Authors: Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice
Over the Midwest
B
reanna Stockard was never comfortable as a passenger on an airplane.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like to fly; on the contrary, she loved flying. Or rather, she loved
piloting
. She loved it so much that being a passenger made her feel extremely out of sorts. Even sitting in the back of a C-20 Gulfstream, she felt as if she ought to be doing something other than studying the thick folders of reports on her iPad, or tracking through the myriad classified e-mails related to her duties at the Office of Special Technology.
The Gulfstream was assigned to the Pentagon for VIP travel, and carried a full suite of secure communications. So she was surprised when her own secure sat phone rang.
Until she saw the call was from Jonathon Reid.
“This is Breanna.”
“Breanna, can you talk?”
Breanna was the sole passenger on the plane. The cabin crew consisted of a tech sergeant who was sitting in the back, discreetly reading a magazine.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ve pieced together information,” said Reid. “I don’t have everything. But I think what I have is accurate.”
“OK.”
“The UAV was contracted for about three years ago, an outgrowth of the same program that produced Tigershark, as we already know. The development was entirely covert; obviously I don’t have all the details.”
The CIA had a long history of developing its own aircraft, going all the way back to the U-2. At times it had worked with the Air Force, and in fact it might very well have done so in this case.
“But it’s not the aircraft that’s important,” continued Reid. “I think there’s a lot more to it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t feel comfortable talking about it, even over this line,” he said. “We’ll have to talk when you come back. I know you’re supposed to go directly to SOCCOM for that conference in Florida, but I’d like to speak to you in person as soon as possible. Tonight, in fact.”
“Can you meet me there?”
“I’d rather spend the time looking into this further, if possible,” said Reid. “How important is the conference?”
The “conference” was actually a two-day meeting with members of the Special Operations Command to listen to requirements they had for new weapons. It was starting the next morning at eight, but Breanna was due to have breakfast with the commanding general and his staff at 0600—6:00
A.M.
sharp, as the general’s aide had put it to her secretary, noting that his boss was a notorious early riser with a packed schedule and an almost hyperbolic sense of punctuality.
Breanna didn’t want to cancel—informal sessions like that were almost always more valuable than the actual meetings themselves. But if she detoured up to Washington, she’d get almost no sleep.
So what else was new?
“All right,” Breanna told him. “I’ll meet you at Andrews.”
“Yes. Good.”
“Jonathon—do we have a problem here?”
Reid didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know that it’s a problem specifically for us,” he said finally.
“All right. I’ll talk to the pilot, and text you a time.”
R
eid stared at the blank virtual wall for several minutes after Breanna had hung up.
No, the UAV wasn’t the whole story, not by a long shot. The code word “Raven” didn’t even refer to the aircraft.
If he was right, Whiplash had just been inserted into the middle of a perfect storm: an illegal assassination program, an off-the-books CIA tech development operation, and an Agency screwup that had just made an unstoppable weapon available to anyone who happened to spot the UAV wreckage in the middle of the desert.
Southeastern Sudan, Africa
D
anny Freah jumped from the Osprey just behind Ben “Boston” Rockland, the team sergeant, and John “Flash” Gordon, the second-ranking NCO. Melissa Ilse was huddled near the rocks.
“Flash, grab the bike!” yelled Boston. “Let’s go, people, we need to get moving!”
Danny trotted over to Melissa. She was crouched down, in obvious pain, holding her shoulder. Sugar—CIA covert officer Clare Keeb—was standing over her, her SCAR-H/MK-17 rifle poised, even though a scan of the area had shown no one nearby.
“Probably dislocated,” said Sugar, keeping her eyes on the terrain.
“It’s definitely dislocated,” said Melissa.
Danny knelt down. Melissa wasn’t what he expected. She was young—twenty-four, maybe, slim and tall, nearly five-ten, he thought, helping her up gently. Even in pain she had a beautiful, flawless face. Her skin was a half shade lighter than his; he hadn’t realized she was African-American.
“I’m all right,” she insisted. “We have to get the aircraft back. Do you know where they went?”
“We’ll take care of that,” said Danny. “Right now we have to get of here. The sun’s coming up. We don’t want anyone to see us.”
“That’s not important.”
“The hell it’s not,” said Boston gruffly.
“Come on, into the aircraft,” Danny told her. “Or do we put you on a stretcher?”
“Ow, my arm!” Melissa shrieked as Boston tried to help her on the other side. “Do you know how to pull it back into place?”
“Sure, but I ain’t doing that here.”
“We’ll treat it,” said Danny. “Get into the aircraft.”
Boston put his hand on her back. “Come on, sister.”
“I’m not your sister, asshole.”
Boston gave Danny a grin behind her back.
Just like Boston to start pushing buttons, thought Danny.
A
half hour later they were back at the base in Ethiopia. The team had taken over one of the smaller buildings to use as a combination common area and command post. Sugar and Danny brought Melissa there and examined her shoulder. It was swollen, and seemed to have some ligament damage as well as a dislocation.
“Best place for you is up in Alexandria,” Danny told her. “They’ll put you out, get the shoulder right, and send you home.”
“What?”
“There’s a good hospital there. And—”
“I’m not going to a hospital,” she insisted. “There’s no need. It’s just dislocated. Just push it back in place.”
“This ain’t like the movies,” said Sugar. “You don’t know what else might be screwed up or broken. You need X rays, and really they oughta do an MRI on you. I’d guess you have rotator cuff tears—”
“Just can the talk and put it back in place.”
“Don’t go ghetto with me, girl,” snapped Sugar. She had earned her nickname because of her extremely sweet nature, but she could be a demon when someone rubbed her wrong.
“I know what I’m talking about,” insisted Melissa. “I’m a nurse.”
“Yeah, and I’m the President of the United States.”
“I’ll handle this,” said Danny. “Shug, go see what Nuri’s up to. All right?”
“Anything you say, Colonel.” Sugar rolled her eyes and left.
A half-dozen small canvas camp chairs had been left in the building. They were the only furniture, if you didn’t count the boxes and gear the Whiplash team had brought. Danny pulled over one of the chairs and sat down in front of Melissa. She had her shirt pulled down, exposing the top half of her breast as well as her shoulder.
Danny concentrated on her shoulder, gently touching the large bruise.
“I don’t think popping it back into place is a good idea,” he said.
“Have you ever done it before?”
“Have you?”
“Twice.”
“On yourself?”
“No.”
“If the muscle and ligaments are torn—”
“I need to get Raven back. It’s in Duka. I’m the only one here who can get in there and find it.”
“That’s not even close to being true,” said Nuri, standing near the door. Sugar was next to him. “Who are you working for?”
“Who are you?”
“Nuri Lupo. I spent six months out here, living with the rebels. I’ll tell you one thing, you’re damn lucky you’re alive. Riding out through those hills? American? Woman? Anyone who found you could have hit you over the head and hauled you back to their village. Ransom on your dead body would have set them up for life. And that’s if they dealt with us—give you to al Qaeda or one of the groups they support, you’d be worth a lot more.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I’ll bet. Who do you work for?” Nuri asked. “Are you even authorized to be here?”
“If my shoulder didn’t hurt so badly, I’d slap your face.”
“All right, kindergarten time is over,” said Danny. “Sugar, get her some morphine.”
“I’m not taking any morphine,” insisted Melissa.
“If you want us to fix it, you’re getting a shot,” said Danny.
“I have a job to do here, Colonel. I’m not doing anything that will endanger it. And I’m sure as hell not going to Alexandria or anywhere else for a hospital. I’m not leaving until we have Raven.”
“That may be a while,” said Nuri.
Danny looked over at Nuri. “Let’s talk outside,” he told him.
Melissa grabbed him as he started to get up.
“I need to do my job,” she told him. “I don’t want morphine. I don’t want to be knocked out. Give me aspirin. That’s all I need.”
“I doubt that,” said Sugar. “Your muscles are in splint mode. Super hard. You need something to relax them.”
“Just get aspirin.”
Sugar glanced at Danny.
“Try aspirin,” he said. “Can you get her shoulder back into place?”
“I can try,” said Sugar. She sounded doubtful. “If her muscles relax enough.”
“How about a half dose of the morphine?” asked Danny. “Just enough to loosen up.”
“All right,” said Melissa. “Half a dose.”
“T
hey took the aircraft to an old warehouse building near a train line,” Nuri told Danny outside. MY-PID superimposed the locator signal on a satellite image of Duka and the surrounding area, projecting it onto a large slate computer Nuri had tied into the system. “The train line was built about a decade ago for some mining operation, but it hasn’t run in years. Most of the locals live in huts on the south and western ends of town, but people will squat in empty buildings all the time. We can’t really be sure what the hell’s going on there without having a look from the ground.”
He moved his finger over the screen, increasing the magnification.
“There were at least two different rebel groups in Duka when I was here,” Nuri went on. “They sometimes work together, at least to the extent that they don’t kill each other. Which is saying something out here.”
“MY-PID have anything new?”
“Nothing more than I’ve said. They’re really small bands.”
“What about this Raven project? Is it related to the place, Duka?”
“I don’t think so. There’s no connection with Li Han and the town. He may have been in the area, but he’s been working with the Sudan Brotherhood. They’re much farther south.”
“So he’s out of the picture?”
“Probably ran off,” said Nuri.
“Anything new on Raven?”
“Totally black,” said Nuri, with more than a hint of I-told-you-so. “Not available in any system MY-PID has access to either. I thought of telling it to go over the wall.”
“Don’t,” said Danny sharply.
“I didn’t.”
Going over the wall meant telling the system to break into Agency computers and other systems that were supposed to be off-limits to it. Theoretically, the safety precautions built into the computer system—meant to prevent it from ever being used against the U.S.—would prevent this. But MY-PID had enormous resources, and Nuri was sure the system could get in if asked.
Which he still might do. He just wouldn’t tell Danny about it.
“What’s Duka like?” asked Danny.
“Typical shit hole. Little city. Used to be about ten times the size but shrunk with the fighting over the past two years. Relatively peaceful now. Two rebel factions share control. One’s religious. The other’s just crazy.”
Nuri had been in Duka twice. He’d had dealings with a man named Gerard, who was the unofficial head of a band of rebels from a tribe whose name—phonetically, “Meur-tse Meur-tskk”—was bastardized by Western intelligence services into Meurtre Musique—“murder music” in French.
The group was actually a subgroup of the Kababish tribe, with a historical connection to French colonists or explorers who had apparently intermarried with some of the tribe during the eighteenth or nineteenth century. It was now more a loose association of outcasts and their families than an extended family, too small to have any influence outside the area where they lived.
The other group—Sudan the Almighty First Liberation in the Name of Allah, to use the English name—was larger, with informal and family ties connecting them loosely to other groups around the region. Like Meurtre Musique, the members were Islamic, but somewhat more observant. Despite their name, they were not affiliated with the powerful radical Islamic Sudan Brotherhood, which was a dominant rebel force in the south.
Meurtre Musique and First Liberation ran the city; the only government presence was a police station “staffed” by a sixty-year-old man who spent most of his time in Khartoum, the capital well to the west.
“You think we can get into the city with the Osprey?” Danny asked.
“Attract a hell of a lot of attention,” said Nuri. “We’d be better off going in low-key, or maybe waiting until night and scouting around.”
There was a short, loud scream from inside the hut. A string of curses followed.
“Sounds like Sugar fixed the princess’s shoulder,” said Nuri.
“What’s her story, you figure?” Danny asked.
“Besides the obvious fact that she’s a bitch?” Nuri shook his head. “Women officers are all one of two kinds—either they use sex to get what they want, or they play hard-ass bitch. She’s the second. We should get rid of her. Shoot her up with morphine and pack her off. The shoulder’s the perfect excuse.”
“This is her operation.”
“No, it’s our operation,” said Nuri. “Her operation ended when the aircraft crashed and we were called in to clean up. I don’t like the fact that it’s walled off, Danny. There is a huge amount here that they’re not telling us.”
“I know.”
Sugar came out of the building. She was smiling.
“Done,” she told Danny. “She didn’t want to wait for the aspirin to take.”
“She gonna be all right?”
“
Phhhh.
That attitude tells me she wasn’t all right to begin with. I’m gonna get some chow and get some rest, Colonel, all right?”
“Sure. You setting up your own tent?”
“You got that right. I’m not sleeping with those pervs. No way, Colonel.” She thrust her finger at Nuri in mock warning. “And you watch yourself, too, Mr. Lupo.”
Sugar exploded with laughter and sauntered away.
Danny picked up the small touch screen and looked at the satellite image. The warehouse where the UAV was located could be attacked easily enough, but he’d prefer to make the assault at night for a host of reasons, starting with operational security. The question was whether they could wait that long.
“How likely are they to move the UAV, you think?” he asked Nuri.
“I have no idea. We don’t even know who has it. If it’s one of these groups, they won’t bother. They have no place to go with it. If it’s just someone moving through—which I doubt—they’ll probably wait until nightfall and start out again. In that case, they’ll be easy to take on the road. Shoot out the driver, grab the bird, and go home.”
“What about Li Han?”
“It could be him,” said Nuri. “This isn’t a Brother village, though. He’d be a fish out of water.”
“Isn’t he already? Being Chinese?”
“True. Maybe we should go in and nose around a bit.”
“Just walk in?”
“Drive in,” said Nuri. “I’ve been here before. I’ll use my old cover. We can plant some bugs for MY-PID to use. Augment the feeds from the Tigershark.”
“OK.”
“Hell, I may be able to buy the damn thing,” added Nuri. “Save us a lot of trouble.”
“Buy it?”
“We’re in Africa, remember? Everything’s for sale.”
“Not to us.”
Nuri laughed. “I’m a gun dealer. I had some dealings with a man named Gerard, trying to sell him some guns. If he’s involved, it’ll be for sale. And if he’s not, he’ll tell us who is.”
“That’s safe?”
Nuri laughed again, this time much harder.
“Of course it’s not safe,” he said when he regained control.