Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

When the rattletrap was out of sight, Banik lifted his gaze back toward the dark, trembling sky. He still couldn’t see anything through the snow. But he didn’t like that noise, not even a little.

Whatever was up there, he needed to inform the entry teams about it in a hurry.

It was just shy of 2:00 a.m. when Raven ’s PDAS radar, infrared, and laser detection systems acquired the objects. They were flying in from the south-southwest at eleven o’clock, traveling a touch over thirty miles an hour, and a hair under the tilt-rotor’s hovering altitude.

In the copilot’s seat, Cobb saw Luna straighten with alarm as he threw the imagery from his HUD onto their huge, shared multifunction display.

“Crap,” she said. “I think that’s a drone flock.”

Cobb had already reached the same conclusion. “I’ll alert Carmody,” he said.

North of the castle, Ray Long, Fox Team, was pulled to the shoulder of the road in Rover Two, his front end facing the crossroads a quarter mile ahead. His vehicle idled quietly, its lights extinguished. The snow had stopped, the outside temperature dropped, and the wind kicked up. Cold blue starlight pierced the thinning clouds at the higher levels of the troposphere. Lower to the ground, it was scattered by a fog of frozen moisture hanging over the trees and fields.

Not yet having heard anything unusual up above, Long sat there per Carmody’s orders and checked his visuals. Two of his sources were video-game stuff. A central dashboard screen gave the big picture of what was happening around him, and coming at him, with high-def aerial images relayed from the Sentinel drone by way of Raven. His digital rearview mirror showed the curved, narrow stretch of road he’d taken from the castle grounds. He could watch the fork up ahead the old-fashioned way, through the windshield with his naked eyes.

“They’re coming,” said the big, dark-skinned E-3 in the passenger seat. One of four Quickdraw guys with Long in the BearCat, his name was Reggie Fults. “Just behind us.”

Fults was at that moment looking at the dash screen. Long was watching the digital rearview. He saw a silky, white fan of light advancing over the roadway about fifteen yards back. It slid around a bend and swiftly resolved into two circles of brightness a few feet off the ground. Behind it was another twin headlight.

The two supercharged motorcycles sped along in single file, their LED headlights shafting out ahead of them. Sleek, compact, cowled in black, they shot up on Long’s right and went humming past him. Carmody was in the lead, Kali following him closely, their heads and bodies tucked in behind the curved glass of their windscreens.

They rode on ahead toward the crossroads and passed straight through, staying on the wide main road, their taillights zipping off into the darkness like red meteors.

When he could no longer see or hear them, Long glanced at the dash screen for a bird’s eye view of the road above and below his position. He immediately picked up the bikes again. And the Regera bearing toward them from the north.

“Okay, this is it,” he said.

Shifting into Drive, he eased from the shoulder onto the snow-covered two-lane, drove slowly past the crossroads, and pulled across the road to block it off.

He had no sooner come to a halt than he heard the noise in the sky.

He looked over at Fults. “You hear that?”

Fults nodded. “It’s close. Whatever it is.”

Long sat listening in silence. He thought it almost sounded like the Sentinel UAV. But louder. As if there were more than one in the air.

He listened some more. The noise got even louder. It reminded him of the swarming cicadas he’d heard as a kid on the farm. He was pretty sure it was being made by multiple drones.

Everyone in the BearCat listened quietly. They were thinking along the same lines as Long, guessing there were drones up overhead, a whole lot of them.

Then Cobb radioed and confirmed they were right.

Kali blew past the crossroads on the Ninja. She was close behind Carmody, doing seventy miles per hour, her headlights tunneling through the darkness.

She sensed more than saw the emptiness of the frozen, expansive pastures to her right. On her left, the soaring trees were a solid black wall, a natural buffer against the ferociously cold alpine gusts. Speed slowed things down for her, and she was moving fast.

Toward the place where two roads met.

“Hekate of the Three Forms. Guardian of the crossroads. Mistress of heaven and hell.”

“Virgil. The Aeneid .”

“I memorized it. For you, Kali. Though, I still don’t understand your fascination with this place.”

She and Drajan. Long ago amid the temple ruins in the gathering dusk. They had traveled to Western Turkey on holiday from school in Madrid.

“The ancient Greeks were first with the concept of free will,” she’d said. “Of taking responsibility for our lives. This temple speaks to it.”

“Yet they came here to beg favors of a goddess? I call that hedging a bet.”

“Then you don’t understand. Hekate carries a torch and key. The torch lights the way for souls in transition. The key opens doors to the underworld. But she doesn’t decide which they take. She protects them in dangerous places. The in-between places. The choice is theirs.”

That familiar look on his face. That hard smile. “A good lady,” he said, and nodded up at the sky. “If the stars ruled my fate, I’d be doomed.”

The memory came and went, sweeping over her like the wind. Kali realized she’d lost sight of Carmody as he took a curve up ahead. Three seconds later she swung into it, and he was back in her lights.

They sped up. She saw no sign of the Regera with her unaided eyes. But the relay feed from Raven showed it in her HUD speeding south.

The road curved and straightened and rose and fell without apparent landmarks to help her distinguish one span from another. In the daylight, she knew, it would be easier. But at night the countryside seemed unvaried and unchanging. The snaking blacktop. The wide open, featureless farm fields. The solid ranks of towering pines and deciduous trees. Nothing to make one empty mile look any different from the next.

No Regera.

They were three or four miles north of the castle when they first smelled smoke. It was slagged asphalt, charred wood, and bubbling sap, commingled with the acrid stink of burning fuel.

They sped up. The tarry smoke got thicker. It made their eyes sting and their chests tight. More curves, dips, and rises, and Kali saw the orange stain of the flames in the sky up ahead. And lower, closer, oncoming headlights. Bearing directly toward them.

In her ears over the drumming of the wind, Carmody’s voice on the RoIP.

“It’s our man,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied.

He sped up again without another word. Kali throttled fuel into her engine and raced after him.

Zolcu recognized the Ninjas the moment he spotted them shooting up from the south. He had been wrong about the Rezvani leading his hunters off his tail. They must have started after him at once. On the Wolf’s own cherished motorcycles.

In hindsight, it should have been no surprise. Nothing tonight was going as predicted. Not for a minute.

The question now was what he would do about it.

His immediate impulse was to run the riders down. Just plunge right into them and leave them for dead. It would be risky. All three vehicles were moving at high rates of speed, and his car was lightweight carbon fiber. And he had hundreds of miles to travel before he reached the Crimean Peninsula. Long, desolate country miles. He did not want to jeopardize his ability to drive that distance with serious crash damage. If the car cut out on him, he would be in bad shape. Trying to make it anywhere on foot in the pitch darkness was out of the question. The temperature outside was falling. The farms and villages here were widely separated. While his phone’s GPS would orient him, it would lose its charge within hours. He might freeze to death before coming upon civilization.