“No,” Angel said.
“So just… just hack the drone again,” Julia suggested. “Try from a different direction or something.”
“It didn’t just lock me out. When it detected me, it locked out everybody. The drone has an ECM pod,” Angel said. When no one reacted, she added, “Electronic countermeasures. There was this… there was…” She ducked back down below the counter and rummaged around down there for a second. The store manager stared daggers at Wilkes, but he just flashed his fake FBI card at her again.
Finally Angel popped back up, yanking a credit card scanner after her. She pulled the cord out of the back of the scanner. She threw the scanner away, then jammed the cord into a port on the side of her laptop.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had this problem,” she said, even as she typed furiously on her keyboard. “Insurgents were burying IEDs all over the place, bombs they could detonate with their cell phones. Bombs like that are super cheap to make, you can hide them easily — it was a nightmare for our guys. So the Pentagon started putting ECM pods on their drones. You know what jamming is?”
Julia frowned. “It’s like — you block somebody else’s, I don’t know. Radios.”
Angel didn’t even look up. “Good enough. The principle is basic, and it’s been around for more than a century. Your enemies are using some radio frequency to communicate, so you just broadcast a ton of noise — just static — on that same frequency and they can’t talk to each other. The jamming hardware on the drone is a lot more sophisticated, but it basically does the same thing. It’s knocked out every cellular connection, every Wi-Fi network, every television, radio, and satellite broadcast for a hundred miles. Just in case anybody tries to interfere with its programming.” She shook her head. “This sucks! I was in. I was in, Julia. I had this thing. I had the drone…”
“So if it blocks out all communications, what are you doing now?” Julia asked.
Angel tapped the cord she’d plugged into her computer. “You can’t jam wired connections. At least, not as easily. I’m still getting a signal through this thing, though ninety percent of the Internet around D.C. is down. Way too many vital connections being shared over Wi-Fi in this town. Damn it! I can’t even contact the drone now.”
“Why not?”
“Signal fratricide,” Angel said. She must have seen the look on Julia’s face, because she visibly calmed herself down and explained. “The big problem with jamming like this is that you jam your own connections, too. The frequency I was using to communicate with the drone is one of the frequencies it’s blocking. I just lost everything.”
“What does that mean?” Wilkes demanded.
“It means we’re screwed,” Angel said, putting her hands on her cheeks as if to warm them up. “It means I can’t stop the attack.”
Something happened to Julia then. Maybe it was just fear, maybe she’d had enough. She wanted to shake her head, she wanted to shake her whole body. Her stomach did somersaults as Badass Julia rose up inside her and took over.
She stood up very tall and stared down at Angel, forcing the younger woman to meet her gaze. “No, it doesn’t.”
Angel clearly wanted to look away. Julia grabbed her face and made Angel look into her eyes.
“I’m telling you,” Angel said, “even if I could get a good broadcast signal, which no, I can’t — even then — I can’t contact the drone. I can’t hack it if I can’t even talk to it.”
“Angel,” Julia said, “the attack isn’t going to happen for another… six minutes. Until then, I don’t want to hear the word ‘can’t’ out of your mouth. You think of something. You think of something right now.”
Angel turned and stared at Wilkes, as if for sympathy, but the marine had nothing to offer her.
Chapel heard something, the scuff of a shoe on the floorboards, maybe just the rustle of a cheap wool jacket. Somebody was up there in the hallway ahead of him. Doors lined either side of the hall and he had no idea where the attack was going to come from, but he knew — he positively knew — that someone was about to try to kill him.
It wasn’t like he’d never felt that sensation before.
Two guards stepped out of a room at the end of the hall, then, their pistols already up in the air. They fired without a moment’s hesitation.
But Chapel was already moving. He swung around, bringing his left arm up high, over his face and the upper portion of his chest. The first bullet missed him entirely, digging a long trench through the hardwood floor. The second bullet sank deep into the silicone covering his prosthetic. The energy of the shot pushed Chapel sideways, not enough to knock him off his feet but enough to knock him off course as he threw himself at the nearest doorway.
His right shoulder hit the wooden door hard, hard enough he worried he might have dislocated the joint. The door resisted for a second, then wood cracked and the door latch gave way, sending Chapel tumbling into the room beyond.
It proved to be a disused storeroom, full of old furniture covered in dusty sheets. He collided with something soft — it felt like a sofa — and he let himself flop down, his feet going wide as he sank to the floor.
There was blood everywhere, all over the room, the sheets, the door. It took him a while to realize it was his own.
Yep. He was definitely getting light-headed.
He craned his head around to look at the hole in his back and saw that his shirt and pants were both soaked in blood. The flow of blood seemed to have decreased to just a trickle, but he’d already lost so much.
The pain was manageable — adrenaline was helping with that — but he knew that shock was going to catch up with him soon. If he didn’t get a proper bandage on the wound, he could just bleed out as well.
A weird whining noise came from his left arm. He tried to make a fist with his artificial fingers, but they wouldn’t close properly. The prosthesis had taken a shot for him, probably saving his life, but it was done for now. Useless.
Out in the hall, he could hear two sets of footsteps coming closer. They were coming slow, giving him plenty of time to show himself, but they weren’t even trying to be quiet.
Chapel was pinned down by multiple enemies, stuck behind cover waiting for someone to just walk up and shoot him. He knew how to handle this situation.
But he also knew the odds.
A lot depended on how well trained these guys were. The MPs at the marina had been easy. Nobody had ever bothered to teach them more than basic hand-to-hand combat and simple overwatch tactics. Chapel had a feeling these two would be a little more advanced.
If they knew how to do their jobs, and if he just let them walk up to the doorway and start shooting at him, he was going to be killed. There was no question about that. He was going to have to take the fight to them. Jump out of that doorway, guns blazing, and hope he caught them by surprise.
It was just about the worst plan he’d ever heard. If there had been anything else, any other way …
Well, he told himself, there wasn’t.
Slowly, aching and bleeding and gritting his teeth, Chapel levered himself back up onto his feet.
Outside in the hall the two guards were only seconds away.
“Okay, okay! Just let me think,” Angel said. She rubbed at her temples. She stared at the screen of her laptop as if the answer was there, as if a riddle was written there that she could potentially solve.
“There’s gotta be something you can do,” Wilkes pointed out. “Take over a cruise missile from an air base around here, send it after the drone. Or, hell, send another drone.”