Read Online Raven Strike by Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice - Free Book Online

I spent six months out here, living with the rebels. I’ll tell you one thing, you’re damn lucky you’re alive. Riding out through those hills? American? Woman? Anyone who found you could have hit you over the head and hauled you back to their village. Ransom on your dead body would have set them up for life. And that’s if they dealt with us—give you to al Qaeda or one of the groups they support, you’d be worth a lot more.”
    “I can take care of myself.”
    “I’ll bet. Who do you work for?” Nuri asked. “Are you even authorized to be here?”
    “If my shoulder didn’t hurt so badly, I’d slap your face.”
    “All right, kindergarten time is over,” said Danny. “Sugar, get her some morphine.”
    “I’m not taking any morphine,” insisted Melissa.
    “If you want us to fix it, you’re getting a shot,” said Danny.
    “I have a job to do here, Colonel. I’m not doing anything that will endanger it. And I’m sure as hell not going to Alexandria or anywhere else for a hospital. I’m not leaving until we have Raven.”
    “That may be a while,” said Nuri.
    Danny looked over at Nuri. “Let’s talk outside,” he told him.
    Melissa grabbed him as he started to get up.
    “I need to do my job,” she told him. “I don’t want morphine. I don’t want to be knocked out. Give me aspirin. That’s all I need.”
    “I doubt that,” said Sugar. “Your muscles are in splint mode. Super hard. You need something to relax them.”
    “Just get aspirin.”
    Sugar glanced at Danny.
    “Try aspirin,” he said. “Can you get her shoulder back into place?”
    “I can try,” said Sugar. She sounded doubtful. “If her muscles relax enough.”
    “How about a half dose of the morphine?” asked Danny. “Just enough to loosen up.”
    “All right,” said Melissa. “Half a dose.”
    “T hey took the aircraft to an old warehouse building near a train line,” Nuri told Danny outside. MY-PID superimposed the locator signal on a satellite image of Duka and the surrounding area, projecting it onto a large slate computer Nuri had tied into the system. “The train line was built about a decade ago for some mining operation, but it hasn’t run in years. Most of the locals live in huts on the south and western ends of town, but people will squat in empty buildings all the time. We can’t really be sure what the hell’s going on there without having a look from the ground.”
    He moved his finger over the screen, increasing the magnification.
    “There were at least two different rebel groups in Duka when I was here,” Nuri went on. “They sometimes work together, at least to the extent that they don’t kill each other. Which is saying something out here.”
    “MY-PID have anything new?”
    “Nothing more than I’ve said. They’re really small bands.”
    “What about this Raven project? Is it related to the place, Duka?”
    “I don’t think so. There’s no connection with Li Han and the town. He may have been in the area, but he’s been working with the Sudan Brotherhood. They’re much farther south.”
    “So he’s out of the picture?”
    “Probably ran off,” said Nuri.
    “Anything new on Raven?”
    “Totally black,” said Nuri, with more than a hint of I-told-you-so. “Not available in any system MY-PID has access to either. I thought of telling it to go over the wall.”
    “Don’t,” said Danny sharply.
    “I didn’t.”
    Going over the wall meant telling the system to break into Agency computers and other systems that were supposed to be off-limits to it. Theoretically, the safety precautions built into the computer system—meant to prevent it from ever being used against the U.S.—would prevent this. But MY-PID had enormous resources, and Nuri was sure the system could get in if asked.
    Which he still might do. He just wouldn’t tell Danny about it.
    “What’s Duka like?” asked Danny.
    “Typical shit hole. Little city. Used to be about ten times the size but shrunk with