I hit the deck. Jihoon jumped from the rack and crawled over to me, his voice hoarse.
“What the fuck was that?”
A second later we heard a distant explosion, and I shook my head. “A tank. It just fired a plasma round.”
“Here?” he asked. “In the city? At their own people?”
I nodded, lighting another cigarette. “Get some sleep, Chong. Because tomorrow is going to be a wonderful day. Welcome to southeast Asia.”
FOUR
Occupation
We’d have to cover more than five klicks to Army headquarters, all of it urban through neighborhoods I barely remembered and Jihoon had never seen. The hotel staff tried to show us on the map. After a mixture of conversations in Thai, English, and hand gestures, I gave up and grabbed Ji’s encrypted phone, punching in the numbers so hard that it almost flew from my hands. It took a few seconds to connect to the voice mail.
“Your coms plan sucks. We’re at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok and need transport to the Royal Army HQ, in addition to combat suits. Ship them to our advisers here. Make sure to send my custom one and Jihoon’s size is… hold on…” I paused to hand the phone to Jihoon, who read out his specifications and then handed the phone back. “We need them yesterday. Also, we need priority use of any of our American assets here, so make sure you let our guys know that whatever we need, we get.”
I finished by giving the code for my new identity so they wouldn’t send it to Stan Resnick, hung up, and Jihoon raised his eyebrows. “What’s the plan?”
“We wait. If nobody comes for us by noon, we might risk it.”
The concierge shook his head. “Do not try on your own. If the protesters catch foreigners, anything could happen.”
“What are they protesting?” Ji asked.
“Some protest against the King and Prime Minister Anupong, who they call dictators, and some of the immigrants would welcome the Chinese as liberators; they want the government to surrender to Burmese forces before an invasion so the city isn’t destroyed by war. Last night, the tank you heard fired on a group of them and killed many innocent people. You stay in the hotel. The Army will protect the hotel because we pay them to, but out there? Anything.”
I glanced at my watch. It was 8:00 a.m., and already the heat had become unbearable, but we’d asked and were told that the hotel now ran on generators and couldn’t spare power for climate control—not when most windows facing the street had been blown out. I crept up to the lobby front, and my shoes crunched on broken glass, a sound almost lost amid the shouts and distant rattle of fléchettes, but it reminded me of bones, and I imagined myself crawling over the skeletons of satos, the hundreds that begged for a longer life but for whom I’d shown nothing except a smile. A smile that was genuine. I was beginning to hate Margaret now; she had brought me here, and the insanity of it all made me want to find her more quickly, and it didn’t matter if she was different from the others because her punishment for taking me to my old killing grounds would be the same as it was for her sisters. The heat made it even more unbearable; without normal skin my back wouldn’t sweat, and without sweat I couldn’t cool. They’d offered me new skin a long time ago and I’d rejected it, but now had second thoughts and couldn’t remember why I’d turned it down. But Margaret would pay for that one too.
From the front windows it became clear that since last night, the Thai Army position outside the hotel had been strengthened, and regular troops in combat suits faced south from behind a wall of sandbags and cars, the tank looming over them. Its turret scanned the street. Every once in a while one of the troops would fire his Maxwell carbine at something, sometimes joined by the rest of them, but I never saw any shots returned. I was about to head back to the concierge when it happened again; the tank fired its plasma cannon, and the drapes billowed around me so that at first I lost track of where I was, my hearing shot almost completely.
I’d been close to tanks before when they fired, but there had always been a helmet, its audio pickups cutting off when outside noise reached a certain level, and without protection the experience frightened me. The suits confined, but they also insulated and cradled their occupants in a measure of safety. Who could know war from inside a cocoon? I thought and then realized that someone was dragging me by the foot away from the window, and I reached for the tattered drapes, wanting to stay, needing to experience war unfiltered.
Jihoon slapped me lightly, and my hearing returned. “You.” I pointed at the concierge. “You bribed the military to protect this place?”
“Not me. Owner. He take care of it.”
“How much you think it would take to get the soldiers outside to take us to Army HQ?” The man cocked his head and looked at me like I was crazy.
“Money,” I said, holding up my credit chit. “How many bhat to have them take us to their headquarters?”
“I don’t know. Ten thousand, maybe fifteen.”
“Would you negotiate it for us?” I asked.
The man’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head. “No.”
“I’ll give you five thousand. Five thousand bhat if you do this for us.”
Jihoon grabbed my arm. “Bug, I don’t think—”
“That will buy a lot of food,” I said, cutting Ji off. “A lot.”
The concierge thought about it for a few seconds and then nodded. “OK. Deal.” He moved toward the front lobby, grabbing a white napkin from under his desk, and then thrust it through the empty door frames, which the day before had been a glittering crystal. He stepped out. We lost sight until Jihoon and I slithered back to the window and raised ourselves slowly, peering over the sill and into the street.
The concierge was already talking to someone, a sergeant who had removed his helmet as the two sat with their backs against sandbags. The sergeant pulled something from his belt. At first I couldn’t tell what it was but then saw our guy stick his finger in for a DNA test, and the next thing we knew, the sergeant had punched him across the jaw, his gauntlet making a cracking noise and sending a spray of blood into the air. The sergeant scrambled for his carbine then and killed the concierge with a quick burst before shouting to his men.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“Shit. They’re coming in. To search the hotel.”
“Time to go.”
We scrambled back toward the elevators behind us and were about to stand and run for it when the Thais crashed through the front doors, screaming over their helmet speakers. Jihoon and I stopped.
“Raise your hands,” said Ji.
I did it and turned to face them. The rest of the hotel staff who had been in the lobby stood still, like us, all of them looking terrified in the face of what had just turned into deadly uncertainty. We waited. Finally the sergeant came in and surveyed the interior until his vision slot pointed in our direction.
“Can you hear if he’s saying anything?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I can’t make it out. It’s too muffled by the helmet and isn’t coming over his speakers.”
But we didn’t have to wait long. The man walked toward us, his soldiers keeping us covered, and he stuck out the analyzer toward Jihoon, who inserted his finger. Then it was my turn. When he was finished, he took off his helmet, and I thought we’d had it, that the next thing we’d feel would be the hard impact of fléchettes and then nothing, but instead, the sergeant grinned and began jabbering in Thai.
“What’s he saying?”
Ji started to smile. “He’s saying something like ‘these are the ones we were supposed to look out for, the two Americans,’ and he’s telling the others to complete a sweep of the hotel.”
The sergeant, still talking a mile a minute, gestured toward the street with his carbine.
“He’s saying we should follow him and that he’ll get us to Army headquarters within half an hour.”
“Jesus.” I shook my head. “That phone message moved faster than I thought.”
Once we got outside, Jihoon interrupt
ed the man and pointed at the dead concierge; after a back and forth, Ji turned.
“I asked him why he wasted our guy, and the sergeant claims he was antigovernment. One of a hundred half-Burmese Thais who’ve caused trouble for them over the last year, and they’d been looking for him for a long time. Apparently they keep a list of potential infiltrators.”
“Oh?” I spat on the corpse and grinned at the sergeant while we climbed onto the back of his tank. “That’s just fine by me.”
Tanks and APCs filled the Royal Army’s parade ground, and men assembled in any empty space, getting ready for what I assumed would be a push through the city to wipe out remaining signs of protest. How many towns and villages in the bush were being leveled? And how had I returned to this place? Now that we were in the open again, my nose picked out the scent of clay over alcohol fuel, and my skin tingled with a suspicion that the jungle was arranging things behind the scenes, the ancestors of Thailand and Burma moving pieces on a chessboard because they’d allied to lure me back under the canopy and into the banyan roots where the air was still and damp. I hated the jungle. In comparison, Kazakhstan and all the ’Stans had been a pleasure, where any number of systems could be brought to bear and line of sight stretched to the horizon in places, but here the jungle swallowed you whole and cut you off; there would be no autodrones if you wrapped yourself with the bad bush, no microbots, and movement and heat from any number of animals would ping suit sensors to the point where it was best to ignore them. The jungle promised two things to those who stayed too long: solitude and decay.
We jumped off the tank, and the sergeant waved for us to follow him through massing troops, where some soldiers stopped and stared at the unusual parade of two Westerners in casual clothes. Some chuckled. They probably assumed that we’d been brought there for questioning, but Jihoon must have caught wind of whatever they were saying because he dropped back and whispered.
“They’re making jokes,” he said.
“About what?”
“Something about how you look like a crazy man.”
I looked straight ahead and kept pace with the sergeant until one of the soldiers nearby smiled at me, nodding as he laughed.
“Shove your head up your slimy Thai ass,” I said, hoping he’d understand. But the guy just kept nodding and gave me the thumbs-up.
“Number one!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Number one, asshole. Burma number ten.”
We climbed the steps to the main entrance, two at a time, and the heat made my shirt a sopping mass so that when we entered the HQ’s air-conditioned space it was as though we’d stepped into a refrigerator, and I breathed the cool air deeply. Dry air. The contrast almost made me giggle since we’d spent most of the previous night and this morning in Bangkok’s humidity, which never moved and felt like a warm bath. Jihoon looked at me and grinned, and I almost grinned back until the sergeant showed us where we were heading.
He stopped at a staircase and spoke with two guards, who then performed another ID scan on both of us.
“They show you the way to your advisers,” the sergeant said and pointed down the narrow stairs.
“Down there?” I asked, and he nodded.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“What’s wrong with downstairs?” Jihoon asked.
I shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just great.”
“You no worry,” said the sergeant. “We have no floods down there in a long time.”
The thought made my skin crawl. “Floods?”
He thought for a second and then spat something in Thai so Ji could translate.
“He said that sometimes their pumps go out, and because the water table is so high, the tunnels flood, but that there’s been no problem like that for a while.”
“What happens if you’re down there when the pumps go out?” I asked.
Jihoon spoke with the sergeant again, who shook his head. “He said that it’s better if that doesn’t happen.”
The sergeant waved good-bye then and walked off. One of the guards ushered us toward the steps, pointing that we should go down as he spoke.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
Jihoon shrugged. “We take the stairs down for a bit, then transfer to an elevator. There’s a subway that will connect us to the Supreme Armed Forces HQ a few klicks north.”
“After you.”
Ji started downward and I followed, my stomach feeling sick. The staircase was narrow, and we twisted around at multiple landings until the effect—combined with the sensation that the walls were pressing in on my shoulders—made me dizzy with the effort of forcing myself onward. Finally the stairs opened into a medium-sized room, where pipes and electrical conduits covered every side except for one, in which an open elevator door waited. We stepped in. A moment later the floor dropped from under us and the box sped downward, shaking as it plummeted so that I grabbed a railing to hold on.
“Are you OK, Bug?” asked Ji.
“Screw you.”
“There’s medication if closed spaces get to you, you know. I don’t know how you manage a combat suit if an elevator gets to you this badly.”
“I said, shut up.”
The elevator opened onto a small platform where a series of three subway cars sat, their sliding doors ajar, and we stepped into the first one, waiting for the thing to move. It took about a minute. The cars sped down a cylindrical tube, which was lit by the single light at the car’s front, and the sight reminded me of the short time I’d spent at the front in Kazakhstan after the Russian retreat, to search alone through empty positions in tunnels filled with abandoned bodies. Man wasn’t designed for those places. But we had been designed for war, becoming so proficient that our weapons drove us into living graves, places that even moles and snakes avoided, because to stay in the sun meant certain death. But the memory faded when the subway cars stopped. A young Thai soldier in cotton fatigues greeted us and escorted us up the elevator and stairs into a command bunker filled with the chatter of tactics and strategy. Somewhere, I thought, in this bunker is one of death’s friends, sending the youth of Thailand into a nightmare. Or maybe death had more than one friend. We saw a group of Western men in Thai combat suits; their helmets were off, and ironically, the lack of any emblems or rank insignia made it clear that they were experts in the art of modern killing, American advisers instructing their Thai counterparts on how to fight like the mole men we had all become. Maybe, I thought, the jungle had lost its grip on man, and maybe now we fought below the tree roots, under the countless bodies we had killed in the century before, and I didn’t know which method was more horrifying.
Our escort whispered to one of the advisers, and he approached us, shaking our hands to introduce himself as Colonel O’Steen. “We only got word this morning that you two were in country. Want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Sir,” said Ji, “we’re sorry, but it’s classified.”
“We’re here for a girl,” I said, and Jihoon frowned, probably pissed that I was about to give up something classified again. “A sato. It’s a cleanup mission, sir, and I apologize. It is classified, but you should know what’s going on in your area of responsibility. And we’ll need your help. We’re to find this girl, interrogate, and then discharge her.”
The colonel shook his head and grinned. “Christ. It’s not enough that I have to somehow make sure our interests in Thailand don’t fall apart, but now I have to worry about two assassins running around Bangkok? SOCOM wants me to give you whatever resources I have available so you can go after one sato?”
“Sir, I’m sorry.”
The colonel crossed his arms, their ceramic plates squeaking as they rubbed against each other. “Who is it?”
“She’s named Margaret. We can give you the serial number if it would help.”
O’Steen looked like I had just slapped him. His face went red, and he glanced around to see if anyone else had overheard. “Jesus. You two do understand that genetics have been give
n asylum here, right?”
I nodded. “I’ve never understood why, sir, but yes.”
“Then I’ll give you an education. The first satos wound up here halfway through the Subterrene War, and Thai officials took a couple of weeks studying them, watching as the chicks putrified. Thailand’s laws about genetic manipulation are some of the strictest in the world; natural births, and only those over a certain age are allowed genetic therapy; deformed and disabled kids are allowed to live. So once they saw what we had done in creating satos and the effects of our two-year safeguards, the prime minister took pity on the girls and—with the approval of the King himself—put his best scientists on the job of saving any who floated into their ports. And they came. Jesus, did they come. The Thais lost the first hundred or so on operating tables, but they figured it out and were able to deactivate the immuno safeguards—repair much of the damage that had been done to the girls’ organs. They even restored their reproduction to normal.”
“How?” I asked, keeping my fingers crossed that this guy already knew; maybe we wouldn’t have to interrogate Margaret at all.
“Hell if I know. They have some genius Japanese geneticists, and whatever they did, it’s now a state secret. But the girls in return pledged their loyalty to the King. Do you know what that means, Lieutenant?” I shook my head, and he continued, “It means that the girls began training his forces. They became trusted advisers—so trusted that a group of satos is now the King’s personal bodyguard. Hell. Do you think the Thais even need me when they have their own contingent of genetic troops ready to die for the guy if he orders it? These girls know more about tactics and strategy than I could hope to learn if I studied my entire life. They don’t need me here.”
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 10
