Nearly out of breath, Nuri was about to give up — the hell with the damn jerks if they couldn’t obey an order not to attack past a certain line. The spikes would teach them a thing or two about being overaggressive.
Then he saw one of the bots trundling up in their direction.
With a stream of curses, he plunged ahead, lunging toward the first man in the group. He leapt up, throwing himself into the middle of the knot as they reached the fence line. Alerted by the bracelet on his wrist, the bot halted its targeting sequence, fearing friendly fire.
Unfortunately, Nuri’s momentum took him and the Marine he landed on full force into the virtual fence. His head felt as if it had exploded, then went numb. Every joint in his body vibrated. He fell to the ground, head still within the field, writhing in pain. He tried to push himself back but could not. His legs and arms flopping helplessly up and down, he tried to talk but could not.
Because the fence was nonlethal, MY-PID’s safety protocols did not allow it to turn the device on or off. It did, however, send an alert to Danny, who dropped back from his assault team and ran down to the fence line. By the time he got in range to see what was happening, the Marines had found their own solution — they pulverized the two devices closest to Nuri, destroying the current.
Not knowing exactly what had happened, Danny assumed Nuri had somehow forgotten about the device. Shaking his head, he told the corpsman to see to him and other two men who’d been paralyzed, then had the rest of the Marines follow him.
Chapter 5
“Come to order! Come to order!” demanded Senator Barrington, the Intelligence Committee chairman.
Ernst practically foamed at the mouth, but he did stop speaking.
“Now,” said Barrington, slamming his gavel down once more for good measure, “we will have a vote on the motion to hold the CIA director in contempt of this committee—”
“And the President,” said Ernst.
“We will not subpoena the President.”
“The President is the one we need to hear from. We should subpoena her. Drag her in here in chains, if necessary.”
Zen had had enough.
“Why do you keep hammering on that?” he said. “What the hell good is it going to do?”
“We have to go on record—”
“Gentlemen!” Barrington once more handled the gavel with feeling. Zen wondered if his arm was becoming numb. “You will address the chair. Senator Stockard, you have the floor.”
Zen cleared his throat. “Everyone knows that the administration and I have not always agreed on everything. In this case, however, I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt — temporarily. If we vote to send a subpoena, it’s going to get ridiculous headlines and be blown up by the media,” continued Zen. He knew that was actually Ernst’s goal, but hoped the rest of his colleagues would listen to reason. “This whole thing is going to become a political football that has nothing to do with the Agency or Raven, whatever it is.”
“As if you don’t know,” said Ernst.
Zen ignored him. “Mr. Chairman, if our goal here is actually to get information, rather than embarrassing the administration and maybe interfering with the country’s pursuit—”
“What pursuit?” yelled Ernst.
Barrington pounded on the table.
“I move to end discussion and vote,” said Zen, realizing it was hopeless.
The motion carried quickly, the senators anxious to get out of the chamber. Zen was the only one opposed.
Chapter 6
Danny ran through the rubble of the ruined one-story building, leaping across the battered stones just in time to join the team assaulting the second house. By now the gunfire had nearly stopped, with only a few gunmen at the far western stretch of the camp defenses continuing to fire. But MY-PID detected heat signatures inside several of the buildings in the last citadel, and the crazy-quilt nature of the complex meant they had to move slowly. The computer tagged and followed each individual enemy as best it could, feeding a raw tally to Danny upon request — it knew of at least five individuals inside the building they were going into, and at least two more in the adjacent one, which shared a wall and almost certainly a doorway.
They found the first two individuals bleeding out in the hallway, gut-shot by earlier fire. Neither had long to live; the team members pulled away their weapons, trussed their arms for safety, then carried them outside the building. Danny watched as the two men laid one of the enemy soldiers down gently.
The gesture struck him as odd and yet touching at the same time — the gravely wounded enemies had been trying to kill the Whiplash troopers just a few minutes ago, and were now being treated with a remarkable and even incongruent sense of dignity and care. In his experience, the acid of battle usually eroded any impulse toward caring for an enemy; he had seen many men simply kill people terminally wounded as they passed. He wondered if either trooper could have explained what they did. Most likely they would have said only that they were getting the men out of the way, and would have been at a loss to say why they hadn’t simply dumped them on the ground. It was all unconscious action, an expression of how they lived rather than how they thought.
Danny caught up with the team clearing the last room in the building. The procedure was repetitive to the point of being industriaclass="underline" mechanical gestures with their hands, a sweep of eyes, the call of “Clear.”
“Room is clear!” yelled Flash.
An explosion shook the building. MY-PID immediately warned that the right side of the structure appeared ready to collapse.
“Back up! Back up!” yelled Danny, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room.
There was gunfire, then another explosion. Danny grabbed hold of the trooper in front of him and pulled him back.
“Out! Out!” he yelled, and then stepped up to the next man, pulling him back, and then the next.
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.