Raven Strike

Chapter 1

At precisely 1303 the cell phone towers that provided southeastern Sudan with its characteristically spotty reception had a power failure. This was not unprecedented; the system had crashed three times in the past two months alone. There were few calls on the network in the area to begin with; not only was the service considered extremely unreliable, but it was also commonly assumed — incorrectly, as it happened — that the government monitored all calls through the cell tower.

Somewhat less usual, there was a malfunction at the same time involving the satellite telephone network most convenient and popular in the area. Anyone on a call inside a hundred-square-mile circle — there were about two dozen — heard a bit of static, then had their conversation fade in and out before completely dying. A few seconds later full service was restored; it was somewhat unusual, but not entirely inexplicable — sunspots, bizarre electrical fluctuations, even strange weather patterns were randomly but plausibly blamed by the few people who happened to be inconvenienced.

The fact that both events occurred simultaneously was not, of course, an accident. The power disruption at the cell towers was accomplished by explosive charges, which wiped out the transformers at two key stations. Had it been detected, the evidence would have pointed to a rebel group, of which there were many operating in the Sudan: the explosive was manufactured in an Eastern European country known for its easy exportation policies. The men seen in the vicinity were driving a four-door white pickup common to many groups. The men, all three of whom were black, wore anonymous brown fatigues that had their origins in China — another common quality among the ragtag groups that vied for control in this corner of the country.

The men were actually two Marines selected personally by the third man, Sergeant Ben “Boston” Rockland, from the two Marine platoons assigned to the Whiplash operation and rushed to Ethiopia only two hours before.

Blowing up the transformer was a rather crude and old school approach to killing communications. While effective, it stood in sharp contrast to what happened to the satellite communications, also perpetrated by Whiplash. This was actually accomplished by a high-altitude balloon and a UAV only a bit larger than the average buzzard. Indeed, the UAV looked very much like a buzzard from the distance; one had to get relatively close to see the net antenna that trailed from the wings or the stubby protuberances from the bottom. These antennas allowed the unmanned aircraft to intercept and redirect satellite signals emanating from the ground to the Whiplash satellite system. This redirection brought the ground half of these transmissions to MY-PID, where they could be altered as well as modified; the system could allow normal communications to proceed through an antenna in the small balloon, or route them to human operators located at an NSA facility in Maryland to conduct the calls.

In effect, no one in this small corner of the world could call home without MY-PID’s permission, and even then it might not be home they talked to at all.

Thus was the Brothers camp isolated from the rest of the world.

Danny Freah, en route south in the repaired Osprey, worried that the disruption of telephone service would tip off the people inside the camp that they were about to be attacked. He wasn’t as much worried about them increasing their defenses as the possibility that they would begin leaving the camp. While he had the road under surveillance, dealing with a mass exodus would have been nearly impossible.

MY-PID now estimated there were nearly 400 people inside the camp, though only 250 to 300 were likely to be fighters. At the moment, Danny had only twenty people to stop them, counting Melissa. The roads were mined and the ridges surrounding it could be blown up to stop an exodus, but it would be extremely messy.

His force would be augmented at nightfall by four Whiplashers arriving with more equipment from the States, the two platoons of Marines he’d been assigned, and the SEAL who had parachuted in with Nuri’s vodka. The SEAL was so eager for action when he saw the Marines arriving that Nuri told Danny he’d probably be shot if Danny didn’t give the OK.

“And I doubt I’ll get the gun out of my holster before he draws his,” Nuri had added.

Pitting a force seventy-odd strong against three hundred made for almost suicidal odds in a traditional military situation. But this wasn’t going to be a traditional military situation. Not only were the core fighters highly trained, but Danny had formulated a plan to use Whiplash’s nonhuman assets to balance the odds.

Primary reconnaissance was being provided by a Global Observer, a long-winged spy plane that could cover a vast swath of northeastern Africa from high altitude. With wings as long as a 747, the odd-looking, push-propeller plane was fueled by hydrogen cells that allowed it to stay airborne for weeks at a time. Her long wings and spindly body mounted an array of video and infrared cameras that covered the entire compound. With backup from the Global Hawk that had been circling over Duka, MY-PID had a comprehensive image of the enemy camp. The computer could selectively zoom in on any spot in the entire area. The images would be fed not just to Danny and everyone else on the Whiplash team, but to the Marine commanders via their standard “toughbook” laptops.

Spread out over almost a mile in the mountains, the Brothers’ stronghold looked something like a pair of sunny-side-up eggs with slightly separated yolks and a misshapen and large white ring. The defenses were situated in a way to protect against an outside attack — from the ground.

The “yolks” were clusters of clay and stone buildings that were like miniature citadels, about a half mile apart. Analyzing intelligence data relating to the terrorist organization, MY-PID had decided the cluster to the northeast was the most likely command post; most radio transmissions seemed to have originated from that area, and the satellite images showed more human traffic there.

Studying the same data, Danny concluded the opposite. The Brothers were undoubtedly aware that they were being monitored, if only by the Sudanese authorities; they would do everything in their power to throw them off. So he decided his first attack would be aimed at what was supposedly the less important “yolk,” with action at the other cluster intended simply to hold the enemy in place.

At first, anyway.

Danny rendezvoused with the Marine commanders in an abandoned oil field about ten miles north of the Brothers’ camp fifteen minutes after communications had been cut. The small village near the field was abandoned about a year before, after the wells went dry; they had polluted the groundwater long before that, making the place virtually uninhabitable by anyone who didn’t have a reason to be there.

Nuri and Hera, who would liaison with the Marine platoons, came as well, as did Melissa and Flash, who was filling in for Boston as Danny’s chief enlisted officer.

Danny arrived a few minutes early, and was on the ground waiting when the Marine Osprey skimmed in over the flat terrain, flying so low its wheels could have touched the ground had they been extended. The aircraft maneuvered so it was behind a set of derelict derricks, then landed neatly thirty yards from the Whiplash bird.

“Colonel Freah, helluvapleashuretameetya,” said the first man off the helicopter, Captain Joey Pierce. The officer in charge of the two platoons, Pierce had a Midwest accent but ran his words together quicker than someone from New York; Danny, whose ex-wife had come from New York, had trouble parsing the syllables into actual sentences.

It took him about ten minutes to sketch out the basic plan, emphasizing that the situation would be fluid from its inception.

“My people will hit the interior of the compound at 2300,” Danny told the captain. “We need you to tie down the main part of the Brothers’ force with an attack in this area here, and a feint at the main gate first.” He pointed to two areas on the southern side of the camp. “We need them to think that the main attack is occurring there. Once they’re committed to defending that area, we’ll come in.”

“Won’t they just reverse course and attack you?” asked Pierce.

“They won’t be able to,” said Danny.

“Colonel, with all due respect.” Pierce pointed to the map. “Looks pretty open to me.”

“It won’t be,” said Danny. “And whatever your forces do, absolutely do not pursue them inside the camp. For your own protection.”

“Our protection?”

Danny nodded solemnly. “We’ll hook into your communications just prior to the assault. Flash has a rundown on the emergency procedures, and what we’ll do if there’s a hurry-up — if things happen before the planned assault time.”

Danny glanced at Nuri when Flash had finished.

“Did you want to add anything?” he asked the CIA officer.

“Just that Colonel Freah isn’t kidding when he says don’t pursue,” said Nuri.

Hera felt the slightest twinge of jealousy as she caught the CIA officer Melissa Ilse glancing at Danny. There was something about the way she looked at him that bothered her. She felt almost protective of the colonel.

“What look are you talking about?” Nuri asked her as they trotted toward the Marine Osprey to head back to the platoon staging area. Since MY-PID wasn’t available to the Marines, Nuri and Hera would stay with them during the assault.

“Just a look,” said Hera.

“Danny would never ever hook up with her,” said Nuri flatly. “Ilse is bad news. No way.”

Men, thought Hera. Always clueless.

Chapter 2

Breanna took one last look at her daughter sleeping in the bed, then gently closed the door and slipped down the hallway.

It was just past 5:00 A.M.; even her early rising husband wouldn’t be out of bed for another twenty minutes or so.

She grabbed the coffeepot and filled her steel insulated commuting cup. Then she went out to her car in the garage as quietly as possible, opened the door and headed for work.

If everything went well in Africa, the controversy would more or less blow over. Edmund could go before the Intelligence Committee and explain that Raven had crashed and had then been recovered.

He’d be out of a job shortly thereafter, but that wasn’t her concern.

The question was, what would happen to Raven?

As Breanna saw it, there were two possibilities: it could be abandoned, or it could be handed over to the Office of Special Technology.

Surely it wouldn’t be abandoned.

She cleared security at the main gate of the CIA headquarters complex, then drove to a lot about two hundred years from the Room 4 building. The building itself had no parking, even though there was ample room around it; it was one more way of confusing the ever more invasive satellite eyes and other data gatherers employed.

Downstairs, Breanna was surprised by the smell of strong coffee. Only one person made the coffee so strong that it could be smelled outside the electrostatic walls: Ray Rubeo.

Sure enough, she found the scientist himself sitting at the table in their main conference room with Jonathon Reid.

“Ray, what a surprise,” she said.

Rubeo accepted a peck on the cheek with his customary stiffness. “I thought I might be useful,” he said.

“Ray has been examining the Raven software,” said Reid. “Which our colleagues so reluctantly made available. I didn’t think you would mind.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“It is an extremely powerful core, with a great number of flaws,” said Rubeo. “One of which is the fact that they’re using a temporary interface.”

Rubeo waved his hand over the table and tapped down with his right thumb. This opened a panel on the wall at the far side of the room, changing the wall surface into a projection screen.

“Coding display one,” Rubeo told the computer.

A slide appeared. It was a “dump” of computer code.

“It was written in C++,” said Rubeo. “Inexplicably.”

“The point being that anyone can interpret it,” said Reid.

“Yes,” said Rubeo, drawing out the word.

Not anyone, thought Breanna — she certainly couldn’t. But the point was, anyone with a reasonable knowledge of programming could.

“I would guess that they did this for two reasons,” said Rubeo. “The first being that they didn’t want to risk the actual program. This is somewhat isolated from the core modules that make up the actual Raven program. The second is that they did it for expediency; this part of the program was developed very quickly. I would guess within a matter of weeks. Perhaps even less.”

“Why so fast?” Breanna asked.

Rubeo touched his earlobe, where he had a gold post earring. It was an old habit, usually signaling he wanted to make some difficult pronouncement.

“Politics,” suggested Reid before Rubeo could speak. “The timing suggests that Reginald Harker was interested in becoming head of the DIA. If he had successfully taken out a high priority target like Li Han, he would have had an excellent leg up.”

“Harker broke the law and risked a top secret development program so he could get a better job?” said Breanna.

Reid didn’t answer.

“Using this command module may have been seen as a safeguard,” said Rubeo. “It certainly isn’t as robust and manageable as I would imagine a mature interface is. Still, the core program must be recovered. If the Russian operative is able to make it from the camp—”

“He won’t,” said Breanna.

Chapter 3

Zen woke even grumpier than usual, surprised and yet not surprised that Breanna had already slipped out to work.

At least the coffee was still warm. He bustled about, getting Teri breakfast, then shaving and dressing himself. He left Caroline sleeping in the guest room and headed out, Teri riding shotgun in the backseat. After dropping her off at school, he swung over and picked up his aide, Jay, then went to the hospital, where Stoner was already in physical therapy when he arrived.

“Did you sleep at all?” Zen asked, wheeling himself into the exercise room.

“I’m good.”

Stoner pushed a set of free weights over his chest. He was lifting five hundred pounds, by Zen’s reckoning, and didn’t seem to be straining.

“Are we going to the game tonight?” asked Stoner. His tone was genuinely enthusiastic — the first time Zen remembered him sounding that way since he’d been rescued.

“Yeah, if you want.”

“I do.”

Zen watched Stoner pump the weights. He reached twenty, then put the weights down easily on the stands.

“I wish I could do it that easy,” said Zen.

“Then you’d have to take the whole package. Headaches, not really knowing who you are. Not trusting your body.”

“I know a little bit about that.”

Stoner nodded.

“The doctor says some of what they did to me might help you,” said Stoner.

“Me?”

“Is that why you’re hanging around?”

“You mean my legs?”

“Exactly.”

The enthusiasm had been replaced by something else — anger.

“No,” said Zen. “I’ve been down that road. A lot. They’ve done a lot of things trying to help me to walk again. None of them worked, Mark. This is what I am. This where I am. It’s just the way it is.”

“That’s too bad,” said Stoner.

The silence was more awkward than even Stoner’s question.

“I come to see you because we’re friends,” said Zen, trying to fill it. “You saved Breanna, remember?”

“Yeah,” he said after a very long pause. Zen wondered if he really did.

“And we were friends before,” said Zen. “Remember that?”

“Vaguely,” said Stoner.

“And…” Zen hesitated. “I was… sorry I couldn’t protect you and the others in that helicopter. I always felt… as if I should have done something more. I should have gone against orders and figured something out. Whatever. Something…”

Stoner looked at him for what seemed an eternity. “It’s OK,” he said finally. “I understand.”

Then he went back to pumping more iron. Zen glanced at his watch. He had to leave.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.

“I’ll be ready.”

He did remember. Everything.

Mark Stoner sat on the edge of the weight bench, thinking about dying, remembering how it had all happened.

It wasn’t Zen’s fault at all. Zen wasn’t anywhere near at the time. Even if he had been, there was no guarantee he could have done anything. None.

He himself had accepted the risks. That was the nature of the job.

Zen had risked his life to get him back here alive. They were more than even, the way those things worked.

It was good to have a friend.

He rose and took two more plates from the rack, slipping them on the bar one at a time.

It would be good to go to the game. Baseball was a good thing.

Even if the hot dogs gave him heartburn.

Chapter 4

The Brothers were called to prayer as the sun set, joining Muslims around the world in turning toward Mecca to fulfill the requirements of their faith.

Just as the prayer was ending, a trio of small rockets arced over the advanced lookout posts and struck the guard posts at the main entrance. A split second later a half-dozen more struck the gutted bus used as the gate, obliterating it.

The rockets looked like Russian-made Grads. Which they were. Mostly.

Ordinary Grads were extremely simple weapons, mass-produced and exported around the word, including to Hezbollah, which used them against Israel. As originally designed, they sat in a tube and were fired. In the original version, the tubes were massed together and mounted on the back of a truck.

These three rockets were fired from tubes on the ground. But their rear sections included stabilizers and steering gear that made them considerably more accurate than the originals. The mechanisms were interlaced with explosives, which meant they disintegrated when they landed.

The real alteration was in the nose, where the explosive used an aluminum alloy mixed with a more common plastic explosive base to produce an explosive power some eleven times more destructive than the original warheads.

A tenth missile — this one unguided — flew a few feet farther, landing harmlessly on the roadway behind the post. The charge in it was stock, or at least appeared so. It failed to ignite properly, fuming but not exploding. This in fact was its intent: evidence for anyone who had a chance to see it that the attack had been launched by a rival group.

A dozen men died instantly. The other fighters in the camp reacted with indignation, grabbing their rifles and rushing to defend the camp and avenge the insult to their beliefs. They were met with a hail of gunfire from the Marines, who had spent the past two hours creeping up the hills into position. At roughly the same moment, another dozen rockets were fired at two sniper posts and four gun positions overlooking the camp. The sniper positions were essentially depressions in the rocks, and firing so many missiles at them was arguably overkill; the resulting explosions caused small landslides, not only obliterating the men there but turning the positions into exposed ravines that could no longer be used for defense.

Even as the dust from the rocket strikes was settling, the first mortar shells began raining down on the positions. These were standard-issue, Marine Corps high explosive M720 rounds, armed with M734 Multioption fuses set for near surface burst — not fancy, especially compared to the weapons Whiplash was deploying, but extremely effective. Fired from a range of roughly 3,000 meters, the rounds exploded behind the first wave of enemy troops, then walked inward toward the defenses, in effect sweeping the enemy toward the front line.

Danny had a bird’s-eye view of the explosions as they rocked the southern side of the camp. He and the rest of the Whiplash team had jumped from the back of an Osprey moments before the first rockets were launched. All were wearing glide suits, which allowed them to guide their free fall into precise routes specified by the GPS module in their smart helmets.

In contrast to the noisy action at the “front” of the camp, the Whiplash team’s descent was entirely silent and, in the dark, practically invisible.

“Target area,” Danny told the helmet. The view changed to a square roughly fifty by twenty meters at the eastern end of the cluster he was assaulting. A red box appeared around two shadows at the left side of the box — armed men who might present trouble. They had just manned a bunkered security post.

“ICS, target and eliminate enemy in designated box A3,” Danny said, this time talking through MY-PID to the integrated combat system aboard the AB-2C that had joined Whiplash for the operation.

The AB-2C was a specially modified version of the B-2A, prepared under Office of Special Technology supervision as part of the Air Force program to investigate replacements for the AC-130. The AB-2C was essentially just a test bed for the weapon system; it was very likely that the final design would be completely automated. But in the meantime, the two men and one woman aboard as crew relished the chance to show what they and their aircraft could do.

Unlike her conventional gunship forebears, the modified stealth bomber carried no howitzers or cannons. Instead, there were two laser weapons in what had been the Spirit’s bomb bay. Descendants of the Firestrike weapon first developed by Northrop Grumman, the lasers were capable of sending a directed beam of just over 100 kW into a target.

The forward laser of the AB-2C burned holes in the skulls of the two mujahideen manning the post in a matter of milliseconds. The crew then sought other targets, concentrating first on the prepositioned machine guns, cooking off their ammunition so they couldn’t be used against the Marines.

Meanwhile, Danny did one last check of the target area and the descending squad before manually deploying his parachute. Though not absolutely necessary, the chute allowed for a softer, surer landing — and not coincidentally, was a hell of a lot easier on his knees.

“I’m in,” said Sugar, landing just to his left on the roof of the building in the center of the targeted compound.

Danny touched down a few seconds later. He quick-released his chute gear and sprinted toward the rooftop defense position. Sugar had already secured it, ramming what looked like a small stopper in the mouth of the machine gun in place there.

“Fire in the hole!” she yelled, somewhat dramatically.

Danny turned away as the charge in the stopper ignited. The blast ripped back the barrel of the gun, rendering it impotent. The sound was lost in the crescendo of the attack near the front gate.

“Let’s go inside,” said Danny as the other two members of his fire team reached the roof.

Melissa was thrown against her restraints as the Osprey pitched hard to get on a new course, avoiding the MC-17 swooping in low over the compound. As the black cargo aircraft came in, two large containers trundled down the interior rail system to the rear bay doors. The large rectangular boxes looked like smaller versions of the shipping containers that carried so much freight around the world. Long droguelike parachutes deployed as the boxes left the aircraft, slowing their descent just enough to allow the cushioned bottoms to properly absorb the blow from the fall.

The flat screen at the forward station in the Osprey’s hold received input from the MC-17’s target-drop system; it declared the boxes had hit exactly 13 and 27 centimeters from their “optimum” positions.

“Good enough for government work,” joked the crew chief, watching over Melissa’s shoulder.

As they hit the ground near the larger citadel, the sides of the large crates unfolded, revealing a quartet of TinkerToy-like objects on a platform. These odd contraptions, known to the Whiplash team simply as Bots, could be configured for a variety of tasks. The eight that had just landed were all equipped with M-134 Gatling guns, essentially the same weapons fired by a door gunner in a helicopter or a crewman on a riverine boat. Moving on tanklike treads, the bots fanned out around the larger of the two central compounds, taking up predesignated positions.

As the last bot reached its destination, all eight began to fire, peppering the exterior of the half-dozen buildings with a barrage of gunfire for exactly twenty-two seconds. As the last bullet hit, a dozen small munitions, launched from the “arms” of the Osprey Melissa was riding in, struck their targets, removing the roofs from the buildings.

Melissa jerked up as the crew chief tapped her on the shoulder.

“Be ready to land in zero-five,” said the chief.

She gave him a thumbs-up, then keyed the screen to show the area Danny was attacking to the northwest.

Danny came in through the door as the flash-bang grenades exploded, his visor automatically adjusting for the burst of light. Something moved on his left; he turned and tapped his trigger, killing a Brother gunman instantly. This was a “full prejudice” mission — no holds barred. The rules of engagement allowed anyone inside to be shot. Everyone in the compound had already declared themselves a member of the Sudan Brotherhood, and the unit’s alignment with al Qaeda made them a legitimate enemy of the United States.

The team moved through the room quickly, reaching the exterior hallway. The next two rooms were unoccupied — the walls were so thin they could see the heat signatures on their helmet screens — and they reached the hallway in seconds.

“Fire in the hole!” yelled Nolan.

Standing at the head of the stairs, the trooper dropped a frag grenade down. As soon as it exploded, the team descended to the first floor of the two-story building. Nolan stayed on the steps while the rest raced to check the rooms.

The walls were either thicker or insulated, and they could no longer count on their infrared images or MY-PID’s interpretation. They swept each room methodically, hitting them with grenades and then coming in. Each room looked like a classroom, with a small desk and a number of chairs — a finishing school for terror.

When the last room had been cleared without finding anyone, Danny checked in with the team that had landed on the building at the diagonal corner from them.

“Flash, what’s your situation?”

“Building cleared. Twelve enemies encountered, twelve down.”

“Move on.”

“Moving.”

“Got all the action over there,” quipped Nolan. “I picked the wrong team.”

Floor cleared, Danny was about to move on to the next building when he heard a shout from Sugar in the back room. He ran over in time to see her pulling a desk away from the side. She kicked the corner of the carpet behind it, revealing a metal trapdoor on the floor.

“Used a string to close it,” she told him. “Squeezed past the desk.”

Danny covered her while she opened it, revealing an unlit staircase.

“Drop a grenade,” he told her.

She did.

“Goes down pretty far,” she told him after it exploded. “Then in that direction, to the north.”

“We’ll have to come back and check it,” he told her. “Help me with the desk.”

They turned the desk on its side and slid it over the hole. Then Danny posted a pair of small video cams, one on the desk and the other at the side of the room, and had MY-PID monitor them for any movement. He also added a pair of charges near the hole so they could blow up anyone trying to escape by remote control.

MY-PID had apparently not discerned the tunnel because of the building structure and angle, which either by design or accident obscured the image on standard radar techniques. The computer calculated — with a 43.5 percent certainty, an admission that it was just guessing — that the tunnel was connected to a mine shaft some two hundred yards away, which had been seen by the radar.

“Target the mine shaft opening,” Danny told the Ospreys. “See if you can bomb it closed.”

In the meantime, the rest of Danny’s team cleared the second building, a one-story structure where three fighters attempted to hold out. Armed with AK-47s, all three were quickly overcome.

“Running out of buildings,” said Flash, reporting that his team had cleared its next objective.

“Keep moving,” barked Danny.

Nuri ducked as a sudden burst of gunfire bounced through the rocks just to his right. The bullets themselves were well off the mark, but they shattered the nearby rock outcropping, sending a fusillade of chips showering in every direction. Several hit his helmet so hard that he fell down. He had an instant headache — but it was far better than what might have occurred had he not given in to Pierce’s “extremelystrongpersonalrecommendation, sir!” that he don a Marine helmet to go with his Whiplash-issued armored vest.

Shaking the blow off, Nuri rose in time to see the Marines he’d been with pump several grenades into the position behind the flattened bus. One of the grenades hit a small store of ammo. This resulted in a cascade of shrapnel even larger than the one that had engulfed him, but it didn’t stop the Brothers who were several yards behind the position from firing.

The Marines countered with a heavy dose of lead from their M-16A4s. Nuri added some rounds from his own SCAR, then saw two of the enemy soldiers running down the hillside on his left. As he swung around to fire, one of the men dropped straight back, taken down by a Marine sniper.

The other tossed a grenade, big and fat, directly at him.

As the rest of his team headed to take down their third and final building, Danny diverted to check on the “spikes” that had been launched and planted just after the start of the mission.

The “spikes”—they had no official name beyond a series of letters and numbers — were a quartet of long metal tubes that were literally rocketed into the ground after being launched from the MC-17. After insertion, a network of small wires shot from the bodies of the spikes, creating a field of electric current — a virtual electric fence, or for the more sci-fi oriented, a force field. Anyone attempting to run through the area protected by the spikes would receive a massive jolt of electricity, roughly the equivalent of three hits from a commercial grade Taser.

The system wasn’t foolproof. A very determined enemy willing to sacrifice a few men could conceivably force his way through. And an enemy that knew what he was dealing with could punch a hole through the defenses by destroying two of the spikes. But in the dark, a confused and unsophisticated enemy would be surprised and stunned by the force of the blow: as evidenced by the two twitching men lying on the other side of the fence Danny saw as he approached.

With the assurance that the spikes were working, he took a quick detour to his left, running in the direction of the citadel cluster where the bots had landed. Here another set of spikes had embedded themselves between the closest ring of defenders and the buildings. Covering a wider ground, the spikes were backed by two of the bots. At least a half-dozen bodies lay on the other side of the virtual fence; from where Danny was, it was impossible to see if they were dead or merely stunned by the shock.

The bots had the buildings under siege. A violent firefight flared at the southeastern corner. Danny considered calling in another round of mini-JDAMs to subdue the resistance, but decided not to — too much damage and they’d never be able to recover the missing UAV parts if they were inside.

By the time he returned to the buildings he’d attacked, both teams were engaged in a gun battle with several Brothers around the last unsearched building.

“I figure this much resistance, it’s a good bet what we want is inside,” said Flash, who was huddled behind the corner of the building across the way. “What do you want to do?”

“Put some grenades through the window,” said Danny. “Lives are more important.”

Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true — everyone on Whiplash was expendable, and they knew it — but Flash complied. He loaded a round into the snap-on launcher beneath his SCAR’s gun barrel, sighted on the window the Brothers were firing from, and pulled the trigger.

An ordinary grenade fired by a skilled fighter would have a fair chance of getting through the window, but even a novice could have succeeded with Flash’s setup. The grenade was a guided munition, designed to follow the beam projected by the laser at the top of Flash’s gun. The round flew through the window and exploded inside, instantly killing all three fighters.

The gun battle continued. There were four men up on the roof of the building. Two had machine guns, and with constant fire they were able to keep the team at bay. Flash had sent two troopers around the side, and he was reluctant to fire any grenades near them, fearing they would be crushed by the wall if it collapsed. Their positions were marked out on his screen by MY-PID, which kept track of the members by reading the location of the transponders in bracelets each wore.

Danny finally decided the best solution was to call in a laser strike.

“Team, stand by,” he told the others before connecting with the laser plane.

“Alert,” said MY-PID, interrupting his transmission. “Four subjects are exiting from Mine Entrance X-ray Dog one five.”

The attack by the minibombs had failed to close the entrance. Danny told the laser ship to stand by, then called up to the Osprey, where his four-member team of reserves, including Melissa, were waiting for their part in the assault.

“We have a slight change in plans,” he told them. “We have people coming out of the mine.”

“We’re just talking about it now,” said Shorty, handling the team communications. “We’ll get them.”

“Melissa, are you all right with this?” Danny.

“I’m anxious to get going.”

“Roger that. Whiplash Six out.”

Nuri cursed as the grenade exploded a few yards away. By then he was facedown in the dirt, the rest of his body hunched flat. The concussion slammed him flat so hard he blanked out. He came to a moment later, feeling as if the back of his skull had been blown straight off. But only his helmet had been forced away, the chin strap sheared off.

He’d also lost his right earplug. He fished around for it — the plug had his radio headset embedded in it — but couldn’t find the wire. It had been severed in the explosion.

Amazing I wasn’t hit, he said to himself.

He glanced at his right arm and realized that wasn’t true — blood was running down the front of his bicep, soaking into the skin.

Shit.

“Sir! Sir! You OK?” yelled a corpsman, running to his position.

Nuri flexed his fingers.

“I’m OK,” he told him. “Help some of those guys.”

“Where?”

Nuri looked in the direction of the Marines who’d been with him earlier, expecting to see them lying on the ground. Instead, they were charging the gate position.

“I’m fine,” he yelled to the corpsman, hustling after them.

Melissa gripped the assault rifle and tried to steady her breathing as the Osprey sailed toward the hill where the men were escaping from the mine. Despite her best efforts, she was hyperventilating, gulping huge wads of air into her lungs.

The aircraft began to stutter. Melissa looked up, worried that they were about to go down.

“They’re firing rounds to try and stop them,” explained Shorty. “The pilots will herd them into a corner, assuming they don’t kill them. Be ready.”

“I’m ready,” she yelled. “I’m as ready as ready.”

Danny turned the corner just behind Flash as the laser took out the last of the gunmen on the roof. Already Sugar and one of the other troopers were at the door; within seconds there was a double explosion inside — a pair of grenades tossed by the two Whiplashers. Smoke rose from the building, and then the wall at the corner of the house furled downward, collapsing from the force of the blast.

“Shug!” yelled Danny.

“I’m OK, Colonel. We’re here. All present and accounted for.”

The team pushed into the house, moving quickly through the first floor. The only people they found were dead — a dozen fighters, all with weapons either in their hands or nearby.

Danny had concluded by now that either his guess on where the UAV parts would be found was wrong and they were in the second cluster of buildings, or they had never been in the camp to begin with. The search of the second floor, which had suffered considerable damage and was missing half its roof, seemed to confirm that, though they did retrieve a desktop computer from one of the rooms where the wall had partially collapsed.

“Sugar, secure the computer CPU with the drive and everything,” said Danny. “Everybody else, we’ll form up outside and take the other cluster.”

Danny did a quick review of the situation. The men who’d come out of the mine shaft were being pursued by the team in the Osprey; MY-PID could track them relatively easily now and they wouldn’t get far. The defenses at the southern wall of the compound had been almost completely neutralized. Upward of four dozen individuals were hunkered down in the huts and tents scattered on the northwestern side of the compound; they showed no inclination to join the fighting. MY-PID’s analysis showed these were mostly women.

But resistance at the last citadel remained strong. Apparently realizing the bots wouldn’t go inside the buildings, the men in the outer ring of houses had spread out, firing intermittently and quickly retreating. This made it more difficult for the robots to concentrate their fire. While the guns did a reasonable job of chewing into the outer walls, the Brothers had begun firing from well inside and in some cases behind the buildings.

Danny had the laser pick off anyone who was uncovered. Then he called over to the Marine captain to get him to move his mortars so they could target the complex.

“I don’t want them to fire unless I give the order,” Danny told Pierce. “But it may come to that.”

“Will do — we have a couple of hard knots of resistance on the western and eastern ends,” reported the captain. “We’ll keep them engaged.” His voice calmed somewhat under fire — truly something you’d only find in a Marine.

Danny circled around toward the north side of the second compound. Flash had repositioned the bots to support their assault. He released two to go back and cover the approach from the gate area, in case the Brothers there tried rallying and ran through the spikes. And he detailed one to accompany them inside the buildings, giving them extra firepower if necessary.

Flash looked up as Danny came around the corner to join the small group. “We’re ready,” said Flash.

“Textbook,” said Danny, raising his hand and waving them to start.

The Marines cleared the gate positions and ran toward the charred remains of the bus. Nuri realized they weren’t going to stop.

“Wait!” Nuri yelled. “No! No!”

He couldn’t tell if the Marines heard him or not. Between his headache and unbalanced hearing, the entire world seemed off-kilter, a crazy quilt of explosions and gunfire.

“Stop, damn it! Stop!”

There were some barks over the radio net — garbled communications that literally sounded like dogs yapping. Nuri sprinted over two dead bodies and caught up to the Marines as they broke past the rocks on the other side of the bus. One of them looked back, but if he saw him, he obviously thought he was urging them on — they continued running, clearing the second set of defenses and the bodies clustered there.

Screaming at the top of his lungs, Nuri tried to warn them about the spikes. There were several bodies near the invisible fence, Brothers who’d been knocked out by the voltage or possibly shot in the cross fire. The Marines seemed intent on getting beyond them before they stopped running.

Nearly out of breath, Nuri was about to give up — the hell with the damn jerks if they couldn’t obey an order not to attack past a certain line. The spikes would teach them a thing or two about being overaggressive.

Then he saw one of the bots trundling up in their direction.

With a stream of curses, he plunged ahead, lunging toward the first man in the group. He leapt up, throwing himself into the middle of the knot as they reached the fence line. Alerted by the bracelet on his wrist, the bot halted its targeting sequence, fearing friendly fire.

Unfortunately, Nuri’s momentum took him and the Marine he landed on full force into the virtual fence. His head felt as if it had exploded, then went numb. Every joint in his body vibrated. He fell to the ground, head still within the field, writhing in pain. He tried to push himself back but could not. His legs and arms flopping helplessly up and down, he tried to talk but could not.

Because the fence was nonlethal, MY-PID’s safety protocols did not allow it to turn the device on or off. It did, however, send an alert to Danny, who dropped back from his assault team and ran down to the fence line. By the time he got in range to see what was happening, the Marines had found their own solution — they pulverized the two devices closest to Nuri, destroying the current.

Not knowing exactly what had happened, Danny assumed Nuri had somehow forgotten about the device. Shaking his head, he told the corpsman to see to him and other two men who’d been paralyzed, then had the rest of the Marines follow him.

Chapter 5

“Come to order! Come to order!” demanded Senator Barrington, the Intelligence Committee chairman.

Ernst practically foamed at the mouth, but he did stop speaking.

“Now,” said Barrington, slamming his gavel down once more for good measure, “we will have a vote on the motion to hold the CIA director in contempt of this committee—”

“And the President,” said Ernst.

“We will not subpoena the President.”

“The President is the one we need to hear from. We should subpoena her. Drag her in here in chains, if necessary.”

Zen had had enough.

“Why do you keep hammering on that?” he said. “What the hell good is it going to do?”

“We have to go on record—”

“Gentlemen!” Barrington once more handled the gavel with feeling. Zen wondered if his arm was becoming numb. “You will address the chair. Senator Stockard, you have the floor.”

Zen cleared his throat. “Everyone knows that the administration and I have not always agreed on everything. In this case, however, I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt — temporarily. If we vote to send a subpoena, it’s going to get ridiculous headlines and be blown up by the media,” continued Zen. He knew that was actually Ernst’s goal, but hoped the rest of his colleagues would listen to reason. “This whole thing is going to become a political football that has nothing to do with the Agency or Raven, whatever it is.”

“As if you don’t know,” said Ernst.

Zen ignored him. “Mr. Chairman, if our goal here is actually to get information, rather than embarrassing the administration and maybe interfering with the country’s pursuit—”

“What pursuit?” yelled Ernst.

Barrington pounded on the table.

“I move to end discussion and vote,” said Zen, realizing it was hopeless.

The motion carried quickly, the senators anxious to get out of the chamber. Zen was the only one opposed.

Chapter 6

Danny ran through the rubble of the ruined one-story building, leaping across the battered stones just in time to join the team assaulting the second house. By now the gunfire had nearly stopped, with only a few gunmen at the far western stretch of the camp defenses continuing to fire. But MY-PID detected heat signatures inside several of the buildings in the last citadel, and the crazy-quilt nature of the complex meant they had to move slowly. The computer tagged and followed each individual enemy as best it could, feeding a raw tally to Danny upon request — it knew of at least five individuals inside the building they were going into, and at least two more in the adjacent one, which shared a wall and almost certainly a doorway.

They found the first two individuals bleeding out in the hallway, gut-shot by earlier fire. Neither had long to live; the team members pulled away their weapons, trussed their arms for safety, then carried them outside the building. Danny watched as the two men laid one of the enemy soldiers down gently.

The gesture struck him as odd and yet touching at the same time — the gravely wounded enemies had been trying to kill the Whiplash troopers just a few minutes ago, and were now being treated with a remarkable and even incongruent sense of dignity and care. In his experience, the acid of battle usually eroded any impulse toward caring for an enemy; he had seen many men simply kill people terminally wounded as they passed. He wondered if either trooper could have explained what they did. Most likely they would have said only that they were getting the men out of the way, and would have been at a loss to say why they hadn’t simply dumped them on the ground. It was all unconscious action, an expression of how they lived rather than how they thought.

Danny caught up with the team clearing the last room in the building. The procedure was repetitive to the point of being industrial: mechanical gestures with their hands, a sweep of eyes, the call of “Clear.”

“Room is clear!” yelled Flash.

An explosion shook the building. MY-PID immediately warned that the right side of the structure appeared ready to collapse.

“Back up! Back up!” yelled Danny, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room.

There was gunfire, then another explosion. Danny grabbed hold of the trooper in front of him and pulled him back.

“Out! Out!” he yelled, and then stepped up to the next man, pulling him back, and then the next.

The floor rumbled. Flash and Nolan appeared in front of him, backing their way out.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” yelled Danny as the building began to fall around them.

The dust blocked his helmet’s infrared vision, shrouding him in darkness. He put his hand out and touched the back of one of his troopers — it was impossible to tell at the moment which — and nudged him, moving with him as the wall to the right sheared downward. Something hit Danny in the back and he tumbled forward, bowling the other man over. He pushed up, throwing off a beam, then realized he was outside. The upper floor of the building had almost literally disintegrated, spewing its remains in the air. The assault team began sounding off; MY-PID reported that all were accounted for.

The Marines who’d come up with Danny from the front gate began helping clear the debris. The air around them was still clouded with dust, but the far side of the citadel was clear enough for both the bots and the laser ship above to make out a dozen targets trying to escape. Within moments the twelve were dead.

MY-PID reported that it could not find any heat signatures within the building complex.

“There were computers and metal in that room,” Flash told Danny, pointing to the collapsed debris. “I think the aircraft were in there.”

“Let’s get digging.”

“They’re putting up their hands,” said Shorty. “They want to surrender.”

Melissa looked at the screen. There were four men, one of whom was almost certainly the Russian — MY-PID identified him as clean-shaven and wearing western clothes.

He had a duffel bag.

“Cease fire,” said Shorty over the Osprey radio, though the pilots already had. “What do you think, ma’am?”

Her orders were to recover the UAV brain intact if possible. That potentially conflicted with what Danny had told her — they would kill the Russian.

Which took precedence?

Did it matter? She couldn’t kill the man in cold blood. Not even Danny would have done that.

The Russian would be valuable — they could get a lot of intelligence out of him if he really was an expert.

“Let’s get down there and take them,” she told the trooper.

The MC-17 swooped down over the camp and dropped its third and last container into the area just south of the cluster of buildings. This one contained two bots, which were somewhat larger than the others. They looked like downsized construction vehicles: one had a clamshell, the other a crane arm with various attachments.

Unlike the gun bots, which were powered by small hydrogen fuel cells, these ran on turbo diesel engines. They lacked innate intelligence; team members controlled them via a set of remote controls. While more powerful, they were not much different than the devices used back home at small construction sites to handle jobs where traditional-sized earthmovers and cranes were either overkill or too big to fit on a work site.

Two troopers checked them out, started them up, then walked them over toward Danny and Flash, who were already pulling some of the debris away.

It took about ten minutes before they could see the outline of the room. In fact there was an aircraft there — MY-PID ID’ed the wing of a Predator. With a little more digging, Danny could make out other parts of the aircraft and a tabletop with diagnostic tools.

He suddenly got a strange feeling — not so much a premonition as déjà vu.

“Everybody back!” he yelled. “Back!”

Flash looked up at him. “Boss?”

“Back!” Danny demanded. “Controllers, you too.”

After the team retreated to the outskirts of the ruins, Danny changed the video feed in his screen to the crane’s.

“I can pull the wing straight up, Colonel,” said the man operating the bot.

“Go for it.”

Danny watched as the crane’s claws grasped the wing and pulled upward. There was a flash. An explosion shook the ruins, bringing down the parts of the building that hadn’t fallen earlier.

“How’d you know?” asked Flash as the dust settled.

“It looked familiar,” said Danny.

Melissa went out last, trotting behind the Whiplash team members as they surrounded the four men. The vest and helmet she’d donned were heavy and foreign; while the team members compared them favorably to the traditional body armor, they felt constricting to her. Sweat poured down her temples, and her arms were awash with it.

“Put down any weapons,” Melissa said in Arabic.

When no one moved, she realized she’d forgotten to switch her com system into loudspeaker mode. Her mind blanked and she couldn’t remember how to do it. Finally, Melissa flipped up her visor and yelled the words.

The men held their arms out to their sides.

“Separate!” she ordered. “Move apart or we will fire.”

They slowly began stepping aside. Two of the team members walked toward the man farthest to the right. The Osprey circled ahead, the thump of its rotors vibrating against the hard ground and nearby hills. Melissa felt her heart racing and tried to calm it.

Suddenly, one of the men began running toward her.

Why? she wondered.

Then she knew.

“Bomb!”

Danny saw the flash in his visor screen as he switched back to check on the escapees.

All he saw was white in the center of black. It seemed like forever before the camera on the Osprey supplying the feed readjusted.

There was a team member down.

Melissa.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “Shorty? Shorty!”

“We have one man down,” said the trooper. “Another minor injury. All of the prisoners are dead.”

“What the hell happened?” demanded Danny.

“He had a vest, and explosives in a knapsack. We have high-tech parts in a bag.”

“What’s Melissa’s status?”

“Breathing. Losing a lot of blood.”

“Evac her the hell out of there.”

“We’re working on it, Colonel. We’re working on it.”

Chapter 7

Jonathon Reid pushed his chair away from the table and rose. He felt as if he’d taken a breath of fresh air for the first time in weeks.

“The electronics match,” he said. “We’ve got it. Thank God.”

“I’m always amazed at how much God is blamed for what humans do,” said Ray Rubeo.

Reid stifled a smirk. He hadn’t known the scientist even believed in God.

“They’ll all be back in Ethiopia inside an hour,” Breanna said. “Three wounded, including the CIA officer. Light casualties, considering.”

Reid nodded. It was an absurdly low casualty rate, given what had been at stake.

There was a certain poetic justice in the fact that the person who’d been most seriously wounded was the one attached to the program. It was an extremely uncharitable thought. Yet that’s what he felt.

He also felt it would have been far more satisfying if it was Harker who’d been wounded.

“Ilse has lost a lot of blood,” said Breanna, who as usual seemed to be reading his mind. “But her vitals are stable. She took some shrapnel in the face. That’s probably the most serious. The cut in her neck didn’t reach the artery. I’m pretty sure she’ll live.”

Reid nodded. The other two injuries were Marines. Both were bullet wounds, one in the arm and one in the leg.

“As soon as all our people are out, the Tomahawks will finish off the camp buildings,” said Breanna. “It’ll be wiped out completely.”

“Do you want to tell the President, or should I?”

“You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll stay here until they’re all on the ground.”

Walking to his office, Reid realized that, if he wished, he could hint that the Russian involvement in the entire affair seemed less than coincidental. It could easily be made to seem part of a conspiracy to purposely “lose” American technology, without actually appearing criminal about it. A case could easily be constructed that pointed the finger at Harker.

Easily.

But Reid would not do that. He knew the facts. And even though he wished Harker ill, he would not bend the truth to harm him.

It occurred to Reid as he sat down at his desk that Harker might actually be in line to take over Edmund’s job. If that were the case…

No, Reid told himself, I must act responsibly. No conspiracy theories, no hints, just the facts.

He picked up the phone and called the White House.

“You’re awful quiet,” Breanna said to Rubeo as they watched the first Osprey take off.

“Yes,” he said, in his long drawn-out way.

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

“We have the hardware,” said Rubeo.

“And?”

“One never knows.”

Chapter 8

Danny hopped out of the Osprey as it settled down, sprinting toward the building that had been turned into a temporary clinic. Two Navy doctors and a small team of corpsmen were flown in prior to the strike to tend to the wounded.

A corpsman met him at the door.

“How are my people?” asked Danny, stepping into the large room.

“All stable, Colonel. We’re just getting ready to evac to Germany.”

Four stretchers and a host of medical equipment were spread out in the room. One of the patients was sitting on a chair, arm in a sling. Another was sitting up on his bed. The medical people were clustered around the third, lying prone on the table.

“How’s Melissa?” asked Danny.

“Serious but stable,” said one of the doctors near her. He came over to Danny. “She’ll make it. Your people did excellent work. Excellent.”

“Can she talk?”

The doctor grimaced. “She’s unconscious. Her face is fairly bashed up. She’ll need plastic surgery. Maybe a lot.”

Danny walked over to the stretcher. Melissa’s face was bundled in bandages.

Her face. Her beautiful face.

“Transport is ready!” yelled the corpsman. “They’re waiting for us!”

“Let’s move it!” said the doctor.

Danny stepped back and watched as they took her and the others out.

“Don’t let her die, God,” he prayed quietly. “And let her be the person she was before all of this.”

Chapter 9

Christine Mary Todd took the news like she took most news — calmly, without noticeable emotion. She thanked Jonathon Reid, not only for helping make the mission a success, but for having had the fortitude to bring the matter to her attention despite what she guessed was considerable personal anguish and, undoubtedly, backlash from the intelligence community.

She hung up the phone, then called Blitz and Bozzone in to see her.

Waiting for them, she took a sip of tea — lukewarm, but welcome nonetheless — and tried to stretch her legs in the small office. The Intelligence Committee vote was deeply unfortunate; it made it difficult for her to send Edmund over to talk to them without seeming to give in. The political nuances of weakening her image could easily come back to haunt her in the future.

But now that Raven was safely in their hands, she had no problem giving the committee the information. In fact, handled properly, it could help fend off another episode like this one.

How exactly could she deal with this?

Perhaps she could persuade the committee to pull back on the subpoena. But they seemed to be in no mood to do so, not given the vote. Only Zen Stockard had stood against them.

She went back to the phone. “Give me Senator Stockard’s office.”

Bozzone came in while she was waiting on the phone. Todd motioned for him to sit down.

Zen’s appointment secretary said he was on the Senate floor, which made it impossible to talk to him immediately.

“I’d like to speak with him personally,” Todd told her. “When do you think he would have a hole in his schedule?”

“For you, he would always be available, Ms. President. But um, uh—”

An idea occurred to her.

“Does he still go to the Nationals baseball games?”

“Yes, ma’am. As a matter of fact, he’s planning on going this evening, I happen to know.”

Todd winked at Bozzone. “Ask if he’d like a better seat.”

Chapter 10

With the team back safely, MY-PID went to work filling in the background and details. It examined the data gathered during the raid, including the cell and satellite phones that had been collected. The computer attempted to find and connect information relating to the phones — where they’d been bought, how they were paid for, etc. — with a vast data bank. The first wave of queries established that the phones were all somewhat ordinary, purchased in Europe at various times. The second found a number of other phones that were undoubtedly purchased at the same time — their sim cards were part of a series that would have been included in a large batch of purchases. The next round of queries and links discovered that, for the most part, the phones had been used in Africa and the Middle East— Egypt especially.

The computer traced the line of money that paid for the phones back to al Qaeda. It was a thin, tenuous line, but a line nonetheless.

There was an incredible amount of data, most of which seemed trivial and only distantly related. The only thing that really stood out was the fact that a cell phone purchased by the same credit card that had bought a number of others at the camp had been used the night before in Washington, D.C.

“That’s more than a little interesting,” said Breanna.

“Hmmm,” said Reid, looking over the results.

An hour later Reid and Breanna sat together in the back of a Chevy Impala. Up front, the head of the FBI task force on domestic terrorism waited with them as a Bureau emergency response team and officers from the Washington, D.C., SWAT unit prepared to go into a house near where the call had been made. The decision to ask for a search warrant had come after the discovery of the cell phone led to a scouring of phone records that discovered a link between the number that had been called and a landline in one of the apartments on the street itself.

The link was tenuous — the number the cell phone had called had been used several months before to call a number in Pakistan used by a known Muslim radical; that radical, in turn, had called another number, which had called the D.C. apartment. But that information led to data about the man who had rented the apartment, a supposedly Egyptian student who, it turned out, was not registered as a student in American immigration records.

This did not make him a member of al Qaeda. Nor could it be assumed that the man had failed to register as the law required: Mistakes in the records were very common, as the FBI supervisor explained.

But it did have to be checked out.

They weren’t taking it lightly. The SWAT team alone had two dozen men on the scene. And that didn’t count the ordinary policemen blocking the street and helping cover the rear alleyway.

The FBI supervisor, Bob Randolph, was an affable Boston area native who’d relocated to D.C. some years before. Breanna had met him once or twice at government conferences, but had never had more than a brief conversation with him.

“Lovely area,” he said, glancing at the graffiti scrawled on the wall of the garage across from them. Next to the building, several garbage cans overflowed with refuse.

“It’ll be quiet tonight,” said Reid dryly.

Randolph gave a polite little laugh. Then he put his hand to his ear.

“Here we go. They’re going in,” he said.

Breanna folded her arms against her chest, waiting. She thought of her fight with Zen — not a fight so much as a disagreement, and not so much a disagreement exactly as just uncomfortableness. She’d been forced into a role she didn’t want to be in, opposing him.

He always seemed to take it all in stride. Why couldn’t she?

“They’re inside,” said Randolph. He leaned toward the driver. “Let’s move up.”

Breanna jerked her head as a bomb squad truck raced past them to the front of the building.

“Are there explosives?” she asked.

“Just a precaution,” said Randolph. “They’re just securing the place now. We have to, you know, anticipate.”

They pulled up at the end of the block. The adjoining houses had been evacuated; Breanna could see small knots of people on the other side herded behind a pair of police sawhorses, one of which was just now being put in place.

“News media will get a hold of it soon,” said Randolph. “Hold on.”

He pressed his hand to his ear.

“We have a dead body inside,” he said. “And traces of explosives in the basement.”

“If nothing else,” said Reid, “it would appear we’ve got a story for the press.”

Chapter 11

Ken glanced to his left and right as he opened the car trunk. He’d found it necessary to steal the car to get here easily; the trade-off was paranoia that someone would spot it and know it was stolen. As highly unlikely as that might be, he couldn’t get the thought out of his mind.

The trunk smelled of fuel. No wonder: the can he’d packed had tipped over while he drove, sending the liquid all over. But no harm done: There was still plenty left.

He took the small robot airplane from the rear of the trunk. Cradling the two wings under his right hand and holding the body in his left, he managed to push the trunk lid back down. Then he walked up the short flight of steps from the schoolyard to the back of the building.

The athletic field was empty. It was starting to get dark. He was two hours behind schedule; he’d planned to launch much closer to five but had last minute problems loading the program into the plane. He was sure it was going to work — sure that the guidance system knew it was supposed to target Christine Mary Todd, the Satans’ President, and knew that her primary location was the White House, which was just over the next hill about three-quarters of a mile away. He’d entered the information about the President — in fact, nearly everything he could find on the Internet about her personal habits, her vehicles, her aides, the Secret Service — everything. He’d found several human interest stories and entered them as well. The program interface had taken it eagerly.

Whether it would actually work—whether his guesses about the software program were correct — that was impossible to tell.

The bomb he had embedded in the fuselage of the aircraft would definitely go off, of that he was certain.

He assembled the wings. The UAV was a simple and ingenious aircraft, a perfect weapon. Anyone who saw it in the air would believe it was a police monitoring device. The camera was still attached, in fact — it had to be, as it helped guide the aircraft.

Wings attached, Ken stood back and pressed the ignition on the controller to start the plane.

The engine started right up. He turned, wondering if he heard someone coming up behind him.

There was no one there. By the time he turned back around, the aircraft was racing across the field, bouncing as it became airborne.

It seemed to have a mind of its own, as if anxious to complete its mission.

Go! he thought. Go!

It did — for about sixty seconds. Then suddenly it veered to the right, zooming high into the clouds.

Ken stared in disbelief. Not only was it going off course, but it was flying away from the city.

He was a failure.

Angrily, he slammed the knapsack that contained the laptop to the ground and kicked it several times, even jumping on it in his anger. Finally he got control of himself. He had to dispose of the thing; it was evidence.

He’d find another way to strike. For now, he had to follow through on his plan to escape.

Ten minutes later, crossing the bridge on Route 1, the smell of the fuel in the trunk gave him an idea: he should stop and throw the car into reverse, cause an explosion that would at least kill someone.

But he wasn’t a martyr at heart. His death had to mean something. And it wouldn’t. Not yet.

He crossed the bridge and found a place to park. Then he walked back down to the river and with a heave tossed the knapsack and laptop into the water.

When he was sure it had sank, he turned and began walking in the direction of the Pentagon Metro stop. Before the night was through, he’d be on an Amtrak heading for Florida.

After that, who knew?

Chapter 12

“Radio says you created quite a traffic jam on the way over,” said Zen, wheeling past the Secret Service agent to greet the President as she arrived at the game.

“Getting through Washington by street is always fun,” she told him, leaning down to kiss him on the cheek. “If it wouldn’t have caused such a fuss, I would have come by helicopter.”

“Given the pitchers tonight, you may want to leave by one,” said Zen. “And soon.”

“Oh come on.”

Zen nodded at the President’s husband, who, though not as hardy a fan of the Nationals as Zen had become, was nonetheless a fellow sufferer.

“Who are your friends?” asked the President, gesturing to the small entourage Zen had left back by the entrance to the President’s suite.

“A very good friend of mine, Mark Stoner,” Zen told her. “He was a CIA officer—”

“Oh, that’s the man who tried to kill you,” said Todd. “And you saved his life.”

“He was sick.”

“I know the history well,” said Todd. She had sent Zen to the meeting where he had inadvertently become Stoner’s target. “Is he OK?”

“He’s still recovering. He has a long way to go. He’s with one of his doctors, and my bodyguard. Baseball seems to be helping bring him back.”

“I’d like to meet him.” The President glanced at the head of her security detail. “OK?”

“I think it would be fine,” said Zen.

The Secret Service agents were wary, but the head of the detail nodded. Zen wheeled back a bit.

“Hey Mark, Doc, come on. Simeon — you too.”

The men, along with two more Secret Service escorts, came into the suite box. Just then, the National Anthem began.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me a moment, gentlemen,” said the President. “I always sing with the anthem. I hope my voice won’t offend you.”

Stoner gazed around the box, taking it all in. The President and her entourage were behind a thick plate of bulletproof glass, looking out at the stadium. There were two rows of seats in front of the box; these belonged to the suite and were unoccupied, except for two Secret Service agents who surveyed the crowd. Zen had hinted they might be able to sit there during the game; the view was actually not as good as from his seats, he claimed, but there would be free waiter service.

Stoner’s gaze moved out beyond the windows. There was another police UAV above the stadium, flying over the area where the parking garage was. It circled the stadium, its wing dipping erratically.

It looked like the one from the night before. And yet, as he studied it, he noticed several differences. Its nose was bigger than the other one. It was flying differently — the other had orbited endlessly; this one weaved, as if looking for something specific.

Stoner took a step forward, then another.

The aircraft turned. It was coming for them.

No…

Yes.

He leapt forward. One of the Secret Service agents put a hand up to stop him. Stoner tossed him aside, then jumped up and grabbed his fingers into the wooden panel of the ceiling, using them to swing his feet up against the glass. It broke with a splatter and he sailed into the seats overlooking the ball field. He tried to roll onto his side as he flew but couldn’t quite make it; his elbow smacked hard against one of the seat backs.

It hurt. That was a new sensation.

Stoner rose, saw the aircraft, and leapt straight out at it, his bionically enhanced legs giving him the leverage of an Olympic pole vaulter.

He caught the wing of the aircraft with his right hand, pushing it as violently as he could before falling straight down into a black, black hole.

Chapter 13

Zen gasped as the air in front of the suite erupted in fire. Something burst in his face. He and his wheelchair flew backward against the wall. The next thing he knew he was on the ground in the dark. Something was on top of him. It was a piece of the ceiling. He pushed it off, then levered himself upright in time to see two Secret Service agents with drawn Uzis pulling the President from the suite.

“What the hell!” yelled Zen.

Someone grabbed him and jerked him up.

“What the hell is going on!” he yelled, taking a swing with his elbow.

He and the man who had picked him up fell down.

“Sir, we’re with the President,” yelled another man. “We’re taking you to safety. Just come!”

Someone else was yelling, “Go, go, go!”

Zen was picked up again. This time he didn’t fight.

Two and a half minutes later he was deposited in the back of a black SUV. President Todd was next to him.

“Are you OK, Jeff?” she asked.

“I–I guess so.”

“There was a bomb in a plane,” Todd told him. “They’re just getting the details now. I have to go back to the White House.”

“My friends—”

“They’re upstairs.”

“I want to stay with them.”

“Jeff, this is very serious.”

“I have to stay with them,” insisted Zen.

Todd rapped on the window separating her from the front.

“Let the senator out. He wants to be with his friends.”

“Ma’am—”

“Considering that one of them just saved my life,” she said, “it’s the least we can do.”

By the time Zen reached Stoner, he had been loaded onto a stretcher and was being taken out onto the field where a medevac helicopter was waiting. One of the attendants who had worked on him after he fell into the crowd looked at Zen and shook his head.

“Is he dead?” Zen asked.

“Which one?”

“The guy who fell from the box up there,” said Zen, pointing.

“No, sir. But I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Zen turned his head as the helicopter lifted off with Stoner inside.

“He will,” Zen said. “I’ve seen him die before.”

Chapter 14

Breanna ran to the door as Zen’s van pulled up. She hesitated, unsuccessfully trying to stop her tears before opening the door.

“Hey,” he said as he wheeled toward her. “What’s up?”

“Oh my God, Zen, how can you be so goddamn cool?” She ran out and threw her arms around his chest. Her sobs erupted into a body-shaking tremor.

“Hey, I’m OK,” he protested. “Hardly even a scratch. I was more worried about my wheelchair.”

“Jeff, Jeff,” she said, over and over again. “God. My God.”

“Hey guys!” Zen waved.

Breanna turned around to see Teri and Caroline in the doorway. Two local policemen and the department chief loomed behind them; the chief had taken it upon himself to come over to protect them.

“I don’t know what all the fuss is,” he said as the girls ran to him. “But I’m not proud — I’ll take kisses.”

When she managed to calm down, Breanna asked what had happened.

“I’ll give you a rundown as I change,” Zen told her, glancing at Teri — an indication he didn’t want her to hear all of the details. “But I gotta go over to the hospital. Mark’s there.”

“Mark?”

“Stoner. He saved the President’s life.”

None of that had been in the media reports.

“Is he OK?” Breanna asked.

Zen glanced at Teri again.

“I gotta go. Help me change, OK?”

Breanna suppressed a shudder, then followed her husband into the house.