Authors: Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice
Southeastern Sudan
M
elissa Ilse cut the motorcycle’s engine, coasting in the dark as the indicator beeper became a steady hum. She was a mile from the UAV.
Hand-built by Ducati to CIA specifications, the lightweight motorcycle had a pair of oversized mufflers that kept engine noise to a low rumble. But sound traveled far in the desert foothills, and she couldn’t afford to take a chance of alerting anyone that she was near. She needed to locate the UAV and recover its brain, or her career was shot.
Harker had told her that in so many words.
Melissa glided off the dirt trail she’d been riding for the past half hour or so, letting the bike’s momentum carry her to a trio of rocks a few yards up the hillside. She put on her brakes as she reached them. Hopping off the bike, she set it down gently against the largest of the rocks. She pulled the MP-5 submachine gun from its holster on the side of the bike and trotted down to the trail, turning back to make sure the bike couldn’t be seen.
Her night vision goggles were heavy against her face. She pulled them off and rubbed her cheekbones and eyes. She was surprised there was enough light to see fairly well, and it was such a relief not to have the apparatus pressing against her face that she decided she would do without it for a while. She stuffed it into her rucksack, then examined her GPS.
The handheld device wasn’t coordinated with the UAV’s homing signals, but it wasn’t hard to get her bearings. The aircraft had gone down on the other side of the ridge. She could either climb directly over it or circle around parallel to the trail she’d been riding.
Direct was always better.
Melissa paused every few steps to look around and make sure she wasn’t being followed. She’d been through this general area several times in the past two months, before Raven was brought in. She might even have been on this very hillside, though she didn’t remember it.
The chapped land and rugged hills reminded her of southwest Nevada, where her dad used to take her camping and hiking when she was a girl. He and her mother had divorced when she was only three; he had custody only a few weeks each year, and they always spent at least one week of that camping. She cherished those trips now, and looked forward to the next, not due for several months.
Melissa scolded herself. It was dangerous letting her mind drift. Crouching at the top of the ridge, she put one hand on the rocky crust, then folded herself against the hillside, peering over the top.
Shadow covered everything before her. She slid down a few feet, pulled off her pack and removed her night vision goggles.
A small settlement sat in the valley on the left, not quite two miles away. There was no sign anyone was awake.
So where was the plane?
From the signal, it should be to her right, maybe a thousand yards away.
Melissa surveyed the area again. The submachine gun felt heavy in her hands. She’d never fired it at an enemy. She’d never used a gun against a real person at all.
She took a slow breath, controlling her nerves, and started down the hill in the direction of the signal.
She came to the wreckage sooner than she thought. The aircraft’s left wing jutted from the rocks. It had sheered at the wing root, pulled off by the force of the midair collision.
Melissa took over, scanning the area. This was bad luck—she’d gone after the wrong part of the plane. The flight computer was in the forward section of the fuselage—the other signal nearly five miles to the northeast.
She cursed silently, then took the camera from her pocket. They’d want to know what the wrecked wing looked like.
Washington, D.C.
S
enator Jeffrey “Zen” Stockard looked up at the receptionist as he rolled into the rehabilitation ward in Building 5123 at the Walter Reed Hospital complex. They were old friends by now, so well-acquainted that Zen knew she took her coffee black with two sugars.
It was important, after all, to get those little things right.
“Luciana, you are looking very chipper this morning,” he said, rolling toward her. “How is my favorite receptionist and nurse in training?”
“Big test tonight,” she told him.
“Better hit the books.”
“I am.” She raised the textbook from behind the counter. Building 5123 was a special facility at the hospital complex, with the highest level of security possible—so high, in fact, that even Zen had to submit to a rudimentary pat down. His aide—Jason Black—couldn’t even go downstairs with him.
Which, in some ways, was just as well.
While the staff members were all medical professionals, they worked for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, a special branch charged with investigating biology and medicine and their implications on the battlefield as well as society.
“Jay brought you coffee,” said Zen, glancing back at his aide. Black handed over the cup of Starbucks.
“You look like you’re still asleep, Jason,” said Luciana.
Jason blushed. “Naw.”
“I ride him hard, Lucy,” said Zen. “Twenty-four/seven, around the clock. How’s my patient?”
“They don’t tell me anything, Senator. But I haven’t heard anything bad.”
“That’s good to know.”
Zen rolled himself toward the security checkpoint a short distance away. Contrary to what she’d told Zen, the staff downstairs would have passed the word if there was a problem. Not that it would have kept Zen from going down to see their patient, Mark Stoner.
Stoner had been a close friend years before. They’d worked together at Dreamland; at one point, Stoner had saved Zen’s wife Breanna’s life.
Stoner had been lost on a mission in Eastern Europe some fifteen years before. Everyone, Zen included, had given him up for dead.
A recent Whiplash mission had discovered him still alive, though so physically and mentally altered, he was barely recognizable. Zen had helped rescue him. Now he felt obligated to help him back to health.
Mental health. Physically, he’d never be what he was. He’d always be much, much better.
Rescued from a helicopter crash by a scientist working with Olympic athletes, Stoner had been the recipient of numerous biomechanical improvements and a host of steroidlike drugs that had turned him into something approaching a Superman. While he had been weaned from most of the drugs the scientists had put him on, he still retained much of his strength.
A single nurse was on duty in the basement ward. Two guards with loaded shotguns stood behind her.
“Good morning, Senator.”
“Katherine.”
“Dr. Esrang is with him.”
“OK.”
Zen wheeled himself next to a chair, then waited as one of the guards ran a wand around him and looked over his wheelchair to make sure there were no weapons or other contraband. Cleared, he got back on and wheeled himself to the steel door. A loud buzzer sounded; the door slid to the side. Zen entered a narrow corridor and began wheeling toward a second steel door. The doors acted like an airlock; only one could be opened at a time, even in an emergency.
Two more guards waited on the other side of the door. Zen was searched once more. If anything, the second search was more thorough. Cleared, Zen went down the hallway to a set of iron bars. The burly man on the other side, dressed in riot gear but without a weapon, eyed him, then turned and nodded. The bars went up; Zen wheeled through. He said hello, not expecting an answer. He had never gotten one in the weeks since he’d been coming to visit Stoner, and he didn’t get one now.
Past the last set of iron bars, the place looked pretty much like a normal hospital suite again. It was only when one looked very closely at things, like the double locks on the cabinet drawers and the ubiquitous video monitors, that one might realize this was an ultra-high-security facility.
The hall turned to the right, opening into a large, glass-enclosed area. The glass looked into four different rooms. Zen pivoted to his left, facing a large physical therapy space on the other side of the glass. Stoner, dressed in sweats, was lying on a bench doing flying presses with a set of dumbbells. If the numbers on the sides of the plates were to be believed, he was swinging two hundred pounds overhead with each arm as easily as Zen might have lifted fifty.
Zen caught a reflection in the glass. Dr. Esrang was leaning, arms folded, against the glass almost directly behind him.
“You’re trusting him with free weights,” said Zen.
“He’s making good progress,” said Esrang, coming over. “He’s earning our trust.”
“Are the new drugs working?”
“Hard to say, as usual. We look at brain waves, we look at scans. We are only guessing.”
Zen nodded. They’d had variations of this conversation several times.
“You may go in if you wish,” said the doctor.
Zen watched his old friend awhile longer. Stoner’s face was expressionless. He might be concentrating entirely on his body’s movements, feeling every strain and pull of his muscles. Or he might be a million miles away.
Zen wheeled over to the far side of the space. There was a bar on the frame. He slid it up, then pushed the door-sized pane of glass next to it open. He made sure to close the door behind him, then wheeled around to the room where Stoner was working out.
Stoner said nothing when he entered. Zen wheeled about halfway into the room, waiting until his friend finished a set. Stoner, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, weighed about 240 pounds, nearly all of it muscle.
“Working with the dumbbells today?” said Zen.
Stoner got up from the bench and went to a weight rack on the far side of the room. He took out another set of dumbbells and began doing a military press.
“Enough weight for you?” asked Zen.
He hated that he was reduced to ridiculous comments, but he couldn’t think of much else to say. Stoner worked in silence, pushing the weights up with steady, flawless efficiency. These were the heaviest set of weights in the room, and he knocked off thirty reps without a problem. He was sweating, but that might have been due to the heat—the place felt like a sauna.
“I can stay for breakfast if you want,” said Zen. “Give me an excuse to blow off a committee meeting.”
No answer. Stoner put down the weights, then went back to the bench and started on a set of sitting curls. His face remained the same: no sign of stress.
“Nationals are doing well. They won last night,” said Zen. “They’ll be back home soon. Maybe we can take in a game.”
“Baseball?” asked Stoner.
“Yeah. You want to go to a game?”
Instead of responding, Stoner went back to his workout. During his treatment in Eastern Europe, he had been essentially brainwashed, his personality and memory replaced with an almost robotic consciousness. His old self or at least some semblance of it remained, but exactly how much, no one could say.
Zen had managed only a handful of conversations with him since he’d been here. Stoner hadn’t said more than a dozen words in each. But that was more than he’d said to anyone else.
Stoner did two more circuits, pumping the iron without visible fatigue. As he finished a set of standing presses, he glanced over at Zen.
The look in his eye frightened Zen. For a split second he thought Stoner was going to toss one of the dumbbells at his head.
He didn’t. He just glared at him, then pumped through another twenty reps.
“Man, you’re in good shape,” said Zen as Stoner racked the weights.
Stoner turned to him. “Need heavier weights. Too easy.”
“Did you ask the doctors?”
Stoner pulled his hood over his head.
“I can try and get more for you,” said Zen. “What weight?”
“Big disks,” said Stoner. “I need more.”
He started walking toward the door next to the rack.
“Feel like having breakfast?” Zen asked.
“No,” said Stoner. “Gonna shower.”
“OK,” said Zen. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then, maybe.”
Stoner said nothing. Zen watched him walk down the hall, turning right into his room.
“I’ve already ordered more weights,” said Esrang when Zen met him outside. “We didn’t want to give him too much at first, in case he decided to use them as weapons.”
“You still think he’s dangerous?”
Esrang pitched his head to one side, gesturing with his shoulders. He was one of the world’s experts on the effects of steroids and other drugs on the human brain, but he often pointed out that this meant he knew that he didn’t know enough.
Zen glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”
Zen smiled. It was a nice thing for the doctor to say, but they both knew it wasn’t necessarily true.
Southeastern Sudan
L
i Han watched as the aircraft was lifted into the back of the pickup truck. It was a lot lighter than he’d expected; three men could easily handle it.
It would fetch a decent amount of money. The design was unique, the materials, even the onboard flight control computer, which had considerably more processing and memory chips than Li Han expected—the right buyer would pay a good price.
The question was finding the right buyer. The best price would come from his former countrymen, though there was no way he could deal with them.
The Russians were one possibility. The French were another. The Iranians, but his last dealings with them had turned sour.
The biggest payday might actually come from the Americans, who would want their equipment back.
Maybe they could make a deal.
He needed to find a place to examine it more carefully, and think. That meant going north, away from the area controlled by the Brotherhood. They would only complicate things.
The Brother holding the forward end of the aircraft slipped as they were placing it into the bed of the pickup. The fuselage fell hard against the truck.
“Careful, you idiots!” yelled Li Han in Chinese.
He ran over to the plane. It didn’t appear to be damaged, at least not any worse than it had been.
“Come,” he said, switching to English. “We need to be away from here before the satellite appears.”
M
elissa was a mile and a half from the transponder when the signal went from a steady beep to a more urgent bleat.
The aircraft was being moved.
She squeezed the throttle on the motorcycle, hunkering down against the handlebars as its speed jumped. A second later she realized that was a mistake. Backing off the gas, she pulled her GPS out from her jacket pocket and got her bearings.
The transponder was in a valley roughly parallel to the one she was riding through. Both ran east to west. According to the map, a road that intersected both valleys lay two miles ahead. She could go to that intersection and wait.
Unless whoever had the UAV turned north rather than staying on the road. There were at least two trails running off the valley in that direction before the intersection. And sure enough, the signal soon indicated that the UAV was moving farther away.
It was starting to get light. Melissa went up the connecting road and stayed on it, speeding roughly parallel to whoever was taking the UAV away. They were about a mile and a half away, but the trail and road ran away from each other, her path going due north while the other gradually tailing eastward.
Finally she stopped and examined the map on the GPS to try and guess where they were going. The trail wound through a series of settlements, intersected with several unpaved roads, and finally ended at what passed for a super highway here, a double-lane asphalt paved road that ran to Duka, a small town that sat on a flat plain at the eastern foot of the mountains. She slipped the GPS back into her pocket. Who had the UAV? Mao Man?
She hoped not. The fact that it was being taken north argued against it: the Brothers’ stronghold was well to the south, where she assumed he’d been heading when attacked. He had only come this far north to arrange for a meeting with weapons suppliers.
Most likely either a government patrol spotted the wreckage and decided to take it, or some local farmer found it and decided to take it to the authorities and claim a reward.
Either could be easily bought off. A hundred dollars here would bring a family luxury for a year.
Melissa slipped the bike out of neutral and began following the signal once more.
L
i Han felt his eyes starting to close as they zigzagged through the hills. He’d been up now for nearly thirty-six hours straight, long even for him.
Shaking himself, he sat upright in the cab of the truck, then rolled down the window, sticking his head out into the wind. He could sleep in Duka. He’d used a building there to house some explosives about a year and a half before; it was sure to be still unoccupied. And though the town was controlled by two different rebel groups, neither would bear him any malice, especially if he promised fresh weapons and ammunition as he had the last time.
But he had to stay alert until he reached the small city. The army occasionally sent patrols through the area. It was unlikely that they would meet any at night, but if they did, the soldiers would assume they were rebels and immediately open fire.
One of the men in the back of the pickup began banging on the roof of the cab. The driver slowed, then spoke to him through his window.
“What?” asked Li Han in English.
“Following. A motorbike follows,” said the driver.
A motorcycle?
Li Han twisted around, trying to see. It was too dark, and the hulk of the UAV blocked most of his view.
It wouldn’t be the army. More like one of the many rebel groups that contested the area.
“Shoot them!” yelled Li Han. He turned back to the driver. “Tell them in the back to shoot them. Don’t stop! Drive faster. Faster!”
M
elissa knew she was pressing it, pulling closer and closer to the truck. But it was alone, and while there were definitely men in the back, none seemed armed or particularly hostile. If she caught up, she could work out a deal.
A poke of white light from the back of the truck told her she’d miscalculated. They did have weapons, and they weren’t in the mood to bargain.
Melissa raised her submachine gun and fired back. The barrel of the MP-5 pushed up from the recoil harder than she’d anticipated, and the shots flew wild over the truck. She tucked the weapon tighter against her side. The road rose, then veered to the right; she shifted her weight, trying not to slow down around the curve. Tilting back, she saw the truck square ahead of her, fat between her handlebars and no more than thirty yards away.
She pressed her finger against the trigger. As she fired, the front of the bike began to turn to her right.
Starting to lose her balance, Melissa let go of the gun and grabbed the handlebar. But it was too late—she went over in a tumble, rolling around in the dust as a hail of bullets from the truck passed overhead.