by Marc Cameron
In effect, all three were shooting at the same time, overlapping their fields of fire. The shirtless bodies danced at the thudding impact before pitching forward. Subsonic rounds tended to remain inside the cranial vault, but Captain Lo had turned, allowing one bullet to destroy his lower jaw. The other two died with the solemn expressions of hero worship they’d had on their faces from watching Wolf Warrior 2 a few breaths before.
Medina found her vision locked on the scene, unable to move her feet, until Mamut patted her arm, pushing the muzzle of the pistol gently toward the floor.
She blinked, taking slow, deliberate breaths to clear her mind. Perhat scanned the room, looking for security cameras. Considering the oily odor of marijuana in the air, Medina doubted cameras would be a problem.
Mamut leaned over the couch, one last check of the bodies. “We must pick up the expended brass,” he said. “Each one has to be accounted for.”
Perhat brandished his pistol toward the flashing screen. “Wait, wait,” he said. “They are coming to the crossbow part.”
“The what?”
The young Uyghur stood transfixed in front of the television, pistol dangling in his fist, three dead men at his feet. “Watch for yourselves,” he said, entranced, breathless. “It is amazing. Leng Feng, the Wolf Warrior, fashions a crossbow out of material he finds lying around and uses it to kill the mercenaries and save the captives.”
Medina returned the pistol to her pocket and gave an indignant scoff as she stooped to pick up spent cartridges at her feet.
“What?” Perhat said, wagging his head. “I know the Han Chinese savior stuff is all lies, but I like the action. Okay?”
“Something is seriously wrong with you,” Medina said, picking up a fourth piece of brass.
Perhat chuckled, deadpan, still watching Wolf Warrior save the day. “If you are only becoming aware of this, then you are not nearly as observant as you need to be. There is something seriously wrong with all of us.” His eyes flicked momentarily to her, then back to the television. “Some may even be beyond help. But after all, God has only damaged people to work with. No? Anyway, I like action movies. As soon as they make one with a Uyghur hero I’ll throw away my DVDs of Die Hard and Wolf Warrior.”
“It is fine,” Mamut said, counting the brass on his open palm to see that it was all accounted for. “It is well and good that you are familiar with this trash. Such things are all the rage among youth today. The media even speaks of Beijing’s Wolf Warrior diplomacy. It would be foolish to disregard this piece of culture . . . propaganda though it may be.”
“Exactly,” Perhat said.
“But there is no need to wallow in it,” Mamut said. “Now let’s go.”
They took an indirect route back to the van. It was late enough that the checkpoints on Highway 312 would be manned by different people, but they remained in Urumqi for the rest of the night, so surveillance cameras would not record them leaving the city so quickly after they’d only just arrived.
The killing of Bingtuan special police, especially when one of them was a line commander—was sure to make a splash. In all likelihood, the action would spawn a brutal crackdown by local authorities, making an already difficult life harder for minorities in Urumqi. Mamut had confided this worry to Medina, but felt the long-term goals were worth the sacrifice.
They’d taken great care to leave no calling card on the bodies, nothing that would give them the obvious credit other than the cold precision with which the assassinations were carried out. They left the bodies exactly as they fell. There was no physical evidence other than the slugs buried inside the dead men’s brains. The whispers would begin before the bodies were loaded onto a mortuary van. Some would blame the killings on other groups—the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or some other independence or jihadist group. Captain Lo marked the fifteenth such assassination for Mamut and his group, six of them regional politicians who had made decisions that led directly to Uyghur imprisonment and death. With that many, some in Beijing would surely call it a plot of the American CIA. Local Party leaders, Bingtuan security force commanders, even the soldiers themselves whispered among themselves, jaws tense, teeth gnashing, hiding their fear with bluster and threat to a foe they could not see or even describe. But they knew who was responsible for each of the killings.
The Nameless.
Wuming.
16
Dr. Patti Moon rubbed exhausted eyes and lay back on the bunk in her cramped cabin aboard the icebreaking research vessel Sikuliaq.
“Are you seriously telling me you don’t hear human voices?”
A wide terry-cloth band held black hair, still damp from an evening shower, out of her eyes. The apples of her high cheekbones were flushed pink, warm with the glow that came from working on deck all day in the cold wind. Dressed in gray merino wool long john bottoms and a white T-shirt—she knew better than to sleep in anything less on a vessel that had frequent abandon-ship drills—Moon rolled over toward her open laptop with a groan to study the digital signature of her hydrophone recording for the hundredth time. Her friend and former shipmate Chief Petty Officer Shad Barker’s voice crackled on the voice over IP connection. The connection was via satellite, which was slow to begin with, and the lag between each sentence was beginning to make conversation a chore. Sixty miles northwest of Utqiagvik, the Alaska city white people called Barrow, satellite antennas had to be pointed almost at the horizon to get a connection. What few visitors she’d ever taken to her home village of Point Hope were always astounded when they learned that, one, the Native people there had satellite TV, and, two, all the dishes appeared to be aimed at the ground.
Moon and Barker had been at it for nearly an hour. She aboard R/V Sikuliaq in the Arctic Ocean, he on the destroyer USS John Paul Jones, steaming off the coast of Oahu four thousand miles away. Moon had spent her fair share of months at sea aboard a tin can, some of it with Barker when they were both second-class petty officers, long before he’d become a chief and she’d left the Navy to finish graduate school. They’d made a short go of a romantic fling—while on liberty in Manila. Hooking up on land didn’t make her feel as loose as getting under way while under way. Moon didn’t want to be “that girl on the ship.” It hadn’t worked out anyway. They’d both been young and stupid enough to let their hormones take control, but old and wise enough to know that they would be much happier as shipboard friends than sneaking around trying to find some nook or cranny on the destroyer just to get a little privacy—which would have given them both reputations they didn’t want.
Turning on her side, she tapped the trackpad on her computer to start the sound bite again.
She pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, squinting as she focused on the sounds pouring through her headphones.
The recording stopped, leaving her banging her head softly on the industrial-strength bunk mattress. “Now tell me you don’t hear that?”
Barker scoffed on the other end of the line. “And you’re telling me you hear voices?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” Moon said.
“That’s a stretch,” Barker said. “If that’s the case, it has to be a submarine and they’re double-hulled. I don’t think it’s possible.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” Moon said. “But I’ve also heard submariners say they have heard voices on their hydrophones—and anyway, I know I’m hearing something.”
“Much more likely to be sea ice, maybe some mating whales or—”
“Why do guys working the sonar always think the whales are mating? Girl whales like to talk at other times, too, you know. And besides, whales don’t mate in Arctic waters. They swim south for that.”
“Can’t blame them there,” Barker said. “But I still think what you’re hearing could be a whale song. Don’t you have narwhals up there?”
Moon clicked some keys on her laptop to
slow down the recording. “There,” she said. “That’s metal banging on metal. I’m sure of it.”
“Are you, though?” Barker asked. “I mean, the simplest explanation is the most likely. It’s probably the screws of your own ship pinging off an ice chunk. Didn’t you say you were in an open lead when you made the recording? That means ice all around you.”
“We were,” Moon said. “But that’s not what this is. I can clearly hear a metal door slamming shut when I slow down the loop. When I filter the lower frequencies I can make out what I think are voices—screaming, panicked voices.”
“Okay,” Barker said, only a little condescending. “I’ll bite. What are these voices saying?”
“I don’t know,” Moon said. “I think they’re speaking Chinese. Shad, if you’d been on the sonar and you heard this, wouldn’t you report it?”
“Of course.”
“Well, somebody needs to be made aware,” Moon said. “And I flat don’t have anybody else to tell besides Twitter.”
“Wait,” Barker said. “You want me to kick this up my chain of command?”
“It’s all I can ask.”
“I hate to point this out,” Barker said, “but nobody is likely to buy this, considering it’s coming from you.”
“I’m aware of my reputation in the Navy,” Moon said. “That’s why you should take the credit.”
“Not in a million years,” Barker said. “This is your baby.”
“But you will kick it up?”
“I’ll do it as soon as we’re done here,” Barker said.
Moon rolled onto her back, staring up at the bottom of the vacant bunk above her. She rubbed her face with an open hand, feeling the glow of warmth from a long day in the wind. “Naamuktuk,” she said.
Inupiaq for good enough.
Barker groaned. “You used to always say that when you were pissed.”
“No,” she said. “Really. I do appreciate this. I’ll send you the coordinates where I picked up the voices—”
“The as-yet-unidentified sound transient—”
She stood her ground. “Voices. I’m certain of it.”
“You know I’m in your corner,” Barker said. “I’m just reminding you that not everyone thinks the shadows are full of conspiracies and secrets.”
“They should,” Moon said. “Because they are. Anyway, thanks again for doing this, Shad.”
“No worries,” he said. “It’s good to talk to you.”
“You, too.” She started to end the call, but was a fraction of a second late getting her finger to the keyboard.
“You ever wish we’d made more of a go of it?” Barker asked. “You know. That time in Manila?”
“That was fun,” Moon said. “But nah, I don’t think so. To be honest, I like you too much to screw everything up with romance.” She returned to the reason for her call. “So, you’ll pass this up the chain as soon as we hang up?”
“Roger that.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m hanging up now. Whoever it is screaming at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is in your debt.”
17
The director of national intelligence was afforded not only an office for herself, but an entire suite of offices that housed her chief of staff and many advisers and assistants. Most were tucked away in other offices or small cubbies off a larger, top-floor lobby. None of these people were more imposing than the woman who greeted Monica Hendricks from behind the immaculately clean desk outside Mary Pat Foley’s closed office door. She was tall, even when seated, nearing sixty years old, with broad shoulders, naturally silver hair, and the hint of a perpetual squint, as if she did not quite believe what was going on before her eyes. Hendricks had made a life out of reading people and felt sure this woman had been a police officer of some sort in an earlier life, perhaps in the military. Or maybe she’d just raised a couple of teenage sons.
Secretaries might be called administrative assistants in the modern era, but at a certain level, there was an unwritten rule that they had to act as a sort of guard dog as well—the last line of defense outside the inner sanctum.
The woman glanced at the visitor’s badge clipped to the lapel of Monica’s navy-blue summer-wool suit. Similar to the ones issued at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, the badge had a bleed-through strip affixed to the front that would read EXPIRED twelve hours after it had been applied and issued.
“Mrs. Hendricks?”
Monica shot her a smile. “That’s right.”
“The director is just finishing up on a call,” the woman said. “I’ll let her know you’re—”
The oak door yawned open and Mary Pat Foley stepped out. “Thank you, Gladys. I’m good now.”
Foley took Monica’s hand in both hers, patted the back in a way that might seem condescending from someone else, but felt genuine coming from Mary Pat.
As usual, Foley was dressed as if she might have to rush off to the White House at any moment. Black pearl earrings accented the white silk blouse, open at the neck, and a gray gabardine A-line skirt. She was barefoot, but a pair of sensible black shoes sat akimbo beside a polished mahogany desk that held little more than a computer screen and a single file folder. She caught Monica looking and chuckled.
“The sign of an insane mind. Right?”
“It is an awfully clean desk, ma’am.”
Foley grabbed the file and then smoothed her skirt behind her with both hands as she sat down across from Hendricks at a small meeting table.
“All the clutter is on those desks out front,” she said.
“You do have a nice office,” Hendricks said.
It was large, though, Hendricks had to admit, certainly smaller than the seventh-floor sanctum of the D/CIA at Langley. And it was much less imposing than she would have imagined for the person in charge of the sixteen other intelligence agencies falling under the purview of the National Counterintelligence Center at the Liberty Crossing complex—a large X-shaped building located across the freeway from Tysons Corner, Virginia. White walls were detailed in mahogany and oak, with crisp blue carpet and a Persian rug. It was de rigueur for those in lofty government positions to display framed autographed 8x10s of them standing on the tarmac beside famous dignitaries during historical moments, presidents, world leaders, Supreme Court justices, even movie stars. Notoriously wary of the camera, Foley had only two photographs of herself that Hendricks could see. One with her family, the other with Jack Ryan, when they were younger, somewhere in Russia. There were, however, plenty of photographs of her boys over the years, playing hockey with a red Soviet flag in the background, graduating from high school, weddings, grandchildren—the vestiges of normal life that people who lived in the shadows clutched tightly in an effort to keep their heads above water.
Foley rested both hands flat on the table, on either side of the closed folder that presumably held Hendricks’s polygraph results. “I speak for the President as well,” she said, “when I say how grateful we are to you for doing this. Virtually begging you to stay, but then asking you to take a polygraph as a prerequisite.”
“It must be important, then,” Hendricks said.
Foley patted the folder without opening it. “You passed, by the way.”
Hendricks closed her eyes and gave a tired smile. “I know I passed, ma’am—”
Foley kept her hands on the table but raised her brow. “Mary Pat.”
“Right,” Hendricks said. “Mary Pat. Anyway, I hate polygraphs. They are embarrassing and dehumanizing even if you have nothing to hide. I mean, a pimple-faced kid half my age asking me if I have any deviant sexual tendencies that could embarrass me if they were made known. Can you imagine? For Pete’s sake, Mary Pat, I’m Southern Baptist. Talking to that kid about sex at all embarrasses me. I did confess to sometimes peeing a dribble or two when I sneeze. I think that tidbit put the little shit off-kilter.”
Foley smiled. “Putting people off-kilter is your superpower, Monica. Anyway, the flutter was a formality to ease the President’s mind.”
“You talked to President Ryan about me specifically?”
“Of course,” Foley said. “Apart from me and the President, only eight people know of the existence of this operation we’re calling ELISE. This mole has no idea we’re hunting him . . . or her.”
“So ELISE is a mole hunt?” Hendricks mused, half to herself.
“Exactly,” Foley said. “A traitor within the intelligence community, likely in the CIA. The Chi-Comms refer to him as SURVEYOR. Our computer spit out BITTER ARROW for a code name, but that sounds too much like what it is. The Chinese are wily, and since we’re looking for someone inside our intelligence community whom they’ve turned, we thought it better to choose something a little less on the nose.”
“I’m assuming you’ve snooped through my bank accounts.”
Foley gave a tired nod. “Among other things. I can compartmentalize a background check without the checkers knowing why you’re being vetted.”
“Surely the fact that there are leaks doesn’t come as a surprise to you,” Hendricks said. “We’re taught from the get-go to assume there is always someone leaking information, even without meaning to.”
“True enough,” Foley said. “But this particular leak is devastating, and intentional.”
“And we’re sure the Chinese aren’t running a disinformation campaign? Sowing mistrust in the ranks and making us chase our own tails?”
Foley gave her a thumbnail sketch of what they knew so far—including the fact that there was a Russian asset in Chinese intelligence.
Hendricks leaned back in her chair, mulling over what little information she had. “I’ve got to say, you have all kinds of aggressive young counterintelligence weenies who would love to run this kind of investigation. Why pick on a chubby woman about to retire? This kind of operation could make a career.”