Personal. The word echoed in Saxon's thoughts and he looked away. He'd been in this so long, letting Belltower take him from conflict to conflict
– Brazil, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Turkey, Iceland, and all the others-that the days blurred into one. The missions… The mission and the mission and the mission, one after another, eating up his life, keeping him in the place where he did what he was best at.
But then the paper came. Real paper, a real letter, not some e-doc in his data stack. Belltower's top echelons liked to do that kind of thing, he remembered. They liked the old, traditional ways, all of them blue bloods out of Sandhurst or West Point, holding on to cap-badge rituals and honors. Personal, embossed on the envelope in bright red ink.
In plain and simple words the paper told him his contract was about to end. Another month, and the blood that Ben Saxon had spilled for them would evaporate. He would be free to take his pay and his shares and leave his guns behind, free to take a different path at the crossroads.
His gaze turned inward, and Saxon's lip curled in cold amusement. How could they ever expect him to do anything else but reenlist? It was a joke that they would even ask him. What purpose would a man like him find in the civilian world? The truth was, half the augmentations in him were classed as lethal weapons in more than a dozen countries. If he stepped out, what would happen to him? Would he be stripped down, defanged? A predator hobbled so it could fit in with the outside world?
Saxon had never connected to anyone outside; his family was long gone. He had no life beyond the unit, no loyalty to anyone but the unit. The paper made him angry. Offering him the choice was almost an insult.
'Jefe?' His attention snapped back to the moment; Duarte was speaking to him, and he'd tuned the young man out.
'What is it?' He covered his moment of reverie by checking his rifle once again.
Sam ran a hand over his shorn scalp, across the wine-dark lines of an intricate angel design, wings spread across his temples. 'These northern guys, they're tough, yeah?'
'Not so you'd notice.'
The words had barely left his mouth when the deck of the veetol tilted sharply without warning, and a scattering of loose items tumbled away.
Saxon grunted as the bulkhead at his back pressed into him, and the straps holding him to the acceleration rack pulled tight, forcing air from his lungs.
The countdown clock read one minute twenty-six; they were still a long way out from the drop point. Another second dropped away and the cargo bay was filled with the dull bray of an alarm.
Amid the sound of it, every member of Strike Team Six heard the fear in the voice of the pilot as he broadcast over their mastoid comms.
'Drones!'
Saxon's gut flooded with ice. Flying low and fast kept the veetol well out of the detection envelope of any surface-to-air missiles, but drones were a different story. Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, the northern forces had taken to layering them in sleeper pods along the line of the border, where they would sit dormant until something that didn't match their preprogrammed library of friendly silhouettes passed overhead.
But this sector had been swept for drones. Belltower's near-flawless intelligence corps had given
Saxon the briefing. No drones. A clear run. Direct line of assault.
'What the hell?' Kano snarled, doubtless mirroring Saxon's train of thought.
He turned toward the African in time to see the first of the heavy rounds from the attack drone's cannon puncture the hull and the tall man's chest. Blood misted the cabin's interior as more armor-piercing shells ripped fist-size holes in the fuselage and flight systems.
Acrid smoke filled Saxon's lungs as he felt gravity snare the veetol and pull it toward the ground.
CHAPTER TWO
Georgetown-Washington, D.C.-United States of America
Anna rose up from where she had fallen, her arm tight with pain in a line of new bruises, all along the points where she had collided with the heavy planters. She felt woozy and her hearing was flattened and woolly from the concussion of the grenade blast. She could smell smoke and dirt and the cloying scent of crushed flowers.
The agent made it up to her knees and blinked; her optics were blurred like a poorly tuned video image, the delicate subsystems of the augmetic eyes cycling through a reset mode. Her vision hazed from black and white to color, and she saw her pistol lying among a drift of broken window glass. Anna loped forward, and stooped to gather up her weapon, eyes darting around.
As her fingers tightened around the butt of the Mustang automatic, she felt a sharp jerk at her back that dragged her off balance. Kelso saw the hood of the stalled town car coming up to meet her and she brought up her hand just in time to block the new impact. Slipping down over the crumpled fender, cursing, she saw her assailant.
It was one of the figures from the car, dressed head to foot in black combat fatigues with a zip hood that closed like a mask over his face. The man was easily twice her body mass, and protruding from the ends of his jacket sleeves were hands of dull machined metal. Her hearing was coming back by degrees, and she heard his combat boots crunching on the glass as the attacker balled a knot of her expensive Emile jacket between those steel fingers and hauled her off her feet. She struggled, but her arms felt like lead.
Blank eyes, shark-black and wet, measured her; this bastard was playing games, tossing her about like a rag doll-but now that was going to end, now he was going to kill her. The other hand came up and clamped around her bare neck and squeezed like a vise. Anna tried to scream, but the sound died in her throat, trapped there. A cascade of warning icons rained down across the inside of her eyes, fed from the implanted biomonitor tracking her vitals. She heard her bloodstream thundering in her ears.
The Mustang was heavy and dead in her grip. It was a block of iron, dragging her down. It took all her effort to lift it, her exertion ending in stifled gasps.
He saw the movement, and tried to deflect her, knock the gun away. Anna jerked the trigger by reflex and the pistol roared. The first discharge missed, but the muzzle flash flared bright across the killer's eye line and he snarled; for a moment his grip slackened and Kelso pushed away, turning. When she fired again, the round hit him at point-blank range through the base of his jaw. Her assailant dropped like a felled tree, trailing a stream of blood from the back of his head.
Anna went down with him, landing hard for the third time. She pushed away and came up in a crouch, turning away from the mess she'd made of him. A crawling, itchy gale of static was gnawing at the base of her skull-she'd lost the mastoid comm from the blast. Putting the dead man out of her thoughts, she moved off, low and quick behind collapsed tables and fallen chairs, wincing with pain at each step.
There was thick smoke everywhere; all of Q Street was wreathed in it, the drifting haze of gray mist put out by the distraction grenades churning with the dark black pall from the burning limo. The rebreather implant in her chest stiffened; she'd use it if she needed to. A strident chorus of pealing car alarms was crying up and down the street, warning lights flashing. She glimpsed Connor lying at the curb, his torso a red ruin of bullet impacts. The agent's eyes were lifeless, staring into nothing.
Anna kept moving. The crackle of automatic rounds sounded nearby, and she heard someone call out. The words were lost to her, but she knew
Matt Ryan's voice when she heard it. She could make out the vague shape of the SUV-he had to be there, with Skyler. The Secret Service's first priority was always to their principal, and Ryan would be doing everything he could to get the woman out of danger.
A figure moved in the smoke, and she called to it, stifling a cough. 'Matt?'
The gunshot that answered her struck Anna in the gut and she cried out. Burning, white-hot agony seared her belly and she recoiled, stumbling against a low wall. Her legs turned to water and she slipped down, a blossom of stark crimson blooming across the white silk blouse beneath her jacket. The round had gone straight through the Kevlar undershirt and buried itself in the meat of her. The agony was like nothing she had ever felt
