Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  He leaned across the table until his face was a few inches from mine. “I would have killed every Marine guard in the whole freaking academy until I got my son or died trying.”

  At first it stunned me. Then he sat back and raised his glass before cracking a grin, and it made me laugh, until we were both laughing, and the waiter left my beer on the table, looking at us as though we were already drunk.

  “You know I am that good,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I gulped down half the beer and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “I could kill every one of those bastards and they’d never know I was there.”

  “Not anymore,” he said, shaking his head. “As soon as you got arrested, you showed up on Momson’s reporting, and his people interviewed your ex-partner’s wife, Michelle; she told them you found out about your son, and after that they beefed up security around Annapolis. So it was a good idea to stop and get laid or you would have been wiped; probably the only smart thing I’ve seen you do.” Jihoon looked around, as if noticing the girls for the first time; it was early, and just a few sat at the table across the room. He shook his head. “Who would take this as a job, anyway?”

  “You think they have a choice?” I asked.

  “Sure. Everyone has a choice, so don’t give me that crap about how they were forced into it.”

  “No, they weren’t. And neither of us knows what it was like before the semi-awares, but I do know one thing: this country is diseased. What’s a woman to do if she can’t find a job, or if she marries a grunt and her husband buys it in a war? On the one hand she could keep working at whatever job she has, get pregnant, and have a kid or two on her own. Or she could marry or remarry. But for some, probably a lot, those options don’t exist. So here comes the government, saying, ‘Go into the breeding program. Take one for Uncle Sam. We’ll give you a nice salary, the best health care on the planet, and you get to live on some tropical island until the baby is born, at which point we hand you a fat check, a pat on the back, and visitation rights. Do it again if you want, we don’t mind. In fact, we encourage it!’ Do you think it’s not an attractive option for a lot of women? How much worse is it than what we do—murdering for a paycheck? I read once that they tried a breeding program that didn’t involve sex, did it through artificial insemination, but I guess asking guys to jerk off into a test tube didn’t attract the kind of numbers they needed. Shit. These girls? They’re doing better than we are.”

  Jihoon thought for a moment and then shrugged, tipping his glass toward me. “OK.”

  “So what’s Momson say? I have to repay the money, promise to never do it again?”

  “Nope. Just get on a plane to Thailand and Charlie Mike. No harm, no foul.”

  “You have an encrypted phone?” I asked.

  Jihoon nodded and handed it to me. I had memorized the number on the chit they gave me in Florida and punched it in, waiting for the ringing to stop and the voice mail to activate. “You know who this is. I’m hopping the next plane to the assignment area and will complete my operation on one condition: you get Phillip out of your system. I don’t care what strings have to be pulled; I want that kid out of the academy, and I’ll come get him when it’s all over. Within one week I’ll expect proof that you’ve done this for me, and you’ll have to figure out how to get it to me. If you don’t, I disappear, and you know what happens when I disappear.”

  “Disappear?” Ji asked after I hung up. “Why is disappearing a threat?”

  “It’s not, but they don’t know that. Force someone to imagine an outcome in a scenario that’s bad to begin with, and usually they imagine the worst one. That’s your first lesson in psyops, Chong: let your enemy’s mind do the work. Let’s go to Bangkok.”

  He looked pissed all of a sudden and stayed in his seat. “Chong is a Chinese name, Bug.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m an American. My great-grandparents were Koreans.”

  “Sometimes, Chong,” I said, getting up, “we don’t like the call sign we get. The problem is that you don’t get to pick it, your first partner does, and when Wheezer picked Bug for me, I kicked his ass. Twice. Guess what happened after that?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Bug.”

  It had been almost a decade since I’d operated in southeast Asia, and when the plane touched down in Bangkok, I was drunk but not so drunk that the greens upon green didn’t strike me as nature’s tawdry display of what it could do given the right conditions. Georgia had nothing on it. We deplaned into a hot wind, the air thick with a kind of humidity that only Asia could muster, a thickness that soaked clothes to the point where I wondered if one could drown here by breathing water mixed with biogenerated kerosene vapor from the jets. It was another argument for combat suits. Their climate controls would have struggled, but just the thought of coolant flowing through an undersuit’s network of hoses made me salivate for one, a Pavlovian reaction of the aging warrior, one who had forgotten the millions of discomforts the suits carried with them. Anyone who had survived for long on combat rations, with their dosage of stool softeners to keep an undersuit’s waste tubes from clogging, developed ulcerative colitis to one degree or another, and mine had been worse than most, a lifelong reminder of service to country, some of which had happened here, days in the bush that I’d hoped to never recall. Even though I couldn’t see it, its smell was on the breeze: the jungle. Somewhere out there were the bones of adversaries I’d knifed or garroted, waiting for me to find them again and either pay homage or join them for that last trip downward into dust.

  Jihoon didn’t think about Thailand the way I did. He looked impatient. What is it that runs through a guy’s head at that age, I wondered, and what had I thought on my first operations? Probably the same thing that I was thinking now, that somewhere in the city or in the jungle would be Margaret, our first target, and that the city streets and jungle creeks would be like arteries, all of them circulating jazz, a kind of nervous energy that would make Jihoon antsy and eager while it made me want to hide.

  He leaned over and whispered, “Did you inject another set of bots?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were they clicked and set for the second ID on your list?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. They were. It’s all cool, Chong.”

  “You’ve got an idea how to find her?” he asked.

  “First, we’ll hit the hotel. Then we’ll start talking to people at the bar. Then we’ll do it every day until somebody tells us something useful. Sometimes we’ll take walks to try and find our way around, get used to the place, hold hands. Maybe we’ll hit a strip club or two, and who knows? If you’re nice to me, maybe you’ll get laid.”

  The line for customs lurched forward, one person at a time, and I was next. Jihoon looked pissed, and I understood why because someone with his background would want a set schedule, performance metrics, and guarantees, but how was I supposed to know what to do on an op like this? This was a shitty, high-risk, high-reward op, and I was goddamned if I wasn’t going slowly. Jihoon had never faced a sato before, and these chicks in Thailand wouldn’t be rotting; they’d be full-blown machines.

  I handed the Thai customs guy my passport chit, stuck my finger in the DNA sampler, stared into the retina scanner, and then told him there was nothing to declare.

  “Next,” he said, and Jihoon made it through just as easily. An hour later we had cleared baggage inspection, moved through the exits to the taxi stand, and stepped into a nightmare.

  “Jesus,” said Ji.

  “They told me that things were falling apart in Bangkok during the mission briefing, but I didn’t expect this; it wasn’t like this the last time I was here.”

  “When was that?”

  I shrugged. “Seven years ago. Adviser to the Thai military during their bush wars with the Burmese. They’ve been fighting over metals and resources for a lot longer than we have. But this is new.”

  The Thai military had positioned it
self along the road servicing the airport terminals, with tanks canted half on, half off the sidewalk, and soldiers roamed through a solid mass of people who shouted as they pushed one another, everyone trying to get into the main terminal. To get out. Whatever was happening in Thailand, it had ramped up since the day they’d offered me the mission, and when the closest people saw that I was white, they began shouting and trying to climb the barrier that separated incoming and outgoing passengers. A nearby soldier raised his Maxwell and fired a tracer burst into the air until they stopped.

  “What were they saying?” I asked.

  “They wanted your passport, whatever good that would do. Some were offering you money for your plane ticket. Hold on.” Jihoon approached the soldier who had fired and spoke to him in Thai, but the man didn’t respond. He stared while chewing on something until Jihoon came back. “That didn’t work.”

  “Some of them were shouting at you too. What were they saying?”

  “ ‘Parasite,’ ” said Jihoon. “ ‘Japanese’ devil and a couple of other things, but I wasn’t about to correct them that I’m not Japanese. Let’s just get out of here.”

  The taxi stand was about fifty meters away, and we dragged our bags behind us, walking as quickly as we could and trying to stay close to the tanks. The first taxi driver opened his door and smiled. Jihoon gave him the name of our hotel, and we got in, grateful once he pulled onto the road and began motoring away from the near riot we had just experienced.

  “Hey,” I said to the driver, “you speak English?”

  The guy nodded and looked at me in the mirror. “I speak little.”

  “Why are all those people at the airport? What’s happening?”

  The man shook his head and lit a cigarette. “Very bad. Bad news. Last month Chinese troops enter Burma, and now they move south toward Thailand border. Everyone want out now.”

  Jihoon and I looked at each other, and I shrugged. “What’s the Thai military doing about it?” I asked.

  But the driver shook his head and repeated himself, even after Jihoon tried speaking Thai. “Very bad. Very bad news.”

  The Mandarin Oriental was almost empty when we got there. Its staff welcomed us, but where I’d expected to see throngs of Asian and American businessmen and-women, the lobby was devoid of anything except a group of hotel workers who had gathered near the front to watch the street, where hundreds of people wearing bandannas ran wild in the traffic, many of them carrying signs. Thai troops had to open a barrier to let our taxi through. Just after we got out and ducked into the building’s entrance, someone threw a Molotov, which detonated nearby and was followed by the sounds of cracking fléchettes, so Jihoon and I dove to the floor, covering our heads to protect them from the shattering plate glass at the same time somebody screamed.

  One of the hotel workers was hit; a girl writhed on the floor, one hand clutched to her shoulder where a grouping of fléchettes had shredded her uniform to the point where I couldn’t tell cloth from torn flesh. She stared at me and screamed again.

  “Stay with me,” I told Ji and crawled over.

  I ripped my dress shirt off, then my undershirt, and used one as a compress, the other wrapped around her shoulders to keep it in place, and then grabbed her good hand, placing it against the bandage; it had already begun to turn red.

  “Tell her to keep the pressure on. And that she’ll be fine once we get her to a hospital.”

  Jihoon did it, and the girl nodded. “What now?” he asked.

  I waved at the concierge, who had taken cover behind his desk. “Can someone get an ambulance for her? She’s bleeding and needs a doctor.”

  “No ambulances right now,” he said. “The entire city has been shut down, and it would take hours for anything to get through.”

  “How far is the closest doctor?” I asked.

  “A kilometer. The clinic on Surasak.”

  Jihoon and I looked at each other, helpless. I was about to throw her on my shoulder and risk taking her there myself when someone tugged at my leg.

  “I take her. I know the clinic.”

  It was the taxi driver. Somehow he had ditched his cab and followed us to cover, and I lifted the girl to chase him in a sprint, back into the street where the carbine fire continued and bright tracers bounced from the buildings. It looked like the Thai Army was firing randomly. Most people had found cover and were staying in place, having abandoned their cars or pulled them onto side streets to go around. The cabbie dove across the passenger seat and started the car, waiting for me to put the girl in the back.

  “You know the way?” I asked, wanting to make sure.

  “I know the way, I know the way.”

  But it wasn’t like I could do anything if he didn’t, and when a burst pinged the taxi’s roof, it occurred to me that the guy might gun the engine with me halfway in, and I backed out, slamming the door shut at the same time he pulled away. I waited in the gutter for a break in firing and then sprinted back to cover at the hotel.

  Jihoon had already made his way behind the check-in counter, where the desk clerks took our passports and put the rooms on one of Ji’s credit chits.

  “This is a hell of an introduction to Bangkok,” he said.

  Already, my idea of going slow started looking bad. I grabbed one of the clerks and pointed at Jihoon. “He’s an American soldier. Are there other American soldiers anywhere? Advisers to the Thai military?”

  Ji glared at me for giving him up, but the clerk nodded, her attention shifting between us and the windows as if she expected someone to attack at any minute. “Yes. There are American military in Bangkok.”

  “Where?” I asked. “The Royal Army Headquarters?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Your passport chits will open your rooms. Fourth floor, rooms four-seven-five and seven-seven. Do you need help with your bags?”

  I shook my head, and we sprinted for the elevators, pressing our backs behind a column until the doors opened. Once we entered, Jihoon sighed with relief.

  “Why the hell did you blow my cover?” he asked.

  “I had to do something. We won’t survive long here if we don’t make some friends, and she wouldn’t have believed I was military. You, though? You scream Army.”

  Jihoon noticed something, and I had forgotten that my shirts were on the girl in the taxi. There was no hiding it now. A network of scars covered my shoulders as if both had melted and been reshaped in the form of wax, and I was glad that my back was to the wall so he couldn’t see the damage there, which was worse.

  “Torture,” I explained. “Captured by the Burmese when I was about your age. The Burmese are a special bunch. They like to take apart thermal gel grenades and then dab the stuff all over your skin, one droplet at a time.”

  “To get you to talk,” Jihoon said.

  “To get you to scream. If talking would have kept them from doing this, I would have told them anything they wanted to know.”

  We slept in the same room, and Jihoon snored on the rack while I stood watch and smoked. You weren’t supposed to, but I doubted with all the riots and an empty hotel that the staff was going to come after me for having a cigarette. My fléchette pistol lay on my lap. It wouldn’t do much good against better-armed assailants, but it comforted me anyway, and despite the noise of glass shattering every once in a while, things had quieted some since our arrival.

  Already, fate had crapped on our mission. The realization made me feel everything, so the scars on my back gave more trouble than normal, and my knees ached from the almost two decades of jumping out of planes, and running up and down however many mountains had added up over the course of countless ops. It was good to have help. I’d see if Jihoon could prove himself over the next couple of days, but the real test would be when we saw our first action, and with the way I felt, all that mattered was that he proved as good at killing as he was at thinking. Killing wouldn’t be a problem for him; you could smell it. I guessed that years connected to a semi, murdering simulated but realis
tic opponents would have desensitized him by now, made him as clinical about taking life as he was about the calculus of politics. It would all start in the morning. The next day, when the sun rose, we’d have to risk the streets and make our way to the Royal Thai Army Headquarters and then talk our way inside to meet with American advisers, and the thought made my muscles ache. When I finished my cigarette, I risked peeking out from behind the thick drapes.

  A tank sat outside the hotel. The sight didn’t make me feel any better, though, because my mind clicked over the reasons for having one at that particular location and told me that it was the wrong place—no intersection, no important strategic or tactical assets, no important political infrastructure I knew of, and the banks were farther down the street. One of its crew lounged outside the hatch, leaning against the vehicle’s massive turret, and I saw the red glow of a cigarette until he flicked it away, where it spun in the dim light to hit the ground in a shower of sparks. He looked up. Although I couldn’t see well in the dim streetlights, it seemed like he stared at our window and saw through the crack to fix my position, then climbed the turret, lowering himself inside to seal the hatch.

  I’m inventing trouble, I decided and shut the drapes. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet or vision hood, and in the darkness of my room, there would have been no way for the guy to see me, but still it was odd that they were there in the first place.

  With nothing to do and not wanting to turn on the holo for fear that its glow would let everyone outside know which window to take potshots at, my thoughts turned to Phillip. For now I had no way of knowing if the higher-ups had gotten my voice mail or, if they had, that they had taken it seriously and would release him from Annapolis. Even if they did, what then? He’d still be in their care, and there was no guarantee that they’d let him go once we’d finished the op because now, technically, the state owned him. All it took was one parent. By signing him off, Bea had given up all our rights and then booked it herself to some dump like the one in Jebson, hoping for a bigger paycheck and nine months of the high life until she had to hand over her next kid. Bea was younger than me and could handle the breeders for a few years, but the anger toward her grew until I found myself hoping that one day I’d run across her—drugged up on happy pills. Oblivious. She’d given over Phillip, and why do I even care? was all I thought about until, without warning, a loud wumph blasted through the street, shattering our window and triggering alarms throughout the hotel.