Raven Strike (7 page)

Chapter 2

Over Sudan

W
ith the UAV located and the CIA officer recovered, Turk’s job settled into a sustained fugue of monotony. He had to orbit above Duka, watching to make sure that the rebels or whoever had grabbed the UAV remained in the warehouse building with it. He had two problems: conserving fuel and staying awake.

The second was by far the hardest. Turk had a small vial of what were euphemistically known as “go pills” in the pocket of his flight suit, but he preferred not to take them. So he ran through his other, nonprescription bag of tricks—listening to rap music tracks and playing mental games. He tried to trace perfect ellipses in the air without the aid of the flight computer, mentally timing his circuits against the actual clock.

His eyes still felt the heavy effect of gravity.

He was at 30,000 feet, well above the altitude where anyone on the ground could hear him, let alone do anything about him. As far as he knew, his only job now would be to circle around until the Raven was recovered. At that point he could land, refuel, and head home.

Maybe with some sleep in there somewhere.

Turk amused himself by thinking of places he might stop over. The Tigershark had been at a number of air shows—the aircraft had been built as a demonstration project and toured before being bought by the Office of Special Technology—so as long as he could get Breanna to agree, he could take it just about anywhere.

Maybe Paris. They said the women were pretty hot there.

Italian women. Better bet. He could land at Aviano, find some fellow pilot to show him the city . . .

“Tigershark, this is Whiplash Ground. How are you reading me?”

“I read you good, Colonel. What’s our game plan?”

“We’re thinking of sending someone into the city to scout around. If we have an operation, we’re not going in until tonight.”

“What’s the status on that tanker?”

“We’re still waiting to hear.”

A tanker had been routed from the Air Mobility Command, but it wasn’t clear how long it might be before it would arrive. Not only had the mission been thrown together at the last moment, but Whiplash’s status outside the normal chain of command hurt when it came to arranging for outside support. Tankers were in especially short supply, and finding one that didn’t have a specific mission was always difficult.

“I can stay up where I am for another two hours, give or take,” said Turk. He glanced at the fuel panel and mentally calculated that he actually had a little more than three. But it was always good to err on the low side. “If the tanker isn’t going to be here by then, it might be a good idea for me to land and refuel at your base. Assuming you have fuel.”

“Stand by.”

Turk gave the controls over to the computer and stretched, raising his legs and pointing his toes awkwardly. This was the only situation where he envied Flighthawk pilots—they could get up from their stations and take a walk around the aircraft.

Not in the B-2s that were controlling the UAV fighters now, of course, but in the older Megafortresses and the new B-5Cs. Then again, most remote aircraft pilots didn’t even fly in mother ships anymore; they operated at remote bases or centers back home, just like the Predator and Global Hawk pilots.

Scratch that envy, Turk thought.

“Tigershark, we have a tanker en route. It’ll be about an hour,” said Colonel Freah, coming back on the line.

“I’ll wait,” he told Danny. “Give me the tanker frequency and his flight vector, if you can.”

“Stand by.”

Chapter 3

Western Ethiopia

N
uri needed to gear up to go into Duka. The first thing he needed was better bling. An arms dealer could get away with shabby clothes, but lacking gold was beyond suspicious. At a minimum, he needed at least a fancy wristwatch. Transportation was critical as well.

Most of all, he needed American dollars.

Which was a problem. The CIA had temporarily closed its station in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. The nearest officer was in Eritrea somewhere.

“Use the cash the existing operation has,” said Reid. “I’m sure they have plenty.”

Reid seemed grouchy, probably because of the hour. D.C. was eight hours behind eastern Africa, which made it close to two in the morning there.

“I’m not getting a lot of cooperation,” said Nuri.

“Shoot them if they don’t cooperate.”

It didn’t sound like a joke.

“Get back to me if there’s still a problem,” said Reid before hanging up.

Melissa had gone to rest in her quarters, one of the smaller huts farthest up on the hillside—not a coincidence, Nuri thought, as she had undoubtedly chosen it for the pseudo status its location would provide.

From a distance, all of the buildings looked as if they had been there for ages. But up close it was obvious they were recent additions—the painted exterior walls were made from pressboard, relatively rare in this part of Africa.

Even rarer was the door on Melissa’s hut, all metal. Nuri knocked on it.

“What?” she snapped from inside.

“You awake?”

“I’m awake,” she said, pulling open the door. Her right arm was in a sling.

“Can we talk?”

Melissa pushed the door open and let him in. There was a sleeping bag on the floor. A computer and some communications gear sat opposite it, pushed up against the wall. The only other furniture was a small metal footlocker. A pair of AK-47s sat on top, with loaded magazines piled at the side. A small, battery-powered lantern near the head of the sleeping bag lit the room.

“I need some cash,” Nuri said.

“And?”

“I need money.”

“Why do you think I have money?” snapped Melissa, sitting down on the sleeping bag. She pushed back to the wall, spreading her legs in front of her. She was wearing black fatigues.

“Look, I just got off the line with my boss,” said Nuri. “He told me I should shoot you if you didn’t cooperate. And he was serious.”

“Give me a break.”

“I know you got a stash of money,” he said. “Nobody works in Africa, especially out here, without bribe money. Piles of it.”

“Why do you need money?”

“I’m going into Duka and nose around. I have a cover as an arms dealer.”

“I have a few thousand, that’s all.”

“It’s a start.”

“I go with the money.”

Nuri shook his head. “Ain’t gonna work.”

“It has to.”

“Nope. Come on. I have a cover here I’ve established. I go in with an American girl—I’d be dead.”

“You don’t exactly look like you belong,” said Melissa. “You’re the wrong color.”

“I’m from Eritrea,” said Nuri. His cover story wasn’t that far from the truth, if you went back two generations. “I’m an Italian. Don’t make a face—it worked for months. I can speak most of the tribal languages, including Nubian, as well as Arabic.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You want Lango or Madi?”

“Nobody speaks Lango up here,” said Melissa.

“No shit. That wasn’t my point.”

“Look, we can work together,” she told him. “We don’t have to be enemies.”

“Just give me the cash.”

“You’re stuck if I don’t. There are no cash machines outside of the capital, which is too far for you to go, right? And Eritrea isn’t going to help. Because there’s one person in Eritrea, and you can never get ahold of him. And the embassy is useless.”

“I can call Washington,” he told her. “And have you ordered back home.”

“Look, there’s no need for us to spit at each other,” she told him. “Let’s work together.”

Nuri frowned.

“You can’t cut me out,” she told him. “Tell your boss I want to be involved.”

“My boss?”

“Colonel Freah.”

“Danny’s not my boss. He commands the military people.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m Agency, just like you. We work as a team.”

“Who’s in charge of the operation?”

“We both are.”

“There has to be
one
person in charge. One.”

“You going to tell me how to run my operation now?”

“I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m sorry.” She shifted against the wall. “Let me go into town with you.”

“So the guys in the truck can recognize you?”

“They never got close enough to see me. It was dark.”

“What part of the company do you work for?”

Melissa didn’t answer.

“How long have you been covert? Or are you a tech geek who found her way over to the action side?”

“I’m not going to play games,” Melissa said. “I work for Harker—talk to him.”

“Look, give me the money,” he told her. “I need to go in right away. You’re in no shape right now. You should have taken more morphine. At least you’d get some rest.”

“You’re a doctor now?”

“Are you?”

“I trained as a nurse.”

Nuri put up his hands. She had an answer for everything.

Finally, Melissa went over to the footlocker and opened it. She hunched over it, counting money out.

“This ought to be enough,” she told him, handing over a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

Nuri started to count it.

“There are fifty,” she told him. “Five thousand.”

“That may not do it.”

“It’ll have to.” She slammed the top down with her right hand, pulling it halfway out of the sling.

“You should get your arm fixed.”

“It’ll be fine. You go and scout. OK. But I want to go on the mission.”

“If there is a mission, that’ll be up to Danny.”

“I thought he wasn’t your boss.”

“He’s not. But he’s more objective than I am.”

B
oston managed to patch up Melissa’s motorcycle well enough for Nuri to ride it across the border into Elada, a medium-sized town in Eritrea, about an hour and a half away. He bought a counterfeit Rolex, some AK-47s, an old Colt service automatic, ammo, and two pair of khaki uniforms for a hundred American dollars; he could have shaved at least another ten off the deal if he’d had exact change.

Finding a decent vehicle was a different story. Pickup trucks, even those in poor condition, were valuable and rare. Nuri wanted either two trucks, or a truck and Land Rover; he’d stick a few of the Whiplash people in the back of the pickup as bodyguards. But he couldn’t find anyone willing to sell. The best he could do was work a trade for a battered Mercedes sedan—his motorcycle, a thousand American in cash, and three stolen credit cards.

The credit cards were Agency cards, disabled by MY-PID two minutes after the transaction. It would undoubtedly be at least a full day before the buyer found out: Elada didn’t have any ATMs, nor were there any in the rest of the country.

The car ran decently, and came with three-quarters of a tank worth of diesel. Which was enough—Nuri drove it about five miles south to a field where the Osprey was waiting. Danny had decided to speed things up by flying it across to Sudan.

“I have uniforms for two bodyguards,” Nuri told Danny as the Osprey took off with the car chained beneath its belly. “How about Flash and Boston?”

“Boston can go, but Flash is going to stay with the aircraft in case we need backup,” said Danny. “I want to come.”

Boston was imposing physically, but his real asset was an angry, craggy face that would scare even a close friend into thinking he was just waiting for an excuse to kill. Flash, though white, had the lean, undernourished look of a down-on-his-luck white mercenary who very likely was nursing sociopathic tendencies.

Danny was big physically, and Nuri knew from experience that he was in excellent shape and was a great shot. But he had a quieter, almost benign face—too relaxed, too in control. The ideal bodyguard out here was just this side of criminally insane.

“You think you can do it?” Nuri asked.

“I’ve gone undercover here before.”

“This is different. You’ll have to be completely silent. If they hear your accent up here, we’re dead.”

“I’m not worried,” said Danny.

Nuri picked up one of the uniforms. “Here you go, then. I hope it fits.”

Chapter 4

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland

B
reanna spotted Jonathon Reid’s gray Taurus parked with its running lights and engine on near the edge of the tarmac as the C-20 turned off the access ramp from the runway. She unbuckled her seat belt and went to the door, waiting while the aircraft taxied over.

“Pilots say the plane should be refueled inside an hour, ma’am,” said the sergeant who was working as the crewman. “If you’d like, I can try and hunt up something to eat.”

“A bagel?” she asked. “With butter?”

“I’ll give it a shot, ma’am.”

Breanna waited impatiently for the aircraft to halt. It seemed to take forever to travel the last twenty or thirty yards. Finally it eased to a stop. The crewman dropped the fold-down stairs, and Breanna trotted down them into a light rain. She walked over to the car and got in on the passenger side.

Reid handed her a cup of coffee.

“The news is that bad?” she asked.

Reid had an extremely droll sense of humor, but he didn’t laugh now.

“I’m guessing what’s going on here,” he told her. “I’m guessing there’s an unauthorized assassination program involved. There are no official records or minutes anywhere. No NSC notes. And I did check, through the back channel.”

“OK.” Breanna had suspected as much when he said he wanted to talk about it in person.

“But it’s the weapon that worries me,” said Reid. “Raven doesn’t refer to the UAV. It was a program to develop software that could seek out and destroy whoever it was targeted against. It could control a variety of platforms. In fact, it could go, on its own, from one to the other. That was its goal.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know.” Reid took a sip from his coffee. “After seeing everything Dr. Rubeo has come up with, I’d say anything is possible.”

“Hmmm.”

“This weapon would be able to take over programs of other countries,” continued Reid. “There was a white paper, very restricted access, that talks about guarding against these things.”

“You should really talk to Ray about it.”

“I’d like to. But I don’t know how much to trust him.”

“I trust Ray implicitly.”

“Would he feel obliged, morally, to discuss it with anyone else?”

“What do you mean?”

“If the Agency has created a weapon that can’t be controlled, and accidentally set it loose, who would he feel he had to tell?”

“What do you mean, it can’t be controlled?”

Reid sipped his coffee, momentarily turning his gaze to the drops of rain landing on the windshield.

“The implication of the white paper was that this software would be like a virus, released into the wild,” he said, still looking at the rain. “Once out there, it would just run relentless until its target was found.”

“You think the Agency would test that without any safety protocols?” said Breanna. “That would be insane.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing. I would assume they would have
some
sort of safeguard. And I don’t know if any of this is even possible. But . . .”

“But?”

“But they’re definitely going after someone in the Sudan, they’re definitely using a UAV no one else has known about, and they’re definitely being extremely secretive. And the person the Whiplash team rendezvoused with in Africa joined the Agency as a software scientist before transferring about a year ago to covert ops.”

“We have to ask Edmund what’s going on,” said Breanna.

“I have. He won’t say. I have a few favors to call in,” added Reid. “And I’ll talk to Dr. Rubeo.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not sure.” Reid put his coffee cup back in the holder. “I have to ask you not to share this with the senator.”

“Zen?”

“I don’t— This could be a real political football in Congress. And . . .” He paused. “I’m not sure the President knows. In fact, I’d almost bet she doesn’t. Just from Edmund’s reactions.”

“You think they’d run an assassination program without telling the President?”

“Without a doubt,” said Reid.

B
y the time she reboarded the C-20, Breanna felt drained. Recovering the UAV—they had located it and were planning to go in as soon as it was dark—was exactly the sort of mission Whiplash had been created for. The political implications of Raven, even if it were “just” an illegal assassination mission, were something else again.

She hadn’t even been thinking of Zen until Reid mentioned that he couldn’t be told.

They both had jobs where it was necessary to keep a certain amount of separation between work and home, and therefore to keep certain state and political secrets from one another as well. But if Breanna knew that the CIA was breaking the law, and being extremely irresponsible as well—could she in good conscience
not
tell Zen about it? What would he say to her when he found out?

Because something like this would eventually come out. Surely.

Hopefully, Reid was overthinking the situation. Losing a top secret UAV would certainly be enough to circle the wagons.

And just because he couldn’t find any approval in the system for the assassination didn’t necessarily mean there hadn’t been one.

“Ma’am?”

Breanna looked up at the tech sergeant, standing in the aisle next to her seat.

“Got you your bagel,” he said, smiling as he handed her a tray. “I have to ask you to buckle your seat belt.”