Conan had expected to be killed within a few moments of setting off down the mountain. Yet here they were. They’d been moving in the dark as quickly as they dared until they’d heard the sound of the pursuer overhead, and then they’d sheltered under their woolen blankets, diving under ferns and into furrows in the forest floor. That was all that was between them and a fléchette rocket or autocannon round. Just a half an inch of wool that hid their heat signatures.
They’d gotten the idea from the Taliban, who used them to elude American drone searches. Finding wool blankets in Hawaii had been the hard part. They’d had to sneak into a frozen-fish processing facility off North Nimitz Highway, where Nicks traded the foreman a captured pistol for the blankets. Conan hoped that gun would be on their side someday. Lots of people said they were waiting for the right moment. A podiatrist in Kaneohe who had hidden Conan and Finn in his garage one night had even shown them his great-grandfather’s newa, an old Hawaiian wooden war club with shark teeth embedded in it. He’d sworn that his ancestors would see him smash it into an occupier’s skull one day soon.
Soon. Would that day ever come? Conan lifted the edge of her blanket and listened. Nothing mechanical moved; she heard only the sounds of the forest at night. She raised her head and clicked quietly and saw the spectral shapes of insurgent forms rise up and circle around her. She waited five minutes and then hissed softly, and they began to move with soft steps down the mountain.
“Beautiful night,” whispered Finn. She could tell he was close by the sweetly vile smell of ammonia and musk.
And then the world went white.
The first explosion lifted her off her feet and launched Finn into a tree trunk. A second explosion followed an instant later, shredding trees with hundreds of dart-like metal-fléchette rounds.
Conan tried to look around but couldn’t focus, as white static seemed to fill her eyes. When her vision cleared, she looked through the infrared scope on her sniper rifle and saw a dozen Directorate soldiers bounding down the trail. In the distance came the low growl of a quadcopter. Then all the soldiers flicked on their flashlights at once. Confident bastards.
She peered out from behind the protection of a koa tree trunk and pulled the trigger. The shot hit a soldier squarely in the middle of the protective faceplate on his helmet. She panned for another target, but a volley of shots ripped through the leaves to the left and right above her and forced her to dive into the dirt and roll to the base of a tree ten feet away. Turkey-peeking around the trunk, she saw the first soldier, now with a shattered visor, back up and advance, firing steadily.
Let them come. She needed them close so the quadcopter couldn’t fire at the Muj from above the forest canopy without also killing the Directorate soldiers. She waited, her back to the tree trunk, wiping sweat from her forehead with her hand.
This was it.
“Montana! Montana! Montana!” she shouted over the irregular bark of assault rifles. She fired wildly around the trunk, not even looking, and then immediately tossed the cumbersome sniper rifle. She took off running, knowing there was no way they could catch her loaded down with their helmets and armored tac-vests, just like the old mujahideen in the ’Stans had run circles around the U.S. troops hauling eighty pounds of gear up and down the mountains. After a hundred feet of running, she ducked behind a tree, took off her backpack, and tossed it onto the path.
Then she took off sprinting downhill again, more agile now without the weight of the backpack, bounding over stumps and rocks. Branches and leaves slashed at her right arm, which she was holding up to protect her face.
The explosives in her backpack detonated on the trail above her. The back blast tossed Conan down, but the two hundred pea-size ceramic ball bearings shot up the trail in the direction of her pursuers. At her insistence, all the Muj patrolled with the homemade mines strapped to their backpacks, what Finn called, appropriately, death insurance.
She lifted herself up and started running down the trail again. The crack of another explosion meant Finn’s charge had gone off as well. It didn’t tell her whether he was still alive or not, but the explosion did illuminate the trail ahead of her, and what she saw sent her stumbling to try to slow her descent.
She hardly saw or heard the third explosion, maybe Tricky’s, because she tripped and started to cartwheel down the trail. Conan clawed at the mud, rocks, and branches trying to stop her acceleration. The speed of her tumbling picked up as the slope steepened.
A fourth explosion.
She snatched a glance at a horizon split between the last few feet of overgrown slope and a black void decorated with twinkling lights. Whether they were stars or buildings below, Conan couldn’t tell. For some reason, she relaxed and fixated on that question as she felt her body lose contact with the ground.
Kakaako, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
Colonel Vladimir Markov nodded once at the Directorate commando. He was a bit surprised General Yu had let the mission go forward. It could have been the prospect of writing yet another letter to a Directorate senior official who had sent his boy off to get a safe war for his résumé only to receive in return a body unfit for an open-casket funeral. Or perhaps the possibility that a woman might be doing the butchering had affronted his warrior’s sensibility.
The commando affixed what looked like a ridged black plastic cup to the apartment door’s handle. He gently pressed the white button on the back of the device, and there was a faint hum, followed by a hiss. The electromagnetic charge in the breacher device silently shook the lock apart. There was a faint pop as the commando removed the cup, and he waved Markov forward with an exaggerated bow that showed the Russian the sinister skull painted on the top of his assault helmet. Markov thought it silly, knowing they’d gotten the idea from that video game15 they all liked to play in their off-hours.
The team already knew she wasn’t home. An external thermal scan of the one-bedroom apartment had shown it was empty. He’d made them confirm it with a second painfully long search done by a two-inch creeper that wormed under the door and checked every room for carbon dioxide levels.
Even though Markov had to bring the commandos with him, he would enter alone. Their commanding officer didn’t mind. He knew what they were thinking: If the Russian wanted to blow himself up in a booby trap, so be it. This war was dragging on, and only the Russian seemed to be in a hurry to lose a limb.
Markov was indeed in a hurry, but his careful movements did not show it. He removed his shoes in the hallway and covered his feet in a pair of surgical booties.
“Your shoes, sir?” said the Directorate commando in English. “Shall I shine them during your stay with us?”
“Just make sure they’re good enough for General Yu,” said Markov over his shoulder as he stepped through the doorway. The laughter in the hallway followed him inside.
He headed first for the kitchen. He’d never understood why, but people loved to hide things in the kitchen. Explosives in the freezer. Shells in the breadbox. False papers and ID tags among the recipes.
He found nothing. No heads in the refrigerator or fingers drying on the windowsill, which part of him had thought was a possibility.
It was a depressing apartment, bare of any personal items. Just a collection of build-it-yourself furniture, much of it apparently bought used. There wasn’t a single photograph anywhere.
Markov sighed and reached into the satchel. He put on a pair of thick, green opaque goggles that looked like the heavy-duty night-vision gear worn by infantry. He powered them on, and the room appeared before him as clearly as he had seen it moments before. A signal meter showed he was connected to the router in the armored vehicle outside where Jian waited, as ever.
He murmured a series of commands in Russian and the room began sparkling with mosquito-size points of light. The flickering consolidated, giving the floor and furniture a green-blue shimmering hue, like a boat’s phosphorescent wake in the moonlight.
Each streak represented
the DNA trail that she’d left during her daily patterns of life. Each was a tiny piece of her that she would never get back.
Ending up in the bedroom, Markov followed the shimmering trail around the bed and over to the wide closet. Of course the trail would lead here. A woman should be close to her clothes, he thought, especially this woman. He then smiled at his own sexism.
The lights showed a cluster of activity toward the back of the closet, mostly concentrated on a faded red-and-white shoebox. The box was for a pair of Puma flip-flops, men’s size 11. Whose, he did not know.
He carefully lifted the box slightly with a pen, testing the weight. It was light, making it less likely that it was booby-trapped. Less likely was not impossible, though. Still using the pen, he gently raised the lid, teasing it up to see if there was any resistance from tape or a wire. There was none, and he took the box’s lid off fully, finding inside a hairbrush in a plastic sandwich bag and a green piece of paper folded into a small envelope. He carried the box over to the bed and sat down.
The envelope was addressed to My Love. He slowly opened it, fold by fold. More writing, some kind of anniversary note, and then, with the final unfolding, a small razor blade. It gleamed even in the low light, bright with DNA traces. He folded the blade back into the envelope and laid it on the bed.
He looked at the hairbrush, curious about why it was stored inside a plastic bag. What was so valuable about it? He took the brush out of the bag and eyed it more closely, turning it in the light.
He slowly shook the brush just above the green envelope; strands of hair fell out. He pulled out his pen and ran it across the brush slowly; a few more hairs fell down. Using the pen, he began to separate them, holding his breath so as not to disturb any. The hairs were all short, none longer than an inch, a few straight, a few curled, all of varied thickness. There were twenty-one hairs in total.
Lotus Flower Club, Former French Concession, Shanghai
Sergei Sechin sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the strands of Twenty-Three’s blue hair sticking out from under the sheet. Against the pink fabric, the hair looked like something found on a coral reef, beautiful and fragile. Then, as the weight of his body pressed down on the mattress, bright red blood started seeping toward him.
He stayed seated as the blood came closer and closer. Had she done it herself, or was this a message to him?
In either case, it meant he was blown. Did he have time to destroy his devices and get a back-alley body scan to see if they had tagged or chipped him? Or should he just run? And yet, what he found himself thinking was that now he’d never know Twenty-Three’s name.
The knock on the door snapped him to attention, and he returned to being the intelligence professional he’d been before he entered the room. Why knock? Perhaps to unsettle him further? See how he would react?
His eyes moved to the corner, where there was a small writing table. He quietly opened the desk drawer and found a pen. It had an ivory inlay set with eight brushed-metal bands and a gleaming silver nib, reflecting the recent fad that had many of China’s most powerful writing letters by hand for the first time in decades. It would have to do.
Aware that he was being watched, Sechin scribbled a note. They would give him time to write it, he knew, thinking it a confession. But it was just a message in Klingon directing them to where they could stick something.
He went back to the bed and sat down, then felt her warm blood seeping into the seat of his pants. He leaned over and kissed her through the wet sheet. As he kissed her, he brushed her hair with one hand and felt his neck for the pulse of his carotid artery with the other. With closed eyes, he tensed up and prepared to jam the fountain pen’s nib into his artery as far as he could and then rip it out.
The door exploded in a spray of fine wooden particles, and the concussion from the blast lifted Sechin off the bed. He crashed face-first into the mirror.
He slumped over at the foot of the mirror, then rolled onto his side, frantically looking for the pen, his ears ringing too loudly for him to hear the faint hum of rubber treads on the floor. The breacher robot rolled up to him, and the gun mounted at its end pointed at Sechin’s neck and fired.
Tiangong-3 Space Station
When they retold the history of this war, no one would believe just how boring the space part of it had been.
They were the true “Warriors of China’s New Century,” as the unit’s commendation letter from the Presidium itself put it. Colonel Huan Zhou had read it to them as they shared a celebratory meal of dehydrated roast pork and mooncakes16 the day after Tiangong fired the war’s opening salvos. But since then, in a metal box two hundred miles above all the action, little had happened for months.
And for that Chang was thankful. If it was boring, Chang dared not mention it. Huan kept riding them hard, conducting training drills as if they had to shoot down the whole cosmos. There’s nothing left! Chang wanted to shout. All the targets have been serviced!
The only real threat they had faced came from a U.S. Air Force jet—an F-15, Huan said later, flying at its maximum altitude—that had fired an antisatellite missile17 at the station. The Tiangong’s laser-defense system turned the missile into more space junk and would have lased the plane if it hadn’t had some kind of high-altitude mechanical failure first.
The worst part about that action was that it was all automated. Chang wanted his son to think he was a hero, but the onboard systems had handled the targeting while Chang slept.
He ate another mooncake and gazed longingly down at the blue Pacific.
“Chang,” Huan called. He sounded even more on edge than normal, which perhaps reflected the fact that they’d run out of stims three days earlier. The pace of war in space was so slow, they’d gone through them faster than planned, trying to stay alert. “What is the MAGIC array status update?”
“Operative at one hundred percent. No anomalies,” said Chang. Hainan had ordered them to shift the geosynchronous orbits of the surveillance satellites from their position above the central Pacific to an area over the Arctic region. It hadn’t made any sense until the new readings came in.
“It’s still tracking the American East Coast squadron coming from the North Atlantic. Two nuclear-ship readings, all data confirmed received. It seems whatever intel they had was right. The Americans are making one more push, this time up north.”
“I almost admire them. They have to know it won’t work, but the sacrifice is still worthy,” said Huan. “Near space clear?”
“Exclusion zone intact. The German comsat launched out of Sudan last week made sure to stay extra-wide. I think it’s a broadcast bird,” said Chang. “I can check the intel reports again.”
“Make sure you do. We want no surprises,” said Huan.
The Directorate had declared a two-hundred-kilometer zone of exclusion around Tiangong. The Germans had apparently learned their lesson three weeks ago after a Belgian weather satellite had wandered into the zone and been lased into a molten ball of junk.
“Today’s traffic?” asked Huan.
“A slow day. Intelligence reports two launches expected: an unmanned Russian replenishment vehicle for the ISS and one of those space-tourism flights from the European spaceport in French Guiana,” said Chang.
“War-zone tourists. In space! Such idiots. Let me check with Hainan to see if we can service that target, maybe make their trip even more exciting,” said Huan, laughing.
Huan’s braying laugh was one of the most trying aspects of life aboard the station for the entire crew. Was it bloodlust or boredom that drove Huan?
“And I will inquire about the resupply. You know, Chang, there may be fresh crew coming.”
Home.
“I’ll leave only when you leave, sir,” said Chang, hoping those words would be enough. If Huan thought he wanted to leave, Chang knew he would be the last to get off the station.
“Naturally,” Huan replied.
Chang closed his eyes and waited. He was good at wait
ing. He thought about his son: What was he doing at this moment? Were his eyes closed too? Chang began to hum a song he used to sing to his son when he was a baby.
A steady ping snapped him to attention. The station’s flight-tracking systems had detected a change of course by the tourists’ space plane.
Chang wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and stared hard at the screen again. No. That couldn’t be. It was heading straight toward the exclusion zone.
USS Zumwalt, North Pacific Ocean
“All stop!” shouted executive officer Horatio Cortez.
As the USS Zumwalt slowed, the black smoke coming up from the bow section of the ship blocked out the view of the nearly flat Pacific Ocean.
“Who gave the order to stop?” asked Captain Simmons, wanting to yell but producing more of a wheeze, as he had to catch his breath. He’d dashed up from the engine room, where he had been talking to the crew about how to get a few more knots of sprint speed out of the ship. “What the hell is going on, XO?”
“It’s some kind of internal explosion,” said Cortez, eyes flickering behind his glasses as he watched the ship give an automated damage report. “Fire-suppression system is working, should be under control any moment.”
The smell of burning plastic started to waft through the bridge.
“No sign of an attack. ATHENA says battery fire,” said Cortez in the clipped voice he used during high-stress situations.
“Then we can start moving. We have a schedule to keep!” said Simmons. He turned and left the bridge, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was headed to find the source of the problem.
As he rushed below decks, the calls of “Captain!” and “Make a hole!” echoed down the ladder wells and passageways. He could never catch up to the crew’s warnings to the others that he was on his way and they should look shipshape.
Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) Page 29
