After the launch, the drone jet would vanish below radar detection height and cross the Turkish coastline, powering northward. Such an action would be a violation of the borders of a NATO member nation, so all the more reason to ensure that no human pilot would be part of the mission loop, and that no direct control by the mothership would be in place by the time the UCAV reached its target.
In an hour the drone would be back over the Med, circling the carrier it had launched from, its weapons load a little lighter and its mission record scrubbed clean. And they would have one less problem to concern them.
“Argonaut Two is away,” reported the radio voice. “Good launch.”
“Confirmed,” Teape responded.
An unpleasant sneer tugged at the corner of Tommy’s lips. “If this don’t do it,” he said, almost to himself, “I’ll walk out there and strangle the bastard myself.”
EIGHTEEN
Marc had assumed that after the whole trip-wire situation, Lucy’s rather confident attitude might have toned down a little, but that didn’t appear to be the case. He winced as she used a swift kick from an army boot to smash open the lock on a door, the mechanism coming away with a crunch of fresh splinters. The upper floor’s corridors converged on this one doorway, and Marc guessed that the building had been deliberately constructed to have two distinct “sectors” that could only be accessed via chokepoints. His theory was confirmed when they found poorly-built walls extended out into the passage, making it into a chicane.
Lucy threw him a look. “See those?”
He nodded. “To slow down anyone coming through. Blockades to break up lines of fire.”
“Which means the people here were paranoid about getting a SEAL Team wake-up one dark night.”
“Yeah, something like that.” With the Glock held close, he eased open a door off the main corridor and peeked through. It was another dormitory, but unlike the ones in the outbuildings, this was better appointed. Of course, “better” was subjective, in terms of having actual glass in the windows, and a ceiling that wasn’t pock-marked with holes. The denuded bedsteads were clearly adult-size bunks, with cloth privacy curtains hanging between them like limp flags. A widescreen television set up in one corner of the room was the only thing that seemed out of place, and Marc noticed a DVD player and a pile of discs at the foot of it.
“I’m guessing those aren’t rom-coms,” Lucy offered.
“They bunked the adults here,” Marc moved away, back down the corridor. “Like tutors and pupils in a boarding school.”
She followed him, frowning. “Safe bet they weren’t teaching them about peace and harmony.”
The corridor ended at a lightless stairwell that went straight down to the basement, vanishing into the hot shadows. Lucy held out a hand to him, her expression turning stony. She said nothing, instead making a silent gesture that told Marc to keep behind her. He nodded and let her take point.
Lucy brought the MP7 up, the muzzle hunting for targets. Marc held his pistol out and down, ready to snap it up to firing position if he saw a threat.
They descended into the darkness, and the air closed in on them, thick and unmoving. A cloying smell seeped into Marc’s throat and nostrils. Lucy eased open a rusty door and the odor came at him full force.
Charred meat. The same awful, charnel house stench from the docks in Dunkirk. He swallowed hard, tasting the acidic burn of bile in the back of his throat, and gripped the gun tighter.
The room was a large space, floor and walls tiled in washed-out sea green. Illumination blazed from a buzzing neon tube that threw stark light across everything.
In the middle of the room was a discolored drain grille set at the hub of a dozen shallow gutters, and gathered around it were patches of what could only be blood. Flies spun around the freshest of the brown puddles. Marc turned slowly in place, not wanting to but unable to stop himself from picturing what had taken place here. A metal autopsy table had been shoved off to one side.
“Gunshot kills,” Lucy announced, her voice flat and empty.
“What?” Marc’s mouth was dry.
She pointed at the patches. “If a knife had been used, there would be spray. Someone … More than one … Was brought down here and shot dead.”
Marc forced himself to study the scene dispassionately, and he saw holes in the tile where some eager executioner had missed with their first shot, or else put a bullet right through the body of their subject. “What the hell is this all for?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, Lucy made for another steel door on the far side of the room. Poorly-oiled hinges gave a low moan as it opened and dry, dusty air wafted out.
The other section of the basement took up the rest of the building’s lower level, dominated by a large furnace. It was barely alight, but still a weak glow shone through the gaping maw of the fire pit, and Marc glimpsed spindly shapes among the ashes that he didn’t want to study more closely.
Lucy didn’t share his reticence. She peered inside, before turning her head to spit. “Fuck,” she breathed.
Marc’s gaze dropped to the floor and he found himself looking at pieces of torn paper, probably dropped from piles of documents as they had been taken to be burned. He crouched, grateful for something else to focus on. The paper was yellow, tissue-thin, the kind of tear sheet that you would be handed by a deliveryman. He used a pen to tease the fragment open and saw strings of symbols he couldn’t read. “Hey,” Marc said, without looking up, “what does this say?”
Lucy loomed over him, scowling. “A date? Not sure. You think that could be something?”
He nodded. There was part of a letterhead visible, and a logo that showed outlines of a truck, a plane and a boat. “Might be a bill of lading.” Marc cast around and found more bits of paper with the same color and form. “Maybe several.”
She drew a black rectangle out of her pocket and offered it to him. “Take pictures. Use this.” Lucy paused to look at the device—it was a smartphone of some kind, but Marc couldn’t see any manufacturer’s mark or identifying symbols. The phone beeped and came alive. A facial recognition lock, he realized. Rubicon were clearly serious about operational security for their field agents.
He smoothed out the pieces of paper on the dusty floor and took a string of shots, the smartphone’s bright flash lighting up the room like a strobe. “I’ve got some image processing software on my laptop we could use on this…”
Lucy shook her head. “Solomon’s got a whole lab full of geeks for that.”
“Oh. Right.” Marc nodded to himself. He’d become used to working alone in the past few days, and it seemed strange to think about being part of a “team” again, even if it might only be a temporary state of affairs.
She snatched the phone from him and tapped out a string of text on the screen. “No signal down here.” Lucy handed it back again. “Go outside, see if you can get a couple of bars. It’ll send the email automatically.” She looked away. “I’ll see what else I can find.”
Marc took the opportunity without hesitating, grateful for it. The sickly air of the basement was oppressive, and all he wanted at that moment was to be out of there.
* * *
Marc came to a halt and shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand, squinting into the sunlight. He took a deep breath of fresh air and tried to convince himself that the death-stink from the basement hadn’t followed him out here. As much as he wanted to think about something, anything else, his thoughts kept returning to Dunkirk, to the weight of Sam Green’s body in his arms and the ashen stench that was that all that remained of her hours later, clinging to him as if it had soaked into his pores.
“Piss off!” He spat the curse at nothing, angry at himself, dispelling the horrible moment of recollection with a snarl.
The Land Rover was nearby, and he trudged over to it, opening the passenger door to find a bottle of mineral water lodged in the footwell. The water was warm and tasted of plastic, but it helped wash away the scent-memory.
Marc drained most of it and then, on impulse, he tore off his cap and splashed the remainder over his face and neck. It seemed to help.
Pulling Lucy’s ghost-phone from his pocket, he held it up and moved around in a circle, squinting at the line of signal bars as he wandered across the quad. He must have looked like an idiot, arm out above his head, waving at nothing. Out here a decent cellular link was more rare than a rainy day, but Marc was willing to bet that Mister Solomon would equip his people with something a little better than the latest device from Apple. The device gave off a sonar-like ping as it found the thinnest margin of a carrier signal, and presently a little icon flashed into life, showing a letter zipping away into the ether.
“Done…” Marc began, dropping his arm. He was turning back toward the main building when he saw sunshine flicker off something moving fast against the distant hillside.
He was still processing what he saw when the wind brought him the rolling whine of an aero engine. The sound immediately seemed off. The pitch was all wrong, too high for a fighter jet, not enough bass and chop for a helicopter.
Then he saw it again, and Marc’s mind caught up with him at shocking speed. Still distant, but clear as it crested a scrub-covered hill, he saw a torpedo-like fuselage sporting twin tail planes and sharp-edged wings, with the dark void of a jet intake across its dorsal hull.
Marc snatched the walkie-talkie from his belt and mashed the transmit tab. “We have a problem!” he shouted. “We got incoming aircraft!”
The American woman’s voice crackled back at him. “Turkish Air Force?”
He shook his head, not that she could see the gesture. “Only if the US Navy has started selling them Sea Avenger UCAVs.” The drone passed behind another hill, banking toward the compound. “It’s definitely coming this way—”
Marc’s words cut off as the unmanned aircraft made a fast pass over the orphanage, and the whining engine echoed off the landscape. The sunlight flash came again, and now the drone was close enough that he could see it reflecting off a pod along the centreline of the aircraft, a cluster of lenses feeding images back in real time to whomever was directing the machine.
When Lucy’s voice came over the radio again, he heard the grim resolve in her voice. “That thing is here to kill us.”
“I’m pretty damn sure I haven’t done anything to annoy the American government!” As he spoke, Marc was keeping low, watching to see where the drone would pop up.
“The Navy didn’t send it,” she said flatly. “It’s a loaner. Listen to me, small-arms won’t be enough to deal with it. I need you to get to the car, get the gun case.”
Rather than answer, Marc broke into a sprint across the quad, back toward the Land Rover. As he moved, he heard the echo of the drone’s engine. It was turning, gaining height. That first low-level pass had been to scope out the target. The next approach would be rolling in with weapons hot. Marc knew the Avenger UCAV could carry a reconnaissance package, a load of 250-pounder bombs or—as this model did—clusters of lethal AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. Even a near-hit from one of them would be enough to bring an explosive end to Marc Dane’s fugitive odyssey.
He slammed into the side of the Land Rover and scrambled to the rear door, wrenching it open. The two cases he had seen Malte loading that morning at the airport were still there, one with a red stripe across it, another with a blue stripe resting on top.
As Marc’s fingers closed around the handle of the blue case, from behind him he heard a distinct shift in engine pitch as the drone came around. Marc hauled the long case out with a grunt of effort—it was heavier than he had expected—and he couldn’t stop himself from casting a look over his shoulder.
It was a decision he immediately regretted. He saw the drone in the near distance, nose-low and framed against the afternoon sky. There was a flash of ignition beneath the Avenger’s belly as one of the missiles dropped from its internal munitions bay. The Hellfire came curving in, a trail of white smoke describing its approach.
He vaulted away from the Land Rover, the case held in a death-grip, running as fast as he could across the quad. Marc heard the shrill, falling shriek of the missile as it dove at the parked 4x4, the warhead meeting the metal of the sun-warmed hood with a massive thud.
He left the ground and tumbled as a wave of burned air hit him from behind and blasted him off his feet. He lost the gun case and landed hard on his shoulder, rolling across the ground. Hot, petrol-stinking fumes washed over him and he choked on dust.
Marc scrambled to his feet. The Land Rover was gone, what pieces of it remained reduced to blackened twists of steel. A flaming pit marked the strike point, a pennant of dark smoke curling up into the air. The wind pulled at it, dragging the haze across the compound. His ear felt wet and he touched it, his finger coming away bloody. Some tiny fragment of the exploding car had nicked him as he fled.
Up above, the drone was already turning inbound for another attack run.
* * *
“Good kill,” said Teape, watching the feed from Argonaut Two. The screen in front of him resembled some abstract war game simulation, the buildings of the orphanage compound rendered as blank boxes and the contours of the local landscape a series of nested green lines. The feed was coming in with a near-zero delay, beamed right to the Santa Cruz by a clandestine link off Stormline’s network.
“If he’s still breathing, then it’s no kind of kill at all,” sneered Ellis. He was watching a different monitor, this one a side-looking view from a video camera in the Avenger drone’s recon pod. He pointed to a flicker moving below as the UCAV banked. “Still got a live target down there.”
Grunewald said nothing, turning to glance at the Englishman. The soldier’s face was set in a hawkish glare, watching every return on the main screen in front of Teape. Tommy leaned forward and pointed. “Cover,” he noted. “Target that and hit him again.”
Teape nodded and moved a mouse pointer over the tactical display, click-dragging a targeting box over the tent-like structure the Englishman indicated. He wasn’t strictly piloting the drone—the Avenger’s on-board computer was smart enough to manage something as simple as a standard flight path—but it was still necessary for an element of human input to be required for the firing of an actual weapon. The drone obeyed Teape’s new orders and shifted position, bringing its nose to bear so the next Hellfire could acquire the designated target.
At the other screen, Ellis was running the video feed back a few moments. A hard drive stored a digital recording of everything the drone observed, and now he set the playback running in slow reverse, the moment of the first missile hit unfolding backward. Grunewald watched the orange fireball shrink and fade, the Hellfire rebuild itself and retreat from the parked Land Rover. At length, Ellis found what he was looking for and drew the other mercenary’s attention. “There he is.”
Grunewald looked, and saw that Ellis had captured a single frozen image. A man, running at full tilt to escape the destruction of the vehicle. It was undoubtedly Marc Dane, the same ragged hair and the unshaven face he had seen atop Mount Etna. “He should be dead five times over,” Grunewald said sourly.
“Luck,” offered Ellis, the word like a curse. The dour Afrikaner would never be willing to accept that someone like Dane had slipped their grasp though any other means. “But we’re gonna run that clock out, ja?”
* * *
Marc found the gun case where it had fallen and grabbed it, lurching away from the remains of the Land Rover. The heat from the explosion made his skin feel sunburned and his ears were still ringing from the detonation. He was only aware of Lucy when she grabbed his arm, yanking him toward the thermal-cloth tent with a hard tug on one of the daypack’s straps.
“This way!” she shouted, but her voice was woolly, like it was coming to him from underwater. “Back to the building!”
Marc nodded and let her lead him back the way she had come. As they made it to the entrance hall, he felt, rather than heard, the second missile hi
t. The blast put them both down, and they stumbled as a wave of displaced dust churned in though the open doors.
“Six Hellfires,” Marc said, his own voice sounding oddly muffled. “Enough to blast this hill into rubble.”
Lucy wasn’t listening to him. She pulled at the gun case and her expression turned thunderous. “You … got the wrong goddamn box!”
“What?”
“These are the non-lethals!” She wrenched the lid open and grimaced at what lay inside. “Red for dead, blue for screwed!”
Mark threw a glance over his shoulder, out through the doorway toward the burning pit. Whatever had been in the back of the Land Rover was splinters and wreckage, same as the vehicle. “How was I supposed to know?” he spat back at her. Inside the case there were a few flash grenades, along with other kit he didn’t recognize.
Lucy grabbed at a taser pistol, and then angrily threw it down. “Great. We can’t even dent that thing with this Star Trek shit.”
Mark ignored her, and reached for the largest device in the case. It unfolded as he removed it, a skeleton stock snapping open to reveal a trigger and pistol grip beneath. The weapon was the size of a short-frame assault rifle, but where a conventional firearm would have had its mechanism, there was a solid block of electronics resembling a fuse box. The device terminated in a curved dish antenna, giving the whole thing the look of a sci-fi ray gun built from electrical spares. Fluorescent warning stickers covered the weapon, forbidding users to operate the gun without protective gear, for more than ten seconds at a time, not to look directly into the emitter head …
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