Raven Strike (32 page)

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.”

N
uri 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.

M
elissa 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.”

D
anny 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.

T
he 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

Washington, D.C.

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

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

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

“And the President,” said Ernst.

“We will
not
subpoena the President.”

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

Zen had had enough.

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

“We have to go on record—”

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

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

“As if you don’t know,” said Ernst.

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

“What pursuit?” yelled Ernst.

Barrington pounded on the table.

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

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

Chapter 6

Southeastern Sudan

D
anny 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.”

“T
hey’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.

T
he 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.

M
elissa 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!”

D
anny 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.”