Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Fox’s head struck the ground with a jolting convulsion, the rifle frame crashing down over his trachea. A sickly crackle of breaking cartilage escaped his lips in a gust of breath, and the light in assassin’s eyes dimmed. Marc kept on pushing down, holding the rifle in place until it was over.

  He rolled off the dead man, his gut churning and his hands twitching. Smoke was everywhere, and with the red light of the guttering, fading flares, the chamber had taken on a hellish, infernal cast.

  Shadows moved, coming closer. Marc grabbed at the assault rifle, wrenching it from Fox’s death-grip, ready to face the next enemy.

  The shadow resolved into Lucy Keyes. Her dark features were drawn and wreathed in sweat. ‘Marc . . . Damn. Did we get them all?’

  ‘I think so . . .’ His gaze dropped to her hands and he saw the cuts there, the sheen of blood from the wounds. ‘Oh shit. You’re hurt!’

  ‘I noticed,’ she said, with a gasp. ‘Don’t worry about me, we have to get out of here. The NIS will be sending reinforcements. And they’re not going to wanna hear what we have to say.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, staggering after her, his heart hammering in his chest. ‘This isn’t done yet. Not by a long chalk.’

  Lucy found a first-aid kit behind the front desk in the atrium and took the bandages. Discarding the ripped gloves and tearing open the sleeves of her over-suit, her mouth twisted as she looked at the ugly mess of weeping cuts that Cat had left her with. Working on the move, she dressed the wounds as best she could, but crimson fluid had already spotted through the bandages by the time they were back out in the parking lot where the Halo had put down.

  She felt the first symptoms of blood loss, her skin clammy, breath coming in gasps. Lucy blinked away a moment of dizziness and pressed on, tilting her head back to let the rain hit her face. The cold droplets gave her something to focus on.

  ‘Here, you take this, you’re the better shot.’ She turned as Marc pressed the assault rifle into her hands. Lucy took it from him and he stooped by the body of a fallen NIS guard, pulling a Daewoo submachine gun from the dead man’s two-point harness. He gestured ahead. ‘You see anything?’

  ‘Fires,’ she replied. Several of the vehicles in the parking lot had been set aflame, either through random damage or deliberate action, and thick columns of black smoke rose up to meet the low rainclouds. A curtain of haze drifted in front of the main NIS campus building, making it hard to pick out any movement. The damp air was acrid with the smell of burning gasoline and scorched rubber.

  Marc shook his head. ‘No, no. The chopper, I mean. The Halo. You see it?’ He looked around, scanning the nearby hillside.

  There was no sign of the hulking cargo helicopter, the drones or the other soldiers. Lucy held her breath, and strained to listen. She thought she could hear the faraway thudding of rotors. ‘Madrigal didn’t stick around.’

  ‘I’m not letting her go,’ grated Marc, and he jerked his chin toward the smaller silver chopper on the helipad near the main building. ‘I can fly that Dauphin.’

  ‘That so?’ She forced a smirk. ‘Last time you told me you could fly a thing, we almost ended up as a grease mark across half of Mogadishu.’

  ‘I don’t tell you how to shoot,’ he retorted. ‘Come on!’

  They sprinted to the other helicopter, coming across more bodies in NIS uniforms scattered at the edge of the landing pad. Lucy evaluated the kills dispassionately. All of them had been killed by shots from medium range, tight groupings and centre-mass. Close by were the remains of two of the masked soldiers, their bodies destroyed by a thermite charge like the dead man back in the outbuilding. The falling rain sizzled off the blackened and twisted corpses as they cooled.

  Lucy swallowed her reaction, turning her thoughts to other questions. ‘Why’d they leave this bird intact?’

  ‘My guess, so the team going after the SCIF had an exit strategy.’ Marc climbed inside the aircraft and ran his hands over the controls. ‘Get in, I’ll spin her up.’

  ‘Do it fast!’ Lucy saw men moving out from the main complex, more of the NIS guards coming to back up their dead comrades. The reinforcements had clearly stopped off at the campus armoury on the way. They wore body armour and helmets over their uniforms, and all of them carried assault rifles with extended magazines.

  Someone saw the Dauphin’s rotors moving and called out in alarm, sending a squad of the guards to break off and came running toward the helipad. Lucy swore and snapped the selector on her rifle to burst fire setting. Aiming over the heads of the approaching men, she let off a salvo of shots that sent them diving for cover.

  In a few seconds, the ducted blades on the Dauphin’s tail filled the air with a high-pitched scream, and Lucy hauled open the sliding door to the helicopter’s rear compartment, scrambling inside as the main rotors picked up speed. She fired again, this time aiming at parked vehicles, deliberately blowing out windshields to create sprays of shattered glass and distract the guards.

  The rotor howl meant she didn’t hear Marc when he shouted to her from the pilot’s seat, but she understood the thumbs-up gesture he flashed and quickly grabbed a safety handle as the Dauphin rocked on its undercarriage. The silver helicopter lifted off the ground and pivoted as it climbed straight up. Lucy saw the bright yellow blinks of muzzle flashes as the guards fired after them, and felt more than she heard the metallic thuds of rifle rounds hitting the fuselage.

  Marc hauled the control stick hard to port and the Dauphin’s blades smacked at the air. He side-slipped the helicopter back over the parking lot and across the top of the outbuilding. Seen from above, the damaged roof was a mess of broken concrete and twisted rebar.

  Lucy dragged the side hatch shut as the helicopter shot forward and continued to climb toward the underside of the low cloud base. Every breath she took was laboured, but she ignored the sticky blood seeping through her bandaged hands as she checked the assault rifle and reloaded it. The Dauphin tilted as it changed course again, and she shouldered the weapon, glancing over the back of the empty co-pilot’s chair and out of the rain-dashed canopy.

  They were cresting the hill, heading back toward Seoul. Although dawn had broken, the sunrise made little impression through the thick layer of the slate-coloured storm cell smothering the city. The lights of stalled vehicles shimmered below them, marking out the grid of the streets. Save for a few buildings operating on their own generators, the residential blocks, shopping malls and offices remained dark and unlit.

  ‘Power’s still out,’ she called. Marc spared her a questioning look, unable to hear her voice in the helicopter’s noisy cabin. She pointed at the city and made a throat-cutting gesture. He nodded in return and quickly made a sign of his own, shading his eyes in a look-see motion, then pointing at the horizon.

  Lucy returned his nod and scanned the sky by sectors, scanning for the distinctive shape of the Halo. It was hard to pick it out with the increasingly poor visibility, a grey whale of a shape against a grey sky, but the cargo helicopter soon revealed itself as a slow-moving shadow at their eleven o’clock position, slightly below their altitude. Lucy could make out the hijacked SCIF cabin dangling below the Halo’s belly, a tan rectangle swaying in the downdraft.

  She pointed it out to Marc and he nodded, turning them on to a pursuit path, descending and closing the distance. The Halo was heading west, and for a moment Lucy tried to fathom where the North Koreans intended to take it. Heading back to the Antonov at Incheon seemed like the most likely option, but there were other possibilities. If it came to it, the Halo had the range to carry the SCIF to a ship at anchor out in the Yellow Sea or even chance making a fast run toward the Joint Security Area and the military border that cut the Korean peninsula in two.

  Would they risk that? Even now, the nearest South Korean airbase would be scrambling its Blackhawks to secure the NIS campus, and their next objective would be to intercept the Halo. And us along with it, she thought grimly. Now the wild rush of contact had faded, she could
think past the immediate moment and try to figure out what their next move would be.

  Out of nowhere, a faint crackling buzz tickled her throat and she instinctively reached for it. The radio earpiece she had been ordered to wear dangled at the end of its cord by her neck, vibrating against her skin. She snatched at it, eyeing the device with distrust. Neither she nor Marc had made use of the comms gear since the firefight inside the SCIF chamber, both of them knowing that the signals were on a party line that Ghost5 and the North Koreans could also access.

  Cautiously, Lucy pressed the blood-smeared radio bead into her ear in time to hear someone saying her name. ‘Keyes? Are you there? Dane? Do you hear me?’ It was Kara Wei’s voice, hushed and intense.

  Marc gave her another searching look, and she responded by tapping his discarded earpiece. In turn, he put it on and listened.

  ‘I hope you are listening,’ said Kara. ‘I’m sending this signal directly to the digital receivers in your gear, in the clear. I don’t have long.’ She paused. ‘Can you answer?’ Kara added, almost plaintively.

  Lucy and Marc exchanged glances, and she shook her head. For the moment, Madrigal and the rest of the strike team were operating on the assumption that the two of them were dead. If Kara was on Madrigal’s side, then the moment either of them uttered a word, that error would be revealed. Lucy and Marc would lose any element of surprise.

  Up ahead, the Halo still followed its course, low and fast above rooftop level, showing no sign that the crew had spotted their pursuers.

  ‘This will sound hollow,’ Kara continued, ‘but I want you to know that I regret what I have done.’ Lucy’s hand tightened on the back of the co-pilot’s seat in anger at her words. ‘It was the only way that I could do this,’ Kara went on. ‘Turning against Rubicon – giving you up – I had to find something that would get me back in deep with Ghost5. Madrigal always wanted me to return, but she wouldn’t have believed it . . .’ For the first time in a long while, Lucy heard what sounded like real emotion in the other woman’s voice. ‘So I had to betray you. Sacrifice my friendship, like an offering.’

  Marc looked at Lucy, and she glared at him, silently warning him not to speak.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Kara. ‘I am so bad at this.’ She paused again, and then the crackling buzz built, smothering her words. ‘I’ll make this right.’

  The radio channel went dead. Lucy’s jaw hardened and she pulled the comms bead from her ear. Marc did the same, his eyes never breaking her gaze.

  Lucy leaned in and spoke loudly enough so he could hear her over the droning of the rotors. ‘Get us nearer. Let’s put these assholes down.’

  Marc nodded, turning back to the controls to apply more power.

  The Dauphin’s nose dipped and it closed the gap with the other helicopter.

  *

  Kara slipped the walkie-talkie radio into the inner pocket of her leather jacket as she pulled it tight over her shoulders. She walked quickly up the Antonov’s open cargo ramp and past the masked soldier standing guard inside, observing him without making it obvious. The North Korean black-ops trooper carried an assault rifle in a ready-to-fire stance, and he was constantly scanning the apron in front of the cargo hangar for any signs of approach. On the other side of Incheon’s runways, the airport itself was in disarray, a victim of the same massive power outage that had brought the city of Seoul to its knees.

  A security car had ventured out to check in on the Antonov after the Halo had departed, doubtless sent by the air-traffic control tower when no response had been given to their increasingly worried radio calls. The airport had switched over to battery power for communications, but it had done next to nothing to alleviate the situation. With the mains cut, they were struggling to stay on top of things. That was likely why no one had questioned why the men in the security car had not returned. Anyone up in the tower looking in the Antonov’s direction with powerful binoculars would only see the rear of the car, still parked next to the hangar. They wouldn’t see the two figures slumped in the front seats, their faces masks of blood, wouldn’t see the bullet holes in the windshield.

  In the middle of the big jet’s cargo bay, Pyne and the other hackers were agitated, snapping at one another or typing quickly into their laptops. They were trying desperately to figure out why the encrypted communications between the Antonov and Madrigal’s strike team on the Halo had been cut off. Some of them were panicking, certain that the operation was falling apart, that the NIS or the local military had reacted faster than anyone expected and were coming to kill them.

  They weren’t looking for betrayal from the inside. Such misdirection was, Kara reflected, a talent she was showing an aptitude for. There had been ample time on the flight from Sydney for her to find an opportunity to map the temporary network Ghost5 were using. Hacking their covert comms protocols had taken her less than thirty minutes. Kara picked apart the encryption programs that made the group’s radio messages into garbled noise and inserted an implant subroutine of her own. She made it so the decoder software that turned the radio signals back into normal speech would stop working after a certain time. Both ends could send and receive, but what they got back was a mess of unintelligible, randomised noise. It was a piece of digital judo, turning the tech’s strength against itself. She’d effectively changed the locks on the radio net, cutting off Madrigal’s means of contacting Erik or any of the others. For now, Kara owned the airwaves.

  But sooner rather than later, somebody on the Halo would figure out that the helicopter’s civilian radio could still talk to whoever was in the Antonov’s cockpit via regular, unencrypted frequencies. And when that happened, Kara’s latest duplicity would be revealed.

  She glanced around, looking for Erik, and didn’t see him. Was that a bad sign or a good one? Her hand went into one of the pockets of the jacket and closed around a thumb-sized USB memory stick she had hidden there. She tried to ignore the tremor. A lifetime of distant emotions were closing in on her, as if they had been held back just to break through in this moment.

  Kara walked toward Madrigal’s place at the jury-rigged work bench, where one of the woman’s computers lay untended. A slim silver laptop without a single hard edge to it, it resembled a piece of extra-terrestrial technology cast against the mechanistic and unlovely hardware of the Russian cargo plane’s interior.

  Madrigal’s machine was a symbolic representation of her presence among the group, like a queen’s crown resting atop a vacant throne. No one would touch it. No one would dare. The Ghost5 collective had few rules for its members to adhere to, but one of the inviolate ones was don’t hack where you live. To mess with another person’s kit was tantamount to an invasion of the most personal kind, and to put your hands on Madrigal’s computer was the equivalent of high treason.

  When she had first been drawn into Ghost5’s orbit and Lex was still alive, Kara had thought it foolish of Madrigal to leave her machine in plain sight. It invited trouble. But Lex had been the one to explain it. Madrigal left that temptation around because she wanted someone to reach for it. To find out who couldn’t be trusted to follow the rules she laid down.

  Kara knew there was another reason. No one in Ghost5 was good enough to break through Madrigal’s firewalls. Anyone who tried would be stymied, taught the lesson of their own fallibility in no uncertain terms.

  Anyone but me, Kara noted, and sat down before the machine, booting it up and snapping the USB stick into an open port.

  Andre was the first one to notice, and from the corner of her eye, Kara saw him hesitate and try to frame his response. He was momentarily shocked silent that she would dare to sully the crown. ‘What . . . the fuck is going on? Get away from that!’

  ‘Shut up,’ she snarled, breaking the first layer of encryption with ease. The USB stick enabled itself with a clever bit of trickery, fooling the laptop’s disabled auto-play subroutine into reactivating. A weighty shot of intrusion software built to Kara’s own designs, some of it borrowed from Ru
bicon tools developed by Marc Dane and Assim Kader, bored into Madrigal’s computer and began hammering down its firewalls.

  Pyne’s head bobbed on the end of her thin, birdlike neck. ‘You shouldn’t be touching her stuff.’ At her side, Billy tugged nervously on the back of his trapper hat and mutely shook his head. The others stopped what they were doing.

  ‘I am going to tell you something,’ Kara spoke with force and conviction, her voice loud enough to carry as her fingers became a blur over the keyboard. ‘And you won’t want to hear it.’ The next firewall went down, then the next. Madrigal’s virtual fortress crumbled beneath Kara’s hands. ‘Ghost5 has changed. Once it was about balancing out the world. Good for bad, bad for good. Not for money but for the fame.’

  ‘What the fuck is she going on about?’ Andre made a move to grab Kara’s arm, but Billy held him back.

  ‘Let her talk!’ said the other hacker, and there were a few nods of agreement from the rest of the group.

  Kara went on, picking up momentum. ‘That’s not what Madrigal was ever about. It was a means to an end. Ghost5 was always her tool. We were her tools.’ She looked up briefly. ‘What do you actually think you’re all doing here?’

  ‘Getting rich,’ said Andre, ‘am I right? Fuck with Seoul, crash the Asia stock market, make bank!’

  ‘No! This about what she wants. Madrigal sold you out!’ Kara shot back.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Andre shouted. ‘Where’s Erik? Someone get Erik! This is bullshit!’

  ‘We all see those North Korean stormtroopers in here with us,’ said Pyne, nodding toward the masked men at the front and rear of the plane. ‘Full on Dark Side. I’m . . .’ She hesitated, before finally finding the words to finish her thought. ‘I’m not okay with that. Fuck it. I don’t care who knows it!’

  ‘Pyne is right! These black-ops pukes with all their guns, man!’ Billy added. His voice rose, the misgivings he had clearly been bottling up until now spilling out. ‘What are we even doing here? I didn’t sign up for this!’