“Something like that.”
“No. Not at all.”
They were silent a moment. The wind picked up slightly, softly howling in the distance.
The MC-17.
“Plane’s coming in,” said Danny. “Come stand over here.”
He led her back away from the target area. The Whiplash support aircraft was a specially modified Cargomaster II. Among other things, its engines had been muffled so they were barely audible even at a few thousand feet. Like the extremely capable stock aircraft, the Whiplash version could land on a small, rough airfield; in fact, it probably could have landed in this field, though taking off might have been problematic. There was no need to risk it.
The plane came in low and slow, dropping a trio of large containers on skids within a few meters of each other. The large crates bounced on air cushions attached to the bottom of the skids, giant air bags that inflated just before impact.
As the airplane cleared upward, three smaller figures appeared overhead — Hera Scokas and two Whiplash trainees, Chris “Shorty” Bradley and Toma “Babyboy” Parker. Hera hit her mark dead on, walking right up to the chem marker in the bull’s-eye. The two men came in a bit to her left, blown slightly off course though still well within specs.
“Colonel, good to see you,” said Hera. The short, curly-haired Greek-American gave Danny a wave, then immediately stowed her parachute and checked on the two newcomers who’d jumped with her.
A variety of Whiplash equipment had been packed onto the three crates, including tents, two motorbikes, surveillance gear, and almost a ton of ammunition. There was also a solar panel and battery array to provide the temporary camp with electricity, along with point defenses that included ballistic panels — high-tech versions of claymore antipersonnel mines — and a surveillance radar held aloft by a blimp. The body of the blimp was covered with an adaptive LED material that allowed it to blend in with the sky, making it virtually invisible to the naked eye.
As soon as they were unpacked, Danny launched two small UAVs to supplement the Global Hawk’s coverage. Barely the size of a laptop computer, the robot aircraft looked like miniature versions of Cessna Skymasters, with twin booms to the tail and engines fore and aft of the cockpit. They flew neither fast nor high — sixty knots at 5,000 feet was roughly their top speed and ceiling, respectively. But their undersides were covered with LED arrays similar to those on the blimp, making them difficult to pick out even in daylight. And the top surfaces were covered with solar cells that supplemented and recharged the batteries powering their engines. As long as the day was sunny, MY-PID could manage the power consumption so the aircraft would fly 24/7.
Melissa pitched in, quietly working beside the others. She’d changed somehow, Danny realized, or maybe fatigue had just worn off the sharp edges.
Whatever the reason, she was actually pleasant to work with now. She volunteered to brief Hera and the others on the overall situation, and even helped set the posts for the command tent.
Maybe, thought Danny, they could work with her after all.
Nuri didn’t understand the significance of what was going on at first; he was too busy following MY-PID’s brief on the Russian and his connections in Moscow. But the computer did.
“Large force gathering near the town center,” the Voice told him as he paged through Kimko’s file on the mobile laptop he’d hooked into the system. “Armed.”
Nuri immediately brought up the image on the computer. Then he got out of the truck and went to find Danny.
The colonel was bent over a tent stake, hammering it in with a large mallet. Some technologies were impossible to improve on.
“Meurtre Musique is going to war,” Nuri told him. “Two dozen of them, trucks, machine guns, grenade launchers. They’re getting together near the town square.”
“Do they have night vision gear?”
“Probably not.”
“They’re going to have a hard time hitting the hills where Sudan First is holed up,” predicted Danny. “They’ll spot them coming, even in the dark.”
“That’s not where they’re going,” said Nuri, watching the screen.
The trucks swung south down the main street, then formed two columns turning up different roads to the east. After they’d gone about three blocks, yellow and white flashes began appearing on the screen.
“Is something wrong with the image?” asked Melissa, peering at it over Danny’s shoulder.
“They’re shooting up houses,” said Nuri flatly. “They’re getting their revenge.”
Melissa felt her stomach sink as the gunfire continued on the screen. The trucks moved slowly through the streets, going no faster than four or five miles an hour, raking everything they passed with gunfire. In the western part of the city, a good portion of the bullets might be absorbed or deflected by the mud bricks of the buildings. But here the buildings were made mostly of discarded wood. There would be little to stop them.
Suddenly, something caught fire at the top of the screen. Danny poked his finger at it, increasing in magnification. A cottage had caught fire. The flames quickly formed a crown as they spread around the outer walls.
Something bolted out from the wall of fire. A finger of flame trailed it, even as it threw itself on the ground.
A person.
Two people, one big, one small.
A mother and child, Melissa imagined.
“This is terrible,” she said. “We have to do something.”
“Like what?” snapped Nuri.
“Colonel, we can’t just let them shoot each other up,” she told Danny. “They’re killing innocent children.”
“It’s not our business,” said Nuri. “Didn’t you say something yesterday about not wanting these people to get in your way? You weren’t worried about collateral damage.”
“This is different.”
“There’s nothing really we can do,” said Danny. “We have our mission. And we don’t have enough force to stop this.”
Melissa knew he was right — and she had said that, and felt it, and did feel it.
But these were real people getting killed.
“Sudan First will retaliate,” said Nuri. “Once they hear what’s up. Both sides go after soft targets first. They’re basically cowards.”
Melissa thought of the clinic. It was an obvious and easy target.
She went over to the tent where they were making coffee, remembering the women and their children there, the people she’d treated before the shooting victims came. Her mind conflated the two, imagining the children shot up, the women bleeding from bullet wounds.
She had to do something.
Danny watched as the pickups retreated back toward the residential area of the city where the Meurtre Musique supporters lived. Their grass huts would be easy targets for retaliation. Didn’t they realize that?
Most likely they did. But just as likely they felt they had to avenge the earlier shooting, and would have to fight it out.
It was senseless, but there was nothing he could do about it. The question was whether it would interfere with his mission — random bullets flying in the air weren’t going to make things easier.
On the other hand, all the gunfire would make a perfect cover for a raid. No one would notice if he went in.
“Thirsty, Colonel?” asked Melissa, walking over to him with a cup of coffee.
“Sure.”
