Or why.
All we know is that twenty-nine days ago a team in Egypt ran the thing through an X-ray machine at what was the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology in Alexandria.
Yeah. You read about Alexandria.
The news services said that it was a terrorist device. Some new kind of nuke. The authorities and the U.N. aid teams keep adding more numbers to the count. So far it stands at seven thousand and four. Everyone at the University. Everyone who lived within a two-block radius. Not that the aid workers are counting bodies. There aren’t any. All that’s there is a big, round hole. Everything — every brick, every pane of glass, every mote of dust, and every person — is simply gone.
Yeah, gone.
And the ball buster is that there is no dust, no blast debris, and no radiation.
There’s just a hole in the world where all those people worked, studied, and lived.
All that was left, sitting there at the bottom of the crater, was the artifact.
One meter long. Silver and green. Probably made of metal. Nearly weightless.
Unscratched and untouched.
We saw it on a satellite photo and in photos by helicopters doing flyovers.
The Egyptian government sent in a team.
The artifact was collected.
Then their team was hit by another team. Mercs this time. Multinational badasses. They hit the Egyptians like the wrath of God and wiped it out.
The artifact was taken.
And the games began. The multinational hunt. The accusations. The political pissing contests. The media shit-storm.
Seventeen days later everyone is still yelling. Everyone’s pointing fingers. But nobody is really sure who was responsible for the blast. Not that it mattered. Something like that makes a great excuse for settling old debts, starting new fights, and generally proving to the world that you swing a big dick. Even if you don’t. If there hadn’t been such a price tag on it in terms of human life and suffering it would be funny.
We left funny behind a long way back.
About one millisecond after the team of mercs hit the Egyptians, every police agency and intelligence service in the world was looking for the package. Everyone wanted it. Even though nobody understood what it was, everyone wanted it.
The official stance — the one they gave to budget committees — was that the device was clearly some kind of renewable energy source. A super battery. Something like that. Analysis of the blast suggested that the X-ray machine triggered some kind of energetic discharge. What kind was unknown and, for the purposes of the budget discussions, irrelevant. The thing blew the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology off the world and didn't destroy itself in the process.
If there was even the slightest chance the process could be duplicated, then it had to be obtained. Had to. No question.
That was real power.
That was world-changing power.
For two really big reasons.
The first was obvious. Any energetic discharge, once studied, could be quantified and captured. You just need to build a battery capable of absorbing and storing the charge. Conservative estimates by guys like Dr. Hu tell me that such a storage battery would be, give or take a few square feet, the size of Detroit. There were already physicists and engineers working out how to relay that captured energy into a new power grid that could, if the explosion could be endlessly repeated under controlled circumstances, power… everything.
Everything that needed power.
People have killed each other over a gallon of gas.
What would they do to obtain perfect, endlessly renewable, and absolutely clean energy?
Yeah. They’d kill a lot of people. They’d wipe whole countries off the map. Don’t believe it? Go read a book about the history of the Middle East oil wars.
Then there was the second reason teams were scrambled from six of the seven continents.
Something like that was the world’s only perfect weapon.
Who would dare go to war with anyone who owned and could deploy such a weapon?
For seven and a half days no one knew where it was. Everyone held their breath. The U.S. military went to its highest state of alert and parked itself there. Everyone else did, too. We all expected something important to go boom. Like New York City. Or Washington D.C.
When that didn’t happen no one breathed any sighs of relief.
It meant that someone was keeping it. Studying it. Getting to know it.
That is very, very scary.
Sure as hell scared me.
Scared my boss, Mr. Church, too, and he does not spook easily.
Halfway through the eighth day there was a mass slaughter at a research facility in Turkey. Less than a day later a Russian freighter was attacked with a total loss of life.
And on and on.
Now it was twenty-nine days later and a shaky network of spies, paid informants and traitors provided enough reliable intel to have me sliding down a wire into a deep, deep hole in North Korea.
If the artifact was here, then any action I took could be justified because even his allies know that Kim Jong-un is a fucking psycho. Basically you don’t let your idiot nephew play with hand grenades. Not when the rest of the family is in the potential blast radius.
On the other hand, if the North Koreans didn’t have it, then I was committing an act of war and espionage. Being shot would be the very least — and probably best — I could expect.
Which is why I had no I.D. on me. Nothing I wore or carried could be traced to an American manufacturer. My fingerprints and DNA have been erased from all searchable databases. Ditto for my photos. I didn’t exist. I was a ghost.
A ghost can’t be used as a lever against the American government.
I even had a suicide pill in a molar in case the North Koreans captured me and proved how creative they were in their domestic version of enhanced interrogation. I tried not to think about how far I’d let things go before I decided that was a good option.
I ran down a featureless concrete tunnel that was badly lit with small bulbs in wire cages. All alone. Too much risk and too little mission confidence to send in the whole team.
Just me.
Alone.
Racing the clock.
Scared out of my mind.
Hurrying as fast as I could into the unknown.
My life kind of sucks.
Chap. 3
“I’m losing your signal,” Bug said. “Some kind of interference from….”
That was all he said. After that all I had in my ear was a dead piece of plastic.
I looked at Karnak.
The small HD screen still showed a floor plan, which was good. But it wasn’t updating, which was bad. The data it showed was what Bug had sent me when I’d detached from the spider cable. We had an eye-in-the-sky using ground-penetrating radar to build a map, but that was a slow process, and suddenly I was behind the curve. The corridor ran for forty more yards past blank walls and ended at a big red steel door. Shiny and imposing, with a single keycard device mounted on the wall beside it. Knowing what was on the other side of that steel door was the whole point of the satellite. Pretty much no chance it was a broom closet. Before I tried to bypass the security I’d like to know that it was my target. Intel suggested that it was, but a suggestion was all it was. That’s a long, long way from certain knowledge or even high confidence.
“Balls,” I said, though I said it quietly.
Our timetable was based on the fact that two things were about to happen at the same time. A motorcade of official cars and trucks was headed here. We’d tracked it all the way from the Strategic Rocket Forces divisional headquarters in Kusŏng. Infrared on the satellites counted eighty men.