Raven Strike

Two more guards waited on the other side of the door. Zen was searched once more. If anything, the second search was more thorough. Cleared, Zen went down the hallway to a set of iron bars. The burly man on the other side, dressed in riot gear but without a weapon, eyed him, then turned and nodded. The bars went up; Zen wheeled through. He said hello, not expecting an answer. He had never gotten one in the weeks since he’d been coming to visit Stoner, and he didn’t get one now.

Past the last set of iron bars, the place looked pretty much like a normal hospital suite again. It was only when one looked very closely at things, like the double locks on the cabinet drawers and the ubiquitous video monitors, that one might realize this was an ultra-high-security facility.

The hall turned to the right, opening into a large, glass-enclosed area. The glass looked into four different rooms. Zen pivoted to his left, facing a large physical therapy space on the other side of the glass. Stoner, dressed in sweats, was lying on a bench doing flying presses with a set of dumbbells. If the numbers on the sides of the plates were to be believed, he was swinging two hundred pounds overhead with each arm as easily as Zen might have lifted fifty.

Zen caught a reflection in the glass. Dr. Esrang was leaning, arms folded, against the glass almost directly behind him.

“You’re trusting him with free weights,” said Zen.

“He’s making good progress,” said Esrang, coming over. “He’s earning our trust.”

“Are the new drugs working?”

“Hard to say, as usual. We look at brain waves, we look at scans. We are only guessing.”

Zen nodded. They’d had variations of this conversation several times.

“You may go in if you wish,” said the doctor.

Zen watched his old friend awhile longer. Stoner’s face was expressionless. He might be concentrating entirely on his body’s movements, feeling every strain and pull of his muscles. Or he might be a million miles away.

Zen wheeled over to the far side of the space. There was a bar on the frame. He slid it up, then pushed the door-sized pane of glass next to it open. He made sure to close the door behind him, then wheeled around to the room where Stoner was working out.

Stoner said nothing when he entered. Zen wheeled about halfway into the room, waiting until his friend finished a set. Stoner, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, weighed about 240 pounds, nearly all of it muscle.

“Working with the dumbbells today?” said Zen.

Stoner got up from the bench and went to a weight rack on the far side of the room. He took out another set of dumbbells and began doing a military press.

“Enough weight for you?” asked Zen.

He hated that he was reduced to ridiculous comments, but he couldn’t think of much else to say. Stoner worked in silence, pushing the weights up with steady, flawless efficiency. These were the heaviest set of weights in the room, and he knocked off thirty reps without a problem. He was sweating, but that might have been due to the heat—the place felt like a sauna.

“I can stay for breakfast if you want,” said Zen. “Give me an excuse to blow off a committee meeting.”

No answer. Stoner put down the weights, then went back to the bench and started on a set of sitting curls. His face remained the same: no sign of stress.

“Nationals are doing well. They won last night,” said Zen. “They’ll be back home soon. Maybe we can take in a game.”

“Baseball?” asked Stoner.

“Yeah. You want to go to a game?”

Instead of responding, Stoner went back to his workout. During his treatment in Eastern Europe, he had been essentially brainwashed, his personality and memory replaced with an almost robotic consciousness. His old self or at least some semblance of it remained, but exactly how much, no one could say.

Zen had managed only a handful of conversations with him since he’d been here. Stoner hadn’t said more than a dozen words in each. But that was more than he’d said to anyone else.

Stoner did two more circuits, pumping the iron without visible fatigue. As he finished a set of standing presses, he glanced over at Zen.

The look in his eye frightened Zen. For a split second he thought Stoner was going to toss one of the dumbbells at his head.

He didn’t. He just glared at him, then pumped through another twenty reps.

“Man, you’re in good shape,” said Zen as Stoner racked the weights.

Stoner turned to him. “Need heavier weights. Too easy.”

“Did you ask the doctors?”

Stoner pulled his hood over his head.

“I can try and get more for you,” said Zen. “What weight?”

“Big disks,” said Stoner. “I need more.”

He started walking toward the door next to the rack.

“Feel like having breakfast?” Zen asked.

“No,” said Stoner. “Go

“OK,” said Zen. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then, maybe.”

Stoner said nothing. Zen watched him walk down the hall, turning right into his room.

“I’ve already ordered more weights,” said Esrang when Zen met him outside. “We didn’t want to give him too much at first, in case he decided to use them as weapons.”

“You still think he’s dangerous?”

Esrang pitched his head to one side, gesturing with his shoulders. He was one of the world’s experts on the effects of steroids and other drugs on the human brain, but he often pointed out that this meant he knew that he didn’t know enough.

Zen glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

Zen smiled. It was a nice thing for the doctor to say, but they both knew it wasn’t necessarily true.

Chapter 13

Southeastern Sudan

Li Han watched as the aircraft was lifted into the back of the pickup truck. It was a lot lighter than he’d expected; three men could easily handle it.

It would fetch a decent amount of money. The design was unique, the materials, even the onboard flight control computer, which had considerably more processing and memory chips than Li Han expected—the right buyer would pay a good price.

The question was finding the right buyer. The best price would come from his former countrymen, though there was no way he could deal with them.

The Russians were one possibility. The French were another. The Iranians, but his last dealings with them had turned sour.

The biggest payday might actually come from the Americans, who would want their equipment back.

Maybe they could make a deal.

He needed to find a place to examine it more carefully, and think. That meant going north, away from the area controlled by the Brotherhood. They would only complicate things.

The Brother holding the forward end of the aircraft slipped as they were placing it into the bed of the pickup. The fuselage fell hard against the truck.

“Careful, you idiots!” yelled Li Han in Chinese.

He ran over to the plane. It didn’t appear to be damaged, at least not any worse than it had been.

“Come,” he said, switching to English. “We need to be away from here before the satellite appears.”

Melissa was a mile and a half from the transponder when the signal went from a steady beep to a more urgent bleat.

The aircraft was being moved.

She squeezed the throttle on the motorcycle, hunkering down against the handlebars as its speed jumped. A second later she realized that was a mistake. Backing off the gas, she pulled her GPS out from her jacket pocket and got her bearings.

The transponder was in a valley roughly parallel to the one she was riding through. Both ran east to west. According to the map, a road that intersected both valleys lay two miles ahead. She could go to that intersection and wait.