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  Tolevi glanced around, trying to find some sort of weapon. But it was too late; the butcher dashed across the yard, sliding next to him.

  “говно!” yelled the Russian. “Shit, holy shit! What is that?”

  It was one of the little bots, the Groucho, walking on six legs toward them.

  The commando took aim.

  Tolevi jerked around. “Duck!” he yelled to the butcher.

  110

  The box—that same moment

  Massina saw the soldier taking aim at the mech.

  “OK, now,” he said as he pressed the button, detonating the device at the rear of the robot.

  The screen blanked with the explosion. Massina looked over at the sitrep. None of the men near the truck moved.

  He directed the UAV to fly closer to the front of the house, then keyed the command for Groucho 1, directing the bot toward the rear of the Russian position there.

  “Tell them help is coming,” Massina told Johansen.

  111

  North of Donetsk—simultaneous

  The wounded Russian heard the crashing noise at the back of the shed over the din of the gunfire up the hill. It surprised him—he wouldn’t have thought a girl and two little boys could break the damn thing down.

  He struggled to get to his feet. He was supposed to kill them if they escaped. Truth be told, he didn’t want to. But orders were orders.

  His legs were wobbly. He’d been struck by two bullets. One had merely squashed itself against his bulletproof vest; it had given him a bruise but not much else. The other had gone into his thigh. He’d lost a decent amount of blood, though the injury didn’t figure to be life threatening.

  Damn Ukrainian bastards. Damn Putin for sending us here.

  An odd contraption turned the corner as he approached. It was metal, alien, something from outer space? It had claws.

  The soldier raised his gun and fired. His first bullet missed. His second hit it square in the body.

  The thing didn’t stop. It sped full into him, claws like spears digging into his chest.

  Falling backward, he lost his rifle.

  Chelsea charged after Peter as the bot pushed its “hand” down on the Russian’s chest. The kids ran in front of her and started kicking him.

  “No, no,” said Chelsea, scooping up his rifle. “Leave him. Don’t kill him!”

  They shouted something at her that sounded like norham jushua. She gathered they were saying he was a bad man or evil.

  “That’s all right. Leave him. He’s hurt. Come on.”

  She started in the direction of the van, following Peter as he headed toward the second Russian.

  Someone yelled, and then there was a shot. Chelsea grabbed the children close and pushed them with her to the ground, watching Peter rush forward toward the commotion.

  A second later she heard a familiar voice yelling from the woods.

  “It’s me!” shouted Bozzone. “I know you’re here if Peter is. Are you all right?”

  Better than all right, ballerina girl, laughed her father in her head.

  Chelsea jumped to her feet.

  Tolevi pushed himself up from the dirt. The butcher was still on the ground.

  “Asshole,” he yelled, stomping his wrist to release the pistol. He grabbed it, then took hold of the back of the butcher’s shirt.

  Something blew up in the front of the building.

  “We’re here, we’re here!” Tolevi yelled, running around to the side. The last thing he needed was that idiot White shooting him. “The butcher is with me! The butcher is with me!”

  112

  Boston—about the same time

  The doorbell rang.

  Borya looked up at Mary Martyak.

  “Think we should get it?” asked Martyak.

  “Yes, of course,” said Borya, putting down her phone. Chelsea had had to hang up but had told her to stand by.

  Stand by.

  Borya left the phone on the table and ran to the door.

  “Who is it?” she asked, pulling it open.

  “Hey there, Borya,” said Johnny Givens. “You left this at work.” He held up the backpack.

  “Oh wow, I totally forgot it.”

  “Hello, Johnny,” said Mary Martyak from inside.

  “Mary.”

  “Come on in,” said Borya, grabbing Johnny’s hand. “I just talked to Chelsea.”

  “You did?”

  Across the street, Medved and the Russian intelligence operative got back into their car.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” said Medved. “Stratowich should be able to keep his mouth shut until then.”

  “He better.”

  “You’re welcome to get rid of him, as far as I’m concerned,” said Medved. “Take him and Tolevi out. I’d sleep better.”

  “What makes you think I’m not going to?”

  Medved nodded. There was a little too much menace in his companion’s voice, he thought, the sort of tone that hinted he would be next.

  “Let’s go to my club and have something to drink,” Medved said. “Relax with some wine and girls. Tomorrow is another day.”

  “Tomorrow, yes,” said the man. “Tomorrow.”

  113

  The box—around the same time

  They were in the trucks, all of them, including Bozzone and Porter, both of whom had been shot.

  The butcher’s hands and feet were trussed, and Tolevi was not being very gentle with him.

  Massina looked over at Johansen.

  “They’re good,” said Johansen. “They’ll make it.”

  “Who is the butcher, really?” said Massina.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He didn’t want to be rescued. He had a gun on Tolevi. You can see it in the videos. And Tolevi tied him up.”

  “He did want to be rescued. At one point.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The Russian SVR officer who was involved in planning the Ukrainian invasion,” confessed Johansen. “The rebels got tired of him and put him in their prison. He sent a message through his brother that he wanted to defect.”

  “Does anyone else on the team know that?”

  “It’s need to know. And they didn’t.”

  114

  North of Donetsk—about the same time

  Tolevi had a strong suspicion about what was up, but there was no way to be sure until it played out. And the only way for that to happen was to pick up the brother as planned, because otherwise they’d never make it through Ukraine. So he drove to an intersection two miles from the compound and waited for the butcher’s brother to appear.

  It took nearly twenty minutes.

  “Hop in,” Tolevi said, opening the side door of the van. “We’re running a little late.”

  The butcher’s brother climbed in. Tolevi pointed to the lumpy frame under the blanket in the back. “He’s unconscious, but OK. We’re letting him sleep”

  The brother yanked a pistol from his belt. “Bastard,” he yelled, shooting at the figure below the blanket.

  He got off three shots before Tolevi and one of the CIA paras managed to get the gun away from him. They wrestled him to the side, then searched him for weapons. They found a small 9mm at his back and a radio.

  The para tied him up.

  “Why?” asked Tolevi.

  “He’s not my brother. I am working for SBU—Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny.” The Ukrainian special service—in effect, their FBI.

  “No shit,” said Tolevi. “But I will say you guys look a lot alike. You could be brothers.”

  “That’s why they sent me, no? I was a colonel in the army. They came to me. We have worked on this six months, more.”

  “Why?” asked Tolevi.

  “He’s one of the barbarians who set up the invasion. He was so despicable, even the rebels couldn’t deal with him. They put him in the prison to keep him safe. A lot of them wanted to kill him. He was in the house by himself.”

  “Why didn’t you just b
low up the prison?”

  “We’ve tried. We couldn’t get him ourselves.” He spit on the blanket. “We knew the Americans could. I’ll help you get across the border. I owe you.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but this ain’t him.” Tolevi pulled off the blanket, revealing a pair of duffel bags, a backpack and some rolled towels. “Don’t worry, though. He’ll pay for his sins many times over.”

  115

  Kiev—six hours later

  Getting to the border was easy, even though none of them trusted the directions the butcher’s brother had laid out. Dan found a road, and a bribe to the Ukrainian guard saved them the trouble of shooting the poor bastard. Once across, they changed the plates so the vehicles looked like government trucks, and they were left alone.

  The “brother” did look an awful lot like Olak Urum, Tolevi thought. But in reality he was a colonel in the Ukrainian intelligence service, which had concocted an elaborate plot to get the butcher killed in revenge for the many deaths he’d caused. Ironically, just like the butcher, he had started his career in the Soviet KGB.

  Takes one to know one.

  Now the butcher was coming back to the U.S. anyway, where he’d detail Russia’s lies for the world.

  They drove for several hours before reaching Kiev and the airport. The plane was waiting in the commercial area. The guards there—all CIA—whisked them to the tarmac. Neither the butcher nor his brother, both sleeping with the aid of a heavy dose of propofol, objected at all.

  They left the Ukrainian in the back of the van. The butcher was carried onto the plane in a stretcher. It was a 737 registered to a South African airline—according to the papers, at least.

  “We got everybody?” asked White as the last para boarded.

  Asshole CIA officers, thought Tolevi. Can’t even friggin’ count. But they always got to be in charge.

  Screw him.

  A million bucks.

  I think Johansen owes me a bonus on this one. Call it entertainment tax.

  How much would one of these planes cost?

  Chelsea stood next to Bozzone as he was helped into his seat. He’d taken two slugs, one in the arm and one at the side of his chest, deflected by the ceramic plate in his bulletproof vest. Both he and Porter had been treated by one of the paras; both were going to be fine.

  “More than you bargained for, huh?” Bozzone said as he sat down.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Guns. You didn’t expect that, right?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “They said it would be dangerous. Were you scared?”

  She had been scared. Yes.

  But . . .

  “I was scared,” she admitted. “But we made it.”

  “We did.”

  The plane began to taxi.

  “I’m ready to go home,” she confessed.

  “Me, too,” said Bozzone. “But it’s going to be dull after this. Real dull.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so. But I won’t mind if it is.”

  116

  Boston, twenty-four hours later

  Tolevi had the CIA driver drop him off two blocks from the house, claiming it was a security issue, even as the man protested loudly that they were not being followed.

  They were being followed, Tolevi knew—by the FBI, whose motives he was sure had far more to do with nabbing American-based mafya connections than protecting him.

  How much protection he actually needed, how much the CIA would actually pay him, what he would do next week—these were all unknowable at the moment, and not worth thinking about. What was worth thinking about—though perhaps even harder to contemplate—was what he would say to his daughter.

  She needed discipline, that much was clear. If she’d been a boy, he would have sent her—him—to military school straightaway.

  But then a boy would never have given him so many problems. A boy . . .

  He knew how to deal with boys. He had been a boy. But girls—he’d raised one and loved one and still she was a mystery, a deep, deep mystery.

  Chelsea, the robotics girl (as he thought of her), had sung Borya’s praises to him on the flight back, calling her a hero and a budding genius, puffing his father’s pride. But now that he’d had a little more time to reflect, he’d not only put the young woman’s praise in perspective—clearly the robotics girl saw too much of herself in his child—but he’d also thought about the possible implications of what his daughter had done. If the mobsters found out that Borya had actually been involved, she could easily be targeted; a young girl would be easily picked off, and those animals had no scruples, no scruples at all.

  Lose Borya? That will be the end. I will kill myself that day.

  No, the next day, the day after I have killed the beasts responsible.

  So she had to be kept out of harm’s way. And he had to discipline her for stealing from the banks . . . as clever as that was. And he had to punish her for breaking curfew and lying. And he had to protect her and nurture, feed this great intellect that apparently she was harboring, because a girl that smart had potential far beyond a normal child, so he owed not just her but probably the race to nurture it properly . . .

  He had to do so many things regarding Borya that he couldn’t settle on exactly what he should do, either in the short or long term, and certainly not in the two blocks that he walked from the car to the house. He thought of walking around the block a few times, but that would be useless—he wasn’t going to get anything settled in his mind out here. He had to go and talk to his daughter, just plunge in, let his gut lead him to where he had to go.

  And besides, it was cold.

  Shoving his hands in his pockets, Tolevi trotted up the steps. He was surprised to find the door unlocked.

  The foyer and front rooms were unlit, and only a dim light came through the hallway.

  “Borya?” he asked, biting back his fear.

  A second passed before there was an answer; in that moment, he felt ten times the anxiety he’d felt at his worst in the Ukraine.

  “In the kitchen, Daddy,” she said.

  Wary, Tolevi walked to the back of the house, muscles tense. The light flickered—Borya had placed two candles in the middle of the table.

  “Ta-dah!” she exclaimed. “Welcome home.” She wrapped herself around him, hugging him tight. “I missed you, Daddy.”

  “I missed you, too, baby.”

  “Where’s your bags?”

  “It’s a long story,” he told her. “But I’m here, safe and sound.”

  “So am I. I made chicken Marsala.”

  “Really?” Tolevi glanced at the stove. A covered grill pan sat on the top.

  “Have a seat,” she insisted. “And there are potatoes.”

  “Potatoes?” he joked. “I feel like a king. . . . Where’s Mary?”

  “She went home. I told her I didn’t need her.”

  “Borya.”

  “Now that I have a job and everything, I’m ready for responsibility.”

  “What job?”

  “Smart Metal.”

  “I thought that’s an internship.”

  “They can call it what they want. But they’re paying. I got you some wine. This is supposed to go with chicken.” Borya retrieved a bottle from the refrigerator. It was unopened—a good thing, thought Tolevi.

  “I invited Chelsea,” added Borya, “but she was too tired. Do you like her?”

  “Uh—”

  “I’m not trying to set you up,” Borya said quickly. “Just, she’s really nice. And smart.”

  “That’s good. Not as smart as you,” added Tolevi.

  “I’m sure she’s smarter,” said Borya, handing him the wine. “Can you open this?”

  In the flickering light, she looked exactly like her mother. Tolevi felt a tear forming at the side of his eye.

  “I need a corkscrew,” he said quickly, rising so he could brush it away without his daughter seeing.

  “We can talk about business tomor
row,” announced Borya, her back to him as she opened the stove to retrieve the potatoes. “Tonight, we’re celebrating, just me and you.”

  “Exactly,” he managed. “Exactly.”

  About the Author

  DALE BROWN is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, from Flight of the Old Dog (1987) to, most recently, Iron Wolf (2015). A former U.S. Air Force captain, he can often be found flying his own plane over the skies of the United States.

  www.dalebrown.info

  www.megafortress.com

  www.facebook.com/AuthorDaleBrown

  Twitter: @AuthorDaleBrown

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  Praise for New York Times Bestselling Author Dale Brown

  “Dale Brown is a superb storyteller.”

  W.E.B. Griffin

  “A master at creating a sweeping epic and making it seem real.”

  Clive Cussler

  “A master of mixing technology and action. He puts readers right into the middle of the inferno.”

  Larry Bond

  “Dale Brown is one of the best at marrying high-tech military wizardry with a compelling plot.”

  Houston Chronicle

  “Brown puts readers into the cockpit. . . . Authentic and gripping.”

  New York Times

  “The action’s relentless. . . . High-tension, all-out action-adventure . . . Brown out-Clancys Tom.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  By the Authors

  The Dreamland Series

  (with Jim DeFelice)

  Target Utopia

  Drone Strike

  Collateral Damage

  Raven Strike