Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  Lili returned a faint-hearted smile and took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “Besides,” Jane said, “if he’s made it twelve years, that means he’s a survivor. I’m sure he’ll find a way to make your marriage survive, too.”

  Lili fell into her arms again. “You’re right. God, I’m just going crazy with the waiting.”

  “Come in . . . stay with me. We’ll watch some mindless TV and be worried together.”

  “Oh, Jane, I’m so selfish. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s okay. I get tunnel vision, too.” Jane knew she could hardly be judgmental, especially considering that seven months ago Lili had risked her life to save Eric. When he and their friend Ryan Lee had been kidnapped and taken to China, it was Lili and her twin sister Ying—both American spies embedded in the Chinese military—who had helped rescue them. Lili had already done so much (and lost much) for Eric: her twin sister had been killed during the escape.

  The two women sat down on the sofa.

  “Where’s Mei?” Jane asked, referring to Lili’s fourteen-year-old niece who had fled China with them.

  “She’s over at Curtiss’s house.”

  “Really?”

  Lili leaned in conspiratorially. “She’s got a crush on the Admiral’s son, Logan . . . says he’s dreamy.”

  Jane laughed.

  “Believe it or not,” Lili continued, “the whole family has really taken her in. And between you and me, I think she feels safe over there. You know, the big house full of people, Curtiss’s bodyguards and all that.”

  Jane nodded. After what the girl had been through, seeking out the safest place on base made sense. Yet Jane knew something about Curtiss that Lili didn’t. During their escape from China, when it looked like Eric, Ryan, Mei, and Lili’s sister might be recaptured by the Chinese, Curtiss had ordered a drone strike to kill them all. It was only because of the mysterious Inventor that they had lived. Jane would never forget what Curtiss had tried to do. It was proof of just how coldhearted he could be. He had been ready to kill four innocent people to make sure that there was no chance they could reveal state secrets to the enemy.

  Jane wondered if Lili might feel different about Mei dating Curtiss’s son if she knew the truth. Yet she also knew that now was not the time to bring up something like that . . . or was it? The meddlesome side of her personality couldn’t help but probe a little.

  “Do you trust Curtiss?”

  Lil glanced away for a moment, her expression conflicted. “I’ve struggled with that question for a long time. When we were in China, we accepted that we were expendable and might never get out. But Curtiss didn’t forget about us, and I owe the fact that I’m alive—and that Mei is alive—to him.” She paused and Jane could see she was choosing her words. “I also know that he has ulterior motives.”

  Jane put her elbow on the back of the sofa and leaned closer. “Go on.”

  “Curtiss sees me as an asset to national security. Getting me out meant that he would gain all my expertise in weapons research to help him here, while simultaneously taking that expertise away from the enemy. In many ways, rescuing Xiao-ping is no different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lili hesitated a moment. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but Curtiss’s plan was to make me the new Director of Genetics. I was supposed to take Olex Velichko’s place. But the DSS won’t give me a security clearance while my husband is a prisoner of the enemy.”

  Jane raised her chin and opened her mouth. “Ah, so that’s it.” Now it was beginning to make more sense. The mission to Africa was not so much about saving a man’s life as it was about advancing their weapons program.

  Lili nodded. “I know he’s a good man but sometimes I have dark thoughts. Sometimes I wonder—if Curtiss had a choice between rescuing Xiao-ping or simply killing him, what would he do? Either way, I’d get my clearance.”

  “No, no, that’s going too far,” Jane lied, knowing how astutely Lili had just judged Curtiss’s character, for that was exactly his thinking during the escape from China. But she couldn’t tell her that now. “Xiao-ping is going to be fine. You’ll see. We have a tough few hours ahead of us, but then everything is going to be all right.” She gave Lili another hug. “Come on, what do you want to watch?”

  Soon the two women were huddled together under a blanket on the sofa watching a bad comedy, the cool blue light of the screen painting their faces. Jane laughed and smiled at each joke, but it was all an act to make Lili feel like everything was normal even though inside she was twisted up and nauseous.

  She reminded herself that she was tough. That she could handle anything. Don’t worry, she chided herself, Eric’s just in a support role, he won’t even be in any danger. But all the fear and anxiety she’d felt while he was in captivity in China flooded back into her mind. She swore that when he came back, she would never let him out of her sight again.

  Chapter Seven

  Seeing

  Namibia

  Lieutenant Fan glided slowly above the woods, trying to see through the tree cover. His aircraft did not have a chin bubble, so to see down he had to bank a little. The second perimeter fence cut through the western tip of the woods, but a no man’s land had been cleared on either side of it to make escaping prisoners easier to spot.

  He did another flyby but saw nothing. “Damn it, he must be in there.” He looped around once more, slower this time, keeping his nose to the woods and hovering at twenty-five meters, low enough to look between the pillars of the trees for any glimpse of movement. That was when he noticed something odd. There was a dead tree that had fallen near the fence. Little was left of it but a long brown stump, half decayed.

  If he held the gunship still, the trunk was straight, but when he moved, it suddenly had a kink in it, like a reed in the water. At first he thought the refraction was caused by his Heads-Up Display (HUD), but when he turned so he was looking out the port window, he saw it again for the briefest of seconds. He pointed it out to his gunner.

  “I don’t see anything,” he replied.

  That’s why you’re the gunner and I’m the pilot, Fan thought. There’s something down there.

  On board the Valor, all eyes were glued on the menacing form of the Black Widow as it hovered lethally close. They stared at the long wand of the chain gun and the rocket pod clusters hanging under its wings.

  “He sees us.” Bailey said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Eric replied. “If he could see you, he would have fired by now. But he sees something . . . something he doesn’t understand.” Eric’s aerial cameras were darting around the two aircraft, helping him decide what to do.

  Everyone in the Valor held their breath. In the cabin, Sawyer got an idea. He slipped a three-foot metal tube from the weapons rack above his head and handed it to Patel. It was an AT4 Pansarskott, a single-shot anti-tank weapon. Patel, who was known for a decided lack of subtlety, often carried one into combat to blow holes in buildings. “Auxiliary points of ingress,” he liked to say. He was also the best shot on the team. Patel took the weapon with a nod and knelt near the door. Curious, Sergeant Kabat stood behind the rocket to get a better look. Sawyer gently eased her to one side to prevent her from being killed by the blowback.

  Staff Sergeant Bill Cantrell stood at the window of the Valor between the cockpit and the bay door looking through the sight of his .50 caliber machine gun, safety off, finger on the trigger. Cantrell could clearly see both the pilot and the gunner in the Z-15’s two-tiered cockpit. The two men were talking, trying to figure something out.

  “Permission to fire,” he whispered into his microphone.

  “Negative,” Bailey said.

  What are we waiting for? Cantrell thought. Let’s blow this fucker out of the sky before he can put two and two together.

  Truth be told, Cantrell was champing at the bit to take
down the Black Widow. He’d been flying in Black Hawks, Chinooks, and Valors for almost twenty years. As the crew chief it was his job to know them inside and out—he could literally take any one of them apart and reassemble it. But Cantrell’s knowledge of aircraft went far beyond that. He made it his business to learn as much as he could about any aircraft that flew in any military. To him, the Black Widow was an abomination—it embodied everything that disgusted him about not only the Chinese government, but also the United States government and its defense contractors. The Z-15 was an insulting combination of Chinese reverse engineering, Pentagon leaks, US government complacency, and contractor greed. Almost nothing in it was Chinese-made. Right down to the reverse engineered M242 Bushmaster chain gun mounted on its nose. Oh, the irony, Cantrell thought, my crew and I are about to be blown to bits by an autocannon designed in the USA to keep Americans safe.

  Yet he had to admit the Black Widow was an effective killing machine. While the Valor was a multi-use aircraft, designed chiefly for getting troops in and out of the battlefield, the Black Widow was designed for attack—capable of supporting troops on the ground and destroying enemy tanks. It had a slim profile and carried only a pilot and gunner.

  The cockpit and the engines of a Chinese Z-15 were well-armored too. In fact, they were specifically designed to take the impact of the very .50 caliber round he was ready to fire at it. But he suspected it had been tested with only a few .50 caliber rounds, not the thirty-three rounds per second at close range he was about to give them.

  In the cockpit of the Z-15, Lieutenant Fan looked again at the log. It was like a mirage. Something had to be there . . . in the air between him and the ground. But how could he see it?

  The sun was up, but in this small valley it was still dim enough. Yes. He reached up and pulled down his night-vision optics. He had to adjust the gain to eliminate the extra light, but when the optics adjusted he finally saw something.

  Eric watched as the pilot lowered his night-vision goggles. At first, he was not worried. He had planned for this and knew that all the equipment and personnel in the aircraft were coated with nanosites that would be invisible to infrared. But the look of confusion on the pilot’s face made him realize his mistake.

  “He can see you! He can see you!”

  It was Yong, the wounded man. The camouflage Eric had improvised for him did not have infrared protection.

  Fan saw the torso of a man somehow floating in the air. It was so strange that he hesitated. How could this . . .

  Cantrell opened fire, the .50 cal spewing hot metal like a fire hose, the illuminated rounds appearing out of thin air and smacking into the Z-15’s armored plating. The gunship dipped its nose and tried to veer off, Fan still confused as to what was happening. “We have enemy contact, taking heavy fire.”

  Patel pulled the trigger on the Pansarskott. It sprang forth with a loud crack, like the sound of a tree split in a storm.

  The Z-15’s chain gun was just beginning to return fire when the AT4 warhead slammed into the rotor housing of the right propeller, knocking the blades clear off. The remaining bulk of the airframe slouched to the right and fell. Cantrell kept firing as it descended, watching as the pilot struggled vainly with the control stick.

  Xiao-ping watched the explosion in amazement and felt the shock wave push against his face, followed by an acrid burn smell. One of the detached blades appeared to be coming straight at them, pitching at an angle like a giant rotary saw. “Ah, shit!” someone said. Xiao-ping ducked reflexively, but somehow it passed over them, cartwheeling into the woods, slicing though boughs, splintering tree trunks and creating a road of destruction.

  “Nice shot, Patel!” Duncan said, patting him on the back.

  Patel looked to Sawyer—his team leader—for his approval. The old SEAL mouthed the words, I love you.

  “That’s such bullshit, Patel,” Cantrell said. “He was mine.”

  With great relief, Xiao-ping heard the engines come to life and the rotors begin to spin.

  Suddenly the airwaves were alive with chatter.

  Night Owl: “Tango Seven Seven, you need to get out of there ASAP. I have four more Z-15s heading your way.”

  Captain Everett: “Zulu Five One [Hill], what is the probability that the enemy will see the rotor glare?”

  Eric: “It’s high, sir. The armor will protect them against the chain guns, but it’s untested against rockets and missiles. We never expected the camp to have air support.”

  Major Winfred: “Whiskey Nine Three requests permission to support Tango Seven Seven.”

  Captain Everett: “Negative, Whiskey Nine Three, you keep that cargo safe. Night Owl will handle this.”

  Everett realized the cat was out of the bag. The wreckage of the Black Widow would be littered with evidence indicating the US—the .50 cal shell casings and fragments of the AT4 Pansarskott. This was supposed to be a quiet op, he thought to himself. If it got any louder, it was going to be live on CNN.

  “Night Owl, as soon you are convinced the enemy is in pursuit of Tango Seven Seven, you are weapons free.”

  “Roger that. I have eyes on all four bogies now.”

  Chapter Eight

  Countdown

  11:45 p.m.

  Washington, DC

  In less than twenty-four hours she was going to kill a man.

  “Is everything in place?” she said into her phone, struggling to keep the anxiety out of her voice. As their leader, she knew she could not let her people sense her fear.

  She was sitting on a park bench outside of the Smithsonian. Even though it was late, she’d been restless in the hotel and felt the need to be outside. Luckily it was a warm fall night.

  “Yes, don’t worry,” came the man’s reply. He had worked hard to get rid of his accent, but her trained ear still heard the faintish lilt to his r’s. “They put the furniture back yesterday and hung the paintings. Nobody suspects a thing.”

  She took a deep breath and tried to relax.

  The man clearly perceived her anxiety: “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” he said. “Remember, we’ve done this before.”

  She thought of reminding him that the previous victim had not been a high-level government official and the hit had not occurred in the heart of the nation’s capital. But she didn’t. Even though she knew their phones had the highest encryption, she dared not be so overt. “You know it’s different,” she said.

  “Not for me.”

  She nodded slowly, acknowledging that he was right. He had done many things that were equally if not more audacious than this. At sixty-seven, he had survived one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in history. He was a professional and a survivor, and that made her feel better.

  The man added, “As I’ve always said, risk everything or gain nothing.”

  “Understood,” she said. “Okay, let’s go through it again. You’ll get a final visual on the target, right?”

  “That’s right, then you’ll have ninety seconds. No more.”

  “Got it,” she replied. “Ninety seconds.”

  “Don’t hesitate,” he said.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  For a moment she considered herself from the outside looking in. An affluent, thirtysomething woman with curly, reddish brown hair, talking on her phone on a park bench. She knew no one would ever suspect that she was preparing an assassination because she still looked like the woman she used to be: the young college professor. Less than a year ago she’d been lecturing, holding office hours, and attending potluck dinners with fellow faculty—until she had discovered her true calling.

  “Is there anything that we could be forgetting?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

  There was a respectful silence as the man considered her question.

  “We haven’t missed a thing, macushla,” he assured her. “You’re going to make a
big bang.”

  Chapter Nine

  Night Owl

  Jacksonville Naval Air Station, Florida

  Drone pilot Master Sergeant Don Hendricks (Night Owl) watched on his screen as the Valor lifted off, dipped its nose and headed west for the coast. From five thousand feet, its pace seemed painfully slow. It took only another thirty seconds for the other Chinese gunships to arrive at the site of their fallen comrade; the Valor now only a mile away.

  They circled around the crash site like enraged wasps, dipping and darting to and fro. They looked in the woods, and one even opened fire. They couldn’t figure out what had happened. Good, Hendricks thought, each moment they waste gives us a better chance of getting away.

  He watched as one of the Black Widows came in low between the wreckage and the LZ. He appeared to be hovering just a few feet off the ground, turning slowly. Then he rose up quickly and headed directly after the fleeing Valor.

  Hendricks lowered his altitude to three thousand feet and targeted the first Black Widow. As far as UAVs went, the Predator was a dinosaur, a relic from the War on Terror, a weapon system that had been replaced by bigger and more lethal drones in every branch of the service except the navy, who kept them because they were small enough and tough enough to use on aircraft carriers. But that smallness meant it had limited armaments. Its two hard points could carry either two Hellfire missiles or four Stingrays. Luckily, he was flying with the Stingrays, but he would have to make every shot count. What’s more, he would have to fire the missiles as quickly as possible to keep the element of surprise. The Stingray was a “fire and forget” weapon. Once airborne the missile used a mixture of heat detection and a camera to zero in on its target.

  He locked on the first Black Widow, waited for “tone,” and fired. Then he did the same for the other three gunships. In less than fifteen seconds, he’d launched all four missiles. It was a drill he had practiced hundreds of times in a simulator, but never in real life.