“Why thank you, Kildar,” the girl said, smiling thinly.
“But I’m definitely getting you out of my house after this,” Mike said, grinning. “And you’ll need that maseo-facial surgery if you think you’re going to get back in.”
“You don’t love me,” Katya said with a pout.
“I don’t trust you,” Mike replied with a smile. “You’d be surprised how much I like you. I’m not sure I’d go as far as love, but…”
Katya looked at him oddly for a moment, then shrugged.
“The audiovisual upgrade,” she said, looking over the list. “Three subcutaneous pouches, the combat drug upgrade and the poison fingernails.”
“I’ll tell the doc.”
“So do I get to call you by your real name?” Mike asked as Director Pareis came into the small, and distinctly secure, waiting room.
“Do I?” Pareis asked.
“I hope you don’t even know it,” Mike snapped.
“Come on, I’m the DIA director,” Pareis said with a sigh. “And I’ve now officially stated that I’m uncomfortable with fitting this…”
“Russian whore,” Mike finished for him.
“Foreign agent,” Pareis corrected, “with some of the most advanced personal enhancement technology on earth.”
“Including the tracker?” Mike asked.
“What tracker?” Pareis asked.
“Oh, come on,” Mike replied, scornfully. “If there’s not a GPS tracker on that girl I’m going to call the President as soon as I get out of here and tell him he needs to can you for being a complete moron. Cottontail is one dangerous bitch. And she’s now going to be the most dangerous bitch on the planet. Once she gets those fingernails loaded I’m not going to want to be in the same room with her.”
“It only transmits when a tickler signal comes from a satellite,” Pareis admitted. “And I’ll be surprised if even she can detect it.”
“You’ve tested these things for interference, right?” Mike asked.
“As well as we can,” Pareis admitted. “She’ll need a day or two of testing and tweaking once she’s out of recovery.”
“And then we hie ourselves to wonderful Albania,” Mike said, snorting. “I take it we got the overheads?”
“They’ll be brought to you by officer courier as you’re on your way home,” the director said. “Along with an intel update. We still don’t know if the girl is still there. They do ship them out, you know. Notably to Italy. And we’ve been afraid to put out feelers about her for obvious reasons.”
“She’s still there,” Mike said. “I can feel it in the water.”
“How you doing?” Mike asked.
The G-V was technically from a charter company, but it had been supplied by DIA so Mike figured it was something along the lines of Air America. The pilots were certainly reticent. Mike missed Captain Hardesty. Not to mention the stewardesses that had accompanied the flights over; he’d had to get his own drinks and it took some hunting and eventually resorting to forcing open a fixture with a screwdriver.
“You were right about the fingernails,” Katya replied, holding up her hands. The palms showed a line of small puncture wounds. “But there is a valve. However, I start playing with it when I get upset…”
“Which is most of the time,” Mike said, looking at her and smiling. “You’ll just have to learn some restraint.”
“I’m working on it,” Katya said, blinking and shaking her head. “And I keep getting double images, one of them grainy. Like a bad TV set showing me what has just happened.”
“You need to work on locking that down,” Mike said, pulling out the sheets of paper, liberally stamped with “Top Secret,” which were her post-op instructions. “No fever when we left, which is good.”
“I’m sore in some odd places,” Katya admitted.
“Odder than normal, I take it,” Mike said, carefully taking her hand. “You’ll get used to it. Are you going to be okay—”
“From all this?” Katya asked, withdrawing her hand. “Or on the mission?”
“Yes,” Mike said, crossing his hands in his lap.
“I am going to get well paid,” Katya said, smiling. “That is all that matters. Why this sudden show of concern, Kildar?”
“Do you think I didn’t care?” Mike asked. “From the beginning? Did you think I was just one of the users in your life?”
“No,” Katya admitted.
“I suppose that makes me one of the suckers, then,” Mike said, snorting.
“Not that… either,” Katya said, at least sounding honest. “So I don’t know what you are.”
“Because there are either users or suckers?” Mike asked.
“Yes,” Katya admitted. “So, yes, I must accept that you are a sucker. Certainly for giving me all these gifts.”
“Use them on the wrong person, and every agent on earth will have a termination contract on you,” Mike pointed out.
“So I must find the right men to use them upon, yes?” Katya said, smiling and working her fingers. “I look forward to it.”
“You’ve got real problems,” Nielson said, gesturing at the map. “You realize that, right?”
“I know some of them, tell me the rest,” Mike said, sighing and leaning back in his chair. He was glad to be back at the caravanserai; America had been almost a culture shock. The caravanserai really did seem to be home these days.
“I won’t go over the tactical issues,” Nielson said. “I’ve been looking at what you might call operational issues. The entire area around Lunari is controlled by the Albanian gangs. You’ve got multiple checkpoints to pass to even get to the town. And forget inserting on foot across the mountains. First of all, egress would be a bitch. Second, that’s the center of the clan power. You’d have a fight on your hands, from all the Albanian clans, from, basically, the time you cross the border. And it’s not only their turf, they’ll outnumber you a few hundred to one. I don’t see doing a land ingress and egress.”
“Lunari is landlocked,” Adams said. “You want us to fly in? The troops aren’t trained in air-mobile operations. Or HALO for that matter.”
“Training on helicopter insertion and extraction isn’t all that hard,” Mike said. “But that begs the question; where in the hell are we going to get the helicopters?”
“More than choppers,” Nielson said, gesturing at the map again. “You’re dealing with multiple sovereign countries surrounding the area. I couldn’t find one spot that I’d like to do an assembly and extraction through.”
“I hope you’re not just throwing this out as an insoluble problem,” Mike said, sighing. “Because we can’t use U.S. assets for this. Not a one.”
“Not insoluble,” Nielson admitted. “But it’s going to be very expensive.”
“How expensive?” Mike asked. “And what’s your plan?”
“There is a group in Russia that supplies heavy lift choppers,” Nielson said, tossing Mike a brochure. “They mostly work on relief operations and oil operations in remote areas. They went in with the Marines in Dali, which is where I first heard of them. When you said the Keldara were going to have to hit Lunari in force, I started looking at the problem and saw the solution pretty quick. And I’ve had some very quiet conversations with them about the problem. They’re willing to provide enough choppers and pilots to get us in and out. But… they figure it’s going to be a hot LZ. And then there’s the problem of being identified. So they want two million, minimum, for the mission. Plus recoup costs on any aircraft lost on the mission, to be escrowed in a Swiss bank account controlled by a neutral third party. The vig on that is another mil. But there’s more.”