They want to get as close to the house as they can before the enemy’s sentinel drone catches sight of them.
A red light winks on in Lincoln’s visor. “Sentinel drone about to pass to the south,” Chris warns over comms. “Take cover.”
His heart booms in slow, powerful beats as he eases deeper into the mottled shade between trees. He goes to his knees, tips the folded copter to the ground, then flattens beside it, pulling his pistol from its holster as he does.
He glances around to make sure Felice and Rohan are also belly-down. Then he looks for the drone.
After a few seconds he sees it gliding past on stealthed propellers. He notes the gun barrel beneath the central pod. It doesn’t swivel to target them. It remains fixed, its muzzle pointing backward—a standard practice to reduce the chance of bugs clogging up the barrel. “Roach is awake and moving,” Chris reports.
“Roger,” Lincoln whispers. He regards Roach as the critical element in a surprise assault on the house, but it’s vulnerable to gunfire from the sentinel—so the sentinel is the first element he wants to take out.
Chris waits another twenty seconds. Then: “You’re clear to move out.”
Felice helps him get the folded copter back on his shoulder. Then they move fast, determined to get as far as they can before the sentinel returns. The soft, slick fabric of their camo doesn’t rustle and it rejects the grip of grasping twigs, but it’s hot and Lincoln is sweating. It doesn’t help that he has to work hard to keep up with Rohan’s long strides. He breathes consciously: deep, quiet, steady breaths.
“Roach is in place,” Chris reports. A few seconds later: “Okay, you’re at the hundred-fifty-meter mark. Prep the copters.”
Lincoln kneels. He puts the folded copter down, pulls off the camouflage blanket, pops off the restraints, and pulls the rotor booms into position, locking them in place so that the eight rotors are evenly distributed in a meter-wide circle. Felice stands over him, pistol in hand, watching the sky.
“Copter one ready,” Rohan whispers over comms.
Lincoln looks up to check Rohan’s work. He’s got the rotor booms fully deployed with two of them propped on little rocks to keep the copter level, but he forgot one step. “Get the plug out of the gun barrel,” Lincoln reminds him.
“Oops.” Rohan pops the plug out and pockets it.
“Cover it with the camo blanket,” Lincoln says. “We don’t want to launch until True’s in place.”
True is looking back behind the SUV. She wants to watch Roach transform but by the time she can see it, it’s already awake and scuttling off the road.
Miles has climbed over the seatback, out of the cargo compartment. He leans forward to touch her elbow. “Give me your pistol, True. I’m going with you.”
She stares at him, incredulous. “Are you serious?”
Khalid glances over his shoulder. “You can’t go. You’re not here as a soldier.”
The mics are on, so Chris is in the conversation too: “Talk to me, people. What is going on?”
True feels a gentle pressure as Miles’s fingers close around her arm—not tightly enough to interfere with her imminent exit, but enough to let her know he means what he’s saying. He tells her, “I’m going out this door at the same time as you. You might as well give me the pistol.”
“You don’t have camouflage.”
He holds up a camouflage blanket. “I don’t need a full uniform. This action is scheduled to start when you’re in position and that’s going to be ninety seconds after we exit the truck.”
Her mind races, seeking options, seeking to fit this new variable into her mental model of the coming battle.
“True?” Chris asks.
“Miles says he’s going with me.”
“Shit,” Chris says. “We can’t—”
Miles cuts him off. “No time to argue. Just call the mark.”
True concedes the truth of this by handing him the pistol. “He’s right, Chris. No time left and I’ve got no way to stop him. He’ll go if he wants to go.”
“Damn it,” Chris says.
But what can he do? Tell her to abort her role in the operation? He knows she’d go on her own. So he lets it run. “On three,” he says in clipped syllables. He counts down while Khalid gradually slows the truck to a fast walking pace.
The truck is visible to the second road warrior, but he’s low on the slope, he’s on the driver’s side, he’s still sixty meters away, and the flash of light and shadow as they pass beneath the trees is a kind of camouflage. True snatches a breath. Again, that soothing eclipse of shade across the windshield. She opens the door, slides out, scrambles hunched over for two paces—time enough to nudge the door gently shut. Then she’s over the road bank and into the brush, following the designated route that lights up on her visor, aware of Miles a step behind her, wearing the camo blanket like a hood.
The air is cool despite the sun. It smells of dust and some aromatic leaf. They move quietly but quickly, using the tire noise of the retreating truck to cover any sound they do make as they weave through sparse brush on a path that keeps the rocky outcropping between themselves and the house below.
True hears a man’s voice as they enter the rocks. Sudden harsh laughter and water being spilled. She pauses several seconds, waiting as a two-foot-long snake slithers away from her booted foot. A good sign, she tells herself. The shy snake’s presence confirms no third man is hidden up here.
Over comms Chris says, “Khalid is in the clear and our two warriors are walking back on the road.”
True looks upslope, evaluating the terrain, and concludes that the vegetation, the rocks, and her camouflage will combine to keep her hidden even if one of the soldiers is standing on the road’s edge, looking directly down at her position. She creeps forward again.
Now she can see two SUVs, below and to the right. They’re backed up almost to the shade of the anti-surveillance canopy as if poised for a getaway. One of them—not the one Rihab drove, but the other—has plastic crates and cardboard boxes lashed to a roof rack, and twenty-liter plastic jugs in a rack on the back bumper. The blue jug is labeled water in Arabic characters. The other is red-orange. There’s room for a third.
She works her way around a boulder. When she can see the roof of the house and the anti-surveillance canopy on the flat below, she gets down on her hands and knees and crawls.
Ten meters separate the bottom of the slope from the canopy. Close enough that she can hear the pulsing tone of an alert. She pauses to look up at the span of sky framed by the ravine’s walls, searching for the enemy’s sentinel drone, but she doesn’t see it. The tone cuts off. A man speaks in Arabic, his voice carrying easily across the quiet afternoon. He sounds annoyed, not alarmed. Something about goats… in the ravine? If they’ve been dealing with false alarms, it will make them less wary.
“I’m in position,” she whispers to Chris.
“I see you.”
Miles is a few feet away, crouched under the camo blanket.
True tips her head sideways to peer over the rock. She’s come down the slope far enough that she can see into the shaded area beneath the canopy. She looks for only a moment. Then she ducks down again, whispering, “Oh God.” Her hand goes to her face. She pushes her visor up, using the pressure of her fingers to fight the pressure in her eyes.