Sergeant Andrews and Corporal Cha found their own firing positions to either side of her and opened up on the wall, spraying bullets fast and hard, to draw fire away from Alpha Team. Second Lieutenant Carney, she noted, was hunkered behind the boulder, pretending to examine something on his gun.

  Deal with that later, she thought, slapping a new magazine into her weapon.

  Sometimes Strickland was almost surprised at how thoroughly and quickly she slipped into the psychological combat zone. Since it left her utterly focused and chill to the point of cold-blooded, it was a very welcome state. In civilian situations—like at the Rainbow Bar—she felt slow and backward, but here, the more chaotic the combat became, the quicker she made decisions.

  She ducked down, resetting to double-tap with digital targeting, then bobbed up and took aim as a round zinged just over her head. The light-scavenging video-sighter was on focus, zooming in on a head-and-shoulders silhouette atop the wall. Was that an RPG launcher in the Tango’s hands?

  Strickland centered the crosshairs in the middle of the target’s face, just a head-shaped shadow. The crosshairs went green and she squeezed the trigger. The double tap hit the target twice, one bullet knocking him back, the second catching him in the throat. She saw the pink mist as the figure crumpled from sight.

  “Tango down,” she said, speaking into her headset.

  The machine gun had been relocated, and it opened fire on them, bullets raking the top of the boulder. Strickland coughed from granite dust as she ducked down.

  * * *

  Smoke rose from the rooftop of the central monastery building, where Mayweather’s drone-fired mini-rockets had struck the communications antenna group squarely. The array was buckled now, its wiring burning, visibly sparking. He couldn’t hit the building again and risk bringing the old monastery down on the prisoners.

  An enemy drone locked on Drone 3. Two Sedjil missiles knocked the American drone out of the air.

  Hellfire. He would have to find another way to take out the machine-gun positions.

  Sitting in the Light-Up parked in the woods, Mayweather heard Burkett’s voice crackle on his headset.

  “Moving in.”

  Mayweather shifted to Drone 1’s cam, seeing Tafir on the small screen as a faint outline obscured by the adaptive camouflage. He was followed by Burkett leading Alpha Team—all of them squat shapes viewed from overhead.

  The Rangers sprinted from the tree line to the blind spot under the southwest cornering wall, leaving the slow but steady Tafir to plod behind in his smart armor. Burkett, Alexi Syrkin, Megan Lang, Lemuel Dorman—and Rod Rodriguez, in case the prisoners needed emergency medical. His medevac LTV was parked just inside the woods.

  Mayweather watched as they reached the stone wall’s corner and rushed down the west side, staying close to the wall to make awkward targets from above. So far, the support-by-fire team was successfully drawing Tango attention and gunfire to the Beta position.

  He remembered being a young Ranger with an SBF team engaging in support fire. Their noisy cover fire had gotten them bombarded by artillery, and he’d wondered who supported the support team.

  Burkett led the way to their target—the doorway. Mayweather considered drone-firing mini-missiles at the barrier, but it was said to be heavily reinforced—the missiles couldn’t be counted on—so Alpha Team brought shaped charges along.

  Turning his attention to Drone 2, Mayweather saw the repositioned machine gun set up on a fallen piece of masonry, angling fire down at Beta Team. The weapon was well supplied and slamming the SBF team hard. Des Andrews popped up just long enough to fire a grenade toward the machine gun but it lobbed too high, went over the target, and exploded in the courtyard.

  “Here comes your ol’ Cap’n,” Mayweather murmured, sliding the objective marker on the screen with the tip of his finger, centering it on the machine-gunner. He tapped the find-and-fire button. The hovering drone tilted and zipped through the air to a hover over Beta Team, a hundred meters up—and fired two mini-missiles at the machine gun. Less than two seconds later the gunner was replaced by a ball of white fire. When it cleared, nothing was left but a black smear and twisted metal.

  “Tango MG down, Sergeant Strickland,” he said. “Resume fire.”

  “Thanks, Captain,” said the voice in his headset. Almost immediately, fire resumed from the outcropping.

  Where was Ken Carney?

  There he was, firing with the others — ducking down, bobbing up, firing in the general direction of the wall. Pretty much at random.

  The General can’t claim we didn’t give his kid a chance.

  Mayweather piloted the drone high overhead along the walls, searching for the other machine guns. There. The gunner spotted him, tilted back, opening fire. A drone at that altitude was hard to hit with a machine gun, and it reported no impacts. Mayweather locked onto the TiL machine gun and tapped find-and-fire.

  The rockets launched, and another white fireball sucked up a TiL. He moved on, decided to take out one of the trucks in the courtyard, mostly to sow panic among their opponents. One rocket, carefully placed, and the truck’s gas tank went up. He’d leave the other one—the plan called for forcing the enemy out, not necessarily killing every one of them. They’d need the truck to get away.

  The drone jarred once, its camera image jiggling on the screen from an impact, but it reported all systems intact. There—another machine gun on the northernmost wall. Captain Mayweather locked and launched.

  A white fireball—

  Then the drone image jittered furiously and blurred with smoke and fire. He brought it back toward the woods but it flew erratically, one of the rotors down. He spun it around and, despite its wobbling, spotted the enemy drone. It was coming straight at his screen from about ten meters off, and it fired its own mini-missiles. Sometimes it was easy to forget for a moment that a drone firing at his drone’s camera wasn’t firing right at him. He almost ducked. But his fingers were working, firing back.

  Mayweather switched over to Drone 1’s view in time to see both Drone 2 and the enemy drone exploding simultaneously, scattering random pieces on the monastery.

  That meant there had to be another drone—the one that had taken out Drone 3—but where was it? He heard a warning buzz from the Light-Up’s monitors and saw an approaching blip on the scanner. It had located his LTV and was setting up to fire at him…

  Mayweather brought his remaining drone back to the LTV—too late. The LTV took a direct hit. Tilting up with the impact, it sent a bone-jarring vibration through the vehicle, knocking Mayweather onto the floor and making his ears ring with the metallic clang of the blast. Instantly, the LTV’s interface shut down.

  The monitors went black. Only red emergency lights glowed inside the vehicle. The armor had held up, but the D-comm transmitters had been destroyed.

  Almost deaf, feeling as if his head were spinning, Mayweather pulled himself up, slid into his seat. He doubted there was time to get out—the drone would be coming from another angle to hit him again—and he hated the idea of abandoning the Light-Up.

  Hitting the start button, he was relieved when the engine began to purr.

  Mayweather stomped the accelerator and spun the wheel so the Light-Up turned sharply, and then bumped off over the rough ground.

  Another explosion, but this time behind him.

  Rocks and shrapnel pinged off the armored rear of the vehicle. Mayweather spun it around again and drove into the copse of trees. Thirty-five meters in, he found a place to turn, the Light-Up crawling over a fallen log to set up between two trees for partial shelter.

  Grabbing his ordnance, a retrofitted grenade launcher, Mayweather tossed it through the ceiling hatch and climbed up the narrow ladder into the turret. The turret’s machine gun wouldn’t be able to hit the drone with any reliability, and it didn’t swivel in a 360.

  “But I do,” he muttered, hands shaking with his hurry, ears still ringing as he grabbed the launcher, loaded it with a Pike from its clip.

  Something whirred just below treetop level. He couldn’t see the enemy drone from his position, but he could hear it. Flipping his night-seeing goggles down, Mayweather scanned the sky—glimpsed the semicircular drone moving overhead. It slowed, paused between the tops of two pine trees, rotated in place.

  Must have spotted the LTV.

  The TiL drone fired a rocket. The upper trunk of a pine exploded, the tree’s top half tilting over and falling with a dusty crash close beside the vehicle. Mayweather had one eye pressed to the sighter and with his left index finger he pressed the laser guidance button. He tracked the straight line of red onto the drone as it slid away for another firing angle.

  “Come on, you bastard, keep the pretty light on the fucking thing,” Mayweather hissed at himself, struggling to track the drone. The drone had one rocket left… and he had one in the chamber. He smiled and fired the mini-missile. The rocket-motor missile arced up, sensing the laser, changing course to follow it.

  The drone slipped to the side. Mayweather fought to keep the laser centered on his target.

  “Dammit!”

  Then the 40mm Pike struck home, and the enemy drone vanished—except for the bits and pieces that clattered through branches onto the pine-needle turf below.

  * * *

  “What was that?” Rod Rodriguez asked, turning to look back toward the woods.

  “Keep your voice down,” Burkett whispered. “Sounded like a Pike. Captain’s shot something close by.”

  Alpha Team pressed to the wall on both sides of the side door in the thick stone of the west wall. The rattling of gunfire from Beta Team was ongoing. There was a swoosh and explosion down that way—someone in the monastery had fired what sounded like a rocket-propelled grenade. Burkett didn’t want to think about what a direct RPG hit could mean to Linda Strickland—and to Cha, Andrews, and Second Lieutenant Carney.

  Tafir was fitting the shaped charge, and Burkett wished he’d assigned someone else. The man was an expert, but the thick gloves of the Talos suit were clumsy to work with. It was taking too long.

  Burkett wanted an update from Mayweather. “You just blow something up, Captain?” he said into his headset.

  “Yep,” Mayweather replied, his voice crackling with static. “Some systems down, some working. Waiting for your prompt.”

  “We’re about to bust a move, sir.”

  “Then get to it!”

  “Roger that, Captain.” He leaned over to whisper at Tafir, “You need some help with that?”

  “No, sir,” Tafir replied, stepping back from the studded metal door, his voice a little distorted by the helmet mic. “Ready for fire.”

  The door clicked—and swung open. Burkett tensed. This wasn’t the door their man on the inside was supposed to open.

  “Spread out, stay close to the wall!” he shouted, as the TiL gunmen in the doorway opened fire.

  Burkett ducked right, firing through the door as he went. Bullets sliced past his head, and he realized that he’d been saved by Tafir stepping in to catch the bullets on his armor. A dozen armed men swarmed into the courtyard that lay beyond, sent as a sortie to flank Beta Team.

  Burkett stepped out to fire through the door. Someone screamed, hit by the burst from the MK-21 SKAR-H. The others kept coming as Alpha Team flattened against the wall. Tafir staggered backward, hammered by gunfire from within the monastery—but he didn’t fall. The Talos armor held and he swung out one of his two weapons: a Fostech Origin 18 semi-auto combat shotgun with a big drum of rounds attached to it, looking more like an old Thompson than an auto-shotgun. The TiL sortie kept coming, firing—getting close. Then Tafir let loose with the auto-shotgun, firing twelve rounds in three seconds.

  The doorway cleared, for the moment.

  Plucking a grenade from his hip pack and leaning to peer through the gun smoke, Burkett saw seven bodies on the ground, torn apart by close-range twelve-gauge shotgun rounds, and a spreading pool of hot blood that showed up clearly on the infrared.

  The remaining TiL thugs had cleared to either side of the door. Burkett activated the grenade and tossed it in.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Dabiri stepped to one side of the door, Burkett to the other, and the grenade detonated. Someone shouted in pain, but Burkett was certain most of the others would have moved out of range. If he led the team through the doorway, they’d be caught in a crossfire from right and left.

  “Regroup at the corner, go!” he shouted.

  The rest of the team sprinted past the doorway and joined him, Tafir stomping after them.

  At the corner, breathing hard, Burkett said, “Tafir, prepare to detonate those shaped charges on my order.”

  “Yes sir.” Tafir’s snarkiness always vanished in combat. In a firefight he was all business.

  “Hold here.”

  Burkett trotted out partway between the wall and the trees, and fired through the door, moving, firing again, trying to give the impression that the team had taken to the woods. Then he sprinted back to the corner. Several men showed in the doorway, firing toward the woods.

  “Now, Corporal!”

  Dabiri tapped the signaler on his wrist and the shaped charges he had fixed to the doorway exploded. The screams of the men caught in the back-blast were almost lost in the roar of the quadruple explosion.

  “On me!” Burkett shouted. He started toward the shattered door.

  “Lieutenant, better let me go first!” Tafir called over the headset.

  Reluctantly admitting to himself that Tafir was right—his being point was part of the plan—Burkett made the tactical hand signal for stop and the team skidded to a halt. Tafir lumbered past toward the opening.

  Bullets skittered past them, thumping into the dirt by the wall, fired from somewhere up on the wall behind them. The shooter, Burkett figured, would have to get in a precarious position, leaning over the wall top, to get any kind of shot at this angle. He turned and saw the shooter trying to do just that. But Megan Lang was already in position to return fire, and as bullets kicked up the dirt around her she calmly fired a double-tap into the man’s head.

  The body fell from the wall onto the ground outside.

  “Nice shot, Sergeant,” Burkett said, then he turned to follow Tafir through the doorway. The corporal’s shotgun boomed repeatedly.

  In the courtyard, a TiL thug was on his hands and knees, the side of his face a tatter of bloody flesh, trying to get up. Without a thought Burkett double-tapped him in the head, and before the man’s body had hit the ground he fired at another standing near the doorway to the main building about twenty meters away. The TiL gangster staggered and fell. The rest who’d been here were dead, sprawled in smears of blood and offal.

  The Rangers double-timed to the door into the main building. As he went, Burkett assessed the courtyard to their right for points of enemy fire. A truck was burning back there, probably lit up by the Captain. It was gouting black-streaked flame. In its light Burkett saw four men moving toward him, about thirty meters off. He squeezed off a burst and one of them went down.

  The survivors dodged into shadow back of another truck, firing sloppily as they went. Lang and Dorman and Alexi Syrkin returned fire. A scattering of response fire, and Burkett felt a round smack his armored vest just under his right arm. He stumbled a little, wincing from the bruising impact.

  That’s gonna smart.

  Tafir said, “Stand back!” and tried the door. They were all aware it could be booby-trapped and supposedly… maybe… his Talos suit would protect him from an explosion.

  The door opened and nothing exploded.

  There were two bodies lying face-down on the floor inside. It looked as if they’d been shot in the back. Burkett saw an antechamber, lit by a single overhead electric lantern. In a wall niche a partly broken icon of St. Basil gazed down with cracked benevolence on the bodies of the two men.

  The air coming out of the room was thick with the mingled smells of mildew and blood. Tafir scanned the area beyond.

  “Clear!” he said, and everyone crowded in after him—everyone except Burkett and PFC Dorman, standing in the door recess.

  Two shots cracked by from across the courtyard.

  “Permission to intercept Tango, Lieutenant!”

  “Not enough cover, Lem. Take a knee and see what you can do. You can watch our backs.”

  “Sir!” Dorman went down on one knee, within the recess, and leaned just enough to give him the angle he needed. He shot into the flame-flickered courtyard. Someone fell from the shadows at the corner of the building, toppling to writhe in pain. Gut shot. Lem kept firing.

  Burkett stepped into the dimly lit antechamber. A voice came from a dark stairway at the back of the room.

  “Come in, it is me, it is Olek!” the voice said. “Don’t shoot me!”

  “Olek!” Alexi shouted. Then he said something more in Bulgarian. He turned to Burkett. “It’s my brother’s voice! I told him to come out, hands up, where we can see no one behind him is forcing him.”

  “Good thought,” Burkett said. “Come on out, Olek! Hands up!”

  * * *

  “What’s this chatter about a mole?” Chance asked. He was talking to Dean Rogers, his opposite number in the Defense Intelligence Agency—and thinking he might regret taking the call.

  Sanford “Sandy” Chance sat in his office at Langley, toying with a cigarette in one hand, turning down the volume on his phone headset with the other, more than ready for a smoking break. He wasn’t particularly interested in this call from Rogers. The mercurial DIA agent was always too loud and too excited about nothing much. There was perpetual chatter about a Russian mole, somewhere—and chatter is all it was: a spy in the White House, in the CIA, in MI6, even in the Mossad.

  Then again, it had happened for real in the past. There was Philby in the UK. There was Aldrich Ames in the USA, but almost always, nowadays, the chatter was baloney, bullshit, and hogwash.

  “Not a lot of people talking about it,” Rogers said. After each phrase, Chance could hear him slurping something. Knowing Dean Rogers, it was probably one of those elaborate coffee drinks from HyperBrew. “Just one guy asking for asylum from Russia, Chance, and yeah, it’s a guy with a lonnnnnng criminal record, hey what?”