At eleven-fifteen the sky began filling with clouds. The moon played peekaboo with them for a few minutes, then completely disappeared.
At eleven-twenty a small red light flashed twice from the middle of the cloud bank.
Danny raised his arm and flashed his wrist light in response. A voice crackled over the ear set he was wearing.
“Whiplash Transport to Ground. Please confirm your identity.”
“This is Whiplash One. How do you read me?”
“Whiplash One acknowledged. Strong coms.”
“Bring it in,” said Danny.
The clouds began to descend. Only when they were within a few feet of the ground did it become obvious they weren’t clouds but an array of airships, camouflaged by a combination of LEDs and vapor generators, which poured mist from faceted baffles and outriggers. The baffles were arranged to reduce their radar signal during flight, when the mist wasn’t being used, making them harder to pick up from a distance.
The first dirigible glided down to a landing thirty meters from Danny. Two more touched down directly behind it.
The cargo compartment was a combination of angles and curves; the leading edge looked somewhat similar to the lip of the SR–71 Blackbird, though this aircraft was as slow as that one was fast. The lip dropped down and a four-wheel-drive pickup lurched out, moving silently on an all-electric motor.
“Hey, Colonel,” yelled Boston, leaning out of the driver’s window. “Want to drag?”
“Only if I’m in one of the Rattlesnakes.”
“Maybe you can hang from the skids,” said Boston. “No room for you inside.”
He wasn’t kidding — the fuselage of the remote controlled helicopter was no bigger than Danny’s desk at his old command. Two of them, with winglet and rotors folded up, were in the back of the pickup.
He watched as Boston parked the truck and checked the rest of the team. The six pickup trucks they’d brought looked like oversized four-door civilian Chrysler Rams. And in fact they had started life as Ram 1500s.
Then subcontractors for the Office of Technology had gone to work. The trucks were outfitted with dual engines — turbocharged big block gasoline engines for fast travel, and heavy-duty electric motors for quiet travel. Screens were installed on the dashboards to interface with MY-PID. The metal skin and windows were doubled and reinforced, and an exterior wall of reactive armor added. This outer skin was designed to explode rocket-propelled grenades before their charges could penetrate; it augmented a “kill first” detection system mounted beneath what looked like a cargo carrier on the truck roofs.
“All present and accounted for, Colonel,” said Boston. “Ready any time you are.”
Danny signaled to the blimps to take off. They were guided by computer; there were no human pilots aboard. A duty officer back in the Ukraine watched over them as they flew. He would step in only if necessary.
“We’re going to stage out of this old barnyard,” Danny told Boston, showing him the GPS coordinates. “It’s two klicks from the target area. We’ve got Predators watching overhead, but be careful anyway. These guys are full of surprises.”
Flash was sitting in the car, watching the video feeds when Danny drove in. There was activity at the Black Wolves’ farm — a lot of it.
“Two trucks came in about a half hour ago. Four more guys total,” said Flash. “Two went into the building and moved things around. The other two put up some new defenses outside.”
“They expecting us?” Danny asked.
“That’s what I thought when I first saw them, but everything’s back here by the house. I think they made their exercise more specific.”
“You have the computer compare it to Kiev?”
“Figured I’d wait until they were done.”
“Right. So have they started yet?”
“No, sir.”
That was bad. The later they started, the later they could move. Keeping a strike force sitting around for several hours doing nothing was always problematic. But Danny knew he had no other choice.
“Let’s see if they’re any good,” he told Flash, pointing to the screen.
They didn’t have long to wait. Tonight there were eight Wolves involved in the exercise, six on the assault team and two inside the building, posing as targets.
The assault group moved more quickly than they had the night before. Four members moved up the road to the large building and slipped inside. The others took posts covering the approach. The infrared sensors on the Predator caught small explosions inside the building — flash-bang grenades, probably, though the thermal signatures were not big enough to see.
“Time them,” Danny told Flash.
“Yeah. On it.”
Flash tapped a set of keys that began keeping track of the elapsed time. Exactly two minutes and fifty-three seconds after he had flicked it on, a grenade flashed near the door. The two men on the outside began shooting into the woods.
Guns began firing back.
Flash zoomed to the spots where the guns were firing from. There was no one there; only weapons.
“Gotta be remote controlled,” said Danny. “Part of the exercise.”
“Yeah. But they were hidden so well we didn’t see them, not even with the ground radar.”
“They’re good. No doubt about that.”
The team came out of the building, moving at close to a dead run. Two men with them, bound and gagged — hostages.
“Only two?” said Flash.
“Two’s a lot for six guys to handle,” said Danny. “I’m surprised they’re taking any.”
Boston joined them, watching as the Wolves worked their way to the cottage and different gun emplacements opened up. Once more they got onto the skeleton helicopters and flew across the compound.
“These are the guys we’re hitting?” Boston asked Danny.
“Yeah.”
“They got a lot of gear.”
“Sure do.”
“At least they’ll be tired when we go in,” said Boston.
The Wolf team practiced their assault three more times. By the time they were done, Danny could have done it with his eyes closed.
They used live ammunition on the last trial. The bullets perforated the trees.
It was almost 3:00 A.M. by the time they packed up. Danny waited until they had been in the house for a half hour before giving the order to saddle up.
“Our turn now,” he told Boston. “Let’s take our shot.”
43
Nuri slouched in the front pew of the small church,pretending to be sleeping. The grumbling of the policemen around him had settled into a low background hum, the sort of sound a generator makes when some of its bearings are worn. Part of him hoped they would grow so bored and disillusioned they would simply go home. Another part of him feared they would decide to lynch him.
It could go either way.
He remembered a somewhat similar operation in Africa, when he’d been working with a local government against guerrillas who had taken to a particularly nasty form of piracy — the guerrillas would hijack buses on a deserted route, holding the passengers for ransom. To prove they meant business, they would kill the person they figured was the poorest, and send body parts to the local army barracks.
Grisly as it was, it was just business to them, and part of their costs included protection from sudden army or police raids. Every time the government threatened action against them, the cost of that protection went up — and so did the ransom amount, and eventually the number of kidnappings.