“Don’t go ghetto with me, girl,” snapped Sugar. She had earned her nickname because of her extremely sweet nature, but she could be a demon when someone rubbed her wrong.

“I know what I’m talking about,” insisted Melissa. “I’m a nurse.”

“Yeah, and I’m the President of the United States.”

“I’ll handle this,” said Danny. “Shug, go see what Nuri’s up to. All right?”

“Anything you say, Colonel.” Sugar rolled her eyes and left.

A half-dozen small canvas camp chairs had been left in the building. They were the only furniture, if you didn’t count the boxes and gear the Whiplash team had brought. Danny pulled over one of the chairs and sat down in front of Melissa. She had her shirt pulled down, exposing the top half of her breast as well as her shoulder.

Danny concentrated on her shoulder, gently touching the large bruise.

“I don’t think popping it back into place is a good idea,” he said.

“Have you ever done it before?”

“Have you?”

“Twice.”

“On yourself?”

“No.”

“If the muscle and ligaments are torn—”

“I need to get Raven back. It’s in Duka. I’m the only one here who can get in there and find it.”

“That’s not even close to being true,” said Nuri, standing near the door. Sugar was next to him. “Who are you working for?”

“Who are you?”

“Nuri Lupo. 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.”

“They 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 the fighting over the past two years. Relatively peaceful now. Two rebel factions share control. One’s religious. The other’s just crazy.”

Nuri had been in Duka twice. He’d had dealings with a man named Gerard, who was the unofficial head of a band of rebels from a tribe whose name—phonetically, “Meur-tse Meur-tskk”—was bastardized by Western intelligence services into Meurtre Musique—“murder music” in French.

The group was actually a subgroup of the Kababish tribe, with a historical connection to French colonists or explorers who had apparently intermarried with some of the tribe during the eighteenth or nineteenth century. It was now more a loose association of outcasts and their families than an extended family, too small to have any influence outside the area where they lived.

The other group—Sudan the Almighty First Liberation in the Name of Allah, to use the English name—was larger, with informal and family ties connecting them loosely to other groups around the region. Like Meurtre Musique, the members were Islamic, but somewhat more observant. Despite their name, they were not affiliated with the powerful radical Islamic Sudan Brotherhood, which was a dominant rebel force in the south.

Meurtre Musique and First Liberation ran the city; the only government presence was a police station “staffed” by a sixty-year-old man who spent most of his time in Khartoum, the capital well to the west.

“You think we can get into the city with the Osprey?” Danny asked.

“Attract a hell of a lot of attention,” said Nuri. “We’d be better off going in low-key, or maybe waiting until night and scouting around.”

There was a short, loud scream from inside the hut. A string of curses followed.

“Sounds like Sugar fixed the princess’s shoulder,” said Nuri.

“What’s her story, you figure?” Danny asked.

“Besides the obvious fact that she’s a bitch?” Nuri shook his head. “Women officers are all one of two kinds—either they use sex to get what they want, or they play hard-ass bitch. She’s the second. We should get rid of her. Shoot her up with morphine and pack her off. The shoulder’s the perfect excuse.”

“This is her operation.”

“No, it’s our operation,” said Nuri. “Her operation ended when the aircraft crashed and we were called in to clean up. I don’t like the fact that it’s walled off, Danny. There is a huge amount here that they’re not telling us.”

“I know.”

Sugar came out of the building. She was smiling.

“Done,” she told Danny. “She didn’t want to wait for the aspirin to take.”

“She gonna be all right?”

“Phhhh. That attitude tells me she wasn’t all right to begin with. I’m gonna get some chow and get some rest, Colonel, all right?”