Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Erik hesitated. Of course he knew about the pulse device, there was no way Madrigal would have kept that from him. But it was a secret to most of the members of Ghost5, and he hadn’t expected Kara to be aware of its existence.

  She watched the reaction cross his face. ‘I was one of them before you came along, remember? Who do you think helped put the thing in there?’ She let her hand drop so it floated over Madrigal’s laptop.

  He glared back at her. ‘If you try anything with that, I’ll end you.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Erik’s reply was a snarl, and he fired a shot into the laptop, blowing a crater in the middle of the keyboard. Hot splinters of plastic stung Kara’s hand as she snatched it away. Erik showed his teeth in a feral grin.

  ‘Idiot,’ she told him, rubbing her wrist, looking at the watch again. ‘You can’t think further than you can see. That’s why she doesn’t let you hack. I set it up hours ago.’ Kara tap-tapped the smartwatch’s touch-sensitive screen. In a fraction of a second it sent a control signal to a Bluetooth intercept receiver she had secretly spliced into the Antonov’s main circuitry bus, when the cargo plane had been somewhere over the Philippine Sea.

  The transient electromagnetic device wasn’t only designed to render the hard drives and circuits on board the aircraft useless. Kara had not lied when she described it as Madrigal’s weapon of last resort. Up in the service crawlspace where the Antonov’s wings connected to the fuselage, the drum-shaped TED activated. Powered by a small explosive shaped charge, in an instant the device super-compressed the magnetic field generated by a high voltage capacitor. The energy of the focused explosion transferred through the field, creating an electromagnetic release ten times the power of a lightning strike. All of this happened in an instant, the TED blowing a hole through the top of the Antonov’s airframe, burning into the fuel lines, shocking a wave of crackling electric discharge down through the fuselage and killing every electronic device within the range of the pulse wave.

  Fire and sparks flashed inside the cargo bay as all on-board power went out, and the big jet rocked on its undercarriage with the force of the blast. Above their heads, a sheet of orange flame peeled back curls of hull metal as the blaze took hold. Erik was momentarily disoriented by the detonation, and Kara used the distraction to snatch at a portable fire extinguisher fitted to the airframe. It came free in her hands and she swung it around in a hard arc, cracking him across the face with the flat of the cylinder. Erik fell and Kara let the extinguisher go, grabbing Pyne with both hands.

  The other woman let out a screech of pain, but she was too weak to resist. Pyne was so slight she barely weighed anything. Kara got her into an ungainly shoulder carry and half-ran, half-stumbled down the Antonov’s open cargo ramp. The heat of the burning fuel pushed at her back as the fire spread, eating into the fuselage, gutting the aircraft from the inside out. Thick black smoke stinking of gasoline choked the air around her as Kara kept running, making for the cover of a nearby hangar.

  Another explosion sounded as one of the Antonov’s wings sagged and collapsed, the fumes and fluid in the near-empty fuel tanks still enough to combust with a dull boom of ignition. Her hands wet with Pyne’s blood, Kara shoved at a door in the side of the hangar and disappeared inside.

  The Halo crew had decided that a shootout wasn’t the way they wanted to handle things, and now the chopper was running with the throttle at full, veering back over the buildings until it went feet-wet over the Han River.

  Lucy tried to keep the other helicopter in the middle of the tactical scope atop the rifle, but Marc had difficulty holding them level. Her sight picture bounced around like she was on the Cyclone at Coney Island, and the weapon’s laser ranger was next to useless.

  The rifle’s magazine had only third of its rounds remaining, so she couldn’t afford to waste them. Both aircraft were heading north again, back in the direction of Incheon and the border. Lucy had a brief and nasty vision of a flight of North Korean Hind Attack helicopters crossing the demilitarised zone to meet them. If that happened, the unarmed Dauphin would be scrap metal in seconds.

  The Halo fell out of her sight-line once more, and this time it didn’t return. She looked away and realised that the Brit was taking them up, trying to gain altitude. Lucy stared down at the blurred disc of the cargo helicopter’s main rotors. Could she put a shot into the hub, maybe get a round into the engine intake? Or would it be smarter to go for the tail rotor and try to hobble them that way? If she could blow through the gears and mechanisms back there, it could force the Halo’s pilot into an auto-rotate crash landing. ‘I wish I had a Stinger right now,’ she said aloud, her voice lost in the coughing and droning of the Dauphin’s wounded engine.

  She squeezed through the gap between the seats in the cockpit and dropped into the co-pilot’s chair, dragging the rifle with her. Finding an intercom headset hanging on a hook, she put it on.

  Marc shook his head at her, then down at the controls. His knuckles were white where he was holding on tightly: translation – I can’t take my hands off these. Lucy took the pilot’s headset and put it in place for him, flipping the mic down to his lips.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, his voice sounding in her ears. ‘Damn it.’ Every couple of seconds, Marc ground out another swearword as the helicopter fought against him to say airborne.

  ‘That bad?’ Lucy replied. Her only flying experience was jumping out of aircraft, not keeping them in the sky, but she understood well enough that the multiple red lights blinking from the control panel were trouble.

  ‘Fuel is gushing out the back from a bust line.’ Marc’s reply was clipped. ‘Oil pressure is falling. We have maybe ten minutes of flying time at best, and that’s if fortune smiles.’

  ‘Open to suggestions,’ she noted.

  He spared her a sideways look. ‘You never like my ideas.’

  ‘I’ll like anything that takes Madrigal out of play . . .’ She trailed off. Out of the side of cockpit, she could see lights flicking on along the far bank of the river. ‘Hey, the power’s coming back up.’ Was that part of Ghost5’s plan as well, or more evidence of the spanner that had been thrown into the works? She thought briefly of Kara, and then dismissed it.

  ‘I’m going to force them down,’ said Marc, nodding in their direction of flight. ‘See the bridge there?’

  She leaned forward, looking through the rain. Ahead of the Halo was a crossing made up of two three-lane highways, with a subway line sandwiched between them. A long series of curved blue truss frames extended along over the railroad, and she could see traffic grouped in clusters of stalled cars, but for the most part the bridge was empty.

  ‘How are you gonna do that?’ she asked, already dreading the answer.

  ‘I set it up,’ Marc replied, through gritted teeth. ‘You knock them down.’ He reduced the Dauphin’s altitude in a swift rush and the helicopter dropped like a stone, right into the vortex from the Halo’s bigger rotors.

  The cargo bird’s blades were wider tip-to-tip than the entire footprint of the Dauphin, but still the smaller aircraft’s downwash was enough to disrupt the smooth airflow over the lifting surface. For one giddy second, Lucy thought the Brit was going to actually crash them right into the Halo’s rotors, but at the last moment the other pilot reacted and tried to side-slide out from under his descending pursuer.

  Marc cursed loudly as he feathered the controls and mirrored the Halo pilot’s move. The blue truss bridge came up fast and the bigger helicopter was swiftly running out of room to manoeuvre.

  Lucy saw her opening and rammed open a sliding panel in the window beside her, poking the assault rifle’s barrel out into the air. Holding the gun across her chest, she steadied it against her bicep and waited for the moment she knew was going to come, the moment when the Halo pilot would panic and make a hasty choice. Her sniper self took over, the clinical and predatory spider-mind that saw the world only through crosshairs. She imagined she was in some silent hide in the middle o
f a forest, invisible beneath a suit of ghillie camo, coldly watching the will of a target break in that instant before they made a fatal mistake and became exposed. She put the bright red pinprick of the rifle’s laser sight on the target and took half a breath.

  The Halo jerked, the heavy whale-shape veering off, the SCIF dangling below it drifting dangerously close to the top of the blue framework of the bridge.

  She fired down through the blur of the spinning rotors, through the cockpit windows of the Halo, turning them crazed and fractured. Lucy saw a splash of red against the inside of the broken glass, and the cargo helicopter’s engine note became a keening wail.

  Marc wrenched the Dauphin away in a juddering turn as the Halo sank too low to clear the top of the bridge trusses. The SCIF slammed into the end of one of the metal arcs and scraped across the steel frame. The side of the reinforced cabin tore open and it tumbled to the road in disarray. The cables trailing up to the Halo snagged in the gap between two of the trusses and snapped tight.

  Now fatally anchored, the Halo’s own power brought it down over the middle of the bridge to strike the highway on the opposite side at a shallow angle. The cargo helicopter’s chin scraped the asphalt in a flash of sparks and fire, tearing off the nose wheel. The fuselage tilted wildly, turning on to its side. The eight massive rotor blades, each nearly fifteen metres long, came down and chopped into the road bed and the bridge frames, one by one splintering and disintegrating into a storm of shrapnel.

  The Halo rolled over and sagged under its own weight, bound in a snare of cables. Flames and black smoke bloomed from the engine compartment.

  Marc held the Dauphin in a shaky hover over the stretch of the bridge where the SCIF had landed. The downdraft caught papers strewn from the storage racks inside the broken cabin. Materials so secret that they passed beyond conventional classification were whipped up and blown into the river below.

  Lucy looked through the assault rifle’s scope, scanning the wrecked cabin for movement. She saw nothing.

  ‘We can’t leave,’ said Marc over the intercom, and the Dauphin dropped down toward the road. ‘Not until we’re sure.’

  They made it to the far side of the hangar’s vast open space before Pyne wept that she couldn’t go any further and collapsed in a heap.

  Kara dragged her into the first place that could generously be called ‘safe’, the open cabin of a twin-engine Beechcraft up on a maintenance stand. She pulled Pyne inside, pausing to survey the trail of red spatter that wound its way across the hangar to this spot.

  ‘I’m going to die,’ whispered the thin girl. ‘Oh god, I don’t want to go out like this. I don’t even know where I am.’

  Kara wiped her bloody hands clean on the material of one of the passenger seats in the cabin and looked around for a first aid kit. She found a green plastic box in a compartment on the bulkhead and pawed through the contents. Taking bandages and sterile pads, she did her best to dress the ugly wound in Pyne’s side, but it was grotesque, sickening work. The other woman faded in and out of awareness.

  When she was done, Kara dared to look out through the oval windows in the Beechcraft’s fuselage and saw smoke gusting into the hangar from the doors on the far side. Out there, the Antonov was alight and distantly she wondered about Andre and the others. Were they already gone, or had the masked soldiers put them down before they made it to the safety of the terminal buildings? It didn’t matter. They couldn’t help her.

  Kara pulled the walkie-talkie radio from her pocket and weighed it in her hand. It was as good as a brick now, having been caught in the wave of the TED’s electromagnetic pulse. She tossed it aside and looked at her smartwatch. It too was inert metal and glass, useless to her.

  Like Pyne? The question came from nowhere as Kara’s gaze settled on the other woman, whose shallow breathing was rasping softly in the silence of the cabin.

  The callous impulse behind the thought was crystal clear. Kara really didn’t owe Pyne anything. When she had fled Ghost5, she had not dared to share that intention with the girl. She had not trusted her. But did that reluctance say more about Kara Wei – about Wong Fei Song – than it did about the other hacker?

  Pyne was less than an hour away from death, at the best estimation. But Kara was uninjured and free to escape. If she left the wounded woman now, she could survive, get away, recover.

  The thin girl shifted and moaned, gasping in breaths of air. Her eyes fluttered open, briefly seeing Kara before clouding, fading again.

  What were the last words Lex said to me? The thought rose from darkness, like the one before, and Kara knew it was some fraction of herself speaking back at her, echoing the questions she didn’t want to acknowledge.

  She couldn’t remember what Lex had said. It had been such a swift and brutal decision to break with Ghost5, coming on the heels of an acid, cutting argument with Madrigal about the future of the group. In that conversation, Kara had known that her mentor would take them down a dark path from which they would not return.

  What had Lex said that day, on an overcast Sunday in a squat off the Montmartre? Did he say he loved her as she frantically packed? Did he try to convince her to stay? Both; neither. The memory wasn’t there, only the phantom ache of an emotion Kara couldn’t experience.

  She had left, though. He hadn’t stopped her. Then he was dead, and Kara would never be able to reconstruct that moment. The missing piece had been lost forever.

  If she left Pyne, that would be history repeating itself. Another loss. If it wasn’t her lover she abandoned, did it matter? But she had abandoned him.

  Kara crouched next to Pyne and gently laid a finger on her throat, feeling the hacker’s weak pulse, then glanced back at the open hatch.

  If I leave again, what does that make me? A shadow passed over her face as the answer emerged from the same place. It makes you like Madrigal.

  ‘Song? Do you smell smoke?’ whispered Pyne, slipping out of lucidity. ‘Not the good kind, like barbecue.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kara. ‘It’s okay. Sit tight.’ She moved down the cabin and opened the door to the grounded Beechcraft’s cockpit. She experimented with the switches, hope blooming in her. The edges of the electromagnetic pulse had not reached this far, their force spent on penetrating the metal walls of the hangar. That meant the light plane’s circuits and its radio would still be operational. From memory, Kara dialled in the guard frequency the strike team had been using.

  It would be in the clear. There was no guarantee anyone would be listening, and it was possible that anything she did say would be picked up by the people who wanted her dead.

  But she had to reach out. She had to try.

  *

  Marc guided the Dauphin into a shaky touchdown on the bridge, easing the helicopter between two streetlamps until the wheels bumped off the roadway. The nearest civilians were a few hundred metres away, staying back by their cars, too afraid to venture any closer. He saw one guy trying to capture the scene on his cell-phone camera, and Marc pulled up his collar in a half-hearted attempt to conceal his identity.

  Lucy was out of the cabin before the helicopter had settled, bringing up the rifle as she advanced on the damaged SCIF. Marc scrambled out after her, snatching the submachine gun from its strap and checking the safety.

  The wind pushing the dark clouds in from the sea had finally deposited the core of the growing storm cell over the city, and the deluge angled down in hard, hissing curtains. It felt like a dark monsoon, pulse after pulse of rain washing across the bridge from the river, battering at the pair of them, streaming off their faces.

  Marc and Lucy shared a look and made their approach to the ruined cabin. Backlit by the flares of orange fire from the stricken Halo on the far side of the bridge, the cables still connected to the SCIF flexed and rattled against the steel arches over the subway line.

  Where the SCIF struck the bridge, the force of the collision had ripped it open along a welded seam that ran the length of the rectangular cabin. It re
sembled a box torn open by a hungry animal desperate to get at whatever was inside.

  Marc walked over a swath of soaked briefing documents and military satellite photos scattered across the road, spilled from the inside of the smashed cabin. Hidden secrets, kept locked down across decades of intelligence operations, lay bleeding out of the container.

  ‘Look at this shit,’ Lucy muttered. ‘It’s a goddamn spy piñata.’

  He nodded, spotting other objects among the debris. Marc saw portable hard-drive modules, splintered and broken open in the impact, cases of old micro discs and shimmering streamers of magnetic tape.

  ‘Cover me,’ said Lucy, moving around to the far side, where part of the cabin’s facia had been ripped open, hanging twisted and bent.

  The SCIF slumped at a shallow angle, and the contents that had broken loose filled the interior with a snowdrift of papers, plastic cases and scattered files. Marc held his weapon at the ready, flicking the fire-select to three-round burst, prepared to shoot at anything that moved.

  The wind whipped at the debris, but nothing human stirred inside the shattered SCIF. Lucy shouldered her rifle and climbed into the container. ‘Proof of death,’ she said, without looking back at him. ‘If her body is in here, I’ll get it.’

  ‘Right,’ replied Marc, somewhat relieved to be leaving Lucy to the grisly business of digging through the wreckage in search of a corpse. The damaged container unit shifted and groaned under her weight as she disappeared into the dank gloom between the storage racks that were still standing upright.

  He clambered up into the cabin after her and found the remains of the workstation bolted to the inside of the nearside wall. The computer console was smashed beyond use, but the server rack above it was still relatively intact. He reached out and ran a hand over the faces of the hard drives still resting in their secured mounts. If he wanted to, it wouldn’t take long to remove the locks holding them in place, pull the modules and get them back to the helicopter. Madrigal had spent years of her life preparing to steal this SCIF, and he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of deeply buried secrets were swarming inside it. Stored in these media were reports of black operations conducted by the precursors to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, stretching back to the bad old days when they had been the KCIA and their reputation for doing whatever the hell they wanted was notorious.