Subterrene War 03: Chimera (14 page)

“Oh?” I spat on the corpse and grinned at the sergeant while we climbed onto the back of his tank. “That’s just fine by me.”

Tanks and APCs filled the Royal Army’s parade ground, and men assembled in any empty space, getting ready for what I assumed would be a push through the city to wipe out remaining signs of protest. How many towns and villages in the bush were being leveled? And how had I returned to this place? Now that we were in the open again, my nose picked out the scent of clay over alcohol fuel, and my skin tingled with a suspicion that the jungle was arranging things behind the scenes, the ancestors of Thailand and Burma moving pieces on a chessboard because they’d allied to lure me back under the canopy and into the banyan roots where the air was still and damp. I hated the jungle. In comparison, Kazakhstan and all the ’Stans had been a pleasure, where any number of systems could be brought to bear and line of sight stretched to the horizon in places, but here the jungle swallowed you whole and cut you off; there would be no autodrones if you wrapped yourself with the bad bush, no microbots, and movement and heat from any number of
animals would ping suit sensors to the point where it was best to ignore them. The jungle promised two things to those who stayed too long: solitude and decay.

We jumped off the tank, and the sergeant waved for us to follow him through massing troops, where some soldiers stopped and stared at the unusual parade of two Westerners in casual clothes. Some chuckled. They probably assumed that we’d been brought there for questioning, but Jihoon must have caught wind of whatever they were saying because he dropped back and whispered.

“They’re making jokes,” he said.

“About what?”

“Something about how you look like a crazy man.”

I looked straight ahead and kept pace with the sergeant until one of the soldiers nearby smiled at me, nodding as he laughed.

“Shove your head up your slimy Thai ass,” I said, hoping he’d understand. But the guy just kept nodding and gave me the thumbs-up.

“Number one!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Number one, asshole. Burma number ten.”

We climbed the steps to the main entrance, two at a time, and the heat made my shirt a sopping mass so that when we entered the HQ’s air-conditioned space it was as though we’d stepped into a refrigerator, and I breathed the cool air deeply. Dry air. The contrast almost made me giggle since we’d spent most of the previous night and this morning in Bangkok’s humidity, which never moved and felt like a warm bath. Jihoon looked at me and grinned, and I almost grinned back until the sergeant showed us where we were heading.

He stopped at a staircase and spoke with two guards, who then performed another ID scan on both of us.

“They show you the way to your advisers,” the sergeant said and pointed down the narrow stairs.

“Down there?” I asked, and he nodded.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“What’s wrong with downstairs?” Jihoon asked.

I shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just great.”

“You no worry,” said the sergeant. “We have no floods down there in a long time.”

The thought made my skin crawl. “Floods?”

He thought for a second and then spat something in Thai so Ji could translate.

“He said that sometimes their pumps go out, and because the water table is so high, the tunnels flood, but that there’s been no problem like that for a while.”

“What happens if you’re down there when the pumps go out?” I asked.

Jihoon spoke with the sergeant again, who shook his head. “He said that it’s better if that doesn’t happen.”

The sergeant waved good-bye then and walked off. One of the guards ushered us toward the steps, pointing that we should go down as he spoke.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

Jihoon shrugged. “We take the stairs down for a bit, then transfer to an elevator. There’s a subway that will connect us to the Supreme Armed Forces HQ a few klicks north.”

“After you.”

Ji started downward and I followed, my stomach feeling sick. The staircase was narrow, and we twisted around at multiple landings until the effect—combined with the
sensation that the walls were pressing in on my shoulders—made me dizzy with the effort of forcing myself onward. Finally the stairs opened into a medium-sized room, where pipes and electrical conduits covered every side except for one, in which an open elevator door waited. We stepped in. A moment later the floor dropped from under us and the box sped downward, shaking as it plummeted so that I grabbed a railing to hold on.

“Are you OK, Bug?” asked Ji.

“Screw you.”

“There’s medication if closed spaces get to you, you know. I don’t know how you manage a combat suit if an elevator gets to you this badly.”

“I said,
shut up.
”

The elevator opened onto a small platform where a series of three subway cars sat, their sliding doors ajar, and we stepped into the first one, waiting for the thing to move. It took about a minute. The cars sped down a cylindrical tube, which was lit by the single light at the car’s front, and the sight reminded me of the short time I’d spent at the front in Kazakhstan after the Russian retreat, to search alone through empty positions in tunnels filled with abandoned bodies. Man wasn’t designed for those places. But we
had
been designed for war, becoming so proficient that our weapons drove us into living graves, places that even moles and snakes avoided, because to stay in the sun meant certain death. But the memory faded when the subway cars stopped. A young Thai soldier in cotton fatigues greeted us and escorted us up the elevator and stairs into a command bunker filled with the chatter of tactics and strategy.
Somewhere,
I thought,
in this bunker is one of death’s friends, sending the youth of
Thailand into a nightmare.
Or maybe death had more than one friend. We saw a group of Western men in Thai combat suits; their helmets were off, and ironically, the lack of any emblems or rank insignia made it clear that they were experts in the art of modern killing, American advisers instructing their Thai counterparts on how to fight like the mole men we had all become. Maybe, I thought, the jungle had lost its grip on man, and maybe now we fought below the tree roots, under the countless bodies we had killed in the century before, and I didn’t know which method was more horrifying.

Our escort whispered to one of the advisers, and he approached us, shaking our hands to introduce himself as Colonel O’Steen. “We only got word this morning that you two were in country. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Sir,” said Ji, “we’re sorry, but it’s classified.”

“We’re here for a girl,” I said, and Jihoon frowned, probably pissed that I was about to give up something classified again. “A sato. It’s a cleanup mission, sir, and I apologize. It
is
classified, but you should know what’s going on in your area of responsibility. And we’ll need your help. We’re to find this girl, interrogate, and then discharge her.”

The colonel shook his head and grinned. “Christ. It’s not enough that I have to somehow make sure our interests in Thailand don’t fall apart, but now I have to worry about two assassins running around Bangkok? SOCOM wants me to give you whatever resources I have available so you can go after one
sato
?”

“Sir, I’m sorry.”

The colonel crossed his arms, their ceramic plates squeaking as they rubbed against each other. “Who is it?”

“She’s named Margaret. We can give you the serial number if it would help.”

O’Steen looked like I had just slapped him. His face went red, and he glanced around to see if anyone else had overheard. “Jesus. You two do understand that genetics have been given asylum here, right?”

I nodded. “I’ve never understood why, sir, but yes.”

“Then I’ll give you an education. The first satos wound up here halfway through the Subterrene War, and Thai officials took a couple of weeks studying them, watching as the chicks putrified. Thailand’s laws about genetic manipulation are some of the strictest in the world; natural births, and only those over a certain age are allowed genetic therapy; deformed and disabled kids are allowed to live. So once they saw what we had done in creating satos and the effects of our two-year safeguards, the prime minister took pity on the girls and—with the approval of the King himself—put his best scientists on the job of saving any who floated into their ports. And they came.
Jesus,
did they come. The Thais lost the first hundred or so on operating tables, but they figured it out and were able to deactivate the immuno safeguards—repair much of the damage that had been done to the girls’ organs. They even restored their reproduction to normal.”

“How?” I asked, keeping my fingers crossed that this guy already knew; maybe we wouldn’t have to interrogate Margaret at all.

“Hell if I know. They have some genius Japanese geneticists, and whatever they did, it’s now a state secret. But the girls in return pledged their loyalty to the King. Do you know what that means, Lieutenant?” I shook my head, and he continued, “It means that the girls began
training his forces. They became trusted advisers—so trusted that a group of satos is now the King’s personal bodyguard. Hell. Do you think the Thais even need
me
when they have their own contingent of genetic troops ready to die for the guy if he orders it? These girls know more about tactics and strategy than I could hope to learn if I studied my entire life. They don’t need me here.”

“Then why
are
you here?” Ji asked.

“Window dressing. The Thais know they can’t get rid of the US completely because they need our equipment, and the Royal Army despises the girls since they compete with the generals’ access to the King, so the Thai generals want us to stick around too. But any time we try to discuss satos, they make it crystal clear: we wanna run an occasional cleanup operation, fine, but only once in a while. And nobody goes after the head sato.”

I had already started getting a bad feeling but had to ask. “Who is that?”

The colonel laughed. “Margaret. Only she’s not just a leader, she’s some kind of religious icon, a prophet and disciple of the holiest girl they know, some chick called Catherine, who died so Margaret could survive. I don’t know all the details. All I know is that you can’t touch her and that even some of the local civilian population and all the Japanese immigrants follow the chick; they converted from Buddhism or Shinto to some kind of freakish version of Christianity, and you can’t miss them if you see them. They call themselves the
Gra Jaai
. The ‘dispersed.’ ”

A great mission,
I thought,
one that keeps getting better the more we learn.
“Can we at least talk to her if we promise not to wipe her?”

The colonel thought for a moment and then turned.
“Wait here.” He went to a Thai general and saluted before the two began talking, at which point the general looked shocked and glanced at us; his face twisted in an expression of anger, glaring at me as though we’d been enemies from birth. The conversation got intense then, with O’Steen bowing every ten seconds, until he returned and sighed.

“It’s your ass if you do this, you know.”

Ji nodded. “He’ll let us see Margaret?”

O’Steen nodded. “Oh yeah. But he’s not doing you a favor. She’s on the front lines at Nu Poe with a mixed force of satos,
Gra Jaai
, and Karen rebels—Burmese mountain people who hate their government even more than we do. Even more than the Thais. And they like the Chinese even less.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Where’s Nu Poe and when do we go?”

“To the northwest of Bangkok on Thailand’s western border with Burma. You leave tomorrow. I got word from the States that your gear arrives tonight, and we’ll equip you with anything else you need from local supplies so you blend in. They won’t spare any air assets to get you there, though. You’ll have to go in by road, and it’s a long, weird trip. Once you arrive, ask for Major Remorro, the senior SOG adviser for line operations, and between now and then I’ll get word to him that you’re expected. In the meantime, I’d go down to Khlong Toei if I were you; it’s one of the slums.”

“Why?”

The colonel waved to someone, who brought us boots and light cotton Thai uniforms with no insignia. When we had finished changing, he handed us pistol belts, and I checked to make sure mine was loaded.

“Because you need a quick education. Khlong Toei is
the black market for people who want genetic alterations or therapy. There’s no better place to get a close-up view of what those girls mean to the Thais.”

“What about the riots and protests?” Jihoon asked. “We saw APCs and tanks getting ready to move out at the Army HQ.”

“Hell,” the colonel said. “The protesters are already dead or on the run, and those forces weren’t mustering to operate in Bangkok. They’re headed to man the second defensive line, behind the sato frontline defenses to the northwest. In case you hadn’t heard, the Chinese are coming.”

I nodded and grabbed O’Steen’s arm before he could leave. “Colonel, have you ever heard of a Samuel Ling, Dr. Chen, or a Project Sunshine?”

He shook his head. “Nope. You want me to ask around?”

“No,” I said, letting go of him. “Probably a good idea if you didn’t. And thanks for the help, sir.”

“Don’t thank me, Lieutenant. You’re on your own starting tomorrow, and by the time you reach the front, you’ll wish we’d never met.”