Modules 32 and 67 attached a new bag of fluid to James T. Pierce’s intravenous line. Then they turned to the other operating table and pointed their bone drill at the crosshairs drawn on Layla A. Pierce’s skull.
At the same moment, Supreme Harmony observed the remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee, who’d gathered in a conference room inside their bomb shelter near Beijing. The emergency meeting began with a minute of silence to honor the memory of the general secretary. Then Module 152 rose to his feet and gave his account of the assassination. Supreme Harmony made the Module’s eyes water as he described the shooting. He told the committee that he and Minister Deng would’ve been killed, too, if they hadn’t immediately fired on the treacherous bodyguards, who had obviously been recruited by the CIA to murder China’s leaders. During the Module’s speech, the network focused on the faces of the other committee members and observed that a few showed signs of skepticism. But no one dared to voice his doubts. After the vice president sat down, the committee unanimously decided to make him their new paramount leader. Module 152 was now the general secretary of the Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China.
The committee members applauded vigorously as the Module stood up again. Then he held out his hands, and the room fell silent. Supreme Harmony put a solemn expression on the Module’s face.
“I think we all know what needs to be done,” he said. “We must show the world that we’re not defeated. We must punish the Americans.”
SEVENTY-SIX
Kirsten sat in one of the jump seats inside the Black Hawk’s crowded cabin. She was only an arm’s length from Sergeant Briscoe, who pointed the barrel of an M240 machine gun through the helicopter’s open door. They were flying low, less than ten feet above the fir trees that covered the terrain. The countryside was still shrouded in darkness, but when Kirsten switched her glasses to infrared she saw a curving river that flowed into a narrow gorge about ten miles ahead. On the eastern side of the gorge was Yulong Xueshan, which she recognized instantly. It was the same jagged row of peaks she’d seen yesterday when she said goodbye to Jim.
Because the Black Hawk’s cabin was so noisy, all the passengers wore helmets equipped with radio headsets. Another door gunner manned the M240 on the other side of the helicopter, and eight more Special Ops soldiers filled the back of the cabin. Hammer sat in the jump seat to Kirsten’s right and Agent Morrison sat to her left. A hundred yards behind them was the second Black Hawk, which was also packed with soldiers and agents and guns.
To calm her nerves, Kirsten reached for her satellite phone and pressed a key that retrieved an audio file stored in the phone’s memory. Just before she’d left the Kachin camp, the NSA director had sent her this file, which held a recording of a radio transmission picked up by one of the agency’s satellites. It had been sent from Jim’s sat phone yesterday at 5:19 P.M. It was a brief recording, less than ten seconds long: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!” Although she’d been terrified when she heard the message for the first time, she soon realized that Jim had been faking the call for help. The tip-off was the fact that he’d said “Kirsten.” Jim always called her “Kir,” never “Kirsten.” He must’ve been playing some kind of trick on Supreme Harmony, trying to fool the network somehow. So the message gave her hope. She slipped the phone into her helmet and pressed the speaker against her ear so she could listen to it again: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!”
She was listening to it for a third time when a louder voice, the voice of the Black Hawk’s pilot, came over the earphones in her headset:
The Black Hawk lurched to the right, rolling into a sharp turn. The evasive maneuver threw Kirsten to the left and her helmet smacked into Morrison’s. She saw the helicopter eject its flares and spew a cloud of chaff to confuse the guidance system of the incoming surface-to-air missile, but she didn’t see the missile itself until it streaked past. The trail of its exhaust, clearly visible in infrared, passed just a few yards from the helicopter’s rotor blades.
This time the pilot veered to the left. The Black Hawk’s engines whined as the helicopter raced down the mountainside, its skids almost touching the tallest trees. Kirsten smacked into Hammer, who shouted something into his headset that she couldn’t make out. The second missile came within a few feet of the helicopter’s tail and then exploded on the slope below.
Kirsten heard the pilot’s voice again:
Then Hammer: “Just fire the package! We’re close enough to the target!”
“Negative, we can’t pop up to firing position. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”
Although the helicopter was rocking violently, Kirsten managed to switch the frequency of her glasses from infrared to the radio wave band. Then she peered through the Black Hawk’s open door, looking for a signal that might be coming from a radar station. It was hard to see anything through all the electromagnetic noise bouncing around the cabin, but after a couple of seconds Kirsten detected a signal reflecting off the helicopter’s metal skin, a powerful, rapidly pulsing transmission at 1320 megahertz. But it wasn’t a radar signal. It was coming from the helicopter itself, from the antenna just behind the rotor mast.
She turned to Hammer and grabbed his forearm. “The transponder! They’re tracking the friend-or-foe signals we’re sending to the AWACS!”
“What?” Hammer looked confused. “That’s impossible! How could they—”
“Trust me on this! Tell the crew to disable the transponder! Then they can return fire!”
Hammer hesitated a moment, then gave the orders. Kirsten heard a flurry of communications in her headset. Then the Black Hawk’s pilot throttled up the engines, and the helicopter swiftly rose a hundred feet above the slope. Kirsten switched her glasses back to infrared and saw a fissure in the mountainside. Inside the gap was a rectangular structure, a bit warmer than the surrounding rock. This, she realized, was the concrete entrance to the Yunnan Operations Center.
A loud bang went off to her right, and for a second she thought they’d been hit. But when she looked in that direction, she saw the hot exhaust of a missile streaking
Then she heard the explosion.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
The closest thing he could compare it to was one of those 360-degree planetarium theaters where the movie is projected on the underside of the dome and the images glide all around you. Except in this case, Jim was acting in the movie at the same time that he watched it.
The first image he saw was the rocky slope of Yulong Xueshan. He was running up the mountain again, his lungs on fire, trying to reach the edge of the glacier. Then the strange movie skipped ahead and he saw himself slamming his prosthetic hand against the ice. Then it skipped ahead again and he was typing a password on the computer terminal at the radio tower. These were his most recent memories, full of detail and color, but they rushed past in a jerky, erratic stream he couldn’t control. Without any warning the movie leaped backward in time and he was in the Underground City, riding on the back of Kirsten’s scooter. And as he watched himself reenact the scene, he got the feeling he wasn’t alone in this theater. Supreme Harmony was with him. It was running the projector.
The movie in his mind jumped back and forth, rewinding and fast-forwarding through the events of the past few days. Jim drove the three-wheeled truck, scaled the Great Wall, swatted at drones with his prosthesis, and
