behind the pine trunk. “Don’t shoot! I have something you want.”
The Module came forward, keeping his AK braced against his shoulder and the muzzle pointed at Jim’s chest. He was thirty feet away, close enough that Jim could see the stitches in the young soldier’s shaved head.
Jim held out his sat phone, making sure the screen was pointed at the Module. “It’s in here,” he said. “The information from Arvin Conway.”
The Module lifted his head from the gun sights and stared directly at the sat phone’s screen. But he kept advancing. The image of Medusa seemed to have no effect on him. He was coming in for the kill.
“No, wait!” Desperate, Jim glanced at his Glock, but it was too far away. The Module would blast him before he could dive for it.
The soldier stepped closer, coming within ten feet. “We’ve confirmed your identity,” he said in perfect English. “You are—”
He stumbled in midsentence. His body went slack, and the momentum of his last step pitched him forward. He dropped the AK and landed face-first in the pine needles.
Jim grabbed his Glock and trained it on the inert Module. The trick had worked, but not as well as he’d hoped. Viewing Medusa from afar hadn’t stopped the Module; apparently, his ocular cameras had to see the image head-on and up close to deliver the correct sequence of data that would shut down the implants. Worse, Jim couldn’t use the trick again. Supreme Harmony would figure out what he’d done and make sure that none of its Modules came too close. The only way to defeat the network was to broadcast the shutdown code from the radio tower, but now he had no hope of surprising Supreme Harmony. The network knew where he was.
Muttering curses, he tucked the Glock in his pants and picked up the Module’s AK-47. Then he started running up the mountainside. Although his plan might be hopeless, he couldn’t turn around. He left the woods behind and climbed the barren slope as fast as he could, leaning forward and pumping his arms.
The cold mountain air seared his lungs. He saw the glacier up ahead, a tattered blanket of dirty ice, ravaged by global warming. Its surface was etched with countless cracks and crevasses, and rivulets of meltwater leaked from its receding edge. Near the mountain’s summit, now less than a mile away, was the radio tower, a steel-lattice antenna rising hundreds of feet above the glacier. The tower’s control station was a simple aluminum-sided trailer resting on the ice sheet next to the antenna’s base. Jim focused all his will on that trailer. It was his goal, his target. He stared so hard at the thing, his eyes watered. Then four figures emerged from behind the trailer, running in lockstep across the ice. Jim could barely see the Modules—they were more than a thousand yards away—but he was willing to bet they carried assault rifles. Although they were beyond the maximum effective range of an AK, they were closing in fast. They’d obviously spotted him.
Jim stopped in his tracks and looked for cover. There was nothing but bare rock to his left and right, and the woods were more than half a mile behind him. But just a hundred yards ahead was the melting edge of the glacier, which rose almost twenty feet above the granite slope. He could take cover behind the wall of ice if he could make it there in time. Summoning all his remaining strength, he dashed toward the glacier’s edge, running headlong toward the Modules. He was dizzy from exhaustion, but he managed to stumble behind the cover of the ice sheet just as the first gunshots echoed against the mountain.
On his hands and knees, he gulped the thin air. The altitude made it excruciating—he was 16,000 feet above sea level and seriously short on oxygen. Once he caught his breath, he surveyed the jagged wall of ice in front of him. A stream of meltwater flowed from a gap in the wall, and the gap led to a crevasse, a trench within the glacier. Jim decided to enter the crevasse and see where it went. It was better than walking on top of the ice sheet, where the Modules could take another shot at him.
The trench zigzagged through the ice, sometimes widening to the breadth of a street and sometimes narrowing to a foot-wide fissure that Jim could barely squeeze through. He moved swiftly and silently for several minutes, but he couldn’t tell whether he was getting any closer to the radio tower. He assumed the Modules had reached the edge of the glacier by now and discovered he wasn’t there. But they were sure to notice the crevasse, and their next logical move was to follow the trench and track him down. Jim supposed he could try to ambush the Modules, but he didn’t like his chances. He might be able to pick off one or two with his AK, but then the others would blow him away.
It was infuriating—he’d come all this way just to get stymied at the end. In frustration, he slammed his prosthetic hand against the side of the crevasse and a chunk of ice the size of a sofa broke off the wall and tumbled into the trench. It shattered at Jim’s feet, nearly flattening him.
He took a deep breath, cursing his stupidity. Then he had an idea.
He raced ahead, examining the ice walls on either side of the crevasse. After two minutes, he found what he was looking for: a break in the ice wall to his left, where a smaller crevasse branched off from the bigger one. The smaller trench went only twenty feet before dead-ending, but it made a good position for an ambush. Better still, at the branching point between the two trenches was a twenty-foot-high promontory of ice. Shaped like a ship’s prow, it was weakened by meltwater at its base and looked ready to collapse.
Jim ran past the branching point, advancing fifty feet farther along the bigger trench. Extending the knife from his prosthesis, he climbed the ice wall to his left and peeked over the top. The four Modules were several hundred yards away, moving synchronously across the glacier. Jim popped his head up and waited until they spotted him. As the Modules raised their rifles, he yelled, “Oh shit!” and ducked. Then, while their bullets streaked overhead, he jumped back into the crevasse and turned on the transmitter of his satellite phone.
“Kirsten!” he shouted into the phone. “They got me cornered! Come help!”
Leaving the transmitter on, he placed the sat phone on the icy floor of the crevasse. Its radio signal revealed its precise GPS location to anyone monitoring the wireless bands. Then Jim ran back to the branching point and entered the smaller crevasse. He climbed the ice wall and crouched on a ledge just below the lip of the trench.
He held his breath and listened. Within ten seconds he heard the clomping of the Modules’ boots on the ice sheet. Five seconds later they reached the edge of the larger crevasse and automatically fired down into the trench, aiming their rifles at the sat phone. At the same moment, Jim popped up behind them and started shooting.
He downed two of the Modules, but the other two dodged out of the line of fire. They wheeled around and sprayed bullets at him, but Jim had already dropped back into the smaller crevasse. For a second time he held his breath, listening carefully as the Modules rushed toward the promontory of ice at the branching point. Then he slammed his prosthetic hand into the promontory’s weakened base, and tons of ice came tumbling down.
While Jim leaped backward, the Modules toppled into the crevasse. One of them landed hard and lay motionless at the bottom of the trench, clearly dead. But the other was still moving, sliding on his belly toward where his rifle had fallen. Jim pointed his AK at the Module and shot him in the head.
Before leaving the crevasse, Jim went to retrieve his satellite phone, but the thing was in pieces. As he’d already noticed, the Modules were damn good shots.
Five minutes later Jim burst into the aluminum-sided trailer next to the radio tower. At one end of the control station were three rows of server racks, and at the other end were two computer terminals and a bank of video monitors, at least two dozen. The screens reminded Jim of the Monitor Room at Camp Whiplash. They displayed a dizzying array of video from Supreme Harmony’s surveillance cameras, showing all the slopes and peaks and mountain trails of Yulong Xueshan. The images on the screens were in constant flux—each monitor displayed the feed from one surveillance camera for ten seconds, then switched to another. Jim was surprised that the monitors and terminals were still running. Supreme Harmony must’ve known he’d disabled the Modules guarding the tower, so why hadn’t it cut the power to the control station? The only explanation was that this communications hub was critical to the network’s operations. And that made it an excellent place to insert the shutdown code.
Jim sat down in front of one of the terminals and turned it on. The characters
