by David Bruns
She drew her weapon, gathered her legs underneath her, and stood, bringing the handgun to bear on the typist.
Everett blinked. The girl behind the keyboard had a narrow, acne-pocked face and shoulder-length stringy black hair. She looked up at Everett in mutual surprise.
“Take your hands off the keyboard.” The girl raised her hands, her thin fingers splayed out like twigs.
“Stand up.”
The girl stood. “Chul,” she said.
“What?”
The reply came in English—excellent English, in fact. “His name is Chul.” Her eyes slid past Everett just as the midshipman heard the scuff of a shoe from behind her. Everett spun, firing her weapon once, twice, three times.
The first shot took Everett high on her left arm and slammed her back against the workstation. Her breath burst from her like an explosion. A second shot hammered her center mass, a punch in the gut that robbed her of any breath she might have had left. Everett’s legs lost all strength, and she slid to the ground.
A booted foot clamped over her wrist, pinning the handgun to the floor. The man looking down at her had dark features and hard eyes, half closed in a fierce squint. His lips twisted in a cruel smile.
“You’re Roshed,” she gasped. Her voice sounded breathy, distant, like she was hearing the words from someone else.
He nodded. The deep black hole of the gun muzzle swung toward her, and Janet Everett wanted to scream, but her lungs were empty. The linoleum felt slick beneath her cheek. She was numb, so still and cold, as the warmth of life fled her body.
The image of the man and the gun darkened in her vision. Her hearing, still dulled from her own shots, registered shots in rapid-fire succession.
But they sounded very far away.
CHAPTER 63
Yang-do Island, North Korea
Lieutenant Winkler was clearing rooms on the lower level with Sidney when his headset burst with a frantic call. “We’re under attack! Help!”
“Who is this?” he said.
“Riley,” the voice screamed back. “I’m in the control room. Brendan’s down—”
The sound of a single gunshot rang over his headset.
Winkler and his canine partner got to the control room in under a minute. Riley was just outside the control room door, his hand clamped high on McHugh’s chest. A trail of blood streaked the floor where he’d dragged the captain’s body out of the room.
“The midshipmen,” Winkler barked, “where are they?”
“Inside,” Riley’s round face was white as paper and his words came out in a rush. “Ramirez took my weapon and went back in. I heard shots … I don’t know about Everett. She was still in there … she went after them. There was a lot of shooting.”
Winkler cursed. The room had been cleared, but he should have left men with them anyway. He entered the ops center with his carbine up. “Midshipmen? Sound off. Where are you?”
“Over here, sir.”
Winkler made his way through the aisles of computer workstations until he got to the back of the room. Goodwin had both hands pressing down on Everett’s upper arm. The young woman’s eyes were closed, but she was still breathing. Leaked blood formed a dark red halo around her upper body.
Ramirez clutched a handgun with both hands, standing over her friends, her gaze slowly circling the room.
“They came out of nowhere, sir. I fired back … and they just disappeared.” Her hands shook; her face was pale. “Is—is Janet dead?”
Winkler felt for Everett’s pulse and was rewarded with a strong beat. He squeezed Goodwin’s hands, nodding for him to keep up the pressure. “She’ll make it as long we get her out of here soon.” He called for a medic, then raced back to Riley.
Winkler knelt next to McHugh. The bullet had entered near his neck where the body armor was lightest, shattering his collarbone. He felt for a pulse. Weak, but there. He slipped his hand behind McHugh’s neck, searching for an exit wound, and cursed when he realized the bullet had deflected down into the man’s chest. Sidney nosed the man’s body, whining.
“Keep the pressure on.” Winkler said. “The corpsman will be here soon.” He stood. “On me, Sid.”
Back in the room, next to the still unconscious Everett, Sidney sniffed at a spray of blood on the floor that held the imprint of a man’s boot. He whined.
The corpsman hustled in, displacing Goodwin. Winkler pulled Sidney back so he could inspect the boot print. A man’s shoe, judging by size. It had to be Roshed. “She winged him.” He looked around. “But where did he come from?”
The mids exchanged glances. “We don’t know,” Goodwin said, watching the corpsman work on Everett. “Janet saw something and knocked us down. Then the shooting started. It all happened so fast.”
Winkler turned to his canine partner. He slapped the floor twice. “Sidney, hunt!” The dog’s nose swept across the linoleum. He ranged through the aisle, Winkler following. They stopped at a computer workstation. “Someone was using this computer,” he called to the midshipmen.
Ramirez turned, her face alight. “They’re logged in?”
Winkler shrugged. “Looks like it.”
She brushed past Winkler, her expression hopeful. “Michael, this station is logged in as system admin. We’re in!” Her fingers flew across the keyboard. “I’m giving you admin privileges. Your password is … Janet.” She typed the last few keystrokes, then sat back.
Winkler followed Sidney as the animal continued along the wall, finally stopping at a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. The dog whined and pawed at the wall. “Must be a door here,” Winkler said. He knelt, searching for the handle.
“Midshipmen!” Riley’s voice was sharp, borderline angry. The two mids stood. “We’ve got a job to do. What’s our status?”
“We’ve got admin access, sir. We can figure out a way to turn this thing off.”
Riley avoided looking at Everett. “Good. Get to work.”
Winkler found the catch hidden on the second shelf. The bookcase swung away from the wall to reveal a concrete tunnel. He shone a light into the darkness, then pressed his throat mic. “This is Winky. I need a squad down here in the control room to clear out a rabbit hole.”
“Sir?”
Winkler turned back to the mids. Goodwin pointed at the wall screen. “They launched a cruise missile. Salvo Tomahawks.”
“Who did?”
“We did. The USS John McCain.” His finger trembled, and Winkler could see the rust red of Everett’s blood on his fingernails.
“What’s the target?”
Goodwin stared at him. “Us.”
Winkler felt a chill run up his spine. They had at least twenty men topside, plus helos. “You mean here? This island?”
Goodwin nodded. “ETA fifteen minutes. Give or take.”
“Can you turn it off? Retarget it?”
The young man shook his head. “They locked out the retargeting function. I can try, but we’re running out of time.” Goodwin looked at the screen. “If the system gets those Chinese nukes…”
Winkler spoke into his mic. “All units, all units, this is team leader. Be advised we have inbound Tomahawks for this location. ETA one-five mikes. Clear the surface and get the helos airborne ASAP.”
Acknowledgments flowed in fast. Winkler watched the two mids work. He owed one to Riley and his team for the warning. He’d seen firsthand the damage a conventional Tomahawk could do.
Sidney pawed at his leg, whining toward the open door. “Not now, boy.”
The dog persisted, and Winkler looked around. “Where’s Riley?”
The two mids looked up. “Don’t know,” said Ramirez, and they went back to work.
Sidney whined at the open door.
“Oh no he didn’t,” Winkler said.
Yang-do Island
Don Riley ran until he thought his heart would gallop out of his chest. He grabbed the rough wall, dragging in deep lungfuls of air. He hauled at the sweaty neckline of the heavy bulletproof v
est.
Brendan shot, maybe dead. He swiped his left hand across his face and realized he was crying. His Glock was still clenched in his right fist.
Pull it together, Riley.
Every rational thought in his head told him to turn around and let the SEALs handle this. They were the pros. It was their job to take this asshole down.
No. Rafiq Roshed had left a track of devastation in Don Riley’s life that must be accounted for. This was personal.
A disused launcher minus the missile loomed in his night-vision goggles, the sharp outline softened by a thick layer of dust. A soft glow shone from the space beyond the rotting hulk. He flattened himself against the vehicle and peeked around the edge. An ancient computer terminal, so old it had only a basic green CRT display, was running.
Roshed had come this way.
He searched in the dust for footprints and found them leading into another tunnel carved out of living rock. And there were two sets of prints: a man-sized boot, and then a smaller, narrower footprint. A woman? The prints were tangled, as if he was dragging the woman. A prisoner?
He dropped to his knee to get a closer look. The larger boot on the right side made a trailing scuff in the dirt. He touched a dark blot on the rock floor. Wet, sticky. Blood. He wasn’t dragging her, she was helping him.
Rafiq Roshed was injured.
He gripped his Glock and moved until his shoulder brushed the rough surface of the rock wall. With steady steps, he advanced down the corridor, weapon at the ready, every sense screaming for a sign of his prey.
No running, no tears, no drama.
It was time for payback.
Yang-do Island
Michael forced the image of a wounded Everett out of his head.
He focused on the monitor, trying to get his mind to see beyond the strings of information on the screen. The structure of the program, the way each piece fit together, was … elegant. He would like to have met the person who built this program. They would have a lot in common, he suspected.
“Michael, we need to hurry,” Dre said.
He ignored her. This could not be rushed. The answer was here—somewhere. His solution needed to be as elegant as the thing he sought to destroy. He needed to put the pin back in the grenade.
The genius of the virus was that none of it resided here in the bunker—it was all resident on the networks it had infected. Somehow this Roshed person had managed to upload the building blocks of his code onto the servers of his targets like a child who had hidden Lego pieces all over his house.
From those hidden pieces, he had built his own shadow command and control network. The resulting program was massive, and it was about to become alive. A feral network controlling some of the most powerful weapons on earth.
All of those pieces would need an assembly program …
“That’s it!”
Ramirez looked at him like he’d lost his mind. She’d rigged up a counter on her screen. The inbound cruise missile would destroy the satellite uplink, cutting off their only chance of shutting the program down remotely. If it received no direction from them, the virus—including the version they’d activated on the US Trident network—would revert to its training. Roshed had taught the Chinese system to execute attacks, but they hadn’t taught the US system anything. Their forces would be sitting ducks in the Chinese line of fire.
He read all this in Ramirez’s eyes—and she was afraid.
The counter read 3:02.
“The assembly routine,” Goodwin said. “They built this program from bits and pieces of code. There had to be assembly instructions, and if there’s instructions to assemble it, then—”
“We can tell it to disassemble itself,” she finished for him. Ramirez turned to the monitor. “There has to be a command sequence here.…” She blasted through screen after screen of information.
“Our forces tried to shoot down the cruise missile,” Winkler said from behind them. “No joy.”
The counter read 2:14.
“There’s too much here, Michael, help me.” She threw him a screen of data. He allowed it to spool, increasing the feed rate until the lines almost blurred in his vision. He could hear Winkler’s heavy breathing behind him, Ramirez’s staccato gasps at his side.
There! His brain registered commands used to search for and link together some of the junk code he’d been searching for back at Cyber Command. He stopped the data feed and scrolled backwards. What he found were more of the linking commands. “I think I found it,” he whispered.
1:47
Ramirez pushed him out of the way. She highlighted the chunk of code and threw it onto a new screen. She muttered to herself; it sounded like chanting. Goodwin couldn’t make out the words.
0:45
Her fingers paused over the keyboard, twitching.
“Send it,” Goodwin said.
Ramirez punched the return key. A confirmation box flashed on the screen.
“It’s gone.”
0:15
The dog whined and looked up at his partner. “It’s okay, Sid,” Winkler said.
The big man put his arms around Goodwin and Ramirez. Gently, he forced them to the floor, using his body to shield them and his animal partner. Sidney’s panting was warm against the back of Goodwin’s neck. He heard Ramirez muttering to herself again. This time he could make out the words.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven…”
Then a giant force smashed him flat against the floor.
Yang-do Island
Rafiq leaned even more on So-won, her thin frame nearly buckling under his weight.
His leg was on fire. The bullet from the girl’s weapon had passed through his calf, touching his shinbone. Probably not broken, but he could not put weight on it.
Still, they’d disrupted the Americans’ progress. There was no way they would be able to stop the program before it cracked the Chinese nuclear codes. And the hidden door let them make a clean escape.
So-won stumbled, forcing Rafiq to stand on his injured leg.
“Ahh!” he cried. He felt a flash of self-anger. He was old, feeble. The Rafiq of his earlier days would have laughed this injury off as a scratch.
And worse than that, he was afraid. He admitted it to himself now. His fear shadowed him in the dark, whispering in his ear.
“Look!” So-won said, pointing forward. A shimmer of gray in the darkness, the outlet of the tunnel. From there, all they needed to do was make it down the slope to the dock and they were free.
He increased their pace. So-won’s nape fit snugly in his armpit, like a human crutch. She was sweating and panting, but they were working as a unit.
“You’ve done well,” he said.
“We need to hurry, Chul—”
“I could not have done this without you.” He could smell the ocean now, taste the fresh salty air blowing in the entrance. They were free.
Her arm tightened on his waist. “You don’t understand. When we were in the control room I launched a—”
Rafiq heard a noise behind them and spun them both around. It sounded like the scrape of a boot on rock. Too late, he realized their bodies were outlined in the light of the cave entrance. He dropped to the ground and pulled his handgun, firing wildly into the darkness of the tunnel behind them.
So-won stood alone. Flashes sparked deep in the tunnel, and he saw one, two, three dark spots bloom on her jumpsuit. She toppled over.
Rafiq waited, his breath coming in sharp gasps. He pointed his weapon back into the dark. By his reckoning, he had one round left. His ears strained to hear something, anything to let him know his attacker’s whereabouts.
He held his breath, but all he could hear was the sound of the surf a few hundred feet below him. The soothing noise made him want to close his eyes.
His weapon still pointed behind him, he shifted his weight, wincing at the noise.
No response.
He slid half a foot toward the entrance. He tensed. Was that a moan? Or the sound of
the wind?
Rafiq was running out of time. The Americans would bring reinforcements. They would find the tunnel and come after him. He needed to move now.
Rafiq slid over and used the wall to pull himself to his feet. The smell of So-won’s blood mixed with the scent of the ocean. Not unpleasant to his senses.
He took a tentative step outside. In the starlight, he could make out the narrow trail down to the hidden dock. He took another step. The pain was not so bad now.
Rafiq Roshed banished fear from his heart. A moment of softness, nothing more. Fear was for the weak. He was strong, and he won. Always.
Another step.
A noise like a sustained crack of thunder sounded high above him. He looked up to see a bolt of flame dropping straight down from the heavens.
The world erupted in fire. He felt the kiss of heat on his cheek, and his breath was sucked out of his lungs. The fear he had so recently banished screamed back into his brain.
The shock wave from the Tomahawk cruise missile threw Rafiq Roshed’s broken body far out to sea.
CHAPTER 64
Undisclosed location in the Russian Far East
The hood came off Borodin Gerasimov’s head with a snap. His brain ached, and his mouth was gummy with thirst. How long had he been drugged? Hours? Days?
He squinted into the softly lit surroundings. He’d lost his glasses in the struggle, making everything appear as shapes and blurs in his diminished eyesight.
But the smells. Moisture, chlorine, scented oils … his heart seized with fear.
Aminev’s bathhouse.
He drew in a deep breath of the humid air and calmed his brain. If Alexi Aminev wanted him dead, he’d already be dead. The fact that he was here meant Alexi wanted something else. Money, Gerasimov decided. This was a shakedown.
One of the blurs in front of him moved, drew closer, and sharpened into Alexi Aminev’s bearded face. “Did you have a good trip, Borodin? Were my boys too rough on you?” His voice was so low it was almost drowned out by the white noise of the hot tub jets in the water behind him.
