In a sane and smart world, all those people would have erased their previous online identities and created new and antiseptic ones. However, as most cops in the world know, few criminals are masterminds. Even those who hired brilliant black hats to advise them still did profoundly stupid things, like keep old email accounts to communicate with friends. Or maintain back-channel lines of communication thinking that those were, by their nature, safe.
Bug loved that kind of thing. A window only needed to be opened a crack for him to get in.
And each day he worked at Mr. Church’s project, he did more damage. He shared crucial information with competitors and outright enemies; he planted unbreakable ransomware on banking systems working with these people; he outed them as pedophiles—even when they weren’t—to the right media sources; he stole billions in funds and donated it to charities; he crashed expensive systems on exactly the wrong days; he leaked corporate secrets just as the opening bell sounded on the world’s various stock exchanges; he created compromising pictures, texts, and emails and sent it to girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, and the law; and he made social media posts that—he was certain—would embarrass them in the eyes of their new employer. Some of those people vanished, and Bug figured that was the result of those posts coming to the attention of Rafael Santoro.
He did a lot of damage. He ended careers, businesses, fortunes, and lives.
He made it hurt.
But he did not find Rafael Santoro or Kuga.
Not yet.
Not yet.
CHAPTER 45
FORESTED AREA
APPROXIMATELY 3,800 YARDS FROM THE BLUE DIAMOND TRAINING CAMP
CADDO MILLS, TEXAS
The sniper was invisible. An angel of death hidden within the shadows of a massive pine tree, lost in the great ocean that was the forest.
The rifle rested on a sturdy limb, and the sniper was covered in cut pine boughs and wore a camouflage hood and balaclava, with grease paint over any inch of exposed skin. Unseen and silent.
The rifle’s scope moved without hurry from one face to the next. The crosshairs drifted over the recruiter’s smiling face, then the man doing the pat-downs. It moved on to the sentries and then to the two big men. First the tall white man and last the older Black man. Each time, the crosshairs froze over their hearts. At that distance, head shots were possible for a sniper of this skill level, but with the sheer destructive power of the copper-jacketed rounds, a center-mass body shot would be both lethal and easier to guarantee.
A voice spoke quietly in the sniper’s ear.
“Do you have them?”
“Yes,” murmured Belle. “I have them.”
CHAPTER 46
JAPANESE ICEBREAKER NOBU SHIRASE (AGB-5003)
NEAR EAST ONGUL ISLAND
QUEEN MAUD LAND, ANTARCTICA
The ship punched through a crust of ice that was far thinner than it should have been. That had become the routine, even here at the bottom of the world.
Captain Hanzo sipped his tea and peered gloomily out at the brilliant blue sky, the flawless blue-white ice, the calm waves, and hated it all. He was old enough to remember first coming to these waters back in the late 1990s, when the ice sheets seemed too vast, too dense, too ancient to be vulnerable to the stupidity and careless cruelty of man.
Now he was watching a continent die, seeing it melt away as the waters rose and the air grew warmer. He personally wished he could get every fool who denied the realities of climate change and force them to work for a full year down here. Force them to see the damage being done to the planet. To his cold world down here.
He kept such thoughts to himself. He was eighteen months from retirement and did not want to go out on a psychiatric discharge. His wife was counting on a full pension and the invitations to all those fancy dinners. She also liked the extra money waiting from lecture tours on sailing the Antarctic that would come once he was a civilian. The same had happened to her father, who’d died well off and a very happy man.
Hanzo, however, was not happy.
The Shirase was not happy, either. Hanzo knew that ships had souls, had memories. They were alive, and he knew that his ship was grieving for a planet out of balance with its natural order.
Those were his thoughts when one of his crewmen cut through the morning air with a yell. Suddenly, a lot of men were bellowing. Feet thudded up and down ladders and along the deck as a knot of sailors clustered together by a section of the port bow rail, all of them pointing to something in the water.
Before Hanzo could demand an explanation, a petty officer dashed onto the bridge.
“Captain, we’ve spotted a lifeboat a mile three points off the port bow,” said the petty officer excitedly. “There are survivors in it.”
“Is it from the Hakudo Maru?” demanded the captain.
“I think it is, sir.”
Hanzo immediately gave the orders for heave to, and to have a pair of his boats swayed down and lowered.
The Hakudo Maru was a scientific vessel that had been sent from Tokyo a few months ago to study the release of ancient bacteria from melting ice. It was part of a joint venture initiated a few years ago after research teams had found—and revived—an eight-million-year-old bacterium that had been dormant in the Mullins and Beacon valleys of the icy continent. Since then, other bacteria had been discovered, and the growing fear was that these prehistoric biologicals could pose a serious threat once ocean currents moved them around the globe. The Hakudo Maru’s task was to catch random fish and study them for the presence of unknown bacteria and viruses.
However, ten days ago, the Hakudo Maru went missing during a particularly aggressive storm, and the high winds made search efforts difficult. No trace of the ship had yet been found. It was believed that the high winds likely drove the vessel into the path of some massive icebergs that had recently calved from the dwindling ice sheet. One of the new icebergs was estimated to be three-quarters of a trillion tons, nearly as big as A-68, the trillion-ton supergiant that broke from the Larsen C Ice Shelf back in 2020. On a dark night, with a mighty storm blowing and the ocean filled with killer ice islands, a small research vessel would have had no chance.
But now … a lifeboat? And hundreds of miles from where the Hakudo Maru was believed to have sunk? This was amazing. The thought of it lifted Hanzo’s heart. He called for his jacket and ran on deck.
Everyone crowded the rail, watching as two shallow-draft rubber rescue boats zipped across the water at high speed. A lieutenant handed Hanzo a pair of binoculars, and he used them to study the operation. There were three men in the boat, each wearing a heavy coat, gloves, and a balaclava against the cold. The coats were unusually bulky, and Hanzo figured they were wearing more than one. How else could they have survived so long in an open boat down here in the coldest place on Earth?
However, as the rescue team came alongside, the men were able to catch ropes and make them fast to their cleats on their own boat. That was promising.
“They must have been able to bring food with them,” said the lieutenant. “They don’t move like dying men.”
“Let us pray you’re correct,” said Hanzo.
Twenty minutes later, the boats had returned, and the three survivors were helped aboard. Despite having been able to secure the ropes, it was clear they were in bad shape. Sailors had to support them to keep the men from collapsing on the deck.
“Thank you, sir,” said one of them quickly, and he repeated the phrase over and over again. He, like the others, was Japanese. They all looked to be in their thirties. None of them looked much like scientists, but then again, there were a lot of people aboard a vessel. Men as rugged and hardy as these were likely engine room specialists or equipment engineers. The other two seemed incapable of speech and just shivered, heads lolling.
“Take them below,” ordered the captain. “Call the doctor.”
The crew helped the men down to the sick bay. Hanzo lingered on the deck for a while, watching as his people
hooked onto the lifeboat and hauled it, dripping, onto the deck. He lit his pipe and puffed until the tobacco was burning smoothly, then clamped the stem between his teeth, watching his men work. They were a good, reliable crew. Hardier than most because work in this kind of extreme weather conditions was not for the average seaman. It required toughness of physical and moral fiber. A toughness of spirit. And not merely tough, but practical, uncomplaining, and good-natured. The kind of sailors who took to this work because it was so difficult. He loved them all.
“Captain,” called his petty officer, “I think you should come and look at this.”
The man was leaning over the side, pointing to one of the thwarts. The captain leaned over, too.
“What is it?”
“Well, sir,” said the petty officer, “I don’t know what this is.”
He reached down and picked up something small and round. It resisted his pull for a moment and then came away with a small pok sound of parting adhesive. The petty officer frowned at it and then handed what was clearly an electronic device to the captain.
Hanzo frowned, too.
“I think it’s a camera, sir,” said the petty officer. “See? There is a lens and below that a battery pack. There’s a green light. It’s still functioning. I think it’s on, sir.”
The device was about the diameter of a binocular eyepiece and made from hard black plastic. It was heavy for its size, likely owing to the batteries, which were sealed into a case that had no visible means of opening. He held it up to his head and heard a small, steady electronic pulse.
“It sounds like a remote transmitter,” he murmured.
“Sir,” said the petty officer, “why would they put a camera on a lifeboat? I mean … if there was a working camera with a transmitter, then why hasn’t anyone picked up the signal?”
Hanzo said nothing, but the questions were curious. No, more than that—they were troubling.
“I’m going below,” he said, and he headed for the hatch through which the rescued sailors had been taken.
He went down the companion ladder and through the ship, the little camera clutched in his hand. As he approached the door to the small sick bay, he suddenly stopped.
“What…?” he said aloud.
There, on the outside of the doorframe, was another of the cameras. It was identical, and when he touched it, his fingers came away wet. He sniffed them and smelled seawater.
This makes no sense, he thought, and stepped into the sick bay.
What he saw made no sense, either.
The doctor, the nurse, and the six sailors who’d helped the rescued men down here lay sprawled inside. Each of them had small black dots on their foreheads or in the centers of their chests. Sometimes more than one.
Hanzo felt his heart judder to a stop in his chest, and his whole body went as cold as the icy seas that slapped against the hull. His mind, sharp as it was, slipped a gear as he tried to navigate through the seas of impossibility. All eight of the people in that room were dead.
They had all been shot.
There hadn’t been any noise of gunfire, but there was brass on the floor.
There was so little blood, but Hanzo knew that dead people do not bleed. He also realized that the head shots had not exited. There was no blood spatter.
Only death.
The three survivors were gone. Their heavy coats and gloves were on the floor, but they were gone.
What had been beneath those bulky coats?
He stood where he had stopped, one foot inside the sick bay, one in the hall. Hanzo looked down at the little camera transmitter in his hand.
“God help us,” he said.
He did not hear the footfall of the man who stepped up behind him. He barely felt the feather-light pressure of the sound suppressor of the pistol touching the hair over his ear. The shot was a soft thup, which he did hear, though only as a fading afterthought as the .22 slug punched through the bone and began ricocheting around inside his skull, expending its foot pound of force by destroying his brain utterly. Lacking the force to exit the skull.
He fell into the sick bay.
Captain Hanzo did not hear the screams and yells as the rest of his crew died.
There were fifty-three scientists and forty-four crew aboard the Shirase. There were weapons aboard, but the lockers were never opened, the guns and rifles never handed out. There was no time for that. The three Fixers swept like a storm through the ship, from stem to stern, deck to deck, killing silently, killing efficiently. They disabled the radio room.
Hanzo, who appreciated tough men working at peak efficiency, might had been impressed. He might also have been terrified, because these men moved much too quickly than was reasonable. In instances where a crewman was able to mount some kind of defense, they swept the counterattacks aside. For all the toughness of the sailors aboard, they might as well have been toddlers.
It was a massacre.
A quick, quiet massacre.
In under nine minutes, all ninety-seven people aboard the Shirase were dead.
INTERLUDE 10
SALES PRESENTATION VIA SHOWROOM
FOUR MONTHS AGO
Mr. Sunday froze the image on the face of Captain Hanzo. The officer had twisted as he fell so that his face was visible, and there was a look of profound surprise stamped on his features.
“Now that,” crowed Mr. Sunday, “is entertainment!”
He chuckled as small windows opened on the screen, each one showing the feed from cameras placed throughout the Shirase as the Fixers moved through it. Each man had a pouch of the camera transmitters, and they activated as soon as they were pressed to a hard surface. The video feeds showed the slaughter.
“Ninety-seven hostiles taken down,” said Mr. Sunday, “by three enhanced Fixers. And ladies and gentlemen, that is an average of 32.3 kills per Fixer. No explosives, no air strikes, no booby traps. Small arms only. Oh, and watch this … this is really fun.”
He cued up one clip where a petty officer tried to rally a group of men on the forward deck of the ship as two of the Fixers emerged. The sailors had oars, improvised clubs, and knives, and there were enough of them that sheer weight of numbers should have carried the fight.
The Fixers stood back-to-back, each holding two .22 automatic pistols with ten-shot magazines. Forty total shots without reloading. Eighteen men charged at them, circling them, trying to crush them in a brutal rugby scrum.
The Fixers began moving in a slow circle, firing and firing. The attackers came at them, and the Fixers had a target-rich environment. Their hands were rock steady, and they emptied their guns into the ring of sailors. Only one sailor—the chief petty officer—made it all the way through the storm of lead and managed to strike a Fixer across the jaw with a three-foot length of pipe. The blow whipped the Fixer’s head to one side, tearing open the balaclava and ripping a red gash along his jawline. Blood splashed out. However, the Fixer neither cried out nor fell. Instead, he walked up to the petty officer, who was about to swing again, buried the pistol in the man’s chest, and fired three shots.
The petty officer grunted and sank to his knees, swayed there for a moment, and fell over.
Mr. Sunday turned to the wall of screens showing the faces of sixteen potential customers. Some of those people would have been appalled had they known who else was watching this sales pitch. Some were sworn enemies who had lost loved ones to the attacks of the others. Some were overtly cruel, others merely desperate in fights against enemies they could not hope to defeat in any kind of standard battle.
“These men here are prototypes,” said Mr. Sunday. “We expect the first batch of our enhanced private military contractors to be ready to board planes to your locations in under six months. Oh, wait, I see we have a question. Let me read it for the group. ‘When did this take place?’” The salesman grinned and looked at his wristwatch. “Just under thirty minutes ago. If this wasn’t in the Antarctic, the bodies wouldn’t even be cold yet.”
He p
aused and cocked his head as if listening to a surprising thought.
“As you’ll all recall from the prospectus I emailed you, there is the ‘self-cleaning’ option. And the reason we staged an op on the underbelly of the world is to highlight the logistical complications of extracting this team. I mean, it can be done, but only at great expense and with great risk. Now … since these PMCs are rentals and not heroes of your homeland or cause, why would you want to put your standard military assets at risk to recover them? Once the mission is accomplished—be that taking a ship, securing a military installation, a rival corporation’s lab, or a target with significance to your particular idealistic or religious stance—the operatives themselves become liabilities if captured or killed. And we—meaning the Kuga organization—do not want prying eyes to play with our toys.”
He walked to a small table and picked up a satellite phone, punched a coded number, and waited. When the call went through, an image—fed by one of the camera-transmitters—showed one of the three Fixers.
“Ichi,” said the man.
“Mr. Ichi,” said Sunday, “have you launched the surveillance drones?”
“Yes, sir. I will key you into the feed.”
Immediately, there appeared an aerial view of the Shirase drifting in the ocean current.
“Thank you, Mr. Ichi. Where are Mr. Ni and Mr. San?”
“They are below in the engine room, sir.”
“Excellent,” said Mr. Sunday. “You have done an excellent job. Please pass along my congratulations on a brilliant performance.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the Fixer, giving a short, sharp bow toward the camera. “When can we expect extraction?”
Instead of answering, Mr. Sunday looked up from the sat phone, raised a small device so that the audience could see it. Then he pressed a button.
On the screen, the picture of Mr. Ichi vanished. The feed from the drone, however, continued to focus on the ship. The middle section of the Shirase suddenly bulged upward as if the whole craft were made of inflatable rubber. The illusion persisted for a full second, and then a massive fireball burst upward from the part of the ship where the engine room had been a moment before. The blast was massive, tearing the icebreaker in half and flinging pieces of metal, wood, and human flesh high into the air. Mr. Sunday let the video play for a full fifteen seconds as debris rained down in what seemed like surreal slow motion. By the time the last bits slapped onto the icy water, both halves of the icebreaker were gone, each slipping beneath the waves to vanish entirely.
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