As drunk as Markov was, the details suddenly were very important to him. She had waist-length ebony hair and wore green contacts. But he knew it must be her from the way she didn’t even give Jian’s blood pooling around her bare feet a second glance as she pulled the long knife out of his throat. She stepped right over the aide’s body, never taking her eyes off Markov. He saw also that the slender hand now pointing a pistol at him was missing the left ring finger.
She sat on the barstool next to Markov, dressed in a loose summer skirt and a linen shirt. Up close, he saw that her eyebrows were gone, replaced by delicate brushwork. She slowly pulled back her hair and peeled off a wig. Her head was razor-shorn down to the skin. There was no stubble, just a bald white dome that gleamed like ceramic in the mirror above the rows of bottles behind the bar. She would truly be a ghost, leaving no trace other than the bloody footprints.
He smiled and raised his glass in her direction, a salute.
“It is a pleasure to see you again, Ms. Shin. You continue to surprise me. Or should I call you what the others call you?”
“Black Widow,” said Carrie. “It is more appropriate than they know. Do you know why I’m here?”
“Yes. I can guess,” said Markov. “What happened at the church was an atrocity. You cannot kill like that and win this war. Other wars, maybe, but not this one. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“Wrong!” she snarled, slamming the knife into the bar; its blade quivered an inch from his hand. It was a Type 98 bayonet knife, the kind the Chinese commandos carried, and the pistol was a Chinese-made QSZ-92. Well, that answered another question regarding the whereabouts of Jian’s escort; Markov doubted the aide would have come here alone. She still held the pistol on him, pointed at his center of body mass. Someone had taught her well. Or was it natural? That question could be asked for so many things about her.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “Before we get on with this, let me finish my drink.” He turned back to the bar to finish off his glass of vodka, closing his eyes and savoring the simultaneous burn of the alcohol and coolness of the ice cube he had tucked in his cheek.
He felt her hand around his neck. She gasped as the meaty rawness of the remains of her burned finger pressed into his throat. But it wasn’t a cry of hurt, Markov realized. She was savoring the pain.
“I want my hairbrush!” she whispered in his ear.
In that instant, his vodka wore off with a chill.
Tiangong-3 Space Station
“Sir, I know you are excited to seize your prize, but you need to let Tick go in first,” said Aaron Best in the practiced tone of a commander used to dealing with very difficult situations. He was tethered just outside the main airlock of the Tiangong, trying to stay out of view of the porthole next to it. The airlock access panel glowed green, indicating it was safe to enter the purgatory between the vacuum of space and the oxygenated confines of the Chinese station.
“But it is my mission, isn’t it?” said Sir Aeric Cavendish.
“Affirmative. But once we exited the vehicle, mission execution became my responsibility. Sir. We did not drill for you to join the boarding party, so we are going to need you to hang back outside until things settle in there. Highest probability for success that way. We can do the breach with fewer men, but not more.” He pointed toward the hatch with a gleaming silver dagger that caught a flash of the sun and momentarily blinded Sir Aeric. “But we’re honored to have you as part of the assault crew, Sir Aeric.”
Best’s logic was as obvious as his sarcasm. Cavendish nodded his assent.
“Stack up,” said Best. The commando called Tick was first inside the airlock, which was soon crammed with four men.
Once inside, the men stopped and paused as the airlock depressurized. Immediately, they took off their helmets, stripped out of the bulky EVA suits, and secured them to the airlock wall.
The men wore slash-proof, formfitting, tiger-striped gray-and-black bodysuits that covered their heads, making them look like evil speed skaters. They put on ballistic masks, motocross-style eye-and-face protection that was resistant to bullets up to nine-millimeter rounds, each painted over to give its wearer a savage look. Another of Sir Aeric’s ideas, but the men had taken to it with relish. Tick’s black facemask had been overlaid with a ta moko, the facial tattoo of a Maori warrior. Hugger, who hunched behind Tick, had used a metallic gold to create hyena-like fangs beneath deeply sunken eye sockets. Hook wore a black mask with almost abstract white brushstrokes to indicate eyes and mouth, like a savage Kabuki actor. Best was the fourth and final commando of the first wave. His mask was airbrushed a gleaming bone white in the style of an old-school hockey goalie’s mask. He’d seen it once in an old horror movie; the lack of expression on the killer’s face made him somehow more menacing. The effect was that these men, while obviously human, looked immune to reason and appeal. The sense was reinforced by the fact that each had a Taser X26 pistol in his hand and one of Sir Aeric’s foot-long titanium-handled steel-bladed brass-knuckled trench knife strapped to his hip.
The first thing Tick noticed when the airlock groaned open was the smell of piss. Floating weightlessly, he pulled himself one-handed inside the main research bay and looked at the three taikonauts there. They had apparently been trying to get into EVA suits.
“Do you surrender?” he asked them in Mandarin.
The three taikonauts stared back at Tick.
Tick repeated himself as the three other commandos made their way into the room, each holding on to the wall with one hand and pointing a Taser with the other.
“Do you surrender?” he asked yet again in Mandarin.
The three taikonauts stayed silent; there was no real movement, just darting eyes and dry lips being licked. Then a hatch to their side opened.
“Contact,” said Best. “Head on, Tick.”
Tick pushed off the station’s wall and rotated his body, turning to parry. But the taikonaut moving through the hatch closed in on him with far more speed than he’d expected given their training. Then he saw why. The man wore a pair of orange exoskeleton boots from an EVA suit, their micro-rockets firing. He had a titanium-mesh frame on his back, and attached to it were the bulky robotic gloves designed for repair jobs in space. One of those exo-gloves wielded a massive wrench.
Tick fired his Taser; the compressed air in the chamber shot out the electric dart on a thin wire, but it pinged off the bulky gloves and then floated weightlessly in the air.
The two men collided, and the taikonaut’s momentum knocked Tick into the bulkhead. The impact broke Tick’s right forearm; he tried to pull out the short sword but had to release it. Screaming, Tick attempted to grapple with the taikonaut using his legs, but one of the taikonaut’s exo-boots drove into his left foot with a crunch of flesh and bone.
Tick’s agony was muted due to the pain pump implanted in his abdomen. Triggered by a sensor in his spinal cord, it released a massive dose of opiates so he could keep fighting. The tiny actuators of the taikonaut’s powered exo-glove now gripped him, and though Tick writhed and flexed, he was unable to escape from its grasp. As the two wrestled, the other commandos closed on their opposites, and the sounds of grunting and stabbing filled the air. Tick tried to wrench his body to the right when he saw his sword float by, mere inches from his uninjured arm. But he was unable to break free to reach it, and then he spun off in another direction, bounced against the far bulkhead, and cracked the back of his helmet. The last thing Tick saw was the wrench smashing into his faceplate.