Hard Burn: The Stefan Mendoza Series, #5

By P R Adams

They tried to kill him, now there's nowhere to hide.

 

As an assassin, Stefan Mendoza learned to never trust anyone, not even his employer. Now he's learning that lesson all over again. After his employer betrays him, the only options are to run or fight back.

 

Mendoza never runs.

 

With time running out and enemies operating around the globe, the chase is on. The only solution is to burn them all to the ground or die trying.

 

For a thrilling look into the dark future, grab Hard Burn, the latest pulse-pounding chapter in the Stefan Mendoza cyberpunk series today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Promethean Tales
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201805999

Book preview

Chapter 1

Over the North Pacific Ocean, 100 miles south of Vladivostok, Russia

---

Inky black beyond the airplane window. That’s what stared back at me. Not stars, not a moon.

An illusion. The placement of the aircraft relative to the heavens.

I closed my eyes, let in the hum of the propellers. They were something more felt through the fuselage of the repurposed plane than actually heard. That was some trick of the rebuild—a significant endeavor.

A significant endeavor: Those were the exact words used by the owner.

My life. This moment. The impossible task ahead.

The crew chief shuffled down the narrow walkway leading from the operations center door, where banks of systems glowed in muted, sickly green. He was a stooped man, edging up on sixty, maybe even past it. Deep wrinkles, gray stubble on sunken cheeks, black skin as pasty as a ghost in the strange light of the jump cabin.

I lowered the oxygen mask, the nitrogen long gone from my blood.

Alcohol and the maintenance grease staining the puffed-out olive drab jumpsuit hid his body odor.

Almost.

He smiled, and a pale tongue dragged over crooked, yellow teeth like a giant earthworm slithering over ancient, leaning tombstones. Any questions I had about whether he had a dental plan were put to rest. Couldn’t ask for a better night.

Windy.

Other’n that.

And cold as hell.

But at the altitude we were flying, it was always cold. We were all wearing heated or insulated suits, and part of the aircraft rebuild had included an upgrade to environmental controls. That was great…for everyone forward of the jump cabin.

To be fair, the US Navy had never planned for an EP-3E Aries II to do this kind of work. Hell, they’d retired the aircraft a couple decades ago.

But the bird had a certain value that made it worth the cost to salvage.

Chuck—the name the crew chief used around me—squeezed past until he was at the closed ramp. He ran a gloved hand over that. You’re thinking she wasn’t meant for this sort of work.

Nah.

You are. It’s in your eyes. He laughed. You’re not the first.

How many runs have you done?

With Sally here?

That was the half-naked lady painted behind the nose. Hourglass figure, a sly wink, black hair…I could come to like her. Into this area?

The old crew chief stared. He dragged the back of his glove through a trickle of snot glistening green in his gray mustache. First time for everything.

That’s reassuring.

No one’s ever asked to go here, that’s all.

I’m a pioneer.

He burst out laughing. Heard you’re a hotshot. You can handle this.

Sure. That’s what I’d told myself to get to this point, wasn’t it?

The lights of an unpainted aluminum box mounted forward of the ramp door lit up: one green, one red.

Chuck grunted. About that time.

Finally.

My nerves were raw, my body dragging. I’d gone from sweating inside my protective gear before takeoff to shivering while my perspiration dried in the cooling air. My underwear rode up into the crack of my ass, chaffing where the seat rubbed.

The old guy didn’t seem to share my misery. In fact, nothing seemed to bother him.

He shuffled forward again, poking his head through the open operations center cabin door. I sucked in a gulp of air—somehow fresh despite the antiquity of the bird—and waited.

The three technicians working the systems leaned back in chairs as one, pulling the headphone speakers off their right ears as they turned toward Chuck. They were too far away to hear over the engines and propellers, and the rattles and shakes that came with an airplane of such age, especially doing what we were doing. But in the glow, there was a youthfulness and boredom about them that was more calming than the old guy’s bluster ever could be.

Then again, none of them were about to do what I was planning to do.

There were two guys and a gal, none of them deep into their thirties. The oldest—the gal—did the talking. She was the one running communications intercept. I’d seen her once in daylight, the day I’d arrived in Tokyo. Not a looker, but the way she carried herself, she knew what she was doing. Such competence created an attraction of its own.

I tried reading her thin lips: pointless.

What was there to say? We’re nearing position. Go time. Mission abort. Something like that.

Reading lips wasn’t necessary. The message was obvious: Go time.

She looked past Chuck at me. Maybe there was a little bit of curiosity in her eyes. Years ago, I would’ve tapped into that curiosity to pass the time. A few drinks, a tumble at the hotel, maybe a quick meal afterwards.

Times were different now. Obligations. Connections. Loyalties.

But I still stared at this confident woman. She had a rooster comb hairdo, funny because her hair was dyed a bright red. Air from an overhead vent fluttered the hairs not pushed down by the headset.

Chuck’s head bobbed up and down, and he sealed the door to the inner cabin.

That was the answer: Go.

Now it was just me and him in the tail of the aircraft—me trying to ignore the metal frame of the seat pushing through the thin layer of cushion until my butt was numb, Chuck pulling a thick jacket off a hook and tugging it on over his spindly arms.

The signal.

I exhaled, wishing I’d gargled more recently but knowing that wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing could overcome stale coffee breath.

The last of my suit was a hardened scuba head cover, slid forward to press my hair flat. Then came my helmet. Before sealing the face shield, I popped five antacid tablets. They cracked, then crumbled, mixing with my thick saliva. The resulting peppermint paste oozed down my throat.

All better now.

Except for the shakes. Those were coming in at full power.

Chuck was there, checking my oxygen canister, the hose, the seal to my helmet, the parachute and gear.

A radio hiss. Read me okay? He was sealed up in his own helmet and oxygen tank.

I didn’t feel like a long discussion, so I flashed him a thumbs-up.

The glow from the two lights shimmered in streaks on his plastic visor when he nodded. I know you already had your briefings, but I’m gonna say it again: This shit’s sensitive. Too far east, you’re in Russia. Too far south, you’re in Korea. You don’t wanna be there. The Chinese fund a bunch of old NoKo militant extremists. They got camps all over the place.

I keyed my mic. I’ve got it.

A dry laugh. The old guy punched my shoulder. Gonna be okay.

Sure as shit.

The red light went out.

Time.

Chuck secured himself to the interior wall with a hook, the line too dark to make out in the limited light. I waddled back to his side, careful not to tangle or stumble in my gear while the ramp dropped.

Below, the cloud tops were silvery, inviting.

The old geezer flashed three fingers.

Two.

One.

I waddled forward, pitched out, face down, arms spread wide.

A cannonball plunging to my target.

Falling.

The clouds drew closer. Stale oxygen came up through the hose. I fought the urge to cough and ignored the burning in my lungs.

Into the clouds, blind to the world, hidden from sight.

Then out of the clouds.

Light grids strung out along the black surface far below sparkled like the stars I hadn’t seen above, differentiating my target from the bordering lands.

Hunchun, China. Where China, Russia, and Korea all touched each other.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Or three devils and the deep blue sea.

My target was worse than any of them.

Chapter 2

Over East Asia, at the juncture of China, Korea, and Russia

---

An electronic beep. A flash of amber on the smoky film of my faceplate. Static.

Then razor-thin lines appeared on the visor: overlays showing the relevant borders, infrastructure, and geographic references.

Another overlay flashed over the top of the first.

A third.

Temperature. Wind speed and direction. Oxygen remaining. Battery power.

In any mission, there was a point in time where everything was optimal. You were on schedule. You had all your gear. Your target was confirmed, and your exit plan was gold.

The temptation would tug at you: relax. This was going to be that one time where everything went right.

Never. Relax.

As if I could right then. I was in a glorified scuba suit, swathed in insulation that kept lethal cold out. Now that I was coming out of the clouds, the lack of moon and starlight was a real thing. It would be close to a minute before I was far enough down to see the sky above.

My focus was on the ground below, on the grid of twinkling lights marking the shape of Hunchun.

My target insertion point.

One of the overlays produced a small window at the upper left of my vision: altitude. The numbers flashed by fast. Another window opened at the right of my vision: a counter to the point of chute deployment. That number dragged.

There was a beauty and calm to being alone in the void once you got used to it. It could almost be serene. Trust the suit. Trust the training. Ignore the certain death if any one link in the long, complicated chain failed.

I had the trust, but I could never find serenity. Why? Because that optimal mission moment was always the fastest thing to pass.

The radio clicked in my ear: Chuck. Hey. We’re showing you five by five. Copy?

My right glove was wired with the primary mic switch. I keyed it. Loud and clear here. Over.

Clear sailing all the way to port. We’ll maintain position until touchdown. Copy?

Thanks for the ride. Over.

Squelch. Silence again. Far above the thick cloud layer, the Aries II went on with its slow, stealthy circling. They were done with me now, hanging around as a courtesy more than a necessity. It was your father holding your hand while the doctor stitched up the gash in your forehead, nothing more. Hang in there, Champ. Ignore the tug of the needle through that barely numbed skin.

Useless. But there was something to be said for it.

I powered the helmet overlays off for a second and flipped through what my cybernetic eyes could make out on their own: the ghostly palette of green from night vision, highlighting light sources while dropping the shadows into a deep black-green; the stark spectrum of white, blue, yellow, and red from my thermal imaging; the grays of infrared.

Then back to my normal vision, as close to human as could be managed by advanced technology.

But there was inhuman crispness. And I had magnification capabilities no human could match. With some effort, I could focus microscopically to pick out fine details on an object. Or I could fisheye to take in a broader area, creating an all-new level of peripheral vision.

Not for me. Not right then.

On top of the mental strain and power drain involved in all of those operations, there was the sense of being other than human brought on by using them.

Half-man, half-machine, synthetic skin glued to the layers of flesh below…

The last thing I needed was something else to make me question my humanity. If anything, what I needed at that moment was a reminder I was human. Speeding through the night, dragged down by gear—electronic systems, weapons, explosives—I felt like anything but.

Thoughts crawled out of the depths: who I was, who I wanted to be.

Detroit. The explosions.

I pushed them back down. If I let that thinking climb back to the surface, I would get sloppy. Sloppy got you killed. At that moment, dying wouldn’t end with me. People were counting on me.

So I powered the overlays back on and focused.

The numbers shrank. I waited. I hoped that the chute and other parts of my load that were every bit as old as the repurposed aircraft didn’t fail.

As if age mattered.

Where the organic parts of me ended, the cybernetics were as new and advanced as there were.

That hadn’t been enough, though. It hadn’t prevented—

Focus.

Eyes back to the overlays, to the black ground below. What I wanted—what I needed—was down there.

Answers.

A chance to correct mistakes.

A chance to do the right thing.

Plummeting. Falling. The ache in my joints. A belch—peppermint doing its best to hide the sharp, sour sting of too much coffee, too little nutrition. I might be largely machine, but the organic part of me still needed care, and I was failing it.

I was getting good at failing.

Damn it!

Down went the numbers. Getting close to deploying. A square framed my target.

Hands flexed in anticipation, imagining a throat. A gulp of air.

The canned oxygen was a cold burn in my damaged lungs, a stale reminder of how vulnerable I was right then.

Plunging.

A human missile.

Numbers counting down.

Soon.

Go over the details one last time.

Hit the ground. Trigger the signal. Contact the team. Fire off the systems scramblers. Bunch the chute. Ready the weapons. Set the incendiary device—

Something flashed far below, bright in the pool of lights marking Hunchun. Northwest of the inland harbor, away from the glowing line marking the winding shape of the canal leading out to the ocean.

Not my target, but…

I switched to thermal imaging. The glow flared bright, like a star. Heat trailed behind it. The shape—a tube of dull warmth in the cold air—rocketed skyward.

Fast. Friction-heated ceramic and steel.

I keyed the mic. Chuck, you tracking this? Over.

Silence. Static. Shit. Holy shit.

More silence. I couldn’t see the plane, but I knew it was above me. That was where the cylindrical nightmare riding a fountain of fire was headed.

I keyed the mic again. Chuck, get the hell out of here. I’m good.

Static. Doing what we can. Panicked.

What could they do? Not much. They were in an ancient airframe, one not built for speed. The engines and propellers were designed more for a reduced heat and sound signature. Radar absorption materials could only go so far when the fuselage still had a shape from decades before—a shape that favored function over anything else.

And the electronics systems? Those were meant more for listening in than anything else.

The weapon shot past, probably a good mile away from me. I twisted my head around to follow it as it sped into the clouds.

A white-hot bloom spread through those clouds. Pinpricks of heat followed.

Flares dropping down. Chaff fluttering around after being ejected.

The crew was throwing every primitive tool available at the death climbing toward them.

Simple. Desperate. Maybe it would be—

Above the clouds, a new star glowed in the night. The explosion blossomed, spreading out. Fiery debris tumbled, trailing diminishing flames, rapidly cooling in the thin air.

Bits of Chuck and the aircrew rained toward the ocean below.

Now I really was alone. A detached part of my brain ached with the loss, even though I barely knew these people. Maybe it was the primitive regret of not seeking out Rooster Comb for a little distraction before the drop. Maybe it was the inevitable empathic fear of death being contagious, something worsened by proximity and magnitude.

It didn’t get much higher on the scale than an explosion blasting things to bits.

Alone. Heart racing. The counters dropping, dropping. The shakes…

Not long now. Just a little bit more, then I could deploy the chute—

Below, a constellation of bright, white fires ignited. Climbed. Dispersed.

Clustered.

Arced. Adjusted. Homing in on their target.

They’d spotted me somehow, maybe the same way they’d spotted the aircraft.

And just like it, I was a sitting duck.

Chapter 3

Over East Asia, at the juncture of China, Korea, and Russia

---

In a sense, I had more control of my situation than the Aries II had of its. I had more speed, presented a lower profile, and could even manage more maneuverability.

I whispered that to myself as the missiles closed.

What could they be tracking? My heat signature was negligible. That was partly the point of the HALO suit I wore. It was bleeding heat from the outside by design, passing on some of it to me while also keeping my heat shielded from detection. Cutting-edge materials. Expensive as hell.

Worth every penny.

But it wasn’t keeping the missiles from tracking me.

Coffee-sour breath filled my mask. Rapid breathing rasped in my ears.

The contrails of the missiles were a slowly dimming path back down to the surface, the source of the weapons fire. It was somewhere outside the golden grid of Hunchun. A weapons site intelligence had missed, maybe.

I was just an unfortunate target of opportunity for the Chinese military.

They just happened to have missile systems capable of tracking a man-sized target squeezed into neoprene and smart materials.

Sure.

This was something unexpected, something unplanned for. It put a dangerous crimp in the mission, the sort of thing I made a point of scolding others about when we reviewed their input for creating our approach.

Others. Just me now, but so much depended on my coming through.

Time to test out just how good these missiles were.

I tucked my arms and legs in, gaining speed.

The missiles adjusted course.

So, real tracking rather than a calculated detonation point based on my speed and direction.

How sensitive was that tracking?

I brought my right arm wide of my body and a little down. It meant fighting for stability, but the change to my trajectory was significant. My speed changed.

The missiles changed course, too. And they were closing.

Not heat. Not pre-calculated detonation that would rely on filling the air with shrapnel. The outer skin of the suit I wore was as close to radar-absorbent as you could get, even though the odds of someone tracking an object of my size weren’t enough to worry about.

That left signals.

Everything I had on me had signals: my helmet, the electronics embedded in the suit, the gear in the bags strapped to me. Almost everything I needed for this mission relied on computer chips and networking. How much of that gave off a big enough signature for some sort of anti-radiation missile to detect?

All I had to go on with ARMs were vague briefings in my Army days and experience with the Agency. Those were both years out of date.

I needed the gear for the mission, but getting blown out of the sky ended the mission before it began. The best option was to take things off one at a time.

The radio was first—useless now anyway. I tore it off, let the wind take it, adjusted course.

One of the missiles separated, tracking after the device.

But the other missiles stayed with me.

Off with the helmet then, leaving the overlays running. The air tore the protective shell away the moment I had the strap undone and the sides pushed up from my ears. I could imagine it tumbling, whipping around in the air currents.

Not enough to shake the missiles, though.

The oxygen tank and mask followed. It wasn’t likely they gave off a signal, but they weren’t necessary any longer. There was enough oxygen to breathe now, the air cold and fresh against my face.

I tore off the cable wired to my right hand and tracked that to the pack on my hip. That had been part of the radio system. I hadn’t expected it to be giving off much of a signal without the transmitter component, but something was giving me away.

They separated from me easily, and I adjusted my fall.

One of the missiles pulled off from the rest.

So, there had been a signal there. But I still had enough signals coming off of me to keep the other weapons coming.

Not good.

There were three gear packs, each strapped atop the other. The top pack was guns and explosives. I’d given up my R60s for an M-18C assault carbine, fully wired into an integrated device that could ride local networks to build out a basic framework of any building. The idea was to create a battlefield awareness system that could be shared among a team moving through an urban space. It was the next generation for urban warfare, but since I was operating alone, it was overkill.

Was there a way to separate luxury from necessity?

Not in the time I had.

I undid the top pack. With a little more time, I would’ve dug out the pistols—Jacob Wang’s Mambas, recovered from the Grigson house after the Lavante Gang debacle.

Time was against me.

The bag flew away.

Another missile peeled off.

What did that say? Different sensitivities? Different targeting parameters?

No. What it said was that I still had three missiles coming at me.

Radio gone. Weapons gone. Helmet gone. That didn’t leave much.

The second pack was the jamming and tracking gear. It was my way through the target’s perimeter security, the means to overwhelm closed-circuit cameras and fry internal communications within the compound. Without it, the plan was useless, moving me from a soft intrusion with a chance at reaching my target with minimal bloodshed to…something else.

I undid the pack and let it tear away.

Mission planning was great. Knowing the target, knowing its capabilities, understanding what path gave you the best chance of success: That was how you operated under ideal conditions. It’s how you minimized risk and saved lives.

You had to actually reach your target for that to matter.

Two more missiles were pulled away by that pack.

One was still coming at me—a persistent bastard.

No time for subtlety now. I unclipped the final pack and turned on everything inside it. There wasn’t much to generate signals, but it was something.

Before releasing it, though, I had to deal with one last potential signal source.

My cybernetics were largely wired. There were interfaces that talked to my nerve centers, translating signals from my brain into signals that my limbs understood. Those signals should have been too localized for any sensor to pick up, but you never knew. The signals from my head? My eyes, the parts of my ears that had been supplemented?

I hooked a finger around the clip of the final bag, holding it tight enough to keep the pack floating behind me, yanking on my arm. Keeping that finger hooked was an active thing. The digit would relax without a signal to hold on.

I rebooted my cybernetics.

Blind. Almost deaf. Absent any control over my limbs.

Immediately, I went into a tumble. I was operating on faith, trusting that I’d made the right call. If I hadn’t, I’d never really know. A missile detonating at close range would rip me to pieces, bulletproof skin or not.

Nausea hammered me as I spun around with no visual reference. Panic shrieked from deep inside. The ground was rushing up! I needed to deploy the chute! Time was running out!

The animal fear was right, but there was no other option. Inside me, computer chips cycled through diagnostics, loaded information from read-only memory, activated the resulting network.

My limbs activated. My eyes and ears. No sensation of tugging on my fingertip.

As I’d expected, the pack had been torn away by the air resistance.

I searched around, listening: the rocket roar, the flash of other explosions in the distance, the trail of fire from the last rocket…

Chasing the last pack.

Not far enough away!

Detonation.

Another star in the night.

Heat. Concussion.

My tumbling grew worse. Any sense of direction was gone before fully coming back, flipping over and over, registering what might be clouds then nothing then golden lights flowing like lava.

A vague sense of cold ran through me. It wasn’t the nausea, and it wasn’t uniform, but it was real. I could feel coldness against my skin in places.

The concussion from the blast, maybe the heat—they’d done something to me.

I was broken, spinning, confused.

And I was falling to my death.

Chapter 4

Over East Asia, at the juncture of China, Korea, and Russia

---

There are only a few ways to pull out of a tumble when you’re skydiving. In a sense, it’s like getting turned around underwater and losing track of up and down. You could blow bubbles and follow them, or you could relax and let buoyancy do its thing.

For skydiving, the best approach is simple: You arch your back. Your body adjusts naturally, the center of gravity righting itself.

I did that, bowing my back, using gravity and drag as allies.

The tumble slowed, stopped.

Now I had a clear view of the situation: the gold grid of lights marking Hunchun; the black of the ocean and the canal snaking up to the inland port, sparkling where lights touched the surface; the deep shadows of unpopulated areas.

Cool air carried the first hint of sharp chemicals from the Chinese city: diesel, oil, exhaust from processing plants and engines.

Even at this hour, there would be engines growling. Falling like I was, all I could hear was the air rushing past.

The cold was still there, biting my limbs. I would check it on the ground.

But…I had to get to the ground first.

And that was only the first problem. After ditching all my gear, I was operating on the bare essentials: my training, my cybernetics, my remaining equipment. That would be good enough to get me on the ground. It wouldn’t be enough to get me to my original landing zone.

On top of all that, I was below my original open altitude. Time was running out.

Another plan gone sideways.

It was typical, to be expected. I’d tried to press that into my young and inexperienced team’s heads.

Adapt. Assess. Keep moving.

Better to be in this situation by myself, really. My experience gave me the edge to survive. I didn’t have to worry about protecting anyone else. No one could be used as leverage against me.

That was the problem with love: You were a hostage to it.

Too late to change my course now anyway. I wouldn’t if I could. The stakes were too high; the potential to rectify wrongs was a lure I couldn’t back away from if I tried.

So, where to go? If I couldn’t hit my LZ, did I even stay in China? Hunchun was built up, a concrete maze lit bright. There weren’t a lot of areas that offered me a clear drop.

To the east, Russia wasn’t quite so metropolitan.

But I had enemies there. Lots of enemies.

That left Korea to the south.

Of course, I could argue the wisdom of that. I could look at the terrain, the greater potential for encountering military forces, the potential for landmines and other traps.

Except there were no good choices and indecision killed.

Just a few miles across the border would be ideal. Chuck had warned me about Chinese-funded NoKo militant camps. It would be decades before the old guard died off, ending all resistance to the new, unified regime. Humans were odd like that. We loved to cling to things, even if they were obviously unhealthy.

Inertia.

Wasn’t I guilty of that? Wasn’t what I was doing inertia?

No. What I was doing was fixing things. Righting wrongs. Fulfilling obligations.

I pulled the hackey handle. It felt frail in my hand, and in fact came away, but the pilot chute deployed, tugging softly.

Then came my main chute and the real tug.

My fall slowed abruptly.

Once again, something felt…wrong.

I looked up, checking my lines for tangle and my chute for proper deployment. The shape looked off, a quarter of the rectangle fluttering instead of ballooning out like a sail. That usually indicated a serious problem: a bad chute, a tangle I couldn’t see, a broken line somewhere.

Not good.

The winds I’d been warned about had me now. With the chute behaving the way it was and the late open, I wasn’t going to put down where I’d intended.

Well south of the gold lights framing the heart of Hunchun, I could finally pick out some details: trees, rock outcrops, ravines. This was an undeveloped stretch of high, rugged terrain—exactly what I didn’t want.

But I was coming in at less than terminal velocity. That was something.

I scraped along a treetop, tore through high branches, then shot toward a strip of bare rock no more than fifty feet wide and less than twice as long. Big rocks poked up in the dark. Too far to the left or overshooting the strip lengthwise, and it was a nice, long tumble down a cliffside.

My boots smashed into that stone, scraped and slid in search of a grip. Rocks shot up as I was pulled along, headed along the length.

It would’ve been better for the chute to catch in the tree.

I leaned back, dug in my heels, my butt inches up from the ground.

The wind hauled on the rope harder than I could counter. Now the damaged part of the chute worked in my favor. My left boot caught on a rock that turned out to be a small outcropping from shallow soil. The impact rattled my hip, drawing a grunt.

But I had an anchor.

I dropped low and hooked my left hand over that protrusion. Finally, the dragging stopped.

With my right arm, I started coiling the lines, dragging the chute in. My back ached from the exertion, but before long, the fabric was too tightly bound to stay inflated. I let go of the rock and finished pulling the chute in with both hands, hurriedly squeezing the nylon into a small bundle and wrapping the lines around that.

That done, I had a chance to pick out real details of my surroundings: a few trees on the right side of a really high hill or low mountain, more such mounds as far as I could see using my night vision. The ravine was probably a narrow valley. I wasn’t in the mood to find out right now.

Other details revealed themselves when I probed my parachute pack: gashes.

Shrapnel from the missile that had detonated too close. There were more slices in my jumpsuit and the insulated layers beneath. Only my synthetic flesh had kept me from being shredded. Barely.

Wrapped chute in hand, I headed back to the trees. There would be soil there, probably moist and soft at this time of year.

At the base of one of the larger trees, I knelt.

My hip protested. The sensation was somewhere between a flare of irritated nerves and numbness.

Like my shoulder where the armor-piercing round had penetrated.

Things just kept getting better and better.

After massaging the joint, I dug both hands into the loamy soil, coming away with handfuls that quickly piled up. I shoved the chute into the resulting hole and scraped the dirt over the material, occasionally taking a second to pat the earth down.

This was the work of a couple minutes, then I was up again. My hip flared, raw and stiff but functional.

I shouldn’t complain. A regular skydiver would probably have shattered a leg on landing or worse. Years ago, one of the guys I’d trained with in airborne had a chute foul on him. He came in hard, couldn’t adjust to try to tumble on impact. When he hit the ground, it was with enough force to send the femur of his right leg popping out the back of his hip socket.

A week later, when I visited him in the hospital, he couldn’t remember anything other than the chute twisting up. He had every intent of getting back in the sky once healed up. A truck hit his motorcycle a week before he was scheduled to qualify again, killing him instantly.

Count your blessings.

This was the time for some of my own rah-rah platitudes: Adapt. Assess. Keep moving.

From where I stood, Hunchun was a distant glow, closer to amber than white. The noise pollution wasn’t enough to reveal a path, but it acted as a guiding star might. My way north was through lightly wooded slopes and—

Something clicked behind me. Scree rattled down the cliffside.

I turned, ready to bolt for the trees, but there were already people on top of the hill with me, pointing their weapons in my direction.

AK-47s. The smell of garlic and body odor. Military uniforms.

The NoKo insurgents.

And I was silhouetted against the Hunchun light pollution.

I raised my hands and did what I had to do. Don’t shoot.

Chapter 5

Detroit, Michigan

One Week Prior

---

Ringing. The biggest, deepest tone. Something you felt in your bones. That’s what I woke to.

I was lying faceup, moving, simultaneously seeing blurry lights and darkness.

Smoke. It was in my mouth, my nose, my lungs. They burned, drawing fiery coughs out. Sour remnants of vomit clung to my tongue, the inside of my mouth.

Then the gap between the light and dark became noticeable. The blur diminished, along with the ringing. Along with the movement—a gliding sensation—was a softness beneath me when there should have been the rough texture of airport carpeting or hard tile. Forms rushed past me, heading the way I’d come.

First responders. EMTs. Cops. Firefighters. The brave.

A look left, then right—sun coming through windows looking out onto the airport tarmac. Black smoke. Flashing lights. Red trucks. An arc of water. Thick foam.

The plane. Someone had been on a plane. Leaving me.

Pitsamai!

I tried to sit up, found straps holding me down. A gurney. At the back of it, a beefy lady with stringy brown hair slipping out of a bun. Wheezing. Face red, damp with perspiration.

She saw me curl up, locked eyes, shook her head. Then she mouthed don’t. Or maybe she said it. All I got was an earful of the ringing sound.

But she was right. This wasn’t the time. I was too banged up.

Except…

Benji. Ichi. Where had they been? Where were they now?

There’d been an explosion. The plane. Pitsamai’s plane. Our plane. It was another one of those things with pieces that spilled out of the box onto your table. You had to make the pieces fit together to see the entire picture—

A puzzle!

This was another puzzle I had to make sense of.

Goddamn puzzles.

The ringing took on a new texture—something rising and falling, distant and insistent.

Detroit. We’d been at the airport. Said our goodbyes. Talked around our regrets.

The lights overhead stabilized, became a consistent glow as the gurney rolled along. This was the terminal that hadn’t been touched by the explosion. Explosions. The one on Pitsamai’s plane. The one on ours.

My movement slowed. Stopped. I was spun around.

A doorway. A small room. Metal doors sliding shut.

Elevator.

Had I heard a ding when the door had closed? Mixed in with the ringing and the piercing rise and fall that was almost like a pressure?

Wait. You wouldn’t go into an elevator after a bombing, would you?

Unless everything was localized. There was still power. The smell of smoke had cleared from my nose. I hadn’t seen a hint of fire or a cracked window. No one stared at me from an airport gate waiting area as I was wheeled along.

Two bombs then. Just two. The damage was kept to the planes, the area around the gate. Not a terrorist strike. But they’d still evacuated the terminal.

These were pieces. They fit together. I squeezed my eyes shut, realized the elevator was coming to a stop.

Stopped.

Ding!

That time I was sure I’d heard it: far away, dull, like a bell cloaked in heavy cloth that sucked up its resonating tones.

The metal doors opened.

Tram. Heading for the tram. Aromas filled this open space: buttery popcorn, sweet pastries, deep-fried meals, coffee.

I remembered this place.

No. That was the level