His breath caught hard in his chest when he peered over the edge and he took a reflexive step back, out of sight.
Less than two hundred feet below, a pair of men in rolled Afghan Pakol hats and knee-length shalwar kameez shirts fingered through their gear. A third man Quinn recognized as the young camel herder from the day before stood behind Ronnie, pinning her arms.
Adrenaline surged through Quinn’s body as he realized he had no weapons. Each of the men had a rifle slung over his shoulder. In this part of the world, they were sure to have knives as well.
Every few seconds the camel herder craned his long neck to gaze up the trail, obviously expecting Quinn to return from that direction. He’d likely convinced his friends to travel all night in order to rob the rich tourists. The other two bandits tossed through clothing and camping gear as they searched for anything of value. It wouldn’t be long before they realized the only thing in camp worth selling was Veronica Garcia.
Quinn formed his plan as he went, relying on instinct over intellect. Jumping from the Enfield, he found a rock and bashed at the damaged muffler where it joined the straight pipe coming directly off the engine. In seconds he was able to shear the remaining screw and rip the muffler away.
Moments later he sat aboard the silent bike. A soft wind blew in his face. Looking over the edge, he shifted into third. He kept an eye on Ronnie while he slipped the Breitling from his wrist and unscrewed the crown on the lower barrel that contained the emergency location transmitter. He stopped short of pulling out the wire that would activate the satellite beacon.
Gripping the watch between his teeth, Quinn made certain the Enfield’s ignition switch was turned on. For his plan to work, he’d need the element of surprise and a hell of a lot of luck. The camel herder already knew he was unarmed-but he hadn’t counted on the Breitling.
Quinn pressed the clutch so he could pop it when he wanted to start the bike, and released the brake. He was rolling.
A hundred feet above the bandits, the trail leveled before making the final drop to camp. Quinn popped the clutch here. The Bullet’s 499cc engine shuddered, skidding the back wheel in the loose gray shale. Thankfully, it caught enough traction and thumped to life. Without a muffler the little bike rattled and popped like a fifty cal.
“ Made like a gun,” Quinn whispered the Royal Enfield slogan through gritted teeth. And that was just how he intended to use it.
Rolling on all the power he had, he yanked back on the handlebars, praying they didn’t snap off in his hands. The bike rose to an agitated wheelie, bouncing over the rocks, rearing like an angry horse.
Two of the men dove for cover at the sound of a sudden attack. The camel herder shoved Ronnie to the side. He brought up the Kalashnikov and began to fire.
The Enfield’s chassis and engine gave Quinn some protection from the gunfire, but he was thankful the guy used the regional “spray and pray” tactic with no attempt at aiming his shots.
Rocks and debris skittered down the mountain ahead of the bike. The deafening crack-crack-crack of rifle fire and motorcycle engine slammed off the cliffs and echoed through the canyons. Thirty feet out, Quinn used his teeth to tug the coiled antenna wire on the Breitling, activating the locator beacon. He tossed the watch toward the two bandits standing beside his gear and plowed the Enfield straight into the camel driver, sending him and the bike over the edge and flailing through empty space.
Quinn bailed off the bike a split second before the front wheel impacted the startled man in the chest. He grabbed Garcia by the arm.
“Run, run, run!” he yelled, dragging her over the edge.
An instant later the high clouds gave a piercing hiss and a Hellfire missile struck the men above with pinpoint accuracy. The entire mountain shook with the explosion.
On the narrow ledge below, Ronnie screamed. Her wrist slipped from Quinn’s grip and they began to slide on loose shale toward the jagged lip of rock-and oblivion.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Northern Virginia
Jacques Thibodaux paced the oblong tile floor in front of the bank of blinking flat-screen computer monitors and glowing digitized maps of China and Afghanistan. The whir of cooling fans gave the place the feeling of a giant white noise machine. Thibodaux had to keep his hands behind his back to keep from slapping the big-eared Air Force staff sergeant sitting behind a computerized instrument panel and beefed-up military version of a game controller. On the wall above hung a three-foot blue banner bearing the motto of his secret unit in ornate golden script: hic sunt dracones — “Here There Be Dragons.”
A red dot pulsed on the tightly stacked topographic lines of the map, seventeen miles across the Chinese border into the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.
An emotionless female voice, like the ones that warned military pilots to “pull up, pull up” and avoid low terrain, sounded the alarm of “Impact… impact…” followed by a repeated set of GPS coordinates.
Staff Sergeant Guttman, the big-eared object of the Marine’s wrath, banged away furiously at the keyboard beside his game controller. His wide eyes blinked in teenage dismay at the instrument display on the panel before him.
A video game prodigy, he was one of a new generation of Air Force pilots assigned to Detachment Seven, the highly classified unit within the Fifty-third Test and Evaluation Group based at Eglin AFB. He was the primary pilot of the AX7 Damocles, a top-secret, Tier III-high-altitude, low-observable drone. Developed by Lockheed Martin’s infamous Skunk Works project office, Damocles differed from the RQ-170 Sentinel in several ways, the most notable being that it carried a payload of weapons. Like the mythical sword on a single horsehair, Damo could loiter above the enemy for nearly two days at altitudes well over sixty-five thousand feet.
The emotionless female voice continued: “Impact… impact…”
Thibodaux stopped to rest both hands flat on the counter, breathing down the kid’s neck. “Somebody wanna tell me what Bitchin’ Betty’s talkin’ about?”
“I swear, sir.” Guttman looked up, terrified. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t deploy anything.”
Win Palmer sat in a leather office chair along the back wall of the narrow control room, across from Staff Sergeant Guttman. The windowless trailer was more like a submarine than an Air Force control center. The national security advisor’s arms were folded across the chest of his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
“What deployed?” Palmer asked. “A Tomahawk or the Hellfire?”
“The one-fourteen, sir,” Guttman chirped, his voice cracking from youth and fear. “The Hellfire.”
“Very good,” Palmer said. He leaned back, nodding as if relieved. “Damocles is normally armed with four Tomahawk missiles. We replaced one with a Hellfire to give Quinn close air support for this mission.”
“And?” Thibodaux wanted to say, What the hell does that mean? But even he knew there were limits to ways you spoke to the president’s right-hand man.
“The Breitling Mrs. Miyagi gave him,” Palmer explained. “We programed Damocles to lock on to the watch when the ELT antenna was activated. The Hellfire would then deploy on a two-second delay. With travel time from altitude, that would give Quinn between five and seven seconds before impact.”
“You mean to tell me”-Thibodaux’s face burned red-“you just shot a Hellfire missile at Jericho?”
Guttman shook his head. He forced a sick smile. The kid was actually wearing multicolored braces on his teeth. “No, sir, at least not unless he told us to. The Breitling Emergency pings at two hundred and forty-three megahertz for your basic military frequency. Mr. Palmer’s shop tweaked it to talk to Damo and Damo only. When your friend pulled the pin, the watch sent up a signal that went out like a giant cone. Damocles just had to lob one in the basket of that cone, so to speak. The Hellfire followed the signal down to the watch with less than one meter of error.”
“Yeah, well,” the big Cajun harrumphed, exhausted at being trapped stateside while Jericho was in danger, again. “Does Damo have a camera?”
“Multiple,” Guttman said, puffing up his chest like a proud father. “Conventional and infrared-all mounted on a Gorgon Stare Pod-”
