The aircraft began to stutter. Melissa looked up, worried that they were about to go down.
“They’re firing rounds to try and stop them,” explained Shorty. “The pilots will herd them into a corner, assuming they don’t kill them. Be ready.”
“I’m ready,” she yelled. “I’m as ready as ready.”
Danny turned the corner just behind Flash as the laser took out the last of the gunmen on the roof. Already Sugar and one of the other troopers were at the door; within seconds there was a double explosion inside—a pair of grenades tossed by the two Whiplashers. Smoke rose from the building, and then the wall at the corner of the house furled downward, collapsing from the force of the blast.
“Shug!” yelled Danny.
“I’m OK, Colonel. We’re here. All present and accounted for.”
The team pushed into the house, moving quickly through the first floor. The only people they found were dead—a dozen fighters, all with weapons either in their hands or nearby.
Danny had concluded by now that either his guess on where the UAV parts would be found was wrong and they were in the second cluster of buildings, or they had never been in the camp to begin with. The search of the second floor, which had suffered considerable damage and was missing half its roof, seemed to confirm that, though they did retrieve a desktop computer from one of the rooms where the wall had partially collapsed.
“Sugar, secure the computer CPU with the drive and everything,” said Danny. “Everybody else, we’ll form up outside and take the other cluster.”
Danny did a quick review of the situation. The men who’d come out of the mine shaft were being pursued by the team in the Osprey; MY-PID could track them relatively easily now and they wouldn’t get far. The defenses at the southern wall of the compound had been almost completely neutralized. Upward of four dozen individuals were hunkered down in the huts and tents scattered on the northwestern side of the compound; they showed no inclination to join the fighting. MY-PID’s analysis showed these were mostly women.
But resistance at the last citadel remained strong. Apparently realizing the bots wouldn’t go inside the buildings, the men in the outer ring of houses had spread out, firing intermittently and quickly retreating. This made it more difficult for the robots to concentrate their fire. While the guns did a reasonable job of chewing into the outer walls, the Brothers had begun firing from well inside and in some cases behind the buildings.
Danny had the laser pick off anyone who was uncovered. Then he called over to the Marine captain to get him to move his mortars so they could target the complex.
“I don’t want them to fire unless I give the order,” Danny told Pierce. “But it may come to that.”
“Will do—we have a couple of hard knots of resistance on the western and eastern ends,” reported the captain. “We’ll keep them engaged.” His voice calmed somewhat under fire—truly something you’d only find in a Marine.
Danny circled around toward the north side of the second compound. Flash had repositioned the bots to support their assault. He released two to go back and cover the approach from the gate area, in case the Brothers there tried rallying and ran through the spikes. And he detailed one to accompany them inside the buildings, giving them extra firepower if necessary.
Flash looked up as Danny came around the corner to join the small group. “We’re ready,” said Flash.
“Textbook,” said Danny, raising his hand and waving them to start.
The Marines cleared the gate positions and ran toward the charred remains of the bus. Nuri realized they weren’t going to stop.
“Wait!” Nuri yelled. “No! No!”
He couldn’t tell if the Marines heard him or not. Between his headache and unbalanced hearing, the entire world seemed off-kilter, a crazy quilt of explosions and gunfire.
“Stop, damn it! Stop!”
There were some barks over the radio net—garbled communications that literally sounded like dogs yapping. Nuri sprinted over two dead bodies and caught up to the Marines as they broke past the rocks on the other side of the bus. One of them looked back, but if he saw him, he obviously thought he was urging them on—they continued running, clearing the second set of defenses and the bodies clustered there.
Screaming at the top of his lungs, Nuri tried to warn them about the spikes. There were several bodies near the invisible fence, Brothers who’d been knocked out by the voltage or possibly shot in the cross fire. The Marines seemed intent on getting beyond them before they stopped running.
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
Washington, D.C.
“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—”