barn?” asked Danny.

“Gatling guns in one of the lower buildings would do it.”

“Do they?” Danny looked at Nuri.

“I don’t see anything in those buildings,” said Nuri. “But we only have infrared at the moment.”

“We’re better off going on the ground,” said Danny, considering. “If they have this much technology, they’ll trust it. Once we’re past the magnetic wall, the rest will be easy. We’ll just pick a path around the sensors.”

“That’s like Moses saying once we cross the Red Sea, we’ll be free from the Egyptians,” said Nuri.

“You know what, Colonel?” Flash held up his control unit. He had zoomed in on a small section of the property. “Can I see this grid on the big screen?”

“Go ahead.”

Flash hunkered down with Nuri, coordinating the grid numbers.

“You look at these plants?” Flash asked after they zoomed the image. “You know what they are?”

“No.”

“It’s cannabis. Pot. They have about two acres worth of marijuana growing down that hillside.”

“Two acres?”

“Shit yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Have a look.”

Danny wasn’t an expert in plant morphology, but MY-PID was. Flash was right.

“Two acres worth of weed,” said Flash. “You sure we ain’t bustin’ a drug operation?”

32

White House

Covert operations were among the most top secret of all government undertakings, but that didn’t meant they didn’t have their own bureaucratic infrastructure and procedures. On the contrary: the bureaucracy and its pathways were in some ways even more elaborate for “black” operations than those involving the rest of the government.

Legal opinions — many more than the average person would believe — as well as myriad logistical decisions and arrangements had to be formulated, reviewed, rejected (more often than not), reformulated, and finally decided upon.

These were all subject to the “serendipitous conundrums,” as Jonathon Reid put it: chance, accidents, and, last and very often least, official policy, which acted like grit in the wheels of the churning system. Even when the chain of command was set up in a streamlined way to purposely get quick decisions and emphasize flexibility, it could take days, if not weeks, to get the outlines of an operation approved.

There were surprisingly few ways to short-circuit the process. The one surefire way, however, was to go directly to the President herself.

Which was what Reid did, arranging to stop by the White House residence to play cards after dinner.

Not with the President — Mrs. Todd abhorred gambling, whether it was cards or horse racing or even the state lottery, something which hadn’t won her many friends when she proposed it be abolished while running for the state legislature at the start of her career. She’d lost that election; it was the last time she ever mentioned the lottery, on or off the record.

Her stance on gambling was 180 degrees different than her husband’s. Mr. Todd — no friends called him the First Husband, even as a joke — held poker games at the residence twice a week. Reid was a semiregular, and had been since well before the venue change that came with the President’s election.

More than just the venue had changed. There was now a butler available to keep the drinks filled.

The cigarette smoke was still horrendous. Mr. Todd was an unreformed hacker.

The President visited the session generally at 10:00 P.M., ostensibly on her way to bed, but most often on her way to do more work in her private office upstairs. She was a night owl, and in fact rarely got more than four hours of sleep.

“My God, Mr. Todd,” she said, coming into the family dining room where the games were held. “So much smoke!”

Everyone, except her husband, stood.

“Next week we do cigars, Mrs. Todd,” he answered.

It was a routine of theirs: she always complained about the smoke; he always threatened more. She walked around to the head of the table and gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Good cards?” he said.

“Four queens,” she said dryly. “Should I be jealous?”

Her husband smiled. No one was ever sure if she was reading the cards accurately or if they were teasing each other. But the prudent thing to do was drop out, and they all did.

“Mister Rockfert,” she said, noticing Sam Rockfert. “We haven’t seen you here in quite a while.”

“No, I know, Mary. Been a while.”

She went over to Rockfert. He was an old friend — a plumber who had befriended the Todds even before the lotto election, when Mr. Todd was working as a Senate staff assistant. He was the only person besides her husband who would use her first name — including her brother-in-law James, who was sitting on her husband’s right.

“How’s Margaret?” the President asked.

“Her knee has been giving her fits. Or I should say, giving me fits.” Rockfert laughed. “Other than that, she’s fine. Grandkids came up last week.”

“You have to arrange to bring them around. We’d love to see them.”

She was sincere, though her schedule meant that it was unlikely she’d be able to spend more than two or three minutes with them, even if such a meeting could be arranged.

“Mr. Reid, I hope you are not betting your pension money,” said the President, seeming to spot him for the first time.

“It wouldn’t be much to lose,” said Reid.

“It’s the money he got from selling guns to the Contras that he doesn’t want to lose,” quipped James. “You notice he doesn’t bet that.”

The President looked over and scowled at him. Her husband laughed.

“Ignore them, Mr. Reid,” said the President. “They’re just jealous of your good fortune. I wonder — could you spare me a moment? I have a few questions, now that you’re here.”

“Of course. The way my luck has been going, I’m glad to take a break.”

Reid got up and followed the President down the hall to the study.

“You have something new for me?” asked the President, sitting down in a chair next to her desk. It was a reproduction of a piece of furniture that James Madison was said to have brought into the White House. The original was in a Smithsonian storeroom.

“We think we’ve found a complex the Wolves use,” said Reid. “In Moldova.”

“Interesting.”

“We’d like to send Whiplash in to find out. But that may involve bloodshed.”

“In Moldova.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. If they are there, striking them now — before the conference — would preempt the possibility of their attack. The conference could go off without a hitch.”

“How good is the evidence?”

Reid laid it out.

“Sketchy,” said the President.

“At this stage, things often are.”

“Yes.”

The President leaned back in the chair. She stared at the wall behind him, her eyes facing a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, one of her favorite predecessors.

“Can we pull this off without being detected?” she asked. “In and out, no complications? No witnesses?”

Reid had given the question considerable thought. An American raid in any foreign country would create a major incident, even if it went off without a hitch. He believed that Whiplash could get into the compound and complete its mission, but there was no way to guarantee it could be done without attracting attention, especially if the Wolves chose to resist. And everything indicated they would.

“I can’t guarantee that nothing would come out,” said Reid. “There is always some possibility of failure.”

The political dynamics were difficult. President Todd was trying to wean Moldova toward the West, as she had done with Ukraine. But the government was on even shakier grounds, with a poor economy, and Russia anxious to prevent further defections to NATO.

Go in and out quietly, and no one would complain. No one would even know. Strike too loudly or trip over the wrong contingency, and the Moldovan government would be forced to renounce the attack, and the U.S., playing right into Russia’s hands. And if they didn’t, popular opinion would surely turn against the Moldovan government, an even better development for Russia.

Those considerations don’t outweigh the necessity of striking, Reid thought, but he could understand the President’s hesitation.

And he had a solution.

“I was speaking with the men in the field before coming over tonight,” he said. “It turns out that a very large amount of marijuana is grown on the site where we would like to strike.”

“Marijuana?”

“Quite a cash crop in Moldova, as it happens.” Reid reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out two sheets of paper. They contained satellite photos of the property and the marijuana. He handed them to the President. “I wasn’t aware of its importance until today. But apparently the farmers do quite well. They seem to supply much of Europe. There are almost two acres of it here,” he added. “You can see in these photos. The leaves are very distinct. They are pointy, with five—”

“Jonathon, I hope you don’t think I have no idea what marijuana looks like,” said the President. “This is the Wolves’ compound?”

“Yes.”

“They sell it?”

“Possibly. They may use it on their own — medicinally, shall we say?”

Reid wasn’t exactly sure why the plant was being grown there. While two acres was a lot, given the security measures and their location, they could easily grow considerably more. That seemed to rule out the possibility that the Wolves were running a drug operation on the side, though there was no way to tell. It might even be a way to explain the secrecy surrounding the property, if neighbors became too curious.

“If we told the Moldovan government that this was a drug operation,” he said, “we would give them cover for anything that happened.”

“Under what pretense does an American military force make a drug raid?” asked the President skeptically.

“As part of a NATO task force operating under UN auspices,” said Reid. “As directed by the UN last year. It’s a fig leaf, but it is authorized. The European Union has been pushing for more antidrug enforcement actions.”

“When do you tell them?”

“Right before the raid.”

“What if they want to come along?” the President asked.

“We let them. Once the place is secure. Then we can use Moldovan facilities to hold the Wolves until they can be extradited for murder. Assuming they survive the raid.”

“There’s a place where they can be held?”

“I’ve spoken to our station chief in the capital. He’s confident they could be held at a Moldovan military base. We’d only need to have them stay until we had charges ready in Poland for the murders there. That should only take a few days. It would avoid having to take them to Ukraine on attempted charges. We also wouldn’t have to reveal how we got the evidence against them. It’s much better than taking them to one of our bases.”

“Granted,” said the President. “But what do we do if the Moldovans won’t cooperate?”

“We’ll be back at the same starting point,” said Reid. “You will have to decide whether to proceed without their permission. But then they’ll at least think this was about drugs. And the Russians will as well.”

Reid assumed that the Moldovan government had been penetrated by Russian spies.

“I’d suggest you make that decision beforehand,” he added. “And that we only proceed if we’re prepared to go alone.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Our station chief reminded me that the Moldovan government received thirty million euros in enforcement money from the E.U. Drug Fund six months ago, without anything to show for it. This will allow them to pretend that they are quite on top of things.”

“You must be very good at poker,” said the President.

“I hold my own.”

“Go. All the way. Make it work.”

33

The Nationals took it hard, losing 7–2. They were never really in the game, getting clobbered with a five-run first inning.

Just as well, thought Zen as he drove home. He didn’t have to invest much emotion in the game, only to see them lose. And Senator Dirks was an admirable guest, insisting on paying for the food and the single beer Zen allowed himself at the games when he had to drive home.

All the lights were on in the house as he drove up. That was unusual. Breanna generally holed up in bed the nights he was out at games, either with work or with a book or a movie. Usually he found her out like a light, her computer or Kindle lying next to her.

Maybe she wants to apologize, he thought. Or maybe she just left the lights on.

The smell of coffee as he rolled himself up the ramp from the garage tipped him off that it was probably none of the above. And sure enough, she was sitting in the kitchen, frowning at a laptop.

“Hey,” he said, coming in. “We lost.”

“So I heard.”

“Check the scores?”

“I wanted to see what kind of mood you’d be in.”

He laughed. “Nah. You can’t really expect the Nats to win. So when they lose, it doesn’t really bother me. Someday, maybe.”

He couldn’t quite read her expression. Was she working? She was using the family laptop, so he thought not.

“Checking the news?” he asked.

“The weather. My flight schedule has been changed. I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Oh. OK.”

“I talked to Caroline. She’ll be here right after class. From what I understand, she’s very excited about going to Prague.”

“I told you she would be.”

“I also spoke to General Magnus today,” said Breanna.

“How is he?”

“He’s going to Prague, too.”

“Really? Suddenly, it’s the cool place to be.”

“He wants to show off the Tigershark to the Germans and the English. He thinks he can sell it as a next-generation NATO fighter.”

“Tigershark?”

“Don’t play dumb with me.”

“Hey, being dumb is something I don’t have to pretend to be.” Zen popped the top on a Rogue Porter — he could tell he needed something substantial.

“You set this up, didn’t you?” said Breanna. “So I’d come with you.”

“Honey, I have no idea what you’re talking about. The Tigershark — it’s a dead deal. You can’t even get it past your own Air Force brass. Manned interceptors have no future in the Air Force. It’s not what I want, but—”

Breanna got up from the table and stormed away.

“Hey — what’s up?” asked Zen. “I didn’t talk to Magnus. Is that what you think?”

The Tigershark had been to air shows before. It was just a coincidence.

He glanced at his watch, wondering if it was too late to call Magnus and see if there was something else involved.

More than likely, not.

Quarter past eleven. Far too late to call. Too late, really, to do anything but drink his beer.

34

Danny, Nuri, and Flash spent the night planting video bugs along the roads, making sure that all of the approaches to the farm were covered. Meanwhile, the Predator V circling overhead was joined by its companion shortly after daybreak. The second aircraft had a ground-penetrating radar that could see into the buildings, as well as hunt for bunkers and other surprises. The pair could stay over the farm, orbiting at roughly 40,000 feet virtually undetectable, for a week.

There were two men inside the main house, in what seemed to be some sort of control room at the back. Probably it was a security post. Otherwise, the place was empty.

Surveillance network established, Danny and the others drove south to find a place to rest. Worried that stopping nearby might inadvertently tip the people at the farm off, Danny drove almost thirty kilometers away, not stopping until he spotted a small inn that sat above a twisting path from the highway. He pulled off the road and waited for the others. It was just after 6:00 A.M.

“That says restaurant and hotel in Russian,” said Nuri when they drove up. He pointed to the sign, hand painted in a neat script.

Danny had seen the Romanian sign in Latin script but not the smaller Cyrillic, which was on the other side of the road.

“How come the sign’s in Russian?” asked Flash. “I thought all the Russians were on the eastern end of the country?”

“That’s the greatest concentration,” said Nuri. “But remember, this was part of the Soviet Union before the breakout. Russians are everywhere.”

There was no special reason to be suspicious, but Danny still decided to look for another place. They found a small café about two miles farther down the road. Two trucks were parked out front.

“You sure you’re not getting paranoid, Colonel?” asked Flash as they got out of their cars.

“I’m always paranoid,” said Danny. “Let’s get some grub.”

They left their mikes open while they ate, hoping the MY-PID would pick up and translate useful local gossip. But the talk was mostly about the weather and a hike in government-controlled gasoline prices, planned to go into effect in a week. The fact that the three strangers in the corner were American didn’t provoke any comments.

Nuri went over and spoke to the hostess, asking about hotels. Bits and pieces of French and Spanish flooded into his head as he spoke. This was both a help and a hindrance, giving him more vocabulary and at the same time making it harder for him to get the right pronunciation.

Nuri had always had a certain fluidity with languages. It was one of his prime assets as a CIA officer. MY-PID helped tremendously — but it also made his ability less important. The next generation of field officers would operate with implants in their head, speaking fluently in any language they dialed up.

The waitress mentioned a few chain hotels back close to the capital. Nuri said he wanted something local.

“You are an American, though,” she said, switching to English. “You want to stay here?”

“Yes,” he said. “My friends and I are researching locations for a movie. We’re from Hollywood.”

“Movie?”

“The Sound of Music,” he said. “We’re doing a remake.”

Nuri was particularly happy about this cover story, and he had to practically bite his tongue to keep from embellishing it. There was always a temptation to add details when you had a good story. And this one was perfect — a movie version of the famous musical, to be shot here in Eastern Europe, with elaborate village scenes. Who wouldn’t eat it up? But the more details, the more likely you were to be tripped up.

“Hollywood,” said the waitress, practically gushing.

She started talking about a movie she had seen being made in the States some years before, when she had been an exchange student in California. If it was during her college days, thought Nuri, it must have been at least twenty years ago.

The memories sprang out in a jumble. Even if her accent had been pure, Nuri was sure he would have understood only a third of it.

Finally, he managed to steer the conversation — or monologue — back to hotels. There were several places in the area, she said, but none worth the trouble.

“Well, we do have to sleep,” he told her.

“Then the Latino, two kilometers on the road, that direction,” said the woman. “And I know just the place where you can set your movie.”

Nuri listened to her suggestions, mentally noting that they were all to the south. He asked if there might be anything to the north, trying to get information about the farm without mentioning it. But even when he named the town it was located in, she just shrugged and said she didn’t know that area very well.

“Give you her life story?” Danny asked when he came back to the table.

“Just about. There are a couple places down the road.”

They found the motel the waitress recommended in the center of a village two miles away. It wasn’t hard: A large 1950s era farm tractor stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, as much a landmark as mascot.

During the Soviet years the town factory had churned out tractors, as many as five hundred a week. The plant had closed soon after independence, and the old buildings now housed a variety of small businesses, including two that repaired and rebuilt the tractors originally produced there.

The town had a population of about five thousand, most living in the village center. Housing projects from the 1970s and early 1980s, their yellow bricks weathered to a dull brown, crowded around somewhat newer structures, brightly painted, which sat around the edges of the small business district. Main Street was the local highway; a pair of blinking lights slowed cars down as they approached, though crossing from one side to the other could be a dangerous undertaking.

The motel was wedged in beside a small grocery store and one of the factory buildings. Two stories tall, it was a narrow box of rooms with a balcony on the left. It presented its narrow side to the street, running back fifteen rooms deep toward a large fence that bordered a set of warehouses.

The clerk took little interest in them once Nuri proffered his credit card. They got three adjoining rooms on the second floor toward the rear. They checked them out, planted some video sensors around the rooms and the motel to keep guard, then drew lots to see who had the first watch.

Flash lost. He set up the laptop in his room, watching the farm via a satellite feed, while Nuri and Danny went off to bed.

Nuri felt as if he had only just drifted off when his satellite phone began ringing. He jerked upright in bed, dazed, before grabbing the phone.

“Yeah?” he said, fumbling for the Talk button. “Yeah?”

“This is Reid. Can you talk?”

“Uh, yeah.” He pushed upright in the bed and glanced at the clock. It was a quarter past one. He’d had two hours of sleep.

“Are you awake?”

“I just — we’re trying to nap a little.”

“Where’s Danny?”

“He’s sleeping, too.”

“Get him, please. Contact me through MY-PID.”

Danny didn’t particularly like the idea of cooperating with the Moldovan government, but he had no say in it. Reid made it clear that the decision had been made by the President.

“It’s window dressing only,” said Reid. “One of our people in Chisinau is already working on the arrangements. If the Moldovans decide to send someone along on the raid, then you simply arrange for them to show up after the area is secure.”

“What if the Moldovans tip the Wolves off?” asked Nuri.

“That should not be a problem as long as the operation is addressed as a drug one,” said Reid. “And by simply limiting the details they have, there should be no chance of that kind of double cross. Besides, it’s doubtful the Moldovans have any real links to the Wolves. We’d have picked up information about it.”

“Maybe,” said Nuri skeptically.

“Dr. Rubeo has some information for you,” Reid continued, ignoring him. “There’s some equipment that will be arriving with your people in Ukraine tonight. I take it that he wants to explain how it works. You had best wait until a reasonable hour to contact him. He’s cantankerous enough as it is.”

Danny had already given Boston the heads-up that they would probably need a strike force. As soon as he got off the phone with Reid, he told him to get it in the air. A C–17 with the team and much of their equipment was due to land in Germany a little after eight. After refueling, it would fly on to Chernivtsi in southwestern Ukraine. There it would meet a second C–17 with their Rattlesnakes. A pair of armed Osprey MV–22s were scheduled to arrive at roughly the same time, completing the assault force.

In theory, they could launch an assault just before dawn. But the force would be tired from the long flight, and Danny still didn’t have much intelligence on the farm. He wanted to move as quickly as possible, but he also knew he would only get one chance at this.

He also thought it would be best to go in at night. More than likely, the men at the farm would be prepared to fight whenever they struck, but attacking at night would make it less likely a stray passerby would wander across the operation.

So he decided to hold off for twenty-four hours. It was a logical decision — they wouldn’t have to rush the planning, and he and the others would be able to rest. But it was also the sort of decision easily second-guessed, not least of all by Danny himself. He lay awake for another hour, trying to beat off the doubts, until finally, exhausted mentally as well as physically, he slipped into a fitful slumber.

35

Breanna paused at the door of the aircraft, preparing herself to go down the steps. Though she’d been back to Dreamland several times since leaving the active Air Force, the return was always emotional. She had spent some of the best days of her life here, and while not ordinarily given to nostalgia, it was impossible to keep the memories from flooding back as soon as she saw the low-slung silhouettes of the research bunkers and nearby hangars.

Some of her hardest had been spent here. Yet for some reason the difficulties, the trials and tribulations — the stays in the hospital, the long nights watching over Zen, her own dramas in the emergency room — all of that faded. Only the good times remained.

“Hey, boss!” bellowed a familiar voice from below. “You’re late!”

Breanna pushed herself out onto the steps.

“I knew you weren’t flying this old crate,” continued Al “Greasy Hands” Parsons, standing at the bottom of the rolling steps, “because you woulda had it here a half hour early.”

“Even I can’t fight head winds,” said Breanna, coming down the steps. “How are we doing, Chief?”

“Chief” was a reference to Greasy Hands’ title fifteen years earlier, when he was responsible for making sure every aircraft Dreamland had could get into the air.

There had been officers over him — plenty — but ask any maintainer on the base who they answered to — and who they didn’t want to cross — and “Greasy Hands” would be the immediate answer.

The same with the pilots.

“Brass is already here,” said Greasy Hands in a stage whisper as she came down the steps. “Got enough of them to stock a hardware store, if there were hardware stores anymore.”

“The chief of staff here?”

“First one to arrive,” said Greasy Hands. “They’re all over the Sabre like ants at a picnic. I’m thinking maybe we can tie a few of them to the wings. I just don’t know which ones.”

Greasy Hands winked. He still had a chief’s perspective on what he liked to call “upper management.”

Dreamland had changed a great deal since her father had the command. There were many more buildings. Taj Mahal — the command center back in her day — was now a research laboratory. It was flanked by two much larger buildings. What had been a tiny residential area used by perhaps a hundred or so military and research personnel, most of them single, was now a small city more than ten times as large. There was a day care center, an interdenominational chapel, and a small school.

And an outdoor swimming pool. She would have killed for that when she’d been stationed here.

Breanna turned toward the sound of advancing rotors. An Osprey was settling down a few yards from the rear of the C–20B that had just brought her here.

“Recognize this bird?” Greasy Hands said as they walked toward the aircraft.

“Should I?”

“You betchya. Picked you up out of that jam in Vietnam.” He said the words as if they were lyrics to a song. “Now it’s a ferry. I remember the oil pressure in that starboard engine used to like to jump up and down. Used to drive Spokes nuts. Which wasn’t necessarily a hard thing to do.”

With a wary glance toward the large props on the tilt wing, Breanna walked to the aircraft as the steps folded down. She clambered into the utilitarian interior, taking a seat on the thinly cushioned bench in the middle of the cabin. Greasy Hands sat alongside her.

“Please fasten seat belts,” said a voice.

Parsons started laughing.

“Please fasten seat belts.”

“What’s so funny?” asked Breanna, pulling the belt tight.

“I remember when Carla Agrei recorded that. It took her more than an hour. Four little words — she couldn’t get them out of her mouth.”

“You were there for the session?”

“You don’t remember Carla Agrei? I think half the base was there watching her. The male half.”

The door to the Osprey closed.

“Prepare to take off, please,” said Carla’s disembodied voice. “Please remain seated while flying.”

It wasn’t just the cabin crew that was automated; the entire aircraft flew on its own. The base flight controller could step in at any time if necessary, but that hadn’t happened in anyone’s recent memory.

“Flight transit time is computed at fifteen point three minutes. Please enjoy the ride.”

Brown Lake Test Area had not existed when Breanna was here. There was only one building, and most of that was underground. It served as a hangar and a small laboratory area. There were no offices, and workers had to be ferried in and out via Osprey. One entered through a set of cement steps that looked as if they’d been dropped into the middle of the desert. The surrounding area was, as the name implied, brown and smooth as glass, and considerably sturdier — heavily laden Megafortresses had landed and taken off from it back when it was a test range.

The Tigershark and a half-dozen Sabres stood in a neat line at the south end of the airstrip area. A pair of large tent canopies had been erected to the east for the VIPs, but no one was under them — as Greasy Hands had said, they were swarming around the Sabres.

The Tigershark, by contrast, stood all alone.

It certainly didn’t look dowdy. But was it the future?

“Put on your smiley face,” said Parsons as the Osprey settled into its landing pattern.

“Am I frowning?”

“Like you just drowned a kitten,” he told her.

Turk saw Breanna Stockard coming out of the Osprey as he emerged from the hangar. He waved in her direction but she didn’t see him; she was immediately engulfed by a small gaggle of officers to witness the test flight.

Turk liked Breanna. It would have been hard not to. She was older than him, but still very easy on the eyes. And as a boss, she was remarkably easygoing. Admittedly, he didn’t have many direct dealings with her, but she was one of those people who not only listened to what you said, but cared about understanding it.

Then there was the fact that she was a pilot and a war hero. Her exploits — and those of her husband and father — were among those that had inspired him to join the Air Force in the first place. He’d never spoken to her about them, nor had he met her husband, but he hoped to do both soon.

“Cap, you ready?”

“Hey, just daydreaming on you,” he told Tommy Stern. The former tech sergeant was a contractor responsible for the environmental systems on the aircraft—“da HVAC guy,” as he often joked. He and Turk had become friends, and Stern really functioned as Turk’s unofficial babysitter, bodyguard, and drinking buddy.

Two crewmen and the crew chief were waiting at the plane with a dozen Air Force and Office of Technology tech people. With a cocked smile, Turk glanced over at the VIPs swarming nearby, then put his helmet on and got ready to fly.

They’d barely buttoned up the plane and gotten the last green light on the system check when the radio crackled.

“Tigershark, status,” said Colonel Johnson.

No automated controller today, thought Turk, unsure whether he preferred the computer or Johnson.

The engineers had isolated the problem with the UM/Fs and corrected it, but just in case, he had added another fifty meters of distance to the routines. No sense in giving the brass too much of a thrill.

“Tigershark, status,” snapped Johnson.

“Prepared for takeoff,” said Turk.

As Breanna took her place in the reviewing area, her thoughts were far from the aircraft, or even Dreamland. She was thinking about Zen.

Worrying about him, though she wouldn’t have admitted it.

She owed him an apology. He had nothing to do with the air show — the idea had come from the British, who were suddenly worried about their aging air force. The new prime minister also seemed to be hoping that a production line for the new aircraft might be opened in south England. He’d talked to Magnus, and suggested taking the plane to the air show. Apparently it had participated in routines there two years before, part of the private company’s last ditch efforts to speed up the procurement process and stave off bankruptcy.

It was completely Magnus’s idea. He even suggested that she go with him, though he didn’t seem too disappointed when she begged off because of work.

Why had she snapped at Zen? Because she was worried about him.

Irrationally. He’d faced much worse dangers, right on this very field.

The show went well enough, with Turk pushing the Tigershark through its maneuvers as the Sabres tagged along. He even threw in an unscripted barrel roll after the UavS completed their bombing run.

Twenty minutes of that, all done precisely according to script, and it was time to call it a day. The big shots had to have their lunch.

Turk clicked the mike button to talk.

“Tigershark to ground. Control, we’re clear of scheduled activities. Looking to land.”

“Negative, Tigershark,” replied Johnson. “Stand by.”

Negative?

Turk was in an orbit at the northern end of the test range, about two miles from the Sabres and out of everyone’s way. Still, being put on hold like this irked him. He ground his teeth together, then told himself to relax. He was only pissed off because it was Johnson. Anyone else giving him direction, he’d be fine with it.

And really, it wasn’t even Johnson’s fault. The brass was probably hassling him for some sort of photo shoot.

Bingo. Johnson came back, directing him to perform a series of maneuvers with the Sabres. None of it was too taxing. Turk concentrated on the flight, hitting his marks with precision.

A fresh set of requests followed. Once again Turk and the Sabres flew through them. Medusa made the process seamless. The little planes flew all around him as he flew tight to the ground, then pulled up sharply to accelerate toward the sky. They followed upward as fast as they could, flying impressively for robots.

Then came a request to replay the bombing sequence.

“Ground, be advised I’m into fuel reserves,” said Turk.

“Roger that, Tigershark. We’re aware of your fuel state. Complete the requested exercise.”

“Sabre control, line up for Series Exercise Three,” he told Medusa. “Pattern Alpha Two.”

An image of the preprogrammed set of maneuvers came up on his far-right screen. Turk reached over and tapped it to confirm.

“Sabre control, commence bombing run on target. Pattern Alpha Two.”

“Pattern Alpha Two. Sabre copies.”

Turk slipped down his throttle, easing the Tigershark’s speed. The Sabres danced in and did their thing, and Turk banked toward the landing pattern.

Just as the flight computer warned that he was low on fuel.

“Right on cue,” he said.

He checked in with ground — no protests this time — then lined up for his landing. The Sabres were right behind him.

Which wasn’t right. They were supposed to be off to the east, following the new safety protocols.

Suddenly he got a warning from the flight computer — the Sabres were too close.

They sure were — the planes were following the same pattern as they had the day before.

Shit.

“Knock it off! Knock it off!” he called.

As he did, one of the Sabres made a sharp cut toward his tail.

The moment Breanna saw the small aircraft cutting to the north, a pit opened in her stomach.

The Sabre was far too close to the Tigershark. The fierce vortices of wind off the complex airfoil made the U/MF hard to control. It began fluttering, then flew directly at the Tigershark’s right stabilizer.

It was almost precisely the same type of accident that had claimed Zen’s legs.

Breanna leapt up from her seat.

“Jeff!” she yelled involuntarily.

By the time the proximity alarm blared, Turk had managed to pull the Tigershark’s nose up and swing his tail down and away in a low-altitude, high-g cobra that dropped the plane to within a dozen feet of the smooth desert surface. The Sabre buzzed overhead, oblivious to his presence.

In any other aircraft, he would have been dead, killed either by the collision or his maneuver to get away. But between the Tigershark’s aerodynamics, razor-sharp controls, and his piloting skills — thank you very much — he was just pissed off.

Turk landed without comment and taxied to the recovery area. He remained silent as the crew helped him out of the aircraft.

“It’s something in the low-altitude routines,” said the head project engineer, running over from his SUV. “It has to do with the landing routines. They’re cutting into an emergency break-off because—”

“You know what?” said Turk. “I really don’t care. Just fix the damn thing before I get killed.”

“I’m sorry for my outburst,” Breanna told their guests as they gathered for the debrief back at Dreamland. “Obviously, we had a bit of a problem there at the end. The Sabres were not in their proper position. We need more work on the low-altitude flight control sections.”

“And you want us to back the project?” said Admiral Brooks.

“The problem is with the Sabres,” said Breanna. “They were not programmed to land in a pattern with another aircraft. It wasn’t Medusa’s fault, or the Tigershark’s. The Tigershark itself is fine. Believe me, any other aircraft would not have been able to escape. You saw how it dropped down.”

Admiral Brooks had brought along two of his own aviation experts. They admired the Tigershark, speaking highly of its recovery at the end.

“It was the only thing that impressed me,” said Captain Fairfield, who had served as an F/A–18 wing commander in Afghanistan. “Any other aircraft put its nose up like that…”

He shook his head. Another Navy aviator mentioned a Russian MiG pilot who had tried a somewhat similar maneuver at an air show and ended up becoming the posthumous star of a viral video on disastrous plane accidents.

Still, it was a tough crowd, and as they broke up for lunch, Breanna sensed they had lost the pitch. General Magnus pulled her aside as one of Dreamland’s colonels met them and led them toward the executive dining area.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “It’s a problem with the Sabres. Something similar happened the other day and they thought they had it repaired.”

“I understand. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine.”

“The accident — what happened was similar to what happened to your husband.”

Breanna felt her face turning red.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You already apologized.”

Breanna felt tears welling in her eyes. She felt bad about how she had left things with Zen.

“I think it’s important to get the Tigershark to the air show,” said Magnus. “But only if this sort of thing isn’t going to happen.”

“The Tigershark itself is fine.”

“OK.”

Magnus started to turn away.

“General — I was wondering,” said Breanna. “What do you think — I wonder if I might tag along with you to the air show?”

“Really? You want to go?”

“Well, Jeff and my daughter are actually going to be there.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you say that? Of course. We can take your family.”

Magnus smiled.

“They already have arrangements. My niece is going as well. They’re leaving tonight. He has to go to the NATO conference.”

“Ah — well then, you probably shouldn’t wait for me. I’m not flying out until Monday night. You’ll miss him.”

“Oh.”

“Go out tonight,” said Magnus.

“By the time I get back East—”

“Boss 12 is going out to Ukraine empty,” said Magnus, referring to an Air Force C–20B used as a VIP transport. “They need a backup in case something happens in Kiev. I’m sure they could arrange a stop in Prague. It is on the way.”

“You think?”

“Well, geography never was my best subject,” said Magnus, struggling to keep a straight face. “But I’m pretty sure it’s in that general direction.”

36

Nuri drew the task of coordinating with the Moldovan government and the CIA field office in Chisinau, which Reid had called in for support. He left for the capital around noon, planning to meet with the CIA station chief around dinnertime. Danny and Flash continued monitoring the farm, watching and planning how to proceed with the raid.

A car arrived shortly after 9:00 A.M. Two men got out and carried luggage into the house. About a half hour later a taxi drove up and dropped off another man at the roadside, leaving him to walk up the long drive on his own. He went in through the side door facing the garage and disappeared. Another did the same a half hour later. Then another car arrived with two men, just like the first.

Nothing happened for a few hours. Danny flipped back and forth through the feeds from the Predators — both were on station now — sipping the awful but free coffee he’d retrieved from the motel lobby.

He tried to imagine Stoner, constructing an image from his memories as well as the intelligence. Six-foot, stocky, square jaw and yet a slightly hollow face, the face of someone who had walked through a desert.

Physically ‘enhanced’?

There was no clear guidance on what that might mean. The intelligence was vague, based on vaguer reports. The Wolves were physically fit and in extremely good shape — that was a given for any special ops type group, which essentially described what they knew of the operation.

But they were more than that. The implication was that, at a minimum, they were using exoskeleton technology to help them run and lift things. And that the technology was more advanced than what anyone else, including the U.S., was using, since it hadn’t been detected.

Which in Danny’s view was highly unlikely.

Even staring at the old pictures, it was hard to see Stoner now. Gray hair? Fuller cheeks?

More than likely he wasn’t here. More than likely he was still at the bottom of that swamp.

Shortly before 1:00 p.m., MY-PID alerted Danny to activity at the back of the farmhouse. Danny hit the hot key on the laptop, bringing up the proper feed just in time to see two figures emerge from the cement stairwell that came out of the basement. Moments later a third and a fourth came out, finally a fifth. They trotted up the steps from the basement, moving around in a haphazard pattern — warming up, Danny thought, like a basketball team.

A sixth figure emerged. The others formed a semicircle around him. They began doing jumping jacks.

It was exactly like a basketball team. Right number, too.

Danny put his finger on the control slider and zoomed to maximum magnification, trying to get close-ups of the faces. He got a partial on one — it was clearly not Stoner.

The man next to him had what looked like the right build. But all he could see was the top of the man’s head. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, with only a small part of his scalp exposed.

“Request facial images,” Danny told the computer. “All subjects.”

The request had to be relayed to the Predator pilot. By the time the aircraft changed its orbit to attempt to see the face, the men had already begun to run around the property. The trees and hills — not to mention the UAV’s altitude — made getting close-ups of the faces very difficult, and the aircraft was only able to obtain two before the men returned to the house via the basement door. Neither man looked like Stoner.

Then again, the images were grainy and obscured by shadows — who could really say?

Flash came in a short time later, while Danny was replaying the warm-up routine.

“You sure we ain’t watching a soccer team?” he asked.

Danny could only shrug.

The farm was quiet for the next several hours. Then, just as dusk began to fall, figures started emerging from the house again. This time it was clear they weren’t an eccentric sports team on retreat — they were in full battle rattle, helmets and vests, rifles and sidearms. They moved over to the large steel building very deliberately, in a combat spread. Once there, they lined up in a close semicircle, waiting as the last figure came out and stepped in front of them.

Danny could easily picture the scene from the ground. He’d done it a hundred times.

OK men. This barn is our target. We infiltrate through the open door. We move through silently to the second floor. This is just to warm up…

Flash leaned forward next to him, watching.

“That’s not Manchester United,” he said.

They switched to the penetrating radar. From above, the image looked like a maze, with rats running through it.

“They firing, you think?” asked Flash. The infrared cameras weren’t picking up any gunfire.

“First time through, probably not,” said Danny. He’d already checked the general layout of the building interior. It didn’t match the building where the NATO meeting was taking place in Kiev. But then again, it looked fairly generic to him.

He keyed up the sensor display on the laptop that revealed electric currents. There were computer hard drives active all through the building. Six were moving — the assault team was equipped with portable computers.

“Gotta be training devices,” said Flash. “Smart helmets. They’re working with a combat information system.”

The group worked through the northern quadrant of the building twice, then reassembled for a third try. There were flashes of heat energy inside the building — flash-bangs. A takedown simulation.

The drill went on for another hour. Then the unit emerged, again one by one. They formed up outside the building, then moved out into one of the nearby fields, heading toward a small cluster of ruins. MY-PID analyzed the team based on the images. They were all between six-four and six-six, seemingly in excellent physical condition as they sprinted up the hill at an under sixty seconds per four hundred meter pace. Their weight was more of a guess, but MY-PID pegged it at just over 250 pounds apiece.

They were well equipped with what appeared to be Russian weapons — four brand-new AEK–971 assault rifles and a pair of Pecheneg squad-level machine guns. The assault rifles were using scopes the computer had not encountered before. The scopes employed what appeared to be short-range radar as well as the standard infrared. Danny guessed this was some sort of training device; he couldn’t puzzle out any other use for the radar.

Finding out about the gear would be a side benefit from the raid.

“They’re going to take that building there,” said Flash, pointing to the screen as the team split into two groups.

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “That small a force — would you split up like that?”

“Maybe. Three guys is an army, if you got the right three guys.”

But they didn’t circle the area. The groups headed to two different buildings, about a hundred meters apart. They didn’t assault them, though they were careful about getting inside.

The building on the right exploded, gray smoke blossoming on the screen.

The other building followed.

“Look,” said Danny.

A small helicopter materialized from the cloud of smoke that had consumed the first building. It looked like a stripped down Ka–126, a vintage 1960s helicopter still used in Russia for crop dusting and other utility tasks. It had two counterrotating propellers overhead, which allowed it to fly with a double tail rather than a powered rotor. The helo was little more than a metal frame strapped beneath the engine. The bulkhead for the cockpit held two seats forward and a double bench behind. There were six places in total on the benches.

A similar helicopter flew out of the roof of the second cottage. They headed north to a cluster of ruins. The team members jumped from the helo, humping toward a low mound next to a half-buried foundation. Two of them knelt down. It looked to Danny as if they were going to pray. Instead, they lifted part of the ground, revealing a dugout with a pair of SUVs hidden below.

“We didn’t see that,” said Flash. “The radar couldn’t see through the roof. The building looked empty.”

The cottages that had “exploded” were still intact — the roofs had simply opened as smoke grenades went off. The material on the roof was somehow able to deflect the penetrating radar, without revealing that it was doing so.

Not technically impossible, but not easy either.

“We didn’t see it at all,” repeated Flash.

“Yeah,” said Danny. “The question is, what else aren’t we seeing?”

37

The CIA officer in charge at Chisinau was Malcolm Gleeb, an old Eastern European hand who had served with the Agency since the Reagan administration. Gleeb greeted Nuri warily. He’d already done considerable legwork, working contacts in the military and national police force as well as contacting the interior minister. But Reid had been purposely vague on details of the operation, and Nuri could tell as soon as he met Gleeb that he was annoyed. Station chiefs could be very territorial, and anyone running an operation within what they perceived to be their domain had to tread gently.

Treading gently wasn’t Nuri’s forte.

“We have an appointment with the interior minister at nine,” Gleeb told Nuri when he picked him up outside the capital’s fanciest business hotel. “He doesn’t know what’s up, but obviously he knows it’s important.”

“The appointment isn’t supposed to be until tomorrow night,” said Nuri. “We don’t want word to get out.”

“The minister is leaving on vacation in the morning,” said Gleeb. “Unless you want to go with him, this is the best we can do. His deputies are not dependable.”

Nuri, who didn’t want to deal with the Moldovans in the first place, folded his arms in front of his chest and said nothing.

“You didn’t check into the hotel, did you?” asked Gleeb.

“No. Why?”

“You have a room?”

“I just got here.”

“I thought so.”

Nuri tightened his arms. He felt as if he was being interrogated. This was his operation, and Gleeb had better ratchet down or he was going to take the guy’s head off, gray hairs and all.

“I suspect you’d like a shower,” said Gleeb. “And a chance to straighten up your clothes. We have enough time. Just.”

“I’m a little hungry, actually.”

“We’ll eat after. If you need a sandwich or something, I’ll find you something at my flat.”

Nuri realized he looked a little rumpled and very possibly did need a shower — the water pressure had been a joke at the motel. Gleeb took him to his residence. The shower was tiny, but the hot water was strong. While he was showering, Gleeb found him a sport coat that came close to fitting.

“Space has been secured on a military base in the northeast, if it’s necessary,” Gleeb told Nuri after he dressed. “My contacts in the state police will cooperate, if there is authorization to do so. It’s up to the minister.”

“Uh-huh.” Nuri adjusted his shirt collar in the small mirror on the bathroom door.

“You don’t really want the Moldovans to help, do you?”

The comment took Nuri by surprise. “Why do you say that?”

“I’d be a very poor agent if I couldn’t tell how unenthusiastic about this you were,” said Gleeb.

“No, I don’t.”

“How long have you been with the Company?”

“Couple of years,” said Nuri.

“You’ll learn. Politics is everything. At every level. Shall we go?”

Nuri resented the I’m-an-old-hand-and-you’ll-learn tone, but there was no question that Gleeb was acting professionally otherwise. Nuri tried to restart the relationship in the car on the way to the minister’s, asking how long Gleeb had been with the CIA. It was a subtle nod toward the older man, without pretending to fawn, which Nuri couldn’t have stomached and Gleeb certainly would have scoffed at.

“I’ve worked with the Company longer than I can recall,” said Gleeb. “I’ve been just about everywhere in Europe. My first assignment was in Moscow. I never looked back.”

He’d become a field agent just before the end of the Cold War, when human intelligence assets — spies — were still the most valued commodity in the business. Gleeb regaled him with stories as they drove, telling of elaborate dinner parties where he and KGB agents vied over contacts and beautiful women.

Mostly the latter, Gleeb confessed.

Nuri had heard these sorts of stories before, but Gleeb’s had just enough of a self-depreciating spin for Nuri to be interested, or at least not bored by them. Gleeb abruptly brought the subject back to the present as they neared the minister’s residence.

“He will be suspicious, but that’s to be expected. I’ve told him you’re working with the UN. I doubt he actually believes that, but he won’t question it.”

“That’s a convenient attitude.”

“Very. Lay out what you need and ask for his cooperation. Let him think it’s up to him.”

The tone grated again. Gleeb was stating the obvious.

“It is up to him,” said Nuri.

Gleeb gave him the most fleeting of smiles.

Nuri guessed, belatedly, that the minister was on the Agency payroll. It would certainly be a subtle arrangement, money coming from some sort of grant to his department or maybe a pseudojob for a family member, but it would be leverage nonetheless.

The arrangement was a mixed blessing as far as Nuri was concerned. While it undoubtedly would make the minister somewhat more compliant, it also meant that he could be bought. Whether the U.S. was the only buyer was an open question.

The minister’s residence overlooked an old castle about a mile outside the capital limits. The castle looked like something out of Frankenstein, dark and ominous, high on a hill.

“That’s their old family estate,” said Gleeb. “They used to own just about everything you see here.”

“What happened?”

“Communists came in. Not that they would have necessarily kept it anyway. The family fortune was ebbing by the end of the nineteenth century anyway. They went through some harder times, until World War Two. His great-grandfather was a hero of the resistance, and apparently he personally saved some relative of Stalin. Or took the credit for doing so.”

Gleeb made a clicking sound with his mouth; he was wearing dentures, and not particularly well-fitting ones at that.

“That’s the minister’s house on the left,” said the CIA station chief as he took a turn just beyond the castle. “A little different, huh?”

The house was a set of modernistic boxes set into the hillside. Gleeb told him it had been built by a famous European architect for more than three million euros — an enormous sum in Moldova.

No wonder he’s taking money from the CIA, Nuri thought.

A maid met them at the door. A pair of bodyguards stood at the side of the foyer, watching them carefully as they came in. Nuri nodded in their direction without receiving a response.

“The minister is waiting for you in the library,” said the maid in English. “Please.”

The library was a small room to the right of the entry. Two more bodyguards, arms down at their sides, waited near the door. The minister was working at a small desk next to a large bookcase that filled one entire wall of the room. The bookcase, constructed of thick, worn wood, seemed out of place; Nuri wondered if it had been scavenged from the castle.

“Mr. Gleeb, very nice,” said the minister. “I will be with you presently.”

“The minister spent time in London as ambassador for the last government,” Gleeb told Nuri. “He speaks the King’s English. It’s certainly better than mine.”

“Ah, when my guests flatter me, it is time to find them a drink,” said the minister, putting down his pen.

He rose and wagged his finger at the guards, who promptly disappeared.

“Our sherry is passably pleasant,” said the minister, going over to a sideboard. Like the other furniture in the house, it was a sleek, modern affair, made of chrome and lightly colored wood.

“That is to put you off your guard for some of the finest sherry in Europe,” Gleeb told Nuri. “He likes to lower expectations.”

Nuri was not much of a judge of sherry. He raised his own glass as Gleeb and his host saluted each other, then took a small sip.

“So you are Mr. Lupo,” said the minister, turning to him. “An alias, I suppose?”

“Actually, it’s my real name,” said Nuri. “I don’t use an alias.”

The minister smirked, then took another sip of the sherry.

“Good, yes?” he asked.

“Very good,” said Nuri.

“So — you have traced the European drug problem to my country,” said the minister. “And now you are going to solve it on the backs of my police?”

“We actually have considerable resources on our own,” said Nuri. “If you don’t want to, uh—”

He saw Gleeb shake his head slightly and stopped in mid-sentence.

“The UN has many resources,” said the station chief, taking over. “But naturally they don’t have the intimate knowledge of Moldova that your forces do. Your people are highly trained, and any assistance that you can render would certainly be useful.”

“Hmmm,” said the minister. “And when would this assistance be needed?”

“Ideally in the next few days,” said Gleeb.

Nuri didn’t say anything. It would be better to have “permission” first. Then he would spring the date on the minister, hoping it would be too soon for any real involvement.

“You’ve already spoken to some of my underlings, Mr. Gleeb?”

Nuri couldn’t tell whether it was a question or a statement. Gleeb handled it smoothly, saying that he had “investigated the circumstances of the situation” before wasting the minister’s time.

Some cooperation might be arranged within the next month or two, said the minister, providing certain contingencies were met.

“I’m afraid the matter is much more imminent than that,” said Gleeb.

“How imminent?” asked the minister, refilling his wine.

Gleeb looked at Nuri.

“Tomorrow night,” said Nuri.

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ve found that any sort of delay, once we have an operation located, can be very detrimental,” Nuri explained. “So we’d like to move very quickly. We’d have to.”

“That might be a problem,” said the minister.

“We’re prepared to proceed.”

“They would naturally move only with aid from the government,” said Gleeb. “But they would not need a great deal of assistance.”

“I don’t know what sort of aid would be available on such short notice,” said the minister. “And it might entail expense — if we are talking about a large operation.”

“Reasonable expenses would have to be compensated,” agreed Gleeb.

A few minutes of negotiation followed. Neither man named a price; they spoke instead of things like manpower and vehicles.

“We really don’t need a lot of policemen,” said Nuri.

Gleeb shot him a glance, then turned back to negotiating. The old guy was good, gently pushing back without losing his good humor or angering the minister.

Nuri wondered if he could use Gleeb when he bought his next car.

They finally settled on three dozen men and two SWAT teams, with a pair of Hummer-style jeeps outfitted with machine guns. The minister agreed that the men would not be notified of the actual raid until the following evening, as a matter of security.

“And where is this adventure taking place?” he asked, once more refilling his glass.

Gleeb looked at Nuri.

“Outside the capital,” he said.

“Where outside the capital?” the minister asked.

“In the northeast. I mean, northwest.”

It was an honest slip, but it annoyed the minister. Gleeb had to step in and calm things, claiming that Nuri did not yet have the exact location himself. “And being a stranger to Moldova, I’m sure the name would mean nothing to him if he did,” he added.

“It is in the north,” said Nuri. “I just don’t know where exactly. As Mr. Gleeb said—”

“You will call me tomorrow morning.” The minister spoke to Gleeb, not Nuri. “You will have an exact location then. You will call me and we will have some men to work with you. An action like this must have some local involvement. They will not be in too much danger, I hope.”

“I will call you, yes,” said Nuri.

“You should have given him the name of a city in the district,” said Gleeb after they left. “You never want to make it obvious that you don’t trust someone. It’s disrespectful. You nearly scuttled the whole deal.”

“I don’t need any of those troops.”

“You’re not getting them,” said Gleeb. “You’ll be lucky to get a few police cars.”

“Not lucky—”

“You’re in a foreign country. You don’t know everything. You need cooperation.”

“Well—”

“Believe me, you do.”

Gleeb took him to dinner in a French restaurant, reputedly one of the best in Eastern Europe. The food was good, but Nuri had no appetite for it. The station chief gave him background about the drug trade in Moldova, outlining its connections to the government. At the moment it was one of the few export businesses thriving in the country.

“The forces he mentioned,” said Nuri after their plates were cleared.

“That was the price only,” said Gleeb. “Their equivalent salaries. You don’t have to worry about any of that. The actual cooperation will be arranged with one of his deputies.”

“The less cooperation the better,” said Nuri.

“Now, Mr. Lupo, you’re starting to sound like you know something,” said Gleeb, smiling and signaling for the check.

38

Turk’s foul mood didn’t lift even after General Wallace and some of his aides met him on the way back to the hangar and congratulated him on a great flight.

“The episode at the end demonstrated just how capable the plane is,” said Wallace. “And the pilot.”

“Thanks,” managed Turk.

“Future of the Air Force — manned flight,” said Wallace, emphasizing the last phrase. “Well done. Carry on.”

“Thank you, sir.” Turk didn’t point out that the phrase “manned flight” was actually a slogan from the space program, which wasn’t faring too well these days.

Three of the engineers responsible for the Sabre control systems, faces ashen, met Turk for the debrief. They looked like a trio of ghosts haunting an air wreck. They had already figured out the problem, they said — an errant line of code had prevented the proper routine from loading.

“You told me it was already fixed,” Turk said. “Isn’t this the problem from the other day?”

“This kept the right solution from loading,” one of the men explained. “We fixed it and had to fix it again.”

“It should have been tested.”

“It was tested. You were part of the tests.”

I pushed the buttons you told me to push, thought Turk, but it was useless to argue.

Breanna Stockard caught up to him and Tommy Stern a few hours later at Hole 19, one of the all-ranks lounges on the main Dreamland base. Turk, sipping a seltzer, was standing at the bar talking to a nurse whose curly brunette hair hung down over her eyes in what seemed to him the cutest way imaginable. He bought her a drink, then started talking about his Ducati motorcycle, hoping to set up a date to take her for a ride.

Stern, who was married, stood by quietly, occasionally rolling his eyes.

“Captain, there you are,” said Breanna, striding across the room toward the bar. “Do you have a minute?”

“Sure,” said Turk, though in truth he would have preferred the interruption to come a little later.

“I have to be going,” said the brunette.

“Hey, hang out a minute,” said Turk. He reached for her hand but she pulled it away.

“Sorry. Lot of stuff to do.”

Turk watched her walk away. It was definitely his loss.

Stern made his apologies as well, which was clearly fine with Breanna. They took a table in the corner.

“I saw what you did on the landing,” she told him, pulling out her chair. “It was very good piloting.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“And you’re modest,” she said sarcastically.

“Some days.” Turk took a long sip of his seltzer.

“No more Sabre flights until the entire low-altitude protocol is rewritten and retested,” said Breanna. “I’ve already given the order.”

“That’s overkill. There’s nothing wrong with the plane.”

“I’m not talking about the Tigershark. I meant the Sabres and Medusa.”

“Well…” Turk suddenly felt protective of the UM/Fs, though he couldn’t for the life of him have explained why. And in fact he’d made more or less the same argument to the engineers earlier. But there was something about having a system that he was working with grounded that put him on the defensive. “I guess.”

“When are you leaving for Prague?”

“Couple of hours.” He held up the seltzer.

Sobriety was actually a nonissue in the Tigershark, because the aircraft’s flight computer put the pilot through a series of mental tests before it would unlock its systems. Supposedly, the test could figure out if you were overtired as well as inhibited by drugs or alcohol. Turk, close to a teetotaler anyway, had never tested it.

“Plane’s ready?”

“All ready.”

Turk was taking Tiger Two. The rail gun had been removed for security purposes; unlike the plane, its existence was still top secret. It also did not have a Medusa unit.

“I’m going with you,” said Breanna.

“In the Tigershark?”

She gave him a funny look. “Of course not. I’m going in the C–20.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s in that seltzer?”

She meant it as a joke, clearly, but Turk felt embarrassed.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said.

“My family’s going to be there. And I thought I would take a look at what’s new. Supposedly the Russian PAK-FA will be there. It might be good to take a look.”

“At 1980s technology, sure,” sneered Turk.

“I wouldn’t underestimate what the Russians and Indians can do if they work closely together,” said Breanna. “Anyway, if we can get together before the show, I’d like to get your thoughts on the plane’s potential and where we can go from here.”

“Is Zen going to be there?” Turk asked.

“Yes.”

“You know, I’d love to, uh, go like to dinner or something with you guys. If I could, um, you know, kinda hangout.”

“Sure.” Breanna rose. She hadn’t touched her beer, Turk noticed.

“The Defense secretary has arranged for me to talk to some of the NATO representatives in the morning on the future of manned flight,” she added. “There’ll be a panel discussion afterward. I thought you’d be a good person to sit on it.”

“Me?”

“You don’t think you’re qualified?”

“Well, yeah.”

“A sudden lack of confidence. That’s refreshing.” Breanna smirked. “You want some advice, Captain?”

“Sure.”

“Fancy Italian motorcycles can definitely be a turn on, but talking about how close you can get your knee to the ground going around a curve — not so much.”

39

The Wolf assault team went through the entire sequence twice more, starting with the mock attack inside the steel building and ending with the SUVs. Danny got the impression that they were still at the walk-through stage; they stopped midway through the second time, rearranging how the teams ran to the cottages where the helos were kept.

The SUVs were interesting. They looked like full-sized trucks, but two people could pick them up with ease. Were the trucks extremely lightweight, like the helicopters? Or were the men ridiculously strong?

The exercise concluded at two in the morning. After the choppers were returned to the cottages, the farm looked exactly as it had before sunset.

“You figure they’re going to sleep?” asked Flash.

“Debrief the session first,” said Danny. “While it’s still fresh. Then sleep.”

“Beers, then sleep,” said Flash. “How long — an hour?”

Danny stared at the screen. He wanted to strike during the dark, minimizing the possibility that his attack force would be seen on the way in. Should he hit the force during the exercise or afterward?

Afterward was his preference. Not only would they be tired, but he could pump gas into the building first, increasing the odds of getting them without a fight. His orders called for him to “use nonlethal means of apprehension” if at all possible.

Danny had wide discretion on that. No one was going to complain if everyone in the house ended up dead, especially now that they’d seen their rehearsal.

And if Stoner was there?

They watched the group gather in one of the rooms on the first floor, going back over the exercise as Danny had predicted. A half hour later all but two were in rooms upstairs, apparently sleeping.

Danny wanted to get Stoner out alive, if he was there.

“You keep looking at the images, like you might recognize him,” said Flash.

“Yeah.”

“I thought you thought it was bull.”

“I do. Mostly.”

Flash nodded.

“Tomorrow, we wait an hour after they pack it in, when they’re sleeping like now,” said Danny, as if Flash had asked him what the plan was. “Pump the house full of the gas, hit them quick. First sign of resistance, we flatten them.”

“No argument from me,” said Flash.

40

Getting around without the use of your legs was never exactly fun, but being disabled and flying a commercial airline flight could be a special trial. Most of the major carriers had special wheelchairs designed to fit down narrow plane aisles; the chairs could then be folded away in the cabin storage areas. But that still left you beholden to the stewardess when you had to use the john.

The bathrooms were their own special hell, though at least Zen wasn’t claustrophobic. He also had the money to fly first class, and was a U.S. senator.

Having a cute kid and a good-looking coed in tow didn’t hurt either.

“Senator Stockard, nice to have you aboard,” said the steward, who met him in the jetway to the plane. “And is this lovely lady Teri Stockard?”

“Yes, I am,” said Teri.

“Excited about flying?” asked the attendant.

“I like to fly,” she told him. “My mom lets me take the controls.”

Zen smiled. Breanna occasionally rented a twin-engine Cessna.

“You’re Caroline,” said the steward to Zen’s niece.

Caroline nodded. She tended to be a little shy around strangers. Zen thought she had no reason to be — she was smart and attractive, not unlike her aunt Breanna.

“Major Stockard.” The pilot practically jumped out from behind the door, hand out, looking to shake. “You don’t remember me, I’ll bet, but I was driving MC–17s back when you were with Dreamland. We were on a deployment with Whiplash. Great to have you aboard, sir.”

“Long time ago,” said Zen, who didn’t remember the pilot. He’d left Dreamland as a lieutenant colonel, so the rank narrowed down the time frame a bit, just not enough to help. “How have you been?”

“Great, great. How’s the political life treating you?”

“Can’t complain. I have a lot of bosses. Meet one of them.” He held his hand out to his daughter. “Teri, this our captain.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The pilot bent down and shook her hand, then looked at Caroline. “This can’t be your wife.”

Caroline blushed.

“My niece Caroline,” said Zen.

Two of the other flight attendants came out and helped Zen and the girls get squared away. The rest of the passengers flooded in, most looking a bit harried and anxious to get going.

Cockpit door closed, the aircraft pushed back from the gate, then slowly began trundling toward the runway.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m glad to have you aboard with us this evening for our flight to Prague,” said the pilot, introducing himself and the crew. “Bob and Lisa will be reviewing some of our emergency procedures with the help of a short video in just a second. Before we get to that, though, I wanted to let you know that we’re flying today with a former member of the U.S. military who has been decorated for bravery under fire more times than most of us breathe. He’s now a member of the U.S. Senate. I knew him as Major Zen Stockard; you might just call him Senator. I’d like to salute him and thank him for his service to our country.”

The passengers broke into spontaneous applause.

Zen glanced down at his daughter. His eyes were starting to swell with tears.

“Something wrong, Daddy?” asked Teri.

“Nothing wrong, baby. Now make sure your seat belt’s tight, right? Pilot can’t take off without it good and snug.”

41

Nuri’s suspicions about the minister proved to be correct — within a few minutes of the CIA officer’s visit, the NSA intercepted two calls from the minister to people who lived in the northeastern corner of the country. The phone calls were short and to the point: the minister said he was taking a vacation for a few days, and they should, too.

Nuri guessed that they took his advice. He wasn’t particularly concerned with the details, however, since neither man owned property anywhere near the Wolves’ farm.

He called the minister’s cell phone the next morning at exactly eight o’clock and told him that the farm was near Drochia, the capital of the province of the same name. This was fairly vague as well as incorrect, but it satisfied the minister.

“One of my deputies will call you within the hour,” he told Nuri. “In the meantime, if you need further arrangements, please let me know.”

The minister’s tone suggested that it would be very much all right with him if they never spoke again. Which was fine with Nuri as well.

The deputy, Johann Lacu, called within the hour. He spoke English fairly well and had a clipped, professional style Nuri liked.

The deputy asked how many men he needed; Nuri told him no more than six.

“Six is a very small number,” replied Lacu. “These criminals may be very desperate.”

“Six is all we need,” Nuri told him. “We can even do with less.”

“You will need cars to take them away in.”

Ambulances more likely, thought Nuri.

“We already have transportation arranged,” he said. “The operation really is under control.”

“That is very good,” said Lacu. “We will assist in any way possible.”

They arranged to meet at 11:00 P.M. at a small church in a village two kilometers north of Drochia. Nuri would brief them, then find some excuse to keep them occupied for a few hours until the raid was complete. At that point they would drive to the farm, which was roughly a half hour away. Gleeb, meanwhile, would stay in the capital to cover any further contingencies with the military or the interior ministry.

Not knowing what to expect and not having anything else to do in Chisinau, Nuri left the capital shortly after noon. He arrived at the town just after sunset.

The place looked quiet enough, a typical Eastern European town down on its luck. The church overlooked a small cemetery and an even smaller park with a monument to soldiers who had died in the Great Patriotic War — the Second World War, as the West remembered it.

The town was so small it didn’t have a restaurant. Nuri drove until he came to another village about four kilometers away. The main and only intersection in town featured a café. He parked in a lot around the corner.

The restaurant was empty, and the middle-aged hostess nearly jumped as he came in the door.

“Good evening,” she said in Moldovan.

Nuri answered in Moldovan, but his accent drove her to English. She told him he was very welcome and showed him to what she called the best table in the house. This was not coincidentally in the front window, where she undoubtedly hoped his presence would attract other customers. She gave him a menu and asked if he would like an aperitif.

“Just water,” he said.

She returned with a tray of homemade cordials, each brightly colored and most with some sort of fruit in the bottle.

“No, that’s all right,” said Nuri.

“For free, for free,” she insisted.

Deciding that courtesy called for a small drink, he had a glass of what looked like the least exotic concoction, an orange-tinted syrup that he hoped would taste something like Grand Marnier, or maybe cough syrup.

It was more like liquid fire. Jelled liquid fire. Like napalm, it clung to his throat.

“Good?” asked the woman.

“Oh yeah. Good,” managed Nuri. “Can I have some water?”

She came back with the menu as well. It offered food in three languages — Moldovan, English, and Russian.

“Do you get a lot of Russians in here?” he asked the hostess after he ordered a small steak.

“Russian?” The woman made a face and said something Moldovan that was too low for the computer to pick up but was clearly not a compliment.

“The Russians cause problems?” Nuri asked.

“You are Russian?”

“No, no. American.”

“I thought,” said the woman. She nodded approvingly and began talking. She didn’t like Russians. She told him that they were dirty pigs and often didn’t pay their bills. The café got a few every few months, big lugs who smelled like sweaty cows.

“Four yesterday, for lunch,” she said. “Enough for a year.”

“Are they tourists?”

She made another face.

“You have a lot of tourists?” Nuri asked.

“Tourists? Here? We have one place to stay. A small place. And this restaurant. What tourists would come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“There are no other restaurants or hotels — that is why people stop here. The countryside, maybe. They see, they like. Every so often, though — Russians.”

“Why? They looking for a bargain?”

She shrugged.

“They say they train for Olympics,” she told him. “Bicyclists.”

“Bicyclists?” Nuri wasn’t sure he heard the word right.

The hostess frowned and waved her hand. “I know what bicyclists look like. Skinny. These are always big. American football. Bicyclists? Ha!”

She walked off, shaking her head.

Nuri remembered the woman’s complaints an hour later, after dinner, when he left the restaurant and heard Russian being spoken behind him. He walked another step, then stopped, looking both ways as if trying to see if it was safe to cross the street.

Two men were entering the café. They were the only other people out.

He thought about them as he walked back to his car. The Russian mafiya was involved in many of the marijuana operations in Moldova, and while this wasn’t a big area for pot cultivation, he had firsthand proof that it wasn’t entirely bereft of it either.

Would the Wolves stop here on their way to the farm? If you didn’t want everyone descending in one swoop, maybe. It was right on the road.

More likely not, he decided. But he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. He walked back, glancing into the restaurant from the other side of the street. The men were seated toward the back of the room, barely visible through the large window. Clearly, the hostess didn’t see their presence as helping business much.

Nuri thought of going in and leaving a bug — he had several in his bag in the car. But it was likely the woman would greet him in a way that made it obvious he’d decided to come back. Even if he came up with a plausible excuse, he might make the Russians suspicious.

He changed direction and headed back toward his car. Just as he was about to cross over, he saw the sign for the hotel the hostess had mentioned. It was more house than hotel, a small, late nineteenth-century residence divided into guest rooms.

Nuri got his bag out of the car and went to the hotel. The clerk at the desk was also the owner, a rotund but friendly woman in her fifties, who smiled when Nuri told her the owner of the café had recommended he stay there.

“I’m a little tired and just need the night,” he said in Moldovan, with MY-PID’s help. “You have rooms?”

They had four. Three were open.

“Maybe my friend is in the other?” he asked, switching to English.

The sign outside had indicated that English was spoken, but the woman didn’t know much beyond “hello” and “credit card.” Nuri was counting on this — he started describing his friend in great detail.

The woman held up her hands and told him in Moldovan that she didn’t understand.

“My friend, my friend,” he said. “A businessman — he came from this town.”

“We have two guests,” she said. “Russian. In Room 4. They’re foul-smelling oafs, but money is money.”

“Money, yes,” said Nuri, pretending that he hadn’t understood entirely. “You have my credit card.”

“Everything good.”

“Great,” he said. “Where is my room?”

Nuri’s room was directly across from the Russians’. He put his bag down in it, then went across the hall and knocked on their door, just to make sure no one was there.

When no one answered, he played a hunch, fitting his room key into theirs. The door opened without his even needing to jiggle it.

He slipped a bug into the light fixture, then decided that was too obvious. He found a better spot in the baseboard heater, and left another in the bathroom beneath the sink.

Could he do more?

He looked around the room. The men had each brought a small overnight bag containing only a change of clothes and a couple of bottles of vodka. There was no laptop to inspect, no papers to rifle through. He had a tracking bug, but he thought it would be conspicuous inside either piece of luggage, given that there were no interior pockets or other crevices where it could be easily hidden.

Back in his room, he tossed his bag out the window into the yard so it wouldn’t be obvious he was leaving for good. That turned out to be unnecessary — the proprietor had gone into her own apartment to watch television when he came down, and didn’t even see him leave.

As he walked around to get his bag, he noticed a small parking lot at the back of the house. He scooped up his bag and walked over to the two cars in the lot — a ten-year-old Toyota, and a new Hyundai.

Which one belonged to the Russian?

The Hyundai surely, he decided, but with two trackers in his pocket, he bugged both, slipping the devices over the cars’ gas tanks.

Nuri drove around the countryside for over an hour, partly to kill time and partly to get a feel for the area. The gentle hills and abundant streams made for excellent small-scale farming, but small-scale farming couldn’t compete with the much larger operation elsewhere in Europe, let alone the rest of the world.

On the one hand, the Moldovans had an almost idyllic setting and lifestyle; on the other hand, they were poor, at least by Western standards. He had seen incredible poverty in Africa, and no place in Europe would ever match that. But he couldn’t help feeling somewhat sympathetic to this country, which seemed better suited for the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.

His job wasn’t to be sympathetic. He was just starting to head for the meeting with the police when MY-PID reported that the Russians had returned to their rented room. Listening to them was better than the radio, and so he had the computer translate for him as he drove.

The beginnings of the conversation were mundane — they criticized the food they’d just eaten and debated whether the hostess would have been worth taking to bed.

Then they broke out the vodka.

“We ought to just go out tonight,” said one. “Better to sleep there than in this flea trap.”

“And risk Black’s wrath? You’re a fool.”

“So what if he’s mad?”

“He killed Ivanski for less.”

“Ivanski was a fool.”

“A dead fool now.”

“Coming up in two and threes and fours — always cautious. He’s overcautious. A coward.”

“Call him a coward to his face. That I would like to see.” The Russian laughed. “You assume he will be there.”

“We’re to work with him.”

“I wasn’t told that. Were you?”

“No. But every time we come to this armpit, who do we work for?”

“I worked for the Frenchman once.”

“A good man to work for. Plenty to drink. Unlike Black.”

“It will be good to work again.”

“I’m ready. I would go tonight.”

“Going at seven is plenty of time for me. At least we will get a good night’s sleep.”

“Not a good breakfast, though.”

“The café will have a good breakfast. They’ll have strong coffee.”

“I feel like going back and screwing the woman.”

“She’s older than your grandmother, and not half as good looking.”

They traded insults, then fell silent, and soon were snoring.

Nuri was surprised to see a dozen police cars parked outside the church. Even more surprising, there were nearly fifty officers inside, all dressed in riot gear.

“You are the American!” said a thin, jolly man who met him near the door. He spoke English with more enthusiasm than polish. “You are very welcome.”

“Are you Johann Lacu?” said Nuri.

“No, no — there’s Johann.”

“Mr. Lupo — Mr. Lupo.” A tall, thin man with a goatee and moustache separated himself from the crowd. “Here I am.”

“There were only supposed to be six people,” said Nuri. “Less.”

“We need more for a raid,” said Lacu cheerfully. “These are dangerous people. I have more men on the way. And an armored car.”

Nuri rubbed his forehead, wondering how he was going to keep the crowd busy for the next several hours. They didn’t have all that far to go — the farm was under ten miles away — and he didn’t want to give away the location until Danny and the rest of the team was in place.

“We are happy to do something against the drugs,” added Lacu. “These are all honest policemen. Their reputations are solid. People say we do not do anything — but what can they do when the people above them are corrupt?”

“I understand,” said Nuri.

“Where will be our target?”

“There are several possible targets,” said Nuri, making it up as he went. “Four or five homes where they move around between. We’ll figure out which one it is, then you and your people will help surround it.”

“If I saw the plans, I could help.”

Nuri fended him off with assurances that the NATO team — he didn’t use the word Whiplash, of course — had everything under control. The Moldovans were only needed to secure the perimeter, and then take the prisoners. The deputy minister suggested that he should be with the team that made the arrests. Nuri agreed, an easy if empty promise.

The deputy minister began introducing Nuri, showing off not just the men but the equipment they carried. They had an assortment of AK–47 models that would have done a museum proud, along with more pistol types than men. They even had a dozen Russian F1 hand grenades that had to be at least forty years old.

“Good weapon,” said the policeman in charge of them. “Thirty meters, killing radius. Thirty meters. These fuses — four seconds.”

He mimed throwing it.

“Four seconds,” said the policeman. “One… two… three… ka-boom!”

Nuri, willing to do anything to kill time, repeated the ritual himself.

“How far can you run in four seconds?” he asked when he was done.

“Very far, with grenade about to go off.”

Nuri couldn’t argue with that.

A sudden commotion outside announced the arrival of an armored car. Nuri went out with the others to inspect it. He looked at it in great detail, admiring the gun at the top and taking a turn sitting in the driver’s seat.

“A handsome weapon, eh?” said Lacu as he climbed out.

“Very handsome,” said Nuri.

“We will use it on you if this turns out to be a wild goose chase,” added the deputy minister.

Nuri smiled. He thought Lacu was joking, but couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

42

At exactly ten minutes after eleven Danny Freah turned off the highway about five miles from the Ukrainian border, pulling down a dirt road to a field he had scouted earlier that afternoon. He got out of the car and checked his watch, then walked up the road about two hundred meters. A broad field lay to his left. Owned by a family who lived on the other side of town some seven kilometers away, the farm had lain fallow for several years.

At eleven-fifteen the sky began filling with clouds. The moon played peekaboo with them for a few minutes, then completely disappeared.

At eleven-twenty a small red light flashed twice from the middle of the cloud bank.

Danny raised his arm and flashed his wrist light in response. A voice crackled over the ear set he was wearing.

“Whiplash Transport to Ground. Please confirm your identity.”

“This is Whiplash One. How do you read me?”

“Whiplash One acknowledged. Strong coms.”

“Bring it in,” said Danny.

The clouds began to descend. Only when they were within a few feet of the ground did it become obvious they weren’t clouds but an array of airships, camouflaged by a combination of LEDs and vapor generators, which poured mist from faceted baffles and outriggers. The baffles were arranged to reduce their radar signal during flight, when the mist wasn’t being used, making them harder to pick up from a distance.

The first dirigible glided down to a landing thirty meters from Danny. Two more touched down directly behind it.

The cargo compartment was a combination of angles and curves; the leading edge looked somewhat similar to the lip of the SR–71 Blackbird, though this aircraft was as slow as that one was fast. The lip dropped down and a four-wheel-drive pickup lurched out, moving silently on an all-electric motor.

“Hey, Colonel,” yelled Boston, leaning out of the driver’s window. “Want to drag?”

“Only if I’m in one of the Rattlesnakes.”

“Maybe you can hang from the skids,” said Boston. “No room for you inside.”

He wasn’t kidding — the fuselage of the remote controlled helicopter was no bigger than Danny’s desk at his old command. Two of them, with winglet and rotors folded up, were in the back of the pickup.

He watched as Boston parked the truck and checked the rest of the team. The six pickup trucks they’d brought looked like oversized four-door civilian Chrysler Rams. And in fact they had started life as Ram 1500s.

Then subcontractors for the Office of Technology had gone to work. The trucks were outfitted with dual engines — turbocharged big block gasoline engines for fast travel, and heavy-duty electric motors for quiet travel. Screens were installed on the dashboards to interface with MY-PID. The metal skin and windows were doubled and reinforced, and an exterior wall of reactive armor added. This outer skin was designed to explode rocket-propelled grenades before their charges could penetrate; it augmented a “kill first” detection system mounted beneath what looked like a cargo carrier on the truck roofs.

“All present and accounted for, Colonel,” said Boston. “Ready any time you are.”

Danny signaled to the blimps to take off. They were guided by computer; there were no human pilots aboard. A duty officer back in the Ukraine watched over them as they flew. He would step in only if necessary.

“We’re going to stage out of this old barnyard,” Danny told Boston, showing him the GPS coordinates. “It’s two klicks from the target area. We’ve got Predators watching overhead, but be careful anyway. These guys are full of surprises.”

Flash was sitting in the car, watching the video feeds when Danny drove in. There was activity at the Black Wolves’ farm — a lot of it.

“Two trucks came in about a half hour ago. Four more guys total,” said Flash. “Two went into the building and moved things around. The other two put up some new defenses outside.”

“They expecting us?” Danny asked.

“That’s what I thought when I first saw them, but everything’s back here by the house. I think they made their exercise more specific.”

“You have the computer compare it to Kiev?”

“Figured I’d wait until they were done.”

“Right. So have they started yet?”

“No, sir.”

That was bad. The later they started, the later they could move. Keeping a strike force sitting around for several hours doing nothing was always problematic. But Danny knew he had no other choice.

“Let’s see if they’re any good,” he told Flash, pointing to the screen.

They didn’t have long to wait. Tonight there were eight Wolves involved in the exercise, six on the assault team and two inside the building, posing as targets.

The assault group moved more quickly than they had the night before. Four members moved up the road to the large building and slipped inside. The others took posts covering the approach. The infrared sensors on the Predator caught small explosions inside the building — flash-bang grenades, probably, though the thermal signatures were not big enough to see.

“Time them,” Danny told Flash.

“Yeah. On it.”

Flash tapped a set of keys that began keeping track of the elapsed time. Exactly two minutes and fifty-three seconds after he had flicked it on, a grenade flashed near the door. The two men on the outside began shooting into the woods.

Guns began firing back.

Flash zoomed to the spots where the guns were firing from. There was no one there; only weapons.

“Gotta be remote controlled,” said Danny. “Part of the exercise.”

“Yeah. But they were hidden so well we didn’t see them, not even with the ground radar.”

“They’re good. No doubt about that.”

The team came out of the building, moving at close to a dead run. Two men with them, bound and gagged — hostages.

“Only two?” said Flash.

“Two’s a lot for six guys to handle,” said Danny. “I’m surprised they’re taking any.”

Boston joined them, watching as the Wolves worked their way to the cottage and different gun emplacements opened up. Once more they got onto the skeleton helicopters and flew across the compound.

“These are the guys we’re hitting?” Boston asked Danny.

“Yeah.”

“They got a lot of gear.”

“Sure do.”

“At least they’ll be tired when we go in,” said Boston.

The Wolf team practiced their assault three more times. By the time they were done, Danny could have done it with his eyes closed.

They used live ammunition on the last trial. The bullets perforated the trees.

It was almost 3:00 A.M. by the time they packed up. Danny waited until they had been in the house for a half hour before giving the order to saddle up.

“Our turn now,” he told Boston. “Let’s take our shot.”

43

Nuri slouched in the front pew of the small church,pretending to be sleeping. The grumbling of the policemen around him had settled into a low background hum, the sort of sound a generator makes when some of its bearings are worn. Part of him hoped they would grow so bored and disillusioned they would simply go home. Another part of him feared they would decide to lynch him.

It could go either way.

He remembered a somewhat similar operation in Africa, when he’d been working with a local government against guerrillas who had taken to a particularly nasty form of piracy — the guerrillas would hijack buses on a deserted route, holding the passengers for ransom. To prove they meant business, they would kill the person they figured was the poorest, and send body parts to the local army barracks.

Grisly as it was, it was just business to them, and part of their costs included protection from sudden army or police raids. Every time the government threatened action against them, the cost of that protection went up — and so did the ransom amount, and eventually the number of kidnappings.

The CIA began working with the government when the daughter of a prominent Episcopalian bishop was among those kidnapped. An eavesdropping program quickly revealed that the local army general was getting kickbacks — something Nuri guessed the first day he’d been briefed on the assignment.

Still, the government insisted that the local army unit be notified when Nuri arranged a raid by SEALs to rescue the hostages. He had spent several uncomfortable hours in the African commander’s home, basically under house arrest, while the raid went forward.

In the end he got out alive by suggesting that the general could make more money on the CIA payroll than by working with the guerrillas. The general proved to be very handy with numbers, and they soon cut a deal. For all Nuri knew, he was still collecting a paycheck.

He nearly jumped to his feet as his sat phone rang.

“This is Nuri,” he said.

“We’re in place,” Danny told him. “Give us ten more minutes, then come along and secure a perimeter. Sign into the Whiplash circuit when you’re ready.”

“Thank God,” said Nuri, shutting off the phone.

44

The key to the operation was a device that looked a little like a lawn mower, assuming the motor was replaced by a large fan mounted horizontally and covered with black plastic grills. A pair of the devices was used to create a resonating magnetic force that matched the field surrounding the farm. Placed side by side, they created a corridor approximately six meters wide for the Whiplash team to slip through without being detected.

Once past the perimeter, they moved stealthily through the woods. While there were video cameras hidden in the trees, MY-PID had calculated a safe albeit twisted path to the fields beyond. The pattern looked like a series of drunken vees. The team had to snake through the thickest foliage single file on their bellies before finally reaching a dried out stream bed where it was easier to move.

All in all it took more than a half hour to clear the wooded area. At that point the team split into two groups. One, led by Boston, began circling to the east to cover the front half of the house and property. The second, led by Danny, continued in from the south. Danny’s group would do the actual assault.

The Predator with ground-penetrating radar provided a good view of the interior layout of the house. There were three floors above ground level, not counting the crawl-space attic. The top floor was divided into two large rooms with chairs; both appeared to be empty. The second floor looked something like a dormitory area, with small rooms boxed off on either side of a long hallway. There were staircases on each end. A total of four common bathrooms with four showers apiece were located between the rooms. All but two of the twelve people inside were sleeping in the dorm rooms, one to a room.

The other two people were in what looked like a small control room at the back of the house, directly above the basement door the Black Wolves had used to get in and out of the building. They were sitting next to each other at a pair of desks arranged in an el shape against the walls. There were no windows in the room, and the door was closed.

The basement, which appeared unoccupied, was divided into a small classroom where the debriefing had been held the night before, a workout room, and what appeared to be an armory. Besides the outside door, a single staircase ran down from above at the exact center of the building. There were no windows.

Even more important than giving Danny the location of the Wolves, the synthetic radar painted the mechanical layout of the house, showing him where the air-conditioning vents were. Most ran in the interior walls. One set, however, came through the attic where the air handlers were located.

That was the starting point for the assault on the house. After freezing a pair of motion detectors on the southwest corner of the house with blasts of liquid oxygen from a small tank — the sensors worked by detecting heat — the assault team moved next to the building. A former Delta trooper nicknamed Tiny and a Marine the team called Bean pulled special booties over their shoes and donned climbing gloves. Cautiously, they began moving up the clapboard siding. The gloves contained tiny, razor-sharp points that dug into the wood; they were surrounded by a supersticky rubberized material that made the gloves worn by NFL wide receivers look like ice packs. The booties, which were strapped tight around their shoes, were made of the same material. The two men were essentially human flies, scrambling upward.

The nickname “Bean” had been shortened from Stringbean, and it was an apt description of the Marine’s body. A quarter inch shy of six feet, he weighed 140—or at least claimed to; Boston joked that if he stood sideways he would fit through a sewer grate with no problem.

Tiny, on the other hand, looked like an artist’s conception of a typical Delta Force trooper, with a well-developed upper body that featured muscles coming out of his muscles. But the image was blown once he stood next to someone — Tiny really was tiny, and very much so, standing five-three and a half. How he managed to get into Delta, which Danny had always thought had a strict height requirement, was anyone’s guess.

The two men climbed directly to the roof, pausing to remove the gloves and booties. Bean then grabbed Tiny’s legs and lowered him from the peak, holding him as Tiny inspected the fasteners on the attic vent.

“Star driver,” whispered Tiny.

Bean pulled him back onto the roof. Tiny reached into his pant leg pocket and removed a small cordless driver, then found the star-shaped bit in the handle compartment. Bean once more grabbed his legs, and Tiny went back over to undo the vent.

The screws came out easily enough, but the vent wouldn’t pull away from the wood. The slow settling of the house over the years had pushed the roof joists apart slightly, levering the vent into the fascia. Tiny had to return to the roof for a standard screwdriver.

In the meantime, two of the people who had been sleeping on the second floor got up. Worried that the sound of prying the vent off might alert them, Danny ordered Tiny and Bean to stop and wait.

“It looks like a guard change,” Danny told them. “We’ll just wait it out.”

The two men inside took their time getting dressed; ten minutes passed before the first one went downstairs. When the next one finally went down five minutes later, Danny told Tiny to take a shot at getting the grill off while the men were on the first floor.

Tiny leaned back over the side. He levered the screwdriver in but found he had to use two hands to get the grill to budge. Suddenly it gave way. Tiny grabbed for it, but it fell to the ground with a loud clang.

Everyone froze.

Danny turned to Flash, who was looking at the radar feed on his laptop. He had the first floor.

“Nothing,” said Flash. “Looks like they’re talking. Maybe hard to hear from there.”

MY-PID, watching the feeds along with Flash, warned that someone was moving on the second floor.

“Freeze,” Danny told the men on the roof.

The man got up and looked out the window. He stared for a few minutes, then went back to bed. It was impossible to tell if he had heard anything or was merely restless.

“As quiet as you can,” said Danny. “Let’s move ahead.”

Bean lowered Tiny to the opening. He slipped in, slithering around the frame as he felt his way to the floor.

“I’m inside,” he whispered. “We need the gas.”

Bean handed down a clamp and a metal pole, which Tiny attached to the top of the frame. The pole had a small pulley at its end. Tiny set a stranded metal line through the pulley, attached a small weight, then let it fall to the ground. Sugar brought up a pair of large gas canisters and attached them to the line. Tiny quickly pulled them upward, while Sugar kept pressure on a lightweight line attached to the bottom of the tanks to keep them from swinging into the building.

Tiny had just hauled the tanks into the attic when the two guards who’d been relieved earlier finally left the room on the first floor. But instead of going to their rooms, they went up to the third floor.

“Right below you,” whispered Danny.

He watched on the screen as they sat on the couch. One of them took something from a nearby table — a remote control. They were watching TV.

Tiny was supposed to drill a hole into the metal ductwork to insert a hose for the gas. But even muffled, he worried that the sound would be enough to alert the men below. He crawled next to it, waiting to see if the men might fall off to sleep or leave the room. After a few minutes he realized that he might be able to loosen some of the screws on a nearby seam. He took out a pocketknife and went to work.

45

The enthusiasm the Moldovan police showed made Nuri feel a little guilty as he watched them fan out around the property. The large size of the contingent did have one advantage — it allowed them to completely ring the property. They set up roadblocks about a mile away from the driveway up to the main house, out of sight of the video cameras protecting the farm. They also moved quickly, quietly, and efficiently, splitting up so it would have been difficult for a casual observer to realize how many policemen had flooded into the area.

Lacu set up a command station off the side of the main road about two kilometers from the property. The spot was on a hill, which allowed them to see the front quarter of the house, as well as the large building nearby where the Wolves had run their training session. Standing on the roof of Lacu’s car, they could make out some of the grounds on the side. The Whiplash strike team was out of sight.

“Who are the owners of this house?” the deputy minister asked as he and Nuri passed a set of infrared night vision glasses back and forth.

“I can’t remember off the top of my head,” said Nuri. It was an honest answer, though it wouldn’t have been very hard for him to look it up. “I thought maybe you would know the property.”

“No,” said Lacu. He sounded relieved.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s owned by Russians,” suggested Nuri.

“I think that’s a very good possibility,” said Lacu.

So there was the story they would use. Nuri would just let the deputy minister fill in the blanks.

“When shall we bring in the armored car?” asked Lacu.

“Hold it in reserve,” Nuri told him. The car, which drove fairly slowly, was still about a few kilometers away. “Our team will try and get the men to surrender without gunfire.”

“Without gunfire? None at all?”

“That would be the hope.”

Lacu seemed impressed. He took the glasses and turned them toward the house, studying it and the surrounding property.

“I don’t see any of your men,” said Lacu.

“You will soon enough.”

46

Danny looked at his watch. It was now past five o’clock. It would be light soon. And the Russians from town whom Nuri had bugged would be coming out at seven, if they held to their plan. They had to move ahead.

The two men were still in the upstairs room, watching TV.

“Tiny, can you talk?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” answered the trooper. He’d moved back to the side of the room, far from where the men were.

“What’s your status?”

“I loosened the coupling on the duct and I think I can slip the gas nozzle inside,” he said. “I can tape around it and make it airtight. It’ll make a little noise, though.”

“Get ready to do it. But wait for my signal.”

Danny had the team outside take their positions for an immediate attack.

Plan A was to use the gas, knock everyone out, then systematically hog-tie them and cart them off.

Plan B was to go in hard, with or without the gas. Charges had been set against the wall at the guardroom, and two Whiplashers were ready to blow them and overwhelm the guards if they survived the explosion. Grenade launchers were aimed at the windows of the occupied dorm rooms; tear gas would be shot inside as the team rushed the building from below. With access to the armory cut off, they would invite the others to surrender, and proceed accordingly if they didn’t.

That was the backup plan. Things would be easier if the gas worked.

“We’re ready,” said Boston.

“Set up and start pumping,” Danny told Tiny. He turned to Flash. “You think we can increase the amount of electricity going into the building without blowing the circuit?”

“Piece of cake,” said Flash.

He opened the panel on the laptop controlling the electrical regulator and edged it up slightly. It had an immediate effect — the volume on the television increased loud enough for Danny to hear it over Tiny’s mike.

By the time the two men had turned it down, Tiny had the gas canisters in place next to the air duct. He began taping the nozzle into the hole.

With the tanks hooked up, Tiny crawled over to the air handler and undid the panel protecting the wiring. He short-circuited the thermostat control with a pair of alligator clips, kicking on the fan.

It took five minutes for the gas to empty from the canisters. By then Danny was feeling the fatigue of the long day. He leaned over Flash’s shoulder and looked at the screen.

“Show me floor one,” he said. “The control room.”

“They’re still at their stations.”

“Awake?”

“Looks like it.”

“What about upstairs?”

Everyone there seemed to be sleeping, but then they had been before the gas. On the third floor, the two men in the TV room were on the couch, still fidgeting, still awake.

Another ten excruciating minutes passed as Danny gave the gas time to work. Nothing seemed to change.

“It should be at maximum effect by now,” said Flash.

The specialist who’d prepared the gas had calculated it would work almost immediately, since there were air ducts in each room. Within five minutes the concentrations throughout the house, with the exception of the basement and the attic, should be more than high enough to put a person out.

It had worked as well as it was going to.

“We go in hard on my mark,” said Danny. “Ready?”

Each team reported back.

“All right,” he said, gripping his SCAR-H/MK–17 rifle. “Three, two, one—”

The charges blew out a large hunk of the wall. A frag grenade followed, eliminating any possibility that the two guards would be able to sound an alarm or fight back. Danny wasn’t about to hang this operation on flash-bangs.

“Go! Go! Go!” he yelled as he saw the smoke from the blasts.

The team swarmed into the building. Danny told MY-PID to bring the Rattlesnakes up. Guided by the computer, the unmanned helicopters took off from the staging area two kilometers away and rushed toward the site, spreading out as they went so they could encircle the property.

Tiny went to the attic opening, a panel in the ceiling of the room next to the one with the television. He pulled it open and jumped down, pausing to adjust his night goggles, which had slipped on his face. As he did, he was blinded by a flash of light. Instinctively, he reached for his weapon.

Gunfire erupted through the building.

“People moving out of the bedrooms!” warned Flash.

“Secure the stairways!” yelled Danny.

In the next second there was a loud explosion on the second story. Something flew out of the wall — two of the Wolves, jumping from the house.

The deputy minister turned to Nuri as the gunfire erupted.

“I thought you said it would be done without gunfire,” said Nuri.

“They’re trying.”

One of the Rattlesnakes buzzed overhead.

“What was that?” asked Lacu.

“A helicopter.”

“There are three of them.”

“Yes.”

“They look — very small.”

“They are. They’re flown by remote control.”

“Are they necessary?”

As if in answer, the gunfire at the house stoked up.

“I don’t think it’s going too well,” said Lacu.

“No, no, it’s going according to plan,” said Nuri.

In the next moment a rocket was fired from the ground. Nuri looked up to see one of the UAVs turn into a fireball.

Danny saw the men jumping from the building, but they ran so fast he couldn’t even raise his gun to fire. He jumped to his feet but then fell back as a series of explosions rocked the ground. Missiles began firing from the woods — antiaircraft weapons that had been secreted so well in the trees they hadn’t detected them. One took down a nearby Rattlesnake; the others crisscrossed in the air, trying to find the other targets.

The Rattlesnakes shot flares, ducking away from the attack. By the time they regrouped, the two men who’d escaped the house were inside the training building.

Gunfire began raining from one of the windows on the second floor. Danny pumped a grenade inside, then ducked as the bullets somehow continued to fly.

Who the hell were these guys?

Tiny felt himself falling to the ground, shaken by the force of several explosions. He rolled to his stomach and groped for his weapon, sure that he was about to be killed at any moment.

The light that had blinded him came from a flash-bang grenade prepositioned in the hallway. A string of them exploded on every floor of the house, designed to break up an attack.

Tiny tried to shake off the confusion. He pushed himself to his feet, then crouched back down, still without his bearings. The circuitry in the goggles had recovered, but his eyes hadn’t, and smoke pouring into the room made it even harder to see.

“Bean, Bean, what the fuck?” he shouted.

Not hearing a response, he reached up and found his ear set missing. His microphone was gone as well — the entire headset had blown off his head when he fell. He pulled it back up, cupping his hand over his ear as he tried to make sense of the cacophony of voices competing over the Whiplash frequency.

“There are three people moving toward the stairs on the second floor,” Flash was warning. “Three people.”

“What about the third floor? Third floor,” said Tiny.

If there was an answer, it was overrun.

Tiny moved back to the door, then threw himself out into the hallway. Smoke was curling everywhere. He began crawling forward on his elbows, moving to the room where the men had been watching TV.

The door was open. He pushed his shoulder against the wall, sidling up the doorjamb. Then he flew forward into the open space, half expecting to be met by machine-gun fire.

Nothing happened. He rose on one knee and saw the two men on the couch, passed out or dead, he couldn’t tell.

Tiny jumped up and ran to the couch. Holding the barrel of his gun at the head of the man on the right, he reached into his back pocket and grabbed the heavy-duty zip-tie cuffs. He reached down and pulled the man’s wrists together, locking them. Then he went around the couch and tied the man’s legs.

Tiny was just starting to rise when something hit him on the side of the head. He flew across the room, against the wall. The force of the blow took his breath away.

He’d been hit by the man whom he had handcuffed. Hands and feet still bound, dazed from the gas but not completely unconscious, the man rose from the couch. He shook his head several times, then raised his arms in front of his chest. He tugged at the restraints. They gave on his first pull.

Tiny pushed to his left, trying to escape. He found his rifle on the floor in front of him and grabbed it, rearing back to fire as he moved away.

Something flew at him, then gripped his ankle. It felt like an iron clamp, squeezing against his bones, crushing them.

It was the Wolf. Tiny flailed with his elbow and the butt of the gun. He hit the man’s face and felt the grip loosen. Then something pounded his left side. He pushed up the gun and began to fire.

The bullets crashed through the man’s face, shattering his nose and the bones of his forehead. But his attacker continued to pound his side. The pain was excruciating. Tiny collapsed as the gun clicked empty.

He lay on his back for what seemed like hours, unable to breathe. Finally he felt himself being pulled to his feet.

“Bean, Bean, get the other guy,” he croaked. He turned, looking over his shoulder.

It wasn’t Bean. It was one of the Wolves.

Tiny was too weak to resist.

“Got two more guys going to the window,” Flash shouted to Danny.

Danny rose and pumped a 40mm grenade into the open window. He saw the flash and smoke, then watched dumbfounded as a man jumped through the window toward him.

He raised his rifle and began firing. The first few bullets hit square in the man’s chest, but didn’t slow him down. It was only as the bullets came up and struck the man’s neck and face that there was any noticeable effect. The man wobbled, then spun and fell to the ground.

Just in time. Danny’s magazine was empty.

“Hit them in the face,” Danny said over the radio.

“MY-PID says they’re moving to the tunnel,” yelled Flash. “They may be trying to leave the property.”

“Nuri — you on the line?” asked Danny. “Nuri?”

There was no answer.

“Can you get Nuri?” Danny asked Flash.

“I’m trying.”

“Boston, move up,” Danny said over the radio. “I’m going back to the perimeter where the tunnel opens.”

For a few seconds there was no answer. Finally, Boston acknowledged. Danny jumped to his feet and began running for the woods.

Nuri couldn’t see everything that was going on at the house, but it was pretty obvious the situation had not gone even remotely like they’d planned.

The deputy minister was walking back and forth near the armored car, wringing his hands as if they were sodden dish towels. His enthusiasm had quickly waned, and his frown grew longer as the gunfire continued.

“It won’t be too long,” said Nuri. “They’ll be done any second.”

Nuri’s sat phone saved him from Lacu’s dubious glare.

“What’s going on?” he asked as the line connected.

“Close down the tunnel entrance,” said Flash, shouting to make himself heard over the gunfire. “Blow it up!”

“Blow it up? Where is it?”

“Two hundred meters from the southeast corner, near the road. The sewer grate. You’re only about seventy meters from it.”

“You want us to ambush them as they come out?”

“Destroy it!”

Nuri turned to Luca.

“There’s a storm sewer near the road up in that direction,” he said, getting his bearings. “We have to destroy it.”

“A sewer? Why?”

“To cut off the escape,” said Nuri. “We need the armored car.”

He began trotting up the road. The grate wasn’t easy to find; he had to pull out the MY-PID control unit for a reference, and even then almost missed it in the low brush.

“There are no shells,” said Luca. “The only gun is the 7.2 machine gun.”

“The big gun isn’t loaded?”

“No shells.”

“Roll the armored car wheel over the opening,” said Nuri, without time to argue. “We can at least do that, right?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, he ran to the truck and started waving at the commander, who was sitting at the top turret.

“Go on the sewer hole. Move!” yelled Nuri, first in English, then in his rickety Moldovan. “Go. Go! Forward!”

The gunfire seemed to calm as Danny ran toward the woods in the direction of the tunnel exit. He’d taken a few steps when he realized he had momentarily forgotten where the minefield was. The prudent thing to do would have been to stop and ask MY-PID for help. But his brain was racing, and he plunged on, running toward the trees.

He reached the trees as the armored car rolled over the metal manhole cover. When he got to the fence line, he saw Nuri and the others standing near the car, staring at the sewer grate.

Danny threw himself halfway up the fence and began climbing over.

He had just reached the top when the armored car heaved upward a good two or three feet. It fell to the right, bouncing on its springs and rolling away from the tunnel opening.

Danny pulled his gun from behind his shoulder as a head popped up from the hole. He fired at it, two solid bursts ripping into the back of the man’s skull. He collapsed over the edge of the hole.

“There’s another! There’s another!” yelled Danny. He flipped over the edge of the fence and half slid, half fell to the ground. He ran over to the entrance to the tunnel, his head woozy.

Nuri, pistol out, reached down gingerly to the dead man and pulled an automatic rifle from beneath his body.

“Get ready!” yelled Danny. “Get ready — there’s another one!”

The truck started to back up. The gunner pointed his machine gun at the hole.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Nuri.

“We have to close off that entrance,” said Danny.

“Did that guy just lift that car off?” demanded Nuri.

“Get the gunner to blow up the tunnel entrance,” yelled Danny.

“Did that guy lift the cover off with the truck on it?” repeated Nuri.

“Yes — get the gunner to hit the tunnel entrance!”

“He can’t — they don’t have shells.”

“Get some explosive and blow it closed!” Danny reached for his headset. “MY-PID — where is the other man who was escaping through the tunnel?”

“He is returning to Building B.”

Danny grabbed Nuri. “Blow the entrance to the tunnel up. You understand?”

“But—”

“Just do it!”

“All right. We’ll figure it out.”

Tiny felt himself being carried through the house like a sack of potatoes. There were two of them — one holding him on his back, another nearby.

They were on the third floor, in the room he had come in through.

Tiny tried to move his legs but the man’s grip on them was too strong. His side pulsed with pain.

He felt himself being lifted, then thrown upward, tossed into the attic like a child’s doll. He clawed at the ground, desperate to get away, but it was useless; within seconds he was scooped up and once more flung over the back of one of the men.

The other was grunting something. It was too dark to see — Tiny’s night vision goggles had fallen off.

He heard a swinging sound, and realized the other man had grabbed an ax. They were going to chop their way out of the roof.

God, thought Tiny, I hope Bean doesn’t shoot me when he shoots them.

Bean felt the wood being smacked a few feet away. He took a step back, sliding along the peak of the roof. Danny had ordered him to hold his position when the gunfire started. Bean had taken some shots at the last man who’d jumped from the window, but otherwise he’d sat here and watched as the situation deteriorated into chaos.

“Flash — I got somebody trying to chop their way out up here,” he said over the radio. “Is it our guys?”

“Two of the Wolves — they have Tiny.”

“Tiny’s with these guys?”

“Yeah.”

The axe blade came up through the shingles six feet away. Bean fired at the blade, striking it point-blank. It disappeared back below.

Bean got up and ran to the hole that the axe had just made. He kicked at it with his heel, then pulled one of the tear gas canisters from his belt and dropped it through.

“Where are they?” he asked Flash.

“They look like they’re going for the stairs.”

He retreated to the edge of the roof, pulling on his gas mask. But he stopped at the edge. It didn’t make sense to go in there with them; they’d just use Tiny as a shield.

Danny ordered the Rattlesnakes to circle the large building, expecting the man heading back to try and escape. Boston and his men, meanwhile, had joined the others at the house, holding positions on all four sides.

Three Whiplash team members had been hurt, one seriously wounded in the leg by gunfire, the other two merely nicked by shrapnel. No one had been killed.

Yet.

There were only two Wolves still moving around in the house, but they had Tiny with them on the top floor.

There was an explosion on the other side of the fence. The tunnel entrance had been blown up.

Danny was huffing for breath when he reached the house.

“The knockout gas didn’t affect any of them,” said Flash. “Bean just tossed a tear gas canister into the attic. They’re still up there. I don’t think it bothered them at all.”

“Where are our guys?”

“They’re on floor three, covering the hole into the attic.”

“American!” The radio crackled with an unfamiliar voice. One of the Wolves had taken Tiny’s headset off. “We have your people.”

“Let him go and I’ll let you live,” Danny replied.

The man replied in what Danny thought was Russian, then switched to English.

“You will see his legs torn off!”

Tiny was still wearing the gas mask over his nose and mouth, but without the goggles his eyes had no protection, and they began stinging as soon as the canister exploded. Tears streamed from his eyes.

It was the final indignity, he thought. It was bad enough that he had to die, but now it was going to look as if he had gone out as a coward.

47

Turk put his hand on the throttle, nudging his power up slightly to maintain his optimal cruise speed as the tailwind shifted.

It was a bit of unnecessary fussiness — the computerized flight controls could have easily maintained the proper speed, even in a hurricane. In fact, the computer could easily fly him all the way to Prague without his intervention, even landing itself: not only could it check in with flight controllers along the way in commanded air space, but it could properly interpret commands from the tower when coming in for a landing.

But where was the fun in that? What good would airplanes be, he thought, if you couldn’t fly them?

They’d be the Sabres, still seen by the brass as the real cutting-edge answer to aviation warfare.

Wallace didn’t think so. But he’d probably retire in a year. Then no one would be talking about “manned flight.”

The hell with the future, Turk thought, marveling at the stars in his viewer. I’m flying in the here and now.

48

Danny ran over to Flash and had him lock out Tiny’s receiver channel so their communications wouldn’t be compromised. But the mike stayed on, and MY-PID could hear the man who’d delivered the ultimatum about Tiny talking to his companion in his native tongue.

The computer identified the language as Kazakh — the language spoken in Kazakhstan, the former Soviet republic that still had close ties with Russia.

“Open his line up again,” Danny told Flash. As soon as it was open, Danny had the MY-PID issue the command to surrender in Kazakh. The words worked as well in Kazakh as they did in English, which was not at all.

“Out,” said Danny, motioning with his finger across his throat. Flash killed the audio. “Flick him in and out. We may be able to use the radio to misdirect him.”

“Gotcha.”

“Circuit is secure,” Danny said over the radio. “From now on, when I say ‘Talking to Wolves,’ assume they can hear whatever you say, until I broadcast a clear.”

He took stock of the situation. They had one man in the large training building, two in the house. If necessary, they could bring the Moldovans in to help.

It shouldn’t come to that. He had them outnumbered more than four to one.

He was used to kicking ass, even when he was the underdog. Now he saw what it felt like to be on the receiving end.

“If we can get them down to the third floor, we can go at them from top and bottom,” said Boston. “We can get more guys up on the roof.”

“We don’t know if they have weapons down there,” said Danny.

“If they had more weapons, they’d have them out by now.”

“We can afford to wait,” said Danny.

“What about their reinforcements? Those guys Nuri spotted in the village.”

Danny had forgotten about them. He glanced at his watch. It was past seven.

“Nuri, you on?”

“I’m here.”

“Those Russians you saw in town—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Secure the road.”

“Already working on it.”

“Tell the police no radios. The Wolves may have something inside to pick them up.”

“Right.”

Danny turned his attention back to the men in the house. He would have just ordered the Rattlesnakes to blow the damn thing up and be done with it if not for the fact that Tiny would die in the process.

He might already be as good as dead.

“Boston, who are our best shooters?” he asked.

“Everybody’s pretty good, Cap.”

“The best guys for head shots if you were the hostage.”

Boston thought for a moment. No one on the team was a poor shot, but not everyone had been trained as a sniper. That meant literally hundreds and even thousands of rounds over and over, under all sorts of circumstances.

They had six men and one woman, if Danny remembered correctly. Who were the best two?

“I guess I’m going with Squeeze and Hooch,” said Boston. “Squeeze ’cause she’s fast, and Hooch because, you know, he’s ice.”

“Tell them to put sniper kits on and get ready. They’re going wherever the bad guys go. Tell them if it looks to them like it’s going to crap, to take their shots. Head shots — these guys don’t go down easy. Tell them they’re not going to be second-guessed. Under no circumstances do the people in that building leave alive.”

“Under no circumstances,” repeated Boston.

“No circumstances,” said Danny. Clearly, these men were too dangerous to allow them to escape. “Tell them not to pay any attention to anything I say over the radio, unless I precede it with the word ‘Whiplash.’ Got that?”

“ ‘Whiplash’ is the safety word,” said Boston.

“Nothing else I say counts.”

“Got it, boss.”

Danny looked over at Flash.

“Still in the attic,” Flash told him. “Moving around. Getting something — I think they’re going for the roof.”

“What’s going on in the training building?” Danny asked.

“He’s moving around in one of the office areas.”

“Have the Rattlesnakes destroy the cottage with the aircraft,” said Danny. “Kill the helicopters. Then take out the garage.”

Rockets began firing from the helicopters within seconds. The cottage with the skeleton chopper erupted in a burst of flame. The garage merely crumbled, the sides collapsing on the vehicles.

“What are you doing, American?” demanded one of the Wolves over the radio. “You are to cease fire.”

“Open the circuit,” Danny told Flash.

Flash gave him a thumbs-up.

“We’re not going to let you out,” said Danny.

“We will kill your man, then kill you!”

Boston waved at him, signaling that Squeeze and Hooch were ready.

“Wait!” said Danny. “Don’t kill him.”

The man laughed.

“They’re coming up through the roof,” said Flash.

“Bean, get down,” said Danny over the radio.

Bean looked down from the roof. Danny waved, signaling that he wanted Bean to comply. The trooper tossed his pack down, then grabbed the line and rappelled to the ground.

While Bean was coming down, the Wolves kicked at the hole in the roof, making it bigger. One pulled himself through. Then the other handed Tiny up and came out himself.

By now the sky had lightened considerably. The men on the house were dark shadows, but it was easy to tell which was Tiny and which were the bad guys. The Black Wolf members looked like defensive linemen, though they moved as gracefully as any halfback. They stood upright on the roof, secure in their balance. One of the men had a rifle. The other held Tiny in one arm. He had Tiny’s own submachine gun in his other hand, pressed against the Whiplash trooper’s temple as if it were a pistol.

Was one of them Stoner? Danny thought of yelling his name, trying to make some sort of plea, then decided it would be a waste of time.

“You will move back!” shouted the man with the rifle. “Those helicopters — they will land! And you are doing a trick with the radio,” he added. “Turning my headset off. Do not do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not a fool, American. No more this turns off, or your man dies. Then you. Move the helicopters back!”

“Have the Rattlesnakes back off, but keep the big building in their sights,” Danny told Flash, mike off. “I don’t want the guy in there to get away.”

Flash gave the command for the helicopters to back off a hundred meters.

“Team, hold your positions,” said Danny over the radio.

“Move back!” demanded the Wolves.

“Where do you want us to go?” asked Danny.

“Back! Back!”

Nuri couldn’t see exactly what was going on at the house, but from what he heard over the radio, it sounded like Danny was going to let them get away.

“Danny, what are you doing?” he demanded.

“Shut up, Nuri, and mind your business,” snapped Danny.

Shut up? Mind his business?

Nuri felt a flush of anger — then realized that Danny was playacting for the benefit of the Wolves in the house.

What was he planning?

Lacu looked at him.

“Your men should hold their positions,” Nuri told him.

“They have a hostage?” asked the deputy minister. “We have snipers.”

“It’s under control,” said Nuri.

“We have a car approaching on the highway,” said one of the Moldovans, running up. He was out of breath; he’d run with the message because of the instructions not to use the radio. “They’re coming to the roadblock.”

The Russians from the hotel. Reinforcements.

“Stop it,” said Nuri. Then he thought of something. “Wait. The snipers — have them meet me by the road.”

“If they stay that close together, we’re not getting a shot,” said Boston. “He must figure we have snipers.”

“They’re not dumb. We know that,” said Danny. “But they have to separate from Tiny to get down.”

“You and I would have to separate,” said Boston. “I’m not sure these guys have to do anything we’d have to do.”

Nuri could see the Russian car slowing as the two policemen put their hands up to flag it down. There were two police cars blocking the road behind it.

If they started to back up, what would he do?

Shoot them. But he needed the car intact. And he couldn’t use the radio to tell them.

He saw one of the policemen in tactical gear running to his right. One of the snipers.

“Wait!” yelled Nuri. “Wait!”

The policeman looked at him. Not understanding, he continued to run.

“Wait, wait!” shouted Nuri, closing the distance between them. He grabbed at the policeman’s arm. “Set up here — set up to get the driver.”

The sniper stopped.

“Get the driver first,” said Nuri, pointing.

The sniper dropped to one knee. Below on the road, the Russian was arguing with the policeman. The car started to back up.

“Now!” yelled Nuri. “Get him, get him, get him!”

They heard the shot in the distance, then another.

“What are you doing, American!” yelled one of the Wolves.

Before Danny could think of an answer, Nuri came over the radio.

“We have someone stopped at the roadblock,” he said. “We had to fire warning shots to get them to stop.”

“You will let the car proceed, American,” said the Wolf.

Boston looked at Danny.

“OK,” said Danny. “Nuri, let the car come up.”

Nuri pulled the passenger out himself. Blood was everywhere. He dragged the body to the side, then pulled off his jacket. He was wearing a watch cap, but it was too sodden with blood to put on.

“Give me your pistol,” he told one of the policemen.

Reluctantly, the man handed it over. Nuri rolled down the window, closed the door, then went to the driver’s side. The body of the driver had been taken out, but the seat was covered with blood. Nuri had no choice but to sit in it.

“I go,” said the sniper as Nuri rolled down the window.

“You have to be prepared to die,” said Nuri.

“I go,” insisted the sniper.

“Pistol only,” said Nuri, pointing to his. “They didn’t have rifles. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Understand. Yes.”

“Take off your shirt,” said Nuri. “You can’t look like a policeman.”

While he did, Nuri thought of one last thing. He leaned out the window.

“Give me a grenade,” he told the policemen. “One of the grenades you showed me at the church. Quick!”

They came back with several. Nuri took just one, then asked for a medical kit. He removed the pin, holding the handle with a pair of bandages. Then he put the grenade down between his legs.

The sniper glanced nervously at him.

“Yeah, I go first if this doesn’t work,” said Nuri. “I can think of a couple of jokes, but they probably don’t translate very well.”

Boston guessed what Nuri was up to as the car approached the driveway.

“They may know who’s been sent to pick them up,” warned Boston. “They’ll see them.”

Danny dropped back to his knee. “Flash, have one of the Rattlesnakes put its searchlight on and drop down. Shine the light so it blinds the guys on the roof.”

“You sure that won’t piss them off?”

“Let them get pissed off. They won’t do anything if they think they’re going to get away.”

The helo dropped quickly, its light flaring. The car came up the driveway slowly.

“Why does that helicopter have lights on, American!”

“I want to see what the hell is going on,” said Danny.

“Turn lights off!”

“No,” said Danny.

The Wolf raised his gun and fired at the light. The searchlight went dark — just as the car pulled next to the house.

“Now what?” said Danny over the radio.

“Stefan and Androv come out of Building A,” the Wolf said.

“OK.”

“Tell them.”

“How?”

“Loudspeaker.”

“I don’t have a loudspeaker.”

“Then go to the door and tell them.”

“They’ll kill whoever goes to the door.”

The Wolf laughed. “That is your problem, American.”

Nuri glanced at the grenade between his legs. Sweat poured down his palms as he moved it to the edge of the seat against the console. He loosened the bandage so that only the weight of his leg kept the trigger from popping.

“When we get out, the grenade will load itself,” he told the sniper. “We have like four seconds. Four seconds. Then the car blows up. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“The car blows up. They’ll be running to it.”

“Yes.”

They were so close to the house that he couldn’t see the roof. This was good — it meant that the Werewolves on top couldn’t see him either. But it was nerve-wracking and dangerous as well — he couldn’t see where they were or what was going on.

“Danny, what’s happening?” said Nuri, realizing that over the radio it would seem as if he was back at the checkpoint. “We let the car go through. Where is it?”

“It came up the driveway,” answered Danny. “We’re going to let the man out of the building.”

“Is that a good idea? You’re going to let them escape in the car?”

“I have no choice,” said Danny. “We’re going to let them leave. One of them is moving to get down now, with Tiny.”

“What? You’re letting him get down?”

“He’s going down the south side,” said Danny. “I don’t have any other choice. We have to let them go.”

Danny glanced in the direction of the sniper on the southern side of the house. He couldn’t quite see him. Or her.

“Where are our men?” demanded the Wolf with the rifle.

“We’re working on it,” said Danny.

The man holding Tiny slid to the southern end of the roof. He had Tiny’s head pressed close to his, using it as a shield. It would be difficult to take him without hitting Tiny; a bullet from the other side would probably go through his skull and kill the hostage as well.

We knew these guys were good, Danny told himself. We just didn’t know how good.

“American!”

“Your men in the building aren’t answering,” said Danny. “They may have been killed — there was a gunfight at the tunnel.”

The two men on the roof began talking to each other. The one holding Tiny was inclined to leave their friends — after all, they had left them.

“Get down,” ordered the man with the rifle. “American, back! If you do anything, your friend will be killed.”

Danny bit his lip, holding his breath as the man took Tiny to the edge of the roof.

Tiny felt his legs dangling over the edge of the building.

Enough of this bullshit, he thought. If I have to die, at least let me do something. Anything.

With a scream, he began to kick and flail his elbows wildly, aiming for his captor’s groin. Whether he hit it or not, the next second he felt himself falling from the roof.

Nuri heard the scream and jerked out of the car, pushing the door closed with his leg, gun raised. The Wolf who’d been holding Tiny let go as he jumped. They were close together, incredibly close — the Wolf was to the right…

Nuri fired as the man fell, and kept firing, moving to his left to get away from the car, shooting wildly. The sniper did the same in the opposite direction.

None of their bullets struck the Wolf’s head, and he rolled to the ground and got to his feet. He put his hand on the car, steadying himself as he took aim at Nuri.

Then the grenade exploded.

“Whiplash! Whiplash! Take them! Take them!” screamed Danny as Nuri fired.

One of the snipers drilled the Wolf on the roof. The man fell backward, sliding head first off the house. In the next moment the grenade exploded in the car. Danny leaped to his feet, running toward the side of the building. The explosion had shattered the windshield, sending the glass flying as shrapnel through the air. But much of the force of the explosion was contained by the car and its engine compartment.

Danny saw Tiny, writhing on the ground on his left. The Wolf, in dark clothes, had been dazed. He was lying on his back in front of the hood.

Is it Stoner?

By the time the question occurred to him, Danny had already shot the man twice in the forehead.

He stopped, caught his breath as he saw the man’s lifeless face.

It wasn’t Stoner.

Nuri found himself on the ground. He was thirty feet from the car. He couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there — he’d run, but had he flown, too, when the grenade exploded?

Maybe.

He couldn’t hear. He tried rolling to his right to get up, then realized he was already on his stomach. He pushed up, dizzy, and began feeling his legs, and then his chest.

Somebody grabbed his right arm. It was Danny, yelling at him.

Nuri tapped his ears. They felt as if he were in a plane, ascending quickly. He tapped them, trying to get them to pop.

“You OK?” yelled Danny. “OK?”

“I guess,” answered Nuri. “I can barely hear you.”

“The grenade in the car — good idea,” said Danny. He ran back toward the building.

Nuri followed. Tiny was on the ground, his face twisted in pain. His right leg was bent at an unnatural angle; it hurt just to look at it, but Nuri couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“The big building!” yelled Danny. “There’s one more person in the big building.”

Before he could turn, the ground shook with an explosion so strong that Nuri lost his balance and fell to the ground.

“Looks like we don’t have to worry about getting him out of the building,” Danny said. “He just blew it up.”