by Brian Nelson
Copyright © 2021 by Brian Nelson
E-book published in 2021 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Sean M. Thomas
Map and illustration by Amy Craig
Cover art by Josh Newton
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-0780-3
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-0779-7
Fiction / Thrillers / Technological
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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For my mother, the believer
First Freedom and then Glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption.
—Lord Byron,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV
The New York Times
new york, october 17, 2026
Turmoil in China
Protests Continue as Wave of Democracy Sweeps Globe
by R. N. Feldman
beijing—Protests and violence continued in China for the third straight week, with large-scale demonstrations spreading to more than a dozen cities. Tens of millions of Chinese citizens took to the streets again yesterday, demanding that the government meet a long list of demands including an end to government corruption, better environmental safeguards, release of political prisoners, and free elections.
The scope of the protests appears to be causing major rifts in China’s leadership, with President Zhao being conspicuously absent in recent days, and there are persistent rumors of a shakeup within the politburo.
China’s mounting crisis is being called a “perfect storm” by some experts, who say that many of the nation’s problems have been building for decades. But others point to the recent wave of similar changes across the globe. “On almost every continent—from South America to Africa, from Asia to Europe—we are seeing major shifts away from authoritarianism and toward democracy,” said Thomas Williams, former UN Ambassador. Williams cited recent regime changes in countries such as Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, and Venezuela as evidence of a “revolutionary transformation” of the geopolitical landscape.
“Some of these changes are coming from surprises at the ballot box,” Williams said. “Others from mass protests and strikes, some from armed rebellion, and still others from unexpected circumstances, such as the sudden death of Venezuelan President Muñoz.”
Professor Katherine Li of the Harvard Kennedy School agreed that when taken as a whole the changes amount to a fourth wave of democratization. “The tectonic plates are still shifting,” she said. “But if democracy really is taking hold in these countries, then this will be bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall and will likely be remembered as a moment when the whole face of the globe was dramatically reshaped.”
Prologue
God is American
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
—Robert Ingersoll
As Vice Admiral James Curtiss set the newspaper down on his desk that morning, he realized that he had become one of the most powerful men in the world. The evidence was right in front of him, spread out in black and white.
. . . A revolutionary transformation of the geopolitical landscape.
And the best part about it: nobody had a clue.
Yet he still wondered if they had gone into Venezuela too quickly. The left-wing media had cried foul, of course, saying it was a conspiracy, a black op by the CIA. But then again, they would have said that even if it weren’t true.
Ironically, this time it was.
The important thing was that there was no evidence. The autopsy of the dead president showed nothing more than common pneumonia, and the subsequent election results had been perfectly clean.
Still, he had to admit the op had been rushed and sloppy. And that was Curtiss’s own fault. He had told the Joint Chiefs they needed one more practice run, one more time to get the kinks out of the new technology before they took on China. But that was only part of the reason. The truth was Curtiss had wanted Muñoz . . . bad. Because Muñoz was the worst sort of third-world despot—arrogant, fanatical, and incompetent. He had run his oil-rich country into the ground, was responsible for mass starvation and the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people. But there was one particular fact that had sped Curtiss’s hand: Muñoz’s incompetence led to daily blackouts that killed dozens of patients in the nation’s hospitals every day. When the power went out, the older patients on respirators and the infants in incubators died in a senseless and completely avoidable daily purge. Yet his intel told him that the lights at the presidential palace always stayed on.
Curtiss couldn’t let that lie. He knew he should. As a soldier, it wasn’t his business to decide what was right or wrong. His job was to stay focused on what was best for America. But the thought of those senseless deaths had gnawed at him, so he used his influence to push the mission timeline. And that wasn’t all. Curtiss made sure that the “pneumonia” that killed Muñoz did so painfully slowly, giving him the terrifying feeling of perpetual drowning. Curtiss had ordered a nanosite transmitter and microphone put in Muñoz’s bedroom. The sound of the man’s suffering gave Curtiss nothing but deep satisfaction.
Curtiss knew that most people wouldn’t understand that, but to him it was a simple fact of life: some people needed to die. He just happened to be fortunate enough to be one of the few who got to decide who should remain among us and who should not. By a mixture of dedication, sacrifice, sweat, and luck, he had arrived at a critical moment in history—as the wielder of a technology that most people could only perceive as magic.
One thing’s for certain, Curtiss thought, global politics has never been quite so interesting.
Within the past four months, he and the Joint Chiefs had accomplished things that were unthinkable just a year ago. They had fixed many of America’s disastrous foreign policy mistakes from the previous thirty years as well as undermined half a dozen international scumbags in the process. After so many years of witnessing America’s decline on the world stage, they now had the technology to turn things around. The world was their oyster once more. Or, as his boss Admiral Garrett had said after the Cuba operation, “It looks like God is American again.”
And they were just getting started.
Once a new government was installed in China, Curtiss would move on to the Middle East, perhaps do a little tweaking in central Europe, then move on to the last domino, the great bear. The thought literally made his mouth water. Purging Russia of its kleptocratic system of oligarchs and former KGB agents—the ones who had yanked the country back into a totalitarian dictatorship just at the moment she was casting off the yoke of seventy years of Soviet rule—well, taking care of them would be the crowning achievement of his career.
Once that was done, Curtiss could finally retire knowing that he had done good, that he had made the world a freer, more open, more democratic place. That was what mattered to him. It would mean that all the terrible things he had done in his long career in the name of keeping America safe would have been worth it.
God is American again.
That wasn’t quite true, of course, but it was okay because the most powerful technology in the world was.
At that moment Curtiss’s personal iSheet rang. One glance told him it was the call he’d been waiting for. It was from the USS Gerald R. Ford strike group, presently off the coast of Angola.
The man on the other end of the line was one of the most valuable members of Curtiss’s team, which was saying something. As the leader of the Naval Research Lab, Curtiss had over three thousand military scientists and computer engineers on his staff. But in the last eighteen months, this man, Eric Hill, only twenty-seven years old, had been responsible for some of their biggest breakthroughs. No one understood the new science as well as he did.
Curtiss answered the call.
“How’s carrier life treating you?”
“Better than I’d expected. The food is surprisingly good, and I’m staying in shape. Although jogging eight miles a day on a treadmill is mind-numbingly boring.”
“Shit, you’ve got it good,” he said. “My first cruise was on a Cyclone class patrol boat, it was only fifty-two meters long—zero privacy, no gym, awful food. It was pure hell.” Curtiss laughed at the memory. “So what have you got?”
“Not much. The logging camp in Botswana was deserted. We flew two drone flights over the area but we couldn’t ascertain where they’d gone.”
Curtiss cursed under his breath. “Anything else?”
“Yes, some good news. Satellite intel found two other mining operations. One in Botswana and one in Namibia. We are currently underway and should be in position to fly over the Botswana camp by noon tomorrow.”
Curtiss nodded. “I know it’s a painstaking job. But each camp you knock off your list puts you closer to finding him.”
“I know. Don’t worry, our morale is high. We are all committed to this, especially me. It’s the least I can do.” Curtiss thought back to Hill’s harrowing mission to China. Just six months ago he’d been involved in a secret operation to infiltrate and sabotage China’s rival weapons program. What Hill was doing now would tie up the final loose end from that mission.
“Okay, keep me posted,” Curtiss said. “I know you can get this done.”
“Yes, Admiral, I will, and thank you.”
Curtiss hung up. They had been searching for two weeks but still nothing.
Despite all the amazing advances they’d made in the past eighteen months, when it came to this—finding one man—they were reduced to twentieth-century technology, satellite reconnaissance and drones.
Perhaps we haven’t made so much progress after all.
All in good time, he reassured himself. The technology would be able to handle a job like this soon enough.
That was the beauty of the new science, which was really the merging of three sciences—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. It was versatile. Insanely versatile, in fact. Why? Because it was alive and could evolve. The same technology that could grow into a synthetic virus to kill a dictator could also make a fighter jet both lighter and stronger, could protect a soldier from gunfire, and could make a young man want to protest against his government.
In theory there was nothing it couldn’t do.
And that was why the Africa mission was so important. It appeared simple—rescue a single man from a Chinese prison camp—but in many ways it was going to be the most audacious mission of all. For the first time they were going to use the new technology in almost every facet of the operation, from the aircraft that delivered the rescue team to their armor and camouflage. It would be their first taste of what he suspected all combat operations would be like in the twenty-first century.
Part One
The Raid
Chapter One
The Voice in the Darkness
October 19, 2026
Somewhere near the Namibia-Angola border, Africa
Xiao-ping stood in three feet of muddy water with seven other men as a Caterpillar excavator lowered a two-thousand-pound concrete cylinder into the flooded mining pit. He and his fellow prisoners had to guide the massive tube into the grooves of a second, submerged cylinder. Once in place, the water could be pumped out, allowing the workers to enter the shaft and dig deeper for gold.
Xiao-ping wiped the sweat from his brow. It was only eight thirty in the morning and already the hot African sun was baking his skin and keeping the water around him as warm as a bath. This was Mine Three and, like the two others, it was a huge gash in the middle of the emerald jungle, an open canyon of orange mud and water that stretched five hundred meters long and fifty meters wide. Hundreds of wet, mud-smeared Chinese men worked the pit, passing baskets of earth up the steep slopes. Ropes and wooden ladders rose haphazardly from all sides, and in his ears was the incessant rattle and sputter of a dozen Honda generators straining to suck up the water from the bottom of the pits.
Xiao-ping suddenly coughed, a violent fit that wracked his whole body. When it had passed he looked around nervously. Please just be a cold!
Tuberculosis ran rampant in the camp. Thousands of men working in close proximity and sleeping together in large cells where they were packed so tightly that everyone had to lie on their sides. It was the perfect breeding ground for TB. As he worked, the sound of other men coughing was constant in his ears. If it were true, this would be Xiao-ping’s third infection since being sentenced to the laogai—China’s “Reform through Labor” program. Each infection was harder to beat because the TB became drug resistant. It was a bitter truth: most inmates didn’t survive their third infection. If he didn’t get proper treatment soon, he was going to die.
He coughed again. Just a cold, he told himself.
He looked up and watched as the huge cylinder was slowly lowered into the water. The men used their bodies to guide it into place while one man gave hand signals to the excavator operator. Xiao-ping had done this many times and had learned to use his thighs and forearms—never his hands and fingers—to guide the cylinder.
Suddenly he heard a creaking sound followed by a loud ping. A piece of broken chain zipped by his head, and he jumped back reflexively. There was an enormous splash as the cylinder crashed down. Men screamed. When his eyes cleared, he saw a horrible sight. The young Mongolian man next to him was holding up a hand with no fingers, only a thumb, the blood bubbling out of the four stumps like water out of a drinking fountain. The young man stared at it and began to weep. Not for the pain, but for what it meant. He knew his life was over. Losing the ability to work in the laogai meant there was no need to keep you alive.
On the far side of the cylinder another man was still trapped. Xiao-ping rushed to him and saw that it was his friend, Nur Zakir, a Uyghur imprisoned for his religious beliefs. The cylinder had caught his wrist and yanked him down until his face was just above the waterline. “Xiao-ping, please!” The man panted, “It hurts.” Xiao-ping felt under the water and ran his hand down Nur’s arm to the wrist before he met the concrete.
“Get a new chain,” he called. A search was made, but there were none to be found. A runner was sent to Mine Number Two. They waited ten, then fifteen minutes. All the while Nur was gasping and screaming in pain. But the runner never returned.
Xiao-ping climbed out of the pit and went to the foreman—a dangerous decision as this was considered an “illegal movement.” Xiao-ping had once been a lawyer, and while the laogai had drained much of his spirit, he still had moments where he felt he had to fight back . . . as best as he could.
“Please, sir, can we do something to help him? We have the sledgehammers, we can break the cylinder apart.”
The foreman glanced at the cylinder and shook his head. “Then I’ll have a useless prisoner and a broken cylinder.”
Xiao-ping returned to the pit and rallied the other men. They wrapped the broken length of chain around the top of the cylinder and heaved. If they could just tip it enough to get the man’s hand out . . . but it was useless. He looked up at the foreman, hoping that he would take action, but th
e man just stood there smoking a cigarette.
“Please help me,” Nur kept muttering. “Please . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Xiao-ping said. “It’s just too heavy.” Nur continued to moan for a time, but after an hour the shock began to take its toll. He began to shiver and speak nonsensically, mumbling about his childhood in Uyghur. Then his face turned an ashen grey and he grew quiet.
The foreman ordered the rest of them out of the pit, and the daily work continued around the trapped man.
Xiao-ping was sent to work the sluice box. At dinner he learned that Nur had died before they could remove the cylinder.
That night, Xiao-ping lay awake in his cell, listening to the sixty-four other men around him snore and cough. The death of yet another friend weighed on him and he was overcome by a feeling of helplessness. He had no power to help his friend, no power to change his fate, and little chance of ever going home.
He coughed again, lightly. Once. Twice. Then he was wracked by a long fit.
That’s not a cold, said a voice in his head. You can’t deny it any longer.
He gave a long sigh and coughed again.
If you want to live, you’re going to need a full regimen of antibiotics. Easier said than done. The guards gave them the antibiotics until they stopped coughing, then they gave them to someone else.
Just face the truth: You’re never going to get better. You’re never going back to China. You are never going to see Lili again.
It was a dangerous thing to accept defeat. If he gave up all hope, he would just die quicker. He’d seen it hundreds of times in the other inmates.
He needed to hold on to something, to believe. And the thing that kept him alive was the memory of Lili. But it had been so long since he had heard from her—four years. Her last letter had arrived just before his transfer to Africa. How precious it was to him, just to hold something in his hands that she had held in hers. I love you and will wait the rest of my life for you if I have to. He could still see the words on the page and tried to hold on to them as if they had just been written, but a part of him had grown cynical. You’re a fool to keep believing she’s waiting, the voice said. You know she’s moved on by now. After all, she has no idea you’re even alive. And there are so many eligible bachelors in China. Certainly someone has come along . . . and . . .
