Himura’s doughy, pockmarked face distorted as he grasped the fleshy fold beneath his neck. His sunken eye sockets stretched, the thin patch of long, stringy hair shifting on his scalp. And then the mask came free, sliding off his face as the man beneath stared at Jonah with penetrating, intelligent eyes. He was in his late forties with thick black hair and a thin beard, instantly recognizable as the intelligence officer who’d tormented Jonah and his crew on the deck of the Scorpion what seemed like a lifetime ago. Bits of latex clung to the man’s nose and ears; he absent-mindedly picked at them as his posture changed, drawing himself up to his full height.
“I think any new relationship must be built from a foundation of honesty,” said not-Himura as he gently folded the mask and placed it atop the ornate writing desk. “I will assume you recognize me?”
“I never forget an asshole,” said Jonah, arms crossed. “And I should have known this whole goddamn circus would come down to Scooby Doo masks. Do I still call you Himura?”
The man shrugged. “I’ve worn his face for so long I think I’ve earned the right. The first Himura died nearly a decade ago, a sudden and devastating loss of one of my nation’s most brilliant minds. What he lacked in heirs, he made up for with his vast fortune and a network of fanatical devotees. It was an unprecedented opportunity to reconstitute the greatest secret Japan has ever kept, perhaps even save my country. So I took his place, bided my time, and prepared for this day.”
“You did me a favor with that transmission to my crew, by the way,” Jonah said. “I don’t want them coming after me any more than you do.” He held one wheel of the chair in place and pushed the other, spinning in a slow, lazy circle, bare feet sliding across the cool bamboo floor. Jonah took in the incredible museum-like chamber within the superyacht, careful to steer well clear of the glass floor panels and the pulsating creature beneath them. “Hell, I would have made the call myself if you’d just asked nicely.”
“I eliminated a variable from the equation,” dismissed Himura. “But I am pleased that you approve—you may not believe this, but I do not wish any more death than absolutely necessary.”
Jonah gritted his teeth, eyes flashing with anger as he thought back to the carnage of the sunken fleet, the young sailors and refugees torn apart, burned, drowned. He shifted in the wheelchair as he took in the words, contemplating the ugly intersection between necessary and death.
Two of the massive interior screens displayed a live feed from the frozen banks of the passing Taedong River, endless farmlands blanketed in white, the wintery scene dotted by aging tractors, crumbling grain silos, and dark, snow-besieged houses. Others were angry maps of fighter planes, tank brigades, and troop movements—an entire third of the country was in chaos, with more cities enveloped by violence every passing minute. Jonah leaned back in the wheelchair and pushed hard, popping the front two wheels in the air and slamming them down again as the aging security guards looked on with extreme annoyance.
“The idea for Meisekimu came from the Americans,” said Himura as he quietly clasped his hands behind his back, watching the sea of information pour from the displays. “In the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Coalition intelligence personnel established the most comprehensive understanding of the Iraqi command structure in history. It was a monumental task, an operation unprecedented in scope. Military databases grew to hold names, rank, tribal, and familial affiliations of nearly every Iraqi officer of consequence. The US preceded the invasion with a barrage of individualized phone calls, emails, and text messages to these men, their wives, their parents and children, all encouraging surrender without fighting, the return of any captured coalition personnel, the abandonment of their weapons of mass destruction. Although, perhaps, the final order is confusing in hindsight. When war came, only the few fighters with no possible future in the new Iraq stood their ground, while the rest simply melted into the population. I wondered if, instead of using this intelligence apparatus to cajole, to beg . . . what if these men were told? What if they received orders, individualized instructions from seemingly trusted sources, indistinguishable from the authentic? The only missing piece was processing power, a computational technology capable of not just compromising digital systems, but manipulating the men who relied upon them. That final piece fell into place when Himura’s gestational experiment in organic computation became mine. Born from decades of forbidden research dating to our wartime human experimentation in occupied China, Meisekimu uses her networked supercomputers to store and process raw data, but she herself brings the uniquely human genius of pattern extrapolation, intuition, and improvisation. She’s a mimic, seeking the vulnerabilities of any target, whether that target is a machine or a man. She can be a father, a commander, a trusted friend, seemingly real in every way but physical form. And then she speaks to them what they believe they already know—whispers of conspiracy, revolution, assassination, civil war. Meisekimu has written the greatest fiction in human history, a story where every North Korean fighting man thinks himself the hero, yet enslaves his will to my purpose. Beautiful, is it not?”
“I think you need to get out of your fancy-schmancy houseboat more often.”
Himura thought for the longest time before saying anything more. “I wouldn’t expect a man without a country to understand,” he finally said. “You cannot see what I see.”
“Strange turn of phrase for a guy who pretends to be blind.”
“What would you do as steward of a dying people?” whispered Himura. “Able to peer into a nation’s future, but unable to affect its unfolding history? Japan is a single generation from collapse. She will be the first to run out of food, out of fossil fuels, out of living space. Our young men won’t fight; our young women won’t bear children. Can you blame them? Their spirts are broken and they know they near the end—a million of them refuse to even leave their rooms, afraid of the world. They sooth themselves with children’s games and animated television programs, rotting our race from within, destroying our future. We cannot survive the coming ravages of climate change, resource scarcity, or political upheaval in this weakened state. And what is the response from our leaders? They’ve allowed every nation to copy our manufacturing, steal our technology, undercut our wages, bet against our currency, mock our culture, besiege our waters, leaving us with shrinking international influence and endless economic stagnation. Our birth rate has collapsed, and in just fifteen years our numbers will have shrunk by a third or more. We’ve been under the umbrella of greater nations for so long that we can no longer even hold it ourselves. We’re a withering people atop a doomed island chain. Our only hope is conflict. We must live as conquerors once more, or we must die as warriors.”
“We found the U-3531 on your island in the Philippines,” said Jonah, probing. “I’m assuming there’s a nuke in the mix as well.”
“A clever deduction, Jonah Blackwell. Our war of that era was already lost by the time we reconstituted the fruits of Germany’s nuclear program. But now I will use the weapon to win a far more important conflict.”
Jonah closed his eyes—he’d been so stupid. “You’re on a suicide mission,” he said with dawning realization. “You have the bomb on this ship. That’s the reason for the grandpa squad. They’ve chosen to die.”
“The Taedong runs through the heart of the Pyongyang,” confirmed Himura. “And the weapon has been placed deep within this very hull, inaccessible even to myself. Meisekimu will detonate it in the heart of the city, wiping out the North Korean leadership and erasing any evidence of our involvement in the process. Roused from its long sleep, the Japanese military will sweep in and annex the country. Their war will be hard-fought, but blameless, the ugly truth behind the conflict expunged forever. Himura will have disappeared without a trace, leaving only unanswered questions in his wake. And when the ash settles, my nation will be a conqueror once more, with access to land, coal, rare earth minerals—”
“And forced laborers,” interrupted Jonah. “You’ll be slavers, jail guards with your boot on the neck of an entire nation.”
“They’re already a nation of prisoners,” snapped Himura. “Prisoners to despotism, to hunger. If nothing else, their Japanese masters will feed them. I’m not a monster. Far fewer men and women will die in the heat of my bomb than would be claimed by their government-sanctioned winter starvation, to say nothing of the winters to come. This will save lives, Jonah—some part of you must know this.”
Jonah stood from the wheelchair and pushed it aside, the security personnel behind him shifting, hands over their weapons. “And children,” corrected Jonah. “The full phrase goes ‘men, women, and children’.”
Himura accepted the criticism in silence, his face impassive.
“You know what? I’m done being your confessor,” said Jonah. “Stick me in a closet with Freya or shoot me on the spot. I’m out of fucks to give, and I’m goddamn sick of listening to you rationalize your own twisted ambitions and demented death wish.”
Himura gestured to his aging security personnel. “I’m glad we had a chance to speak. I can’t discuss the mission with my men, not like I can with you. Like me, they believe so strongly that they have agreed to die. Like me, they’ll never live to see the new Japan they bring about. Like me, their sins are too many; the world we will create must live in our minds alone. But it is nice to be able to speak of these things. Thank you for listening to the last words of a true patriot, Jonah Blackwell.”
Jonah turned to watch the monitors, silent to their horror. Himura drew the volume up, closing his eyes as he took in the symphony of video transmissions, the sound of artillery bursting and automatic weapons fire, tanks rumbling across the landscape, jets streaking through the skies as their bombs fell on cities. An entire nation was tearing itself apart before his eyes.
Alexis strained as she clutched a rung of the Scorpion’s interior conning tower ladder with both hands, her shoulder and head buried in Dalmar’s dripping armpit. She groaned under the crushing bulk of his immobile body as she tried to lower him one inch at a time. Hassan had braced himself beneath the former pirate’s other arm as Sun-Hi struggled with a single heavy leg. Blood ran freely down Dalmar’s bare left foot, collecting in a puddle on the deck below.
“Easy—easy!” said Alexis, barely recognizing her own wheezing voice. “Christ this fucker is heavy!”
And then her steel-toed boot slipped. Alexis yelped as she fell the last few feet to the deck, rolling out of the way as Dalmar slammed into the ground beside her like a collapsing mountain, Sun-Hi still tangled up in his massive legs.
Hassan jumped down beside them; hands already holding a pair of scissors as he began to cut away at Dalmar’s clothes.
“Should we get him on top of the chart table?” asked Alexis, breathless.
“Perhaps if he were a man-sized man,” said Hassan without looking up. “Or if we had a deck crane of some variety.”
Vitaly stole a glance from his disorganized console as he lowered the submarine to periscope depth, deftly skimming the sliver of water between the river’s surface and rocky bed below. “On regular ship chart table is used for chart,” he called out. But Alexis could hear the anxiety in his voice—she’d never heard him so scared.
Dalmar’s head and eyes lolled as Hassan cut away the last of his bloody clothes, revealing a gunshot wound to his torso and two to his left leg. He felt underneath the massive man, probing the exit wounds with a gloved hand. “The bullets all went straight through,” he said, ripping open a packet of white clotting agent and shaking it over the wounds. The substance acted almost instantly, turning the flowing crimson into a grainy, muted red. Hassan smeared disinfectant over the tiny holes and began to bandage them tightly, staunching the last of the leaking blood.
“He will be okay?” asked Vitaly, his voice warbling as Hassan prepared a thick syringe of mustard-yellow liquid.
“We will find out in the next ten seconds,” said Hassan. “Alexis—Sun-Hi—hold him down.”
“Hold Dalmar Abdi down,” repeated Alexis with incredulity. “You have to be shitting me.”
“He is very big man,” confirmed Sun-Hi in a worried tone. Hassan took a deep breath as he sat on the former pirate’s chest. He steadied himself for a moment before leaning forward and burying the syringe into Dalmar’s right pectoral, thumb depressing the plunger. Alexis and Sun-Hi each grabbed onto one of the pirate’s massive arms, using all their weight to hold him down.
Dalmar’s body jolted once, twice as Alexis and Sun-Hi held on for dear life. For a moment Alexis thought she’d actually be able to keep his arm on the deck. And then Dalmar leapt up, sending her and Sun-Hi tumbling in either direction as he drew himself to his feet, rising like a phoenix from the scraps of his bloody, shredded clothing. Hassan yelped as the pirate grabbed him by the collar, hoisting him in the air with a single hand.
“Hassan the Butcher!” announced Dalmar, his eyes wide. “It is most excellent to see you.”
Alexis snuck a glance towards the periscope monitor. Himura’s yacht was barely visible in the distance, expanding the gap with each passing second. “It’s-nice-to-see-youtoo,” squeaked Hassan, still trapped in his grip.
“Why do we not pursue Himura?” demanded Dalmar, setting the doctor down without so much as glancing as his own half-naked, bandaged body.
“Jonah said no rescue attempts—we’re getting out of here.”
Dalmar cocked his head with a strange mixture of fury and pleasure. “In the words of my famous cousin—Look at me. I am the captain now. Can we catch them?”
“Yeah,” said Alexis. “But we’re going to have squat in reserve when it’s time to turn tail and run for the sea.”
“How you even get on board?” said Vitaly. “You shot to pieces first time!”
Dalmar pointed to the shrinking image on the monitor, thick finger held over the glass-encased greenhouse on the yacht’s stern. “It was a mistake to go through the front,” he said. “No cover, no element of surprise. We must ram them from behind, go through the trees.”
“Why solution always crash?” complained Vitaly. “Crash submarine into door, crash truck into ocean, crash big ship into big island, crash car into Scorpion, now crash Scorpion into glass ship! You no better captain than Jonah.”
“So we’re doing this?” asked Alexis. “We’re going after him?”
“It appears so,” said Hassan. “Seal all fore compartments and prepare for impact.”
“Already on it,” said Alexis as she remotely activated the hatches using a series of jerry-rigged switches, their clanging slams echoing throughout the forward section of the submarine’s narrow central corridor.
“This is mutiny!” Vitaly looked up at Dalmar, his eyes gleaming. “Mutiny very exciting.”
Dalmar purposefully strode out of the command compartment and towards the rear of the ship, seemingly unaffected by his bullet wounds. Alexis, Hassan, and Sun-Hi struggled to keep up as he ducked into the armory. Still naked to the waist, the former pirate yanked a heavy bulletproof vest off a hook and wrapped it around his almost comically muscled chest.
“You can’t go back out there like that!” protested Hassan in frustration. “Look at you! You’ll—you’ll freeze!”
“I will bring my own heat,” said Dalmar. He hefted Florence from the deck once more, wrapping the heavy canvas straps over his powerful shoulders.
Alexis steeled herself as she grabbed armor as well, pulling a shotgun and a bandolier of shells out of the case. She tried to hand Sun-Hi a small pistol, but the diminutive woman shook her head.
“I train with this,” she said, removing an AK-47 off the wall and slinging the strap around her shoulder. The weapon dwarfed her, practically as long as she was tall.
“What’s your plan?” asked Hassan as he too picked out an assault rifle, body armor, and a combat medical kit.
“Ram Himura’s ship and board her,” said Dalmar, teeth bright as he grinned. “And then I burn all the men.”
Sun-Hi began to squirm in her boots. “I think Sun-Hi might have a better plan,” suggested Alexis.
“We destroy the transmitter!” said Sun-Hi, her voice pitched with excitement as she held out a small electromagnetic detector for Dalmar’s inspection. Even within the submerged Scorpion the needle was almost buried in the red. “It is his only true weapon—and this will show us where to find it, destroy it!”
“It’s settled,” said Hassan. “We destroy the transmitter.”
Dalmar glowered at all three of them. “Um, ” began Alexis, “and then you can burn all the men.”
“This is a very good plan,” announced Dalmar, covering Sun-Hi’s shoulder with his huge hand and giving it a squeeze.