“Shit,” muttered Danny, getting up quickly.
He found Stoner sitting across form the woman in a chair. She was talking in English, her face red. Danny started to say something to the CIA officer, but Stoner stopped him by putting up his hand.
“They burned the house first,” continued the woman. “The houses were huts, not even as sturdy as this. Two people we have never seen again. These are the people you call saviors.”
“I didn’t call them saviors,” said Stoner. His voice was flat, as unemotional as a surgeon asking for a fresh scalpel.
“We want only to live in peace. Is that too much to ask?”
“You’re not in a good place,” said Danny, taking another step toward her. Her cheekbones were puffed out and her hair brushed straight back; her anger made her seem more like a woman.
“Where would you have us live?” she demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“If you turn us over to the government, they will massacre us.” She looked at Danny defiantly for a moment, then turned back to Stoner and began to cry.
“Mr. Stoner, a word,” said Danny. He turned and went out of the tent. When the CIA officer appeared, he walked a few feet away.
“She telling the truth?” Danny asked him.
“I told you there’d be a sob story.”
“Sob story—two people being killed is hardly a sob story.”
“What would you call it?” Stoner asked.
“A fucking massacre—an atrocity.”
Stoner shrugged.
“We’re not turning her over to the government, or the army,” said Danny.
Stoner said nothing.
“We’re not,” said Danny. “We’ll move them ourselves. Fuck those bastards—we’ll move them ourselves. Well? Say something.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say you agree.”
Stoner shrugged.
Danny felt his anger rising so high he almost couldn’t control it. “What the fuck, man? What the hell—aren’t you human?”
“We can move them. But sooner or later, the Army will find them again. We won’t have control over what happened then.”
“You know.”
Danny clamped his hand into a fist, stifling his anger. Would it do any good to tell Stoner what had happened in Bosnia? Probably not.
It didn’t matter. He’d move them himself.
“You going against me on this?” Danny asked.
Stoner shrugged. “I’m not for or against it. It’s not really my business. There’s a communication network. I have NSA intercepts that are reporting on ship activity and transmitting.”
“From here?”
“They haven’t been able to pin down the location, which is pretty interesting. I guess. There are two kinds of transmission—radio, and something that goes underwater. Not all of it’s decoded.”
“And she’s involved in that?”
“I doubt it, but we won’t know till we look in her village.”
Danny frowned, as if Stoner were saying he should have done this before.
Which, in a way, he was.
“The gear’s pretty sophisticated,” said the CIA officer. “They wouldn’t be able to hide it.”
“Those atolls,” said Danny. “If there’s some sort of network, they’d have to be involved.”
“Probably.”
“All right,” Danny nodded. “We’ll go to her village ASAP. But here’s the deal—if what she’s saying checks out, we move her ourselves.”
Stoner shrugged. Danny took that to mean it was okay with him.
Dog figured he could sneak fifteen minutes away with Jennifer while the rest of the Iowa’s crew got the plane ready. He shouldn’t, of course—but rank had its privileges. Besides, Rosen and the others were fully capable of handling things on their own.
Now, if he were really taking advantage of the situation, he would ask someone else to fill in for him as pilot, which he wasn’t.
“Miss Gleason, if I could have a word,” he said as the others began filing out of the trailer.
“Miss Gleason?” she said, her face red.
“Um, Ms. Sorry.”
“Miss Gleason”
“Uh-oh, Colonel, you stepped in it,” said Zen.
“Hmmmph,” said Breanna.
“I had an idea about adding something to the com section of the computer,” said Dog. “A language translator. As part of the regular communication area. “We had—”
“Which communication area?” she snapped. “In the flight-control computer, or the master unit? Tactical or the mission-spree areas?”
She wasn’t angry with him, he told himself, she was just busting his chops.