Maneuvering to the nearest side of the large main building, he braced his legs once more and took a giant leap up and onto the flat roof of the main building. He would not go through or around. It was much easier to go over.

The roof was dotted with riflemen and one of them was stunned to see Shahim’s determined face rise suddenly up out of the panicked night. Shahim had seen the guard waiting on the roof from the satellite image that was being relayed to him by the AI, and, in mid-flight he was already reaching down and drawing one of the twelve-inch hunting knives he had strapped to his calves. He landed in another roll to minimize the noise of the impact, just past the shocked guard, and immediately turned into the sights of the guard’s rifle. As the stunned man began to squeeze his trigger, the long, sharp blade of the heavy knife drove straight through his forehead, the force of it repelling the instantly dead guard backward toward the side of the building.

Shahim, still grasping its hilt, wrenched backward viciously, the motion pulling the blade free, and dragging the body of the guard away from its impending, noisy fall to the ground, to crumple, instead, quietly on to the roof where it had stood moments before.

It would, no doubt, have been easier and quicker to use one of his built-in weapons systems to burn a neat hole through one of the man’s eye sockets, but such a strange injury might have aroused unnecessary suspicion, and using the sonic punch when in midair would have thrown him back just as hard as it would have hit the soldier. No, primitive instruments would be preferable for now, until the intensity of events forced him to use more deadly tools.

* * *

The prime minister of Pakistan was incredulous. An attack? Were they mad? He had nearly four hundred men stationed in the compound as part of his personal guard, and more at a nearby barracks. Certainly, it had been attempted before, but all it had ever accomplished was the needless death of the few insurgents stupid enough to try it, and the loss of several of his brave guards.

He frowned at the captain of his guard for having dragged him and his family down to the bunker for what was, no doubt, another futile attack, and then turned to his wife and children, smiling reassuringly as he explained that there was nothing to worry about.

The sound of two of the rooftop guards hitting the top of the bunker after a forty-foot fall was little more than a series of dull thuds, but it nonetheless knocked the reassuring smile from his face.