Authors: Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice
Room 4, CIA Headquarters Campus
J
onathon Reid sat at the large conference table, staring at the gray wall in front of him. He was alone in the high-tech headquarters and command center.
The top of the wall began to glow blue.
“Open com channel to Ms. Stockard,” he said softly.
The rectangular window appeared in the middle of the wall. It expanded, widening until it covered about a third of the space. The outer portion of the wall darkened from gray to black. The interior window, meanwhile, turned deep blue, then morphed into an image of Breanna Stockard in a secure conference room in Dreamland.
She was alone, and she was frowning.
“Breanna,” said Reid. “Good morning again.”
“Jonathon, what’s really going out there in Africa?”
“I told you everything the director told me.”
“Nuri says there’s a lot more to the project than we’re being told.”
“I don’t doubt he’s right.”
“And?”
Reid said nothing. The Raven program was clearly an assassination mission, and clearly it involved top secret technology that the Agency had developed outside of its normal channels. But Harker hadn’t spelled any of this out; he had merely said the UAV must be recovered. All Reid had were guesses and suppositions, not facts.
“Jonathon, you’re not saying anything.”
“I know, Breanna. I don’t have more facts than I’ve shared.”
“Listen, the only way this is going to work is if we’re completely honest with each other.”
Reid nodded.
“Well?” prompted Breanna.
“Clearly, this is a CIA project that’s highly secret, and they don’t want to tell us any of the details,” he said. “And they haven’t.”
“I got that.”
Breanna and Reid had gotten along fairly well since the program began, despite the vast differences in the institutions they reported to, their backgrounds, and their ages. Cooperation between the military and the CIA was not always ideal in any event, and on a program such as Whiplash and the related MY-PID initiative, there was bound to be even greater conflict. But so far they had largely steered clear of the usual suspicions, let alone the attempts at empire building and turf wars that typically marred joint projects. Partly this was because they had so far kept the operation—and its staffing—to an absolute minimum. But it also had to do with their personal relationships. Reid, much older than Breanna, liked and admired her in an almost fatherly way, and she clearly respected him, often treating him with professional deference.
Not now, though. Right now she was angry with him, believing he was holding back.
“I can only guess at what they’re doing,” Reid told her. “I have no facts. I know exactly what you’re thinking, but they’ve put up barriers, and I can’t just simply whisk them away with a wave of my hand.”
“We need to know exactly what’s going on,” Breanna told him.
“Beyond what we already know? Why? We have to recover the UAV. It’s already been located.”
“What we don’t know may bite us.”
“Granted.”
“God, Jonathon, you’ve got to press them for more information.”
“I have.”
“Then I will.”
“I don’t know that that will work,” said Reid. “I have a call in to the director. I am trying.”
Reid could already guess what Herm Edmund was going to say—this is on a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know.
“Jonathon, I’ve always been up front with you,” said Breanna.
“And I’m being up front with you. It’s a UAV, it’s obviously an assassination program, though they’re not even saying that. Not to me, anyway.”
“If one of our people gets hurt because of something we should have known—”
“I feel exactly the same way.”
The window folded in on itself abruptly. Breanna had killed the transmission.
Reid sat back in his chair. One of the rock bed requirements of being a good CIA officer was that you stopped asking questions at a certain point. You stopped probing for information when it became clear you were not entitled to that information. Because knowing it might in fact endanger an operation, and the Agency.
On the other hand . . .
“Computer, show me the personnel file for Reginald Harker,” said Reid. “Same with Melissa Ilse. Unrestricted authorization Jonathon Reid. Access all databases and perform a cross-Agency search for those individuals, and all references to Raven. Discover related operations and references, with a confidence value of ten percent or above.”
“Working,” replied the computer.
Southeastern Sudan
M
elissa rolled in the dirt as the motorbike flew out from under her. She threw her arms up, trying to protect her face as the rear wheel spun toward her. A storm of pebbles splattered against her hands as the wheel caught in a rut; the bike tumbled back in the other direction.
Her shoulder hit a boulder at the side of the ditch. Her arm jolted from its socket and an intense wave of pain enveloped her body. Her head seemed to swim away from her.
My shoulder, she thought. Dislocated. Something torn.
I need the gun.
Get the gun.
Melissa pushed herself to her belly. Her eyes closed tight with the pain.
For a moment she thought she was still wearing the night goggles, and feared that the glass had embedded in her eyes, that she was blind. She reached with her left hand to pull them off, then realized she hadn’t had them on.
There was dirt in her eyes, but she could see.
Get the gun!
Her right arm hung off her body as she pushed herself to her knees. The bike was a few yards away, on the other side of the road. But where was her gun?
Melissa crawled onto the hard-packed dirt road, looking for the MP-5, then shifted her weight to rise to her knees. The pain seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, throwing off her balance.
Another wave of dizziness hit her as she got to her feet.
The gun! The gun!
Melissa turned back in the direction she’d taken. She started to trot, then saw a black object just off the shoulder on her left. After a few steps she realized it was just a shadow in the rocks. She stopped, turned to the right, and saw the gun lying in the middle of the road.
“T
he motorcycle has stopped following us,” the driver told Li Han.
Li Han twisted in the seat, looking behind them. The men in the back were clutching onto the wrecked aircraft, holding on for dear life as the truck flew over the washboard road.
One of the men leaned over the cab and yelled at the driver through his window.
“They fired at us,” said the driver. “One of our men is hurt.”
“How many were there?” asked Li Han.
“Two, maybe three. But they’re gone now. Amara says that we kill both. In the dark, hard to tell.”
Li Han considered going back to check the bodies. It might be useful to know which band they were with. The fact that they had motorcycles was unusual—perhaps they were future customers.
“The Brother needs a doctor,” said the driver. “He was hit in the chest.”
“Tell them to put a compress on,” said Li Han.
The driver didn’t understand. Li Han decided not to explain; they’d figure it out on their own eventually.
“Turn around,” he told the driver. “Let’s go find out who they were.”
“Turn around?”
“Yes, a U-turn.”
“There may be more.”
“I doubt it,” said Li Han. “Let’s go see.”
Western Ethiopia
“C
olonel Freah?”
Danny looked over at the door to the building as Damian Jordan came outside. The sun was not quite at the horizon; gray twilight filtered over the base, making it look like a pixilated photograph pulled from a newspaper.
“What’s up?”
“Melissa is on the radio. She’s located the UAV. I figured you wanted to talk to her.”
“Exactly,” said Danny.
“Uh, she says she’s been hurt.”
“Bad?”
“Dunno. She’s crabbier than usual, so probably fairly bad.”
Jordan led Danny inside to the table where he’d set up an older satellite radio, a bulky unit with a corded handset. The console, about the size of a small briefcase, was at least ten years old. While it was powerful and had encryption gear, it was hardly state of the art. Nuri had pointed out that the operation surely had access to much better equipment; this was some sort of wrongheaded attempt to keep an extremely low profile.
“Here you go,” said Jordan, giving Danny the handset.
“Ms. Ilse, this is Colonel Freah. Where are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Danny Freah. I’m the person who’s going to get you and your UAV back here. Now where the hell are you?”
She grunted, as if in pain.
“Are you OK?” Danny asked.
“I dislocated my shoulder. I’m all right. Some of the natives grabbed the UAV. They’re taking it in the direction of Duka. I have to get it. If you’re going to help—”
“My team is going to be here in about twenty minutes,” Danny told her. “You’re roughly seventy miles away—we can get there inside an hour.”
“All right,” she said weakly.
“Are you OK?” he asked again.
“I’m fine.” She snapped off the radio.
Danny handed back the handset.
“She goes her own way,” said Jordan. He smiled, as if that was a good thing.
Over the Sudan
T
he problem with flying the Tigershark, especially at very high speeds over long distances, was that it was boring.
Exceedingly, even excruciatingly, boring.
The plane flew itself, even during the refueling hookups. In fact, the Tigershark II had been designed to operate completely without a pilot, and very possibly could have handled this mission entirely on its own.
Not that Turk would have admitted it. He wouldn’t even say it out loud, especially not in the plane: he’d come to think of the Tigershark almost as a person. The flight computer was
almost
sentient, in the words of its developer, Dr. Ray Rubeo.
Almost sentient. An important word, “almost.”
Turk checked his instruments—everything in the green, perfect as always—then his location and that of the area where the UAV had gone down. The robot aircraft had a set of transponders that were sending signals to a satellite.
“Tigershark, this is Whiplash Ground. You hearing us?”
“Colonel Freah.” Turk reached his right hand up to his helmet, enabling the video feed on the Whiplash communications system. Danny Freah’s face appeared in a small box on the virtual screen projected by the Whiplash combat helmet. “Got good coms up here, Colonel.”
“One of the operators has been tracking our item in country. She’s hurt. We’re going to be en route in a few minutes to her location. We’re wondering if you can take a pass and check on her.”
“Uh, roger that if you give me a location,” said Turk. “I’m just about ten minutes from the target area,” he added, pointing at part of the virtual instrument panel where the course way markers were displayed. “Eight and a half, to be exact.”
“I have GPS coordinates,” said Danny. “Stand by.”
Turk waited while Danny uploaded the GPS tracking channel used by the CIA officer in western Sudan. He then increased the detail on the sitrep panel.
“Colonel, do you know that one of the transponders is moving?” said Turk. “It looks like it’s approaching her location.”
“Are you sure about that, Tiger?”
Turk double-tapped on the GPS locator and told the Tigershark to fly to that spot. Then he went back to the radio.
“Yeah, roger that. Affirmative,” he added. “Be advised I’m unarmed at this time.”
“We copy.”
“Operative got a name?”
“Melissa Ilse.”
“It’s a girl?”
“I already told you it’s a she, Tigershark. And that would be a woman, not a girl. Copy?”
“Roger that. I’ll do what I can.”
Southeastern Sudan
M
elissa heard the truck rattling toward her. She glanced around for cover, but nothing was handy. She decided her only option was to move up the nearby embankment, to get out of easy view.
If they found her, she’d have to make her stand.
Her right arm and shoulder screamed with every step and jostle. She tried to keep it from moving too much by gripping the bottom of her jacket with her hand. The pain was so intense that she couldn’t fold her fingers into a good grip, and had to simply hook her thumb around the cloth.
It was almost ironic. As part of her training for the mission, she’d been put into a rush course as a nurse so she could learn enough to use that as a cover. She had then treated two colleagues for dislocated shoulders during a particularly difficult survival refresher course she’d taken right afterward. Putting their arms back in place didn’t seem like such a big deal.
Being on the other side of the pain gave her an entirely different perspective.
The sound of the truck grew louder. She dropped to one knee, then eased down to spread herself flat against the side of the hill. She was no more than twenty yards from the roadway, if that.
Her headset buzzed with an incoming call on her sat line, but she didn’t answer it—the truck’s headlights swept across the road ahead.
Maybe she could shoot them now. But she’d have to fire with her left hand.
She wasn’t even that good with her right.
God, what a mistake she’d made getting close to the truck. What the hell was she thinking?
The truck jerked to a stop near the bike.
Melissa tried to will away the pain, extending her breathing, pushing the air all the way into her lungs before slowly exhaling.
The men got out of the truck.
Her headset buzzed again. She still didn’t dare answer it.
T
wenty thousand feet above, Turk switched to the Tigershark’s enhanced view, trying to get a good read on what was below. The UAV and its CIA operator were roughly twenty yards from each other.
The Tigershark had been designed to carry a rail gun, which could fire metal slugs accurately to twenty miles. It still had some kinks, but would have come in very handy now.
“Whiplash Ground—Colonel Freah, I’m looking at a truck with people getting out of it. Our contact should be nearby. Are these hostiles?”
“We believe so, Tigershark. But stand by. We’re trying to contact her now.”
There was no time to stand by—the men in the truck were spreading out, moving in the direction of the CIA officer. They were carrying weapons. That made them hostile in Turk’s book.
The only weapon he had was the Tigershark itself. He pushed down the nose, determined to use it.
M
elissa watched as the men moved up the road. They moved quickly—too quickly. They’re scared, she thought.
A good sign, in a way: their fire would be less accurate.
She’d take the man closest to her, the one going to the bike. Then sweep across left, then back to the truck.
She’d have to reload before she took out the truck.
Her finger started to twitch.
I can do it.
I have to do it.
Melissa took as slow a breath as she could manage, then pulled the gun up. It was awkward in her left hand. She forced her right arm toward the front of the weapon, hoping to steady it. The pain was excruciating. She twisted her trunk, putting her hand, still gripping her shirt, closer to the weapon.
Steadying herself as best she could, Melissa raised the barrel with her left arm, ready to fire.
Suddenly there was a rush of air from above, the sky cracking with what seemed a hurricane. Dirt flew everywhere, and the night flashed red and white. A howl filled her ears. Melissa threw herself down, cowering against the force of whatever bomb was exploding.
L
i Han had just started to get out of the truck when there was a vortex of wind and a hard, loud snap directly above him. It didn’t sound quite like an explosion, but the wash threw him back against the vehicle. Dirt and dust flew all around; he was pelted by small rocks.
“Dso Ba!”
he yelled in Chinese, even before he got back to his feet. “Go! Leave! They’re firing missiles! Go! Go!”
He pulled at the door. There had been no explosion: whatever the Americans had fired at them had missed or malfunctioned.
“Wo-men! Dso Ba!”
The driver looked at him, paralyzed. Li Han realized he was speaking Chinese.
“Go!” he shouted in English. “Leave! Leave! Get the truck out of here.”
One of the men in the back pounded on the roof of the cab. It was Amara, yelling something in Arabic.
“Go!” he added, switching to English, though it was hard to tell in his accent and excitement. “Mr. Li—tell him go!”
“Go!” repeated Li Han. “Let’s go!”
The driver began moving in slow motion. The truck lurched forward.
“Faster!” yelled Li Han. “Before they fire again.”
B
y the time Melissa raised her head, the truck had started moving away. The men on the road picked themselves up and began scrambling after it.
What the hell had just happened?
Had someone fired a missile? Or several of them?
But there didn’t seem to have been an explosion, just a massive rush of air.
When the men were gone, she rose slowly. She’d forgotten the pain, but it came back now with a vengeance, nearly knocking her unconscious. She fell back on her rump, head folded down against her chest. The submachine gun fell from her hand.
In a mental fog, Melissa began to gently rock back and forth, trying to soothe her injured arm as if it were a baby. Gradually her senses returned, though the pain remained, throbbing against her neck and torso.
She swung her knees around and rose, trying to jostle her arm as little as possible. Finally upright, she walked down to the road. There was no bomb crater, no debris.
Melissa retrieved her gun. Her ruck was a few yards farther up the hill. She had no memory of taking it off.
The sat phone was on the ground as well, near where she’d been crouched. She picked it up and called Jordan back at the base camp. Instead of Jordan, however, a man with a deeper, somewhat older voice answered.
“This is Danny Freah. Melissa, are you OK?”
“Who are you?”
“It’s Colonel Freah again. Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Stay where you are. We’ll be at your location in twenty minutes. My Osprey is just taking off now.”
“What Osprey?”
“Listen, Ms. Ilse, you don’t know how lucky you are to be alive. Just stay where you are.”
“I’m not moving,” she said. She tried to make her words sharp, but the pain in her shoulder made it difficult to talk; she could hear the wince in her voice.
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” said Danny, his voice softer. “Just stay on the hill, behind those rocks. You’ll be OK. The truck has moved on. I have to go—the aircraft is here. We’ll contact you when we’re zero-five from your location.”
The connection died. Melissa lowered herself to the ground, sitting as gently as she could.