Gun Metal Heart (32 page)

That's when he noticed the Colt .45 as well.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Snow felt panic rise. “What's this? You two have to leave. Right now.”

Crace studied her handheld device. “If he speaks again, kneecap him.”

The redhead didn't bother responding.

Snow's pilots sat frozen.

Olivia Crace finally looked up. “You lost control of the drones for sixty seconds in Florence. Since then you've run every test you can dream up to explain the glitch. Every test but one.”

The pilots looked from the newcomers and the massive Colt to Snow.

Snow said, “Hey. I don't know—”

“I had the NSA bring us this device so I could see if any unauthorized radio transmissions were leaving this building. Your offshore bank accounts also were flagged, Snow.”

One of the pilots said, “Offshore accounts? Bryan?”

Snow tried to gut it out. “You need to leave. This is my—”

Crace said, “Kneecap only.”

The redhead stepped forward.

Snow said, “Okayokayokay! Fine, yes! C'mon, please!”

Crace said, “Thank you. Please put us back in control of the drones. Do it now.”

Belgrade

Dragan Petrovic gulped whiskey, his vision blurring with tears. He stared out the window, past the ruined Chinese embassy, at the American buildings two blocks away. He pictured his beloved Adrijana and their three daughters in their festive frocks, laughing, the girls with bows in their hair and flutes of sparkling pear cider. Adrijana, his beautiful butterfly, in her element.

Petrovic offered a silent prayer to St. Siva to accept the terrible blood offering he made on behalf of all …

He squinted. He wiped tears away from his eyes.

A hawk arced into view.

Heading directly toward him.

Petrovic saw a splinter of light flash beneath the mechanical bird.

His window shattered.

*   *   *

Despite the gloom of dust and the penumbra of the street lights, both Daria and John glimpsed the Hotspur drone. Both saw the flicker of light from the belly of the hawk. A second later they heard the tinkle of breaking glass coming from the Parliament building.

Daria said, “It's started.”

“So what do we do?”

“The fellow I interrogated said … Hold on.”

She deftly hopped up on an iron garbage can that was welded to the sidewalk. Passersby gasped as she straddled the can, balanced on both boots. Teenage boys hooted.

John had a working understanding of the term
undercover
and thought probably this wasn't that.

She pointed. “There!” She faced the graffiti-laden security wall around the remains of the old Chinese embassy. The wall featured a padlocked gate beyond which lay a corrugated maintenance outbuilding. Parked next to the shed was a newish silver van featuring a small but advanced telecommunications transceiver on the roof.

She hopped down. “The van. That's them.”

John checked his watch. “I'll get to Parliament, tell the guards they're under attack.”

“No.” She turned to him and smiled. “You're much smarter than I. I need you to go find Zoran Antic. He's been ten steps ahead of everyone, me, the Serbs,
Skorpjo
. I need you to check him. Go.”

John blanched. “Go? Into the ambassador's residence? With the armed Marines who already know I tried to sneak in before?”

Daria pulled a Makarov out of her backpack. “Yes.”

“The fuck am I supposed to do that?”

She grinned. “That's where the
smarter than I
part comes in. Good luck.”

She sprinted for the bombed-out Chinese embassy and the silver van.

*   *   *

Winslow squinted at the centermost plasma monitors. The .22 had made only a modest hole in the window of Dragan Petrovic's office but a more sizable hole in Petrovic himself. The man had fallen fast, but the blood spatter on the window was most gratifying.

The hawk drone was not firing incendiary rounds, he noted. Unlike the attack in Florence. Otherwise, Petrovic's corpse would be smoldering.

Winslow made a gun of his forefinger and blew on it, gunslinger style. He reached for his controls and toggled the suite of hawk drones, two of which were equipped with American Citadel's miniature pyrophoric rockets.

He targeted the Parliament building.

A red warning light flickered on a screen. He almost missed it.

First his hummingbird watcher drones began vectoring away from Parliament. Then the hawks followed.

“Hold on…” Winslow muttered, trying to determine the problem. Had Sandpoint reacquired control of the MAVs?

A new screen popped up. It took Winslow a moment to realize it was an audio monitor. He peered at the time stamp and GPS location. The search parameters had been fed into the Mercutio drones days earlier. And in Italy.

One of his speakers crackled:

“No. You're much smarter than I. I need you to go find Zoran Antic. He's been ten steps ahead of everyone, me, the Serbs,
Skorpjo
. I need you to check him. Go.”

A head-and-shoulders mug shot appeared on the screen. The woman with a heart-shaped face and straight black hair.

“Ah, we are holding,” Winslow spoke into his mic.

Viorica's voice came back quickly. “Problem?”

“The Mercutios were tasked to find your Miss Gibron. I think they just did.”

A second audio signature appeared on the monitor. The words
Target 2
blinked to life next to it.

“Go? Into the ambassador's residence? With the armed Marines who already know I tried to sneak in before?”

“Yes.”

“The fuck am I supposed to do that?”

Winslow said, “Gibron's here. And she has a friend.”

Viorica said, “Where's ‘here'? Be specific.”

But it was the dour Afrikaaner, Danziger, who broke into their comms first. “Here is here,” he said. “She's at the fence.”

 

Forty-One

The Chinese embassy had been seven or eight stories tall, a brick-fronted slab of bureaucratic and Communist sobriety and efficiency. The grounds originally had been paved over with cement, but waxy grasses had reasserted themselves, pushing up here and there, displacing entire ten-foot-by-ten-foot pavers, raising the corners of some to create a tilted, cracked public area. The grounds were littered with fast-food bags and cigarette packs and hypodermic needles and random bits of clothing. Government officials may have thought the cadaver of the building was mute testament to Western aggression. Belgrade citizens were using the grounds as a blockwide trash bin.

The corrugated-tin maintenance shed on the grounds was dilapidated and rusted-out and the frame so warped that the double doors were as crooked as a snaggled tooth.

Only the silver van was new. That, and the telecommunications array on its roof.

Daria hopped down from the fence and jogged into the grounds as a big, pale man with a square, jowly face and shaved skull stepped out from behind the shed and fired a single silenced shot at her. The .45 bullet snapped off the raised, ruptured cement and sent a tuft of caked dirt and hearty weeds into the air.

Daria changed tack, turning on a dime, seeking cover behind a tall breaker box that was standing like a dull gray casket in the middle of the grounds.

She had time to register the gunman when a second bullet panged into the ground and coughed up crumbled cement. But this shot came from behind her.

Behind her and above her.

A hawk drone swooped past her, arcing over the van and gaining elevation for a second pass. Daria crouched behind the breaker box, adjusted her backpack, and dug out a stolen Makarov. She glanced at the sky and found two hovering hummingbirds, unblinking plastic eyes locked on her.

Two more hawks circled for position.

Hummingbirds are spotters. Hawks are shooters.
The combat analysis flashed through Daria's mind without any conscious effort.
Hummingbirds hover. Hawks swoop. Hummingbirds can operate stationary. Hawks need a glide pattern facing their target.

The pale man fired his sound-suppressed SIG, and a bullet smashed a hole clean through the breaker box, a meter over her head. Daria spat, “Shite!” and bolted.

A movement caught her eye. No time to analyze it.

She sprinted for the body of a rusted-out Russian Kamaz truck. Long abandoned and slumped on disfigured rims, the midseventies vehicle had the aerodynamics of an anvil.

The pale shooter's SIG coughed again, and the bullet cratered the Kamaz's radiator. Daria ducked behind the snub-nosed truck, landing on her ass. A hawk made a pass for her, but she'd changed position before it could adjust its diving run.

Her years of combat training fed her a continuous stream of subconscious analysis.
You can't aim the guns on the hawks. You can only aim the hawks themselves.

Fat lot of good that would do her if any of the shooter drones were carrying missiles. And given their target—the Parliament building—she assumed at least one of them was.

*   *   *

Simultaneously—both in Sandpoint, Idaho, and inside the silver van sixty paces from Daria's redoubt—Bryan Snow and the hacker, Winslow, attempted to regain control of the drones.

Snow, in Idaho, did so with an army officer's handgun aimed at the back of his skull. He was sweating heavily and in fear of losing control of his bladder. His two pilots stood frozen, their faces a combination of helplessness and slowly evolving anger, as they realized Snow's role in the crisis.

Snow's fingers flew over his keyboards. “I can't…” he bleated. “I can't get 'em back!”

Colonel Crace said, “Why not?”

“Their signal is too strong! They're … Jesus, I don't know! They've boosted their signal somehow. They're blocking me out! I don't know!”

A little over a thousand kilometers to the east Winslow breathed a thankful prayer that Viorica had boosted their signal through the communications array of the ambassador's residence. The added gain was more than enough to disrupt the signals beaming from the Idaho panhandle.

“American Citadel attempting to reacquire,” he spoke calmly. “And failing.”

Viorica's voice came over his headset. She spoke from inside the residence. “Do we have control of the drones?”

“They were programmed to find Gibron amid a crowd, to isolate her and to kill her. That program is running.”

Viorica said, “All of the drones?”

“Yes.”

“Well, get the missile birds back on target!” she hissed. “Mission number one is the destruction of the Parliament building.”

Winslow allowed himself a smile. “I'd say mission number one is keeping that crazy woman away from me and this trailer, thank you very much.”

But he began to reprogram the two drones carrying missiles.

*   *   *

Daria squatted with one boot under her, the other leg extended and ready to provide her with balance if she moved left or right. She gripped the Makarov in both hands.

When she was behind the breaker box, she'd sworn out loud and noticed that both of the hummingbirds froze. Those beasts were the ones tracking her voice print.

She inhaled deeply, let it out, breathed in again, and shouted:

“My country tiiiiiis of thee…!”

The Afrikaaner, Danziger, had moved up from the shed to seek cover behind the silver van. He got ready to move again, to pin down the Israeli, when he heard a song: off-key, bellowed.

“… sweet land of liiiiiiberty!…”

The two hummingbirds reacted to Daria's acoustic signature and vectored for her position. They found her and hovered, sending telemetry via satellite directly to the hawks.

Daria bleated, “… of theeee I—”

She rose, spun, and snapped off two shots, then dropped to her haunches again.

She heard the sounds of sparks jumping and metal clattering to the cement.
Funny
, she thought: she hadn't realized she'd had that song stuck in her head.

*   *   *

In the U.S. ambassador's residence, Viorica stood in her shimmering black leather outfit and stilettos, beaming vapidly, waiting for the latest faux interview to end. She thanked her subject in high Arabic and watched as her rigger escorted the Bosnian businessman away from the alcove.

She heard Winslow over her earjack. “Christ!”

She flipped the frequency of her hand-held cordless mic. “Trouble?”

Winslow's voice sounded in her ear jack, “I … wait…”

“Talk to me.”

“Two Mercutios are down!”

“Two?”

“Ah … yes. They were tracking the woman. Then … no signal.”

Viorica squeezed her eyes shut. “She's going for the drones. Winslow: you have six more Mercutios. Get them back on task. Danziger: kill her.”

Across the elegant drawing room, Viorica made eye contact with Zoran Antic, the little Bosnian diplomat in the too-large suit. She nodded.

He made a show of glowering and looking at his wristwatch.

*   *   *

Sure enough: Daria's stolen Makarov jammed.

When she had fieldstripped the weapons in the pharmacy, she realized the
Skorpjo
hitters had not taken good care of them. She'd been expecting the cheap gun to jam.

The big man across the way leaned out and fired at her, then ducked back.

Daria pegged him at six-five and three hundred pounds. She preferred not to go hand-to-hand against a gorilla. But if it ended up being a hand-to-hand fight, Daria wanted it to be on her terms. The man was right-handed but also right-eyed—he lined up his gun with that eye. And right-footed: from the way he moved, the man would strongly favor going to his right.

Knowing that wasn't much of an advantage, but a little advantage often is enough.

Daria drew the second Makarov from her backpack. She reached up and gripped the long whip aerial of the rusted-out Russian truck. She placed the gun barrel against the base of the antenna and fired once.