Extinction Machine

Chapter Thirty-five

The Warehouse

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 8:06 a.m.

The screen display on the ringing phone said “Jerry Spencer.” Mr. Church punched a button to put the call on speaker.

“Go,” he said.

“I’m at the car stop scene,” said Spencer, the former Washington police detective who now headed the DMS forensics unit. “I went over the two vehicles used to box Joe. They’ve been wiped pretty clean.”

“So we have nothing?”

“Did I say that?” asked Spencer with asperity. He was a gruff and unsociable man most of the time, and this morning was even more irritable for having a hangover. He’d been at Dr. Sanchez’s bachelor party, too. “I said it was wiped pretty clean, but nobody wipes down every single inch.”

Church waited for the details, choosing not to provoke Spencer by prodding him.

“I pulled two prints off the underside of the gas-cap release, flash-scanned them and ran ’em through MindReader. Got an instant hit. Prints belong to a Thomas Erb. Former Marine Force Recon. Did a two-year knock for giving a Taliban drug convoy a free pass. Got out twenty-two months ago and has been working for Blue Diamond Security ever since.”

“Blue Diamond,” mused Church. “Now isn’t that interesting.”

“I matched his prison ID to the phony credentials Joe got and it matches one of the guys.”

“That’s excellent work—”

“I’m not done. You want all of this or should I just go f*ck myself?”

“Of course,” said Church carefully, “please share whatever you have.”

“MindReader pulled his tax returns for me, and he draws his paycheck from a local Blue Diamond office here in Baltimore. Payroll for that shop says there are twenty-four active operatives. Bug hacked their database for me and pulled up the IDs of the others. We pinged the others Joe danced with.”

There was a long silence.

Then Spencer said, “You going to say anything or do I just stand here with my dick in my hand.”

“Excellent work, Detective. I’ll roll Echo Team on the Blue Diamond office.”

“Sure, fine, whatever.”

Spencer disconnected the call. Church punched the in-house line for Gus Dietrich.





Interlude Two

People’s Liberation Army Navy Secure Base

Changxing Island

Yangtze River Delta, China

Twenty-nine hours ago

The craft was there, right in front of him. Sleek, dark, massive, and absolutely immobile.

Admiral Xiè bent down, his knees creaking under his ponderous weight, as he attempted to peer under the craft.

“So!” he breathed in wonder and delight. There was an unobstructed view all the way to the far side of the bay. The only limit to visibility was a very faint distortion, like a heat shimmer. Otherwise, nothing. No wheels, no support framework, no landing struts. Merely a faintness of disturbed air. Xiè held out a hand to his aide, who helped him up.

To his left, six officers in crisp uniforms stood to attention. Caps perfectly squared, pressed trouser seams as straight as sword blades, eyes staring into the middle distance with equal discipline and affected obliviousness to everything around them. Xiè would expect the same expressions if fire imps appeared or if orangutans appeared out of nowhere and began copulating on the floor. These men were the very cream of the People’s Army. None of them wore a name tag, unit patch, medals, or other identifying insignia except a single number stitched onto the front of their hats and the sleeves of their left arms. They were known only by these numbers. Even Xiè did not know their names offhand. He would have to access classified documents and open sealed files.

And it did not matter. These men were never going to rise further within the People’s Liberation Army Navy than they were now, and they were never going to find comfortable seats in any history books. They had signed away those rights, and all others, in exchange for the honor of being part of this project. And, Xiè mused, for some financial considerations for families they would never again see.

Xiè turned to the six officers and they immediately saluted. He returned their salute and walked over to them with his aides in tow. Even when he tried to make direct eye contact with them, the men stared into nothing.

Very good, he thought. Like machines.

For Xiè, the measure of military discipline was how well an individual or group of soldiers acted like parts in a greater machine. Well oiled, perfectly designed, carefully maintained. To think of these men as men would be to invite empathy and compassion, and that was a short path to weakness and self-doubt. These were parts to be added or replaced as needed. That these particular parts were of the highest standard merely meant that the machine could run at a new level of productivity. And how lovely a thing was that?

After a few long moments of study, Xiè turned to his chief aide. “Now,” he said.

The aide barked a terse order and the six men turned smartly and began trotting in unison along a metal catwalk, heading for the nose of the craft. If “nose” could even apply to so improbable a design. The front of the craft was whichever direction it was pointed. The cockpit, as such, was in the center—six sunken chairs arranged in a ring, facing out toward a larger circle of curved screens that allowed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree exterior view. Additional screens above and below them combined to create a nearly perfect spherical view, and the cockpit was positioned on gimbals to allow it to turn in any direction. The design philosophy was lovely, elegant, and limited only by the fact that pilots—even top fighter pilots like these six—were never truly adapted to spherical thinking. Ten years in zero-gravity flight simulators, however, had pushed them far out onto the edge. Perhaps the next generation of pilots, the ones raised in a world where this craft was part of everyday reality, would be better suited. That jump in perception and mental processing would come. Everything comes in time.

As the pilots reached the end of the catwalk, a panel slid open on the side of the craft and a short boarding ramp extended. The pilots entered the ship, the plank retracted, and the door slid shut.

Admiral Xiè moved to the handrail and leaned on it, eyes narrowed to study the craft. So much was riding on this. The seven previous craft, though successful in one way or another, had also been spectacular failures. Whole laboratories had been destroyed, there had been test-firing side effects of catastrophic proportion, the loss of valuable staff, and the waste of so much money. After the first debacle in Tangshan, Hebei, back in 1976, the whole project was nearly scrapped. Back then the creation of the Dragon Engine was deemed a fanciful waste of time and resources. Only the scope of the disaster itself was the thing that saved the project from termination. That one prototype engine had exploded, causing the single largest earthquake of the twentieth century.

That was power.

It demonstrated a potential that was unlike anything previously guessed. If it could be harnessed, there would be none of the suicidal clumsiness of nuclear power, none of the slow process to enrich plutonium. No radiation, no contaminated waste to be hidden somewhere. The Dragon Engine, for all of its terrible destructive force, left no chemical or energetic signature behind. This was the true face of clean energy, and it eliminated the threat of mutually assured destruction, leaving in its place only the destruction of the enemies of the People’s Republic.

It meant that for the first time since the dawn of the age of superpowers, a global war could be fought and won, with a guarantee of life on a living planet afterward.

That kind of power could not be ignored, and so the program continued. So did the disasters. The Kunlun earthquake of 2001, Ruichang earthquake of 2005, and the Sichuan quake of 2008. All failures of prototype Dragon Engines.

Of course, the very fact of that kind of power made everyone in Xiè’s division curious to the point of paranoia. How close were the Americans or the Russians or the British? Was the Haiti earthquake of 2010 a natural disaster, or the spectacular failure of someone else’s own prototype engine? One of Xiè’s spies even worked up a credible paper to suggest that the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 was an early attempt to fire an engine. Xiè believed that report. It fit the estimates of where the Americans were at that time. And it explained why their progress had been stalled for so long after that.

His aide stepped forward to be noticed. When Xiè nodded to him, the aide said, “The pilots report that they are ready, Admiral Xiè.”

“Tell them that they may proceed.”

The aide hesitated. “Admiral Xiè, perhaps you would be more comfortable in the telemetry room?”

That room was in a reinforced bunker on the other side of the island. A quick trip by underground air car. Xiè shook his head.

“We will all witness it from here,” he said.

The aide nodded and stepped back. He, too, was trained not to let his emotions show on his face. Xiè was faintly amused.

The craft remained perfectly still. Although there were lights all around it, there was no glow from its metal skin. The entire ship was coated in nonflective polymers. On a dark night, with the running lights off, the ship would be invisible at a hundred yards. Against a night sky, it would vanish entirely except where it passed across the moon or a star cluster. There were plans in research phase now for the new generation of cloaking technology that had been developed by the Americans. Thousands of tiny cameras on the upper surface of a craft fed real-time images to LED panels on the bottom so that a ground observer would see what he expected to see when he looked up at the sky. The American Locust bomber program was being used to test the latest generation of that technology, and Xiè’s team would have those results and all related science within a few weeks.

That was part of a barter whose specifics had taken many years to work out. The American government was not involved, of course. Xiè dealt with Howard Shelton for such matters. That man—that reptile of a person—was sometimes willing to throw scraps to Xiè and thought that his generosity gave him a clear window into the status of the Dragon Engine project. The view Xiè provided, however, was very much a window display. Shelton had no idea what the true status of this project was. Or so Xiè told himself, hoping that his intelligence was accurate.

As Xiè waited, his eyes flicking over the craft, he tried to discern the exact moment when its main drive systems went online. There was supposed to be absolutely no exterior signature. No heat bloom, no shudder as the engine went from its station-keeping mode to full operation. If there was so much as a tremble, Xiè was going to have someone shot.

After three long minutes, Xiè turned around to glare at one of the scientists.

“Am I to stand here all day?”

“Admiral Xiè,” said the scientist, a sweaty little stick-bug of a man, “if you please.”

He gestured to the ship. Xiè sighed heavily and turned around.

To see nothing.

The ship was gone.

That fast, that silently. Gone.

Xiè’s mouth hung open.

When he could speak, when he could command himself enough to form a thought and put it into words, he stammered, “W—where is it?”

The scientist indicated a large status board mounted high on the wall to the left of the bay. Everyone turned toward it. It showed a satellite image of the Shanghai area, with Chongming at the top and the midstream islands, Changxing Island and Hengsha Island, lower down. There were two red lights glowing on the board. One indicated the laboratory here on Changxing. The other identified the craft. As they watched, the second light moved away from Changxing at incredible speed. It flew high, paralleling the G40 Hushan Expressway toward the mainland. Within seconds it was moving toward the heart of Shanghai. And this, Xiè knew, would be the ultimate test. It was a cloudy night and the sky would be a featureless and uniform black. Even so, Shanghai was the most populous city on Earth, with twenty-three million people, and so many of them with cell phones and cameras. If there was one picture, one clip of video, then the great secret would be out.

The craft kept going.

And going.

As he watched, Xiè thought of who he wished he could tell about this. No, not tell … Xiè thought about whose nose he would like to rub in this. It was easy to conjure an image of the man’s sneering face and superior smile. Shelton, who loved to brag about how far along the M3 Project was … and offer false sympathy for the many setbacks in the Dragon Engine’s development. Xiè would have given much to see Shelton’s face at the precise moment when he discovered the truth.

Well, he mused, now the worm has turned. And in turning, revealed itself to be a dragon.

Xiè was not a man much given to profanity, but there were moments for everything. As he held the image of Shelton in his mind he murmured, “Cào n zzng shíb dài.”

F*ck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation.

Admiral Xiè closed his eyes and took a nice, long, deep breath of perfect contentment.