And repeat.
Mai leapt into life. “Which one’s the most senior?”
Hibiki pointed someone out. “Him.”
“Final protocol?” Mai bounded over to him. “Does it really blow up the whole island?”
The man swallowed nervously. Mai had no time to waste so she threatened him where it would make the most impact but still give him focus. “Your balls.” She said and twisted hard. “You can have them back for an answer.” Alicia would have been proud of her.
“Ye.” He gasped in Korean. “Haeng un eul bile o yo.”
“What did he say?” Mai shouted.
Hibiki translated. “He said ‘good luck.’”
More Korean rhetoric spewed forth.
“What did he say?”
“Umm. My hovercraft is full of eels. As near as I can tell.”
Mai took it to the next level. A wrench and a three-quarter twist sent the man to his knees, squealing like a terrified warthog. The clang of the alarm deepened. The disembodied voice announced “Three and a half minutes to destruction.”
“Why’s it speaking in American?” Smyth wondered.
“It’s speaking in English because the call transmitted in English.” One of the Koreans stepped forward. “It’s adaptive. Like North Korea itself, it bends to better understand its enemies and then bends again into the shape of the hammer that destroys them.”
Smyth stared.
“You think we are all ignorant fools? Conscripts. Brainwashed by a tyrannical leader. Well — not all of us. Not even half of us. Have a good death, Americans.”
Mai sent Hibiki a hopeless look. “You know nothing about this protocol?”
The Japanese undercover agent shook his head.
Mai felt her death approaching. It was do or die time. She raised her gun and started shooting. The English speaker was the first to go, shot through the forehead and sent tumbling back into an array of instruments.
The mechanical announcement droned on, “…three minutes…”
“I’ll kill you all!” Mai promised. “One by one.” She pulled her trigger each time she spoke a word. Korean soldiers jerked and spasmed. Blood spattered each man’s neighbor and the walls behind.
“Tell me!”
“It’s not unstoppable!” One man screamed in Korean, instantly translated by Hibiki just as loud. The man held his hand up as if to ward off Mai’s bullet, putting his head down. He was not a soldier. This man was one of the island doctors.
“Your life for information.” Mai shot another Korean as she spoke.
“There is a missile in a silo beneath the island. It is programmed to launch, return, and explode on impact with the compound. But it’s not a one-man protocol. Not even a madman would allow that. The failsafe is that two men have the authority to launch and abort.”
Hibiki suddenly stopped short and stared at the doctor. “No,” he said in English. “That’s so unfair.”
Mai chewed her lip. “What?”
“General Kwang Yong and the base commander both have the authority to abort the launch,” Hibiki said. “By the fingerprint scanner on that console.”
“…final protocol will occur in two minutes…”
Mai ran like never before. She hurdled a body, hit the door at a dead run, shouldered it aside so that it almost crashed off its hinges. She jumped down the steps, felt her feet touch the grass and accelerated to full sprint. She vaulted a drainage ditch, leaned her body down without losing pace and scooped up the first discarded rifle she passed.
All the time counting the seconds off in her head.
“Ninety…eighty-nine…eighty-eight…”
She found the clearing where the overweight island boss lay. His dead eyes and chubby face stared up at her with the mocking appearance of a smile — a last laugh. Mai stepped in and didn’t give her next action any more thought. She set the rifle to auto and pulled the trigger.
Bullets slammed through the boss’ arm at the elbow, churning up dirt, blasting apart bone and flesh until the appendage separated from the rest of the body.
Mai scooped it up, dropped the weapon with a crunch, and hurled her body back the way it had just come. Forty-three…forty-two…forty-one…
Pounding across the uneven grass, springing from one rise to the next, a full-flight hurdle across a fallen tree, now seeing the distant comms building, seeing the door standing wide open.
…nineteen…eighteen…
She wasn’t going to make it.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Her life was measured in seconds. The distance between her and the fast approaching comms building seemed to elongate like some special effect, making it seem farther away. Smyth was at the door, screaming. She felt an ill-omened rumble begin under her feet. The ground shook.
The arm she held slapped a tree on the way past. Mai barely kept hold of it. If she dropped it there was no doubt—game over.
But it already was. Nine…eight…
Mai flung her entire body at the top step, skidded across the threshold and into the room, twisted in mid-slide and dug her boots against the concrete for purchase. Then like a hundred-meter sprinter, on her knees with her hands against the floor, she was out of the traps like a gold medal winning Olympian.
Smyth had cleared the path to the console. He was even pointing at the fingerprint pad.
…three…two…
Mai lunged.
“One.”
“Final protocol engaged.”
Mai jammed the boss’s fingers to the pad. She heard a click. But then the threatening rumble beneath her feet grew to a shaky groan. Smyth ran to the door and Mai followed him.
Above the distant trees, a trail of light and fire shot high into the sky. Mai spared a despairing glance for Hibiki and then stepped close to Smyth.
“At first I thought you were an insolent prick, my friend. It is strange that I grew to like you so much. It has been…a life experience.”
“That it has, Maggie.” Smyth’s eyes tracked the boiling stream of light as it painted the skies. “That it has.”
The rocket attained the end of its vertical flight and began to turn. Mai was surprised to feel Dai Hibiki’s hands suddenly resting on her shoulder. “You must go.” He coughed. “Run. You might make it.”
Even Smyth laughed. “I doubt even the great Mai Kitano could outrun a rocket, bud.”
“Well, not with a marine in tow.” Mai’s thoughts turned to Drake. Here she was, staring into the scorching face of her fate, unsure if the man she already knew she loved was even alive. She remembered their first meeting so well she could recite every line, recall every event, simply because she ran it through her head at least once a week. Chechnya had been a hellhole, a veritable outpost of purgatory and a den for all the Devil’s demons, but Mai knew it as the place where she’d met the love of her life.
Amidst battle. Amidst war. A fitting occurrence that defined all her days since the clan had bought her from her destitute parents. To be a human child, and then for that child to be remade into steel, into the hard edge of the night, and then to be turned human again by a single chance meeting with a great man.
“What the—?”
Lost in her thoughts, in her unfulfilled dreams, Mai hadn’t even been aware of the rocket anymore. Smyth’s outburst brought her back just in time to see the burning fire trail flutter out. In the same instant, the terrible weapon stuttered and fell, like a bird killed in mid-flight, straight down toward the ocean.