Raven Strike

“Back up! Back up!” yelled Da

There was gunfire, then another explosion. Da

“Out! Out!” he yelled, and then stepped up to the next man, pulling him back, and then the next.

The floor rumbled. Flash and Nolan appeared in front of him, backing their way out.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” yelled Da

The dust blocked his helmet’s infrared vision, shrouding him in darkness. He put his hand out and touched the back of one of his troopers—it was impossible to tell at the moment which—and nudged him, moving with him as the wall to the right sheared downward. Something hit Da

The Marines who’d come up with Da

MY-PID reported that it could not find any heat signatures within the building complex.

“There were computers and metal in that room,” Flash told Da

“Let’s get digging.”

“They’re putting up their hands,” said Shorty. “They want to surrender.”

Melissa looked at the screen. There were four men, one of whom was almost certainly the Russian—MY-PID identified him as clean-shaven and wearing western clothes.

He had a duffel bag.

“Cease fire,” said Shorty over the Osprey radio, though the pilots already had. “What do you think, ma’am?”

Her orders were to recover the UAV brain intact if possible. That potentially conflicted with what Da

Which took precedence?

Did it matter? She couldn’t kill the man in cold blood. Not even Da

The Russian would be valuable—they could get a lot of intelligence out of him if he really was an expert.

“Let’s get down there and take them,” she told the trooper.

The MC-17 swooped down over the camp and dropped its third and last container into the area just south of the cluster of buildings. This one contained two bots, which were somewhat larger than the others. They looked like downsized construction vehicles: one had a clamshell, the other a crane arm with various attachments.

Unlike the gun bots, which were powered by small hydrogen fuel cells, these ran on turbo diesel engines. They lacked i

Two troopers checked them out, started them up, then walked them over toward Da

It took about ten minutes before they could see the outline of the room. In fact there was an aircraft there—MY-PID ID’ed the wing of a Predator. With a little more digging, Da

He suddenly got a strange feeling—not so much a premonition as déjà vu.

“Everybody back!” he yelled. “Back!”

Flash looked up at him. “Boss?”

“Back!” Da

After the team retreated to the outskirts of the ruins, Da

“I can pull the wing straight up, Colonel,” said the man operating the bot.

“Go for it.”

Da

“How’d you know?” asked Flash as the dust settled.

“It looked familiar,” said Da

Melissa went out last, trotting behind the Whiplash team members as they surrounded the four men. The vest and helmet she’d do

“Put down any weapons,” Melissa said in Arabic.

When no one moved, she realized she’d forgotten to switch her com system into loudspeaker mode. Her mind blanked and she couldn’t remember how to do it. Finally, Melissa flipped up her visor and yelled the words.

The men held their arms out to their sides.

“Separate!” she ordered. “Move apart or we will fire.”

They slowly began stepping aside. Two of the team members walked toward the man farthest to the right. The Osprey circled ahead, the thump of its rotors vibrating against the hard ground and nearby hills. Melissa felt her heart racing and tried to calm it.

Suddenly, one of the men began ru

Why? she wondered.

Then she knew.

“Bomb!”

Da

All he saw was white in the center of black. It seemed like forever before the camera on the Osprey supplying the feed readjusted.

There was a team member down.

Melissa.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “Shorty? Shorty!”

“We have one man down,” said the trooper. “Another minor injury. All of the prisoners are dead.”

“What the hell happened?” demanded Da

“He had a vest, and explosives in a knapsack. We have high-tech parts in a bag.”

“What’s Melissa’s status?”

“Breathing. Losing a lot of blood.”

“Evac her the hell out of there.”

“We’re working on it, Colonel. We’re working on it.”

Chapter 7

Room 4

Jonathon Reid pushed his chair away from the table and rose. He felt as if he’d taken a breath of fresh air for the first time in weeks.

“The electronics match,” he said. “We’ve got it. Thank God.”

“I’m always amazed at how much God is blamed for what humans do,” said Ray Rubeo.

Reid stifled a smirk. He hadn’t known the scientist even believed in God.

“They’ll all be back in Ethiopia inside an hour,” Brea

Reid nodded. It was an absurdly low casualty rate, given what had been at stake.

There was a certain poetic justice in the fact that the person who’d been most seriously wounded was the one attached to the program. It was an extremely uncharitable thought. Yet that’s what he felt.

He also felt it would have been far more satisfying if it was Harker who’d been wounded.

“Ilse has lost a lot of blood,” said Brea

Reid nodded. The other two injuries were Marines. Both were bullet wounds, one in the arm and one in the leg.

“As soon as all our people are out, the Tomahawks will finish off the camp buildings,” said Brea