Lethal Circuit (19 page)

“What would you call yourself then?” Kate said.

“A realist.”

“Good. Then understand this. That satellite is the equivalent of a very large bomb. To make that bomb the Chinese reverse engineered their reactor design including all of its communications protocols from the damaged Horten they found. If we can locate the second Horten and plug it into that green box we found, if the boys in tech can find a clear-code that will reboot its systems, there’s a chance we can keep that bomb from blowing.”

“Just a chance?”

“A chance is the best we’ve got.”

Michael stared down at the low clouds hanging over the valley. Regardless of the belated manner in which Kate had shared this information, he knew in the pit of his gut that she was right. The stakes were too high to beat around the bush. They needed to talk to the old man. But something material had to change. They needed a reason for him to trust them. Instead they got a clap of thunder. A gunshot echoed up from the valley below. It sounded like a twelve gauge, but Michael guessed it could have come from any large caliber weapon. It was followed quickly by a second shot, this one seemingly louder than the first and in that moment Michael knew that the luxury of decision was no longer his. The second shot still reverberating through the hills, he kicked the bike to life, Kate hopping on behind him.

T
HEY
HEARD
THE
screaming before Michael even killed the engine. The boy stood wailing in the middle of the path, tears streaming down his face. The old woman then stepped out of the hut and one look at her told Michael that the man with the knife had been her husband and he was dead. She ignored Michael and hunched over on the ground, knees in the dirt. Others appeared, hurrying down hidden trails onto the main footpath of the village, and soon the wailing was everywhere. One of their own had fallen.

Michael dropped the bike in the soft dirt and headed into the hut where the old man had been cooking. He only needed to poke his head in the doorway for a second before looking away. It wasn’t like an automobile accident seen from afar, it was more visceral than that. And despite everything Michael thought he knew about being born from the earth and going right back to it, he felt an overpowering urge to sink to his hands and knees and vomit. The old man’s head, or what was left of it, was slumped to the side of his neck at an unnatural angle. A second shot had taken out most of his face, reducing what had been a person to what looked like a bloody rump roast hanging from a stump of flesh. Michael grasped his gut and dry heaved. Kate, who had entered the hut cautiously behind Michael, looked momentarily stunned, a faraway look in her eye. Michael left the hut.

“Who did this?” Michael asked two of the villagers. “Who did this?”

The villagers ignored him. Michael’s only response was the low moan of the old woman, the boy now seated against the stone wall of a nearby hut dropping a pebble repeatedly into the mud as though caught in an infinite loop of disbelief.

Kate echoed Michael’s question in Mandarin. The stray villagers who had come down from the hillside looked up at her, but quickly redirected their attention to the old woman. Kate, undeterred, continued forward, repeating the question. The villagers only shook their heads. Looking at them, still breathing hard from their run from the fields, it was unlikely that there would have been any witnesses except for the kid and the old woman. No, it was obvious to Michael that if he wanted answers he was going to have to go straight to the source. But Kate beat him to it. She knelt down in the dirt before the old woman, taking her by the hands.

Kate spoke in soft Mandarin but the woman didn’t reply to her. She just looked directly through Kate as though whatever these foreigners might do or say from this moment on didn’t matter. Her husband was after all sitting not ten feet away, dead as Mao, his head hanging off his neck like so many pounds of raw meat. But Michael was now convinced there would be more death if they didn’t press on.

“Your husband. He had a knife.”

The old woman looked up at Michael and wailed the long low moan of the emotionally dead. The moan didn’t end, it just went on and on echoing through the hills until finally Michael stood, taking Kate by the shoulder. Even if this was the only way forward, Michael reasoned they had to give it time, if only a little. But then, as Michael raised Kate to her feet, the old woman looked up from the dirt and met Michael’s eye. She held the look for a long moment. Then she muttered something, barely audible at first. To Michael’s unpracticed ear it sounded like a single syllable, maybe two.

Kate addressed the woman softly in Mandarin. “What was that? I didn’t hear.”

This time the old woman screamed in forceful Mandarin, slapping her open hand against her skull.

“What is it? What’s she saying?”

Kate struggled to understand, the old woman still screaming. “It’s in his head,” Kate said. “She says it’s in his head.”

30

T
HE
OLD
WOMAN
moaned down at the earth, arms clutched against the side of her skull.

“What? What’s in his head?”

Michael did his best to reach out to the woman, placing his hands on her shoulders to calm her, but she pulled away, slapping her skull, still screaming.

“Tell me what’s she saying.”

“The same thing. It’s in his head.”

Michael turned toward the villagers who had gathered from the surrounding hills. “Ask them if they know what she’s talking about.”

Kate addressed the villagers. They responded, but one look at Kate’s face told Michael she didn’t understand what they were getting at. “They say the old woman talked a lot. About the war.”

“Which war?”

Kate translated as the villager went on. “He says the war that happened long ago. The war with many doctors.”

“What kind of doctors?”

Kate translated. “He says, Japan. Japanese doctors.”

Michael thought about it. “The Imperial Japanese Army was a Nazi ally here. They had a whole lot of guns, but not many doctors, at least not out here. Not in the sticks.” Michael paused for a moment. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What?”

“I read some of the history of the area before I left home. There were hospitals in Guilin. They were known for certain procedures.”

“Procedures?”

“Keep the woman outside,” Michael said, already halfway back to the hut.

M
ICHAEL
KNEW
WHAT
needed to be done, he just wasn’t certain he wanted do it. What he hadn’t made clear to Kate were the type of activities the Japanese Imperial Army had become famous for: namely the medical experimentation upon and vivisection of conquered peoples. Michael recalled that the experiments ranged from testing vaccines to the clinical administration of torture, right on through to genetic manipulation and vivisection. But staring down at the old man lying there in a spray of arterial blood, his head half blown off, Michael was less concerned with what the experiments were comprised of than with what came next.

Steeling his nerve, Michael looked away from the old man’s corpse to the clay oven in the corner of the hut. On top of the newly washed dishes sat a pair of yellow rubber gloves. Michael put them on, noting that the old man’s fingers were still wrapped around his pocket knife, rigor mortis setting in. Michael had no desire to make this process anymore invasive than it had to be so he reached into his own pocket for his newly purchased Swiss Army knife. He opened up the main blade thinking that this was probably not what the manufacturer had intended. The old man’s face was gone, disintegrated in a flurry of shot, and Michael knew that his first task was to cut away the skin so that he could get to the skull. Holding the head steady in one hand, Michael exhaled and made his first cut, sinking the blade into the flesh laterally along the pulpy scalp. Though this was definitely a first for him, he thought that all those years of carving jack-o’-lanterns could finally be put to good use.

“Michael?” Kate said, poking her head in the doorway unable to keep the look of what had to be horror from spreading across her face.

“Just keep the woman and the kid away.”

Michael carefully sliced the bloody skin back from the skull. He continued cutting slowly but firmly with the knife, slicing the skin down toward the left eye.

“What are you doing?”

“You heard her. It’s in his head.”

“It’s an expression. Like I’ve got a song in my head. It doesn’t mean I literally have a song in my head.”

“Here I think it does.”

Michael doubled back and continued his incision down toward the right eye. Holding the head steady in one hand, he took hold of the flap of skin between thumb and forefinger and peeled the flesh down the skull like the skin of a grape.

“Do you have to?” Kate asked, covering her mouth and looking away.

Michael’s medical training was limited to basic first-aid, but with the skin gone and the bone of the skull exposed beneath, he saw exactly what he had thought he might: a discoloration in the skull. The discoloration was darker than the rest of the area, round, and about two inches in diameter. It’s hue was a yellowish black, but when Michael rubbed it with his glove, the fatty substance rubbed away revealing a perfectly round metal plate inset in the old man’s skull like an all knowing third eye. Michael reached back toward the sink grasping a pitcher of water. Quickly rinsing the plate, the small recessed screws holding it anchored firmly into the skull became visible, their tiny Phillips heads shining out at him like stars. The four screws were encrusted with calcium deposits after being in the old man’s skull for decades, but with the help of his Swiss Army knife, Michael was able to scrape them off and twist them two turns each. After this he inserted the blade of his knife into edge of the skull around the perimeter of the plate. One smooth lever motion and the plate popped out, nearly hitting the floor before Michael caught it in his yellow gloved hand.

Though it was hard to tell in the low light if the plate was nickel or platinum, one thing was clear: it had been cast to resemble a full moon. Japanese Kanji were inscribed around its circumference, a stylized relief of a double peaked karst etched in the foreground. Twin peaks rising before a full moon, the pointed mountain looked strangely familiar yet like nothing Michael had ever seen before. It looked, Michael thought, like the devil’s pitchfork.

31

R
AND
LAID
INTO
Mobi like there was no tomorrow. He threatened prison. He threatened a lively physical interrogation before Mobi made it to prison. And he threatened an active sex life for the duration of Mobi’s stay in prison. Then, after several wasted hours during which Mobi was forced to sit in the corner like a new improved Buddha, Rand decided he needed him. He conscripted Mobi to assist his men in the installation of their equipment in JPL’s main tracking station. Apparently, the ASAT orbital platforms Alvarez had referenced could be controlled from just about anywhere provided there was a set of eyes to monitor their progress and a large enough antenna to provide secure communication. Through its Goldstone Deep Space Antenna Array and trained technicians, JPL provided both.

Alvarez clicked her tongue, clearly done with the long wait. “It looks like you’ve got all the angles covered, Colonel.”

“Nice try, but you and your engineer are sitting in on this one. I don’t want to encounter any resistance up here and the best way to ensure that is to keep you two on tap.”

“Respectfully, I have eleven active missions that I need to keep flying today. I’m sure NASA would prefer that you let us do our jobs.”

“I couldn’t give my sorry ass pension what NASA prefers,” Rand said. “That stunt your engineer pulled hacking beyond his pay grade proves he isn’t to be trusted. If there’s a problem with the uplink, I want him here where I can see him.”

“Which is where he’s going to be,” Alvarez said, pointing across large room. “Right behind that door, watching space traffic in Secondary Ops while you get the prime real estate here in Mission Control.”

Rand considered. He might still need Alvarez. No need to piss the lady off for nothing. “If I need him,” he said, “I want him stat.”

“You’ll have him.”

Rand eyed his two operations engineers, both comfortably ensconced in front of their terminals. “How long until we’re in range?”

“If the current orbital degradation holds?”

“Ballpark,” Rand said.

“Thirty-nine, forty minutes.”

Rand looked to Alvarez and said, “Keep him close.”

Mobi immediately understood he was being offered a reprieve and stepped across the room, moving to pull the door to Secondary Ops open. But as he laid his fingers on it, Alvarez’s hand touched his, opening the door for him. Mobi’s eyes met Alvarez's for a split second as he felt her fingers on his palm, but he quickly looked away. Once in Secondary Ops, Mobi kept right on walking out the door on the other side, buoyed by the keycard he felt hidden in the palm of his hand.

Mobi knew what the keycard meant. Thankfully, the rigorous biometric security protocols of JPL’s secure level entrance were behind him. He swiped his way back down to the lower lab and within a couple of minutes he was inside Alvarez’s office. Alvarez had a pair of louvered blinds on the glass window to the corridor which he promptly closed. He checked the multi-line phone on the desk. It had an internal configuration. Then he examined the keycard. Alvarez had scrawled an eighteen digit number on the back of it which Mobi guessed included a contact number for Quiann. But Mobi knew he wouldn’t be able to make a call out without going through the JPL operator. Not the best plan under the circumstances. He tried the desk drawers, but found little of note: a few pencils and pens, a ream of paper, and a pack of batteries. Mobi began to question his assumptions. Was her office where Alvarez had intended he come? With the exception of her long mohair coat sitting rumpled in the corner, the place was empty.