by Mark Alpert
“Bullshit.” Kirsten shook her head. “You know that wouldn’t happen.”
“It’s unlikely, I admit. But it’s easier to believe than your story.”
Kirsten was furious. She wanted to smash her tin cup into Hammer’s smiling face. “Fuck you! It’s not a story! I saw what the network did at Yichang. It murdered millions of people, and now it’s getting ready to kill more!” Her eyes stung, but she stopped herself from crying. Whatever happened, she wasn’t going to cry in front of this prick. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “Pierce is at the Operations Center right now, trying to shut down the network. But if he fails, the nukes will start flying, maybe in the next few hours. Then we’ll be done for, understand? That’s what Supreme Harmony wants.”
Hammer stared at her. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “All right, you had your say. Now let me tell you what my assignment is. The agency ordered me to coordinate the Special Ops raids into southern China. The air force is trying to eliminate the PLA’s nukes, but the Chinese have hidden their long-range Dongfeng missiles in underground bases that our bombers can’t destroy. So Special Ops is inserting commando teams all over China. There are three targets in Yunnan Province where the agency thinks there might be warheads or missiles. Our team is supposed to infiltrate the bases and disable any nukes we find.”
Kirsten held up her hand to stop him. He was still missing the point. “Your plan won’t work. A solid-fuel missile like the Dongfeng can be moved out of its shelter and readied for launch in fifteen minutes. Once the PLA makes the decision to go nuclear, the game’s over. That’s why we have to focus on the Operations Center.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out Arvin Conway’s bulky flash drive. “I have a copy of the shutdown code in here. If we can just get access to one of Supreme Harmony’s computers, we can stop the war right now.”
“Hold on, I’m not finished. One of the three targets on my list is the Yunnan Operations Center.”
“What?” She was confused. “What are you talking about?”
“All the agency knows for sure is that it’s a newly constructed base buried deep in the mountains. Our analysts think there might be some nukes hidden there.”
“But… but there’s no missiles or warheads in the place. It’s Supreme Harmony’s headquarters. I put all that in my report.”
“Well, our analysts don’t consider you a reliable source, so they kept that base on my list of targets. And the agency left it for me to choose which target we’re gonna hit first. So I think we’ll go visit Yulong Xueshan this morning.” He smiled once more. “We’re gonna hit the base before sunrise. Want to come along?”
For the first time, Kirsten smiled back at him. He was still a prick, but at least he was on her side now. “So you believe me after all? After all this crap you’ve been giving me?”
He let out a harsh laugh. “Hell no, I don’t believe you. But I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, how’s that?” Raising his tin cup, he tilted his head back and finished off his tea. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And to be perfectly honest, I have my own reasons for going there. If the world’s gonna go up in smoke today, there’s something I gotta take care of first. I owe a debt to your friend Jim Pierce.”
Kirsten was confused again, but then she remembered the battle in the mud-walled compound of Camp Whiplash. So much had happened since then, she’d almost forgotten. “That’s right. Pierce saved your life.”
“Please, Chan.” Hammer grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
Jim opened his eyes. The world was a bright, disorienting blur. He shut his eyes against the brightness, but the beam of light was so intense it penetrated his eyelids. He wanted to go back to sleep, but even with his eyes closed, he could see the beam moving. The backs of his eyelids turned orange as the light swept across his face.
His throat hurt and he felt sick to his stomach. He hoped to Christ this wasn’t heaven.
Then he felt a rough finger on top of his right eye, pulling up the lid. Instinctively, he tried to swat the offending hand, but his prosthesis was missing and his left arm was paralyzed. He couldn’t move his legs either. He’d been injected with some kind of nerve agent, probably similar to the one carried by the drones. The only parts of his body that seemed to work were his eyes and mouth. His lips were numb, but with great effort he pursed them and curled his sluggish tongue. “W-w-w-wha-what…”
The finger released his eyelid. “We’ve confirmed your identity. Your name is James T. Pierce. You were born February first, 1964. Place of birth, Avondale, West Virginia.”
Jim recognized the voice. The diction, the phrasing. He’d heard it before, at the Great Wall, when he was eavesdropping on Arvin Conway’s conversation with the Modules. Now he opened both eyes and saw a thin Chinese man holding a silver penlight. The man wore a white lab coat and stood to the right of the operating table that Jim was lying on. Judging from the stubble on the man’s head and the healing of his sutures, Jim guessed that this Module had been incorporated three or four days ago.
“Y-y-you.” Jim was furious. Some feeling came back to his tongue and lips. “Who the… hell are…”
The Module smiled effortlessly. “This body was formerly occupied by Dr. Yu Guofeng. He was the chief assistant to Dr. Zhang Jintao, whose Module is no longer operational. Layla A. Pierce terminated its life functions.”
Jim’s throat tightened at the sound of his daughter’s name. The last thing he remembered was her terrified face, her hands gripping his prosthesis, her tears wetting his shirt.
“Layla!” The name came out loud and clear. He glared at the Module. “Where is she? Where—”
“We transported both of you from the radio tower to the Operations Center.” The Module stepped to the side. “She’s right here.”
Jim strained his eyes to the right and saw another operating table. Layla lay on her back with her eyes closed and her hands resting on her stomach. She wore a new, unwrinkled hospital gown. One of the Modules had used a Magic Marker to draw a pair of crosshairs on her bare scalp. They marked the place where the bone drill would go into her skull.
“Layla!” His voice grew louder, becoming a scream. “Layla, wake up! Wake—”
The Module slammed his palm over Jim’s mouth. “We can’t allow you to wake her. The process of incorporation is stressful, and both of you are suffering from exhaustion. To wake her now, just before we start the procedure, would needlessly increase her stress.”
Jim narrowed his eyes, focusing all of his hate on the Module’s tranquil face. The network was worried about their health now. Supreme Harmony wanted to make sure they were in good shape when it took possession of their bodies.
While keeping his right hand over Jim’s mouth, the Module put his left hand in the pocket of his lab coat. “We wouldn’t have awakened you either, but we need to ask you a question. We’ve analyzed your activities at the radio tower and concluded that you were trying to input Arvin Conway’s shutdown code into our network. We haven’t isolated this code yet, but we believe it’s likely that you’ve shared it with others. Therefore, we need to protect ourselves before someone makes another attempt to disable our implants.”
He pulled something out of his pocket. Jim expected it to be some kind of torture accessory—maybe a knife or a gag or a pair of electrodes. But, instead, it was a small metal disk, about the size of a nickel. It was Arvin’s Dream-catcher, the electronic device Jim had hidden in his sock.
“We found this in your clothes,” the Module said. “And we recognized it immediately. When we recovered Arvin Conway’s body, we observed that he was missing the external part of his pulvinar implant, where his most recent memories were stored. We confirmed that this disk is the missing part by collecting trace amounts of Arvin’s DNA from its surface.”
Jim had cleaned the device but not thoroughly enough. As the Module held the silver disk above Jim’s head, it reflected the fluorescent lights on the ceilin
g of the operating room.
“When we downloaded the data from the device,” the Module continued, “we discovered that all but one file had been deleted. The remaining file, which is labeled Circuit, has been encrypted, most likely with an Advanced Encryption Standard key, but we can make a guess about its contents. Before Arvin died, he told us he’d hidden a fifty-megabyte file holding the information needed to disable the shutdown switch in our implants.” The Module lowered the disk until it was a couple of inches above Jim’s nose. “Although we can’t read the encrypted file, we see that it contains approximately fifty megabytes of data.”
Jim closed his eyes. He didn’t want to reveal anything else. Supreme Harmony was very good at making guesses.
The Module lifted his hand from Jim’s mouth and pressed a finger to his right eye again, pulling up the lid. Then he raised his penlight and pointed the beam at Jim’s pupil. “Now that we have the file, we need to decipher its data. So here is our question for you, James T. Pierce: Do you know where we can find the encryption key?”
Jim tried to look away from the light, but the beam followed his pupil. “Shit,” he said. “Why don’t you just go into my head to find out?”
“Yes, we intend to do that. We’ll insert the retinal implants to send commands to your brain and the pulvinar implant to extract your memories. We’ll have to change the implantation procedure, though. Ordinarily, we lobotomize the patient first, then insert the implants. But because the lobotomy disrupts the neural circuits, we can’t access the long-term memories until the connections are reestablished approximately six hours later.” The Module closed Jim’s right eye and moved on to his left, performing the same inspection with his penlight. “On the other hand, we can retrieve the memories immediately if we put in the implants first. Once we have the information we need, we can proceed with the lobotomy.”
Again, Jim tried to look away from the light. He found it difficult to think with the beam shining in his eye, but he saw one thing clearly: Supreme Harmony was worried. The network was accelerating the implantation procedure because it feared that someone was coming to shut it down.
Jim’s heart knocked against his sternum. He knew who was coming. “Kirsten,” he said. “She did it. She called for backup.”
The Module didn’t respond. He continued examining Jim’s left eye for several seconds, then switched off the penlight. “We have the answer to our question. From analyzing the changes in your heart rate and body temperature, we’ve determined that our guesses are correct. The encrypted file does indeed contain the information for disabling the shutdown switch. And you can tell us where to find the key for deciphering it.” He turned away from Jim and bent over a medical cart between the two operating tables. “Now we can begin the procedure.”
“You’re fucked, you know that?” Jim curved his numb lips into a defiant grin. “My people are coming. They’re gonna pull the fucking plug on you.”
The Module stayed bent over the cart. “The Operations Center is well defended. We have a garrison of Modules armed with surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. The American helicopters are outmatched.”
Jim’s heart beat faster. “So they’re coming in helicopters? That’s even better than I thought.”
When the Module finally turned around, he was holding a syringe. He leaned over Jim and stabbed the needle into his left shoulder. “You won’t be fully conscious during the procedure. It’ll be more like a vivid dream. But it’s a dream we’re going to share. Once the neural implants are inserted, we’ll be able to communicate directly with your brain.” The Module pushed the plunger all the way down, then pulled out the needle. “It may get a little uncomfortable. It’ll be less painful if you don’t resist. You can’t stop us from extracting the memories.”
Jim had no idea what drug they’d just given him, but it acted fast. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. “Just… try me. I’m a stubborn… son of a…”
“Yes, you are. But you won’t be the only one in pain. Your daughter will be in the dream, too.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
Supreme Harmony observed the pair of UH-60 Black Hawks as they skimmed over the mountains southwest of Yulong Xueshan. The helicopters flew too low to appear on radar, but the network could track them by following the signals they exchanged with the U.S. Air Force AWACS plane cruising over southwestern China. The plane, an E-3 Sentry, was monitoring all the American aircraft in this section of Chinese airspace by continuously broadcasting friend-or-foe queries to the bombers, fighters, and helicopters in the area. Because Supreme Harmony had access to all American military communications, it could detect the coded signals sent in response by the Black Hawks’ transponders. The helicopters were currently near the village of Shiguzhen, less than thirty kilometers from the Yunnan Operations Center.
The network issued new orders to the Modules stationed in the fortifications at the center’s entrance. The flight path of the Black Hawks hugged the western face of Yulong Xueshan. Under ordinary circumstances, this approach would prevent the Modules from firing their surface-to-air missiles at the helicopters until they came within a few hundred meters of the Operations Center. But Supreme Harmony had modified the missiles so that they could be guided by the transponder signals emitted by the Black Hawks. The Modules would be able to fire at the aircraft as soon as they came within six kilometers, which would happen in approximately five minutes.
Meanwhile, on the lowest level of the Operations Center—about two hundred meters inside the mountain—Modules 32 and 67 removed the bone drill from James T. Pierce’s skull and prepared to insert the pulvinar implant. It was a superb piece of microelectronics, smaller than an apple seed, so tiny that that the Modules could attach it to the tip of a surgical probe and slip the device through the brain’s lobes without damaging the tissue. Using a CAT scan of Pierce’s brain to guide them, the Modules maneuvered the implant to the very center of his skull, where the walnut-size thalamus relayed and coordinated the billions of neural signals that generated the man’s consciousness. Then they embedded the device in the pulvinar nucleus, the part of the thalamus where the brain’s visual perceptions were collected. Within seconds the implant’s minuscule radio transmitter started to send those neural signals to Supreme Harmony.
The radio receiver had already been embedded in Pierce’s scalp and the retinal implants inserted into his eyes, so the network was now fully linked to his brain. But the first signals that Supreme Harmony picked up from Pierce were very different from what it usually received from its Modules. After the six-hour waiting period that followed implantation, the mind of a lobotomized Module was like a pool of clear water, perfectly transparent. The network could easily retrieve the Module’s long-term memories and put its logic centers to work. But because Pierce hadn’t been lobotomized yet, his mind was more like a roiling ocean. In his semiconscious state, his visual perceptions were a maelstrom of remembered images and absurd fantasies. Supreme Harmony had to dive into these swirling waters to find the encryption key. Nevertheless, the network was confident of success.
Modules 32 and 67 attached a new bag of fluid to James T. Pierce’s intravenous line. Then they turned to the other operating table and pointed their bone drill at the crosshairs drawn on Layla A. Pierce’s skull.
* * *
At the same moment, Supreme Harmony observed the remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee, who’d gathered in a conference room inside their bomb shelter near Beijing. The emergency meeting began with a minute of silence to honor the memory of the general secretary. Then Module 152 rose to his feet and gave his account of the assassination. Supreme Harmony made the Module’s eyes water as he described the shooting. He told the committee that he and Minister Deng would’ve been killed, too, if they hadn’t immediately fired on the treacherous bodyguards, who had obviously been recruited by the CIA to murder China’s leaders. During the Module’s speech, the network focused on the faces of the other committee members and observed
that a few showed signs of skepticism. But no one dared to voice his doubts. After the vice president sat down, the committee unanimously decided to make him their new paramount leader. Module 152 was now the general secretary of the Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China.
The committee members applauded vigorously as the Module stood up again. Then he held out his hands, and the room fell silent. Supreme Harmony put a solemn expression on the Module’s face.
“I think we all know what needs to be done,” he said. “We must show the world that we’re not defeated. We must punish the Americans.”
SEVENTY-SIX
Kirsten sat in one of the jump seats inside the Black Hawk’s crowded cabin. She was only an arm’s length from Sergeant Briscoe, who pointed the barrel of an M240 machine gun through the helicopter’s open door. They were flying low, less than ten feet above the fir trees that covered the terrain. The countryside was still shrouded in darkness, but when Kirsten switched her glasses to infrared she saw a curving river that flowed into a narrow gorge about ten miles ahead. On the eastern side of the gorge was Yulong Xueshan, which she recognized instantly. It was the same jagged row of peaks she’d seen yesterday when she said goodbye to Jim.
Because the Black Hawk’s cabin was so noisy, all the passengers wore helmets equipped with radio headsets. Another door gunner manned the M240 on the other side of the helicopter, and eight more Special Ops soldiers filled the back of the cabin. Hammer sat in the jump seat to Kirsten’s right and Agent Morrison sat to her left. A hundred yards behind them was the second Black Hawk, which was also packed with soldiers and agents and guns.
To calm her nerves, Kirsten reached for her satellite phone and pressed a key that retrieved an audio file stored in the phone’s memory. Just before she’d left the Kachin camp, the NSA director had sent her this file, which held a recording of a radio transmission picked up by one of the agency’s satellites. It had been sent from Jim’s sat phone yesterday at 5:19 P.M. It was a brief recording, less than ten seconds long: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!” Although she’d been terrified when she heard the message for the first time, she soon realized that Jim had been faking the call for help. The tip-off was the fact that he’d said “Kirsten.” Jim always called her “Kir,” never “Kirsten.” He must’ve been playing some kind of trick on Supreme Harmony, trying to fool the network somehow. So the message gave her hope. She slipped the phone into her helmet and pressed the speaker against her ear so she could listen to it again: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!”