“Good men get killed doing stupid shit like this,” said Jonah, returning the squeeze. “But maybe a pirate, an anarchist, and their outlaw captain have a chance. Hassan, you have command.”
The doctor nodded in acknowledgement, a strange saddened resolve in his eyes as though this were the last time he might see Jonah. No other words were exchanged between them.
“Approaching position!” Vitaly announced as he suspiciously glanced at Freya and her massive fire axe. Jonah felt the familiar shift beneath his feet as the Scorpion rose through the waters, splitting the waves as she surfaced beside Himura’s sleek superyacht.
Jonah began to climb the ladder. “Come back in one piece!” shouted Alexis from her station, her voice fading below him. “Or at least one big piece and maybe some smaller pieces you won’t miss if Hassan can’t reattach them.”
The hatch popped open with a hiss, freezing night air snatching Jonah’s breath from his lungs. The darkness was all consuming, illuminated only by the haze of the burning city in the distance. The Scorpion kept pace with its quarry at a frightening velocity, paralleling the railing of the yacht’s starboard forequarter. A slight flurry of snow danced around Jonah as Dalmar and Freya emerged from the hatch beside him, a single flake landing on the side of his cheek. He gently pressed a fingertip against it, but it was hot and gritty, smearing to the touch. The flake wasn’t snow — it was ash.
They were in the wide, flat mouth of the Taedong River now, the speeding vessels slicing through translucent sheets of drifting river ice, swollen, snow-laden banks passing on either side. The smoky haze of the night was illuminated by massive flames, the arcing salvos of artillery fire in the distance.
“Ten seconds!” said Jonah, slinging his submachine gun around his back as he prepared to leap. Neck and neck, the two vessels jockeyed for position like Kentucky thoroughbreds, the Scorpion’s angular bow slipping ahead by a nose before sideswiping the unblemished walls of the superyacht. A groaning, ear-shredding scrape reverberated between the speeding ships, jostling Jonah from his precarious foothold on the lip of the conning tower. Freya hurled her fire axe onto the yacht’s empty helicopter pad with a hammer-throw before leaping across the gap, feet barely touching the yacht’s railing as she deftly landed on the open pad. Dalmar and Jonah jumped after her simultaneously, the pirate landing hard on the deck, while Jonah awkwardly tumbled into a painful heap behind him.
The massive yacht reacted like a thing alive, engines roaring as it twisted away from the Scorpion with erratic precision, throwing Jonah to his knees. Dalmar grabbed Jonah by the loop of his bulletproof vest, dragging him to his feet as hidden illumination flickered to life beneath their feet. The length of the bow erupted with bright security lights like a performance stage — they’d already lost the element of surprise.
“We must advance!” shouted Dalmar. “There is no cover!”
No sooner had he spoken than a trio of recessed panels slid open along the bridge tower. Long, cruel barrels emerged from within, erupting with tracer fire. Jonah threw himself behind a heavy anchor winch as bullets split apart the night air, pouring withering automatic fire into the winch and the Scorpion’s exposed conning tower. The submarine’s heavy steel hull could hold against the barrage — but not for long. A massive geyser of water burst upwards from behind the Scorpion’s tailfins as her engines reversed full, propellers biting into the water as the ballast tanks filled, plunging her beneath the yacht’s wake.
Jonah, Dalmar, and Freya were on their own.
Helplessly pinned down, Jonah blind-fired over the top of the winch, his barely-aimed bullets scattering ineffectually across the yacht’s bridge tower. The turrets simultaneously returned fire with quick, staccato bursts. There was no hesitation, no adrenaline-fueled spurts — the turrets were autonomous, activated without the uncertainty of a human hand.
Jonah dared a quarter-second glance around the edge of the winch, pulling his head back as six rounds zinged by. The turrets were each connected to an insectoid-like stalk of multispectral cameras, laser rangefinders, and motion trackers. Exactingly precise, every arcing bullet would be analyzed in real time, adjusted for the sway of the ship, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure. The artificial mind behind the barrel would never get tired, never stop tracking him. It would learn with each shot, becoming only more accurate the longer they were pinned down.
“We should have brought smoke!” shouted Jonah. But even his wishful thinking fell short of a solution; the heat-sensing cameras on the turrets would be able to see right through even the thickest cloud.
Dalmar grimly smiled. “Do you trust me, brother?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Jonah went to grab the pirate’s arm, his fingers slipping before they caught purchase. “Don’t you fucking do it, Dalmar!” he screamed.
But it was too late — Dalmar leapt to his feet with impossible speed, heavy machine gun at his waist as he took aim at the first of the turrets. He pulled the trigger, his opening salvo bursting apart the guns’ insectoid eye stalk. Jonah and Freya sprinted across the helicopter pad towards the bridge tower. She’d hoisted the heavy fire axe high above her head, hurling it one-handed like a tomahawk toward the second turret, the axe blade smashing into the turret’s control unit.
Dalmar had only made it a quarter of the way before the final turret opened up, a long arc of bullets tracing their way across the open deck. He twisted to the left, but not fast enough. Dalmar crumpled as bullets ripped through his thigh and abdomen, throwing him over the railing like an oversized rag doll before he disappeared into the freezing waters below.
“Dalmar — no!” screamed Jonah, his heart in his throat as he charged. The turret swiveled back towards him just as he and Freya slid into a covered entryway beneath the muzzle, tumbling across the deck and into an open bulkhead door a heartbeat before the weapon could fire.
Jonah cursed himself for his stupidity. His eyes hadn’t even adjusted to the interior darkness before he felt the cold steel of a pistol barrel pressed against the back of his neck. Doors didn’t open on their own, not for men like him — Himura had allowed them in. There were three men behind Freya as well, wrestling her powerful arms behind her as a fourth yanked a canvas bag over her face and held it tight. Jonah knelt to the floor in impotent silence as she was violently subdued with fists and feet and left facedown and tied, her lungs wheezing through the scratchy fabric.
The lights of the yacht’s interior began to brighten, revealing an immense open chamber running nearly the length of the ship. Steep, glinting aluminum walls rose a stunning sixty feet to meet at the awe-inspiring ceiling apex, forming a perfect triangle. Five black-suited security personnel were behind him, guns raised as rough, unseen hands yanked away his submachine gun and patted him down for other weapons.
Jonah felt chills as he looked down at the chamber’s expansive floor. The bamboo paneling had been retracted, revealing a grotesque, pulsating assemblage of wire-connected organs within glass vessels. The organic mass was surrounded by massive screens across nearly every wall, displaying blossoming, fractalized images of a thousand intercepted camera feeds across North Korea, forming a dreamy montage of chaos and war. A soft, commanding voice echoed from the far end of the chamber, its speaker lost to the darkness.
“Remove your shoes, please.”
Jonah snorted until he almost gagged and spat a foul mixture of blood and snot on the immaculate bamboo. The men behind him shoved him to the ground as a knife blade flashed, slicing through his laces. He stole a backwards glance as his boots were ripped from his feet. Jonah’s eyes went wide with surprise as he took in their wrinkled, deeply lined faces, their close-cropped white hair. There wasn’t a man among them younger than seventy-five.