“All right,” Rapp conceded. “You’re rehired. But you’re on notice.”

Wick grinned and raised his middle finger.

“What’s next?” Coleman said. “Are there jet packs?”

“Jet packs? Um, no.”

“You guys have been promising me a jet pack since I got into this business. When are you going to deliver?”

“We can get them in the air, but the range is crap, sir. The more fuel you put in them, the heavier they get. It’s physics, you know?”

“What about those night vision eye drops?” Bruno McGraw said. “You’ve been saying they’re six months out for years now.”

“Those actually work,” the sergeant said. “But they make everything green and kind of hazy. So, you can see at night but only about ten feet before you can’t tell a human from a signpost. It’s coming, though.”

“Let me guess. Six months?”

“You said it, not me. Until then, let me show you something else you might be interested in.”

They trailed him up a dirt track toward an old cabin on a ridge. The sun was starting to get low on the horizon, bringing temperatures back down into the seventies and signaling the winding down of a day that had started before dawn. An interesting day, though. The march of technology had turned into a sprint and Rapp knew that sticking his head in the sand wasn’t an option. In a world where some dumbass who’d never picked up a rifle could take you out from three thousand yards, it was evolve or die.

The wood and asphalt-shingle structure looked like it was in the process of collapse, with no glass in the windows and no door in the frame. It contained a single room with a table in the middle and seven high-tech mannequins sitting or standing around it.

“I think you’re going to like this,” the DARPA man said, tapping what looked like an aerosol paint can centered on the table. “It’s basically a Taser grenade. Let’s say you want to clear a room with an unknown number of combatants. What do you do? Not many options. Probably your best bet is to throw in a flashbang and roll through the door hoping the enemy is sufficiently disoriented.”

“How does it work?” Rapp asked.

“Push the red button and in three seconds, twelve heat-seeking cables shoot out.” He snapped his fingers. “Everyone goes down just like that.”

“Bullshit,” Coleman said. “You’ve got enough power in that little can to take down twelve full-grown men?”

“We’ve refined the waveform. Less energy, more impact. But you don’t have to take my word for it. These dummies are heated to body temperature and have sensors in them that’ll give us electrical discharge numbers.”

“I’m not an engineer,” Rapp said. “I’m not going to bet my life and the lives of my team on a computer printout.”

“Sir, we—”