Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37)

by Robert J. Crane

  Ah, there was Bilson. In DC, no less. And at...

  Shit. He was at Nealon's apartment. Or at least his phone was.

  Chapman looked around his empty office, contemplating. What could that mean, Bilson's phone being at Nealon's apartment? They'd been working this thing together, sure, but had he gone...whatever the politically correct phrase for “native” was in this situation? “Anti-China,” probably.

  How could he even share this with the Network?

  He couldn't. Not without revealing that he had a way of tracking them.

  What could he even do about it?

  Nothing, really. It wasn't as though he had tremendous influence in DC. Lobbyists and an office, sure. But real influence...? Someone he could trust to go over there and grab Bilson, shove him in the back of a car, and make him go wherever he wanted?

  Well, that was the kind of vulgar exercise that Chapman had never really bought into.

  Which left him frowning at the display, deciding how best to handle this little tidbit of information.

  He was still considering it five minutes later when everything went straight to hell.

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  Sienna

  “I think that's your freighter,” Cayce said as we rumbled across the dark ocean, hints of purple on the horizon indicating the sun might be rising sometime soon-ish.

  There were several ships on the water before us, at varying distances. The closest was a cargo ship, for sure, with containers piled up on deck in a tight square. The bridge was on a tower near the back of the ship, facing away from us, and I could see the red flag of China painted across the flat stern.

  “I think you're probably right,” I said, “but get me a little closer, will you?”

  “I'll get you as close as I can without crashing,” Cayce said, and there was an edge in his voice. “What you do after that is going to be your business, though, you understand?”

  “I understand completely,” I said. “Not your mission, not your monkeys. We're copacetic, Cayce. You can drop me off and bail if you need to.”

  “Thanks for permission,” he said, dripping sarcasm. Yeah, he wanted no part of what I was up to. Logical, really; it was the sort of thing a guy could lose his pilot's license for, after all.

  “Can you take us in low?” I asked. “I don't want them to see us coming.”

  Cayce's lips twisted as he contemplated my request. “Best I can do is maybe come in at a forty-five degree angle behind the bridge on the starboard side. They'll have no visual on us, but depending on their radar they may register us. And this thing ain't quiet, so...”

  “Got it,” I said. “Sweep in on them, drop me on the bow, and boogie.”

  He nodded, once, and I sensed that was all I was going to get out of him.

  The helo dove toward the water, and soon we were skimming the surface, the skids of the Kiowa rolling over the choppy waves. It had a black tint to it, like oil, purple sky barely giving it any light to work with. The Zoushan's superstructure was lit up, as were various points around the railing/hull, and as we grew closer the ship got bigger and bigger.

  I'd failed to realize how huge the Zoushan was. It was three football fields long, riding out of the water some forty, fifty feet before the deck rails even started. Above that went another five or so cargo containers, layered across the deck in a huge cube of metal stacks filling the entire front of the vessel.

  Cayce brought us along the side of the ship and then coasted us to a stop as he banked and came over the bow railing. Using the shipping containers that lined the front as a shield from the bridge of the Zoushan, he hovered there.

  “You want out, this is your chance,” he said tightly. “I'm bailing in five...four...three...”

  I didn't need to be told twice. I was out of my seatbelt and out the door before he even started the two count, my AR in hand and my other equipment in my belt. He'd brought us to ten feet over the deck, and the moment I was out and down, the helicopter ducked over the side in a speed run maneuver, bolting off the opposite direction from whence he'd come.

  Rising to my feet, I found myself on the forecastle, a mountain of shipping containers rising up in front of me. They were stacked side to side, tight enough that I could barely wedge a hand in between them. It was like a warehouse of metal, and I hurried across the empty forecastle, looking for cover.

  Once I was against the shipping container mountain, I eased along it to the side railing. Coming to its end, I looked out and along the railed side of the ship.

  It stretched a long damned way, a walking path no bigger than five, ten feet across all the way to the bridge tower. No cover, nothing, for the length of the forward container mountain. A perfect shooting gallery if I got caught out there, nowhere to hide for two hundred yards or more.

  A quick trot back to the starboard side of the ship revealed a perfect mirror of a situation. Wide open traversal with zero cover for a long distance. Shit.

  I decided to look for a third way, and that meant climbing the cargo containers. Snugging my AR-15 and checking once more along the side route to make sure it was clear of any crew, I started to climb.

  It wasn't slow going, but it was delicate work. The only handholds available were the spaces between each cargo container. Each container was approximately eight to ten feet high, so I'd leap and grab, then hang there for a second before leaping again.

  Going at that pace, it only took me twenty seconds or so to reach the top of the mountain. Once I had my hands on it, I scaled swiftly, tired of hanging my ass out in the open air, waiting for a guard to come along and drill me.

  I rolled onto the top of the container, staying supine. In the distance, across the container stacks, I could see the ship's bridge island, with a huge platform walkway in front of it like a balcony. Someone was up there on the superstructure, and I kept flat, hoping not to draw the eye with movement.

  Still, I slowly moved to get a hand on my AR. I didn't want to shoot if I didn't have to, but I also didn't want to get caught out here with no recourse.

  A quiet voice in the distance said something in Chinese. It sounded calm, reasonable. Not a shout for help or cry of alarm. That was reassuring. I was at a distance of a couple hundred yards, after all, just a lump on the top of a container. No cause to be worried about lil' ol' me.

  I maintained that level of calm until something blew up underneath me like a distant car crash, and the ground dropped from under my back, tipping the world to an abrupt angle.

  Sliding wildly, I rolled down the now nearly vertical container roof and bounced into midair. I found myself falling forty, fifty feet, and barely got my feet beneath me before I struck the ground.

  I landed hard, but stayed upright. My AR was in my hands in a hot second, knees ringing with pain but not bad enough to dump me over. Nothing was broken, just stinging at the impact. I raised my weapon, looking over the iron sights, pointing it at the ship's superstructure.

  Klieg lights switched on around me, stunningly bright, like I was on the fifty-yard line of a football field. I squinted against them, trying to see where I was.

  It wasn't at all what I'd expected.

  The containers that I thought had formed a solid block on the bow of the ship didn't; Cayce and I hadn't seen it on approach because we'd come in low, below the railing, but they weren't a solid cube of stacked containers at all.

  They were a square ring, like an arena, with me in the damned middle.

  When I'd been atop the front crate, someone had blown some sort of mild explosive along the seams. Now I could see the damage; every single container around the perimeter of the square had collapsed in, empty, creating a triangular slope to the top level. No matter where I'd climbed up the “arena,” I'd have been dumped down here by the trap.

  And it was a trap. Several of the bottom-level containers had popped open, and men in black tactical gear – that ubiquitous fashion choice of people the world over who wanted to die at my hands – were out in force. I c
ounted ten, twenty, thirty, with guns all pointed at me. Under the floodlights shining in my eyes I could see some strangely configured weapons. Some had barrels that made them look like toy guns; others were long sniper-looking rifles with strangely fluted barrels. It took me a second to sort it all out in my head.

  Sonic weapons.

  Dart guns. With either suppressant or tranquilizer in them.

  And there, atop the superstructure, two figures.

  One was plainly, easily obvious – my old pal Firebeetle. He stared down at me with hard eyes over the lines of Chinese spec ops soldiers, but next to him – oh, next to him...

  A grinning man with a wide smile, one that I'd seen oh so recently.

  “Yan Liao,” I called up to him, keeping my AR pointed in his direction. “Isn't the Chinese government going to be disappointed when you get them implicated in this?”

  Liao, clearly not much of an actual diplomat, just laughed in a tone that told me how little he cared about what I thought. “For the prize of Sienna Nealon...” He leaned forward, planting his hands on the railing, and even two hundred yards away his grin shone obnoxiously, “...there is nothing China would not have risked.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  Chapman

  KORY: Something's wrong.

  That was the message that greeted Chapman as he logged into the Escapade app. It boded ill, and set his stomach immediately on edge.

  JOHANNSEN: Are you getting this, too?

  Chapman just gaped. How could these idiots not share? It wasn't like they were all psychic – put the damned information out there! He started to type that, but Chalke beat him to the punch.

  CHALKE: Care to share with the rest of the class?

  BYRD: Whut up u guys

  God, Byrd. What the hell did he even type with, his tongue?

  KORY: The Slack channels my guys are on with reporters from other publications? They're lighting up right now with this video from Sienna Nealon. It's going viral.

  Chapman was tapping at his keyboard before he even got done, then dialed his phone with one hand. He didn't wait for the person on the other end to finish answering before he barked an order: “Anything that's got Sienna Nealon's name on it, crush its organic search results. For Socialite, Instaphoto and FindIt. I want anyone sharing it to be deranked to oblivion, you hear me? Make it so their damned mother can't find it – hell, make the posts private and don't let them know it's done. Extinction Protocol.”

  “Uh, understood,” came the reply. Chapman was hanging up before it even finished coming through.

  CHAPMAN: I just killed it before it could trend. Anything with Nealon's name on it goes nowhere as of now.

  KORY: It's getting passed around pretty heavily among our reporters.

  Chapman felt a surge of irritation. What the hell was the point of these people if they weren't going to act?

  CHAPMAN: Quash it. Anyone who puts out a story on this is going to get hit with the Nerf bat and watch their post engagements die until they don't even have a publication left. Any blog that puts it out there is going to be seeing organic traffic of their mother clicking their articles and pretty soon even she's going to forget to look at them.

  JOHANNSEN: Where is this video coming from, Dave? My reporters can't seem to figure it out.

  Chapman was already on it, dialing another number: “A Sienna Nealon video just got posted. Where was it uploaded from?”

  Tapping keys on the other end, no talking. Thank God. “Looks like a political account. New Way Forward for America, LLC.”

  Chapman hung up, cursing a blue streak.

  CHAPMAN: It was Bilson. Posted from one of his companies or PACs or fronts.

  FLANAGAN: Whoa. What do we do about this?

  Chapman only had to think about it for a second.

  CHAPMAN: We kick him out. He's gone against the consensus and flagrantly, at that. Seems like he wants to go to war with us.

  Chapman's jaw tightened.

  CHAPMAN: Let's show him exactly what that means for him.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  Sienna

  Yan Liao's laugh rang over the wide arena of cargo containers that penned me in, echoing past all the tactical operators he'd stuck in here with me. It was loud and long and pretty Bond villain-esque, and I didn't hesitate to tell him so.

  “You did all this for little ol' me?” I called, still staring at him over the iron sights of my weapon. A hundred-yard shot with a 5.56 was the sort of thing fresh Army privates did in their sleep during basic. “All this kidnapping? Ambushing? Killing? Conspiracy?”

  “Not all for you, no,” Liao said. “China had need for metahumans with certain powers. They didn't exist on the mainland in the numbers needed, if at all. Why not reach out our hand and pull a few of our former citizens back? They belong to us by rights anyway. As does the future.” He leaned over the railing. “The world will belong to China...with your help.”

  “You think I'm going to help you?” I asked. Didn't put much denial in it, mostly because I wanted to see what he'd say.

  “Not wittingly, perhaps,” Liao said. “But you will.” He gestured toward me. “Do you know how many eggs the average human female contains? How many your body contains, with its constant power of regeneration?” He couldn't help himself; he let a grin that could only be described as evil spread across his lips. “When we're done, China will boast an army of incubi and succubi in numbers enough to take over the world with ease.”

  “Dude,” I said, “you have given way, way too much thought to my lady parts, and way, way too little to the other parts of me, which are of much more immediate applicability to your life.”

  Liao chuckled. “Like your trigger finger? Good luck making that shot before my men drop you.” He made a show of looking at his fingernails. “You don't have to be alive for us to harvest you, just so you know. We have medical facilities on the ship equipped to take care of everything right now. But...it could go easy for you. We could treat you like a queen.” He shrugged. “Or deal with you like a farm animal.” That grin again. “Your choice.”

  The guys in black around me were moving to my flanks, circling me left and right. I doubted any of them were meta, based on the way they moved. Special forces, probably, but not meta.

  “All right,” I said, and let my AR-15 drop, safety off, the sling catching it as it fell by my side. I put my hands out to either side. “That queen deal sounds pretty good.”

  There was a dramatic pause as everybody stopped moving. Literally everybody. Liao, Firebeetle – who'd been pushing against the railing, clearly ready to jump over – and all the spec ops guys around me.

  Liao was blinking, grin replaced by surprise. “...Really?”

  I started to put my hands out in front of me, clearly far from my weapons, palms out. “I mean...why not? I would like to be treated like a queen. For once in my life.”

  This was failing to compute with Liao. He got a suspicious look. “I don't think I believe you.”

  “No, really,” I said, acting like I was going to get down on my face, just give up and surrender. “I mean, if you're going to breed me like a bitch in heat anyway, why not get everything I can out of it? Oh, and by the by – psych.”

  I dropped face-first to the deck, caught myself on both hands, pulling my knees to my chest and spring boarded backward, lashing out with my feet behind me.

  The hiss of tranquilizer bullets whizzing by my face was bracing. They'd aimed for my torso but whoops – I wasn't there anymore. Now they were passing through where I'd been a moment before, feathered tails dancing past as I flew backward.

  I donkey kicked the container behind me with both feet and it made an almighty, thunderous crunch as I caved in the corrugated metal side. I hit the deck and rolled as tightly close to it as I could–

  As a tower of containers started to collapse around me.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  Bringing down the house on yourself is kind of stupid.

  B
ut not as stupid as allowing yourself to walk into a ChiCom ambush and letting them harvest your ova from your unwilling body so they could breed an unstoppable army of Sienna Nealon babies.

  The container row behind me came crashing down from my little trick, collapsing over me like a bridge falling down. Bullets and darts flew into the falling containers, which shielded me. And fortunately, too, because I didn't have any tricks for dodging a dozen tranquilizer guns and real-deal bullets.

  I did have a plan to deal with the sonic guns, though, and I started preparing myself as I lay there, containers slamming over the top of me, my body sheltered beneath two of them like a hobo under a bridge in a hailstorm. There wasn't much I could do besides watch the tower fall.

  Oh, and spring out of the way as soon as an escape route was available to me.

  I came out from beneath the bridged containers already firing, AR in hand. I moved left and fired in the same direction, opening up on the guys who'd started to flank me before I dropped the stack. If I was lucky, I'd thinned the herd some with my trick, given that a considerable number of these flunkies had been standing in front of me when I brought the tower down.

  Drilling Chinese spec op Commies felt like mowing down Taliban in a way; remorse was a thing I saved for people who had souls, not kidnapping bastards trying to harvest my body to aid their hegemonic ambitions. I drilled a spec ops douche with a double tap to the head, watched the pink mist for about a quarter second before switching targets and popping the guy next to him. Then I covered behind a fallen container and kicked it, sending it sliding in the direction of the right-side flank. Screams and crunching followed, filling my heart with joy and the arena with the screams of enemies.

  Another ChiComm rounded the corner, blasting me with his weapon as he turned it. It hit me squarely, sending sonic waves through my body.

  “Ooh,” I said, the wax earplugs I'd packed from my gun range bag securely planted in my ears, “that kinda tickles. Aim lower.”