Danny circled around toward the north side of the second compound. Flash had repositioned the bots to support their assault. He released two to go back and cover the approach from the gate area, in case the Brothers there tried rallying and ran through the spikes. And he detailed one to accompany them inside the buildings, giving them extra firepower if necessary.

Flash looked up as Danny came around the corner to join the small group. “We’re ready,” said Flash.

“Textbook,” said Danny, raising his hand and waving them to start.

The Marines cleared the gate positions and ran toward the charred remains of the bus. Nuri realized they weren’t going to stop.

“Wait!” Nuri yelled. “No! No!”

He couldn’t tell if the Marines heard him or not. Between his headache and unbalanced hearing, the entire world seemed off-kilter, a crazy quilt of explosions and gunfire.

“Stop, damn it! Stop!”

There were some barks over the radio net—garbled communications that literally sounded like dogs yapping. Nuri sprinted over two dead bodies and caught up to the Marines as they broke past the rocks on the other side of the bus. One of them looked back, but if he saw him, he obviously thought he was urging them on—they continued running, clearing the second set of defenses and the bodies clustered there.

Screaming at the top of his lungs, Nuri tried to warn them about the spikes. There were several bodies near the invisible fence, Brothers who’d been knocked out by the voltage or possibly shot in the cross fire. The Marines seemed intent on getting beyond them before they stopped running.

Nearly out of breath, Nuri was about to give up—the hell with the damn jerks if they couldn’t obey an order not to attack past a certain line. The spikes would teach them a thing or two about being overaggressive.

Then he saw one of the bots trundling up in their direction.

With a stream of curses, he plunged ahead, lunging toward the first man in the group. He leapt up, throwing himself into the middle of the knot as they reached the fence line. Alerted by the bracelet on his wrist, the bot halted its targeting sequence, fearing friendly fire.

Unfortunately, Nuri’s momentum took him and the Marine he landed on full force into the virtual fence. His head felt as if it had exploded, then went numb. Every joint in his body vibrated. He fell to the ground, head still within the field, writhing in pain. He tried to push himself back but could not. His legs and arms flopping helplessly up and down, he tried to talk but could not.

Because the fence was nonlethal, MY-PID’s safety protocols did not allow it to turn the device on or off. It did, however, send an alert to Danny, who dropped back from his assault team and ran down to the fence line. By the time he got in range to see what was happening, the Marines had found their own solution—they pulverized the two devices closest to Nuri, destroying the current.

Not knowing exactly what had happened, Danny assumed Nuri had somehow forgotten about the device. Shaking his head, he told the corpsman to see to him and other two men who’d been paralyzed, then had the rest of the Marines follow him.

Chapter 5

Washington, D.C.

“Come to order! Come to order!” demanded Senator Barrington, the Intelligence Committee chairman.

Ernst practically foamed at the mouth, but he did stop speaking.

“Now,” said Barrington, slamming his gavel down once more for good measure, “we will have a vote on the motion to hold the CIA director in contempt of this committee—”

“And the President,” said Ernst.

“We will not subpoena the President.”

“The President is the one we need to hear from. We should subpoena her. Drag her in here in chains, if necessary.”

Zen had had enough.

“Why do you keep hammering on that?” he said. “What the hell good is it going to do?”

“We have to go on record—”

“Gentlemen!” Barrington once more handled the gavel with feeling. Zen wondered if his arm was becoming numb. “You will address the chair. Senator Stockard, you have the floor.”

Zen cleared his throat. “Everyone knows that the administration and I have not always agreed on everything. In this case, however, I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt—temporarily. If we vote to send a subpoena, it’s going to get ridiculous headlines and be blown up by the media,” continued Zen. He knew that was actually Ernst’s goal, but hoped the rest of his colleagues would listen to reason. “This whole thing is going to become a political football that has nothing to do with the Agency or Raven, whatever it is.”

“As if you don’t know,” said Ernst.

Zen ignored him. “Mr. Chairman, if our goal here is actually to get information, rather than embarrassing the administration and maybe interfering with the country’s pursuit—”

“What pursuit?” yelled Ernst.

Barrington pounded on the table.

“I move to end discussion and vote,” said Zen, realizing it was hopeless.

The motion carried quickly, the senators anxious to get out of the chamber. Zen was the only one opposed.

Chapter 6

Southeastern Sudan

Danny ran through the rubble of the ruined one-story building, leaping across the battered stones just in time to join the team assaulting the second house. By now the gunfire had nearly stopped, with only a few gunmen at the far western stretch of the camp defenses continuing to fire. But MY-PID detected heat signatures inside several of the buildings in the last citadel, and the crazy-quilt nature of the complex meant they had to move slowly. The computer tagged and followed each individual enemy as best it could, feeding a raw tally to Danny upon request—it knew of at least five individuals inside the building they were going into, and at least two more in the adjacent one, which shared a wall and almost certainly a doorway.

They found the first two individuals bleeding out in the hallway, gut-shot by earlier fire. Neither had long to live; the team members pulled away their weapons, trussed their arms for safety, then carried them outside the building. Danny watched as the two men laid one of the enemy soldiers down gently.

The gesture struck him as odd and yet touching at the same time—the gravely wounded enemies had been trying to kill the Whiplash troopers just a few minutes ago, and were now being treated with a remarkable and even incongruent sense of dignity and care. In his experience, the acid of battle usually eroded any impulse toward caring for an enemy; he had seen many men simply kill people terminally wounded as they passed. He wondered if either trooper could have explained what they did. Most likely they would have said only that they were getting the men out of the way, and would have been at a loss to say why they hadn’t simply dumped them on the ground. It was all unconscious action, an expression of how they lived rather than how they thought.

Danny caught up with the team clearing the last room in the building. The procedure was repetitive to the point of being industrial: mechanical gestures with their hands, a sweep of eyes, the call of “Clear.”

“Room is clear!” yelled Flash.

An explosion shook the building. MY-PID immediately warned that the right side of the structure appeared ready to collapse.