“How about you, Alexis?” asked Jonah. “Any amazing discoveries?”
“Yeah — there’s some great stuff down here,” said Alexis, still intent on her work as she finished tightening one last hose clamp. “Tons of old tech, pretty much all of which is obsolete. Weapons, engines, even a bunch of silk parachutes. But this is my favorite.” She stood and turned to proudly display the business end of a massive flamethrower, complete with handles and triggers, attached by a hose to a two-tanked backpack sitting on the metal workbench.
“Could it be…?” breathed Dalmar, daring to hope.
“Yep — it’s an operating, no-shit military flamethrower prototype,” confirmed Alexis with a sly smile. “The tanks were crap, so I swapped them out with spares from the Scorpion. Beyond that, most of the critical components were in surprisingly good shape, just need a little oil and a whole lotta love.”
She tried to pick up the tanks, but they were too heavy to even budge. Motioning everyone to step away, Alexis instead pointed the nozzle towards a rocky wall on the far end of the workshop, nearly thirty feet away. She clicked a button on the butane nozzle lighter, frowning when it didn’t ignite. Alexis shook the assembly a little, slapped it with her palm a couple of times, and tried again. The lighter sparked and a tiny jet of butane fuel flashed bright in the dark room.
And then she pulled the trigger. A prodigious grout of thick fluid spurted from the end of the flamethrower, instantly igniting as it hit the hissing butane. The liquid stream exploded, erupting outwards in a roiling, uncontrollable fire, all but blinding everyone with sudden, searing heat. Jonah felt like he’d briefly stepped onto the surface of the sun.
Sun-Hi clapped her hands in amazement as the last gush of flames petered out to a dribble of still-burning fuel. Jonah felt for a moment that the bright, cheery Sun-Hi he’d first met was still within her — but she wouldn’t so much as look at him, instead returning to continue disassembling the ancient computers.
“Alexis — do be careful!” Hassan stared with his mouth open, horrified at the sheer magnitude of the weapon’s output.
“Um, yeah,” said Alexis a little gingerly. The size of the explosion had taken her by surprise as well. “I’m still experimenting with the mixture. It could probably use a little more fine-tuning.”
“This is… this is for me?” whispered Dalmar, almost at a loss for words as he stepped gingerly towards the flamethrower, transfixed.
“Of course it is, you big galoot,” Alexis said, setting the nozzle back down on the table. “I don’t know anybody else who could even lift this goddamn thing — it weighs a metric shit-ton.”
Dalmar brushed past her to pick up the prototype flamethrower, easily hefting the thick canvas straps over his shoulders as he put the tanks to his back. He turned the weapon from one side to the other, admiring the original craftsmanship, as well as Alexis’ careful maintenance and innovations.
“I shall call her Florence,” growled Dalmar, arching his eyebrows at Alexis. “The most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
“Okay… you’re welcome?” said Alexis. “Just watch where you point that thing.”
Jonah laughed out loud, patting her on the back before glancing over towards Hassan. But the doctor simply stared into the darkness, distracted. “Remind me — what were the symptoms in the physician’s journal?”
“Uh, let me look,” said Marissa as she picked the logbook back up again. It took a moment to find the correct page. “Looks like headaches, bleeding gums, barfing, and the shits. That mean anything to you?”
“It may well have been radiation exposure,” whispered Hassan. “The Germans were moving refined uranium eastward as their war effort collapsed. Allied forces believed they’d captured it all — perhaps they were wrong. This clandestine organization, whatever it is, may have made off with a great deal.”
“How much?”
“Certainly enough to make a bomb.” “Well that’s just fucking awesome,” Alexis sank down in a chair.
Jonah looked around the room. “The submarine and laboratory have been picked clean; anything of value is long gone. Let’s get a Geiger counter down here just in case, but my guess is that it won’t pick up so much as a stray rad. Whoever used this island — whoever still uses it — almost certainly has access to a nuclear weapon. Refining uranium is the tough part, any third-year physics grad student could build a bomb with the right components. And the Germans handed them those components on a silver platter.”
“I find these on every machine,” announced Sun-Hi, emerging from behind the partially dissembled computer bank with a handful of metal tags.
Jonah squinted at the identical tags, turning them over in his hands. He couldn’t read the Japanese script. “What do they say?”
“SABC Electronics and Industry.”
“That’s one of the largest defense contractors in Japan,” Marissa said. “Still headquartered in Tokyo.”
Jonah nodded, considering the information.
“This is the best lead we’ve had yet — shall we follow it?” Hassan asked.
“I mean, we have to, right?” said Marissa. “They’ve got to be the ones with an answer.”
“If I require an answer, I will often find someone to ask—” began Dalmar.
“Wait for it,” interrupted Alexis.
“—at gunpoint,” Dalmar said, finishing his thought. “It is the best way to get truthful information.”
“Agreed,” said Jonah. “Enough fucking around. I’m going to take a page out of Dalmar’s book. We’re going to track down their CEO, kidnap him, stick a gun in his face, and get some answers.”
CHAPTER 18
Itching liquid snaked through Freya’s inner thigh, maddeningly hot. The pain rippling throughout her body was distant, indistinct, experienced only through the fog of a distant memory or a forgotten dream. Her mind swam in a twilight haze between conscious and unconscious — her racing thoughts indistinguishable, eyes soft and unfocused, limbs paralyzed. She moaned and shifted, and felt the thin cotton of a hospital gown against her skin, along with the slick plastic of a mattress pad. She wanted to drift away, fade to white. It would be so easy to just let go.
Focus. Breathe in. Breathe out. Think.
She tried to move, but her fingertips were dull and numb, and the tubes and wires running across her body were impossibly heavy. Her mind swam again, threatening to release her back into unconsciousness. She tried to call out, but her lips were frozen, immobile. So, she struggled to open her eyes and focus on the single blinding light above.
Focus. You were medicated again. It’s wearing off. Breathe. Think.
She tried to inhale deep and slow, but the air caught in her throat. Her stomach suddenly wrenched into a jolting contraction. She strained against the thick nylon straps crisscrossing her body, and twisted her wrists bound in their plastic restraints that were painfully chafing against heavy zip ties. A too-thin rush of vomit bubbled up and out of her throat. She groaned and coughed, flooding her oxygen mask with the foul-smelling bile. But it was too late to spit it out. The acidic liquid was sucked back into her burning mouth and nose as she struggled to breathe, choking.
Garbled voices erupted into a rapid-fire exchange around her. Freya’s mask was roughly yanked from her face and slid down around her neck as latex-covered fingers probed her mouth. A hand pressed her face firmly to one side as a second jammed a plastic tube between her teeth, its whistling nozzle sucking the vomit from between her tongue and cheek. The tube disappeared only to be replaced moments later with a metal irrigation straw, washing the bile from her mouth as she coughed and retched once more.