Subterrene War 03: Chimera (13 page)

“Where?” I asked. “The Royal Army Headquarters?”

She nodded. “Yes. Your passport chits will open your rooms. Fourth floor, rooms four-seven-five and seven-seven. Do you need help with your bags?”

I shook my head, and we sprinted for the elevators, pressing our backs behind a column until the doors opened. Once we entered, Jihoon sighed with relief.

“Why the hell did you blow
my
cover?” he asked.

“I had to do something. We won’t survive long here if we don’t make some friends, and she wouldn’t have believed
I
was military. You, though? You
scream
Army.”

Jihoon noticed something, and I had forgotten that my shirts were on the girl in the taxi. There was no hiding it now. A network of scars covered my shoulders as if both had melted and been reshaped in the form of wax, and I was glad that my back was to the wall so he couldn’t see the damage there, which was worse.

“Torture,” I explained. “Captured by the Burmese when I was about your age. The Burmese are a special bunch. They like to take apart thermal gel grenades and then dab the stuff all over your skin, one droplet at a time.”

“To get you to talk,” Jihoon said.

“To get you to scream. If talking would have kept them from doing
this,
I would have told them anything they wanted to know.”

We slept in the same room, and Jihoon snored on the rack while I stood watch and smoked. You weren’t supposed to, but I doubted with all the riots and an empty hotel that the staff was going to come after me for having a cigarette. My fléchette pistol lay on my lap. It wouldn’t do much good against better-armed assailants, but it comforted me anyway, and despite the noise of glass shattering every once in a while, things had quieted some since our arrival.

Already, fate had crapped on our mission. The realization made me feel everything, so the scars on my back gave more trouble than normal, and my knees ached from the almost two decades of jumping out of planes, and running up and down however many mountains had added up over the course of countless ops. It was good to have help. I’d see if Jihoon could prove himself over the next couple of days, but the real test would be when we saw our first action, and with the way I felt, all that mattered was that he proved as good at killing as he was at thinking. Killing wouldn’t be a problem for him; you could smell it. I guessed that years connected to a semi, murdering simulated but realistic opponents would have desensitized him by now, made him as clinical about taking life as he was about the calculus of politics. It would all start in the morning. The next day, when the sun rose, we’d have to risk the streets and make our way to the Royal Thai Army Headquarters and then talk our way inside to meet with
American advisers, and the thought made my muscles ache. When I finished my cigarette, I risked peeking out from behind the thick drapes.

A tank sat outside the hotel. The sight didn’t make me feel any better, though, because my mind clicked over the reasons for having one at that particular location and told me that it was the wrong place—no intersection, no important strategic or tactical assets, no important political infrastructure I knew of, and the banks were farther down the street. One of its crew lounged outside the hatch, leaning against the vehicle’s massive turret, and I saw the red glow of a cigarette until he flicked it away, where it spun in the dim light to hit the ground in a shower of sparks. He looked up. Although I couldn’t see well in the dim streetlights, it seemed like he stared at our window and saw through the crack to fix my position, then climbed the turret, lowering himself inside to seal the hatch.

I’m inventing trouble,
I decided and shut the drapes. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet or vision hood, and in the darkness of my room, there would have been no way for the guy to see me, but still it was odd that they were there in the first place.

With nothing to do and not wanting to turn on the holo for fear that its glow would let everyone outside know which window to take potshots at, my thoughts turned to Phillip. For now I had no way of knowing if the higher-ups had gotten my voice mail or, if they had, that they had taken it seriously and would release him from Annapolis. Even if they did, what then? He’d still be in their care, and there was no guarantee that they’d let him go once we’d finished the op because now, technically, the state owned him. All it took was one parent. By signing him off, Bea
had given up all our rights and then booked it herself to some dump like the one in Jebson, hoping for a bigger paycheck and nine months of the high life until she had to hand over her next kid. Bea was younger than me and could handle the breeders for a few years, but the anger toward her grew until I found myself hoping that one day I’d run across her—drugged up on happy pills. Oblivious.
She’d given over Phillip, and why do I even care?
was all I thought about until, without warning, a loud
wumph
blasted through the street, shattering our window and triggering alarms throughout the hotel.

I hit the deck. Jihoon jumped from the rack and crawled over to me, his voice hoarse.

“What the fuck was that?”

A second later we heard a distant explosion, and I shook my head. “A tank. It just fired a plasma round.”

“Here?” he asked. “In the city? At their own people?”

I nodded, lighting another cigarette. “Get some sleep, Chong. Because tomorrow is going to be a wonderful day. Welcome to southeast Asia.”

W
e’d have to cover more than five klicks to Army headquarters, all of it urban through neighborhoods I barely remembered and Jihoon had never seen. The hotel staff tried to show us on the map. After a mixture of conversations in Thai, English, and hand gestures, I gave up and grabbed Ji’s encrypted phone, punching in the numbers so hard that it almost flew from my hands. It took a few seconds to connect to the voice mail.

“Your coms plan sucks. We’re at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok and need transport to the Royal Army HQ, in addition to combat suits. Ship them to our advisers here. Make sure to send my custom one and Jihoon’s size is… hold on…” I paused to hand the phone to Jihoon, who read out his specifications and then handed the phone back. “We need them yesterday. Also, we need priority use of any of our American assets here, so make sure you let our guys know that whatever we need, we get.”

I finished by giving the code for my new identity so they wouldn’t send it to Stan Resnick, hung up, and Jihoon raised his eyebrows. “What’s the plan?”

“We wait. If nobody comes for us by noon, we might risk it.”

The concierge shook his head. “Do not try on your own. If the protesters catch foreigners, anything could happen.”

“What are they protesting?” Ji asked.

“Some protest against the King and Prime Minister Anupong, who they call dictators, and some of the immigrants would welcome the Chinese as liberators; they want the government to surrender to Burmese forces before an invasion so the city isn’t destroyed by war. Last night, the tank you heard fired on a group of them and killed many innocent people. You stay in the hotel. The Army will protect the hotel because we pay them to, but out there? Anything.”

I glanced at my watch. It was 8:00 a.m., and already the heat had become unbearable, but we’d asked and were told that the hotel now ran on generators and couldn’t spare power for climate control—not when most windows facing the street had been blown out. I crept up to the lobby front, and my shoes crunched on broken glass, a sound almost lost amid the shouts and distant rattle of fléchettes, but it reminded me of bones, and I imagined myself crawling over the skeletons of satos, the hundreds that begged for a longer life but for whom I’d shown nothing except a smile. A smile that was genuine. I was beginning to hate Margaret now; she had brought me here, and the insanity of it all made me want to find her more quickly, and it didn’t matter if she was different from the others because her punishment for taking me to my old killing grounds would be the same as it was for her sisters. The heat made it even more unbearable; without
normal skin my back wouldn’t sweat, and without sweat I couldn’t cool. They’d offered me new skin a long time ago and I’d rejected it, but now had second thoughts and couldn’t remember why I’d turned it down. But Margaret would pay for that one too.

From the front windows it became clear that since last night, the Thai Army position outside the hotel had been strengthened, and regular troops in combat suits faced south from behind a wall of sandbags and cars, the tank looming over them. Its turret scanned the street. Every once in a while one of the troops would fire his Maxwell carbine at something, sometimes joined by the rest of them, but I never saw any shots returned. I was about to head back to the concierge when it happened again; the tank fired its plasma cannon, and the drapes billowed around me so that at first I lost track of where I was, my hearing shot almost completely.

I’d been close to tanks before when they fired, but there had always been a helmet, its audio pickups cutting off when outside noise reached a certain level, and without protection the experience frightened me. The suits confined, but they also insulated and cradled their occupants in a measure of safety.
Who could know war from inside a cocoon?
I thought and then realized that someone was dragging me by the foot away from the window, and I reached for the tattered drapes, wanting to stay, needing to experience war unfiltered.

Jihoon slapped me lightly, and my hearing returned. “You.” I pointed at the concierge. “You bribed the military to protect this place?”

“Not me. Owner. He take care of it.”

“How much you think it would take to get the soldiers
outside to take us to Army HQ?” The man cocked his head and looked at me like I was crazy.

“Money,” I said, holding up my credit chit. “How many bhat to have them take us to their headquarters?”

“I don’t know. Ten thousand, maybe fifteen.”

“Would you negotiate it for us?” I asked.

The man’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head. “No.”

“I’ll give you five thousand. Five thousand bhat if you do this for us.”

Jihoon grabbed my arm. “Bug, I don’t think—”

“That will buy a lot of food,” I said, cutting Ji off. “A lot.”

The concierge thought about it for a few seconds and then nodded. “OK. Deal.” He moved toward the front lobby, grabbing a white napkin from under his desk, and then thrust it through the empty door frames, which the day before had been a glittering crystal. He stepped out. We lost sight until Jihoon and I slithered back to the window and raised ourselves slowly, peering over the sill and into the street.

The concierge was already talking to someone, a sergeant who had removed his helmet as the two sat with their backs against sandbags. The sergeant pulled something from his belt. At first I couldn’t tell what it was but then saw our guy stick his finger in for a DNA test, and the next thing we knew, the sergeant had punched him across the jaw, his gauntlet making a cracking noise and sending a spray of blood into the air. The sergeant scrambled for his carbine then and killed the concierge with a quick burst before shouting to his men.

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“Shit. They’re coming in. To search the hotel.”

“Time to go.”

We scrambled back toward the elevators behind us and were about to stand and run for it when the Thais crashed through the front doors, screaming over their helmet speakers. Jihoon and I stopped.

“Raise your hands,” said Ji.

I did it and turned to face them. The rest of the hotel staff who had been in the lobby stood still, like us, all of them looking terrified in the face of what had just turned into deadly uncertainty. We waited. Finally the sergeant came in and surveyed the interior until his vision slot pointed in our direction.

“Can you hear if he’s saying anything?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I can’t make it out. It’s too muffled by the helmet and isn’t coming over his speakers.”

But we didn’t have to wait long. The man walked toward us, his soldiers keeping us covered, and he stuck out the analyzer toward Jihoon, who inserted his finger. Then it was my turn. When he was finished, he took off his helmet, and I thought we’d had it, that the next thing we’d feel would be the hard impact of fléchettes and then nothing, but instead, the sergeant grinned and began jabbering in Thai.

“What’s he saying?”

Ji started to smile. “He’s saying something like ‘these are the ones we were supposed to look out for, the two Americans,’ and he’s telling the others to complete a sweep of the hotel.”

The sergeant, still talking a mile a minute, gestured toward the street with his carbine.

“He’s saying we should follow him and that he’ll get us to Army headquarters within half an hour.”

“Jesus.” I shook my head. “That phone message moved faster than I thought.”

Once we got outside, Jihoon interrupted the man and pointed at the dead concierge; after a back and forth, Ji turned.

“I asked him why he wasted our guy, and the sergeant claims he was antigovernment. One of a hundred half-Burmese Thais who’ve caused trouble for them over the last year, and they’d been looking for him for a long time. Apparently they keep a list of potential infiltrators.”