The Night Ranger

28

LANGLEY

Shafer and Duto stood side by side behind Tomaso’s workstation, watching the convoy chug northeast through the empty plains. Wizard and Awaale had set their meeting at an abandoned watering hole ten kilometers from Wizard’s camp. They were less than three kilometers apart, close enough that they would soon glimpse each other through the scrub that covered the pancake-flat land. Tomaso dialed back the Reaper’s main camera to pick up both the White Men and the Ditas simultaneously.

“The God view.”

“The Old Testament God,” Shafer said. “All-seeing and vengeful and loaded for bear.”

“Just wish we had a little more ammo.”

“A B-52’s worth, yeah.”

“What’s a B-52?”

This kid. “Ever heard of the Cold War? Dr. Strangelove—”

Tomaso grinned. “Messing with you, Ellis. Course I know what a B-52 is.”

“I hope you choke on your hair.”

But the joke was on them both. Maybe they didn’t need an eight-engine bomber, but they could have used an A-10 with a full load of depleted uranium shells. The gap between the two militias was painful to see.

The Dita Boys had showed up at the meeting site a few minutes before Wells called Shafer from the convoy. As Shafer had warned Wells, the Ditas had come with a dozen technicals, enough to keep four in reserve in case Wizard tried to circle and attack from the rear. Each technical was mounted with a 12.7-millimeter NSV machine gun draped with belts of copper-jacketed ammunition. Shafer recognized the NSVs immediately. They had been the Red Army’s frontline machine gun during the seventies and eighties. They were sleek, nasty weapons that fired thirteen rounds a second. They were easily lethal at five hundred meters, and capable of serious damage at three times that distance. A skilled NSV gunner could take out a light plane.

The Ditas didn’t bother with unarmed pickups, either. Their soldiers traveled in three open-topped five-ton trucks, the same troop transport that real armies used. At this distance, even their uniforms were convincing, the mismatched jumble of their camouflage blurring together.

Meanwhile, the White Men looked like a bunch of recruits on their way to their first day of basic training. Or worse, kids headed for camp, with those ridiculous Range Rovers that belonged in a Connecticut suburb. Coach said if we were good we could ride with him after practice. Their lone technical was a couple hundred meters ahead. The rest of the convoy was bunched close, running single file down the track, spinning up mud.

Shafer had worried that Awaale might set an ambush near Wizard’s camp, trapping the White Men before the meeting. Instead, the Ditas hadn’t even bothered with scouts. Shafer could see why. No doubt Awaale saw the meeting itself as all the trap he needed. The technicals gave the Ditas an overwhelming advantage. Once Wizard brought his men within firing distance of those machine guns, Awaale would decide whether they left.

Whether the White Men survived this battle or not was irrelevant to Shafer. The alliance between Wells and Wizard didn’t even deserve to be called a marriage of convenience. It was more like a one-night stand. But if the White Men were overrun straightaway, Wells and the hostages would be captured. Wells might be killed on the spot. For them to have any chance at all of getting away clean, Tomaso would have to land the Reaper’s five-hundred-pounder perfectly and Wizard would have to move instantly in the chaos that followed.

—

Duto tapped Shafer’s shoulder. “Come.” Duto had been furious since Wells asked for help, confirming what they all knew anyway, that the White Men were badly outgunned.

“This is not the time.”

“Now, Ellis.” Duto kept his voice even, walked out loose and easy, like he was inviting Shafer for lunch. But once they were outside the operations center he grabbed Shafer’s arm and pulled him back to the ice-cold conference room.

“You should have found a way to slow this down, given us time to bring in more drones.”

Like Duto hadn’t signed off, too, making his own selfish calculations.

“You keep forgetting, Vinny. That guy on the ground, Awaale, gets a vote, too. And he wasn’t waiting on us.”

“If Wells hadn’t been so in love with doing this himself, we could have put guys in the air hours ago.”

“Funny. I didn’t see John in your office with a gun to your head to stop you from telling the Pentagon about this. Anyway, what are you worried about? You made the call your eleven-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer told you to make. You’re protected.”

“Not the point.”

They were standing close now, and Shafer took some small pleasure in seeing the row of tiny pimples high on Duto’s forehead. Duto was appearing regularly on CNN and Fox News and Sunday-morning talk shows, raising his profile for his Senate campaign, and he had the bad skin that came with television makeup. Duto could have his teeth brightened until they were supernova white and wear two-thousand-dollar suits, but he’d never be handsome. Shafer knew he shouldn’t care, he was hardly the best-looking guy in the room himself, but he took some small pleasure in Duto’s ugliness. “That’s always the point with you,” Shafer said.

“You let him gamble with these hostages.”

“You’re so upset, I almost forgot it’s his ass on the line out there and not yours, Vinny.”

“We put ourselves in this corner for no reason. Because you couldn’t talk him down last night. He ran all over you. Like he always does.”

“We both know he’s earned the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you should save the blame game until we see whether he pulls it out.”

“This crush you have on him—”

Shafer felt his cheeks sting like Duto had slapped him. “Loyalty. A word I know you can’t imagine.” He brushed past Duto. “If it’s all the same to you, we should get back, see what’s going on over there before you write John’s obituary.”

—

Back at Tomaso’s workstation, they watched in silence as the convoy edged closer. On screen, the technical turned off the track, rolled through a pool of rainwater. The rest of the convoy followed. Fifteen hundred meters from Awaale, the lead three pickups spread out and rode side by side by side, the Rovers single file behind them.

Shafer couldn’t tell if Wizard had a tactical reason for the change or if he simply hoped the T shape might make his force seem larger than it was. Either way, if the White Men tried to charge the Ditas in open pickups, the technicals would tear them apart before they got close, as Wizard surely knew.

Tomaso’s hands never stopped moving, adjusting the cameras, making sure the Reaper was flying smoothly despite the weight imbalance that came from having a five-hundred-pound bomb on one wing and not on the other. He looked up at Shafer.

“The air looks good. Unless you object, I’m going to go brain, fly autopilot on a two-click hold around the Red Six. That way I can focus on the payload. But we’ll only have partial visuals on the friendlies.”

“In English,” Duto said.

Tomaso’s eyes slid to Duto, like he’d just remembered who his real boss was. “We have smooth air right now, nothing the software can’t handle. I want to set the Reaper on autopilot to circle at a two-kilometer radius around those four technicals in the middle. We’re assuming that’s where the enemy commander is—”

“Awaale—” Shafer said.

“Awaale is. That way I don’t have to worry about keeping the Reaper in the air, I can focus on putting the GBU and the Hellfires on target. Only downside is that we may lose visual contact with the friendlies.”

“Sounds fine,” Shafer said.

“Great,” Tomaso said. But his eyes stayed on Duto until the DCI nodded approval.