“Yes, certainly.”
“The one thing I never heard was how he died.” She chattered on, slaking her curiosity in a way other locals never would have dared. “What did happen to him?”
“The board’s leash got caught around his neck,” said Markov. “But it is not yet clear whether it was an accident or not.”
“Oh my God. That’s horrible,” she said. “Wasn’t there any video of the beach? Maybe a wave-cam?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.” He paused. “But as part of the revised security measures, we will be collecting something better from all the staff here.”
“Better than pictures?” she said.
“Much better. DNA,” he said. “That way we can track our friends throughout the island,” he said.
“Friends like me?” she said.
“Exactly,” he said.
Iliahi Elementary School, Wahiawa, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
The body lay sprawled face-down on the ground. The mesh bag of soccer balls that the Chinese marine had brought for the students to play with had opened and the balls had spilled out; bright pink and yellow spheres rolled around the courtyard, leaving trails of blood behind them.
Nicks’s grip on her SIG Sauer P220 loosened for a moment, then she squeezed the pistol tighter. Her hearing returned and her field of vision widened, allowing her to take in the chaos. Parents and children screamed over the ringing in her ears.
This was what the coach had been trying to warn them about when Nicks and the three other insurgents turned left off California Avenue. The coach had smiled a welcome but had waved his hands off to the side. Nicks cursed herself for missing the cue, caught up momentarily in the flash of normalcy brought on by the giddy kids around them.
“Contact!” shouted Charlie.
“A bit late for that,” said Nicks. “You hit?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Charlie. “There’s got to be more; where are they?”
A Chinese marine burst around the gym corner, his assault rifle spraying wildly. A shot took Charlie in the neck. Nicks, with her pistol already up, instinctively fired two .45-caliber rounds at a distance of ten feet. The marine spun and collapsed over a blue hippo sculpture in the school’s courtyard.
More fearful shouts in Chinese came from where the marine had been.
Nicks and the two other insurgents rounded the corner and found a lone Chinese civilian, evidently a member of one of the new community development units they’d been sending around to split the population from the insurgents, crying into a radio. She had a pistol but made no motion to use it; her two escorts were now dead.
They dragged her past Charlie’s still body and over to the entrance of the building, and they took cover by the doors. After a moment, the woman stopped crying, and the unsettling calm that followed close combat came over Nicks. Her ears rang, her hands tingled, and she felt like her feet were so firmly planted in the ground, she couldn’t take another step if her life depended on it. The feeling would pass, as it always did after the adrenaline waned, but in the moment, it took everything she had to stay focused and think about what was supposed to happen next.
“She was on the radio,” Nicks shouted to her squad mates, too loud because her ears were still ringing. “I don’t know if she got someone on the other end. But we gotta tell Conan this place is blown and get clear.”
She looked up and saw three kids peering down at her from behind the blue-painted railings on the school’s second-floor balcony. They looked blankly at the dead bodies and then at the NSM members. Then, one by one, they began to look skyward, until they were all squinting at the sky to the south.
That was when Nicks’s ears cleared and she heard it too, the thumping of helicopter rotors coming closer.
Hidden Valley Estates, Wahiawa, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
Conan and Finn cut through the empty parking lot of the Mormon church adjacent to the school, jumping off their bikes as they entered a stand of trees separating the church from the houses nearby. They kept beneath a long canopy of thick green foliage that ran through the clusters of one-story and two-story homes in the Hidden Valley Estates housing complex. Seeing a quadcopter zoom down the road toward the school, they ducked down and hid among the trees.
“Hold here,” said Conan.
“Screw that, let’s go,” said Finn. “We can get to the cache, arm up, and then get them out.”
Conan shook her head. “No, we can’t,” she said.
Neighbors had begun to spill out of their homes into the street, pointing and screaming. Some of them, probably parents, were rushing toward the school, racing against the arrival of the Directorate forces.
Finn turned to look at her, trying to puzzle it out. “Conan, our guys are one thing, but the kids. There are kids there.”
“Exactly,” said Conan quietly.
“What? What do you think is going to happen?” said Finn.
She didn’t answer, just stared back at him. Finn tried to get up, but she wrestled him down. He had just shrugged off her grip when a pair of Directorate Z-8K assault helicopters roared overhead and then spun to flare just above the playing field next to the school. One after another, black-suited Directorate commandos jumped out. They fanned out around the landing point, the equipment shed with the weapons cache now inside their perimeter.
Finn ducked back under the brush and looked at her angrily. “Conan. You know our guys — they are going to fight. And those kids and teachers are going to be stuck in the middle of a shitstorm.”
“It was always a risk that something bad would go down at the school,” said Conan in a whisper. “Why do you think I chose it?”
Fort Mason, San Francisco
“I love you.”
Jamie knew what Lindsey would say when he walked through the door. She said it every night, even when he knew it was a struggle for her to get the words out.
Nights like tonight when he returned home late, exhausted and drained. The adrenaline had ebbed months ago; what propelled him now was a cocktail of caffeine, stims, and anger.
The boat hit the dock’s edge gently, perfectly done, and he sharply saluted the shipyard launch that dropped him off at pier 2 in the dark. It was a perk of command that spared him the autobus ride home and kept him on the water that much longer. Plus, it was only a quick walk up to his house in Fort Mason and he could be home in a few minutes once he set foot on land.
Like every night, though, he first stopped and sat down on a bench, a vestige of a time when this was an area for festivals and tourists. From his seat he looked east through the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge was illuminated tonight, the LEDs woven into the cable wires showing a winking flag displayed, fifty stars bright. It was something the governor had decided to do, against the advice of the Defense Department. The bridge was a symbol of what they were fighting for, he argued, and it should not be lost in the fog of war and the Bay. That speech had gone over well; no doubt one of his public affairs team’s own social-engineering algorithms had come up with it.
Jamie took a last sip of coffee and slowly dumped the rest out, watching it spatter the ground at his feet. It was oddly soothing and had become a ritual as he tried to slow his mind down from the past sixteen hours at work.
“Halt!” said a voice in the dark.
Simmons looked up and saw no one. He was tired, but tired enough to hear things?
“Identification,” said a sentry. It was one of the California National Guard troops who patrolled the waterfront around the clock.
“Proceed,” said Simmons. “Captain James Simmons. Navy. I live at the fort, house forty-nine.”