Raven Strike (16 page)

Turk smirked at the terminology.
Handshake.
All the damn radios did was squawk at each other.

H
aving five hundred euros in his hand made Li Han feel almost insanely giddy. It was foolish and stupid—he had far larger sums than that in any number of his accounts, and several thousand in American dollars stuffed into his boots. Yet he couldn’t help the intoxication. He’d been raised in a dirt-poor village in northwestern China; when he was growing up, the family pig ate better than he did. All the years since had done nothing to erase the memories of abject poverty and worthlessness, and only magnified the importance of money. Of cash. Of bills that passed smoothly between your fingers.

He folded them carefully, then put them in his pocket. Back to the problem at hand.

“Why did the program execute once it was in the laptop?” Li Han said aloud. He spoke in his native Chinese, trying to work out his problem with an invisible colleague. “And what does it think it’s doing? Is it trying to go after me? I wonder what sort of intelligence it has. Because clearly it has intelligence.”

“What are you saying?” asked Amara in English.

“Something you wouldn’t understand,” snapped Li Han in Chinese.

The young man didn’t understand what he said, but the harsh tone came through, and his face turned to a frown. Li Han felt a twinge of guilt—Amara wasn’t a bad kid. He should be kinder to him, especially since he thought he would be useful.

“I am exploring a problem,” Li Han said in English, trying to make his voice kinder. “The aircraft’s brain is a computer. When it interfaced with my computer, it acted as if it were alive. It started to operate. Do you know what that means?”

“The program began to work on its own.”

“Exactly. Which is not something it should do.”

He isn’t completely ignorant, Li Han thought. He might be taught; he could be useful.

“I don’t entirely understand it yet,” continued Li Han. “I think it is some sort of control unit that is plugged into the brain and then programmed. But the programming is very involved. My face and a file of information about me was there.”

“Why?”

“Good question. I’m not sure. It is clear I was its target. These weren’t surveillance images. So was the aircraft programmed to watch me? I think so. How did they do it? How is this connected to the rest of the software, the part I haven’t seen? I’m not sure. That is what I am pondering.”

“Why is all this useful?”

Li Han couldn’t help but smirk. Amara was not stupid, but there were clear limits.

“Let’s say we want to watch someone,” he explained. “Let’s say we want to target the President of the United States for surveillance. If we gave the computer all of the information, could it do it? That is my question—because the information about me is in the command deck, the portion of the program that is supplying controls. Why would it be there otherwise? I don’t know,” added Li Han. “We must do more work.”

“You are going to sell it to the Russian.”

“Not that part,” said Li Han. “Not the brain. The brain is self-contained.”

Li Han explained how he had pulled it from the aircraft.

“I believe it could work in another aircraft,” he added. “I’m not entirely sure. I need to experiment more.”

They took a left turn off the main highway moving west, away from the city.

“Where are you going?” Li Han asked.

“You told me you wanted a new place.”

“True,” said Li Han.

Suddenly, a host of suspicions fell on him. Paranoia surged back. Where was Amara taking him?

Li Han put his hand down casually, letting it rest on his holster.

They drove about two miles, climbing up a low hill. Li Han’s suspicions grew, then eased. If Amara had wanted to kill him, any place would do. They had already passed plenty of abandoned fields.

“It’s just ahead,” said Amara. “Twill will be there. If he waves, then we must go on by. You should duck then,” he added. “It will be a signal that he is being watched.”

“Why so far away?” asked Li Han.

“We expect fighting in the city. We don’t need to be caught.”

Li Han stared out the window. It was reasonable, but he wasn’t sure—it still might be a trick.

Too elaborate for Amara. But he was being more assertive than before—far more assertive.

There was a small building near the road on the left. Twill, the thin man with the close-cropped hair, stepped out from the shadow.

He didn’t wave.

“There he is,” said Li Han.

Amara slowed, then pulled off the side of the road, stopping just in front of Twill. Li Han got out. There were two pickups parked near the building. Even in the dark it looked like a good burst of wind would knock it down.

“This isn’t much of a building,” he said, starting toward it.

“Too bad if you don’t like it,” said Amara, suddenly next to him.

Li Han, surprised by the sharp tone, started to turn.

Amara’s first bullet caught him in the side of the head. By the time the second struck his forehead, he was already dead.

Targets Unknown

Chapter 1

Duka

D
anny Freah turned onto the hard-packed road, gingerly pressing his foot against the Mercedes accelerator. Their subject was only two hundred yards ahead.

“I have a full connection,” said Nuri. “Everything’s being routed back through MY-PID. All right. He’s heading east . . . Whoa, slow down. He turned off onto a dirt road. I think there may be a lookout about fifty yards away. MY-PID, analyze and identify this position.”

Danny concentrated on the road as Nuri pointed at the screen and talked to the computer.

“One of the bugs I set isn’t in the proper location,” Nuri told him. “It’s in the truck we’re following.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I’m listening to a conversation in Russian.”

“Russian?”

“Shhh.”

M
Y-PID provided the translation on the fly, almost instantaneously. It heard not only the caller in the car, but was able to amplify the conversation on the other side.

Voice 1 (in car): . . . I don’t know exactly what it is. I have photos on a camera. I will upload them when I am at a safe location.

Voice 2 (phone): How did he obtain it?

Voice 1: It crashed somehow. I don’t know. I can find out, if it’s important.

Voice 2: The price is ridiculous.

Voice 1: I told him.

Voice 2: These Africans think any scrap of metal is valuable.

Voice 1: I need to meet him at dusk at the old stationmaster house. If you’re not interested—

Voice 2: We’ll send someone. Who is he?

Voice 1: He’s Chinese. He’s connected with the Brotherhood.

Voice 2: Ah—I think I know who it is. Call at the usual time.

Voice 1 hung up. The man in the truck said nothing else.

“MY-PID, can you ID either of the voices?” asked Nuri.

“Call was made to a phone registered to the Stalingrad Export Company,” reported the Voice. “Caller voice patterns are being compared to Russian SVG and GRU known agents.”

“Good.”

“Caller 1 is identified as Milos Kimko, known operative with Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki,” said the Voice a few seconds later. “He was posted to Africa 03-02-13. Dossier available.”

“Hold it for me,” said Nuri. “Where’s the old stationmaster house?”

“Insufficient data.”

“Is there a stationmaster house in Duka?”

“Two possible buildings identified,” responded the computer. “Both are near the railroad tracks.”

“Place them under constant surveillance.”

“Are you talking to a person, or a machine?” asked Melissa.

“Nuri can fill in the details later,” said Danny. “Right now we have to decide which way we’re going. The turnoff the truck took is ahead.”

“Don’t turn,” said Nuri. “Keep going. We’ll have to head back to follow Li Han. This guy doesn’t have the UAV. Not yet, anyway.”

Chapter 2

Duka

T
hey dumped Li Han’s body inside the building, raked over the dirt where he had fallen, then climbed into the trucks.

Amara started away. He drove quickly, exactly as he had rehearsed, moving toward the main road south. It was dark but he didn’t use his headlights. The fewer people who noticed him, the better.

He’d driven nearly halfway to the road when his hands began to sweat. Until now he’d been completely calm, unmoved by what he had done. Li Han was nothing to him, an infidel and worse. Ali Aba Muhammad had told him to kill Li Han and take the item back; obeying was as easy as breathing.

But his body began to rebel. The sweat was the first sign. It wouldn’t stop. He wiped his right hand on his pants, put it back on the wheel, then wiped his left. The sweat kept coming.

“There is no God but the true God,” he said to himself, beginning to pray.

The prayer calmed him, but only slightly.

By rights, he should hate Li Han and feel no remorse. His killing of Swal—a man whom Amara had, admittedly, despised—showed that he was a sinner and infidel of the worst sort. But for some reason Amara remained disturbed.

Li Han was not the first man he had killed. But the others had been during battles, and in truth Amara was not even sure that any of them had died—they had been far away, and he’d been either under cover or running. Nor had he known them. Here, Li Han had been right next to him. They had spent several weeks together. Even though Amara suspected from the beginning that he would kill him, even though he had quickly grown to despise the foreigner with his haughty manner, still, Amara had been close enough to him to actually see his face, his eyes, as he died bare inches away.

He had to die. It was God’s will, as the Mentor had explained, and he was preparing to betray the Brotherhood to the Russians. But with all that, with all these good reasons, still Amara felt a tinge of regret and even fear. Twice as he drove he thought Li Han was in the truck beside him; once he even swore for a moment that he was there just before he glanced over.

The seat of course was empty, and he knew for a fact that Li Han was back in the building. But the feeling lingered.

When he reached the highway, Amara flipped the lights on and stepped on the gas, determined to put as many miles between himself and Duka as quickly possible.

He rolled down the windows. The wind rushed into the cab. It filled his lungs with energy and braced his cheeks. He would be in the south very soon. Li Han’s ghost would be left far behind.

Chapter 3

Duka

“V
ehicle located,” MY-PID declared.

“Display on a grid map,” commanded Nuri.

The system popped the image onto the control unit screen. Li Han’s pickup was parked outside of a ramshackle house on the western outskirts of town.

“Can you locate the subject?” Nuri asked.

“Subject appears to be in building,” answered the computer, interpreting the infrared heat signature inside. “Certainty is eighty-four percent.”

“How many people are with him?”

“Subject appears alone. No activity.”

“Looks like Li Han found a new place to stay,” Nuri told Danny. “He’s sleeping in a little shack outside the city.”

“Why’d he change location?” Danny asked.

“Don’t know.” Nuri magnified the image, but it was impossible to see inside the building; the thick roof filtered and dulled the IR signal. “When’s the rest of our gear getting here?”

“The MC-17 should check in any minute,” said Danny. “I’ll arrange a drop near here.”

“Good.”

Nuri told MY-PID to examine the house where Li Han had been earlier. Someone was there as well. The computer declared that there was too little data to positively rule out that Li Han wasn’t in
that
building; only so much could be determined from studying heat signatures. They would have to watch both buildings.

Meanwhile, the bug tracked the Russian as he headed to a ramshackle compound southeast of the city, wedged into a trio of craggy hills. This was the Almighty First Liberation’s “fortress.” MY-PID counted twenty-eight man-sized heat signatures within the various buildings, accounting for the bulk of the rebel force. They were in defensive positions spread out in the rocks, guarding the approaches; clearly they expected retaliation for their leader’s attack.

“Why are the Russians working with these guys?” Danny asked. “I thought Russia wasn’t involved in Africa at all.”

“It’s something new,” answered Melissa from the back.

Nuri tried to keep his teeth from grinding. She was right, but he still resented her, and something compelled him to answer everything she said. “They try to come in every so often.”

“You know this guy?” Danny asked.

“Never even heard of him,” said Nuri. “According to his dossier, he’s been around awhile, was in Iran a while back. This may have been a demotion, or maybe he’s interested in something special. Hard to tell.”

“The computer keeps track of all this?” asked Melissa.

When Nuri didn’t answer, Danny did, which only annoyed Nuri more.

“The system is like having a thousand assistants at your beck and call,” said Danny. “It’s a serious force multiplier.”

“It’s just a computer,” said Nuri. His tone was so harsh that Danny glanced at him.

“Can I interface with it?” asked Melissa.

“You have to be trained,” snapped Nuri.

“It responds to certain voices,” said Danny, still staring at Nuri. “But we all benefit.”

“I’m authorized to terminate Li Han,” said Melissa. “Once we’re sure we have the UAV, we take him down. I don’t think we should wait,” she added, sliding forward and leaning near Danny. “I think we should get it now.”

“We tried that already, and we missed,” said Nuri quickly. “We’re not positive where the UAV is. We can’t afford another miss.”

“Can’t your device figure out where the plane is?”

Melissa said it innocently, but Nuri took it as a challenge.

“It’s not omniscient,” he said. “It needs data. The area wasn’t under surveillance when it went down. We don’t have our sensors in place.”

“I’m for moving sooner rather than later,” said Danny.

“You think we can take over the whole city?” asked Nuri.

“No, but we will have reinforcements soon,” answered Danny. “Enough to deal with the people here. The problem is, if it’s not here, we’re losing a lot of time.”

“If it’s not here, where would it be?” said Nuri. “Anywhere in Africa.”

“True,” said Melissa.

God, thought Nuri, I must be wrong.

W
ith the connection to MY-PID now permanently supplied by the satellite, the Tigershark was no longer needed. Danny released Turk to fly home, which he reluctantly agreed to do.

Meanwhile, Danny located a spot for the Whiplash MC-17 to make an equipment drop. It was an open field about four miles northwest of the city. With the Osprey holding south in case the rest of the team was needed, Danny decided they would go up and meet the newcomers and their supplies, setting up a temporary base there. Driving or even flying back and forth to Ethiopia would take too much time. And ideally, he wanted to close the operation down quickly—as soon as he had a definitive word on where Raven was.

They got to the drop zone five minutes ahead of the aircraft. With Nuri monitoring what was going on in Duka through MY-PID, Danny got out and placed some chem markers in the field. The markers were small sticks that emitted a light visible only through infrared gear. Technically, the Whiplash MC-17 could make the drop without the lights, but Danny liked the extra measure of safety.

Melissa got out of the car with him, walking along as he set out the lights.

“I owe you an apology,” she said after he had finished.

“What’s that?” he asked, surprised.

“I was—I felt that you guys were barging in and trying to take over. I didn’t realize how professional you were, and I acted . . . territorial. Bitchy.”

“Forget it.”

“I am sorry.” She touched his hand and smiled. “I was afraid—this is my operation. You’re trained to not let people in.”

“Sure,” said Danny.

Her hand lingered for just a moment.

“There were a lot of sick people in that clinic,” added Melissa. “They’re pretty desperate for help here.”

“Yeah, I know. We were in a village to the west a few months ago, a couple of villages. It’s a shame. They’re so poor.”

“Do you think—being black . . .”

“Like what? It could have been us?”

“Something like that.”

“No. Not at all.”

They were silent a moment. The wind picked up slightly, softly howling in the distance.

The MC-17.

“Plane’s coming in,” said Danny. “Come stand over here.”

He led her back away from the target area. The Whiplash support aircraft was a specially modified Cargomaster II. Among other things, its engines had been muffled so they were barely audible even at a few thousand feet. Like the extremely capable stock aircraft, the Whiplash version could land on a small, rough airfield; in fact, it probably could have landed in this field, though taking off might have been problematic. There was no need to risk it.

The plane came in low and slow, dropping a trio of large containers on skids within a few meters of each other. The large crates bounced on air cushions attached to the bottom of the skids, giant air bags that inflated just before impact.

As the airplane cleared upward, three smaller figures appeared overhead—Hera Scokas and two Whiplash trainees, Chris “Shorty” Bradley and Toma “Babyboy” Parker. Hera hit her mark dead on, walking right up to the chem marker in the bull’s-eye. The two men came in a bit to her left, blown slightly off course though still well within specs.

“Colonel, good to see you,” said Hera. The short, curly-haired Greek-American gave Danny a wave, then immediately stowed her parachute and checked on the two newcomers who’d jumped with her.

A variety of Whiplash equipment had been packed onto the three crates, including tents, two motorbikes, surveillance gear, and almost a ton of ammunition. There was also a solar panel and battery array to provide the temporary camp with electricity, along with point defenses that included ballistic panels—high-tech versions of claymore antipersonnel mines—and a surveillance radar held aloft by a blimp. The body of the blimp was covered with an adaptive LED material that allowed it to blend in with the sky, making it virtually invisible to the naked eye.

As soon as they were unpacked, Danny launched two small UAVs to supplement the Global Hawk’s coverage. Barely the size of a laptop computer, the robot aircraft looked like miniature versions of Cessna Skymasters, with twin booms to the tail and engines fore and aft of the cockpit. They flew neither fast nor high—sixty knots at 5,000 feet was roughly their top speed and ceiling, respectively. But their undersides were covered with LED arrays similar to those on the blimp, making them difficult to pick out even in daylight. And the top surfaces were covered with solar cells that supplemented and recharged the batteries powering their engines. As long as the day was sunny, MY-PID could manage the power consumption so the aircraft would fly 24/7.

Melissa pitched in, quietly working beside the others. She’d changed somehow, Danny realized, or maybe fatigue had just worn off the sharp edges.

Whatever the reason, she was actually pleasant to work with now. She volunteered to brief Hera and the others on the overall situation, and even helped set the posts for the command tent.

Maybe, thought Danny, they could work with her after all.

N
uri didn’t understand the significance of what was going on at first; he was too busy following MY-PID’s brief on the Russian and his connections in Moscow. But the computer did.

“Large force gathering near the town center,” the Voice told him as he paged through Kimko’s file on the mobile laptop he’d hooked into the system. “Armed.”

Nuri immediately brought up the image on the computer. Then he got out of the truck and went to find Danny.

The colonel was bent over a tent stake, hammering it in with a large mallet. Some technologies were impossible to improve on.

“Meurtre Musique is going to war,” Nuri told him. “Two dozen of them, trucks, machine guns, grenade launchers. They’re getting together near the town square.”

“Do they have night vision gear?”

“Probably not.”

“They’re going to have a hard time hitting the hills where Sudan First is holed up,” predicted Danny. “They’ll spot them coming, even in the dark.”

“That’s not where they’re going,” said Nuri, watching the screen.

The trucks swung south down the main street, then formed two columns turning up different roads to the east. After they’d gone about three blocks, yellow and white flashes began appearing on the screen.

“Is something wrong with the image?” asked Melissa, peering at it over Danny’s shoulder.

“They’re shooting up houses,” said Nuri flatly. “They’re getting their revenge.”

M
elissa felt her stomach sink as the gunfire continued on the screen. The trucks moved slowly through the streets, going no faster than four or five miles an hour, raking everything they passed with gunfire. In the western part of the city, a good portion of the bullets might be absorbed or deflected by the mud bricks of the buildings. But here the buildings were made mostly of discarded wood. There would be little to stop them.

Suddenly, something caught fire at the top of the screen. Danny poked his finger at it, increasing in magnification. A cottage had caught fire. The flames quickly formed a crown as they spread around the outer walls.

Something bolted out from the wall of fire. A finger of flame trailed it, even as it threw itself on the ground.

A person.

Two people, one big, one small.

A mother and child, Melissa imagined.

“This is terrible,” she said. “We have to do something.”

“Like what?” snapped Nuri.

“Colonel, we can’t just let them shoot each other up,” she told Danny. “They’re killing innocent children.”

“It’s not our business,” said Nuri. “Didn’t you say something yesterday about not wanting these people to get in your way? You weren’t worried about collateral damage.”

“This is different.”

“There’s nothing really we can do,” said Danny. “We have our mission. And we don’t have enough force to stop this.”

Melissa knew he was right—and she had said that, and felt it, and did feel it.

But these were real people getting killed.

“Sudan First will retaliate,” said Nuri. “Once they hear what’s up. Both sides go after soft targets first. They’re basically cowards.”

Melissa thought of the clinic. It was an obvious and easy target.

She went over to the tent where they were making coffee, remembering the women and their children there, the people she’d treated before the shooting victims came. Her mind conflated the two, imagining the children shot up, the women bleeding from bullet wounds.

She had to do something.

D
anny watched as the pickups retreated back toward the residential area of the city where the Meurtre Musique supporters lived. Their grass huts would be easy targets for retaliation. Didn’t they realize that?

Most likely they did. But just as likely they felt they had to avenge the earlier shooting, and would have to fight it out.

It was senseless, but there was nothing he could do about it. The question was whether it would interfere with his mission—random bullets flying in the air weren’t going to make things easier.

On the other hand, all the gunfire would make a perfect cover for a raid. No one would notice if he went in.

“Thirsty, Colonel?” asked Melissa, walking over to him with a cup of coffee.

“Sure.”

She gave him the cup. “How do you take it?”

“Black’s good.”

“I want to borrow one of the motorcycles to get into town,” she said, sipping her own. “I need to be there in an hour, just at dawn.”

“What?”

“The clinic,” she told him. “I need to get back.”

“It’s not a good idea to go there,” said Danny. “There’s going to be a lot more fighting.”

“I think that’s why I should go.”

Danny stared at her. She was like his wife more than just physically; he couldn’t quite figure out what she was thinking.

“We put you in as a spy yesterday,” he told her. “That made sense. Now, though, we have all our gear here—we don’t need someone on the ground.”

“You’d be amazed at what these people tell me.”

“Like what?” said Nuri skeptically.

“I found that first house.”