“The highest-ranking ground forces NCO,” he responded boldly.
“And who is that?” Mardukas asked politely.
“Me. I’m the only member of the ground forces on board. Therefore...” He pointed to the space to the left of the captain’s chair, the place where Kalinin used to stand. “I want to stand there. Is that all right?”
He hadn’t just come up with that on the fly. It’s what he’d planned to do if he decided not to go through with the mutiny.
“Hm... well, I suppose it makes sense,” Mardukas admitted, “but...”
“Why not?” Tessa said. “But we’re a little while yet from our area of operations. You may get rather bored.”
“I don’t mind,” Sousuke told her.
“Go ahead, then. Feel free to leave if you get tired of it.” Her tone was not malicious, but it was overly casual. Normally she would have at least said, “Permission granted,” first.
Sousuke had seen Tessa’s final briefing of the crew, and her manner had changed a bit since then. The sense of grim tragedy was gone, though the emaciated atmosphere remained.
She was neither cheerful nor completely free of her demons, but there was a sort of impudence, a carefree sense about her now. If he had to liken Tessa’s new demeanor to something, it was closest to her manner when gossiping with Mao off-duty: pouting, unhappy, listless... If he asked her about the operation now, she’d probably say, “Do whatever you like” in a dismissive fashion.
For some reason, though, Sousuke couldn’t bring himself to worry, and Mardukas and the rest of the crew seemed to feel the same way. He met the eyes of the navigation officer sitting nearby, and the man just raised an eyebrow slightly before shrugging. It was like he was just saying, Weird, huh?
Sousuke shook his head as if to say, I wouldn’t know, then faced front again in an at-rest posture. He checked Tessa’s current manner out of the corners of his eyes.
“I’m fine,” she whispered, as if reading his intent. “I’m fine now, but what about you?”
“Ah,” he managed at great length. That one word from her hit him harder than anything Mao and Clouseau had said to him that day. A woman far stronger than him had seen through his masculine veneer.
Sousuke was still in at-rest posture and couldn’t move. His hands behind his back brushed against the pistol hidden in his waistband. For the first time in his life, he felt ashamed for carrying a gun.
Large letters were displayed on the screen. Time to area of operations: 21 hours, 12 minutes.
If I lose focus now, he reminded himself, I won’t stand a chance.
21 hours, 11 minutes.
Mao and the others were at an airfield in western Nepal, some eighteen hours after leaving the de Danaan. Time was of the essence, yet they’d already wasted two hours here in this small river valley.
The region was mountainous. The airfield, on the edge of a town called Dipayal, consisted of nothing but a short runway and some small buildings. The airstrip wasn’t even paved. It was accustomed only to receiving small aircraft, so it wasn’t hard to imagine the surprise of the locals when their massive C-17 transport came diving down with an explosive roar.
They had taken their helicopters from the de Danaan to Brunei, then transferred to an allied C-17 transport and sped west, crossing illegally over Cambodia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh with their ECS on full blast.
It was still twelve hundred kilometers from here to the missile base in northeast Afghanistan. They planned to do their last refueling here, as well as taking on a drop unit. The enemy would probably take control of the nuclear missile launch functions within four hours. But none of that felt real here in the hushed, quiet scene that surrounded them, where the air was clear and cold.
The mountains around them were covered with snow, and Mao’s breath came out white. The temperature was a degree or two below freezing, but she was grateful that there wasn’t any wind. Thanks to the field jacket she wore over her AS operator’s uniform, the only part of her that felt the cold was her face.
She was doing equipment checks with the rest of her team next to a run-down prefab warehouse. The local farmers watched them from afar, looking understandably unsettled. “I know I asked you to get us a final restock point... but why here?” she whispered to Lemon, who was with her.
“Sorry, it was the only place I could find,” said Lemon. Normally he might have said something like, “Don’t complain, I only had twelve hours to rig this up,” but he’d been a little bit muted around Mao lately. Lemon had been there when Kurz Weber had died, after all. From what Sousuke had said, it wasn’t his fault by any means, but perhaps he’d still felt like there was something he could have done.
He wouldn’t have known the specific relationship Mao had with Kurz, so the guilt was probably nothing more than “I let your subordinate die,” but...
“It’s okay,” she shrugged while she ran through her submachine gun checklist. “I’m just worried about the rubberneckers. Are the local police cool?”
“They’re on our side... I think,” said Lemon.
“What do you mean, you think?”
“There’s a Chinese man who owes a favor to Mr. Hunter, and that man’s brother owns a trading company with an office here in Nepal, which has a Nepalese government official on the take, and that official’s brother is vice chief of the local police...”
“Right,” said Mao, cutting him off. “Not very reliable, then.”
“It’ll be fine,” Lemon told her. “The closest police station is two hours away by car. We’ll be long gone by the time some hard-nosed detective makes his way here.”
“Assuming it arrives before then,” Mao grumbled. She was talking about the drop unit for her M9.
Mao and Clouseau were both set to drop in the upcoming operation, but the understocked de Danaan had only one drop unit. It hadn’t made it in time for the ocean resupply before they parted ways with Tessa and the others, so a member of an allied logistics unit was going to bring it directly to the airfield. That resupply was running late, which meant they were stuck here. She couldn’t help being upset, but realized she was losing too much of her cool.
Perhaps realizing how unhappy she was, Lemon spoke up hesitantly. “I heard the drop unit was coming from western Bengal, but why would they have M9 equipment there?”
“The Indian Ocean Battle Group was destroyed a year ago, but their warehouse is still around,” she told him. “The survivors from there prepared it.”
“Hmm. Ah... is it here?”
Ten meters from where Mao and Lemon were standing sat Clouseau, who was seated on a rusty metal barrel and using a handheld radio to receive some kind of communique. After a brief exchange, he shouted to the soldiers in the area, “The helicopter will be here in five minutes! Prepare to refuel and load up!”
As his people quickly began making preparations to take in the new stock, Mao got her own equipment together and jogged toward the C-17 transport currently housing her M9. She had to take the M9 out to attach the drop unit to its back.
She boarded the M9 and moved it outside the transport, then knelt it down a little ways away from the runway and waited. The farmers watching from the outskirts of the airfield stared up at her in awe. It’s probably their first time seeing an AS, Mao realized. She zoomed in on the farmers and saw that one of them had a cheap digital camera which he was using to take pictures of her.
“Ah, no pictures. Sorry.” Mao activated her machine’s head-mounted radar. While adjusting the beam’s effect radius and wavelength, she shot out a brief pulse at maximum power. The wavelength was harmless to people, but it would be fatal to consumer electronics. The young man who’d been taking the pictures began messing with the suddenly broken camera in a panic.
“Here it comes,” Clouseau said over the radio.
A transport helicopter arrived over the southern mountains: a CH-53 derivative frequently used in Western nations. It was painted flashily with orange bands over a white background, and the words “HUNTER AIR LINE” were written on the side. It was probably disguised as a civilian airline company cargo carrier.
The turboshaft engine roared out over the previously silent airport. Mao kept the M9 waiting in standby posture and dropped back out of it.
The helicopter circled as it descended slowly, kicking up clouds of sand around them. Before the rotors could even stop spinning, a passenger came out of the machine’s hatch.
It was a slender East Asian woman wearing a beige pantsuit. Mao knew her.
“Wraith?”
Wraith was the intelligence division agent who’d served as backup for Sousuke when he was guarding Chidori Kaname in Tokyo. She was also the one who had recovered the Arbalest’s core unit and delivered the Laevatein, built by Gavin Hunter and the research division, to Sousuke... So while Mao hadn’t had many chances to interact with her, she knew that, like Hunter, Wraith and Sousuke were on the same team. Lemon had said he’d lost track of her during an attack by Leonard on an operation in Moscow, but...
“Wraith!” Lemon called out, running up to the new arrival. He was beaming so brightly at her that Mao thought he might hug her. “Thank goodness you’re safe!” he declared. “How’d you get here?”
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” said Wraith, who seemed far less happy about the reunion than he was. She turned the question back on him without a hint of a smile. “How exactly are you still alive?”
This took the wind right out of Lemon’s sails. “Oh,” he mumbled. “Well, it’s a long story...”
“I’m kidding,” Wraith said. “I’ve been briefed.”
“Oh, I see...”
When Mao approached, Wraith nodded to her as well. “Lieutenant Mao.”
“Glad to see you’re alive and well,” Mao told her.