by Claire North
The next day very little happened.
The next day, very little again.
On the tenth day of battle, the Indian air force succeeded in dropping two hundred and fifty men, supplies, mortars and heavy weapons into the valley below my bunker, while unknown separatists simultaneously blew up my airfields in Xinjiang, assassinated two of my generals and, in a stroke of beauty, launched an all-out assault on the government offices of Ngari near the Indian border, diverting Chinese attention (and my pieces) away from our quiet, undeclared Kyrgyz war.
Within twelve hours, she had pushed my troops back into the bunker itself, yielding all the positions they’d held outside. Four hours after that, the unit was down to fifty men who debated whether to surrender or fight to the death. Thirty surrendered – twenty swore they would die fighting.
Eight hours after that, the twenty who were left alive, were still fighting, pushed deeper and deeper into the bunker. I detonated booby traps as they withdrew, helping them on their way, sealing off corridors and butchering enemy men who came after them, until at last they were in the lowest part of that place, in the darkest corner from which there was no way out, and the enemy stood at the doors and said:
We can kill you all now with a couple of grenades. You have nowhere to run. Be smart – surrender.
They answered with gunfire and died in a flash.
When the smoke cleared, the bunker was taken. Hundreds of men were dead, the mountain shattered from within. In China, rebels raged through the westernmost towns; in Russia, fighters burned on their runways, while in Kyrgyzstan the Gamesmaster’s troops opened the very last door to the very deepest part of the bunker and found looking back at them my camera and network server, and six pounds of C-4.
I detonated the explosive from my room in Tokyo, watched the screen go black. I turned to the men and women in the room, the spies, hackers, cyber-terrorists and cyber-experts, the forensic accountants and military advisors, special forces and retired generals whom I had gathered, the greatest assemblage of pieces that I could muster, and said:
“Did we get it?”
They conferred for a little while, their screens still hot with rolling data. Then an accountant from Maine put his hand up and said, “Yes.”
Chapter 36
Every battle has an alternative history.
As men screamed and died for a nameless mountain in Kyrgyzstan, I and my assembled team gathered data.
First, we were based in Yushu, but by the third day of the battle, enough of the Gamesmaster’s soldiers had been identified, by unit or uniform, to pinpoint the pieces which had deployed them. As the vast majority of pieces she was playing were being deployed from Russia, we had headed north to Changji, only to change our minds and divert south when the spies and satellites I’d placed over the battlefield detected Indian troop movements to the south. By the tenth day, we had identified thirty-two of her pieces – generals, spies, prime ministers – and by the eleventh, had full access to their communications and finances.
On the thirteenth hour of the eleventh day, and for the first time in ten years, I heard her voice.
It was a phone call to a self-styled colonel of a mercenary band heading into the conflict zone. She said:
“Leave none alive.”
By the morning of the twelfth day, when the last of my troops fell, we had tracked that call – and a dozen others – back to a single point. The accountants ransacked the transactions leading to the bank of every mercenary and captain she threw against us, every helicopter pilot and every paid-for bullet, and even as our plane touched down in Tokyo, they confirmed what all other sources suggested: the Gamesmaster’s orders were coming from Japan.
When the last bomb went off in the last room of the bunker, we had data on every single man who’d died, every piece that had been played, every command issued.
And, as the dust settled over the dead of the mountain, an accountant from Maine turned round, raised his hand and said, “I think I’ve found the debit card she’s been using to pay for her mini bar.”
I looked at the screen that he looked at, looked at the last transaction, noted that it was twenty minutes ago and five miles away and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”
Chapter 37
Racing through Tokyo in a convoy of trucks.
What do I feel?
Bright lights, tall buildings, treeless streets. Glass and steel, the taste of salt in my mouth.
I have orchestrated the deaths of over seven hundred men, and from their deaths an accountant has managed to trace a mini-bar bill that may or may not be the place of residence of the Gamesmaster.
She castled several years ago, fortifying herself at the top of a tower in Tokyo from which all things are coordinated. In attempting to break down my castle in Kyrgyzstan, she has revealed her position. Safety or a trap? Castling can be both if you are careless with your positioning.
Lights in the streets of Tokyo. Katakana, hiragana, imported characters and exported words. Mitsubishi, Nissan, Sony, Honda: once upon a time these were samurai clans which were turned to merchant manufacturing when the old order fell. Then the Americans came after the Second World War and declared death to all zaibatsu, the corporate conglomerates. Now the youth of Japan compete with a mania that borders on disease to get lifelong positions in these companies, and economics shake and technologies change, and the world turns and everything is different, and everything is just the same.
Someone asks if I am all right, and I don’t understand why.
“You’re breathing fast, sir. You’re breathing very fast.”
Am I?
Perhaps I am.
I close my eyes, breathe slowly. A player never shows their feelings, never reveals their hand. Only the board; only the game. The rest is distraction.
I counted up the pieces I had in play.
Thirty mercenaries in the trucks behind mine, dressed in police uniform. Another twenty armed men on their way, played through an arms dealer I’d won in Iwaki.
In my pocket, I rolled a coin round and round between my fingers. Flak jacket over my shirt, gun on my hip, we broke every speed limit, jumped every red light, and someone said, will it be a problem? and I supposed it might be so I phoned a policeman I’d won…a long time ago…and told him to ignore it, to seal the area around Ikedayama Park, nothing in, nothing out. Someone else said, will she run? so I phoned an arsonist I’d won in Nagoya, gave him the clear to bomb the air traffic control tower at Yokohama, grounding all flights, perhaps even – if we were lucky – sealing Japanese airspace. I let the Chinese secret service unleash the computer virus they’d been sitting on since I seized control of their agency, slicing servers in half across Japan and, eleven minutes after its execution, plunging Tokyo into darkness as it shut down relays in the power grid. I gave the go to every assassin who’d been waiting for the signal, every hitman and petty thug I’d kept in reserve, unleashing them on all of the Gamesmaster’s pieces who’d been identified from Kyrgyzstan. No mercy. Leave none alive.
I tried saying the words out loud, tried matching the tone of her voice as she had spoken them, but nothing in my voice could make the words sound like her, make the words sound like me.
“Leave none alive,” says a voice, and I find it suddenly impossible to imagine it is me.
Who spoke them, then?
That other fellow, the other man there, the one sitting with a gun at his hip, a coin in his hand, that man – what shall we call him? He lost his name so long ago, sold his heart, auctioned his soul and to become – here it is, here it comes…
A player.
Not a person at all.
I rolled the coin between my fingers as we drove through the darkness of electrically broken streets until we came to the only building that still shone brightly in the night. Moriyoshi Tower, forty-nine floors of it, named for a heroic prince who fought valiantly and died betrayed. A glass spike to the sky: the pillar of wealth and vanity, it had its own generators, still shining
bright, all the brighter for the darkness of the city that surrounded it. Looking up at it, I thought it was a very beautiful place to castle a king, and wondered if she liked the views.
A fixer gave me a quick rundown – shops for the first five floors, then offices, then restaurants, then more offices, then at the top a hotel so luxurious that it didn’t even bother to have a website listing: you either knew about it or you weren’t connected enough to afford it.
“Can you access their cameras?” I asked. “Can you see inside?”
She could not.
“That doesn’t bode well,” I sighed, unclipping the safety from my holster. “Even if it isn’t a surprise.”
We went inside.
Shops, still open. No one buying; faces pressed to the glass, looking out; people talking, pointing, marvelling at their suddenly black, suddenly silent city. We – thirty armed policemen, assault rifles and helmets – were almost unremarkable in the dead quiet of the sudden urban night, for if the power had failed, of course but of course it made sense that policemen had come.
We moved by, looking for a way up. Around, ads still blared to the uninterested eye, the newest phone, the latest computer, the smartest watch, the trendiest clothes, the most expensive glasses, the biggest films, the loudest books, the sweetest drinks, the richest foods.
Come buy come buy, said the walls.
You need the latest.
You need the best.
You need to be the latest, the best.
Hot hot, now now, more more!
I felt a prickling in the corner of my eyes and wondered what it was. At the unmarked lift to the hotel, a man in white gloves stepped forward exclaiming, “No! This is exclusive! You cannot come up here!”
One of the mercenaries hit him across the side of his face with a rifle, and five men piled into the lift. I stayed behind and when the bomb on top of the car detonated four floors up, I turned to the survivors and said, “We’re taking the stairs.”
On the twelfth floor my phone rang, announcing the arrival of reinforcements. I deployed them remotely, sealing off the ground floors of the building, putting a helicopter overhead to shoot down anyone who attempted to flee into the skies. On the fourteenth floor, another phone call alerted me to the bombing of Yokohama air traffic control. Seventeen people were missing, presumed dead; more information not yet forthcoming.
They started shooting at us on the twenty-third floor.
Initially I couldn’t see who “they” were, as my mercenaries pushed me bodily out of the stairwell, already a killing ground. Only three corridors later, as we searched for an alternative route up and gunfire blared behind us, did I catch a glimpse of “them” – men in black suits, black ties, white shirts, who wielded sub-machine guns with a quiet professionalism and made no other sound as they blasted at us.
Their tactics were poor, their teamwork almost non-existent, but with a relentless force of numbers and a reckless disregard for their own safety, they kept coming– five dead, ten dead, fifteen dead or injured – and still they kept firing, kept pushing against us, until we were pressed between the killing ground of the stairwell and the bloodstained corridors of the tower ahead. I took the assault rifle off a man who fell by my side, a bullet to the femoral artery, dead in four minutes, and kept firing as the corridors filled with the stench of cordite and the thin, sickly traceries of smoke. My ears sang with the high shrill of cells dying from the volume of noise, and when someone threw a grenade at me, I was saved only by the weight of the dead man by my side, which absorbed most of the force of the blast. His blood ran down my face, stuck my hair together in clumps, stained my hands, and still the enemy kept coming.
“With me!” I grabbed four men, peeling away from the rest to make a break for the lift banks. One died when a door behind us opened to reveal a young man, barely seventeen years old, his face twisted with fear that he had forced to become rage, who leant out to spray us with bullets, and who died a few seconds later from a gunshot to the head. Another, less glamorously, pulled a muscle when he tripped over the body of a dead laundry woman, caught fleeing in a burst of wandering bullets that tore her stomach out and left her, nameless soul, sprawled across the field of battle.
We found a bank of lifts, and entering, climbed up through the access shaft in the ceiling to carefully remove the explosives wired up to the cable base, before pressing “up”. As the doors closed, five men, alerted perhaps by some unseen controller, came running towards us and a bullet took out my limping soldier before the doors closed.
He didn’t die quickly. He didn’t groan or shout or scream, but sat on the floor of the elevator, one hand over the wound to his chest, breath coming pink from his lips, a look of surprise, more than pain on his face. We three, the three left standing, looked at each other uncertainly before one man squatted down to give his colleague the shot of morphine that hung from a chain round his neck. He said, “Thanks,” and didn’t seem to understand that he was dead and the lift was his coffin.
The lift stopped with a shudder between floors, two storeys short of its destination. We didn’t wait for what would follow, but prised the doors open, wriggled out on our bellies onto the small box of floor above us. The last man pulled his feet free a moment before the explosive fired somewhere higher in the shaft, severing the cable of the car and plunging the elevator and its wounded prisoner forty-seven floors to their destruction.
I looked around the floor we’d crawled into. A reception area for a hotel. Glass fish-bowls held crystal stones and no fish. Clocks showed the hour in Moscow, New York, London, Beijing, Singapore, Cairo. TV screens down one wall blared out the news – crises here, disasters there, outbreak of disease, collapse of fortunes, broken, broken, broken, until the ads played, women with impossible smiles, men with impossible bodies, more, more, more, now, now, now, want, want, need.
A single receptionist stood behind a curving desk of crystal and aluminium. She was crying silently, back stiff and straight, a red silk scarf around her neck, a perfectly white cuff at the end of each sleeve. Were it not for the tears, she could still have looked like the perfect professional, waiting to meet guests. She stayed standing as we, bloodstained and armed, pass her by looking for stairs, and she bit back the sobs in the pit of her throat as we departed.
A black city outside, corridors of blue within. Doors were locked shut, nothing moved. A service trolley, soft towels and fragrant soap, sat in the middle of the corridor. In a corner, an ice machine spat white cubes onto the floor, something broken inside, the internal parts groaning, clunking with the strain. The sound of gunfire was distant now, men dying below.
We found stairs, started to climb. Two men with semi-automatic pistols burst from the floors above us, but we had come too far to die at the hands of amateurs and took them down before they could fire a single shot. Forty-seventh floor; forty-eighth; forty-ninth. A helicopter circled somewhere nearby, but the odds were high that it was mine, prowling the skies, waiting for someone to be foolish enough to cross its path. I pushed open the door to the highest floor with the muzzle of my gun, stepped into a corridor like any other, blue lights, potted plants, black marble floor. At the end of the corridor, a pair of double doors opened to a place unknown. White light shone beneath it, and then quickly went out. We moved forward. No one stopped us.
At the door, one man took a position to the left, the other to the right. I listened and heard nothing inside, threw a flashbang in anyway just in case, and the second after it burst, I was inside too.
A penthouse suite, a few lights burning, one above a desk strewn with papers, one next to a wall covered with screens. Three men on the floor, their eyes shut, their hands over their ears, guns at their feet – they died quickly, not knowing how.
Scenes of a life lived. A newspaper lay open on a sofa. A cup of coffee cooled on the crystal table, now flecked with bits of brain and blood. A white dressing-gown had fallen in a pile by the door, ready to be cleaned. A pair of high-heeled shoes, ano
ther of trainers, lay in a tatami-clad nook where visitors could remove their boots and put on slippers. There were no slippers to be seen. The wall of screens in one corner of the suite showed camera feeds, some from the hotel, some from other places: unknown walls, unknown corridors of power. I looked, and saw dead men filling the stairwells, frightened men – so few now – scurrying for shelter as the last of the bullets flew below.
Another pair of doors – black, metallic – stood a little ajar, leading from this room to another. We edged towards it, pushed the doors open, saw a room bigger than the first, couches and a low aluminium bar, a winter coat casually thrown across one of the stools, a chess-board set out on a table by the long glass window, the position halfway through a game, white winning. Not a soul in sight. Slowly, keeping to cover as we moved, we advanced, another set of doors ahead. I saw a shadow move across the line of light beneath the door and raised my hand to command a stop.
We froze, waited.
Waited.
Silence.
Even the helicopter outside was silent, an absence that frightened me more than any bullet.
I glanced at my two surviving men, and saw that they were afraid.
Saw that they sensed the thing we dare not name.
Silence.
Something behind us clicked.
The door we’d entered through, locking shut from behind.
The door ahead rolled a little ajar. I didn’t see the hand that pushed the grenade through, but I guessed at it and ducked behind the bar, hands over my ears, eyes tightly shut. The blast rocked the bottles above my head, knocked a half-drunk cocktail from its perch, spilling peach juice and vodka across the floor in front of me. The second grenade was nearer and I heard one of my men scream, and someone start to fire and I peeped my head up long enough to see the men coming through the door – not aimless men in suits, but professionals in masks, body armour, steel-capped boots, assault rifles raised, centres of gravity low. One of my men got four shots off, taking down two of his attackers before a bullet caught him in the throat. The other was already dead, skin ripped from flesh by the concussive force of the explosions that greeted us.