“Forget about it,” said Danny.
“Let’s just fucking take the bastard out,” said Egg. “Demo the door.”
“No. You got a flash-bang?” said Danny. “Let’s see if we can make him use up his ammo.”
Egg rolled the stun grenade down the hallway, hunkering down as the loud bang and flash filled the corridor. The Taiwanese guard immediately began to fire his weapon; if he didn’t go through the entire box of slugs, he came pretty close. Danny waited until he stopped firing, then told Bison to toss another grenade. It bounced, rolled a bit, and then went off. Another fusillade of gunfire filled the hall.
Danny trained his taser on the doorway, expecting that the man would run out into the hall, tired of being toyed with. But the guard showed admirable restraint.
“Let’s smoke him out,” said Egg. “I’ll go down and pop a smoke grenade in.”
“Not yet,” said Danny, fingering his own stun grenade. He set it, then underhanded it down the hall.
The grenade boomed and flashed, but this time the guard did nothing.
“Figured it out,” said Danny.
“Or he’s out of ammo.”
Danny put the visor in radar mode and went down the hall, half walking, half crouching. The man was still there, still staring at the door. Danny took out the telescoping IR viewer, angling to get an idea of what was left of the door. The center had been shot out, but the frame and lower portion remained intact.
The man inside began firing again. Danny fell back as a slew of 5.56mm bullets laced up the corridor, the last few only inches away.
No one would blame him now for saying the hell with the damn nonlethal crap. One conventional grenade—he had two—and the SOB and his stinking machine guns would be history.
But he had his orders.
“We’re going to use a variation of your plan,” Danny told Egg. “Post a flash-bang. When it goes off, I’ll toss in a smoke grenade. Nail the motherfucker with the tasers when he comes out.”
“You going down that close?”
“Bullet holes show where he can reach.”
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“Damn, Cap. Be careful he doesn’t shoot your hand off.”
“Yeah,” said Danny. “Let’s go.”
The grenade rolled down to the end of the hall. Danny pushed his head down, waiting. The helmet took some of the loud impact away, but the charge was still unsettling; he swung up and popped the grenade into the hole, slipping and losing his balance as he did.
A shadow moved behind the doorway.
Danny saw the barrel of the Minimi inches away.
He pressed the trigger on his taser just as the first bullet flew from the Belgian-made gun. Something smacked him hard against the leg—then everything went blue, and he smelled fire.
“Shit, shit,” Egg cursed, running up. He fired his taser at the door two, three times without a target.
“He’s down, he’s down,” said Danny, seeing on his visor that his shot had knocked the Taiwanese guard back into the room. “I’m all right. Chill.”
BY THE TIMEStoner got in with the Marines, the technical experts back at Dreamland had finished a preliminary analysis of Building Two. Aided by the data on the computer as well as their physical analysis, they had no doubt that one or two devices had been stored and probably assembled here.
They also had no doubt that the devices were no longer in the building.
The next logical place on the site was Building One, and Stoner sent a team inside with their rad meters and a video cam. But even before the feeds from their gear started back through the mobile transmitters, Stoner had climbed to the top of the administrative building, trying to figure out where else on the site the bomb might be.
“How you doing?” asked Danny Freah, clambering up behind him.
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Yeah. I’m going to let Zen and Colonel Bastian know what’s going on.”
Stoner folded his arms, thinking.
“I say we stop that ship right away.”
Dreamland Command Center
14 September 1997
0935
JENNIFER JOINED THEothers in the command center after pulling an all-nighter working with the computer team on a Trojan horse virus to take over the ghost clone’s control system. Jennifer was convinced that the best bet was to simply block the communications, then try to insert some of the commands they’d intercepted. The problem was, they couldn’t be sure what those commands were, Page 193
which meant they might succeed in stopping the clone from doing what its masters wanted, but not be able to have the clone do what they wanted.
Jennifer took a seat at a station in the second row reserved for her use and began loading the necessary code into computer memory so it could be shipped out to Zen. As the CD-ROM spun, she popped open her notebook computer; she had some more code for the Flighthawk control computer aboard Raven, which would have to attempt the takeover.
“And?”
Jennifer looked up at Ray Rubeo, who was wearing his twenty-four-hours-with-no-sleep frown.
“And is a conjunction,” said Jennifer. “You can’t use it alone.”
“Can we take over the clone?”
“Probably not,” she said frankly.
Rubeo frowned.
“Yes. Come look at this,” he told her, starting for one of the stations at the very front of the room, just below the large display screen. The bomb experts were reviewing coding from a computer at the Taiwan base.
“It’s encrypted. We’re working with the NSA on it,” said one of the experts. “We’re feeding it back and forth. There’s a lot of technical data and inventory information. We want to see where to concentrate our resources; the encryption takes quite a while to get through.”
“This block here is email,” said Jennifer. “Look at the structure. Tell them to look for the dates and times.”
“Why?” asked Rubeo.
“Maybe they’re instructions on when to do something, like launch an attack.”
“They may just be love notes,” said Rubeo, scowling.
Even though he meant it as one of his acerbic remarks, the idea stung Jennifer.
“Maybe,” she said, looking over to the screen where the decryptions were appearing.
Aboard Raven
15 September 1997
0040
ZEN HAD H AWK Four posted to the north, ready to intercept the ghost clone if it got off. He swung Hawk Three down, readying a pass that would take him from bow to stern and give the people back at Dreamland a good view of the ship, which was about forty miles out of the harbor. The Navy destroyers, meanwhile, were still a good hour away to the south.
The E-bomb had successfully wiped out the radios back at the assault zone; Raven’s powerful sensors Page 194
had not picked up any transmissions from the Dragon Prince. It seemed clear that the ship did not know what was going on; its speed was below ten knots. Except for its normal running lights, the deck and the area where it launched the ghost were dark.
Zen checked his speed, nudging off the throttle slightly as the ship grew in the screen. The HUD ladder notched downward; he dropped through five thousand feet. The Flighthawk engines were relatively quiet, but at this altitude the aircraft could be heard; Zen figured that was a reasonable trade-off for the better images the lower altitude would provide.
As he closed to five miles off the bow, the water on the starboard side of the boat bubbled. His first thought was that the crew aboard the Dragon Prince had thrown the robot aircraft overboard; a few seconds later another geyser appeared on the port side, and Zen finally realized what was going on.
“Submarines,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. “Two of ’em. Those ours?”
Two people started to answer at once, and Dog said something over the interphone circuit. Zen kept Hawk Three on beam, riding in over the tanker.