Rogue

by James Swallow

  She baulked at his casual use of her first name.

  ‘I’m not some child you can pat on the head and send on her way. I want to know why you did this!’

  Lau balanced on his walking stick, staring down at a few scattered shell casings among some fragments of broken glass. He poked the spent brass with the tip of his cane and considered her demand.

  In thirty years, he had never really told the story.

  *

  Hornet.

  That was what they called it: Operation Ma Feng, named after the huge winged insects that swarmed in China’s forests. They were great black creatures with flickering wings that had terrified Lau as a child. He had been six years of age when he saw an old woman killed by a swarm that attacked her because she disrupted their nest.

  But the hornets were not only killers. They were industrious. They built intricate homes for themselves. They colonised and conquered. They acted with a strict collective will.

  They were a fine metaphor for what the People’s Republic of China intended to do on the African continent.

  In the early 1990s it was a land of unexploited riches and oppressed peoples who had been misunderstood and mismanaged by short-sighted Soviets and self-obsessed Americans. Only China, a nation born to understand the long view of history, could see its true potential. A potential that could secure the future of the People’s Republic as the next century’s sole superpower, if only the chaos could be tamed.

  Lau remembered a mess of spent bullet casings at his feet. There had been gunfire, confusion and death.

  The guerrillas ambushed Lau’s team on the road from Niassa. Insurgents, remnants from the Front for Liberation or the Mozambique Resistance Movement, or one of half a dozen other paramilitaries – in the melee that followed it was no longer important.

  All that mattered to the men who attacked was that Lau’s group were outsiders. Not whites, not Europeans or Westerners, but alien to them all the same. Perhaps they had seen through the veil of the team’s cover legend and guessed that this so-called ‘business mission’ and their ‘land surveys’ were nothing of the sort. At the last township, there had been soldiers among the locals, and it was possible they recognised Lau and his comrades as military men, even out of uniform.

  Or perhaps it was just poor timing. There were few people in north-eastern Mozambique who were not part of the civil war, and in that flashpoint, ‘foreigner’ had become interchangeable with ‘spy’ or ‘mercenary’.

  They were soon overrun. Their hired guards died in the first salvo of shots from the trees, and their vehicles were expertly ruined with bullets through the radiators and tyres. As a punishing rain fell down upon them, beating the dirt road into a ribbon of mud, Lau was certain he was going to die there.

  What surprised him was how little fear came with that realisation. A good son of the People’s Republic should have wept to think he would perish unknown and forgotten so far from home, in a land so alien it had no ghosts. But Lau felt something else in that moment.

  He felt free.

  Zheng Ma – that skinny wretch, that rat of a man who would be the seed for the problems that came after – had crouched in the back of the Land Rover and trembled with abject terror. He clutched at Lau’s arm, whispering that he did not want to die, he should not have to die, that he was too important to die. But no one here cared where he was from or who his family was.

  Lau shook him off and counted the rounds in his Type 59 pistol. Too few bullets and too many men out there with murder on their minds. He took a breath of stale, wet air and steeled himself to go down fighting.

  But then Lau saw other men coming. Other rebels, carrying rifles and shouting in fury. Leading them was an African no older than he, whose rain-swept face shone like polished teak wood and showed only fearlessness.

  *

  The three of them sat in the Airbus’s conference room, in exhausted silence. Malte worked on bandaging Assim’s arm, patching up the lacerations around his shoulder where splinters from the hull of the Hermes had cut him, while Lucy slumped in the chair, resting her head on the circular wooden table in the centre of the cabin.

  Marc stared blankly at the artwork that dominated one wall of the room, a rich landscape in oils depicting the African veldt. Despite the beauty of the piece, it had always struck him as sparse and distant. It mirrored his own feelings, a sense of emptiness that came over him as the rush and fury of their escape faded.

  What the hell do we do now?

  The question that no one had asked, but that none of them could ignore, drifted in the brittle silence. Finally, Marc could stand it no longer and his frustration propelled him to his feet.

  ‘I need . . .’

  He hesitated.

  What? A stiff drink? Twelve hours of sleep? A deep dark hole to crawl into? All of the above.

  The curtain partition leading to the front of the jet slid open and revealed Solomon. Like the rest of them, he was tired and worse for wear. His jacket was gone, his trousers torn in several places, his tailored cotton shirt stained with dirt and sweat. But his face told the real story. His gaze passed over them, and in it was a mixture of gratitude, dread and resignation.

  ‘Captain Silber has reprogrammed our IFF transponder to confuse any tracking,’ he began. ‘We will follow a staggered course along international borders to obfuscate our route.’

  Marc accepted that with a nod. The latter was a tried and tested ploy used by military spyplanes, flying a course in the interface zone between the boundaries of two nations to avoid tracking by either one. Air traffic controllers, who were always overworked and understaffed no matter where they were, would see the jet on radar and assume it was talking to ATCs on the other side of the border, and vice versa.

  Sticking to the blurred lines between radar coverage zones could get them away from the more densely populated airspace over Europe, but it would only work for so long. It was a tactic but not a solution.

  ‘Where we headed?’ said Lucy, taking a long breath.

  ‘South,’ said Solomon, confirming what Marc already suspected. ‘Across the Sahara. I have given Captain Silber co-ordinates . . .’ He stopped himself before he said more. ‘We have enough fuel for a day’s flight.’

  Marc’s pilot instincts kicked in, and he mentally calculated how far that could get them.

  Not far enough to escape the Combine’s grasp, he thought.

  ‘We cannot risk connecting with any elements of the Rubicon network.’ Solomon settled into another of the seats. ‘We must assume that all SCD assets are similarly compromised.’

  ‘So Rubicon is . . . lost?’ Assim sounded plaintive.

  ‘The Combine made their K-O move,’ said Lucy. ‘That guy Lau was their hitter, and he walked right in through the front door.’ She looked to Assim. ‘We have to consider ourselves rogue. As of now, Rubicon belongs to the Combine.’ She paused, coldly considering her own words. ‘And that is as bleak as shit.’

  His work done, Malte stepped away from Assim’s side and gave him a nod.

  ‘Well,’ began the hacker, ‘at least we destroyed the Grey Record files. That’s one thing they didn’t get.’

  Marc watched Solomon as Assim spoke, and the flicker in the other man’s eyes answered a question that had been bothering him since they fled Monaco.

  ‘That’s not true, is it?’

  The fatigue in Solomon’s gaze was instantly gone, and he fixed Marc with a hard look.

  ‘The more instances you have of a bit of data, the safer it is. The more copies of something that exist, the less chance there is of it being lost forever.’ Marc looked back at Solomon. ‘So I don’t believe for one second that the server we cooked in Monaco is the only place that held the Grey Record.’

  ‘As usual, Mr Dane, your insight does you credit.’ Solomon leaned forward in his chair. ‘A backup does exist. It mirrors the content of the Monaco server, along with several black budget caches.’

  ‘We’re going after
it,’ said Lucy.

  Solomon nodded. ‘When the Monaco server went offline, an encoded fail-safe was sent to the backup, causing it to disconnect from external communications. By now it will be in total lockdown.’ He paused again. ‘It represents the only power we have left. Securing it is a matter of survival.’

  ‘So no connections in or out, no way for anyone to log on and access the data remotely.’ Assim shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘That means a physical intrusion, actually on site, to get to it.’

  ‘I’m assuming you didn’t just stash it in some branch office in Mombasa?’ said Marc.

  ‘It is in Mozambique.’ Saying the name seemed to age Solomon. ‘In the north. I chose a place . . . A place that I know well enough. It is in a concealed location that only two people are aware of.’

  Lucy frowned. ‘Who’s the other person?’

  ‘It’s Delancort, isn’t it?’ Marc answered before Solomon could reply, and at length he gave a brisk nod. ‘Great. What’s to stop him spilling that to Lau or McFarlane, or whoever’s running Rubicon now?’

  ‘I do not believe Henri will give up that information,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Did you believe he was going to turn on us?’ Marc snapped. It was a cheap shot, but his fatigue was making him irritable. ‘It doesn’t matter. If the Combine are inside Rubicon, the first thing they’ll do is take the network to pieces, looking for leads on us and anywhere we’d go. They’ll find that fail-safe eventually.’

  ‘The situation is complex,’ Solomon countered. ‘Henri did what he thought was right.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that doesn’t cut any ice with me.’

  Marc kept his focus on the other man, unwilling to yield any ground.

  Malte sensed the growing tension in the room and rose, nudging Assim to come with him, and the hacker reluctantly followed.

  When it was the three of them, Solomon went to a cabinet and poured them each a drink.

  ‘There are facts you need to know,’ he said at length.

  ‘The accusations,’ offered Lucy. ‘Lau talked about war crimes. And your past with him . . .’

  Solomon nodded. ‘It is true, in its way.’

  ‘Then you need to explain it to us.’ Marc’s tone turned grave and flint-hard. ‘If we don’t trust each other now, we’ve got nothing.’

  Solomon’s gaze turned inwards.

  ‘When I met Lau Fa Weng for the first time, he was a bullet away from his death. And we changed the courses of each other’s lives.’

  *

  The insurgents from the north had been a thorn in the side of Solomon’s militia for months, pushing recklessly into their territory from hideouts near the border with Tanzania and striking with wild abandon.

  Solomon’s closest comrades – big and bellicose Barandi and even the more level-headed Simbarashe – wanted to take the fight to them. He had resisted, knowing that there were other battles to be won, but then the insurgents had forced his hand on the road to Niassa.

  They had come too far and done too much to be allowed to escape unchallenged. Solomon’s soldiers broke their ambush and in turn, broke them. The ones who were not shot fled into the undergrowth, and left him with the problem of what to do with the Chinamen they had been trying to kill.

  Barandi’s bloodlust was up, but Simbarashe saw the value of taking the foreigners hostage. Western corporations always paid fat bounties for the release of their agents, calling it a ‘passage payment’ instead of ransom money. China’s powerful men would do the same for their people, he assumed.

  They took them to their encampment, and for the most part the Chinese made no trouble, remaining watchful and respectful among the guns of Solomon’s men. Simbarashe believed that was because they understood who was mighty here, but Solomon saw differently.

  He saw how they watched, measuring and calculating. Especially the one called Lau, the nominal leader of these so-called businessmen. These were not what they appeared to be. Solomon had practically been born a soldier, and he smelled that same spoor on these men.

  Lau’s coolness impressed him. Here was a man, thousands of miles from his homeland in a place utterly alien to his experience, and yet he remained in control of himself. He was almost comfortable here, Solomon reflected.

  They talked and they played chess, and Lau seemed in no hurry to leave. Solomon found himself liking the man; day by day, they drew back the layers of each other, finding something kindred.

  Why are you really here, in my nation? Solomon asked him that one night, as they drank warm beers and listened to wood crack and spit in the campfire. Why did your masters send you to Africa?

  Because I am not Chinese enough to serve in China.

  Lau’s reply was bitter and rueful. There was foreign blood in him, he explained, from a grandmother born in a bordering country. And perhaps there were foreign thoughts in his head. Not much, but enough for the men in power to deem him only worthy of duty in other lands.

  I am here because I am considered disposable. You know how that feels, Ekko?

  As a man grown to be a warlord, from a boy traded into slave-soldiery, he knew that very well. The sense that one’s life was valueless destroyed everything; it made nothing matter. It gave power only in one place – in the manner of how you would die.

  Or so Solomon had believed, until the day he killed the man who owned his life. On that day, he reclaimed his future. He took back not only the right to choose how he would die, but how he would live.

  Soon he had some men with him, then some land and some power. Then some villages and mines and farms who looked to him for guardianship. With each new step, he drew a path towards a better tomorrow.

  The insurgents came back that night, seeking revenge and hoping to kill the valuable hostages into the bargain. The ploy was devious and unexpected, and it caught Solomon’s militiamen unprepared. The enemy almost succeeded.

  But when the shots flashed brightly in the darkness, Solomon did not stop to think when he threw a rifle to Lau and let the other Chinese take up arms. Together, they killed every last insurgent who had dared to attack them. And by dawn, the thorn in Solomon’s side was torn out.

  *

  ‘I presented Ekko with something that no one had ever offered him,’ said Lau, limping to the conference room window as his walking stick clicked over the floor. ‘A partnership of equals.’

  ‘The group’s foundation was backed by agents from Communist China?’ McFarlane was incredulous. ‘I can’t believe that!’

  ‘You do not understand.’ Lau made a negative noise, a clicking of the tongue. ‘That is a simplistic interpretation. Circumstances were far more complicated. Where it began – and what we did to bring it to pass – that is not important.’ He eyed her. ‘What is it that horrifies you? The fact that the roots of Solomon’s empire were founded with bloodstained money? You are not so naive. Ethics and morals are an expensive indulgence. Rich men can enjoy them, the poor and the desperate seldom have the choice.’

  ‘Most rich men don’t bother with them either,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yes. A perverse truth, is it not? But not one that Solomon was willing to accept. He had different plans, and for a while I believed I could follow that same path.’ He shook his head with a bitter chuckle. ‘Foolishness on my part, of course. It seems I was the naive one.’

  *

  The men whom Lau served were often of narrow thinking. To them, victory was a binary construct. For every success, there had to be someone who failed. For every winner, there had to be a loser. It was beyond their hidebound mindset to conceive of a victory where all might profit from it. By their lights, mutual benefit was a sham. They would be happy to pretend that there was advantage on both sides, but that was a phantom promise. Their long views only showed a world where, in the end, it was China that stood alone and victorious.

  That Lau thought otherwise was partially why he was out here on this mission into the wilderness. But ironically, it was also why he was best suited to
warp the mission’s end towards something more in line with his own way of thinking.

  Solomon was well educated for a self-taught bush general, and he was cunning and thoughtful. He devoured books on history and geography, soaking up knowledge like a sponge. Lau saw an echo of himself in the African, he could not mistake it. Two men so different in birthright but so alike in instinct.

  They were incapable of lying to one another. It was as if each man was glass to the other. It became the bedrock of the comradeship that was forged between them.

  And so Lau’s offer had no artifice to it.

  China seeks a foothold in Africa, he told Solomon, seeing no point in obfuscating the reality. It can be here, in your country.

  Lau and his men were only one group of scouts operating across the continent, looking for resources to secure, like the mines rich in iron, bauxite and rare earth minerals so vital for modern electronics. They were the pathfinders.

  You can be part of this, he said. We can make each other wealthy and influential. Command of land leads to guns, guns lead to power, power leads to freedom.

  At first Solomon was angry. We do not want to be colonised again. Other nations tried that. I have no desire to repeat history.

  But this is not colonisation, insisted Lau, this is a partnership.

  He promised a path between their nations where power was on an equal footing, and he meant it. Because this was as much an escape for him as it was a way for Solomon to forge the future he wanted.

  China would never truly honour Lau’s service to his nation, never recognise the sacrifices he had made. Never reward him with the life he deserved. But here, far beyond the gaze of the Dragon, he could find some measure of what he was owed.

  *

  ‘I agreed to it,’ said Solomon.

  A shaft of light through one of the windows played across his face as the jet made a gentle turn, briefly illuminating him before passing on and plunging him back into shadow.

  Marc and Lucy exchanged glances but said nothing. There was much more to come, they could both sense it.