fortifications and made a popping noise in the darkness overhead. Supreme Harmony assumed the missile was a dud. It ordered the Modules to fire at the Black Hawk, which was now an easy target.
The Modules picked up their missile launchers and rested the barrels on their shoulders. But a moment later, three of them dropped their weapons and fell to the ground. Then four more collapsed and started to convulse. Supreme Harmony scanned the area but didn’t detect any more incoming fire from the Black Hawk. Instead, it saw several hundred insects descending on the Modules.
The Black Hawk’s missile had released a drone swarm.
SEVENTY-NINE
The Black Hawk raced through the darkness toward the Operations Center. With her glasses tuned to infrared, Kirsten spotted at least a dozen warm bodies lying on the ground near the pillboxes. Several other Modules ran headlong down the mountain. As the helicopter sped closer to the fortifications, she saw a cloud of whirling dots just above the slope. Because the flies were cold-blooded they didn’t stand out so well on the infrared display, but their implanted electronics glowed brightly.
Smiling, Kirsten turned to Hammer. “How the hell did you get the drones into a missile?”
He smiled back at her. “You remember Dusty, my tech guy? He figured out a way to stuff the bugs into the payload. They’re pretty tough critters.”
After a few seconds, the Black Hawk slowed down and hovered over a line of boulders perched on the mountainside about a hundred yards from the pillboxes. The Special Ops guys sprang into action, throwing their fast ropes out the doorways of the helicopter and sliding to the ground. Kirsten donned a pair of gloves and slung an M-4 carbine over her shoulder. She hadn’t jumped out of a helicopter in twenty years, but the army had trained her well. Grabbing one of the braided ropes with her gloved hands, she skidded down to the rocky slope and ran for cover behind the boulders. Hammer and Agent Morrison followed right behind, and then the Black Hawk took off, chasing the Modules who’d fled downhill.
Kirsten peered around the edge of a boulder as the Special Ops team regrouped. The entrance to the Operations Center looked free and clear. But while she was searching for any Modules who might remain in the pillboxes, the cloud of drones suddenly collapsed. All the whirling dots fell to the mountainside and lay motionless. She turned to Hammer. “Hey, your swarm just died.”
“Already?” Hammer peered around the boulder, but without infrared he couldn’t see the drones in the dark. “Fucking hell. They must’ve shut it down.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Guoanbu must’ve put a shutdown switch in the drones they gave us. Just like Arvin did with the retinal implants.” He shook his head. “I knew this might happen, but I thought we’d have more time. How the fuck did they shut it down so quick?”
“You’re not fighting the Guoanbu now,” Kirsten said. “You’re fighting Supreme Harmony. The network moves fast.”
As if to underline her point, a burst of machine-gun fire erupted from one of the pillboxes. The commandos ducked behind the boulders. Sergeant Briscoe, who crouched beside Hammer, gave the CIA agent a dirty look. “I thought you said there’d be minimal resistance.” The bullets ricocheted off the rocks. The sergeant had to shout over the noise. “Is this your idea of minimal?”
Hammer didn’t answer. Briscoe turned away from him and got on his radio to contact the Black Hawk. Meanwhile, Kirsten recalled what she knew about Chinese weaponry. The machine gun in the pillbox was probably a W85, which shot 12.7 mm bullets at a rate of 600 rounds per minute. There was no way the Special Ops soldiers could make it to the entrance of the Operations Center. They were pinned down.
After a few seconds, the gunfire paused. Kirsten heard Briscoe talking into his radio, ordering the helicopter pilot to launch his Hellfire missiles at the pillbox. She wasn’t sure, though, that this would do any good. The Hellfires were great for destroying tanks, but the fortifications outside the Operations Center were hulking structures with thick concrete walls. And the Modules had already proved they could shoot down a Black Hawk.
Feeling desperate, Kirsten dared another look around the boulder. What she saw surprised the hell out of her—the whirling dots were in the air again. It looked like the drone swarm had come back to life. “You’re not gonna believe this,” she told Hammer. “Your drones are back in business.”
“What? They’re flying again?”
But as Kirsten looked closer, she saw that the swarm no longer hovered above the pillboxes. The drones were coming their way, heading for the line of boulders. This was a different swarm, she realized, not Hammer’s. These drones belonged to Supreme Harmony.
Kirsten grabbed Briscoe’s arm. “Get the Black Hawk over here! Tell the pilot to fly over our position!”
The sergeant was so startled he almost dropped his radio. “Jesus, Chan, calm down! The bird can’t come here. It has to be farther away from the target when it shoots the Hellfires.”
“Forget about that! We need the Black Hawk to scatter their drones! The wind from the rotor blades will do it!”
“Wait a second! I thought they were
It was too late. The machine gun in the pillbox resumed firing at their position, and a moment later the swarm surrounded them.
EIGHTY
He was acting in the movie at the same time that he watched it. He had to live through it again, and he couldn’t change a thing. Jim saw himself as he was in August 1998, a cocky and ambitious thirty-four-year-old intelligence officer with two strong arms and a loving wife and a pair of beautiful children. In the next three seconds he would lose it all.
He’d stopped by the embassy that morning to drop off some paperwork. For the past six months he and Kirsten had worked on setting up a new listening post in Kenya. The NSA had detected an increase in Al Qaeda activity in East Africa and ordered the construction of an advanced facility for monitoring communications in the region. But now the job was done, and Jim was going to take his family on a long-planned vacation, a two-week safari in the wilderness of Amboseli National Park. He was saying goodbye to one of the embassy officials he’d worked with, a cheerful attache who’d helped him negotiate with the Kenyan authorities, when he heard a distinctive thump coming from outside the building. In midsentence he left the attache’s office and returned to the large windowed room where he’d left his wife and kids.
They stood by the window because the noise outside had made them curious. The movie in Jim’s mind was stuck at this instant, unwilling to move forward. This was the last moment of his old life, and he couldn’t bear to let it go. He couldn’t see his wife’s face, but everything else was so clear: her open-toed shoes, her slim, pale calves, the blond hair that trailed down the back of her sundress. She touched the window with her right hand and gripped their son Robert’s arm with her left. Julia wasn’t frightened yet, but some maternal instinct had made her reach out to the boy. Robert was ten years old and tall for his age. The top of his head reached his mother’s shoulder. His hair was in a blond crew cut because he wanted to look like his father.
The only one who wasn’t staring out the window was Layla. She could stray from her role in the remembered scene because she was linked to the network and communicating with her father. Their thoughts were connected by the implants that had been inserted into their brains. Layla was inside his mind just as surely as Supreme Harmony was, sharing his memories of the morning of August 7, 1998. And just like her father, who appeared in this movie as his cocky thirty-four-year-old self, Layla inhabited the image of the seven-year-old girl she was on that day. She wore a bright pink scrunchie in her hair and a T-shirt with a pink patch in the shape of a kitten. But on her face was a knowing, hopeless look that only an adult could wear. “Oh God,” she said. “This
