“No, it isn’t. I can make the shot. But you’re sure about this? There’s no going back.”
Yulia handed her the weapon with a curt nod. “Just do it.”
Jet focused her attention on the police and waited until she had a decent opening before squeezing off three controlled bursts. The first went wide and hit the side of the SUV near Taras, but several of the second and third salvos slammed into him, as well as cutting the legs from beneath one of the cops.
Jet and Yulia were up and running in a flash as the police opened fire. They ducked and weaved as they tore through the trees, pushing themselves as hard as they could, moving erratically as slugs whistled around them. The bark of gunfire continued from the SUVs until it was faintly audible in their ringing ears, and then they were clear of the shooting, running wordlessly through the forest.
After several minutes, Jet whispered to Yulia to stop, and they froze in place. A flashlight beam flickered behind them, and Jet pointed away from the road. Their best bet was to lead the chase well away from the van, in hopes that the police would give up once they were too far from the relative safety of their vehicles. Yulia signaled understanding and followed Jet, the only sound the pounding of their shoes and their ragged breathing as they vanished into the darkness.
Chapter 36
Manbij, Syria
Simon sat in his hotel room. The exchange had gone without a hitch, the terrorists pleased to trade the missiles for a fistful of American cash. His local contacts had picked up the ball from there, and the weapons were now on their way to their ultimate destination, and Simon’s job in Syria was finished.
A ceiling fan orbited slowly overhead as he sipped from his bottle of purified water, the air conditioner predictably out of commission, blowing a tepid stream of humidity around the room. Par for the course, he thought bitterly and wondered for the thousandth time whether this would be his final field outing, the adrenaline in his system having been replaced by the usual post-operative melancholy.
Simon had long ago given up on the idea that what he did for a living was justified in any absolute moral sense; he’d traded the idealism of his youth for a cynical pragmatism as he’d seen too much. He’d walked through towns that had been bombed into ruins so the inhabitants could celebrate democracy – those that still had their lives, if not their limbs. He’d seen atrocities so gut-wrenching they still haunted his dreams, performed in the name of abstract principles that were little more than slogans. Simon no longer believed in a greater good, or evil, or that anything besides might made right. The realization that the rules the majority of the planet lived by were a sham, a contrivance engineered to make them more controllable by a tiny minority, had set him free, even as that understanding erased any belief that he was engaged in a higher purpose that made his actions defensible.
He flipped his notebook computer open and logged into a secure site whose stream was encrypted using military-grade algorithms. Even if it was intercepted by a snooping hotel agent, all they’d see was unintelligible static, lacking the coded microprocessor required to convert the gibberish to images. He tapped in a command, and the screen zoomed in on the earth until it was hovering over Syria from a distance of a few miles. A tiny red dot blinked in one corner of the screen, and Simon smiled to himself as he reached for his cell phone.
“Roamer,” a digitized voice answered on the first ring.
“This is Eagle.”
“Authentication code?”
“Niner seven two niner one one.”
“Proceed.”
“Target verified,” Simon said, and confirmed the latitude and longitude of the faint pulsing signal.
“Copy that.” The voice repeated the numbers back. “We have a lock.”
“Estimated time to impact?”
“Bird’s away. Ten minutes. Countdown will display real time in three…two…one…”
A timer appeared on Simon’s screen. “I have it.”
“Nice work.”
Hearing the praise from the mechanical voice chilled Simon’s blood. Was everything similarly artificial? Were his emotions, or lack of them, engineered like the computer program that offered an “atta boy” like a treat to a drooling dog?
“I’ll be off the board by eight a.m. local time, Roamer.”
“Roger that. Check in once at base.”