Intimate Danger. Amy J. Fetzer

this kind.

      Down the hall, teams worked on everything from lightweight liquid body armor to global positioning beacons implanted in military personnel before reconnaissance missions. Cool stuff. All to prolong lives in battle.

      The ACCESS DENIED icon startled her. Deny me? “Oh, I so don’t think so,” she whispered, spinning in the chair and attacking the keyboard.

      My technology, my business, she thought and went through the back door of the program. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, syntax and screens of numbers coming up, but Clancy saw through it, saw the program’s heartbeat.

      “You are completely toasted,” she muttered.

      Inside within seconds, she opened files, scanned the content, then went into another. She found a report with her name on it, but it was Dr. Yates’s documentation procedure for the implantation. Wasn’t surprising; they traded information all the time, and she barely glanced at it, about to close the file when she noticed the date. A month old. She didn’t get this copy.

      Orangutan implantation was two months ago.

      Her gaze flicked to Boris snoring inside his cage, then back to the screen. She scrolled and read, checking the vial numbers against the implant document.

      A chill slithered over her skin when she realized that Boris wasn’t the only test subject. They’d already used it.

      On humans.

      Two

      UAV Surveillance operations

      Arizona

      “Two minutes to target, sir.” It’s like playing a video game, Sergeant Jason Willager thought as he glanced at the satellite image and maneuvered the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. They were on loan to DEA, searching for drug traffic and fine-tuning this particular UAV, when analysts saw what they suspected was a Scud missile launcher hidden in the South American jungle. Jason didn’t have an opinion. His job was to move it where they told him and let the UAV do the job. UAVs had numerous capabilities. Several were sweeping over Iraq and setting off the insurgent bombs before they could detonate in a crowded mosque or market. Some dropped ordnance without a single soldier getting close to the target. They were safe to personnel, efficient and accurate.

      The only problem was, they weren’t invisible.

      The Predator model, with over a forty-two-foot wingspan and loaded with heat-seeking missiles for battle, was still a target as much as a jet. They didn’t make much noise, which gave them better stealth capabilities, but his baby, the Falcon, was smaller and lighter, and while it was armed with Hellfire missiles, more of a deterrent than tactical, its purpose was reconnaissance. She was a shutterbug snooping her way across the Andes along the Peru–Ecuador border. The Falcon could fly higher and faster than the others, and since it was linked to satellites, it had unlimited capability. The Trojan Spirit II Satellite up there was helping Jason along.

      He controlled it as if he were sitting in the cockpit. Of course, the Falcon didn’t have a cockpit at all. Beside him, four other techs in the thirty-by-eight-foot GCS, Ground Control Station, trailer in the comfort of AC and silence were doing the same thing somewhere else in the world.

      “Sixty seconds to target,” he said into the comm link to his bosses. They were watching the visual recon on a big screen in some undisclosed location. The information went out to several high-ranking officials. It wasn’t a concern. He’d trained two years to get this seat.

      “Forty seconds to target.” The digital camera detected the darkness of the area and automatically switched to high-resolution infrared. The Falcon was outfitted with night vision, infrared, and thermal. The recording never stopped from the moment it was in the air, but the first hours were nothing but flyover scenery. He maneuvered the craft over the appointed area. More than one flew in South America, just not on this particular part of the border. Ecuador was pretty tight with its border control and neutral about getting into Peru and Colombian drug cartel squabbles. In this area, nothing was safe.

      He frowned when something dark colored pierced the green of the jungle.

      “Sergeant, what is that?”

      “I don’t know, sir.” Immediately he maneuvered the UAV out of the direct path to the right and made the UAV climb. He turned the UAV so the cameras had a clear visual. It’s gaining speed, he thought, and in a heartbeat the visual relay went dead. He frantically worked the keyboard trying to bring it back. Great, the big cheese is watching and I screw up.

      “Sergeant, what happened?”

      “I think something shot it down, sir. I have nothing here, nothing.”

      He turned to another monitor and replayed the data, watching with a bunch of generals as what looked like the nose cone of a small rocket obliterated the UAV. He replayed it in slow motion, magnifying the last few seconds.

      Jesus. Tell me I’m wrong, and I didn’t just let a million-dollar aircraft be destroyed.

      “Sorry, sir. We have nothing. Not even beacons are active.”

      Completely destroyed, Jason thought. Yet that meant the wreckage and the two missiles were just waiting to be scavenged. Along with the evidence that the U.S.A. was snooping in another nation’s affairs.

      Subjects didn’t arrive at this facility in ambulances; they came in cages.

      The discovery settled inside her with a harsh weight before she realized this was why they were pressuring her to sign off on a completion. They needed to cover their butts because they’d already done it. Oh, jeez. Her tail would be in the fire if anything went wrong too.

      Human volunteers. Did they even know the dangers? Her mind filled with all the problems, the risks, and she started to get up to go find Cook or Yates and call them on it, but she stopped. If they kept this from her, what else did they do without her knowledge?

      Their betrayal worked under her skin, the wound tearing and burning to anger.

      Damn them. She stared at the computer. She needed to know more, anything, everything—and she knew where to find it. She drew in a lungful of air, fingers poised over the keyboard. This was a violation of the worst kind, and for a moment she asked herself why she was risking everything for four men she didn’t know.

      I created it. I’m responsible.

      She kicked off her shoes and plunged into accessing files, using back doors. She knew computers, especially military computers. She’d worked on them from inside the Pentagon. She pried into Yates’s personal files, and read the data about the men. Candidates, Yates called them. Names listed with the vial numbers this time. It made them real to her. Young men. God, who would volunteer for this? It was madness till it was thoroughly tested.

      Get off that horse, girl, it’s dead and buried.

      Implantation was a couple of weeks ago, status deemed excellent. No side effects. Like Boris. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was fine and she was concerned over nothing. Which would be a real feather in her own cap. Prove me wrong, she thought as she read Francine’s personal notes, written on an iPod, then downloaded, but it hadn’t been turned to type font yet. Her handwriting stank. But the last entry made her breath catch.

      Released for mission status.

      No monitoring? She closed all the files, erased the trace, and then went to level five, into the Pentagon. She was denied twice. That would start a trace to this computer. Her fingers flew over the keyboard so fast her hands hurt. She’d never get inside in time and went into the colonel’s file. Only problem was if he was sitting at his desk, he’d know it.

      Come on, give it up, Cook, she thought. This type of data wasn’t recorded, not with any easy access, but Clancy knew where she was going. I should have done this a long time ago. She scrolled and read, closing one only to open another.

      She found one under an odd title. Crash and burn. Someone had a sick sense of humor. She opened it. Colonel Cook was being kept apprised of the candidate’s