The Humvee lurches and rocks as Weaver follows the faint two-track out of the village Intel had labeled T-3, or Tallach 3, given that Afghanistan has a total of four villages within its borders with that same name.
Karla bounced and swayed in the passenger seat. Behind her, Pud Pounder was standing, his upper body propped in the turret behind Ma Deuce, the Browning .50.
The desert valley looked flat as a lake bottom, but the terrain was illusory. Periodic rains had carved patterns of narrow drainages across the flats. No more than ten to twenty inches deep, a person could lie down and essentially vanish from as far away as thirty feet.
They could pop up just as fast, level a rifle or an RPG, and unleash hell. The late afternoon sun slanted toward the craggy and steep mountains in the distance. From up there, Haji would be watching her dust as Bravo Platoon raced out from T-3.
Of course, if Haji had any sense, he’d be short-stroking his communications for all they were worth. Karla and her LPO, or Light Petty Officer, had spent the last two days laying this one out. They’d picked a series of rocky outcrops that stuck up from the flats just outside the canyon mouth. The key to the position wasn’t the outcrops, or the field of fire they offered; her interest lay in the series of deeply incised gullies that ran beneath them and met just east of the main highway.
A Marine convey would pass over that road sometime around midday tomorrow. Not that it was any kind of secret, since an Afghan detail was accompanying the Marines. Given Afghan dedication to security, that in turn meant every insurgent within a hundred klicks knew when and where that convoy would roll.
“We’re on all their scopes now,” Weaver observed as he laid his right hand atop the wheel. He glanced in the driver-side mirror. “Socket’s sniffing right up our ass. That reaming you gave him sure cured his lollygagging attitude, Chief.”
“Just a reminder, boys,” she said as she keyed her mic. “Sloppy means dead.”
Golf’s voice came through her earbud. “You sure they’ll be able to figure out where we’re going, Chief? Or should we have sent them a pajama-gram with a map?”
“They’re not stupid.” Then she smiled. “Mostly. Their spotters are banging jaws as I speak. If we’re unlucky, they’ll figure out who we are and what we’re up to. They do that, and they’ll treat the whole operational area like a plague zone. We’ll be bored stiff watching that convoy pass. But if we’re lucky, they’ll think we’re a no-threat routine patrol, and they’ll filter right down through those drainage channels. If they do, they’ll pop up right under our noses. Air strikes will take out any we don’t get to kill first.”
She ran it through her mind again, imagining the terrain, which of her snipers would go where, how their fields of fire would overlap as the insurgents came boiling out of the drainage channels.
“Jabac Junction ahead, Chief,” Weaver said.
She turned her attention to the irregular collection of mud-and-stone huts—flat-roofed and colorless as the hardpan on which they’d been built. Only a few families still lived there, tending a couple of gardens and a handful of goats.
Weaver was roaring down on it, the engine whining . . .
“No! Fuck, no!” Karla cried, flying upright in bed. Sweat streaked her face as she clawed at the blanket, desperate to rip it from her body.
“Son of a bitch!” she rasped, throat dry, lungs heaving. “Easy. Easy, Karla.” She managed to raise a shaking hand and slicked sweat from her hot face.
“Shit!” She knotted a fist, pounding impotently at the blanket. Leaning her head forward, she sucked in cool air, holding it, and letting it stream out of her.
From out of her memory came Colonel Ryan’s soothing voice: “Tell me what you see, Karla.”
“I was back. Reliving that day.”
“Tell me about it, in complete detail . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, Skipper.” She smiled into the night. “I got it memorized: ‘Words are tools, Karla. Handles on memory and a means to manipulate dreams.’”
Throwing back the blanket, she swung her feet down and braced herself while afterimages of shattered reality faded into nightmare where they belonged.
She stood; her T-shirt and panties were damp with perspiration.
“Damn you, Skipper.” She walked into her bathroom, turned on the faucet, and scooped water into her mouth, splashed it on her face. Water dripping from her chin and nose, she threw her head back and stared at her image in the mirror where it lay lost in darkness.
“All that talk about trust? You had to drag that shit up, didn’t you?”
She pulled on a pair of sweats, padded to her door, and pressed the intercom button.
“Chief Raven? Anything wrong?” Virginia Seymore’s voice came through the speaker.
“I’m up . . . and moderately sane for the moment. I just want to walk around a bit. Maybe swing my arms and pace.”
“Check with me at the station.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The door buzzed softly and clicked before Karla stepped out into the illuminated hallway. She glanced to her left at the mysterious gray door that blocked the end of the hallway. Her thoughts centered on the woman they called Gray. How she had worked so competently on the doohickey, as if she’d been building machines like it all of her life.
“Hope you know how lucky you are, bitch. The Skipper really thinks he can help you.”
She turned, padding down the hallway on bare feet. As she passed the doors, she considered the other inmates. Of course she’d like nothing better than to beat on Winny Swink for a while before she choked her down for being an arrogant ass. Talavera? She barely registered. A civilian, too damn smart for her own good, and soft at that. Trying to slit her wrists on the Capitol steps because her research had killed a bunch of bad guys? Shit. How freaking silly could a bitch get?
Karla sauntered up to the nurse’s station at the end of the hall. The big security door beyond it was closed for the night, sealing off the women’s wing from the rest of Ward Six. She leaned on the counter and waited while Virginia Seymore filled out something on a clipboard.
“Let me guess, you’re making a note of the fact that I’m out of my room.”
“Let me guess,” Seymore repeated playfully. “You’re right.” The RN put her pen down and turned. A wizened woman of perhaps fifty, she adjusted her reading glasses; the knowing brown eyes in her round face took in Karla’s attempt to look nonchalant.
“Flashback?”
“Happens.”
“Want something for it?”
“Nope.” She flexed her fingers. “Skipper dragged it up from the depths. Kind of like hauling a corpse up from the bottom of the bay.”
“That man’s a saint.” Seymore gave Karla a studied look over her reading glasses. “I just hope all of you know how much he cares.”
“He was so worried about Gray that he didn’t notice when I stole his stapler. Guilt got the best of me, and I left it with Janeesha on the way out.”
“He thinks he might have had a breakthrough with Gray. The whole staff is talking about it. That man would offer himself on the cross if he thought it would help any of you.” Seymore pulled at her nurse’s uniform as if it were binding. “Dr. Ryan hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in days. He only clocked out a half hour ago.”
Karla glanced up; the clock on the wall read 02:33. “What’s the Skipper’s problem?”
“Outside of the normal headaches he gets running this place?” Seymore tilted her head in the direction of the hallway. “I’d say it’s Gray. I’ve been keeping an eye on her all night. She’s got that contraption of hers looking like something out of a Transformer movie with all the bits and wires. She blew her breaker a couple of times today, and Megan Holly worked overtime to fix it. Something about boosting the power.”
“What do you think, Virginia? Is letting her build this device a good idea, or is the Skipper just as nuts as the rest of us?”
Seymore propped her chin, tapping her fingers on her lips as she studied the monitor. The screen was out of Karla’s sight where she leaned on the counter.
“Gray’s obsessed. Still up and at it,” Nurse Seymore told her. “She’s got that one wire, and she touches it in a pattern, almost a rhythm, to that other coil of wire. Then she’ll stop, turn the machine slightly, like reorienting it, and go back to tapping. Since I came on duty, she’s almost made a quarter turn.”
“Almost ninety degrees,” Karla said thoughtfully. “But I mean it’s not a radio, right?”
“Whatever it’s doing, there’s some kind of magnetic field around it, but it’s not broadcasting radio waves. Some of the techs know radios.”
“And what does the Skipper say?”
“He thinks that somehow he’s found a way to crack her out of whatever psychosis she’s in. Maybe enough that he can find a handle to lead her back to reality.”
“The man’s got faith, I’ll tell you that.” Karla slapped the counter. “Thanks for the talk, Virginia. I guess I’ll go back and lock myself in with my flashbacks again.”
“You sure you don’t want something, Chief?”
“No. Skipper said he’s got faith in me. Maybe it’s time I tried to live up to it.”
“Not if it means you’re hurting yourself, Chief.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She made three steps down the hall before Seymore called, “Bring it back, Chief.”
“Huh?”
“The box of paperclips. The one that was just under the lip of the counter.”
Karla made a face, stepped back, and handed over the box. Never knew when a person might need paperclips. All kinds of things could be made out them.
“Didn’t mean to do that.”
Seymore tonelessly said, “I know.”
Karla plodded back to her room and stopped as she studied Gray’s thick security door. Here it was, middle of the fucking night, and the yellow-haired bitch was tapping wires against some electrical gizmo?
“Woman, I don’t know what your problem is, but I hope for the Skipper’s sake that he hasn’t just given you the equivalent of handing a SEAL a paperclip.”
She was reaching for her door when the first peculiar ripple ran through her—like bobbing on an unseen wave. She blinked, having never felt anything quite like it. Then the prickling sensation began, literally a thousand electrified ant-feet charging around on her skin. Her unruly black hair crackled faintly as it stood, gooseflesh rising on her arms, legs, and back.
She heard a muffled pop.
An instantaneous flash of euphoria jolted her, followed by a sinking in her stomach. Weightless?
The world went black. Karla heard more than felt herself thump against the floor—knew that sensation: as if her strings had been cut.
The disorientation receded, and Karla came to. Her entire body tingled the way it would when recovering from a combination of intense orgasm and electrical shock.
She wondered when the lights had gone out and scrambled to her feet. Swaying, she put a hand on the wall. “Hallway,” she whispered. “Women’s wing, Ward Six.”
She felt for Gray’s door, surprised to feel a high-frequency vibration. It surprised her enough that she ran her fingertips along the metal as it faded.
“Okay, what the fuck just happened?”
Karla shook herself, concentrated on breathing, and started back down the hall. Whatever was wrong, the nurse’s station needed to be secured first. Then she could start figuring out the rest.
She was almost there—counting doors as her fingers brushed the left wall—when the lights flickered and came on again.
“Hello? Hello?” Nurse Seymore was saying into her telephone.
“Virginia?” Karla called. “You all right?”
“Chief? Yes. Fine. Did you feel that? Like an earthquake tremor, huh?”
Karla frowned. “Didn’t feel any quake, but that weird prickly sensation? That was new. Not exactly like sticking my finger in a light socket, but not all that different, either.”
Virginia glanced up from her phone, a deep frown incising her forehead. “Prickly sensation? Light socket?”
“You didn’t feel that?”
“Only a kind of shiver like static electricity, you know? And all the monitors are out.”
“Yeah, well, I can tell you, it was nothing like that on my end of the hall.”
“Must have been a lightning strike.”
“. . . Maybe.”
“Go to bed, Chief. Somebody from the central . . . Ah, wait. Monitors are on again. Yeah. Must have been a lightning strike. Funny we didn’t hear the bang.” She leaned forward. “And if you said it was more . . . What the hell?”
At the tone in Nurse Seymore’s voice, Karla leaned in through the opening, balancing her hard belly on the counter and craning her neck to stare at Nurse Seymore’s monitor. She recognized the room, having seen it just that afternoon in the Skipper’s office. The weird drawings on the wall, the piles of paper, the bits and pieces of electrical equipment, were Gray’s.
Seymore reached out and turned a knob. As she did the camera panned this way and that. “Where’s the doohickey? And what did she do with the desk it was on?”
“Even more to the point,” Karla said thoughtfully, “where’s Gray?”
Seymore’s fleshy hands did something with her mouse, and the scene shifted to a small bedroom, the walls covered with more of the odd mathematics and short phrases in oddly rendered block letters. “That’s her bedroom.”
“Well, I’m not seeing her unless she’s under the bed.”
“Sensor would have told me. She must be in the bathroom.”
She changed cameras. The small bathroom was empty.
Desperately, Seymore switched back to the main camera, shooting this way and that around the room. “Where is she?” Her voice rose, louder. “Where the hell is she, Chief?”
“Maybe you’d better get security on the line, Virginia. ’Cause Gray sure as hell might have found a way to hide her skinny little ass in there, but that machine is something else.”
“She can’t be goddamned gone!” Nurse Seymore cried.