A Sample from

Call Sign: Raven, Book 1

The Joshua Experiment

Madam Green-Eyes had just started to squirm, then rolled onto her left side facing me and tried to catch her breath.

I watched her, still half-expecting some kind of attack, and switched the nine-mil to my left hand and pointed it at her face. After picking up my empty Magnum with my right and shoving it into my right coat pocket, I switched the nine-mil back into my shooting hand and quickly glanced around to make sure no one else was sneaking up on me.

The boy was still hobbling toward me despite all the gunfire of the last handful of seconds, and Shawrinique was smartly running away up the sidewalk. I grabbed Madam Green-Eyes’s purse, intending to find her hidden weapon, and dumped the contents onto the sidewalk. There was no weapon. Just woman-stuff—paper and pen, eyeliner pencil, powder kit, lipstick tube, chewing gum, keys, and the cell phone she’d dropped back in when I bounced her off the ground.

That’s when it occurred to me that all of the agents had been getting out of the SUV, looking at Raven as if they expected him to be exactly where he was, yet none of them were weapon-ready. The big dude had pulled his gun fast, and the female federal agent seemed stunned by my presence.

Regardless, I braced my nine-mil in a two-handed grip and brought it up in Raven’s direction, ready to take out anyone else who had a specific interest in my mentor. To my surprise, he hadn’t taken cover behind his armored door and hadn’t brought up a weapon to join in the wild fray. Instead, his attention had shifted to an airborne projectile with a look of panic on his raised face.

Raven pivoted and dove into the BMW, leaving the driver door open, as I glanced skyward and saw the impossible. The plume of smoke made a sudden right turn two thousand feet above me, then made another course correction and streaked back down toward its target—Raven’s car.

He must have known he couldn’t run far enough or fast enough to escape the coming blast and made a snap decision, trusting the armored car could survive an RPG attack. It was designed to withstand several grenade impacts so surviving a single RPG hit seemed reasonable. That’s why I’d bought the damn thing.

I looked back at the white convertible just to confirm what we were dealing with and could see now that the tubular weapon was not an ordinary RPG launcher. The tube was longer and fatter, some kind of high-explosive ordinance, armor-piercing. They’d want to be sure to kill their target with the first round. But RPGs were inexpensive heat seekers with no onboard guidance systems. How the hell could it have found its target when accidentally launched straight up into the air?

Suddenly, the complexity of the trap Raven and I had walked into became crystal clear. The government agents were there for Raven. They hadn’t expected two of us to show up. That’s why they hadn’t been watching my side of the street. They clearly were not a tactical team because they had no SWAT backup. Maybe they simply wanted to question him. How they’d gotten an earlier meeting time out of him, I could not fathom.

Some other adversary had set up the killing trap and knew about Raven and about me. Raven had flown in to La Guardia from DC, and they knew exactly where and when he would be arriving and my location all along. They’d sent Mr. Uzi to take me out from behind and arranged for the two guys—mercenaries, from the looks of them—in the white convertible to take out Raven’s car. This adversary clearly didn’t care about innocent collateral damage.

All of five, maybe seven seconds had passed since the first gunshot. Now I watched the missile’s exhaust streak down toward the BMW. It wasn’t like in the movies where the hero would see death streaking toward him and have time to run across the street and dive behind a brick wall just in the nick of time. There was nowhere for Raven to escape to and nothing I could do to help him. All I could do was save myself and even that was not guaranteed because I was too close to the coming blast.

Dropping my Glock 9mm, I reached out to the teens still wrapped in each other’s arms and yanked their arms. They landed on top of me, but I rolled over on top of them as I grabbed the green-eyed woman to keep her pinned down behind the white convertible car.

My cell started its third ring.

DING-ding! “You have—”

The digital woman’s voice was cut off as the missile destroyed Raven’s cell.

Along with the deep boom of the explosion, I felt a tremendous surge of hot air and then heard a cacophony of things around me breaking and shredding. The convertible was slammed over onto its side by the blast and would have flattened us except for the street pole that stood between us and the car. People had been screaming either in panic at the sudden explosion or in delayed reaction to the gunfire, but their screams were suddenly silenced. Metallic whistles pierced the air as thousands of bits of razor-sharp shrapnel sliced through everything and everyone in its path of destruction.

I replayed in my mind my last vision of Raven. My car had become his tomb.

I suddenly thought about the reason I was in this messy predicament and glanced back to where I’d last seen the kid, but he wasn’t there. Nothing remained of the front of the clothing store where I’d last seen him. The remainder of the glass display case that hadn’t been destroyed by Mr. Uzi was now completely obliterated by the concussive force of the blast.

The killers had succeeded after all. The boy was dead.