Kill Decision(72)

An attractive woman with blond hair did a double take at the ski-masked McKinney, but Odin barked, “Ignore her. Keep working.”

The woman immediately resumed what could only be described as set dressing.

Odin stopped and McKinney came up alongside him.

Two young men were adding finishing touches to what was a frighteningly real reproduction of herself—complete with hair and eye color. It was a simulacrum of her sitting at a desk, hands on her own laptop keyboard. Her twin wore a green polo shirt and jeans. One of the special effects artists was using an airbrush to touch up her neck, while the other one concealed wires beneath a mat on the ground.

“This is creepy as hell.”

The men looked up at her. One of them smiled. “Thanks.”

“What are the wires for?”

Odin answered. “Body heat. We know the spotter drones use IR, so your decoy needs to match the thermal signature of a human being. Between that”—he pointed at the iPhone sitting on the desk—“your cloned phone, your malware-infected laptop, and your physical likeness, we should be able to lure this thing in.”

One of the artists pointed. “Odin, check this out.” He plugged a wire in, and McKinney’s twin’s fingers clattered on her keyboard.

“Ha!” Odin chuckled. “Nice touch, Ian.”

McKinney’s mouth was dry just looking at her sacrificial twin. “When does this all start?”

“A few hours from now, I’ll have your laptop ‘accidentally’ log on to a mobile broadband tower overlooking Interstate Seventy, at the top of that hill.” Odin looked out at a distant antenna tower surrounded by fencing atop a nearby ridgeline. “That should let them know you’re in the United States. And where.”

“And what do you do if something comes?”

Odin studied the sky. “Let’s get some breakfast. . . .”





CHAPTER 18

Firestorm



Falling asleep in the cargo bay of a C-130 was like trying to catch some shut-eye on the undercarriage of a passenger train. Even after three hours she hadn’t managed a wink. McKinney stared out of one of the few round porthole windows, crystals frosting its edges. She could see a wide, barren canyonland below of eroded basins and distant brown mountains in the moonlight. The plane looked to be about twenty thousand feet up. It was a crisp, clear winter night.

Odin glanced over at her and spoke into his headset microphone. “We’ll give it another twelve hours, and then change crews at Hill Air Force Base.” His expression suddenly changed. He stopped and touched a hand to his headphones, listening to something she couldn’t hear in her radio.

She searched his expression. “What is it?”

“Something is here.” Odin turned to the others and circled his hand. “All units. All units. Bogey approaching White Sands Base at three o’clock.”

The radio crackled. It was Foxy’s voice—coming from farther forward in the C-130’s payload bay. “No unidentified radar contacts, Odin. The sky and ground are clear.”

Odin looked to Foxy across the pallets and the length of the cargo hold, talking on radios even though they could see each other. “Negative. I just got a transmission from Huginn. He’s got a positive contact.”

McKinney looked around and noticed she hadn’t seen Odin’s ravens on board. She gave him an incredulous face. “Huginn and Muninn are talking to you.”

“Yes.” Odin grabbed his rucksack from an overhead stowage rack and rummaged through it to produce a ruggedized tablet computer. “They’ve been on the ground at White Sands Base for over a day. I’m in contact via satellite radio.”

“You’re talking to your ravens over a radio?”

He nodded as he booted his equipment. “Training. They communicate direction, distance, and type of contact. Whatever this is, it’s airborne, and coming in from the east. Navy SEAL teams command attack dogs via headset commands—the only difference here is that ravens are more intelligent.” He logged on. “And can see and hear for miles and cover vast areas over any type of ground without being detected.”

Foxy’s voice came over the radio channel again. He was examining a tablet computer of his own over by the flight deck doorway. “The only radar contacts the techs have in the east are dozens of miles out. American Airlines Flight 733 from Denver to Salt Lake City forty miles out at thirty-eight thousand feet, and two private aircraft, one eighteen miles out, heading north at four thousand, and another at twenty-two miles out heading southwest at five thousand feet. You sure it wasn’t our MQ-1 they saw?”