“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
Southeastern Sudan
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.
He had a duffel bag.
“Cease fire,” said Shorty over the Osprey radio, though the pilots already had. “What do you think, ma’am?”
Her orders were to recover the UAV brain intact if possible. That potentially conflicted with what Danny had told her—they would kill the Russian.
Which took precedence?
Did it matter? She couldn’t kill the man in cold blood. Not even Danny would have done that.
The Russian would be valuable—they could get a lot of intelligence out of him if he really was an expert.
“Let’s get down there and take them,” she told the trooper.
The MC-17 swooped down over the camp and dropped its third and last container into the area just south of the cluster of buildings. This one contained two bots, which were somewhat larger than the others. They looked like downsized construction vehicles: one had a clamshell, the other a crane arm with various attachments.
Unlike the gun bots, which were powered by small hydrogen fuel cells, these ran on turbo diesel engines. They lacked innate intelligence; team members controlled them via a set of remote controls. While more powerful, they were not much different than the devices used back home at small construction sites to handle jobs where traditional-sized earthmovers and cranes were either overkill or too big to fit on a work site.
Two troopers checked them out, started them up, then walked them over toward Danny and Flash, who were already pulling some of the debris away.
It took about ten minutes before they could see the outline of the room. In fact there was an aircraft there—MY-PID ID’ed the wing of a Predator. With a little more digging, Danny could make out other parts of the aircraft and a tabletop with diagnostic tools.
He suddenly got a strange feeling—not so much a premonition as déjà vu.
“Everybody back!” he yelled. “Back!”
Flash looked up at him. “Boss?”
“Back!” Danny demanded. “Controllers, you too.”
After the team retreated to the outskirts of the ruins, Danny changed the video feed in his screen to the crane’s.
“I can pull the wing straight up, Colonel,” said the man operating the bot.
“Go for it.”
Danny watched as the crane’s claws grasped the wing and pulled upward. There was a flash. An explosion shook the ruins, bringing down the parts of the building that hadn’t fallen earlier.
“How’d you know?” asked Flash as the dust settled.
“It looked familiar,” said Danny.
Melissa went out last, trotting behind the Whiplash team members as they surrounded the four men. The vest and helmet she’d donned were heavy and foreign; while the team members compared them favorably to the traditional body armor, they felt constricting to her. Sweat poured down her temples, and her arms were awash with it.
“Put down any weapons,” Melissa said in Arabic.
When no one moved, she realized she’d forgotten to switch her com system into loudspeaker mode. Her mind blanked and she couldn’t remember how to do it. Finally, Melissa flipped up her visor and yelled the words.
The men held their arms out to their sides.
“Separate!” she ordered. “Move apart or we will fire.”
They slowly began stepping aside. Two of the team members walked toward the man farthest to the right. The Osprey circled ahead, the thump of its rotors vibrating against the hard ground and nearby hills. Melissa felt her heart racing and tried to calm it.