“Havoc Actual to Havoc Team,” I murmured. “I’m at the east corner. Count four security and two dogs.” I gave the locations of each and the direction of the foot patrol.

“Got them,” said Belle.

“Two more each in the towers.”

I switched the Scout glasses to low-light enhancement but otherwise normal vision. That made it easy to spot one of the two towers. They were really elevated platforms with camouflage canopies. They wouldn’t have dogs up there. Which gave us eight armed sentries but just the two dogs.

The challenge in situations like this is to decide where we fell on the force continuum. These guards might be bad guys, or they might be rent-a-thugs who merely worked for a bad guy. Killing them was not immediately justified. And I hate to kill a dog.

I slipped down from the ridgetop to study the video images in my tac-com. The little high-def computer screen was divided into different feeds, one from each bird, but I selected the overhead view from the bird circling the building at a hundred feet. What I was looking for was a blind spot where I could get close enough to ambush the foot patrol and attempt to take them and their dog out using a long-barreled, high-compression Snellig dart gun.

“Sandman only,” I told my team. “Verify my order.”

They did, and if I heard some reluctance in their voices, that was fine. I wasn’t feeling entirely charitable myself. Mercy and compassion had taken a lot of really bad hits lately. There was a cloud of darkness boiling inside me that took real effort to keep from filling my head with the kind of hatred that could erase all sentiment and humanity.

The order to use Sandman actually stuck in my throat.

It was, however, what I said. It was the only mercy I’d brought with me to Trstenik Island.

Not that Sandman is especially kind. It is a cocktail of chemicals built around the veterinary drug ketamine. It also has a little bit of BZ—3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate—to cause intense and immediate confusion, and DMHP—Dimethylheptylpyran, a derivative of THC—for muscle failure. And it has some benzodiazepines and chloral hydrate and some other goodies. We call it Sandman because if you get one hit from it, you go right down right now. No bulling your way through. You drop. Everyone does. And for the next couple of hours, you have intensely strange, disturbing, and—I’ve been told—weirdly erotic dreams. And by weird, I mean that one of the members of Havoc Team—the big kid from Orange County, Bunny—dreamed he was being seduced by penguins. And liked it. Says he has fond memories of that dream. Most people, though, have what can best be described as a bad trip. Monsters come out of the walls, memories warped into nightmares.