The helicopters pulsed out of the northwest, vibrating across the city. Cam felt the noise in the lumber and glass beneath his boots. Somewhere to his left, he heard the clink of bricks as a dune collapsed.
Cam and Alekseev had been hustling through the mayhem on the west side of the school for most of an hour, risking the penlight after Cam opened his cheek on a jutting length of wood. They’d both fallen several times, bruising their hands and knees. Medrano, alone, was on the north. Obruch had the east and southern sides where their defenses would be the weakest. Nor did they expect much chance to reinforce each other if necessary. The perimeter was too big. Cam had accompanied Alekseev less as a guard than as a student. He might need to know how to wire the plastic explosives himself.
“They’re down,” Cam said as the tremor of the aircraft briefly magnified, then cut off as the helicopters landed at Saint Bernadine. With the change in sound, his pulse deepened, too, finding a familiar calm. Beneath it, he felt a fresh edge of determination that was both welcome and unwanted. The waiting was over.
It won’t take them long to realize no one’s there, he thought. “We’d better start back. Save whatever you have left.”
“Da. I’m done.”
At each place they’d stopped, first Alekseev had shaped the off-white clay. Then he’d eased a thin cylinder into the explosives and set the tiny digital readout near its top. The cylinders were frequency-specific remote control blasting caps. The initiator was an olive drab clamshell like a small lunchbox. Most of it was nothing but battery, a blunt antenna, and shock-absorbent steel. The bottom face held a digital display and a simple twenty-three button keyboard. The first twenty were square. The next three were rectangular and read ARM, CANCEL, and FIRE. It was American gear that Alekseev’s people had scavenged during the first war.
Seeing those words in Alekseev’s hands was strange. Just a day ago, they would have been at each other’s throats. Now they were friends. Cam didn’t like it, but he needed the other man.
As he worked, Alekseev had keyed each blasting cap to one button at frequencies between 1000 and 3000 megahertz. Medrano used 4000 to 5000, Obruch 6000 to 7000. Each of them would be able to detonate the others’ charges if necessary, including Cam, who carried his own initiator. Their best hope of buying time would be to appear as if a significant force had occupied the campus. That meant bombs wherever they couldn’t direct their guns. Most of those charges would be small. Alekseev hadn’t brought as much C-4 as he would like — but they had other surprises.
They also hoped the Chinese would be hamstrung by the fear of damaging their labs and scientists. The Chinese probably didn’t know those people were dead. Alekseev planned to fake a hostage situation. With any luck, they could string out their negotiations until Kendra infected them all.
Deborah flinched but said nothing when the helicopters’ beat reverberated through the tent. Instead, she watched Kendra. Then something pattered against the black plastic sheeting above them. The debris slid down two sides of the tent, stroking it like fingers and odd faces. Was the building itself cracking in the new sound? Did Kendra even notice?
The skinny, bedraggled witch had frozen ten minutes ago. She said nothing. She did nothing. She only stared at the machining atomic force microscope. Deborah was afraid to jostle her, but how long could they just stand here?
The black tent held them like a shroud or a veil. It seemed much smaller than fifteen-by-twenty feet. The walls shone in the halogen lamps, crisscrossed with shadows from the equipment and themselves. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the plastic wasn’t opaque or if they had a radio or someone to talk to on the outside.
Deborah’s shoulder hurt. Her face. Her chest. At least there was water. Medrano had brought two gallon jugs from the labs’ kitchen before he taped the plastic shut, and Deborah used one to wash her own face and neck and Kendra’s bone-tight skin, too, caring for the dull-eyed witch as if she was a young girl or a doll. It seemed to revive her. For a while, Kendra had been sharp, multitasking like a different person altogether. Their first thirty minutes together had been harried and productive as Kendra skimmed through binders and sample cases, snapping over her shoulder at Deborah as she described the Mandarin characters she sought.
They’d found early models of the vaccine. They inserted one substrate after another into the MAFM, Kendra using Deborah as her hands, talking to her, thinking with her. Deborah was impressed by her momentum. Kendra identified the fifth and eighth samples as ideal. Then she’d sketched on the notepad, solidifying her concepts. Deborah thought the drawing looked like a tadpole. It had one long-necked curl above an oval body, meant to swim and hunt, but first Kendra needed to build it and she’d grimaced when two laptops denied her, lacking the necessary passwords. At last she’d accessed the third, mumbling in Chinese with a laugh. That was the first hint something was going wrong. Her movements became stuttered, even manic. She spoke to Deborah again — in the wrong language.
Kendra had brought up twenty files and discarded fifteen more while Deborah struggled to grasp their significance, recognizing nothing. The other woman’s mind simply outpro cessed her own, but it was also fragmenting at that speed. “We can program the MAFM to assemble a bastardized nano from preexisting work,” she’d said. “We’ll save hours. But first I need to… What if we… No.”
Then silence. Kendra stopped. Deborah didn’t know where she’d gone. Each breath felt like pressing on eggshells. Deborah thought she could bring Kendra back with a word or a touch, but what if that was a mistake? She might disrupt whatever calculations were taking place. Above all, it was important not to frighten the ugly witch.
They couldn’t rely on her, and Deborah wondered what Kendra would do when the shooting started.
27
Jia’s Z-9 lifted away from the hospital as he finished his radio call. “Our people at point one were killed by enemy action,” he said through heavy static, glancing at the Elite Forces on either side of him. “I say again, our people at point one were killed by enemy action, over,” Jia said, inciting his men as much as confirming his report. In the faintest green light reflecting from the cockpit instruments, their eyes were beautiful, feral and bright.
The Z-9 was a small-bodied aircraft. Jia had only five soldiers in addition to the pilot and copilot, both of whom were commandos themselves. The other chopper also held eight men. Jia would have preferred an army, and he’d minimized any risk to his troops after their first pass over Saint Bernadine. The evidence had been grotesque even at a distance. Through night-vision goggles, they’d seen liquefied corpses all over the courtyard and an overturned Z-9 in the rubble nearby.
One of the dead had drawn his sidearm. That was enough for Jia. The corpses looked melted, and nobody fought runaway nanotech with a pistol. Qin was right. Impossibly, Qin was right. The Americans had infiltrated far into the Los Angeles basin, surprising the lab personnel. Most likely the Americans were already gone, fleeing with invaluable data and prisoners.
Where? How?
The anger Jia felt was unseemly, directed as his own people as much as the enemy. He could have protected this place if he’d known it was within reach. The men above General Qin had no right to blame him for this loss, but they would. It made him feel ever more attracted to Qin’s cabal.