Blue Warrior (36 page)

“Good shooting, Mikey. Now duck your ass back down,” Pearce ordered.

Early wolf-howled. “The party’s just getting started!”

“Save your ammo, cowboy. It’s going to be a long day.”

—

G
uo raged.

Two vehicles destroyed by a UAV, and another disabled by the
guılao
gunman in the tower. Where did the UAV come from? If Pearce had a UAV at his disposal, surely he would have used it earlier.

No matter. He would solve the UAV issue later. The
guılao
problem he could solve now.

“Second positions,” Guo whispered in his headset. The DPV nearest Early sped away instantly, and the two in reserve behind the hangar retreated back several hundred meters. They knew to keep moving in broad, irregular patterns to avoid the same fate as their comrades.

Guo painted Early with his laser scope, fixing the red crosshairs on the big American’s head.

—

P
earce turned around, shouted back into the hangar. “Everybody stay put. I’ll be right back.”

He scanned the tarmac. It was clear. The DPV he’d fired at was too far away to worry about. Pearce ran in a crouch out the hangar opening and toward the tower entrance, expecting a hail of machine-gun and grenade fire to cut him down before he got three feet. But his adrenaline had kicked in and his luck held, and moments later he sped up the
crumbling cement stairs to the observation tower, shouting in his mic, “Mikey! Get covered up!”

Pearce reached the top of the stairs, greeted by Early’s toothy grin plastered on his huge, sweaty face. “God I miss this shit!”

Early’s head exploded. Blood and brain matter splattered on Pearce’s face and torso. Instinctively, he dropped to the deck. Early’s headless corpse thudded onto his back. Pearce rolled out from beneath the heavy body and sprung into a crouch, desperate to get away from his dead friend without exposing himself to the killing fire.

“Mikey . . .”

The ragged neck wound pumped hot blood onto the floor with the last beats of Early’s dying heart, the blood surging over broken glass, spent casings, cigarette butts.

“GOD DAMN IT!” Pearce’s face twisted with rage and grief.

Cella crested the stairs. Saw Early on the floor. She gasped. “Mike!” She ran to his corpse.

Pearce crashed into her, wrapping his arms around her waist, putting his back to the shooter to cover her, driving both of them back down the staircase just as another bullet smashed into the wall above their heads.

Cella screamed and cried and beat Pearce’s shoulders with her fists, grieving and hating all at the same time as he forced her back down the stairwell.

57

Aéropostale Station 11
Tamanghasset, Southern Algeria

15 May

P
earce vise-gripped Cella’s wrist and dragged her in a dead run back to the hangar entrance, slinging her inside and into Mossa’s arms. She buried her head in his chest and wept like a child. Mossa patted her head but locked eyes with Pearce, his face dark with grief.

Pearce shook his head. Mike’s dead.

Mossa led Cella over to a corner and sat her down, then returned to Pearce. Mann stood next to him.

“A sniper, but I did not see where the shot came from,” Mossa said.

Mann cursed. “They shot down the Switchblade earlier, so I didn’t spot him, either.”

“Ian? You see anything?” Pearce asked in his mic.

“Sorry, nothing.”

“Can you take the others out?”

“I can try. But I only have two shots left. Good chance I’ll miss them while they’re on the move.”

“You saw the Hummingbird wreckage?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Do you have a backup plan?”

“That was the backup plan.”

“It’s turning into a Hungarian cluster fuck down here.”

“Fortunately,” Ian said, “I have a backup plan for the backup plan.”

—

T
he sky flashed like lightning.

A second later, a thundering boom vibrated the air.

Pearce felt it in his chest. A flower of smoke petaled high in the sky, like a Fourth of July firework.

“Ian! Did you see that? Ian? Ian?”

Karem Air Force Base,
Niamey, Niger

“Log the incident.”

The Blue One flight engineer, Captain Pringle, had given the self-destruct order. Having lost control of the Reaper thirty minutes earlier and unable to regain control or force a return to base, the operational protocol was to hit the self-destruct switch. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, but he’d get blamed for it anyway. The Air Force was funny in that regard. Destroying a fourteen-million-dollar airframe, no matter the justification, was generally frowned upon by the comptrollers in blue suits.

It was a lousy way to end a lousy mission, but better than letting the MQ-9 get hijacked and parted out. If Pringle was lucky, he’d only get a reprimand and a notation in his service jacket. If he had let that Reaper fall into enemy hands, he would’ve been busted out of the service for sure. Maybe even court-martialed. Too many American RPVs had been stolen in recent years. Several nations had built their drone programs primarily from stolen American and Israeli technology.

Pringle wished to God he hadn’t pulled this second shift. He knew better than do to favors for anyone, let alone volunteer. Life had proven to him once again: No good deed goes unpunished.

Oh well, he said to himself, and shrugged. He’d been thinking about separating from the service anyway. Try to land some cushy civilian contractor job back in the States.

—

D
idn’t see it, exactly.” Ian’s brogue got thicker with his growing fatigue. “My screen went blank. Near as I can tell, they hit a self-destruct switch.”

“I bet the bad guys saw it, too,” Pearce said.

“Count on it.”

Pearce worried. He figured the only reason the DPVs hadn’t attacked again was that they were afraid of the Reaper overhead. If they knew it was out of action, he could expect trouble soon.

“I need eyes on the ground, Ian.”

“What about your Switchblade?”

“Shot down earlier.”

“Then you’re fecked.”

“You just figured that out?”

CRACK!

The sound exploded in Pearce’s earpiece.

“Ian! You there?”

Pearce Systems Headquarters
Dearborn, Michigan

The flash bang burst two feet from Ian’s workstation. The exploding light stabbed his eyes and the concussive blast knocked him out a second later, blood pouring out of both of his ears.

The FBI SWAT team had disabled the building’s security system with a chemical EMP grenade detonation and easily disarmed the three lightly armed security guards on the property, not at their sharpest just after four in the morning.

Earlier that morning, the special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI
field office had received an emergency request from Washington to immediately assault Pearce Systems headquarters and seize all evidence and persons. Credible intelligence indicated that an AQ-affiliated cell located there was about to commit a terrorist act with a weapon of mass destruction.

The all-volunteer SWAT team, headed by an assistant SAIC, deployed to Dearborn within thirty minutes of the request. Thirteen minutes later, Dr. Rao, Ian McTavish, and a half-dozen other Pearce Systems employees on the premises were in plasti-cuffs, hooded and loaded into security vans and whisked away to a secure location while other specialist teams began searching for hazardous materials and WMDs. Once the all clear was given, an intel team seized computers, phones, hard drives, and other storage devices. Before the sun rose at 6:07 a.m. that morning, Pearce Systems would be completely shut down and its personnel quarantined, all thanks to a bogus emergency command issued by Jasmine Bath through a back door in the FBI’s Washington Bureau server.

Troy Pearce was on his own now.

Pearce’s cabin, near the Snake River
Wyoming

Skeets received the go signal from Jasmine Bath at exactly 2:13 a.m. local. He knew that meant the FBI had just launched its assault on the Dearborn facility. His mission was to take out Myers and anybody else he might find in the cabin. The two attacks had to be perfectly coordinated. Bath couldn’t afford for Myers to warn McTavish or vice versa.

“Skeets” was a nickname, of course, one of the ridiculous monikers that soldiers picked up while in service, especially in special forces units. A fourth-generation coal miner, the steely West Virginian had escaped black lung and double-wide-trailer payments by enlisting in the U.S. Army. He tested off the charts and could run for miles without winding. But what brought him to the attention of the NCOs was his
preternatural sharpshooter’s eye and dull moral conscience. Killing came easy for Skeets, and without regrets. PTSD was for pussies.

The Army had been good to him. Fed him well, trained him better, even knocked some of the hillbilly out of him. He traded his thick regional accent for the clipped staccato cadence of Army patois. The war had been fun, and getting paid to hunt people even more so. But three tours of
yessir
s and
nossir
s and bullshit regs and ROEs were quite enough, thank you. He had the good sense to take online college courses in business in his downtime. Discovered he was a laissez-faire capitalist. Decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur.

So he quit Uncle Sam’s Army and joined the ranks of private security contractors at five times his annual salary as a sergeant. He quickly earned a fearsome rep in the merc community and was soon invited to join the CIOS corporation.

CIOS was generous with its cash offer, and selective in the targets he would be sent to assassinate. Jasmine Bath, the corporation president, had personally assured him that only America’s worst enemies would ever be targeted, and only those that could not be legally arrested or killed but otherwise posed an immediate security threat. Skeets told her she was lying and that he didn’t give a rat’s ass who the targets were, guilty or not. Bath hired him on the spot and his income doubled.

Skeets had kept the cabin under surveillance from a distance for the last four hours but hadn’t seen or heard anyone on the property.

He disabled the surveillance cameras mounted high in the trees with a silenced .22 semiauto firing subsonics, then burst into the cabin, 9mm pistol drawn. Found nobody. As instructed, he searched for computers, phones, and storage devices—anything that might identify more links in Pearce’s network. But the place had been cleaned out. Skeets called it in to Bath. She told him simply, “Burn it down.”

He did. The old cabin went up faster than dry kindling, the fire ignited by a timed charge. He watched the towering flames lick the early-morning sky in his rearview mirror as he sped away.

Skeets felt no remorse. Pearce was a target. So was the former president. It was a job. Nothing more.

Aéropostale Station 11
Tamanghasset, Southern Algeria

The situation was static, which was fine by Pearce, because that meant he was still alive to know the situation was static, and that the rest of the caravan wasn’t dead, at least not yet.

Ian was offline, Judy was incarcerated, and the tangos out there hadn’t opened fire since Early’s death. Ian’s stolen Reaper had pushed them way back, but the DPVs were still in control of the field with three of them remaining. The DPVs mounted automatic grenade launchers that could fire five hundred rounds a minute up to six hundred meters effective range, and the 7.62mm machine guns were almost as lethal.

If Pearce and the others tried to make a run for it on the camels they’d be run down and cut to pieces. But staying in the sweltering hangar reeking of camel piss indefinitely probably wasn’t a viable option, either. It would only be a matter of time before the DPVs lined up across the hangar and unloaded their arsenal into them. At least the big animals had calmed down and were kneeling quietly in the back again.

“The explosion. Your drone?” Mossa asked.

“Not my drone, exactly. My man stole it. But it looks like it was destroyed.”

“Too bad. It was useful.” Mossa was staring at the burning wreckage of the two DPVs blasted by the Reaper.

“That sniper out there might be on the move, too. I didn’t see the shot, but given the angle I’d say he was somewhere in that direction.” Pearce pointed toward the northeast.

“If I were him, I would move,” Mossa confirmed. “We could hunt him, but then his friends would hunt us.” He looked up into the sky. “Without your friend up there, they will attack soon.”

“You said something about the cavalry not arriving in time?”

“I radioed one of the local chieftains. He said he was on the way.”

“Any idea when he will arrive?”

Mossa shrugged. “Abdallah Ag Matta is a good man, but he is an Imohar, and our sense of time is not like yours. He will get here as soon as he can.”

“Let’s hope it’s soon enough.”