Free Raven Strike by Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice Page A

too far for you to go, right? And Eritrea isn’t going to help. Because there’s one person in Eritrea, and you can never get ahold of him. And the embassy is useless.”
    “I can call Washington,” he told her. “And have you ordered back home.”
    “Look, there’s no need for us to spit at each other,” she told him. “Let’s work together.”
    Nuri frowned.
    “You can’t cut me out,” she told him. “Tell your boss I want to be involved.”
    “My boss?”
    “Colonel Freah.”
    “Danny’s not my boss. He commands the military people.”
    “And what are you?”
    “I’m Agency, just like you. We work as a team.”
    “Who’s in charge of the operation?”
    “We both are.”
    “There has to be one person in charge. One.”
    “You going to tell me how to run my operation now?”
    “I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m sorry.” She shifted against the wall. “Let me go into town with you.”
    “So the guys in the truck can recognize you?”
    “They never got close enough to see me. It was dark.”
    “What part of the company do you work for?”
    Melissa didn’t answer.
    “How long have you been covert? Or are you a tech geek who found her way over to the action side?”
    “I’m not going to play games,” Melissa said. “I work for Harker—talk to him.”
    “Look, give me the money,” he told her. “I need to go in right away. You’re in no shape right now. You should have taken more morphine. At least you’d get some rest.”
    “You’re a doctor now?”
    “Are you?”
    “I trained as a nurse.”
    Nuri put up his hands. She had an answer for everything.
    Finally, Melissa went over to the footlocker and opened it. She hunched over it, counting money out.
    “This ought to be enough,” she told him, handing over a wad of hundred-dollar bills.
    Nuri started to count it.
    “There are fifty,” she told him. “Five thousand.”
    “That may not do it.”
    “It’ll have to.” She slammed the top down with her right hand, pulling it halfway out of the sling.
    “You should get your arm fixed.”
    “It’ll be fine. You go and scout. OK. But I want to go on the mission.”
    “If there is a mission, that’ll be up to Danny.”
    “I thought he wasn’t your boss.”
    “He’s not. But he’s more objective than I am.”
    B oston managed to patch up Melissa’s motorcycle well enough for Nuri to ride it across the border into Elada, a medium-sized town in Eritrea, about an hour and a half away. He bought a counterfeit Rolex, some AK-47s, an old Colt service automatic, ammo, and two pair of khaki uniforms for a hundred American dollars; he could have shaved at least another ten off the deal if he’d had exact change.
    Finding a decent vehicle was a different story. Pickup trucks, even those in poor condition, were valuable and rare. Nuri wanted either two trucks, or a truck and Land Rover; he’d stick a few of the Whiplash people in the back of the pickup as bodyguards. But he couldn’t find anyone willing to sell. The best he could do was work a trade for a battered Mercedes sedan—his motorcycle, a thousand American in cash, and three stolen credit cards.
    The credit cards were Agency cards, disabled by MY-PID two minutes after the transaction. It would undoubtedly be at least a full day before the buyer found out: Elada didn’t have any ATMs, nor were there any in the rest of the country.
    The car ran decently, and came with three-quarters of a tank worth of diesel. Which was enough—Nuri drove it about five miles south to a field where the Osprey was waiting. Danny had decided to speed things up by flying it across to Sudan.
    “I have uniforms for two bodyguards,” Nuri told Danny as the Osprey took off with the car chained beneath its belly. “How about Flash and Boston?”
    “Boston can go, but Flash is going to stay with the aircraft in case we need backup,” said Danny. “I want to come.”
    Boston was imposing physically, but his real asset was an angry,