‘Now, now. Be nice. There’s still time for me to make sure a little girl in Ohio becomes an orphan tonight.’
He felt Lucy tense and saw her hands contract into fists, but the woman said nothing.
Ahead of them, Cat boarded the Halo, her movements still a little stiffer than the other black-clad soldiers. Another of the masked figures stood by the hatch, and the blank face of their helmet tracked Marc and Lucy as they climbed into the helicopter’s cargo bay. The Halo’s engines were humming now, the big rotor blades chopping sluggishly through the wet air, gaining speed with each turn.
‘This is going to be simple,’ Madrigal went on. ‘You’ll be taken to a location and given a task to accomplish. Do as you are told and it will be over quickly.’
Fox and another of the soldiers were the last to board the helicopter, and now the rotors were spinning at take-off speed. Fox gave Marc a shove toward a set of folding chairs built into the wall of the cargo bay. He sat and snapped a safety belt into place. Lucy took the spot next to him, doing the same.
‘If you deviate from my directions in any way,’ continued the voice in their ear, ‘there will be consequences.’
Fox and Cat bracketed the two of them so they couldn’t move freely, and Marc looked back out through the Halo’s open rear. The Antonov was visible as a wall of white fuselage through the driving dawn rain. ‘You’re not going to come see us off?’
‘There are live video feeds streaming from a camera in each helmet,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got eyes everywhere. So don’t try anything dramatic.’
The Halo’s turboshafts growled as the pilot applied power and the big helicopter lurched as it left the ground. The rear hatch stayed open, a sure sign that the soldiers on board were going to make a fast deployment when they reached their destination, and the downdraft blew a swift squall through the cargo bay as they gained height. Marc saw a flash of the Antonov’s broad wings and the drab green of the hangar roof before the view swept around as they sped away.
He watched the airport vanish as the Halo left the artificial island where Incheon International was located and turn east toward Seoul. They raced under the low cloud, moving fast along the line of the Ara Canal that led from the Yellow Sea to the heart of the South Korean capital.
Marc looked down into the ribbon of green water and thought briefly about making a break for it, but they were over a hundred metres up, and a fall from this height would be fatal.
Instead, he cast around the interior of the helicopter, watching the troopers prepare. His instinctive tech-head mindset rose to the fore as he clocked their gear, tried to read intentions through the loadouts carried by the masked figures. Marc noted that they had American M4 carbines rather than the Daewoo K2 assault rifles used by soldiers in the South, or the Type 58 Kalashnikov-copies employed by the DPRK army in the North. A deliberate choice, he guessed. Using US-made weapons loaded with NATO-standard ammunition would obscure the origins of any attack.
A cold, creeping realisation marched over him. He and Lucy were in the middle of some kind of false flag operation, so called because the aggressors would act directly under cover of another actor’s identity and seek to fool their targets into thinking they were someone else.
‘Right. We’re in this up to our necks now.’ Marc spoke so the radio earpiece would pick up his words. ‘You going to tell us what the target is? Or do I have to guess?’
‘It’s a surprise,’ said Madrigal. ‘But go ahead, try to figure it out. It’ll keep you occupied.’
There were hundreds of sites in the city where a force of armed killers could wreak havoc, but this wouldn’t be as blunt and as violent as the Soldier-Saints attack on a San Francisco park. Madrigal’s plans were too layered, too complex for anything so basic. Taking lives would not be enough for her. Ghost5 were already doing that, sowing confusion with the first stages of their paralysing hack against Seoul’s infrastructure.
The Halo pitched as the pilot brought the nose up in a sharp, climbing turn, and Marc’s head thudded against the hull. He twisted in his seat, watching the view to the rear as they skimmed over a railyard. Something pressed into his chest beneath the tac vest, but he ignored it, knowing that the soldiers all around were watching his every movement.
He looked down and saw hundreds of inert commuter trains in their sidings, the network terminus choked by the forced shutdown of the system. Then they were over the water again, the wide expanse of the Han River this time, snaking through the middle of the city. The helicopter flashed over the faded red arches of a highway bridge and it too was a mess of stalled vehicles, a solid traffic jam reaching from one side of the waterway to the other.
Still gaining altitude, the Halo cut through wisps of grey cloud, skimming the bottom of the gloom hanging over a cityscape of residential apartment buildings and smoke-blowing factories. From the air, Seoul resembled a crowded spread of coloured building blocks, arranged in patchwork patterns around splashes of dark jade parkland.
The rotors slapped at the air as the aircraft rolled into a hard pivot, perhaps to avoid another helicopter flying nearby, and through the drizzle Marc caught sight of a domed building on the far shore of the river, lit up by spotlights that made it gleam in the dawn light. He recognised it as the National Assembly, a core part of the Republic of Korea’s governmental structure. Was that the target?
It didn’t seem right. This early in the morning, the place would barely be staffed. An assault on it would be symbolic, but it wouldn’t draw blood, and having looked Madrigal in the eye he knew that was what she wanted.
‘Not far now,’ said the woman, like she had read his mind. ‘There’s only one more thing that needs to happen.’
The hairs on the back of Marc’s neck stood up, and he felt an irrational dread. It was as if Madrigal were at his shoulder, her icy smile widening as she set the last pieces of her plan into motion.
‘Here we go.’ The Halo dipped again, trading height for speed as it raced past the Assembly building without slowing, leaving it and the river behind to thunder southward. A sprawl of densely packed buildings blurred past below the tail rotor, and Marc distinctly heard the near-sexual anticipation in Madrigal’s voice as she spoke again. ‘Lights out.’
From the north of Seoul, receding into the distance, came a wave that advanced over the city in patches of darkness. Irregular, jagged chunks of the landscape dimmed as the power failed in district after district. The buildings became shadows as the grid went down for ten million people. With the rain and the thick cloud smothering the rising dawn, Seoul was caught in a strange half-night.
One of the masked soldiers opened a case at their feet and Marc saw a set of black quadrotor drones in vertical cradles. He watched the soldier pull them out and toss them out into the helicopter’s wake one at a time. As each drone tumbled away, it righted itself on four buzzing blades and zipped off out of sight.
‘What’s going on with those?’ said Lucy.
‘Eyes in the sky,’ Marc replied. ‘Good way for them to keep watch on everything.’
‘Same type we saw at Hite’s place?’
Marc nodded.
The Halo continued to power south, as the sprawl thinned into suburbs and then became the rust-hued flanks of a shallow hillside. Marc heard nothing, but he saw the silent soldiers react as one to a new order. They stiffened and readied their weapons as the helicopter pulled into a sharp nose-up attitude, rapidly burning off forward motion.
The aircraft pivoted and dropped like a stone, the ground rising up to meet them. ‘Where are we?’ grated Lucy, straining to see out of a nearby window.
As the Halo rotated to make a combat landing, Marc saw another distinctive building, this one made up of curved sections and low blocks, set in the middle of a great circular space cut out of the hillside. Visible through the sheeting rain, the darkened windows of the place reflected the stony sky overhead.
He spotted an identifying plaque sporting a version of the taegeuk, the yin-yang swirl from the South K
orean flag, overlaid with a stylised flame and flanked by the forms of a tiger and a dragon. And then he knew exactly where they were.
Madrigal had brought them to the headquarters of Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the organisation that forty years ago had been the KCIA.
SIXTEEN
The squad of masked soldiers deployed from the back of the Halo in fast, clean order, covering their sectors as they spread out and secured the immediate area surrounding the helicopter. As Lucy followed them down to the tarmac, she tried to take in everything at once, searching for a weak point in their arrangement, for a chink in their armour that could be exploited. There was nothing. These men and women moved with silent purpose and she couldn’t help but wonder how long they had been training for this day.
What the hell are we in the middle of? She glanced back as Marc emerged from the helicopter into the rain, another of the soldiers following behind him to make sure they didn’t hold anyone up.
The Halo had landed on the edge of a wide parking lot sparsely populated with commonplace subcompacts and SUVs. In one direction was a low outbuilding, a four-storey office block isolated by lines of discreet concrete crash barriers disguised as ornamental planters. Looking the other way, she saw what had to be the main complex. Much larger than the outbuilding, it had a blank, seamless facia of blue glass reflecting the nearby hillside.
It reminded her of the of the blandly monolithic architecture she’d seen at places like the NSA’s ‘black box’ in Fort Meade or the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Characterless but still threatening, the NIS campus looked like what it was; a concrete slab built to house a nation-state’s spooks. There was a landing pad on the forecourt, occupied by a spindly silver helicopter a third the size of the hulking Halo, and the uniformed guards milling around it were already starting to break away and move in her direction. Lucy tensed. Any second now, and contact would kick off. She felt exposed and vulnerable without a weapon to hand. The heavy shock bracelet Kara had locked around her wrist weighed her down.
The two soldiers closest to Marc and Lucy shoved them into cover behind a parked car, and she took a closer look at their kit. One of them, the largest of the group by a clear margin, carried extra pouches on his tactical vest, each one filled with demo packs of C4 explosives. A cylindrical, variable-fuse grenade hung off a loop on one of the vest’s straps, and Lucy recognised the purple banding around the device immediately, the text INCEN written above it standing out a mile. She glanced at the other soldier, a woman. She too carried a single thermite grenade, a powerful high-temperature incendiary device capable of burning through the engine block of a truck. Why they needed them here wasn’t clear, and Lucy was in no hurry to find out. The female soldier cocked her head, then looked down at a display on the smartwatch on her wrist.
Lucy heard a now-familiar high-pitched whining sound, and another pair of black quadrotor drones flashed past overhead. Someone in the Halo or back at the airport was using them to coordinate the attack.
A male voice called out in Korean, and although Lucy couldn’t understand the words, the tone was clear. Confusion and surprise. With the unexpected power outage, the guards would be scrambling to figure out what was going on.
The masked soldiers did not allow them the chance to learn the answer. Under the thudding of the Halo’s idling rotors, the attackers opened up on the guards with short, precise blasts of fire. Three-round bursts laid exactly on target spat from the muzzles of their suppressed M4s, and the NIS men fell sprawling in puffs of red fluid. None of them got off a round in return. One of the soldiers drew a silenced pistol and dashed out of cover, quickly putting a shot into the heads of the fallen men to be sure.
‘Fuck . . .’ muttered Marc. ‘These arseholes aren’t messing around.’
‘It’s what they are trained for.’ Madrigal’s silky tones seemed to pour like poison into Lucy’s ear, and she winced at the sound. ‘You have to admire their efficiency.’
‘Right . . .’ She watched the group hesitate as they listened to an order coming in over their headsets. One of them tapped the same device on their wrist that Lucy had seen on the female soldier. They were clearly working to a precise timeline.
Above, the two little drones settled into a steady hover, watching the approaches while the soldiers moved in their inhuman manner, communicating without appearing to speak. After a moment, the group parted into two units, the first moving off toward the main complex at a run, the rest falling back to form up and deploy toward the nearer outbuilding.
The masked female gestured for Lucy to follow the second group, and to underline the point Madrigal gave the order. ‘Go, hurry on now.’
Lucy glared into camera eye mounted on the soldier’s machine-like helmet. ‘How about we don’t?’ She searched the mask’s dark lenses for some inkling of the person beneath, but could see nothing.
‘Then you’ll never know how this ends,’ snapped Madrigal.
The soldier raised her rifle, threatening to strike Lucy with the butt of the weapon.
‘Come on,’ said Marc, pulling Lucy away. ‘Don’t give them an excuse.’
‘Fuck this puppet-and-mime shit,’ Lucy retorted, but walked on regardless. She knew he was right – they had to play along with Madrigal’s dumb little games until an opening presented itself to turn this around. But the odds on that happening were growing longer with every passing moment.
Up ahead, the first line of the silent soldiers were pushing through the doors to the isolated building and into the atrium within.
‘Power cut makes sense now,’ said Marc, thinking aloud. ‘Blowing out the candles for the whole city, that’s not because they want to cause havoc.’ He jerked his thumb at the main building behind them. ‘They couldn’t pull the plug on the NIS campus by targeting the local grid, that’s too small. It had to be a total shutdown across the whole region.’
‘I don’t follow you . . .’ Lucy shot him a questioning look.
‘Bigger blackout, different systems protocol,’ he explained. ‘When everything goes out, it takes that much longer for the emergency back-ups to cycle, so—’
As they passed by two parked minivans, a black blur exploded out of the gap between the pair of vehicles and gunfire sounded. Lucy reacted, seeing Marc dive away as a man in an NIS guard uniform came out of nowhere with a semi-automatic pistol in his hand.
The guard must have been one of the group that had come out to greet them, smart enough to circle around the back, lucky enough to avoid the hail of bullets that had cut down his colleagues. The soldiers escorting Lucy and Marc were nowhere to be seen. The situation narrowed abruptly to the immediate space around her and the will to survive the next few seconds.
The man snarled as he turned on Lucy as the closest target, bringing the pistol up to aim at her face. He saw no difference between her and the soldiers, helmet or not. She was an intruder like the rest of them.
Lucy didn’t wait for the guard to complete the motion and deflected his gun-arm with a forearm block. The pistol discharged harmlessly into the air, and Lucy kept up the momentum, punching the guard in the throat, trying to blunt the energy of his assault. His eyes locked with hers and she saw fury and hate. He’d seen the other men killed, it was right there in his expression, and he believed that Lucy was one of the people responsible.
She bit down on the human response, the impulse to tell him No, not me, I’m sorry and reached for a violent reaction instead. Lucy trapped his wrist and twisted it the wrong way, drawing a howl of pain from the guard. She made it so the only way he could move to disengage was to step into her next attack, trapping him. He realised that too late, as she grabbed at his chin and slammed the man’s head back, cracking the passenger window of the minivan with the back of his skull. He staggered, dazed and disorientated, and she did it again. The second time his head connected with the glass, the window shattered and the man’s eyes rolled back to show the whites. He slumped against the flank of the van, slipped down
the wet metal and on to the ground.
Lucy saw where the guard’s gun had landed and took a step toward it, but a powerful grip tightened around her arm and yanked her back. The bigger of the two masked soldiers held her firmly, while the other one, the woman, came in and kicked the fallen pistol out of reach beneath the van.
Marc came back into view. ‘Are you hit?’ He looked shaken.
She gave him a worried look. ‘Are you? I thought . . .’
‘Close. Parted my hair.’ He shook his head. ‘Shit. Where’d he come from?’
Lucy’s reply was swallowed by a report from the masked woman’s gun as she calmly executed the unconscious guard.
‘Motherfucker!’ She spat the insult at her.
‘Stop stalling,’ Madrigal’s ghost-voice demanded. ‘Unless you want to end up the same way.’
Madrigal would have them killed no matter what. If there had ever been an iota of doubt in Lucy’s mind, it melted away as she looked at the dead guard. Blood streamed down his face from the entry wound in his skull, thinning as the downpour washed it away.
As they entered the isolated building, lights on the ceiling blinked back to life. The NIS campus’s independent generators had finally reached the activation point in their cycle and power was returning, but not quickly enough to prevent the North Korean strike team from blowing through the facility’s outer defences.
Marc’s heart hammered in his chest from the near-hit of the security guard’s bullet. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he told Lucy how close it had come; he felt the round cut past his temple, the hum of it making him flinch away. A centimetre or two the other way and the guard’s shot would have buried itself in his face. The sense of death passing so close to him made Marc’s gut twist and he swallowed a deep breath.
He felt heavy and uncomfortable in the ill-fitting tactical rig Kara had hung on him. Something jabbed him in the ribs. He pulled at the vest, failing to make it sit more easily. Reaching inside, his fingers touched a foreign object there and he hesitated. What is that?
Ghost: Page 32
