by Mark Alpert
She was listening to it for a third time when a louder voice, the voice of the Black Hawk’s pilot, came over the earphones in her headset: “Shit! We got incoming!”
The Black Hawk lurched to the right, rolling into a sharp turn. The evasive maneuver threw Kirsten to the left and her helmet smacked into Morrison’s. She saw the helicopter eject its flares and spew a cloud of chaff to confuse the guidance system of the incoming surface-to-air missile, but she didn’t see the missile itself until it streaked past. The trail of its exhaust, clearly visible in infrared, passed just a few yards from the helicopter’s rotor blades.
“Watch out, here’s another!”
This time the pilot veered to the left. The Black Hawk’s engines whined as the helicopter raced down the mountainside, its skids almost touching the tallest trees. Kirsten smacked into Hammer, who shouted something into his headset that she couldn’t make out. The second missile came within a few feet of the helicopter’s tail and then exploded on the slope below.
Kirsten heard the pilot’s voice again: “I don’t see any radar. How the hell are they tracking us?”
Then Hammer: “Just fire the package! We’re close enough to the target!”
“Negative, we can’t pop up to firing position. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”
Although the helicopter was rocking violently, Kirsten managed to switch the frequency of her glasses from infrared to the radio wave band. Then she peered through the Black Hawk’s open door, looking for a signal that might be coming from a radar station. It was hard to see anything through all the electromagnetic noise bouncing around the cabin, but after a couple of seconds Kirsten detected a signal reflecting off the helicopter’s metal skin, a powerful, rapidly pulsing transmission at 1320 megahertz. But it wasn’t a radar signal. It was coming from the helicopter itself, from the antenna just behind the rotor mast.
She turned to Hammer and grabbed his forearm. “The transponder! They’re tracking the friend-or-foe signals we’re sending to the AWACS!”
“What?” Hammer looked confused. “That’s impossible! How could they—”
“Trust me on this! Tell the crew to disable the transponder! Then they can return fire!”
Hammer hesitated a moment, then gave the orders. Kirsten heard a flurry of communications in her headset. Then the Black Hawk’s pilot throttled up the engines, and the helicopter swiftly rose a hundred feet above the slope. Kirsten switched her glasses back to infrared and saw a fissure in the mountainside. Inside the gap was a rectangular structure, a bit warmer than the surrounding rock. This, she realized, was the concrete entrance to the Yunnan Operations Center.
A loud bang went off to her right, and for a second she thought they’d been hit. But when she looked in that direction, she saw the hot exhaust of a missile streaking away from them. The Black Hawk had just fired it at the Operations Center. The pilot immediately returned to the relative safety of the lower elevations, but as the helicopter leveled out above the mountainside, Kirsten saw the exhaust trails of three more surface-to-air missiles. They rushed past, converging on the Black Hawk a hundred yards behind them.
“Watch it! You got incoming!” the pilot shouted over the radio. “They’re—”
Then she heard the explosion.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
The closest thing he could compare it to was one of those 360-degree planetarium theaters where the movie is projected on the underside of the dome and the images glide all around you. Except in this case, Jim was acting in the movie at the same time that he watched it.
The first image he saw was the rocky slope of Yulong Xueshan. He was running up the mountain again, his lungs on fire, trying to reach the edge of the glacier. Then the strange movie skipped ahead and he saw himself slamming his prosthetic hand against the ice. Then it skipped ahead again and he was typing a password on the computer terminal at the radio tower. These were his most recent memories, full of detail and color, but they rushed past in a jerky, erratic stream he couldn’t control. Without any warning the movie leaped backward in time and he was in the Underground City, riding on the back of Kirsten’s scooter. And as he watched himself reenact the scene, he got the feeling he wasn’t alone in this theater. Supreme Harmony was with him. It was running the projector.
The movie in his mind jumped back and forth, rewinding and fast-forwarding through the events of the past few days. Jim drove the three-wheeled truck, scaled the Great Wall, swatted at drones with his prosthesis, and turned on his satellite phone. This last image gave him a jolt. Supreme Harmony was homing in on the information it wanted. It was rifling through his memories to find the encryption key that would decipher Arvin Conway’s file. Hundreds of images flashed in quick succession, and then the movie froze on one in particular, a view of the sat phone screen that revealed a list of files stored on the device. At the top of the list was CIRCUIT, Arvin’s diagram showing the location of the Trojan horse.
Jim’s alarm was so strong, it disrupted the image. The sat phone’s screen flickered for a moment as if hit by an electrical surge. All at once Jim realized he wasn’t powerless. His emotions could alter his memories. With enough effort, maybe he could take control of the projector. Focusing his will on the list of files, he imagined a mighty hand grasping the image and thrusting it deep underground. Then he replaced it with another memory, the picture of Medusa. He was hoping that Supreme Harmony would retrieve the image and convert it to the shutdown code, but unfortunately his recollection of it was fuzzy. Medusa appeared in bits and pieces: first her mouth, then her eyes, and then one of the snakes sliding across her brow.
Before the picture could fully materialize, he felt a bolt of pain. Everything went black and he tumbled through the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing. The projector had stopped and the theater was silent, but Jim sensed that Supreme Harmony was still there. The network was all around him. It knew what he’d tried to do, and now it was angry.
After a while, the darkness lifted, but the pain stayed with him. He saw a whirlwind of images scattering in all directions. His recent memories of China and Afghanistan hurtled out of sight, and older scenes rushed into view: He was in the workshop at his home in Virginia, he was eating dinner alone in front of his computer, he was drinking a shot of Jack Daniel’s while staring at the telephone. Supreme Harmony was rummaging through his brain, tossing everything aside in its search for the encryption key. Although Jim could bury this secret, he couldn’t delete it, and the pain got worse as the network dug deeper.
The movie took a huge leap backward, and he saw himself as a six-year-old running away from his father, who strode across their living room with a leather belt in his hand. Then he was a plebe at West Point, marching across the parade grounds. He ran obstacle courses, slithered through the mud, slept on his feet, dangled from a parachute. Then he was in the 75th Regiment, and his dread steadily increased as he relived his army years. He was at Fort Benning, then Panama, then the deserts of Kuwait. Then he was in Somalia, and the pain became unbearable. He was pinned down behind the charred wreckage of a helicopter that lay on a street in Mogadishu. Hundreds of Somali militiamen were converging on his position, and their rocket-propelled grenades whistled through the air. One of his men was already dead and another was dying. And all the while Jim felt Supreme Harmony beside him, probing his every thought. Beneath the screams and explosions and gunfire, he heard the network’s persistent voice: Where have you hidden it? Is it here? Is it here?
The theater went dark again. Jim was writhing in agony, but he refused to give up. He pushed his secret even deeper into the darkness. They won’t get it, he vowed. They’ll have to kill me first.
Then the pain eased. He wasn’t in Somalia anymore. He was in civilian clothes and standing in the middle of an office. It was an ordinary State Department office, just like a hundred others around the world—gray carpet, white walls, drab desks. On the wall was a framed photograph of President Clinton, and on each desk was an outdated, government-issue computer
. But the office workers weren’t sitting at their desks. They crowded by the window, looking outside.
Jim opened his mouth, ready to shout an order, but then someone in the crowd turned around. It was a young girl, only seven or eight years old.
“Daddy?” she said.
It was Layla. Her adult voice came from the little girl’s mouth. She looked around the office, taking everything in. “I don’t remember this place,” she said. “Do you know where we are?”
Jim knew. Although the others were turned away from him, he recognized them from behind. The brunette in the army uniform was Captain Kirsten Chan, a twenty-eight-year-old intelligence officer assigned to Jim’s NSA team. And the blonde in the yellow sundress was his wife, Julia. Their son, Robert, stood beside her, his nose pressed to the glass.
“Daddy, can you hear me?” Layla’s voice was frightened. She said she didn’t remember this office, but on some subconscious level she probably did. “Where are we?”
They were in a bad place, the worst place in the world. It was the morning of August 7, 1998. They were on the fourth floor of the American embassy in Nairobi, and a Toyota truck had just stopped outside the embassy’s gate.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Supreme Harmony observed the deployment of the Dongfeng 41 nuclear missiles. Each three-stage rocket lay horizontally on a mobile launcher, an eighteen-wheel flatbed designed to transport the Dongfengs out of their underground base in Hebei Province. Five minutes ago, the new general secretary had issued the launch order, and now Supreme Harmony was using the base’s security cameras to watch the Second Artillery Corps move the thirty missiles into position.
This base—dubbed Dixia Changcheng, the Underground Great Wall—occupied a complex of tunnels deep below the mountainous countryside. The mobile launchers drove through the tunnels at twenty miles per hour, each carrying a Dongfeng to one of the launch sites in the nearby canyons. Once they exited the tunnels, the launchers would lift their missiles from horizontal to vertical and start the countdown. Supreme Harmony estimated that the whole process should take another fifteen minutes, which meant that the nuclear strike would begin shortly before 6:00 A.M. The PLA’s ballistic-missile submarines would launch their warheads at approximately the same time. Most of the missiles were aimed at American cities, but Supreme Harmony had changed some of the targets to include cities in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East as well. The purpose of this war was to kill as many humans as possible, so the destruction had to be global.
The network had already prepared itself for the American counterstrike. Nearly all its Modules in China had taken refuge in shelters outside the blast zones. Supreme Harmony had also strengthened its communications system by installing hardened equipment that could withstand the electromagnetic pulses caused by nuclear explosions. Because of these precautions, the network anticipated that at least a hundred of its Modules would survive the nuclear exchange. And because Supreme Harmony had accumulated a large stockpile of implants, it could make up for any losses by incorporating some of the human survivors. Amid the chaos, it would dispatch its Modules to every part of the globe, seizing control of any governments that managed to outlast the apocalypse.
In the Politburo’s shelter outside Beijing, Modules 73 and 152 sat in the conference room with the other members of the Standing Committee, who anxiously monitored the launch preparations. On the opposite side of the globe, in southern Pennsylvania, Modules 156 and 157 entered the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, a bunker for top Pentagon officials. And deep inside the Yunnan Operations Center, Modules 32 and 67 adjusted the mix of sedatives being administered to James T. and Layla A. Pierce. The implantation procedures had been successful, and the retinal and pulvinar implants were functioning normally. As soon as Supreme Harmony extracted the information it needed, the Modules would lance the patients’ thalami to cut the neural connections that sustained individual consciousness. Then the father and daughter would become Modules 175 and 176.
Outside the Operations Center, the network’s infrared cameras observed the burning fuselage of a UH-60 Black Hawk tumbling down the western slope of Yulong Xueshan. The other helicopter was two kilometers away from the center’s entrance and closing in at fifty meters per second. Supreme Harmony alerted the platoon of Modules at the fortifications, ordering them to aim their shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles at the remaining Black Hawk. Although the network could no longer guide the missiles toward the helicopter’s transponder, which had shut down, the Black Hawk was now close enough that the Modules could employ their laser-guidance systems. But as the Modules prepared to launch their SAMs at the helicopter, the network detected an incoming missile apparently fired by the Black Hawk a few seconds ago. Supreme Harmony ordered the Modules to take cover inside their fortifications. The concrete pillboxes could withstand a direct hit, and they were equipped with portholes to allow the Modules to return fire.
The incoming missile didn’t hit the pillboxes, however. It didn’t even explode. It arced above the fortifications and made a popping noise in the darkness overhead. Supreme Harmony assumed the missile was a dud. It ordered the Modules to fire at the Black Hawk, which was now an easy target.
The Modules picked up their missile launchers and rested the barrels on their shoulders. But a moment later, three of them dropped their weapons and fell to the ground. Then four more collapsed and started to convulse. Supreme Harmony scanned the area but didn’t detect any more incoming fire from the Black Hawk. Instead, it saw several hundred insects descending on the Modules.
The Black Hawk’s missile had released a drone swarm.
SEVENTY-NINE
“Ha!” Hammer yelled. “Take that, assholes!”
The Black Hawk raced through the darkness toward the Operations Center. With her glasses tuned to infrared, Kirsten spotted at least a dozen warm bodies lying on the ground near the pillboxes. Several other Modules ran headlong down the mountain. As the helicopter sped closer to the fortifications, she saw a cloud of whirling dots just above the slope. Because the flies were cold-blooded they didn’t stand out so well on the infrared display, but their implanted electronics glowed brightly.
Smiling, Kirsten turned to Hammer. “How the hell did you get the drones into a missile?”
He smiled back at her. “You remember Dusty, my tech guy? He figured out a way to stuff the bugs into the payload. They’re pretty tough critters.”
After a few seconds, the Black Hawk slowed down and hovered over a line of boulders perched on the mountainside about a hundred yards from the pillboxes. The Special Ops guys sprang into action, throwing their fast ropes out the doorways of the helicopter and sliding to the ground. Kirsten donned a pair of gloves and slung an M-4 carbine over her shoulder. She hadn’t jumped out of a helicopter in twenty years, but the army had trained her well. Grabbing one of the braided ropes with her gloved hands, she skidded down to the rocky slope and ran for cover behind the boulders. Hammer and Agent Morrison followed right behind, and then the Black Hawk took off, chasing the Modules who’d fled downhill.
Kirsten peered around the edge of a boulder as the Special Ops team regrouped. The entrance to the Operations Center looked free and clear. But while she was searching for any Modules who might remain in the pillboxes, the cloud of drones suddenly collapsed. All the whirling dots fell to the mountainside and lay motionless. She turned to Hammer. “Hey, your swarm just died.”
“Already?” Hammer peered around the boulder, but without infrared he couldn’t see the drones in the dark. “Fucking hell. They must’ve shut it down.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Guoanbu must’ve put a shutdown switch in the drones they gave us. Just like Arvin did with the retinal implants.” He shook his head. “I knew this might happen, but I thought we’d have more time. How the fuck did they shut it down so quick?”
“You’re not fighting the Guoanbu now,” Kirsten said. “You’re fighting Supreme Harmony. The network moves fast.”
As if to underline her point, a burst of machine-gun fire erupted from one of the pillboxes. The commandos ducked behind the boulders. Sergeant Briscoe, who crouched beside Hammer, gave the CIA agent a dirty look. “I thought you said there’d be minimal resistance.” The bullets ricocheted off the rocks. The sergeant had to shout over the noise. “Is this your idea of minimal?”
Hammer didn’t answer. Briscoe turned away from him and got on his radio to contact the Black Hawk. Meanwhile, Kirsten recalled what she knew about Chinese weaponry. The machine gun in the pillbox was probably a W85, which shot 12.7 mm bullets at a rate of 600 rounds per minute. There was no way the Special Ops soldiers could make it to the entrance of the Operations Center. They were pinned down.
After a few seconds, the gunfire paused. Kirsten heard Briscoe talking into his radio, ordering the helicopter pilot to launch his Hellfire missiles at the pillbox. She wasn’t sure, though, that this would do any good. The Hellfires were great for destroying tanks, but the fortifications outside the Operations Center were hulking structures with thick concrete walls. And the Modules had already proved they could shoot down a Black Hawk.
