Going Dark (21 page)

Abajian won’t need us to report the location of the facility. He’ll know where it is the moment we disappear inside. From that point on, he’ll have the data he needs to target it, but we are trusting him to wait.

After a long time, the sun finally climbs into the sky and daylight seeps into the back of the LTV. It’s a gloomy illumination, but at least we can see. There’s no comparable improvement in the road. We bounce and jar and rattle. And then we bump so hard there’s a hammerblow clash of metal on metal. Tran and I are tossed into the ceiling. Logan manages to hold on and so does Leonid, but even his patience is exhausted. With his huge fist, he pounds furiously on the blackout screen, cursing Damir—and the LTV slows to a less-insane speed.

Tran rubs at a lump sprouting on the back of his head. “Fucking driver needs to learn to drive!”

Damir knows how to drive. He just has his own fearless style. The engine revs madly. We heave over terrain so rough I wonder if we’re still on a road at all. We brake hard and then shift back up through the gears, over and over again, climbing and descending and crawling around what feels like hairpin turns.

At one point the LTV slides sideways. Luftar shouts useless advice as Damir works the gears, gunning the engine. God knows how far we’ll fall if the road collapses from under us and still it’s not fear I feel. It’s a weird, low-grade anger. I
do not
want to die on the way to the UGF. I want to get there. I want to find it. I want this mission to prove worthwhile. I feel the desire like an obsession that leaves me chemically armed with attitude. I look over at Logan. The intensity of his glare makes me think he’s charged up the same way.

The tires get traction. We shoot forward. Tran kicks the blackout screen with the sole of his boot like he’s trying
to kick it out. “Don’t get us killed before we get there, dumbass!”

I can’t help myself. I start laughing. We are fucking robots, programmed, and eager to execute.

•  •  •  •

Four hours and nine minutes after we leave the airport, the LTV finally rolls to a stop.

I hear wind outside. Nothing more.

I need to piss.

Logan’s artificial voice arrives over gen-com.
We here?

I ask the same question out loud, addressing the man who should know. “Papa, are we here?”

“No, it’s too soon.” He sits up, pulling his cushion away from the door.

I draw my pistol.

“Take it easy,” he adds irritably. “We are guests. They want to impress us, not kill us.”

The door swings open, admitting a blast of freezing air along with the glare of daylight, blinding after the gloom of the LTV. I squint at the face of our driver, the smiling young madman, Damir, as he peers inside. Damir’s smile widens into a grin when he sees my pistol.
“Bang,”
he says, targeting me with a finger gun. He laughs and then waves at us to join him outside. “Come, sir. Come, Papa. We can rest here.”

Leonid goes first, clearing the way. I holster the Stonewall, grab my coat, and follow. Logan and Tran pile out behind me, both with pistols strapped to their thighs.

A thin layer of snow frosts the ground. Behind the LTV I can see our muddy tire tracks, but on the unpaved road ahead of us, the snow is clean and undisturbed.

We have stopped near the bottom of a deep, narrow ravine, just at the edge of a scattered cover of young evergreens. A stream runs below the road. Wooded slopes rise
above it, framing a sky layered with high, gray clouds. A light wind rocks the treetops. It’s goddamn cold.

I glance into the cab, confirming our HITRs are secured in the ceiling racks like they’re supposed to be. Then I get my coat on.

GPS coordinates come in, telling me what I already know: We are in a rugged region with no towns or villages close by. The road we are on is a ragged scratch in the mountains, without a name or a number.

I dismiss the map so I can watch Luftar. At the airport he wasn’t wearing farsights, but he’s wearing them now. He has his Lasher Biometric slung over his shoulder, and an SA-40 angel in his hands—a pricey surveillance drone with self-adjusting wings, designed for mountainous environments with erratic winds. He carries it out from under the trees, and when there’s open sky above him, he flicks on the SA-40’s electric engine and lets it go. Its quiet propellers carry it swiftly up and away, in the direction we’re driving.

Luftar doesn’t watch the angel. He moves back under the trees, where he stands with his head cocked, studying the display on his farsights. “Floater,” he growls in English, returning to the LTV.

Damir steps up beside me, an excited glint in his eyes. “Do you see it?” he asks, gazing skyward.

“See what?”

He takes my arm, urging me out into the open. I go with him, crunching through the snow on my titanium feet, with Logan following behind.

“There.” Damir points. And then I do see it. A large bird, maybe a hawk or an eagle—or a drone designed to mimic a raptor.

I turn at the sound of a door slamming behind me. Luftar has traded his Lasher for a Light Fifty. Tran moves in, watching with an incredulous expression as Luftar sets
up the sniper rifle, resting the bipod on the high hood of the LTV. Over gen-com, Logan says,
No way.
Even if Luftar has an AI to help him aim—and I don’t think he does—it’s a crazy shot.

But Luftar looks confident. He crouches behind the Light Fifty, aims high, and squeezes the trigger. The shot echoes off the valley walls as I turn my head in time to see the bird—the drone?—pitch and then tumble, shedding glittering bits of feathers or plastic as it falls, dropping out of sight in a swift arc.

Beside me, Damir erupts in a celebratory whoop, his ecstatic voice echoing in the ravine.

Luftar looks up with a proud grin. “Smart bullet,” he says. “Never miss.” I should have guessed. He was using a self-guided projectile, not ordinary ammunition. He looks so damned pleased, it’s impossible not to smile in return.

“Do you know who fielded the floater?” I ask him.

It’s Damir who answers. “It doesn’t matter, sir. If it’s not ours, it’s the enemy’s.”

“And we have many enemies,” Leonid proclaims. He walks up to Luftar and gives him a hearty slap on the back. “But we are well guarded.”

I look up again at the sky. Luftar’s SA-40 is still up there somewhere. Colonel Abajian will have eyes in the sky too, but the drone he’s using will be high-altitude—something subtle, sophisticated, untouchable.

“Careful, Shelley,” Leonid says in a gently mocking tone. “The floater is gone, but look up too long and a satellite might log your face.”

“Long odds on that.”

To identify an individual in a deep ravine like this, a high-resolution spy satellite would need to pass almost directly overhead during these few moments when my face is exposed—and I don’t always photograph well.

“Ah, my friend, unlikely odds kill men all the time.”

I turn to look at him. He’s still under the trees, standing alongside the LTV. Despite his easy tone, his face is serious. I realize he’s trying to warn me, to counsel me that I’m making a mistake. I glance up once more at the sky. I’m out in the open with Damir. I’m not too worried about it because I want Abajian to know where I am; I want his invisible high-altitude drone to mark my presence. But James Shelley the arms dealer would not feel that way. He would be more cautious.

I nod and, signaling Logan to follow, return to the cover of the trees.

From where we’ve stopped, I can see the road ahead as it climbs a steep slope. Seventy meters on, it jogs around a sharp turn and disappears.

I’m suspicious of this road.

Abajian’s report said the missile launcher was transported in pieces and assembled on site. It would have to be, because this roadbed couldn’t support either the weight or the width of the BXL21. I’m not sure it could support the trucks that would be needed to ferry its components.

I look again at Leonid—
Papa
—but if he is suspicious, he reveals no hint of it. He’s smiling, joking in Russian with Luftar, feigning a large rifle held against his shoulder. He mimes pulling the trigger and then throws his hands up in pretended shock, stumbling sideways as if the recoil has almost knocked him over. He laughs. Luftar and Damir laugh with him. Hell, I laugh. Leonid is an arms broker. I know he is a bad-ass, stone-cold killer, but it doesn’t show—and he’s fucking funny when he wants to be. Maybe it’s his self-deprecating humor that has let him stay alive so long.

Luftar puts the sniper rifle away and then hands out cans of sweetened tea, bread, and cold roast lamb. We eat standing up under the trees, and then Damir smokes a cigarette.
After a few more minutes, Luftar speaks to Leonid in a soft, apologetic tone. Leonid listens closely, nods a grudging agreement, then turns to me. “The SA-40 has sighted a patrol in one of the valleys ahead of us. Luftar would not be concerned with meeting them, except that you are with us, Shelley. Questions would be asked.”

“Okay. What do we do?”

“We stay here. This is a good place. Later in the day, when the patrol has passed, we move on.”

So we sleep in the LTV, with the door partly open. When I don’t want to sleep anymore, I walk under the trees. The SA-40 returns twice. Luftar swaps out the battery pack and sends it out again. The third time it returns, he decides it’s okay for us to move on.

“Do you know how far we’re going?” I ask Leonid when the door is closed.

“Only halfway to Hell,” he assures me.

•  •  •  •

I watch the time tick past in my overlay as I sit braced against the bumps and turns of our crawling progress. The pinpoints of light leaking into the back of the LTV gradually fade as night arrives. On the other side of the blackout screen, I hear Luftar speak. My overlay doesn’t catch what he says, but the tone is positive. A few seconds later, Damir whoops and pounds on the steering wheel. We come to an abrupt stop. Again, I reach for my pistol, though I’m thinking longingly of my HITR in the gun rack on the other side of the blackout screen.

There is the sound of one of the front doors opening, slamming closed. Seconds tick past. Almost a minute. The LTV lurches forward again. Moving slowly, we bump over a low obstacle, rolling onto a smooth, level surface. We continue for a few seconds and then stop again.

Even over the LTV’s climate control I can hear men outside, speaking. There is a thud. Maybe a heavy gate, or door, being firmly closed. Needles of bright, artificial light shoot again through the pinholes in the blackout paint. But it’s still too dark inside to see faces, so I do a sound check. “Logan, you ready?”

“Roger that.”

“Tran?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We are among friends,” Leonid warns, his low voice weighted with caution.

“We look forward to meeting our new friends, Papa,” I answer.

“Yes, Shelley. Exactly so.”

I think,
Be ready for anything.

The door swings open.

At first I imagine we are in a garage. It’s the daylight bulbs that mislead me. They’re mounted to the ceiling, but it’s a ceiling of chiseled rock, not concrete. The lights are bright, but the area they are required to illuminate is large and there is too much distance between the bulbs. The result is a grid of shadows. The air is moist and cold, but not as cold as it was out in the wind. Somewhere, a generator is purring.

Damir is standing at the door, looking in, still smiling. Behind him I count twelve men, including Luftar. There are no women.

Like Luftar, most of the men are dressed in forest camouflage—military garb but not American. A few wear black sweaters over olive-drab pants. They are a weathered, sun-hardened crew, but still young. Half have thick, shaggy hair and beards—black, brown, ginger, blond. The rest have buzz cuts and beard stubble. None show any gray hair.

My overlay tags one of the brown-haired buzz-cuts
as Maksim Abaza, leader of this terrorist coven. Abaza is Caucasian, sharp-featured and lean, his face still showing a remnant of brown tint from a fading tan. A pleased half smile conveys a sense of victory as he eyes me.

My overlay fails to tag any of the other men, but my system will remember their faces.

Luftar cradles his Lasher 762. Three others carry the same weapon. I should take that as a threat, but as they crane to see into the LTV’s dark interior, all I see in their expressions is curiosity. Leonid signals me to exit first, so I do, climbing out with my pack in hand. I am met by a murmur, with random words chosen for translation by my overlay, mostly the equivalent of
See his feet? It’s him.

Just like Abajian promised, I’m a celebrity, even here.

Wherever the hell here is.

Abaza steps forward, proffering his hand in an American greeting. “Shelley!” He nods at my feet. “No question it is you, alive as promised, though rumor insisted you were dead. I am honored, sir. Honored.”

I reach out to shake the hand of my terrorist host and am pulled into a bear hug, while behind me Leonid protests, “Maksim! I swore I would bring Shelley to you! Did you doubt me? I am wounded!
Wounded.
” He grips at his heart to prove it while we all laugh. We are a merry bunch, bent on returning the world to the primitive communications of the 1950s.

I shake hands with the muscle, while my own toughs clamber out of the LTV, packs on their backs and pistols on their thighs. Logan and Tran glare, narrow-eyed. They are behind the curve on our program of international friendship. I ignore them, and so does everyone else.

Everywhere is raw, gray stone without any concrete. The floor is flat but gritty, and there’s a lot of open space—enough to easily turn the LTV around. Ours isn’t the
only vehicle. Three pickups, all with PKM machine guns mounted in the cargo beds, are backed up against a wall directly in front of the LTV. An empty flatbed truck is backed against the far wall. So my initial impression of a garage wasn’t completely wrong. But the missile launcher I’m looking for isn’t here.

That doesn’t mean our intelligence is wrong. A tunnel leads away from the lighted area. It’s wide enough to drive a tank through—or a road-mobile missile launcher—so it’s possible our target is stored in another part of this complex.