I went through the lobby like that. Naked. And laughing at a limousine that had just arrived to dump a pair of newlyweds at the hotel, but then another fight broke out. Not physical, but it looked like the newlyweds were two men, guys in suits, who poked their fingers in the cops’ faces and gave them a real chewing out. It was over before
I realized it. And rather than being loaded into the police van, the newlyweds threw me into their limousine.
“Sergeant Resnick?” one of them asked.
“Yeah. But I’m tired. They hit me with a nonlethal of some kind. Can’t see straight.”
“We’re sorry to hear about your partner, Sarge,” the other one said.
“Yeah. Me too. He was the eye in the back of my head, monitored the angel, you know?” They both nodded, and I tried to focus but my eyesight was wavering too badly. “You two just married?”
They looked at each other. “You sure you’re OK, Sarge? Maybe they hit you too hard.”
“Nah.”
“We’re not married. We came to pick you up and have orders; you’ve been reassigned to Strategic Operations and promoted to lieutenant. It wasn’t supposed to happen until tomorrow, but the embassy’s been keeping a close eye on things, and when they heard about the cops…”
“Wow,” I said, “you guys came fast.”
“Fast? Lieutenant, you held the cops off for an hour and put four in the hospital.”
There wasn’t anything to say. The words registered, and I did my best to make a mental note that whatever they had shot me with didn’t mix with alcohol, had rocketed me past screwed up and into a mental time warp.
“I’ve never heard of Strategic Operations,” I said, but they were already gone, along with the limo.
Someone wheeled me up the loading ramp onto a transport plane, and next to me the engines roared to life, spitting and whining as the rotors turned, and the smell of precious kerosene synthetic wafted over my nose, making
me grin. The gurney locked to the floor, and a Navy medic hovered over me. I felt a pinprick. Then he hung a saline bag, which made me feel better almost immediately, taking the edge off a headache that came out of nowhere and threatened to get worse.
“I never heard of Strategic Operations either, LT,” he said.
“Whose an LT?”
“You are, sir. That’s what your records say.” He showed me the flexi-tab, my name and image floating in the middle of off-green plastic. “See. Lieutenant Stanley Resnick, along with all your physical data. The rest looks classified.”
“Where are we headed?”
He shrugged. “Not my business to know.”
“Well, I’m in the shit now.”
“What do you mean?”
But I’d already started ignoring him because he was worthless. The cold air made my skin tingle, and when the aircraft started pulling takeoff
g
’s, I nearly vomited with the sensation of weight, a weight that terrified me for a moment because it wouldn’t leave, just like the one I’d felt in Bea’s apartment building.
Wheezer was dead. It should have still bothered me, but the bottles I’d had in the hotel and the scrape with the police had been just the right mix to purge any emotion. And one other thing helped: this had to be a new mission. It was the one reason they’d have rescued me from such a monumental screwup and then promoted me.
Only the high brass thought that way.
N
aval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.
By the time the plane landed, the medic had produced a new uniform for me, complete with second lieutenant’s bars, and when I started getting my first salutes, they hit me like insults. And my head had swelled, literally, from the beating. There was nothing I could do about the bruises, and when the guy asked if I wanted to shave before debarking, I looked in the mirror. Both eyes were black. My hair stuck out in all directions, and my beard had grown in, but I’d never been much at growing facial hair and so it stuck out in patches, lending me the appearance of a prophet or homeless guy—maybe both. I decided the look was perfect for meeting with brass. Besides, we played by different rules, right? Operators were supposed to look nongovernment issue, and if it weren’t for the uniform, I doubt anyone would have let me on the base.
Still, I was uneasy; being called to Florida was unusual. In fact, it almost
never
happened. My driver didn’t say anything. He picked me up at the air station, the guy focusing on the road until we had driven for so long that I fell
asleep and woke about six hours later when we approached an installation I didn’t recognize, and it surprised me that he didn’t even have to stop at the gate. The sentries must have seen something on his car; they got ready to challenge but instead backed away with a salute, and when we got out, my driver ushered me through a doorway and into an elevator.
Down into the earth
. My palms started to sweat, the seconds ticking by and my brain orbiting a singular thought, trying to factor the chances of a cave-in. The doors opened onto a conference room, and my escort ushered me in.
An admiral, a Navy captain, and a Marine brigadier sat around a small mahogany table, and my CO, Colonel Momson, motioned for me to have a seat next to him. When the door slid shut, the admiral grinned.
“Nice work in Sydney,” he said. “Shame about your teammate, but four kills is good and these things happen.”
Screw you
, I thought. Who were these guys? Had any of them ever been in the field for any reason other than to spend six weeks at some rear base, just to have their tickets punched so they could claim they’d “seen” combat? He was right, these things
did
happen, but he said it as though he understood, and I doubted he knew anything except how to kiss ass and make JCS, or maybe he knew things happened because he had ordered so many people like Wheezer to their death—all from the safety of this bunker. “Yes, sir. They
happen
.”
“Admiral,” the captain said, “before we get started, I want to reiterate what I said before, that this is a job
my
guys can do. Christ, if we hadn’t stepped in, this guy would be rotting in some Sydney prison with Japanese gangsters.”
The admiral lit his pipe. “Really, Mike? Like your group in Uzbekistan? How many you lose during that recovery operation? Ten? Twenty?”
“It was a mess,” the Marine general added. “You had micros, air support, and a platoon against two satos. Those girls knifed most of
your
guys.”
The Navy captain shut up, looking so pissed that I had to force myself not to smile, and the admiral nodded to my CO. “Colonel, why don’t you kick this off?”
“Stan, we have a new operation,” Momson began. “Now, I want you to understand before I lay out your role, that this is all volunteer. There will be no orders, and you won’t be connected to us anymore—not
officially
. Your records will indicate that you were honorably discharged for medical reasons, and this means that if you run into trouble, you’ll be all alone. So you
can
say no to this one.”
The room got quiet then, and I waited before realizing that they expected a response. “You want an answer now,
before
telling me about the mission, sir?” I asked.
He nodded. “That’s the way it’s got to be. You say no and then turn around and head out the door so the corporal can take you back to the air station to send you home to wait for the next op. But if you say yes, there’s no turning back.”
“What about pay?”
“Not a problem.” He glanced at the admiral to make sure it was OK to continue. “You’ll be set with an untraceable account into which someone will deposit the equivalent of two years’ salary, plus mission expenses, courtesy of a long lost—and dead—benefactor.”
The mission or home.
It was such a familiar scenario that it shouldn’t have bothered me, but it always did, same
as now. I knew how I was supposed to act—that I should have at least pretended to want to go home, maybe spend some time with Phillip and take them on a vacation, just relax—but I’d given up on that route a long time ago, so it didn’t take a second to decide. “I’m in. What’s so special about
these
satos; are they Russian?”
The admiral gestured, and my CO reached back to dim the lights, a holo image popping up on the table at the same time. “Not satos exactly,” he said. “To be honest, we don’t know what they are, and there’s likely a person involved. A real person, an American.”
The air had gone out of the room; I looked at him to make sure he wasn’t kidding. “Sir?”
“You heard me. Human. A Dr. C. L. Chen, former CEO of Genetic Designs and Solutions, the other a woman, a…” He stopped to tap on a keyboard so that the image came into sharp focus. She had blonde hair, but it was one of them, a sato, genetically engineered, although it took a second to realize it because a maze of tattoos swirled in a hypnotic pattern—not pretty, but attractive in an exotic sort of way—around her face. “Unit three-seven-nine-oh-four-six-five, given name Margaret, Germline Two. She and her unit were captured by Russian forces two months after their first deployment to Kaz, and we assumed they had all been killed. About a month ago we found her. She turned up on our scope in South Korea and then again in Thailand, a full two years past her expiration date, and there was no sign of spoiling.”
Momson let the fact sink in, and I shook my head. “None?”
“None. Just like the four you wiped in Australia.”
The image disappeared then to be replaced by a map
with a bright red arrow pointing to a location in Russia, to an area just east of the Urals but near the Kazakh border. “Then our signals guys intercepted battlefield communications last month, as the Chinese pushed westward out of Siberia and toward Moscow. You need to hear this. The translation track is about ninety-eight percent accurate, give or take.” He hit a button on the console in front of him and amped up the volume until it was audible. You heard explosions in the background. There was a Russian talking over the noise, and although he didn’t sound panicked, it was the voice of someone doomed but whose training had taken over so he could function despite an overwhelming terror. A computer-generated voice spoke over him, almost drowning out everything with its expressionless narrative.
“Vengerovo strongpoint overrun. Chinese forces, genetics in powered armor, estimated strength three divisions supported by heavy tanks and APCs. Atypical genetic configuration. Enemy units appear to have been bred specifically for powered armor, consistent with previous reporting, and with little resemblance to humans or to Russian or American genetic forces—”
There was a burst of static, and the recording started over again, but the colonel killed it and switched back to the holo of the girl, Margaret.
“That’s all we got.”
“So what’s the operation?” I asked.
“Chen. And Margaret could lead you to him. We have a full accounting of Margaret’s escape from captivity in Russia, where she ran with a fellow Germline unit named Catherine; the pair of them traveled through eastern Siberia at the same time the Chinese invasion of Russia kicked off. According to our information they came into contact with
Chinese genetically engineered units, and Margaret may have learned the location of Dr. Chen after she arrived in Thailand. Catherine is dead, but find Margaret; she was last seen in Bangkok as part of the escaped sato population that found a home there.” Momson knew how I felt about Thailand, and he stopped me with a hand when I started to get up. “Sit
down
, Lietuenant. You’ve heard the news by now and you know the drill. Thailand is our most valuable ally in the South China Sea, so we need someone who knows the playbook and terrain already, especially if the Chinese are in Burma.”
I shook my head. “Thailand will fall in a week if they cross the border. You don’t need me; you need an army.”
“Probably. Bangkok is barely keeping a lid on its population; with so many refugees from the last war with China, everyone is talking about getting out or talking the government into surrendering now so they can strike a deal with Beijing. One protest has already been put down.”
“You
know
what happened the last time I was there, Colonel,” I said.
“Too late, Bug. It’s your op now, and Thailand is where the job is. They’re still a key ally.”
The admiral cleared his throat and yanked the pipe from his mouth. “Find Chen and execute him, Lieutenant. He’s one of us. Trained at MIT, postdoc at Oak Ridge National Lab, and then lead contract researcher on our Germline developmental unit before he disappeared five years ago. The Chinese have something new, something we’ve never seen before; we doubt he came up with whatever it is, but he’s helped those little yellow bastards perfect it, sure as shit.”
“And once he’s dead, collect all the data you can,” Momson added. “Tablets, chits, tissue samples, anything.
Also, if you can get us one of the Chinese genetics, even better, but don’t bust yourself trying to accomplish that last task.”
“You already have someone working on that one?” I asked, but nobody answered, which meant they did. “Look, I can kill Chen and the sato, that’s my specialty. But this seems as much an intel op as it is a cleanup job; sounds like you need a collection team, not a janitor.”
Momson nodded and brightened the lights again, shutting off the holo. He slid a data chit across the table. “That chit contains all the information you need. We prepared a space for you to review it, where you can take as much time as you need to study and memorize because you won’t be leaving with that thing. It turns out that the boat you inspected and the satos you wiped were en route to Bangkok for delivery to a Dr. Samuel Ling. It’s one of Chen’s aliases. The Australian satos were held in the boat, which was supposed to go directly to Thailand, but its captain decided to make some money on the side and detoured for a drug run. Bad mistake. He had no idea how dangerous his cargo was and paid for it. Those girls were two years past their expiration date, just like Margaret, and that’s one thing we want to know: how they’re deactivating genetic safety protocols. So why you—besides the fact that you know Bangkok? Because you’re already involved.”