‘I have not killed a single soul!’ Crackerjack’s eyes were rimmed with tears.
Jay adjusted his aim, sighting the bridge of the man’s nose.
‘Please, listen to the truth,’ the man said. ‘They want me dead because I threaten their control!’ Jay ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth. He could taste the man's fear.
‘You better take out the target,’ Damien whispered into Jay’s earpiece. ‘We have company.’
Jay squeezed slowly on the trigger, reached first trigger pressure. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said to Crackerjack.
‘All I wanted was for my country and my neighbors to be independent.’
Jay’s finger uncurled a fraction. ‘Then why did your country revolt against you?’
Crackerjack looked genuinely confused. ‘They… there was no revolt. NATO bombs destroyed everything.’
Jay ground his teeth together. ‘You lying piece of shit.’
‘Ninety percent of my people supported me!’ Crackerjack yelled suddenly. ‘What does that tell you? I suppose you will never know this because—’
Jay squeezed the trigger. Blood splashed the wall behind the man. Jay felt some hit his face.
Damien entered the room and held up four fingers. Jay could hear the four men moving up the stairs. Shit.
He wanted to change mags, but didn’t trust that he could do it in complete silence. He had ten or eleven rounds left. That would have to do.
Damien moved next to Crackerjack’s body, taking position on one side of the doorway. Jay backed away, covering the right. Damien pointed downward, gesturing across the landing. Jay heard it too. More of them, trying to move quietly through the first level.
Fuck, how many were there?
The worst thing they could do was hide in here. All it would take was one frag grenade and they’d be toast.
There was a window behind them, shades drawn. Damien lifted one corner, revealing iron bars. He shook his head at Jay.
Crackerjack’s men had stopped moving. Stalemate. The men couldn’t enter the room without being shot. And Damien and Jay couldn’t leave the room without being shot. He hoped they didn’t have grenades.
‘Any bright ideas?’ Jay whispered.
Damien looked at him, then shook his head.
‘Plan B then.’ Jay pulled the ring off his last flashbang and hurled it over the landing.
Damien’s eyes were wide.
‘Close your eyes!’ Jay hissed.
Here we go again, he thought, clenching his eyelids tightly. This time, the bang was louder. His eardrums whined.
He opened his eyes. Damien was beside him, ready to move. Jay stepped out onto the landing. Three men were waving their rifles aimlessly. Jay raised his MP5 to shoot.
More men on the staircase. Below the landing, he saw four others below, also disoriented.
Too many of them. Jay couldn’t clear a path in time.
Fuck it.
He leaped over the edge of the landing. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He aimed for one of the men below, almost landing on the man’s chest. One of his knees inadvertently cracked the man’s nose. Blood splashed onto Jay’s already crimson-dotted dishdasha. Gunfire lit up the room. Someone else started shooting blindly. Jay lunged under the arc of fire and stepped behind the man. Damien landed gracefully beside him.
Damien stayed down while Jay gripped the man’s shoulders with both hands and directed his aim, splashing 7.62mm rounds through the house. Damien used his MP5 to catch the targets Jay missed.
Jay released the man’s shoulders, cupped his hands and slammed them over the man’s ears. The man cried out in pain as his eardrums burst. He collapsed, hands over his bleeding ears. Jay collected the man’s AKM in mid-air and dived under the landing. Unfurling from his shoulder roll, he punched rounds through the ceiling, emptying the magazine.
Silence.
He waited a further ten seconds, then gave Damien the signal that he was reloading.
Damien shuffled underneath the landing and watched both entries into the room. A tough arc to cover, but he had no choice while Jay ditched the AKM and returned to his MP5.
On one knee, Jay gripped the MP5 mag, thumbed the release catch, placed the mag on the floor and engaged a new mag from his vest. He tugged the new mag to make sure it was in, then stuffed the old one in his vest. Even if it was empty, he wasn’t about to leave it lying around.
‘Ready,’ he said.
It was Damien’s turn to reload. Like Jay, he didn’t waste his time with the tactical reload that some special forces preferred. They’d quickly learned in their training that attempting to juggle two magazines in the same hand while in a combat situation was like trying to thread a needle on a roller-coaster. It was slow, stupid and a sure way to get yourself killed. Instead, he speed-reloaded with the safety off. He already had a round chambered and the bolt was closed. All he had to do was swap the mags. He took a fresh mag from a left pouch of his vest and placed the near-empty mag in a pouch on his right side. He was smooth and focused. Even with the dishdasha to contend with, he was ready in four seconds.
And just in time, as Jay heard more footsteps. This time from the front of the house, which ruled it out as an escape route.
Damien pulled the pin on his flashbang, tossed it into the front room. Same drill: shut eyes, cover ears, move.
Moving forward, Damien swept his aim over the landing above them. With that covered, Jay made the corner, switching his aim from the front room to the back. Two men were waiting for him; one halfway through priming a grenade, not a flashbang.
Jay dropped him without thinking, and the man next to him. Stray rounds smacked the tiled floor. The grenade fell. Pin missing.
‘Grenade!’ Jay yelled.
He leaped back around the corner, colliding with Damien. They both went sprawling into the middle room. Jay was prone now, MP5 in both hands. He focused on the front room in case anyone came out guns blazing.
Damien was beside him, still partly exposed to the back room. He dived over Jay, rolling under the landing.
The explosion was deafening. Twisted bits of metal sliced across the room, cutting into the wall and smashing glass and pottery. Jay heard men groaning on the stairs.
More footsteps at the front of the house.
On his feet, he helped Damien up and they sprinted around the corner. Behind them, devastating 7.62mm rounds cracked through the air.
They moved out the blue door with little precaution. Jay felt dread, knowing it would be easy for anyone waiting for them to cut them down.
He ran for the corner and peered around. He wanted to see what was going on at the front of the building. He could see three 4WDs and he could hear shouting in Arabic. Either his hearing was fucked or his Arabic wasn’t as good as he thought it was, because he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Damien was busy priming his last flashbang. He lobbed it into the back room. Whether he’d got the timing right or not, neither of them could know, but it was better than nothing.
‘Go!’ Damien yelled.
Jay shook his head and pointed to the tree line. He wasn’t giving Damien a chance to argue. He positioned himself off-center from the blue door, elbow resting on one knee, and waited for the first unlucky bastard to step through. Behind him, he heard Damien sprinting for the trees.
‘Go!’ Damien yelled again, over the earpiece. His voice was dull over the ringing in Jay's ears. Damien was in position, covering Jay.
Just as Jay was about to launch to his feet and run, there was a sliver of movement. He spotted a man advancing from the middle room. And someone behind him. Jay switched to full automatic and splashed a good ten rounds inside the room, just to pin them down, he hoped. Then he remembered his rounds were suppressed. They probably hadn’t even noticed. He ran like fuck.
Ahead of him, he could make out Damien lying prone behind a palm tree, his left elbow and MP5 barely visible through Jay’s enhanced vision. It took ten seconds to cl
ear the open ground. Jay dropped flat onto his chest, breathing deeply, then shuffled around so he was facing the house. Two men emerged from the blue door, rifles leveled. One flash of red. And another. They collapsed. Damien had dropped them.
‘Go,’ Jay said.
Damien was off the ground and moving deeper into the band of palm trees that divided the town from the desert.
‘Go,’ he said.
Jay jumped to his feet, adrenaline super-charging his movements. He ran. The cold desert air bit into his face and neck. Crackerjack’s words played over in his mind. Ghost explosions rang in his ears.
Chapter Twelve
Denton’s attention was transfixed on archival footage. From the satellite, Qom was a handful of glittering diamonds on black velvet. And in the center of the diamonds, he noticed a brief flicker. At first, he thought it was just a glitch, a digital artifact in the footage. But a fraction of a second later the glitch was replaced by an object that looked like a bell-shaped jellyfish. A jellyfish that might’ve swallowed a bioluminescent tangerine.
For a second, the tangerine jellyfish remained stable. Then it grew, expanding as though the city was its next big lunch. An explosion at a jerky twelve frames per second.
Denton followed its hazy edges as it stretched outward in an ever-expanding sphere, shaking buildings and curdling the mountains in the north. He couldn’t see what happened next because the jellyfish — now a furious scarlet — blossomed into a white flash that expanded from Qom and consumed Tehran. When the white faded, all that remained in the immediate blast radius was a city-sized blanket of ash.
Denton chewed his lip. With his thumb on the tracking ball, he wheeled the footage back to before the jellyfish, back to the time when his operatives had recovered Damien and Jay, and Sophia had escaped. He transposed the location where Sophia had last been seen over the top of the footage. Although Sophia had cut out her RFID, Denton had been lucky. The surveillance satellite was already in place to monitor the nuclear fallout, and that served him very well. Had Sophia continued north, his coverage would’ve been toast. But by heading west, she’d made a grave mistake. She’d unknowingly slipped into the satellite’s range, giving him this extraordinarily high-resolution footage in visual and infrared spectrum.
He licked his lips, tasting the peculiar apple flavor of the Guaraná Antarctica Ice Penguin or whatever it was called. Switching to the infrared spectrum, he magnified in close to watch the interception.
The bus smashed into the fire truck. Damien and Jay were stuck inside, buffered with sticky foam. Sophia plunged into the river and disappeared. Three hundred yards south of the bridge, her fuzzy outline crawled ashore. From there, she continued south on foot beside a hydroelectric plant. She kept herself concealed in the foliage. Had it not been for the infrared vision, he would’ve spent hours trying to pinpoint where she’d emerged. When she did, she was on a highway that ran parallel to the river. The first time he’d watched the footage, he was surprised she’d exposed herself to a main road, especially unarmed and wearing drenched, ill-fitting civilian clothes. But this time around, he wasn’t surprised. He was curious. Maybe it was the apple flavor.
A pale blue car pulled up alongside Sophia. She approached the driver’s side and pulled the driver out. He wobbled, lost his balance and hit the asphalt. She took his place and drove the car southwest along the highway. Denton measured 1.4 miles before she took a right off the highway, then the first right after that, feeding her into a small street. She circled what looked like a factory, then parked in the parking lot and exited the vehicle. Denton watched with rising interest as she walked straight inside the factory. It was a Sunday. The place was likely to be closed.
Now Sophia had a roof over her head, Denton could only use the infrared. He watched the blob that represented Sophia move around the factory before it decided to lie down. Was she injured? Had she found a concealed place to get some rest? He didn’t have the answer. Yet.
He panned around the surrounding terrain. Mostly residential; some large vacant blocks. Others appeared to be growing crops. It was flat, spread out and exposed. Sophia wouldn’t attempt to cross it during the day, even by vehicle. She would wait until night, completely unaware that in two hours she’d be killed in a nuclear explosion.
He leaned back in his chair. There was something about her movements that bugged him. Out in the open, on the highway. It didn’t make sense. She was trained to know better than that. Was she really that desperate? And lying down to rest in a factory. Why there?
He shuttled the footage back and played it again, starting from her fall into the river. Out of the river. Move alongside the hydroelectric plant. Out onto the highway. Steal a car.
He paused, watched again.
Sophia pulled the driver out of the car.
Denton zoomed in tight. At this altitude, it was getting blurry. He switched off infrared and replayed. She pulled the driver out of the car, but didn’t strike him. She didn’t need to. He’d lost his balance and fallen.
There was something about the driver that prickled Denton’s mind. He couldn’t put his finger on it so he let the footage play out. Only this time he didn’t track Sophia, he stayed on the driver.
The driver stood on the side of the highway for seventeen minutes and forty seconds, then waved down a van. The van pulled up and, after a quick verbal exchange through the window, the driver hitched a ride.
Denton paused the footage to visit the vending machine. He swiped his ID for three more cans of Penguin Antarctica and carried them back to his desk. He cracked one open, filled his glass, then turned the infrared back on.
Inside the van, a single person glowed. Denton almost choked on his drink. As far as the satellite was concerned, the driver Sophia had kicked out of the pale blue car seventeen minutes ago was the only person in the van. That was quite a feat, considering he wasn’t even fucking driving.
There was something deeply troubling about this whole thing. Either the van was remote-controlled or the actual driver had blocked his infrared heat signature. Neither option was easy to pull off. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to do this. And it had to be connected with Sophia.
He drained his glass and refilled it. Then dialed a number on his com.
The call connected immediately.
He said, ‘I need a hazmat team prepped 2200 hours Zulu Time Four.’
* * *
Through the visor of his XM50 mask, Denton observed the rocky mountain peaks south of Qom. Behind him, boots crunched over debris. He turned to see the team leader approach.
‘We’ve swept the factory for the third time,’ the team leader said, his tinny voice amplified through his mask’s voicemitter. ‘There’s nothing to recover here, Colonel.’
Denton went to fold his arms, but the nuclear, biological and chemical warfare suit he was wearing made the movement too uncomfortable. He settled for hands on hips instead.
‘You’ve spent the entire afternoon in this factory and you haven’t even found a goddamn finger?’ he said.
‘I’m afraid not. The only bodies we’ve recovered are in the surrounding streets. No evidence inside the factory at all.’
Denton grunted. ‘And what does that suggest to you?’
‘It suggests to me that Sophia was killed by one of the several explosions that went off inside this factory when the nuke hit.’
‘Actually,’ Denton cast a final glance at the empty factory, ‘the lack of evidence suggests to me she wasn’t killed at all.’
Chapter Thirteen
Sophia had read just about every English book in the library. Her Italian wasn’t strong enough to attempt any of the Italian-written seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works on theology, literature, history, botany, medicine or geography. She’d spent so much time learning Polish that her Italian left a lot to be desired.
She placed the gramophone’s needle on her favorite piece, Variations in A-Dur. The light cadence reminded her of rain on the rooftops and it
relaxed her in a way that no other piece could. Ribbons of glowing silvery pink drops danced above her, shimmering and swaying like flocks of candlelit birds. She enjoyed their movement. Instead of distracting her, they actually helped her focus as she skimmed through an Italian book on history. Which was probably why this was her favorite piece. She was beginning to grow fond of her mixed senses — or ‘synesthesia’ as Leoncjusz had called it. Though he’d said it wouldn’t last.
She turned the pages of the Italian book, able to identify some words while just glazing over others. It was like a puzzle without enough clues. She picked up enough of one section to work out it was about Christmas. In Italy, Christmas was celebrated from 24 December through to 6 January, with Christmas markets beginning weeks in advance. She didn’t understand much of the rest of the text, except that families hung ornaments from their Christmas trees and attended the local Mercatino di Natale, Christmas market, to eat and celebrate.
Over the music, she heard the faint squeals of children playing in the streets. There were more of them than usual. Then she realized they must be going to the Christmas market. Putting the book aside, she went to seek out Leoncjusz.
He was in his office, which wasn’t at all unusual, sitting in almost trance-like stillness, his reading glasses resting low on his nose. He was studying a handful of papers with notes scribed in black ink. The glowing drops from the gramophone followed her into the heated office and playfully swooped down on Leoncjusz from the high ceiling.
‘I’ve been trapped in here for months,’ Sophia said. ‘It’s the twelfth day of December.’
Leoncjusz slowly looked up from his papers. ‘I am not fond of eggnog. However, if cup of tea is on offer before dinner …’
‘I can hear the Christmas market.’
He raised an eyebrow; his sign that he was waiting for her to make her point.
She wanted to escape and this was her chance.
‘I want… well, I want a Christmas tree.’
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