Nomad

by James Swallow

  Beyond was a corridor that branched off into other walkways, or stairwells that went back toward the upper decks. Marc silently directed Lucy, and she inched forward until they found the door they were looking for.

  Another grunting snarl of rusted hinges brought them into bay two, and immediately Marc saw why the overhead hatches had not—and probably never would—be opened.

  The bay had been refitted, sections of decking welded into place in order to turn the cargo compartment into some kind of workshop. There were a few lights in there, so Marc slipped the NVGs up to his forehead and scanned the chamber for any indication of what it was being used for. The work lamps revealed benches scattered with cutting gear, mechanical tools and electrical components.

  “Hey,” called Lucy, from another bench. She held up a circuit board to show him. “You know what this is?”

  He let the SMG drop on its sling and came over. The circuit board was just one of dozens, long and thin, connected by flat bunches of wire. He held one up to the light and saw Chinese characters etched among the copper tracks and embedded CPU chips. “This is military,” he announced. “At a guess, part of an avionics package?”

  Lucy accepted this without comment. Her attention was on something else, a support frame covered with a dust cloth. She grabbed a corner and pulled it away.

  Ice formed in the pit of Marc’s stomach as the objects under the cloth caught the light. The unmistakable shapes of two air-to-air missiles lay on the frame, their casings cracked open, more wires trailing from within like the tendrils of an uprooted plant.

  He looked back at the circuit boards. “Those are from these.”

  “The PL-5’s we were tracking,” announced Lucy, peering closer. “Serial numbers match. Missiles built for the Chinese air force, traded to the North Koreans and sold on to the Combine by a general with an eye for dollars. But it doesn’t make sense…”

  As Marc looked around, he saw other cylindrical parts, other components that revealed themselves as pieces of the dismantled rockets. “They took them apart. Why would they do that?”

  Lucy shook her head, tapping her mike. “Thunderbolts have been located, state is inert. I say again, inert. But something isn’t right.”

  “I’m monitoring,” said Delancort. “Proceed. Report as you go.”

  She turned to Marc. “When these were taken, we thought we were going to find Al Sayf converting them for use in an aerial attack. Maybe mounting them on a civilian light aircraft…”

  “I get that. They could use them to shoot down airliners, fire at buildings…” He scowled at the idea, moving to examine one of the missiles more closely. He visualized the shape of the weapon and the parts that comprised it, as if it were an exploded engineering blueprint. “But instead, they gutted them, and—” Marc’s words died in his throat as a sudden realization made itself apparent. He turned about, looking in all directions. “It’s … gone.”

  “Something wrong?” said Lucy.

  “Look at this.” He held up a section from the front end of the missile and showed it to her. “Tell me what is missing.”

  And now she saw it too. “Oh shit.”

  “Yeah.” A single PL-5 missile had a warhead packed with one of the most powerful explosive compounds on earth, a substance known as HMX—but each rocket’s load had been removed. “Six missiles, you said. That means around thirty, thirty-five kilos of military grade explosives if they harvested the lot?” Even a small amount of that material, correctly placed, would have been enough to cause the sinking of the Palomino and the carnage in Barcelona.

  He tapped his throat mike. “These … thunderbolts … They weren’t the first ones to fall into the hands of our friends, were they?”

  Delancort’s reply came back after a moment. “It is possible. We are not certain. But we think they may have had more.”

  “They never wanted the missiles,” said Marc. “They just wanted the warheads. Military-grade HMX makes the bathtub plastic explosive most terrorists use look like a joke. They’re building bombs, Lucy. Bigger and nastier than anything we’ve seen them use yet.”

  The woman didn’t respond immediately. She was standing in front of another hatch on the far side of the workshop, studying the decking at her feet. “Check this?”

  Even from across the compartment, he could see the distinct mark of a boot print in front of the hatchway, left as if deposited by someone walking into the chamber. The print glistened, dark and oily in the half-light.

  “Blood,” Lucy announced, matter-of-factly. “No more than a couple of hours old. Tracked in here from the next compartment.”

  Marc looked up as Lucy reached for the handle to release the latch and open the door.

  But before her fingers could brush the metal, the hatch suddenly yawned wide and a figure filled the doorway; a thickset man with Slavic features set in angry surprise. In his hands he had an AK-47, the muzzle pointing directly at Lucy Keyes.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The guard caught Lucy by surprise, and she reacted a heartbeat too slow. Her hands were snatching at her rifle as the big Slav spun up the wooden stock of his AK-47 and cracked her hard across the face. She staggered back, her night-vision goggles broken by the force of the impact.

  He hit her again, this time a hard blow in the center of her sternum, and she cried out in pain. Lucy fell against the raised gantry and lost her grip on her rifle. The guard swore at her. Catching sight of Marc, he rotated the Kalashnikov, ready to rip a burst of gunfire across the woman and then toward him.

  Marc snapped the Vector to his shoulder as the door banged open, but he wavered as the guard stormed in, hesitating to shoot in case he caught Lucy in the fire zone. Now she had fallen clear, that moment of vacillation melted away, and he squeezed the trigger.

  The silenced Vector gave a chattering snarl, the muzzle rising as a stream of .45 ACP bullets blasted out and caught the Slav straight on. The shots hit him in the stomach and chest, slamming him back into a guide rail near the open hatch. His legs gave out beneath him, and the guard toppled forward, falling over the edge of the gantry and down past the makeshift deck, into the murk along the keel-line. Brass shell casings clicked off the gridded platform at Marc’s feet, rolling this way and that.

  The entire encounter lasted less than twenty seconds.

  Breathing hard, Marc ejected the magazine and reloaded before moving to help Lucy to her feet.

  She growled through gritted teeth as she stood. “Motherfucker,” she said, with feeling. Lucy probed the skin over her cheekbone and winced, turning her head to spit out blood.

  Marc peered over the guard rail and saw the dead man splayed in a peculiar position a few meters below. His legs were at an unnatural angle, his chest a red ruin. “That’s a problem,” he muttered.

  “Only if he’s missed,” Lucy said thickly. “Which he will be, probably sooner than we would like.” She gathered up the Mark 14 from where it had fallen. “C’mon, we have to keep moving. If he was in there, he was protecting something.”

  “Okay. Yeah.” Marc pushed past Lucy, not waiting for her to complain about him taking the lead, and crossed the companionway into another refitted compartment.

  The metallic stench hit him as he opened the next hatch, and he wanted to tell himself it was just seawater and rust; but the odor had the tang of death about it. The light inside the chamber gathered in streaks of reflection across the black tarps that lay scattered across the decking. It was like the execution room back in the basement of the orphanage, but worse. Much worse.

  Blood, on everything, as if someone had uprooted an abattoir and placed it here in the middle of the cargo ship. Lucy said nothing, but he heard her sharp intake of breath, the faint sound at the back of her throat that might have been a stifled gasp.

  The compartment resembled a battlefield operating theater, the kind of thing one might have expected to see in some Vietnam War-era firebase where soldiers were chewed up by withering enemy fire. An operating table, racks
of equipment and gas cylinders were ranked to one side, visible behind olive-drab sheets that had been hung from wires to create some kind of partitioning. Large plastic cubes inside steel cages were filled with water, taps draining into grates below, perhaps to allow whomever had worked in here to sluice the blood from their hands.

  Marc nudged open cases to find packets of sterile syringes, scalpels, bandages and more, still sealed and ready to be used. There were cool-boxes too, the kind you might take on a picnic to fill with ice and chill your beer. Inside Marc saw antibiotics, morphine and fentanyl ampoules.

  “God, not again.” Lucy’s voice was rough and scratchy. “What the fuck were they doing in here?”

  The machine shop and the dismantled missiles had been ominous enough, but this … Marc’s thoughts fell toward the darkest, the most horrible of possibilities as he circled the compartment, taking it all in. On one gurney he found a plastic tray laid out with little spiders of electronic components. He recognized coin-sized lithium batteries connected to the stripped-down guts of Bluetooth earpieces, hand-assembled things constructed from repurposed off-the-shelf hardware. Each unit ended in a tiny metallic tab, an electric igniter of the kind used to set off fireworks. “These are remote detonators,” he said tonelessly. Each one was sheathed in a furry covering that resembled cotton down.

  “What you got?” asked the woman.

  “Shit.” Marc felt bile rising in his throat and sat heavily on a stool. “Oh shit, I think I know.” He looked up at her, swallowing hard, breathing through his mouth. “Those things are wrapped in Gore-Tex. The stuff they line waterproof coats with.”

  “I don’t follow you—”

  He waved her to silence. “These are implants, Lucy. That material is what they use to coat medical implants, like replacement bones or organs … It fools the body into ignoring the immune response, stops it getting rejected…” He trailed off. It was all coming back to him, clear as day. The long and complex explanation the doctors had given him and Kate when they talked about Mum’s kidney replacement surgery, a lifetime ago. “Do you get it? You can cut someone open, put those inside them, stitch them back up.”

  Lucy’s eyes widened in shock. “Along with, what? A pound of HMX?”

  He nodded bleakly. “More than that.” Marc was finding it difficult to swallow. He couldn’t get the acid taste out of his mouth. “Get into the space around the gut…” He pressed a hand to his belly. “Surgeons call it the peritoneal cavity. You could put, hell, I don’t know … Wads of the fucking stuff in there, chunks the size of cricket balls.”

  “And then you got yourself a walking weapon.” She spat on the deck. “That’s how the orphanage figures into this. It wasn’t for training soldiers. It was for finding mules.”

  * * *

  “There is problem,” said the bullish Serbian, cradling an Uzi in his hands, his thickly-accented words hard and percussive.

  Grunewald looked up and took a moment to flick a speck of lint off the lapel of his leather jacket. He wanted to be off the Santa Cruz and away from here, but closing up the back end of this stage of the operation was taking longer than he wanted.

  The Eastern Europeans the Combine had supplied as low-level muscle were competent but they were not efficient, and they dragged their heels with any work that didn’t include intimidating people or shooting at things. Grunewald had ordered them to clear out any materials that might immediately link back to the group and pack them into a cargo container to go overboard.

  “What now?” he asked. “This needs to be done by dawn, you understand that?”

  The Serb shrugged and held up his radio. “Man is silent. No call.”

  Grunewald frowned. “A guard missed his check-in? Where is he supposed to be?” It was a problem with using these criminal types, not professionals. They were easily distracted.

  “No call,” the Serb repeated. “Man was in hold. Hospital. Sergey up on deck heard noise.”

  “What kind of noise?”

  The other man held up his weapon. “Gun,” he explained.

  The mercenary’s face twisted in irritation and he stood, pulling a pistol from an inner pocket. “Get Sergey and some other men. Then show me where.”

  * * *

  Marc and Lucy were silent, both of them struggling to process what they had discovered in the makeshift operating room.

  At length, she took a look around. “This is what you’d need,” she said to the air. “A surgical theater, somewhere more or less sterile, enough antibiotics to stave off any infection. Anesthetic, oxygen, couple of pairs of hands who know their way around the ER. All that would be a piece of cake for the Combine to source.”

  Marc was only half-listening to her. He was thinking back to the intelligence reports that had come out of the Barcelona bombing. The Spanish had been stymied by the data they had recovered from the building’s metal detectors; according to the scanners, nothing had gone through the doors that could possibly have concealed an explosive device powerful enough to level the police station.

  But clearly, it had. Some poor bastard with a bomb sewn inside him, Marc thought, horrified by the grisly prospect.

  It was a hideously ingenious strategy. With security systems like advanced chemical sensors or millimeter-wave body scanners capable of peering through outer layers of clothing and even false limbs, the conventional suicide bomber was no longer the most expedient option for militant extremists. Terrorists couldn’t just strap a bomb vest under a big coat and walk on to an airliner or into a protected location without being identified … but someone carrying a device actually inside their bodies would be virtually undetectable.

  Lucy’s thoughts were taking a similar path. “This is the next evolution of suicide bombing, right here,” she said, eyes flashing. “You know about the al-Asiri bomb in Jeddah, back in ’09? One guy, promising to give up his pals working for Bin Laden, just as long as he gets some face time with the head of the Saudi counter-terror force. He gets the meet, makes a call on his cell and the fucker just explodes. He had a hundred grams of plastic explosive stuffed in his gut, and that only has a fraction of the potential of HMX…” She caught herself and tapped her throat mike. “Hey. You getting this horror show out there?”

  “Yes,” said Delancort, and his tone was muted and sober through the buzzing distortion of the radio link. “Every word. Unfortunately.”

  “Did you know this was what they were doing?” Marc demanded.

  “Hell no!” Lucy snapped back, and he believed her.

  Marc got to his feet and straightened. The revulsion of what they had discovered here would have overwhelmed any rational person, but he couldn’t allow that feeling to rise up in him now. He had to be cold and clinical about this, remain focused on the situation at hand and figure out how they were going to deal with it.

  He stared at the operating table. “We’ve missed what they were doing in here,” he said. “They must have been implanting the devices during the voyage … So either the bomb carriers are still on board—”

  “Or they’ve already been deployed against their targets,” Lucy concluded. Then all the work lights in the compartment died and plunged them into pitch darkness.

  Marc snatched at the NVGs and pulled them down over his eyes as the shooting started.

  * * *

  With the strike to her head still echoing through her bones, Lucy felt as if she had been plunged to the bottom of a well as the cargo bay went black. For dizzying seconds, she could see nothing at all as her eyes adjusted, and she silently cursed the guard Marc had dispatched for smashing her goggles beyond repair. She was starting to pick out shapes inside the compartment when muzzle flashes flared yellow-white on the gantry above, and through the shadows she heard the humming of heavy caliber rounds cutting the air about her head.

  She fired blindly with the Mark 14, shots kicking off as fast as she could squeeze the trigger. She dodged away, scrambling for cover behind one of the big cube-shaped water barrels. Lucy though
t she saw the glitter of glassy eyes up there, mechanical insect faces staring down at her. The mercs had low-light goggles too, the more complex four-scoped versions that gave better coverage with the trade-off of making the wearer look like a mechanical cockroach. She saw Marc shooting back, but the attackers had the numbers, and they were getting their range.

  Shots punched holes into the far side of the plastic barrel, causing water to jet across the bloodstained deck. Lucy pivoted and fired a couple of bursts at the point where she estimated the incoming rounds were originating. She was rewarded by the keening shriek of ricochets as her shots sparked off the walls of the freighter.

  They were rats in a trap here, and she could only guess at how many men the mercs had to pour in after them. The guard, she thought, they found us because we smoked that unlucky son-of-a-bitch.

  “We gotta move,” Marc called out. “I’m coming to you!”

  He burst out of cover, a shadow against shadows, spurts of exhaust gas from the Vector’s muzzle dancing in the air. Lucy did what she could to give him covering fire, shooting wildly until the mag was empty.

  Marc didn’t pause, just grabbed at the strap of her tac vest and pulled her with him. With Lucy virtually sightless in the depths of the ship, only he could see well enough through the Ortek goggles to guide her to some kind of safety. She ran with him, gripped by a horrible, naked sense of vulnerability.

  Marc’s gun ran dry, and he shouted “Hatch!” as they both collided with the closed doorway on the far side of the compartment.

  Her hands scrambling over the old metal, she found the lever and threw her weight behind it to shove it open. Shots clipping at their heels, they fell through into the dark corridor beyond—and for a second Lucy was afraid the fall would go on forever.

  Marc helped her up, and she could make out his silhouette, hear him gasping with effort.

  “Where are we?” she asked, becoming aware of pain across the backside of her right thigh. Lucy reached down, found a rent in material and her hand came away wet. Damn.