It’s noon when the riad’s double doors open to admit Li Guiying. She transits the passage in cautious steps, pausing to peer into every corner of the courtyard before she emerges. The sun is witness. It pours a rectangular column of light onto the tiles, the fountain, the citrus trees. The brilliance deepens, by contrast, the shade beneath the balcony—though this late in the year, the air remains cool, not even sixty degrees Fahrenheit.
Shaw has reorganized the courtyard furnishings, moving the chairs and the padded bench close to the fountain, where they’re under open sky. True objected to this, but he insisted on it. “Don’t worry. I’m watching.”
Of course he is. He told her last night he likes to know who his enemies are. He is using Guiying to draw them out. True doesn’t like it, but she resists the urge to look up. She’s not wearing her visor, so there’s nothing she could see anyway against the blinding sunlight.
She sits in one of the chairs as Guiying enters. Shaw stands behind her, stone-faced in his visor, assault rifle held casually in the crook of his arm. Guiying lowers her head in greeting. It is only the second time True has seen her in person.
She is thirty-four years old but still with the same waiflike figure and wispy, layered haircut that True remembers. Like that first time, she is finely dressed, wearing a tailored black business suit and carrying a large shoulder bag, clutching its strap in a white-knuckled grip. There are shadows under her dark eyes, and though her face is round, her cheeks are gaunt and striated with a faint red flush.
True gestures for her to sit on the bench. She does so, setting her bag on the ground beside feet sheathed in graceful black high-heeled shoes. She tries to keep her gaze on True but it drifts up, perhaps inevitably, to Shaw.
True waits, unwilling to direct the conversation. After a few seconds Guiying coughs softly into her hand. Then, in contrast to their first meeting years ago, she looks True in the eye, and her gaze is steady.
Details of that meeting come back to True and it’s not pleasant. All war is risk, Guiying said. Advancing technology demands to be used. Words that might have meant anything, but she clarifies their meaning now, and though her voice is a little hoarse, her English has become polished and her accent refined when she says, “I am responsible for the death of your son, Diego.”
At this admission, True feels her heart explode against her ribs. Eight years late, she thinks. It angers her, knowing that Guiying sought her friendship, watched her—out of guilt or insecurity, it makes no difference. And oh! it hurts to hear it said. But True did not come here for comfort. Only for the truth. At last, the truth.
Shaw, his voice a low growl, reminds them both, “It’s not just Diego. It’s hard to see past his spectacular exit, but there were more men with me on that mission. Do you know what their names were?”
The red streaks on Guiying’s cheeks deepen in color. “Their names were Francis Hue, Jesse Powers, Hector Chapin, Mason Abanov, and Shaw Walker.” Beside her the fountain sparkles in the hazy light. “It was a miscalculation,” she adds in clipped, determined syllables. “A mistake. I… wanted to prove the effectiveness of our autonomous capabilities. I wanted to show that the task given to those men could be done by my swarm instead… so that in the future there would be no need to risk the lives of our patriotic soldiers. It was a simple mission. I thought it was a perfect test. But there was an issue with the swarm’s instruction set, and… we did not have real-time communication to correct the aggressive response.”
True leans in, angry now. Guiying calls it a mistake, a miscalculation. Oh, yes. Because what she meant to do was show off her talents. She wanted to beat Shaw’s team, hijack their mission, leave them looking slow and ineffective with nothing left to do but quietly withdraw. And when it all went wrong… she abandoned them.
“You had communication,” True says. “You must have, because you instructed the last mech in the swarm not to attack, but to follow the survivors, even after they were captured. You knew they were alive.” She hears a rising strain in her voice but she presses on. “You knew where they were being held. Were you under orders to stay silent?”
“No,” Guiying says firmly, insistently. “My superiors did not know what had happened. I made a decision not to report it. Not then. This was my decision. I eliminated the data we received and I told them I was forced to destroy the swarm when it lost integrity and the components became scattered in the forest. I did this because I had to put my country first. We could not be seen as the cause of failure. Don’t you see? The recriminations that would have followed, the mistrust. Then after the video… I was afraid of how it would escalate, of what might happen.”
She draws in a sharp breath. “They were soldiers. They knew they might be sacrificed for a greater good.” She frowns down at the low table between them, composing herself, before returning her gaze to True. “It was your son, and so you think it was the wrong decision, but without cooperation between our countries, how many more would have died?”
“It wasn’t your decision to make,” True says, forcing the words past her constricted throat. She swallows and tries again. “You’re not sorry for what you did?”
“I’m sorry I had to do it.”
True presses her fist to her lips while in her mind she hears Lincoln saying, Someone’s got to do the dirty work.
Shaw picks that moment to step out from behind her. A cobra. Guiying shrinks from him, turning a shoulder to the unforgiving glint in his pale eyes.
“I never did finish the story, True,” he says in his calm way. “I didn’t tell you about our last stand. It was after Mason got hit. We’d been running for over an hour, and he’d been hit more than once. Then a bullet took him in the knee, shattered the joint. He couldn’t walk, but he could still shoot. Diego was all shot up too, hit in the side, the shoulder, the leg. And we still had Francis with us, though he was barely breathing, wasn’t gonna last long.
“I was the only one with no wounds, like I had a fucking force field around me. Mason told me, ‘I feel sorry for you. God clearly has plans for you and you are going to pay hell for catching the Old Man’s attention.’”
Shaw finally moves to sit down in the empty chair. He looks on edge, wound tight. “I told him what I thought of God.”
True glances at Guiying, listening with rapt, respectful attention.
Shaw says, “We set up a defensive position. Nothing else to do. And we held that position until we burned through all our ammo. Any UAV in the area should have observed that firefight. Command should have known, no matter what fake intelligence her office was sending them. That fucking Lincoln, he should have known. He was supposed to be shadowing us. He should have sent backup but we got nothing—and we had nothing left.”
There was a rescue effort. True knows this because Lincoln told her. But the first helicopter had to put down because of mechanical issues and by the time the second bird was on-scene, the forest was quiet and two men were missing.
Shaw doesn’t know this, or if he does, he chooses not to believe it. He says, “Francis had passed by that time, and Mason too. He took a final hit right through the eye. Diego was the last of my men. He was in bad shape, running on adrenaline. And me? I wasn’t even bleeding. God’s a hell of a joker.”
His knuckles are white as he grips the Triple-Y.
“Diego didn’t want to surrender. He still had fight in him. He got his knife out. Said we were gonna make them kill us. I said okay, that’s how it would be—and we tried. There were just too damn many of them, and Saomong knew the propaganda value of taking us alive.”