troop trucks, no doubt, coming down the highway. He moved a little faster, threading his way through the thick brush and trees.
Something swiped his face. He rebounded, thinking it was a snake and then realizing it was just a tree frond he hadn’t seen. But his reaction threw him off balance; he stumbled to his left, crashed against a tree, and fell over.
Josh lay facedown in the brush, not thinking, not encouraging himself, not despairing. He got to his knees slowly, listening, in full survival mode, listening and only listening.
There were other sounds ahead, something else moving through the jungle.
Voices.
Chinese.
He focused his eyes on the jungle before him. The brush parted — the girl, running to his left.
Two figures in gray swept across from the right.
Josh’s rifle had slipped from his shoulder as he fell. Before he could grab his pistol, the girl and the soldiers disappeared.
Two more figures crashed through the brush, five yards away.
They were nearly next to each other. Two hands on the gun, he fired quickly, taking both down. Then something else took over — Josh leaped up, ran, and without thinking about what he was doing, fired point-blank into the skulls of both fallen soldiers. He swept down, grabbed their rifles, pulling them off the fallen men. He pushed over the bodies, grabbed clips — big banana-style clips. He dropped the pistol — the clip was empty — and left the rifle he’d been using, walking in the direction the other soldiers had taken, moving slowly and as quietly as he could, all of his attention focused on following them. No stray thought, no emotion or feeling, interfered with his eyes or ears.
Josh veered left. He began moving sideways, keeping his eyes focused on the direction they had gone, but still moving toward the fire. After five or six yards he stopped and listened — he could hear sounds but not make them out.
The fire was a red glow directly in front of him, thirty yards away.
The girl screamed.
Josh resisted the urge to charge ahead. He walked even slower, sifting through the trees, drifting there as if a leaf being pushed by the gentlest of breezes.
The two soldiers were smacking the girl’s face.
Josh brought one of the rifles up and aimed. But at this range, in the dark, with a gun he’d never fired before, he worried that he wasn’t a good enough shot to ensure he’d hit just the soldier, not the girl.
He started to sift closer.
One of the men grabbed her from behind and began shaking her.
One step, two steps.
The other man yelled something, angry. He looked in Josh’s direction.
He’d heard something.
The soldier holding the girl threw her down.
The gun was set on full automatic. Josh emptied the clip in a quick sweep. Out of bullets, he threw the gun down, grabbed the other off his shoulder left-handed, the trigger wrong, everything wrong except what he was doing, except what he had to do.
One of the soldiers was down. The other staggered to his right.
The rifle jumped in Josh’s hand. Some of the bullets went wild. The rest did their work.
The girl was still lying on the ground, dazed, when Josh reached her, sliding on his knee next to her side.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Okay, okay.”
She looked at him, big eyes, no voice.
“Did they shoot you?”
She blinked. There was no blood on her that he could see, no wounds.
“Come on,” he said, jumping up. He went to the soldiers, took a pistol, as many mags as he could stuff in his pocket and beltline. His heart was pounding.
The girl was still on the ground.
“We go! We go!” he told her, running back.
He reached down and grabbed her shirt. She winced, injured somewhere he couldn’t see.
“Come on, we go, we go,” he told her.
He lifted her to her feet. She wasn’t crying, but she was more than scared.
“Up, we go,” he said, and he bent down and levered her up onto his shoulder before turning and starting off in the forest, away from the fire and dead soldiers.
10
The small engine was a handicap in another way — it could handle only a limited payload, especially when taking off from the ground. Because of this, on many missions, Gumdrop was launched from the wing of a larger aircraft, generally a C-130.
The engine had been specified to keep the aircraft’s infrared signal as small as possible. Indeed, the signature was said to be smaller than a Bic lighter at one hundred yards.
The facets in the body, along with radar-absorbing coating, made its radar profile even smaller. The Air Force officer who had first briefed Mara on the aircraft’s capabilities — a captain with horrible skin and even worse salami-breath — had bragged that it was smaller than a mosquito at three miles.
Mara didn’t care particularly about its radar or infrared profiles, except for the fact that they allowed the aircraft to deliver packages under the most stressed circumstances. She had received several in Malaysia, including one delivered to the top of a burning building surrounded by rebel forces.
By comparison, the drop to the field at Nam Det was child’s play.
Nam Det and the small village where she had taken Kieu appeared to have been abandoned. The house where she’d left the injured pilot was empty, the only evidence that he had been there the missing sheets on the bed.
Mara checked her watch. It was five minutes to two. Gumdrop was supposed to arrive exactly on the hour. Rolling up her skirt and holding it against her thighs, she trotted along the edge of the old runway, taking one last look in the ditch to make sure there was no one there. Then she jogged onto the edge of the field. Unfurling the skirt, she counted off her steps until she found the center; she then walked from there to the end and counted off three long steps before looking up at the sky.
Gumdrop — its official designation was R26A Unmanned Drone/Replenishment Profile, or UMDRP — was already descending overhead, coming down through ten thousand feet in a gradually tightening spiral. As it passed ten thousand feet, its remote pilot, sitting in a bunker in Utah, reoriented his long-range infrared sensors to look for heat sources on the ground. The computer assisting him immediately spotted Mara, informing him that a single subject was standing precisely.012 meters from the target area. The pilot continued scanning the screen, observing the nearby jungle to make sure there was no one else waiting nearby.
The computer spotted Mara’s truck, identifying it as a Chinese version of the venerable ZiL, a Russian design
