Northeastern Japan
Randi Russell’s eyes snapped open, but she couldn’t see much. Just spinning green set to the sound track of the ringing in her ears. She remained completely motionless, moderating her breathing to the point that it was completely inaudible and picking a fixed point to stare at.
Slowly the spinning stopped, but the ringing persisted with enough intensity to make her virtually deaf. Were the projectiles gone or were they all around her, waiting for any sign of motion that they could target?
She moved only her eyes, finding nothing but dense foliage intermittently broken by a darkening sky. The slope she’d cartwheeled down was to her left and the river was maybe another fifty yards downslope to her right. She was in a fair amount of pain but none of it was localized in a way that suggested serious injury—just the depressingly familiar feeling of having spent half an hour in a clothes dryer with a bunch of bowling balls.
She lay like that for a few more minutes, trying to find any sign of the things that had killed Vanya and chased her into the canyon. Soon, though, thoughts of her team and Wilson’s students began to overwhelm her. What had happened to them? Were any still alive? Did they need her help?
Lying there was pointless, she concluded. She didn’t know anything about the weapon that had been used against her. It might key on motion, but it could just as easily track heat or the shape of human outlines. The more interesting question was, did it just search for targets until it ran out of fuel or could it power down and lie in wait?
In the end, there was only one way to find out.
Randi grabbed a tree branch and used it to pull herself into a sitting position. She was in no condition to run and there was nowhere to go anyway, so she just sat there for a moment, waiting.
Nothing.
“Report,” she said into her throat mike but got no response.
Finally she risked standing. Miraculously, the damage to her body was limited to countless scrapes and gashes peeking out from tears in her clothing. Most of them had clotted and the shadows were lengthening, suggesting she’d been unconscious for the better part of an hour. Too long.
Randi started back up the slope, using trees and bushes to help propel her along the steep grade. Her progress was uncharacteristically slow but her balance was way off and the fact that she couldn’t hear much was making it worse.
It took fifteen minutes to cover the ground she’d careened down in only a few seconds, and she finally stopped just below the canyon’s lip. Crouched beneath a tree, she looked for any sign of danger or life. There was nothing, though. Just a light breeze rattling the leaves.
“Randi.”
She spun, snatching a rock from the ground since she hadn’t been able to find the gun she’d dropped.
“Stop! It’s me!”
Eric Ivers had prudently chosen to put a solid five feet between them before calling out. Now he crawled up next to her. “What the hell’s wrong with you? I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last five minutes.”
She pointed to her ear and he nodded his understanding.
“You okay?” he said, bringing his mouth close to the side of her head in order to be heard.
“Yeah. You?”
“I’ve been better but I’m still breathing.”
“Have you ever seen anything like those things?”
“I’ve never even heard of anything like those things.”
“Why aren’t we dead?”
“I think I can answer that,” he said. “I rolled about halfway down the canyon and when I stopped, one of those goddamn things had me dead to rights. Nothing I could do, so I just laid there. Then the contrail disappeared and it started to lose altitude.”
“It ran out of gas?”
“That’s what it looked like to me.”
“Did you pick it up? Do you have it?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, pointing down. The projectile was lodged in his shin.
“Shit,” Randi said. “Can we get it out?”
“I tried. It’s barbed. The goddamn Japanese think of everything.”
“Okay. You wait here,” Randi said. “Let me go scope things out.”
“Fuck that.”
She’d anticipated his response and wasn’t prepared to argue. His wife was up there and she wasn’t responding to the radio.
Randi crept forward with Ivers right behind. Normal tactics seemed pointless—there was no way to provide each other cover from those things. Better to stay close and maybe one of them could draw fire while the other went for another ride down the canyon.
She came over the crest in first position and still there was nothing but empty wilderness. They angled left, stopping every few seconds for Ivers to listen for the telltale hiss of the projectiles’ engines.
Finally they came upon the digger and Randi felt the breath catch in her chest.
She’d lost people before. More than she wanted to remember. The difference was that they were all pros who had signed on of their own free will. This was very different.
She stood straight and walked toward the shredded bodies of Wilson and his students. Not a single one was even worth crouching down and checking for a pulse. Their dead eyes stared accusingly at her, and the weight of those stares left her bracing herself against the blood-spattered tunneling machine.
After a few moments, Randi started in the direction Ivers had gone, no longer concerned about the projectiles or anything else Takahashi could throw at her. The team she’d put together was down, a bunch of innocent kids were dead, and pretty soon that genocidal maniac was going to go on a rampage through the most populous country in the world.
Yet she kept on breathing. It was her greatest talent. Sometimes she wondered if it was her only talent.
Reiji was lying facedown, penetrated by no fewer than four of Takahashi’s projectiles. Ivers was up another twenty yards, kneeling over his dead wife. Randi gave him a wide berth. What could she possibly do? What could she say?
Instead she headed for the table they’d been using as a command center. The secure satellite link was undamaged and she put the headset on, opening an encrypted channel to Fred Klein.
“Go ahead,” said the familiar voice.
“We’re shut down.”
“Casualties?”
“Two survivors including me.”
“The professor and his stu—”
“Gone.”
“Understood. I have an extraction team on alert at the Okinawa air base. They’ll be in the air in—”
“No. I don’t know what we’re dealing with and I’m not going to put any more of our people in the line of fire. Eric and I will find our way home by ourselves.”