“You should give that one something as well,” suggested Amara as the other two were paid. “Having an angry thief in the city is not a good thing.”
“Yes,” said Li Han, nodding. It was a wise suggestion; Amara had more intelligence than he’d thought. He gave the boy three dollars in consolation, then watched as Amara explained.
Amara spoke English as well as Arabic and the local lingo, but there was something else about him. He had a curiosity about him that the others lacked, and he seemed to put it to good use. Perhaps he could be useful.
“Are you good with computers?” Li Han asked him when the boy was gone.
“I use them for e-mail. The Web, that is all,” answered Amara.
“You can’t program?” Li Han booted his laptop up.
“No, I cannot.”
Amara’s accent was thick, and at times his vocabulary strained, but his grammar seemed perfect. Li Han suspected that he had been to the States or at least Europe, something rare for a Brother.
He let Amara watch as he hooked up his laptop to the aircraft’s brain. There was no response, and he couldn’t get his system to recognize it as part of a network. He tried the other plug with similar results.
The problem, he thought, might be that the UAV’s brain wasn’t powered; he made sure he had voltage flowing from a battery to the motherboard, but had not bothered to examine the network hook-ins.
“Here, watch me,” said Li Han, starting to examine the circuitry.
“What are we doing?” asked Amara.
“We are looking for a break. A cut wire, a bad solder connection. It’s a guess,” Li Han added.
He quickly found a small unattached wire. Unsure where it had been attached, he narrowed down the possibilities until he found what looked like a match to the broken solder on a small post near the transformer section. This was some sort of last minute patch, something added possibly to allow the network connector, though it was impossible to tell without a schematic.
Solving the connection mystery gave him another problem: he had no soldering gun. And he suspected that would be a hell of a lot harder to find than a network cable.
Li Han went upstairs to the common room and looked over their supplies. There was a large medical kit with syringes. Filled with morphine, they had been stolen some weeks before from an aid group.
He squirted the drug out. Amara eyed him curiously.
“Do you have a lighter?” Li Han asked him.
“No.”
“Does anyone?”
“Swal smokes, though it is forbidden.”
“Get the lighter from him.”
Amara went over to one of the youths sleeping on the side. He woke him, then had him walk to the opposite side of the room. They argued a bit — Li Han could tell the boy was lying about not smoking. Amara insisted. Swal, who was bigger, pushed him and started back to the nest of blankets where he’d been sleeping. Amara grabbed him; Swal shoved him violently across the floor.
Li Han put down the needle. With two quick strides he was halfway to Swal. He took his Glock from his belt and raised it just as Swal pulled his arm back to swing at Amara.
Swal froze. He held out his hands. Amara said something to him. Swal reached into his pocket slowly, then took out the lighter.
By now the others were awake, and staring at them.
“Translate, Amara,” said Li Han. “When I ask for something, I want it immediately.”
“But—” started Amara.
“Translate!”
Amara did so.
Swal nodded that he understood. When his head stopped bobbing, Li Han put a bullet through his temple.
“We will have no traitors in our group,” said Li Han. He held out his hand. “Now give me the lighter.”
Chapter 9
Breanna thanked the major who had shown her to the secure communications area. The sergeant waiting at the console handed her a handset, then walked to the other side of the room to give her a little privacy, pretending to fuss over something there.
“What’s the situation, Danny?” she asked, holding the phone to her ear.
“We’re going to go in tonight to the building where the UAV is,” he told her.
“Good. You spoke to Jonathon?”
“Yes. He made quite a deal about our being discreet. Don’t worry,” said Danny. “I should mention that Nuri wants to hold off until the morning. He thinks he may be able to make a deal for us to get it back without any bloodshed. But that may take at least another day, probably two or three.”
Under other circumstances, Breanna might have been inclined to wait. But given what Reid had told her the night before, the decision was easy.
“Get it back now. Go in ASAP.”
“I intend on it.”
Breanna hesitated. How much should she tell him?
Her inclination was everything. But if something went wrong — if he was captured and started to talk, that would make things worse.
“Call me as soon as the operation is complete,” she said. “Danny — this one’s important.”
“They always are.”
Chapter 10
Danny Freah checked his weapon and his watch, waiting for the signal from Boston. Boston and Sugar were approaching the front of the target building from opposite directions, aiming to cut off any reinforcements from the nearby warehouse. Both had grenade launchers on their SCAR assault guns; their job was simply to delay any response from that direction until the Osprey could swing overhead and back them up. The aircraft’s Hellfire missiles and chain guns would make short work of the building and anyone trying to take them on.
The rest of the Whiplash team, six men, were all with Danny. Once Boston and Sugar were in place, the two teams would move up to the north side of the warehouse. They’d plant charges on the sides, and at a signal, blow themselves a doorway.
Whiplash used a patterned explosive string that was designed to act like a can opener on a metal wall. The explosive in the device was metered and focused in a lenslike pattern that peeled down the top of the panel as it blew in.
The Whiplash team members were armed with SCARs configured either as submachine guns or as submachine guns with grenade launchers. Each wore special lightweight body armor that could resist anything up to a.50 caliber machine gun bullet at fifty yards. Their smart helmets had full face shields whose screens could provide either infrared or optical feeds from the cameras embedded at the top; the circuitry also provided some protection against sudden bright flashes — handy when using flash-bang grenades during an assault. The helmet com systems connected them with the others in the team, MY-PID, and a dedicated Whiplash com channel that connected with Room 4.
There were still only two men inside, both at the south end of the building. If they resisted, they’d be killed. If they surrendered, they’d be bound and then left after the operation — they were of no value once Whiplash had the UAV.
Danny flexed his fingers, waiting for Boston to check in. The air felt cold, even though it was well into the fifties. His stomach started to churn — that always seemed to happen lately, the acid building right before the action.
“I have someone moving inside the building,” said Turk, watching from above in the Tigershark. “Uh, going to the north, maybe that front door.”
“What’s up with Building Two?” asked Danny quickly, asking about the nearest building, which was roughly seventy yards away, diagonally across the road.