1 Urasha apartment complex, unit 3B São Paulo district Luanda, Angola 2222 local time Kyle Ryan sat in the dark, his face lit by the blue-gray glow of his laptop computer screen. "Pull Me Under" by Dream Theater played in his headphones as he worked the keyboard with methodical, tenacious effort. His mind was fully immersed in the slipstream of data and the task at hand. In this state, his body felt separated-his consciousness tethered only by a biological umbilicus providing the fuel and oxygen necessary for computation. In this state, his body was nothing but a distraction. Only when hunger, dehydration, bladder pressure, or exhaustion reached an alarming level would he stop to address the constraint. Bodies were such a bother. Sometimes he wished he didn''t need one.
He''d argued he could do this work remotely from Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) headquarters in Virginia, but his boss had maintained otherwise and sent him to Angola. As usual, his boss had been right. The data and communications infrastructure in Angola would never have supported remote configuration. The hardware required for that did not exist in theater. This is why he and the hardware team were building out the infrastructure they needed in situ, including dedicated antennas, multiband transceivers, relays, cameras, and power supplies. And all of this was being done without permission or knowledge of the Angolan government. Their new stealth communications and surveillance network would operate entirely independently from any existing or future Angola Telecom infrastructure. AT''s recent partnership and multimillion-dollar contract with Chinese telecom giant Huawei meant that all traffic living on the state-owned network would be subject to Chinese scraping and interrogation.
The DIA certainly couldn''t risk or tolerate that. The Chinese were eating America''s lunch in a raging cyberwar that no one wanted to admit was happening. Just because the bullets being fired happened to be electrons instead of lead slugs didn''t make it any less real or any less important to national security. And when the DIA put out a call for capable volunteers to fight this war, like the Ryan that he was, Kyle raised his hand. While he performed device configuration routines and programming, his teammates bickered like little brothers on the comms circuit. "Dude, what the hell are you doing?" Cockburn said in Kyle''s headset. "You''re on the wrong roof." "No, I''m not," Waddle fired back.
"Yes, you are." "Bro, I''m not. Check yo-self before you wreck yo-self." "Seriously? That''s your go-to-Ice Cube?" Cockburn said. "I do what I do. You like it, great. You don''t, go listen to somebody else. I''m stickin'' with the people who stick with me.
" "Who said that?" "Ice Cube, obviously, fire dick." "You''re a toddler, you know that, right?" Cockburn fired back. "Takes one to know one." For Kyle, their bickering idiocy was the concentration-wrecking equivalent of being tapped repeatedly on the shoulder by a bony index finger. He sighed, stopped what he was doing, and shifted his gaze from the laptop he was working on to a second laptop, whose screen saver had activated due to inattention. He tapped the space bar to wake the machine, then pressed his thumb on the fingerprint sensor to authenticate. The display refreshed from the log-in screen to a bird''s-eye view of the one-square-mile area of Luanda where they were working. On the map, he saw one green dot with the tag cockburn and another a block away labeled waddle.
Kyle wasn''t sure which team member''s surname was more ridiculous. And though it was something he rarely reflected on, whenever he was in the company of Cockburn and Waddle he was glad to be a Ryan. "I can settle this debate," Kyle said, looking at the monitor. "Bravo is technically on the correct roof." "Ha, take that, Hot Willy," Waddle said. "I told you I knew what I was doing." "I said technically, Bravo. You''re on the right roof, but you''re installing the dish in the wrong place," Kyle said, addressing Waddle by his call sign before either man could chime in with a retort.
Despite all the smack talk and clowning around, they were professionals and never used their actual names on comms. "It was supposed to be positioned in the northeast corner; you''re on the southwest corner. So, in one sense, Alpha makes a point-you''d be closer to the correct install location if you were in the same quadrant on the wrong building next door." Kyle fully expected a snarky celebratory comment from Cockburn, but the hardware tech didn''t say anything. "Well, that''s a first-burnt weenie is speechless," Waddle said as Kyle watched Waddle''s green dot moving across the roof to the correct corner. A long, awkward static-filled pause followed. "I think you hurt his feelings," Kyle said, breaking the silence and cracking a smile. "Dude, no reason to get all sensitive.
You know I''m just messing with you," Waddle said, shedding his wise-guy bravado for the first time all night. Cockburn didn''t answer. A twinge of uncertainty flared in Kyle''s chest as he shifted his attention from Waddle''s green dot to Cockburn''s position indicator. The field tech had been walking north on Rua Cristiano dos Santos, and his dot had been moving on the map accordingly, but now the icon had gone still. "Alpha, sitrep. You all right, buddy?" Kyle said, eyes locked on the dot. No reply came. "Bravo, this is Omega-comms check," he said, hailing Waddle, just to make sure his transmission was going out.
"I hear you Lima Charlie, Omega," Waddle answered. "I''m going to check on Alpha. I should be able to see him from up here." "Copy that. Good idea." Kyle turned back to Waddle''s green dot, which had reversed directions and was now moving south on the rooftop toward the edge of the building. He looked back at Cockburn''s position indicator and saw that his dot was now moving in little fits and starts into an alley between two rows of buildings. For this operation, he had neither a satellite nor a drone providing imagery.
This was not a spec ops evolution. He and his team were cyber division, not shooters. "Bravo, it looks like Alpha is on the move," he said, picking up the bottle of fruit punch-flavored Bodyarmor sitting on his desk. "He seems to be ducking down an alley." "What the-" Waddle said, but his transmission abruptly cut off. At the same time, Kyle also heard what sounded like a gunshot, followed by a thud. "Bravo, sitrep?" he said, snapping upright in his chair and dropping the bottle without taking a sip. "Bravo, do you copy?" Waddle didn''t answer, and the green dot on the roof had stopped moving.
Fear blossomed in Kyle''s chest and the primitive fight-or-flight subroutines he so rarely accessed in the depths of his brain activated and took control. For complex multifactor problems like strategy and programming, the amygdala lacked the processing power to compete with the cerebral cortex. But for situations like this, it had no equal. It cut through analysis paralysis like a blowtorch through butter. The how, the why, the what-ifs . none of these things mattered. The amygdala processed the events of the past two minutes and simplified the logic into terms that even an ADHD brainiac like Kyle Ryan could not misunderstand: His team had been identified and targeted. Cockburn and Waddle were dead.
All that remained was a simple, binary decision: Run or die. Every fiber in his being wanted to bolt out of the apartment like a man on fire, but duty compelled him to perform one final task before evacuating. He pressed and held Ctrl + Alt + F1 for three seconds and a pop-up window appeared: Authenticate to erase all data. Kyle swiped the pad of his thumb across the fingerprint reader. The window refreshed. To proceed, press the "Y" key. To abort, press the "N" key. He tapped the Y key, whirled, and sprinted to the front door, leaving everything in the apartment exactly where it lay.
As he grabbed the doorknob, the invisible hand of caution stopped him from turning it. What if a gunman was waiting outside in the hallway for him? Or in the stairwell? "Shit," he muttered, wishing he''d paid more attention to the layout and details of the apartment building both inside and out. If his survival came down to a gun battle, then Kyle knew he was already dead. First and foremost, he wasn''t armed. And even if he were, he was no match against a professional. Yes, he was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and had fulfilled all mandatory firearm handling and shooting requirements, but he was no shooter.
Unlike his older brother, Jack Junior, Kyle didn''t inherit a single strand of Marine Corps DNA from his dad. During plebe summer, a midshipman upperclassman had berated Kyle with the line "It''s obvious there ain''t a single ounce of Navy SEAL in that skinny-ass body of yours, Ryan." As it turned out, the jab was true. A warrior, Kyle was not. But there was one thing he could do better than his big bro and probably ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet, and that was run very long distances very fast. As a junior, he ran a sub-twenty-four-minute 8K at the Paul Short Run cross-country course at Lehigh University, placing second at the meet. Even now, despite the.