Karr took a few steps toward Gidrey, his balance precarious. How the hell could he tell them Gidrey was on his side? With his radio out, there was no way to communicate with them.
Of course there was. He knew there was. He just couldn’t remember it.
Marie Telach stared at the large screen at the front of the Art Room showing the radar image from the belly of Puff/1. Karr was between two groups of people. The one to the south was almost definitely a guerrilla force; they were now about a half-mile away. To the immediate northeast, less than a hundred yards from him, was a second group. The vegetation made it impossible to use the optical camera to see them.
They had the synthesized view in a window in the comer. The northeast group wasn’t on it.
Friends or foes?
One of the people who’d been with Karr earlier was missing from the synthesized screen. But there was no way to know until it was too late if he was with the other group.
It wasn’t the computer’s call anyway. It was hers.
Karr had to be protected at all costs.
“Marie?” asked Sandy.
Better to kill allies or even friendly civilians than to lose her man.
“Malachi, target the group at the northeast.”
“Got ’em. I’m locked.”
“Fire on my signal,” she said, staring at the screen.
Karr could hear the Puff/1 banking above them, undoubtedly ready to shoot.
He had to talk to them somehow.
He pulled out his handheld computer. The unit had to be plugged into his com system for instant messaging and serious downloading; at the moment it was just another handheld — albeit one on steroids.
They’d see it, though.
“Yo, Marine,” said Karr.
“What?”
“Catch,” he said, throwing the computer in the direction of the shout.
Malachi moved his thumb back and forth across the red button at the top of the thick joystick controller, waiting to fire. The target designator was locked on, the gear constantly computing the exact angle as the gunship circled overhead. He had the option of giving a verbal order but liked the old-fashioned trigger better; it was faster.
He leaned toward the screen, waiting for Telach’s order.
The group was moving toward his man.
Something flickered on the infrared feed.
“Fire,” said Telach.
But Malachi didn’t. Karr had thrown something toward the other group.
“Magnify object,” he told the computer.
Grenade?
No. Karr’s handheld computer.
“Don’t fire! Don’t fire!” yelled Telach.
“I’m with you,” Malachi said, drawing a breath and staring down at his hand, making sure it obeyed.
64
Dean looked away from the small computer screen, his eyes starting to cross with the bad light. The Art Room had downloaded information about the target they were heading toward, along with instructions on how to operate the spectrometer and other gear that had met them at the airport in Italy. The tech manual seemed to have been written in Chinese, then translated into Russian before being put into English.
Lia claimed to already know it all. Which confirmed for Dean that he’d better struggle with the instructions.
She was sitting two rows in front of him. They had different covers for the mission. He was supposedly a Canadian archaeology professor; she was a French tourist with a shadowy past linking her to arms dealers. His was by far the more dangerous cover.
Their target was a prep school favored by foreigners in the northern area near the coast of the Mediterranean, about five miles from Latakia. Dean would visit the school as a prospective parent. According to his back story, he was working on a book on hunter-gatherers, which included the Nafutfians, who’d inhabited Syria somewhere around 10,000 B.C.
How could Keys have done this? And where was he?
“Something to drink, sir? Wine perhaps?”
Dean looked up into the smile of a stewardess.
“Sure,” he said, but when he felt his stomach rumble, he changed his mind. “Maybe just some water,” he told the young woman. “Or better, coffee.”
He’d need some sort of artificial stimulation to get through all this reading material.
65
Marie Telach felt a tremor run through her body as the gunship circled south.
She’d nearly killed one of the Marines.
“God, help me,” she whispered to herself. “Thank you.”
“Marie, that helicopter we were counting on is still on the ground,” said Sandy Chafetz from her station. “They have some sort of mechanical problem.”
Telach turned to the runner, not quite comprehending. Fatigue and shock over what had nearly happened had temporarily blanked her head; she couldn’t think straight.
But she had to.
“What sort of problem are they having?” Telach asked.
“Bad oil pressure or something. I don’t know if it’s bullshit or not, but they refuse to budge. What should we do?”
“Where’s the asset we had as backup?”
“Navy helicopter. Won’t get there until nightfall. Might be safer to wait until morning, when we get the Special Forces people in. They said they’d have a Blackhawk ready to go at first light.”
Another decision she had to make. Could she trust her judgment?
“Marie?”
“I want him out of there as soon as possible,” Telach told the runner. “ASAP. Have them get in there even though it’s dark.”
“Your call.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, but it was only a whisper.
66
Gidrey had managed to find what passed for a doctor in the Burmese outback: an old woman who seemed to have been trained as a nurse or maybe as a witch doctor. She and another man in the party that had come out from
