Qi asked his first question in a soft, unhurried voice, as if quizzing a student. In any other circumstance, it would have been reassuring.
“We know you have been passing information to the Americans. What have you given them?” asked Qi.
“Just some technical information,” said Sechin. The part that wanted to resist thought the best way to do so was to appear to cooperate, to extend the clock. Or was that the part that actually wanted to cooperate tricking him?
“About?” asked Qi.
“Space,” said Sechin. “About satellites.”
Sechin’s mind raced. Which part had said that?
“We are losing time. Both of us,” said Qi, leaning in closer as if admiring the texture of Sechin’s skin. “Based on the documents you accessed, it would seem you have provided them information on how we can track their submarines. Is that correct?”
Yes. No. What had he said?
“Excellent. Thank you for your cooperation.” Had he really answered, or was that one of Qi’s tricks?
“What I need to know is what they are planning to do with that information. What other information had they asked you to gather? What was the meeting today to be about?”
Sechin tried not to answer, to take his mind somewhere else again, imagining Twenty-Three’s face, running his hands through her blue hair. Or was he telling Qi that he had passed the file to her?
Qi displayed a photo of Twenty-Three on the view screen, her body laid out on a stainless-steel morgue table, the bluish pallor of her skin a faint echo of her blue hair. Sechin tried to imagine her in bed with him but couldn’t bring back the image. “This is who you were to meet today. I show you her not to provoke bad memories but to let you know that while I am in a hurry, the ultimate truth I seek is more important than your own truths. If you want to save them, you must cooperate.”
Suddenly the image of Twenty-Three in the morgue disappeared. Was it gone from the screen or from his memory?
“Now, tell me, why the meeting today?”
He tried to hold on to something, anything. Her hair was blue. Yes, her hair was blue.
“Today?” said Sechin. “Today was about many things.”
After not feeling his body for most of the interrogation, Sechin became acutely aware of his skin burning, as if every single cell were on fire. His nose involuntarily sniffed the air for the scent of smoldering flesh.
“I am sorry to do that, but you must understand there is no tolerance here,” said Qi. “No tolerance for your lies and no tolerance for your pain, when the very experience of it is merely signals in your brain. It can last as short or as long a time as we want you to feel it, or, rather, perceive that you feel it. Now, please tell me, what was the primary goal of the meeting today?”
“Sex,” said Sechin.
At the base of his skull, Sechin felt a tingling, almost purring sensation that then exploded in another wash of fire across his body. Why? He had told the truth! Or had he?
Qi shook his head and paused. Or was there actually a pause? Had someone talked, and then they’d rewound back to this moment, his sense of time now manipulated?
“Only one last set of questions, then. Why did the Americans want you to provide them information about our northern defenses? Does it have to do with their fleets now on the move?”
Sechin saw only blue. He heard someone talking but wasn’t sure who it was. What had been said? Had he answered? He could see only blue.
“Thank you. You have done very well.” Sechin heard Qi order the information be relayed to an admiral as fast as possible and then felt Qi’s hand gently cup his face. It was soft, the effect almost soothing.
“I am not the monster many think me to be. This is far more humane—dare I say refined—than their old ways of forcing information. More important, what has been taken can be restored. And that, General, is my farewell gift to you.”
Qi then lightly patted him on the cheek and exited from his field of view. Sechin thought he heard the whirring again of a drill, but then he saw her. Twenty-Three. She truly was beautiful. He began to caress her, running his hands through her blue hair, stroking her skin from her neck down, and then his body spasmed over and over again in the exact moment of his imagined release.
It was all Sergei Sechin could think of as the fiber-optic wires were yanked out of his brain.
Directorate Command, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
General Yu held the plastic bag up to Markov’s face. The finger looked like it had been seasoned with pepper and tossed in flour. It was unmistakably a burned finger, though: Carrie Shin’s entire left ring finger.
“The fingerprints match,” said Yu. “So does the DNA. It seems I got your girl before you did.”
“Where’s the body?” said Markov.
“Mixed in with the rest of them,” said General Yu. He tossed the bagged finger to Markov. “Make a necklace out of it.”
Markov snatched the plastic bag out of the air with his left hand without breaking eye contact. His right hand rested loosely at his side, meaning he could draw his Makarov and fire two rounds in just over a second. Tempting as it was to think of himself holding the severed finger of a serial killer in one hand and his two-rounds-lighter pistol in the other, he centered himself with a steady exhale and said nothing.
“You can take it back to Moscow with you,” said Yu. “You’re done here. But to show you that I am not as terrible a man as you think I am, you will use my jet for the return trip. Let your last glimpse of Hawaii be from my seat.”
Markov shook his head. “You’re in that much of a hurry to get rid of me, General? Do you know what they call her? The Black Widow. Your spider-bot may have found her, but your stupidity creates more like her every day.” He threw the plastic bag at the general, who flinched as it bounced off his barrel chest and back onto the desk.
General Yu started to tremble, his eyes bulging in anger, but then he calmed himself by running his hands over his freshly shaved scalp.
“On second thought, Colonel, my plane is no longer available,” said Yu. “We have a resupply ship departing for Yangshan tomorrow evening. Its voyage should give you sufficient time to contemplate what punishment awaits you for striking your commanding officer. Guards!”
Tiangong-3 Space Station
Without his helmet, Chang felt far calmer. He knew he was still trapped, but he did not feel like it for the moment. He felt his pulse start to slow until a flash of movement at one of the observation windows caught his eye. A deranged face with a tongue sticking out hovered outside the observation hatch. Then someone tapped a gleaming short sword on the shatterproof glass.
Chang switched to the camera view that monitored that section of the station for tiny space debris and micro-meteor impacts. He panned the camera and saw a man in a jet-black EVA suit, the helmet and faceplate apparently painted with some kind of strange design. He watched as the astronaut began to attach a device to the outer hull of Tiangong.
Then the radio speaker on the console in front of him chirped to life.
“Tiangong crew, this is Sir Aeric, er . . . Captain Cavendish here. Righto. My men have just attached a pair of auxiliary thrusters to your station. You will now surrender the station to us. If you do, we will treat you as prisoners of war, following the rules set by the Geneva Conventions. If you do not comply, the station’s rotation will cease, and my scientists tell me the temperature inside will slowly but surely rise, cooking you to a temperature of eight hundred degrees, all thanks to our comrade in arms the sun, who is always on the side of the righteous . . . This is our last communication. Grant us access, and do not resist. Or you will die. Your choice, really.”
A burst of static hissed through the speakers, so loud that Chang turned off the sound. He peered at the monitor to see what Huan was doing. All Chang could tell was that the rest of the crew members were arguing with Huan, their EVA suits not yet on.
A jolt made Chang return to the window. He craned
his neck to see if that specter had returned. He saw nothing. Then a faint telltale distortion of the stars behind the station chilled the sweat pooling in his suit. It was one of the pirates’ auxiliary thrusters beginning the gradual slowing of the station’s rotation.
A steady alarm honk started, indicating that the station’s position was shifting from its preprogrammed orbit.
They had promised to treat the taikonauts fairly, hadn’t they? Wasn’t it better to live as a prisoner than die as a—what, a pig roasted to death in a box of coals?
There was no other option. Huan could keep arguing with the others about some foolhardy attack, but in the command center, Chang now had the power. He disarmed the Tiangong airlocks. He didn’t care whether his son would be proud or not, he just wanted to see him again.
Sundown Lounge, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
Colonel Vladimir Markov swallowed an ice cube that had been slowly dissolving in his vodka over the past few minutes. He hadn’t been this drunk in years. Not since the aftermath of that debacle in Yalta. He was irretrievably drunk but thinking with such clarity that he wondered how many days he had squandered not seeing things as plainly as he did now.
He delicately turned another page in his treasured book of Pushkin’s poems, ignoring the footfalls closing in behind him and the faint chill working its way from his toes up to his fingers. He knew it wasn’t the bartender, whom he had ordered to leave.
“Jian, my shadow, I have missed you. What brings you here?” Markov said, still not looking up from the pages.
Ruin was a gradual process, just as Pushkin had foreseen. The poet’s financial fall and then humiliation by the czar must have stolen so many words and passages from the great man’s mind. Or had it? Maybe it had given him his real voice. Was it courage, then, that made the poet agree to fight a duel that he knew he could not win? Was the choice whether to die gradually or accept it all in a sudden blow? As he heard Jian’s footsteps cross the room, Markov put his hand on the empty pistol holster at his hip, his fingertips brushing where the weapon’s metal slide would have been if his pistol had not been taken away, back at the base.
“Colonel! General Yu ordered me to find you,” said his former aide.
“And so you have. But for what purpose? That is the real question,” said Markov. “Let us reason this out, Jian. He cannot fire me again, and I doubt he is a man who would change his mind about the final objective of the long slow journey to an inevitable death sentence he has sent me on. Ah, that is it. He lacks the patience to await the natural course of what he has set in motion for me.”
He looked up to see that the aide had already drawn his pistol.
“Yes, finally you answer something correctly, Jian. Well done. That is it, I see. General Yu calmed down and now wants certainty. Far better for him if I die in an unfortunate incident here—perhaps another insurgent attack. That way he does not risk my speaking truths to the wrong ears.”
“I do not question my orders,” said Jian. He stepped two paces back from Markov, as if unsure how close he should be to the man he was about to shoot.
“Have a drink, at least,” said Markov, reaching to grab a bottle. “Might be the last one for both of us.”
The aide stepped back again to ensure he was outside the Russian’s reach and extended his arm with the pistol, aiming it right between Markov’s eyes rather than targeting his body mass. Yet another amateur move, thought the Russian. He smiled at Jian and saluted him with his glass of vodka. Jian looked confused for a second, and then shocked, as a knife blade shot out of his throat from behind.
As drunk as Markov was, the details suddenly were very important to him. She had waist-length ebony hair and wore green contacts. But he knew it must be her from the way she didn’t even give Jian’s blood pooling around her bare feet a second glance as she pulled the long knife out of his throat. She stepped right over the aide’s body, never taking her eyes off Markov. He saw also that the slender hand now pointing a pistol at him was missing the left ring finger.
She sat on the barstool next to Markov, dressed in a loose summer skirt and a linen shirt. Up close, he saw that her eyebrows were gone, replaced by delicate brushwork. She slowly pulled back her hair and peeled off a wig. Her head was razor-shorn down to the skin. There was no stubble, just a bald white dome that gleamed like ceramic in the mirror above the rows of bottles behind the bar. She would truly be a ghost, leaving no trace other than the bloody footprints.
He smiled and raised his glass in her direction, a salute.
“It is a pleasure to see you again, Ms. Shin. You continue to surprise me. Or should I call you what the others call you?”
“Black Widow,” said Carrie. “It is more appropriate than they know. Do you know why I’m here?”
“Yes. I can guess,” said Markov. “What happened at the church was an atrocity. You cannot kill like that and win this war. Other wars, maybe, but not this one. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“Wrong!” she snarled, slamming the knife into the bar; its blade quivered an inch from his hand. It was a Type 98 bayonet knife,35 the kind the Chinese commandos carried, and the pistol was a Chinese-made QSZ-92.36 Well, that answered another question regarding the whereabouts of Jian’s escort; Markov doubted the aide would have come here alone. She still held the pistol on him, pointed at his center of body mass. Someone had taught her well. Or was it natural? That question could be asked for so many things about her.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “Before we get on with this, let me finish my drink.” He turned back to the bar to finish off his glass of vodka, closing his eyes and savoring the simultaneous burn of the alcohol and coolness of the ice cube he had tucked in his cheek.
He felt her hand around his neck. She gasped as the meaty rawness of the remains of her burned finger pressed into his throat. But it wasn’t a cry of hurt, Markov realized. She was savoring the pain.
“I want my hairbrush!” she whispered in his ear.
In that instant, his vodka wore off with a chill.
Tiangong-3 Space Station
“Sir, I know you are excited to seize your prize, but you need to let Tick go in first,” said Aaron Best in the practiced tone of a commander used to dealing with very difficult situations. He was tethered just outside the main airlock of the Tiangong, trying to stay out of view of the porthole next to it. The airlock access panel glowed green, indicating it was safe to enter the purgatory between the vacuum of space and the oxygenated confines of the Chinese station.
“But it is my mission, isn’t it?” said Sir Aeric Cavendish.
“Affirmative. But once we exited the vehicle, mission execution became my responsibility. Sir. We did not drill for you to join the boarding party, so we are going to need you to hang back outside until things settle in there. Highest probability for success that way. We can do the breach with fewer men, but not more.” He pointed toward the hatch with a gleaming silver dagger that caught a flash of the sun and momentarily blinded Sir Aeric. “But we’re honored to have you as part of the assault crew, Sir Aeric.”
Best’s logic was as obvious as his sarcasm. Cavendish nodded his assent.
“Stack up,” said Best. The commando called Tick was first inside the airlock, which was soon crammed with four men.
Once inside, the men stopped and paused as the airlock depressurized. Immediately, they took off their helmets, stripped out of the bulky EVA suits, and secured them to the airlock wall.
The men wore slash-proof, formfitting, tiger-striped gray-and-black bodysuits that covered their heads, making them look like evil speed skaters. They put on ballistic masks, motocross-style eye-and-face protection that was resistant to bullets up to nine-millimeter rounds, each painted over to give its wearer a savage look. Another of Sir Aeric’s ideas, but the men had taken to it with relish. Tick’s black facemask had been overlaid with a ta moko, the facial tattoo of a Maori warrior. Hugger, who hunched behind Tick, h
ad used a metallic gold to create hyena-like fangs beneath deeply sunken eye sockets. Hook wore a black mask with almost abstract white brushstrokes to indicate eyes and mouth, like a savage Kabuki actor. Best was the fourth and final commando of the first wave. His mask was airbrushed a gleaming bone white in the style of an old-school hockey goalie’s mask. He’d seen it once in an old horror movie; the lack of expression on the killer’s face made him somehow more menacing. The effect was that these men, while obviously human, looked immune to reason and appeal. The sense was reinforced by the fact that each had a Taser X2637 pistol in his hand and one of Sir Aeric’s foot-long titanium-handled steel-bladed brass-knuckled trench knives strapped to his hip.
The first thing Tick noticed when the airlock groaned open was the smell of piss. Floating weightlessly, he pulled himself one-handed inside the main research bay and looked at the three taikonauts there. They had apparently been trying to get into EVA suits.
“Do you surrender?” he asked them in Mandarin.
The three taikonauts stared back at Tick.
Tick repeated himself as the three other commandos made their way into the room, each holding on to the wall with one hand and pointing a Taser with the other.
“Do you surrender?” he asked yet again in Mandarin.
The three taikonauts stayed silent; there was no real movement, just darting eyes and dry lips being licked. Then a hatch to their side opened.
“Contact,” said Best. “Head on, Tick.”
Tick pushed off the station’s wall and rotated his body, turning to parry. But the taikonaut moving through the hatch closed in on him with far more speed than he’d expected given their training. Then he saw why. The man wore a pair of orange exoskeleton boots from an EVA suit, their micro-rockets firing. He had a titanium-mesh frame on his back, and attached to it were the bulky robotic gloves designed for repair jobs in space. One of those exo-gloves wielded a massive wrench.
Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) Page 32
