The floor rumbled. Flash and Nolan appeared in front of him, backing their way out.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” yelled Danny as the building began to fall around them.
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 Danny in the back and he tumbled forward, bowling the other man over. He pushed up, throwing off a beam, then realized he was outside. The upper floor of the building had almost literally disintegrated, spewing its remains in the air. The assault team began sounding off; MY-PID reported that all were accounted for.
The Marines who’d come up with Danny from the front gate began helping clear the debris. The air around them was still clouded with dust, but the far side of the citadel was clear enough for both the bots and the laser ship above to make out a dozen targets trying to escape. Within moments the twelve were dead.
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 Danny, pointing to the collapsed debris. “I think the aircraft were in there.”
“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 Danny had told her — they would kill the Russian.
Which took precedence?
Did it matter? She couldn’t kill the man in cold blood. Not even Danny would have done that.
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 innate intelligence; team members controlled them via a set of remote controls. While more powerful, they were not much different than the devices used back home at small construction sites to handle jobs where traditional-sized earthmovers and cranes were either overkill or too big to fit on a work site.
Two troopers checked them out, started them up, then walked them over toward Danny and Flash, who were already pulling some of the debris away.
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, Danny could make out other parts of the aircraft and a tabletop with diagnostic tools.
He suddenly got a strange feeling — not so much a premonition as deja vu.
“Everybody back!” he yelled. “Back!”
Flash looked up at him. “Boss?”
“Back!” Danny demanded. “Controllers, you too.”
After the team retreated to the outskirts of the ruins, Danny changed the video feed in his screen to the crane’s.
“I can pull the wing straight up, Colonel,” said the man operating the bot.
“Go for it.”
Danny watched as the crane’s claws grasped the wing and pulled upward. There was a flash. An explosion shook the ruins, bringing down the parts of the building that hadn’t fallen earlier.
“How’d you know?” asked Flash as the dust settled.
“It looked familiar,” said Danny.
Melissa went out last, trotting behind the Whiplash team members as they surrounded the four men. The vest and helmet she’d donned were heavy and foreign; while the team members compared them favorably to the traditional body armor, they felt constricting to her. Sweat poured down her temples, and her arms were awash with it.
“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 running toward her.
Why? she wondered.
Then she knew.
Danny saw the flash in his visor screen as he switched back to check on the escapees.
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.
“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 Danny.
“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
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,” Breanna said. “Three wounded, including the CIA officer. Light casualties, considering.”
