Warriors (19 page)

It was a place where evil felt at home.

Two women, both exotically beautiful, but one a decade older, stood outside the two-story Victorian aviary and watched the horror unfolding within. The complex iron lacework structure was beautiful, finely wrought in the shape of a cathedral dome, designed by the Bishop of Ely, who had built this place nearly two hundred years earlier.

The women were bathed in the cold blue artificial moonlight pouring down from the floodlights mounted high up inside the cage. Six large round lamps mounted inside the dome of the aviary and illuminating the nightmare below. A cold, dry wind blew hard from out of the east. Dark, snow-laden clouds scudded past the moon, touching the fields and barren black forests below.

“What do you think?” Chyna Moon, the elder of the two said.

“He’s had enough, I should think. Let him out, poor sod.”

“No. He has not. He’ll talk if it kills him. He’s betrayed us! The professor here’s been working the other side for years. My father sent me a shot of him sitting on a goddamn bench with some Six agent, a man in Berkeley Square. Doing a pass. My father demands the bloody name of that agent, and I will have it from his mouth or seal it forever.”

“God, stop the birds then, Chyna. Look! They’re going for his tongue now . . . there’s one trying to get inside his mouth!”

“Christ, you’re right, he’s down . . . giving up,” she said, unbolting the ornately carved cast iron door and darting inside. She knew she’d extracted just about every syllable of information she was going to get from the old traitor. But he had one more name, she knew it. And she wanted to hear it before he died.

She carried a thick canvas tarp, stiff with blood, with a weighted edge like a fishing net. She shooed the birds away, then flung the tarp out in a perfect arc. It landed atop of the victim, covering his body completely.

The birds were not done. One of the nightmares dove at the tarp, letting out a piercing scream of ravenous appetite and furious frustration.

The older woman stepped between the bird and covered victim. She wore a sterling whistle hung round her neck. Now she put it to her lips and blew. The pitch was well above the range of human hearing, but it was certainly effective enough for her pets. Miraculously, all the whirling birds seemed to halt in midair, retreating in an instant, darting above, finding perches high in the leafless arms of the great trees that grew inside.

The ravens became perfectly still.

Their black eyes glinted malevolently. They were only waiting for a signal. A second sound from the whistle meant resume attack.

“Ravens, vultures, and crows,” Lorelei Li whispered as if mesmerized. “Ravens, vultures, and crows . . . ravens, vultures, and crows . . .”

“Stop chanting! Come and help me, girl, will you!” the older woman cried. She had one arm around the old man, trying to drag him out with the cover still protecting him. He wasn’t helping, too weak from loss of blood. “He’s too bloody heavy, damn you. Get in here!”

The younger, arguably the prettier, one slipped inside. Together they dragged him outside and laid him down. The older one knelt on the frozen ground near his head, bent over him, caressing him gently.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me who you met with on that bench in Berkeley Square. Give me his name! All these years, asking me your innocent questions about my family in China. About my father. All about my father! Why? For money? Silly old fool, look what it’s cost you. You’ve got me to deal with now . . . and I know you’ll believe me when I say I can be vastly more unpleasant than your little friends at MI6.”

“Kill me,” the old soul whispered in a ragged croak.

“Not just yet . . .”

THE TWO WOMEN STRUGGLED WITH
the old man going down the steep, twisting stone staircase that led to the cellars. When they reached the bottom, they lit some of the torches that stretched off into the darkness, bolted to the stone walls with ancient iron brackets. The old man was unconscious again, sagging between them. His feet bumped along on the cobbled stone as they took him to meet his fate.

It was a large stone room and the site of many evils over the centuries. Tears of water seeped from the stone above and fell upon their heads. At the far end stood a heavy wooden structure. It had served as a gibbet at one time, a guillotine later on. It now served as something far worse.

Steps led up to a wide square platform of white tile with stainless steel gutters on all four sides. It was those awful gutters, actually, that made the trembling, half-blind, half-mad victim’s skin crawl.

Where once a noose had waited, there now waited the current executioner’s recently installed machine of death. A gleaming, razor-meshed contraption in the shape of a large bag hung from an overhead beam. Dating to the Tang dynasty, the hideous device was called Qian Dao, the “Shining Basket.”

It was a torture even more terrible than the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

OUTSIDE IN THE FORECOURT, IT
had begun to snow.

Really snow.

“I got the name I wanted,” Chyna said. “The man photographed in Berkeley Square. He whispered it to me just before I let the bag drop.”

“Who is it? What name did he say?”

“Hawke. Alex Hawke. That bastard.”

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes. I know him, all right. Lord Alexander Hawke. Ex–Royal Navy, now MI6 intelligence officer. He’s been a thorn in our side for as long as I can remember. Years ago, my father had had enough and sent my older sister Jet to Cannes to kill him. She fucked him instead.”

“Why?”

“Simple. Because he’s the most attractive man you’ll ever meet. And charming. And rich as the gods. He treated Jet like a common whore and disposed of her like a soiled tissue. And, later, he got my other sister killed for her troubles. My father and my sister Jet loathe this man. Wait till I give them this little piece of information.”

“I’d like the chance to meet this Alex Hawke before you do anything drastic, Chyna. Okay? Just once. I promise.”

Chyna frowned. “You little slut.”

“What of it? You ought to know me by now. I’m the kind of woman who can fuck a man
and
kill him.”

THE TWO WOMEN LOADED THE
almost weightless corpse into the boot of the old silver Rolls-Royce, slammed the lid, and climbed inside. There was little blood spatter in the boot. The victim had bled out suspended above a rain barrel in the Shining Basket. Now he was wrapped inside the canvas tarp.

“Where do we take him?” the younger one asked.

“Cambridge.”

“Cambridge? You’re bloody joking.”

“On the contrary. I know a spot. A secret place, actually. No one has set foot inside its walls in a decade or more. It’s perfect. Besides, look out there. It looks like quite a snowstorm. And snow covers any number of dreadful sins.”

C
H A P T E R
  2 4

T
he central companionway was wide and mostly featureless save for the miles of tubing and conduit. At least forty feet in diameter, it seemed to be little more than an oval stainless steel tube with a flat, honeycombed deck that ran the length of the vessel. Missiles forward, reactors aft, he knew that. But, Taylor wondered with mounting curiosity, where the hell were the crew quarters?

A sub this size would carry a complement of at least 150 souls. So where was the damn head? The wardrooms? Where was the galley? Where were the pots, the pans, the dishes, and the damned garbage? And, most curious of all, where in God’s name was the sub’s control room?

“Skipper, hold up,” a young crewman said in his earphones. “It’s Sparky, sir. I got something back here. Almost missed it.”

“What have you got, Sparky?” Taylor called back.

“Recessed panel in the bulkhead, sir. Large enough to be a hatch.”

“Open it,” Taylor said, making his way back.

“Can’t, sir. Look. No handle, nothing.”

“Gotta be a way . . . wait, a keypad.”

Taylor looked at the thin outline carved into the bulkhead. About seven feet high by four feet wide. Definitely a hatch into a room of some kind. He leaned forward and peered closely at the keypad. There was something else above it. In the low NVG light, he’d almost missed it.

“Okay, here we go, gentlemen. Small brass construction nameplate screwed into the bulkhead. And with some kind of writing below . . . looks . . . yeah, it’s Chinese . . .”

“A giant Chinese sub with almost forty nuclear warheads just outside U.S. territorial waters?” Sparky said. “Holy shit, where’s Wolf Blitzer when you need him?”

“Yeah. This vessel is Chinese, all right. Wouldn’t you just know it? Seaman Ka-Ching, get up here now, I need a translator.”

An athletic young seaman in heavy black glasses came forward, stood on tiptoes, and peered at the small steel plate for a second or two.

“Bingo,” the sailor said.

“What’s it say, Ka-Ching?”

“Here at the top it says ‘Gaius Augustus’ . . . gotta be the name of the vessel. Weird, right? A Roman name? I think, anyway. Well, and then, right below that, ‘First Centurion of Rome.’ ”

“What’s this bit at the bottom?” Taylor asked.

“Down here at the bottom it says, ‘Control Room/Sonar. No entry.’ ”

“No entry? A control room you can’t enter?”

“That’s what it says, Skipper.”

“Well, guess what. We’re entering it. Ordnance, gimme a thin line of C-4 around the edges. Blow it. Rest of you guys come with me out of harm’s way.”

They moved along the corridor to get away from the blast and Taylor got on the radio to Stubbs, whose detail was doing the bow recon. “We got a control room back here, Stubbs, but we have to blow the door. Just a heads-up so you don’t shit your Jockeys, Ensign. Stand by . . . okay . . . thirty seconds . . . fuse lit . . . Count it off . . .”

BOOM!

The noise was deafening inside the length of the closed tube. But the door was gone, blown inward. Taylor entered first, sweeping his automatic weapon side to side. Not a soul. He flicked on his helmet LED light as did the others. Shafts of pure white light now crossed and crisscrossed the darkened space.

“Control room, clear!” he said, motioning his detail inside.

It looked like a control room, all right. Extraordinarily high-tech but still recognizable. But the first thing they noticed was that it was a control room with no goddamn place for the captain to sit. Or, they saw looking around, anybody else for that matter. Weird. You spend all day staring at an instrument panel, you need a place to sit!

But there was at least a periscope!

It emerged up out of a well and disappeared through an opening in the overhead. Clearly, there was a deck hatch directly overhead for when the periscope was deployed, but they’d missed it somehow. There were no eyepieces. Clearly, whatever the lens saw was projected directly onto digital displays. But how the hell did you control the thing? How did you steer the
boat
, for God’s sake? Another mystery.

The control room was nothing but an austere space packed to the gunwales with twenty-first-century technology. Racks upon racks of servers obviously capable of feeding data throughout the sub via wired and wireless networks. Large digital monitors, imaging technologies including what looked to be IR camera feeds for night vision, sonar screens for acoustic data, laser-ranger finders, huge bundles of fiber-optic cables snaking across the deck (really odd!) they couldn’t help tripping over.

To port were all the combat and situational awareness systems, hundreds of terabytes of processing power to crunch data during combat and arrive at the most complete picture of the wartime environment. And next to that, a grid showing all forty long-range missiles in their silos, their current status, “Armed,” and the myriad of systems’ readouts that accompanied any complex launch platform.

“I feel like I’m in the middle of a
Matrix
movie,” Sparky said, “just walking around the set looking for my Xbox joystick.”

“Yeah. Not exactly a user-friendly workplace environment, is it, gentlemen?” Taylor said. “All right. We’ve seen it. The weather topside’s not getting any better. We’ll go aft for a quick recon of the stern compartments, verify whether or not there are survivors. And then get the hell off this ghost ship.”

ALL LIEUTENANT TAYLOR AND HIS
men found in the stern were the sub’s nuclear reactors. There were no sealed watertight compartments. No crew quarters, no heads, no messrooms. There were no survivors aboard because there was no place, no room, for survivors to be!

When they’d completed searching every square inch of the vessel, Taylor radioed Stubbs and told him to get his men headed back to the amidships section where they’d entered the sub. On the double. He wanted to get back aboard the motor launch and back to
Dauntless
to inform the captain about everything he’d seen.

He already knew what he was going to say, and he could already hear what the captain would reply. He got the old man on the radio:

“Captain, there are no survivors. Because that vessel out there is the world’s first USV.”

“The first what?” the skipper would say. “No survivors?”

“There is no crew. No provisions for one. She wasn’t built for that.”

“What the hell was she built for?”

“It’s a submersible launch platform, sir. Just massive reactors and forty huge long-range nukes being driven around the world’s oceans by some sub driver-controller in an underground bunker in Beijing.”

“Are you out of your mind, son? What did you call this fat bastard?”

“A USV. I made it up.”

“What’s it stand for?”

“Unmanned submersible vessel.”

“Are you out of your effing mind, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Get your ass back here for debriefing. Now!”

TAYLOR FROZE. THE GODDAMN SUB
had started to
move
!

First he knew in his gut the sub’s silent reactors had come back up online. Then he heard the powerful roar and whir of the massive props at the stern. He felt the ship shudder . . . She was moving forward, gaining momentum . . . and then the unmistakable roar of seawater flooding into the three-foot hole they’d cut in the hull. Mother of God, the dead boat had somehow come back to life; he could feel it, hear it, all around him.