What did concern her was when Kornev suddenly stopped halfway down the tunnel. She wasn’t expecting it, and she bumped into him. Kornev turned quickly to face her, and he casually placed the end of his Glock on the delicate bridge of her nose.
Kara guessed that Kornev was waiting for her to make a move of some type. Maybe step back, fall to the floor, maybe scream or maybe cry. But she did none of those things. Instead, after taking the briefest of time to compose herself, she smiled.
This was apparently not what Kornev had been expecting.
Tonya said, “I know you like to play with guns, Victor, but don’t you think this is a little over the top?”
In Kara’s eyes, Kornev didn’t look like he was playing around. He looked dead serious.
The Russian said, “Turn this way — turn that way — all the way up until we run into the only cowboy in the entire desert who just happened to be waiting for us in the middle of the road. Who are you?”
The gun was beginning to leave an indentation in Kara’s white nose, but she didn’t attempt to move away.
“Who do you want me to be?” she asked in a deadpan voice.
Kornev looked frustrated and said, “I can pull this trigger, and no one will even hear the shot since we are deep underground. I can leave you here to rot. Answer me. Who are you?”
Kara said in a measured tone, “Honestly, does it make any difference to you who I am? I thought you wanted to have some fun. Isn’t that why you called me? But so far, we have been chased by some crazy-looking machines that were shooting real bullets at us. Then you get accosted by a cowboy in the middle of the frickin’ desert. Then we go visit some ancient friend of yours who ogles at me. His breath could kill a dead horse. Now, here we are in the middle of a tunnel, and you are resting your heavy gun on my little nose. I’ve got news for you, Victor. This might be exciting for you, but it really isn’t all that much fun for me. I have had just about enough of this. I was picturing dancing and drinking and partying.”
Kornev looked more confused than angry. He wasn’t getting an answer to his question, and this woman didn’t seem to be concerned in the least a gun was still centered in the middle of her face.
Kara pushed the gun to one side and said, “Who do you think I am? What kind of job do you do? I was telling you to turn the SUV because the flying things were on my side of the car, so it made sense to turn away from them. After all, you didn’t appear to be doing anything other than panicking.”
Kornev slowly lowered the gun to his side. He didn’t know what to say. And Tonya had a point. Worst-case scenario she was working for an intelligence agency of some sort. But did that really matter at this point? The Americans had already made it very clear that they didn’t want him dead. On the contrary, they wanted him alive so he could work for them. From a pure safety standpoint, the woman was not a threat. And if she was, as she claimed to be, a woman who just wanted to have fun, he would find that out soon. They were headed to a beautiful beachfront home at an exotic locale called Snake Island.
Kornev returned the gun behind his back, tucking it back into the waistband of his pants. He apologized to Tonya.
“I’m sorry. You understand that in my line of work I have to be careful?”
It was a trap. She wasn’t going to take the bait.
“I don’t know what line of work you are in, but something tells me I don’t want to know. Just so you know that as far as a second date goes, this one really sucks.”
Kornev tried to shrug it off. He gave her a little hug and told her, “I am going to make it up to you — I promise.”
“And what does that mean?” she asked suspiciously. “Are we going to go skydiving without parachutes? Are we going to go run with the bulls? I don’t believe you know how to make it up to me,” Tonya huffed. She pouted.
This time, Kornev laughed at her joke. He put his arm around her waist and they began walking further down the dank tunnel.
Kornev patted Kara on her round bottom as they came to the stairs that led up to the compound. As Kornev patted her other cheek, he found her cellphone and removed it from her back pocket.
“You won’t need this,” he said. “They barely have phone service around here.”
Kara considered protesting, but understood it was pointless. She decided to say nothing and began climbing the stairs.
Gulf of Guinea — Aboard the Hail Proton
Turtles’ was built like a tank, and it was clipped onto the belly of the drone, Foghat. Foreigner was lying on its back on the catapult of deck two aboard the Hail Proton waiting to be shot into the night. Turtles looked like a hunk of brown shell that sat like a blob of structured clay on the smooth conical carbon fiber drone.
Hail Proton’s lab workers took great care inspecting the latch mechanism connecting the little drone to the larger one. Violent forces would stress all exterior surfaces when the drone went from 0 to 100 miles per hour in less than a second. If the connection between the drones was anything less than perfect, there was a very real chance of Turtles being ripped from the belly of Foghat. If that were to happen, it would sink to the bottom of the sea.
Captain Mitch Nichols was waiting by the control panel on the wall, ready to activate the catapult’s charging field. When the lab workers were satisfied that everything was ready to go, the captain would hit the big red button.
Both Lang and Parker looked apprehensive about the launch, as if the drone was their child, and they didn’t want to see any harm come to it. If it were a child, it was indeed a deadly one. Turtles held enough C-4 explosives beneath its shell to shred the inside of the hangar deck if it inadvertently exploded on takeoff. If component A ripped away from connector B and touched exposed relay C, all three of the people next to it would be D for dead, and the crew understood that real possibility.
Foghat’s wings were swept into their far back launch position. The tail of the long-range drone had been retracted into the body of the aircraft. Nothing had been left sticking out of the drone that could cause drag as it shot into the air.
Reluctantly, both technicians stepped back from the huge tube on the rail, and they gave their captain a thumbs-up. Nichols flipped the switch to charge the catapult. Moments later, the humming died away, and the green light came on, indicating the catapult’s capacitor farm was at full charge.
“Let ‘er rip, Tater Chip,” Captain Nichols urged. He lifted the handset of a phone bolted to the iron wall next to the catapult panel. He held it to his ear and put his finger on the button to fire the catapult.
“Jason,” Nichols asked, “do you have Foghat online and ready to fly?”
Back in Hail Proton’s mission center, Jason Wilson was manning the control station and had Foghat’s flight control set loaded on his screens. As with many of Hail’s pilots, Wilson was young. He was a nineteen-year-old black kid who didn’t have anyone who cared about him. Jason Wilson was a byproduct of a broken home, raised in the bad part of a big city, surrounded by negative influences. He had struggled his entire young life, yet he’d avoided getting sucked into the neighborhood gang. Wilson paid for it with regular beatings. He had longed to leave behind the shootings, stabbings and robberies that were part of his everyday existence. At the age of fifteen, his mother had been killed in a drive-by shooting, and Jason found himself a ward of the State. He never fully understood how Hail found him, but he had. Hail walked into the halfway house where Jason was living while good-meaning government employees tried to find him a foster family. Hail had spoken with the lady who was in charge, and then he had come over to talk with Jason.