The rain turned the streets to rushing streams and each intersection was a muddy lake. Manny swept his eyes from side to side and, aside from some kids peeping at them from under the awning of a shop, no one was on the street. Even the local dogs were nowhere to be seen. These third world towns always had packs of dogs who gave up any strangers in the 'hood with their barking. Not tonight. Tonight Father Monsoon was watching over them all.

  Bogie gave a low whistle and a Filipino marine jumped up a utility pole with a set of big-jaw bolt-cutters slung through his webbing. He was up the pole in seconds and cutting away lines from a terminal box. Sparks sprayed over Manny and the others as they pulled their night-vision gear down the slot on the front of their helmets and in front of their eyes. As the block went dark, the world they could see turned to high noon.

  The marines were arrayed around the ramshackle corner building that was their target. It was a three-story pile of bricks with broad canvas tarps spread out as awnings over the first floor entrances. The building was situated where two long blocks of similar buildings met. The homes and businesses were jammed together in continuous rows, and seemed to lean on one another for support. Many had second floor balconies that hung over the street. Fruit crates, trash bags, and other debris was piled at the curb. Some kind of half-ass food market. The whole place looked like it was going to fall in on itself. It wasn't anyone's idea of what a high-tech server farm should look like, other than some barely concealed sat dishes on the corners of the roof. But the team had seen even more primitive set-ups on raids in Nigeria and Somalia. 21st Century cyber war in a Third World setting.

  The exterior secured by the Filipinos, the team shouldered through the thin lattice-work front doors and were inside in seconds. Re-Pete and Chili lobbed in flash-bang grenades and turned aside as the brilliant strobes lit up the building's interior. The broad front room was an open-plan interior with the ceiling cut away to reveal a balcony running around the second floor. Figures moved, disoriented and blind, in the wide lobby area. They stumbled over stacks of consumer goods set up for sale and cried out in Tagalog. A woman was screaming somewhere. There was panic but it was fresh. These skinnies were used to rolling blackouts, especially during storms. Until the flash-bangs took away their sight and hearing, they were just chilling in the dark.

  The team moved in swiftly. Pig scooted to one side to cover some stairs with the SAW. Three men were coming down the stairs from the second floor. Two armed with AKs. The muzzle flash of the SAW lit up the dark in short bursts and the three were down. Now, it was on. Everyone inside was on their game; sphincters puckered and heads on swivels. Manny led the team up the bullet-riddled stairs, leaping over the tattered forms lying unmoving. The guys followed, covering the balcony walkways as they moved.

  The Filipino marines were through every door and window, and sweeping the first level. The flat snap-snap-snap of their rifles taking down any resistance. They had the front and back doors covered. No one was getting out. Bogie's men moved in close and were dropping skinnies with shoulder checks and rifle butts, and already flexi-cuffing a few. Efficient and without a word. These guys, and those that came before them, had been fighting an insurgency against Islamic zealots since the 1920s and usually winning.

  With Manny in the lead, the team reached the top of the stairs and fanned out, swiftly running down balconies that ran around the open center of the building. A stream of red tracers came out of the dark and rained plaster down from the ceiling over Flame and Re-Pete. Some asshole firing blind. They let fly with controlled bursts and nailed a skinny with an AK in a doorway ahead of them. Flame moved closer and finished the guy with a head shot, then swept the room he came from. Nothing but a cot and a radio.

  Flame's adrenalin was up. He turned back to Re-Pete with wild eyes and a fixed grin that exposed all his teeth. They moved on, Flame in the lead, guns pressed to their shoulders, eyes boring down all around them through their ring sights.

  More shots from the far end of the building. South wall. The chugging freight train sound of a Kalashnikov going full auto in the hands of an untrained amateur. Tracers buzzing by everywhere. They followed their instincts and training, and ran toward the source of the shots, blazing away with suppression fire as they ran. Pig moved to support and kept the SAW trained ahead of them. He let fly with a series of short bursts and the AK went quiet. Manny, Heath, and Chili came up on the opposite side of the open area, guns up and moving forward down the center walk of the balcony along the west wall. Bullets like to track along flat surfaces, so they steered clear of them. They swept their sights over doorways and other cover offered by furniture and cartons piled against the walls. As clear a field as the night-vision gear allowed them, it could also disorient, as it flattened the images in its range of vision. They looked for movement above all. They were predators and that's what predators do. They look for their prey to move.

  A figure leapt from a doorway ahead with an AK chugging in his fists as he soared across their field of fire. Some poor son-of-a-bitch who'd seen too many movies. Manny heard two rounds zip close past his ear before pumping a triple-tap into the skinny's center mass and dropping him to the floor with enough force to raise dust from between the planks. Heath gave the motionless form a kick and two more rounds on his way past, and trotted to keep up with Manny, who was moving fast.

  Flame was through a doorway on the south wall with Re-Pete at his back. They sprayed the room with suppression fire and caught a skinny coming up from behind a work table with a shotgun in his hands. The man's head exploded as two rounds caught him above the bridge of his nose. Wet brain gobbets accented with white bone fragments painted a pattern on the wall behind. He folded up and dropped to the floor; a lifeless sack of meat.

  To discourage prying eyes, the windows of the room had plywood sheets nailed over them. Tables lined the walls with keyboards and monitors set up on them. One wall of the room was a floor-to-ceiling shelf system packed with CPU towers. This was part of the server farm Griggs promised. Cables running along one wall were bound into thick bundles using duct tape, and seemed to disappear behind a mirror-fronted cabinet of carved teak.

  Flame pulled the cabinet down with a crash and the mirror shattered. He and Re-Pete aimed their weapons at a ragged, man-sized hole chopped in the plaster behind the cabinet.

  "We got a rabbit hole, Manny!" Flame said into his mike, as he stepped through the hole into the dark space without a pause.

  "Move on it, Flame!" Manny's voice came over the ear bud. "We'll catch up! We're right behind you. But Rabbit has to be taken alive! Acknowledge."

  "Roger that!"

  "Roger me again on that, Flame!"

  "Roger! Roger!"

  A drop-down attic staircase led up through the ceiling of the room. The room was lined with more PC towers and stacks of external hard drives, as well as a workstation on a table. There was a mattress on the floor, and nearby lay a messy stack of books and magazines. A Gameboy. A hot plate with a scorched tea pot. All the signs of a well-used hideout.

  Re-Pete pulled the ring on a flash-bang and lobbed it up through the opening in the ceiling. It clanked home. A dull thud, and dust rained down on them as the ceiling plaster fractured. They were both up the rickety stairs and dropping to the floor of a long room as the smoke from the grenade cleared. They were on the top floor now and the rain pounded down on the uninsulated metal roof above them. This level was open, the full size of the building, with piles of crates and cases, many of which were familiar to Flame and Re-Pete. Crates with Chinese markings held grenades for RPGs and pallets of cardboard boxes contained ammo for AKs. There were lots of boxes and cartons of consumer goods, too. The floor was a filthy mess of empty food containers, packing paper, and God knew what. This place was a warehouse in addition to a network hub.

  They swung their sights left and right and moved forward as swiftly as the unsure footing would allow. Rats ran through the trash in every direction around them. They kicked cans and bottles aside with their boots.

  White flashes from a jumble of cartons to their right, and Re-Pete fell with a grunt. Flame dropped to a crouch and sprayed the source of the muzzle flashes with a long burst from his M4. He dropped down by Re-Pete and changed magazines.

  "Still with me, Re-Pete?" Flame asked, and let the action of the M4 to slide home with a loud clack.

  "Wind knocked out," Re-Pete said through clenched teeth. "Hit my vest. My vest."

  "Then off your ass," Flame said, and leapt up spraying the suspect stack of cartons. As an improvised bunker it sucked ass. Paper bits flew in a cloud as the fat rounds punched through the boxes and their contents. Flame felt a momentary chill on the back of his neck as he considered that those cartons could contain explosive ordnance. The M4 was empty again, and he let it drop on its combat sling. He ripped the shotgun from its Velcro strap and moved ahead low, thumbing back the safety over the pistol grip as he went. Re-Pete was up and creeping along one wall with his own weapon tight to his shoulder. He was shaky but ambulatory, despite the agony of having taken a couple of shots to the armor. There was a numb tingling in his right arm.

  More red tracers screamed their way. Under the boom of the weapon, they could hear the staccato of an AK's bolt slamming home again and again. Rounds punched through the ceiling above, and rain and watery light poured in through the fresh openings. This guy was firing blind.

  Re-Pete blasted some suppression that struck high on the back wall of the room, creating a haze of plaster dust.

  Flame took the opening provided by Re-Pete and came swiftly around the makeshift bunker of cartons. A skinny, crying in fear and frustration, was trying to reload his AK with shaking hands. It wasn't Rabbit so Flame took him down with a double-ought to center mass. The skinny slid to the floor convulsing. Flame pumped the next round in order, a rifled slug, into the chamber and finished the skinny with a head shot that sprayed the carton barricade with a cloud of red. He thumbed three more rounds into the shotgun.

  Re-Pete joined him and they swept their gun sights over the close space between the stacked cartons and the back wall. They found another hole roughly chopped through the wall; low to the floor and large enough to admit a man if he got on his knees. This is what the skinny was defending. He didn't crawl through himself so he was covering someone else's getaway.

  "We have another hole. West wall. Rabbit may have left the building," Flame said into his mike.

  "Follow him through," Manny said, live, behind Flame. Heath was with him.

  Re-Pete sat down heavily on the floor and clutched his side. His hand came back with blood, black in the harsh light of the night-vision lenses.

  "Go with Flame, Heath," Manny said, and began calling orders into a handheld, set to the frequency assigned to the Filipinos. He informed them quickly that their target could be anywhere on the block now. There weren't enough of them to secure a perimeter but they could broaden their search. He told them he had a man down and needed his wounded out of here ASAP.

  On his knees and elbows, Flame led the way into the building next store. He rolled on his back and clear of the hole to cover Heath sliding through. The ceiling was low here and wouldn't allow them to stand. The floor was thick with dust and rat droppings, and they could see the slide marks of someone who crawled ahead of them, recently. Monsoon rain drummed on the metal roof inches over their head. The room was crowded with rows of cots along each wall, and the mosquito netting that hung everywhere obscured their vision, even with the advantage the Gen-3 night-vision goggles gave them. And they couldn't hear shit over the constant torrent striking the rooftop. In a space like this, there was no room to move. Bullets would track along the ceiling and floor at them like they were at the wrong end of a funnel.

  Heath pointed a finger to the left and rolled that way. Flame crept to the wall along the right. It wasn't until he got closer that Flame realized the shapes on the cots were children. They looked under twelve, but it was hard to tell with Filipino kids. Some were two to a bed. They lay still as statues and stared up at him with wide frightened eyes. Child labor. The floors below would be sewing rooms or hands-on assembly lines of some kind. Better and better every second. He shifted away from the wall toward the center of the room. Heath stepped out too.

  "We have to get out of here," Heath said in a hiss. "All these damned kids."

  Flame answered by moving forward at a trot, shotgun extended before him, eyes trained over the bead sight.

  A half-moon pattern of red tracers sprayed out from a moving target at the far end of the room. Flame caught a glimpse of the figure through the gauzy layers of netting as he dropped to the floor. He hit the ground on his shoulder and loosed a spray of buckshot, pumped, and sent out a second spread. An anguished cry came back to him. Heath charged forward with Flame on his feet and close behind.

  There was a blood smear on a wall that led to a peeling wooden door. They heard gunshots on the floor below. They barreled through the flimsy door and out onto a landing. A twisting wooden staircase led down, and shouts and screams echoed up the stairwell. A volley of AK shots and silence. Heath was taking two steps at a time and Flame followed, reloading the shotgun on the run.

  They hit the ground floor and bounded over a body lying in a cramped foyer. Faces peeped timidly from doorways. Through a doorway and out into the teeming rain. They ran headlong into Filipino marines. A figure was pelting away down an alley toward a turn. Chubby guy running as fast as his fat little legs could carry him.

  Heath body-checked the Filipino marines.

  "No!" Heath shouted. "That man is ours!"

  Rabbit was pumping for the end of the alley. Flame dropped to a deep crouch and the stubby shotgun in his fists sent a load winging low down the alley. The running man stopped as if his legs were gone from under him and dropped to slide away into a puddle.

  Flame and Heath sprinted forward with the Filipinos close behind.

  They trained their weapons down at a pudgy guy in glasses moaning through pressed lips. He caught a full load of buck in the legs and his khaki pants were a bloody tatter. He was shivering in the rain, going into shock. His AK was flung far away from his grasping hand. He glared up at them through dark eyes filled with fear.

  "Wasically wabbit," Flame said with a grin.

  CHAPTER 11

  CLIFTON HEIGHTS, PENNSYLVANIA

  K-Bone was on the down low. He stuck around his mom's house and didn't go out much. This turned out to be not as bad as he thought it would be. His mom had gotten off his ass lately. He figured it was probably because, since he'd found his center and his purpose, he was easier to have around the house. He wasn't high or drunk half the time and asleep the rest. He took baths regularly, and cleaned and pressed his own clothes. He threw the PlayStation away, and spent most of his free time reading books he heard about on the message board and taking care of the lawn. He'd become the perfect son.

  He watched the news avidly, even though he knew it was lies. Since he suspected he was being observed by the FBI or CIA or some black ops group, he thought some clue as to what was happening beyond the little three-bedroom brick row house might be helpful. He was never much for current events, but now his mind had been opened to a larger world and he could see through the deception to find the truth between the lines of the falsehoods coming from the mouths of the anchorbimbos and talk show liars. Left and right--they were all puppets of the gamemasters and he was on to their game; no longer a pawn but a rogue player who could move as he wished, and for now he was content to stay on his square and wait for what was next.

  * * * * *

  An uneventful month spent as a "person of interest" to the Powers That Be and he began to relax his guard. He had the disappointing suspicion that perhaps he was not under surveillance. He didn't spot any strangers on the block or hear any suspicious clicks on his phone. Had the gamemasters lost interest in K-Bone? Was it time to do something to put him back on their radar?

  He was contemplating how to accomplish that one evening, after his mom left for one of her quilting events and the living room was free. He slouched back on the sofa and surfed between the news channels and the Cartoon Network. The front doorbell rang. Mom back early? Maybe she just forgot her keys.

  Kevin pulled the front door open to find a diminutive girl about his age standing on the stoop. She was dark, with black eyes and black hair, and wore a thin sweater under a windbreaker. She looked up at him with recognition even though he'd never seen her before in his life.

  "Can I--" he started.

  "Young-El sent me," she said.

  CHAPTER 12

  ARTURO ASUNCION MARINE BARRACKS, ZAMBOANGA CITY

  "That's gonna be one sexy scar," Flame said, and held up a hand mirror.

  Re-Pete sat on the edge of a bed in the sick bay. He turned his head as much as he could manage to try to see his back in the reflection. One hundred fresh sutures starting at his left side of his rib cage and running at an angle, ending at his lower back.

  "Doesn't hurt much," Re-Pete said. His sad-horse face turned contemplative. "Jesus was looking out for me."

  "I can't deny that," Flame said. "Someone was damn sure smiling on your ass."

  "Doctor said the round made it through a seam in my vest," Re-Pete said, and moved gingerly to prop himself on some pillows. "It spent itself. Spent itself. And followed my ribs around just under the skin."

  "Looks like they filleted you, bro." Heath came walking down the long, sunny hall lined with empty beds. He had a paper bag under his arm and presented it to Re-Pete. It was a six pack of Yoo-hoo and Re-Pete smiled like a kid.

  "They're even cold," Re-Pete said, vigorously shaking a bottle and twisting the top off.

  "Only the best, bro," Heath said. "Growin' boy needs his corn syrup and chocolate. We're helo-ing off to the Carl Vinson. You up for it, Re-Pete?

  "Yeah. It just stings a little. Stings. Docs gave me some antibiotics. We rolling out today?"