Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (21 page)

“Fine. Okay.” Brooks lowered her head, fighting not to swear under her breath. “Thank you for telling me, Reynolds. You’re dismissed.”

The woman hesitated, then saluted smartly.

As she turned on her heel to walk away, Brooks called after her, “…Keep me informed if anything new comes to light around it. Anything, Marine.”

The woman saluted her again, clicking her heels that time.

With Reynolds gone, Brooks exhaled more heavily, grinding her teeth as she gripped the balcony railing in both hands, so tightly her knuckles whitened. The teeth grinding was a new habit she’d picked up too, sometime in the last six or so months.

Now she was doing it awake, in addition to while she slept.

Sathorn, a suicide? What next?

She fought to think, staring at the main intelligence board on the far side of the room. The command center stretched into the distance below her, far enough to suffer from mild perspective distortion. It was huge, maybe half the size of a football field with a ceiling that stretched three stories high. Concentric half-rings of monitors filled much of the empty space of the main floor, culminating in a platform stage with a long conference table that seated around thirty people. The table stood directly under a wall-length feed monitor build directly into the wall itself.

That screen currently showed a map of the world.

Smaller screens jutted out of various locations, displaying 3D imagery in more or less real time, via a series of feeds rotating through different satellites, as well as whatever remained of their on-the-ground surveillance. Up on the dais, the screens projected full virtual, three-dimensional environments with a single impulse from Brooks’ implant.

It felt like being in the real place…down to the smell of sweat and blood, urine and smoke, burning bodies and rotting plant matter…and whatever else.

The military bigwigs called the command center “the Arena.”

The name always evoked gladiators in Brooks’ mind, people clawing and fighting one another to the death. Which, come to think of it, was more or less apt.

What remained of her presidency lived here now, deep below what had once been NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. The tunnels had been expanded heavily over the years, something Brooks hadn’t realized until the crisis with C2-77.

The place was a damned city of its own now, or near enough.

Her eyes focused back on the screens, shifting from one hot spot to the next.

Of course, none of those screens showed images from what had come to be called the “blackout” cities. Their cameras and satellites remained completely inaccessible to anyone inside Brooks’ administration. Brooks had seen the list of those cities so many times now she nearly had it memorized: Dubai. Hong Kong. Singapore. Munich. Buenos Aires. Oslo.

New York…Salt Lake City…Anchorage.

There were others, but those last three stung the most.

Even inside her own country, they’d locked her out.

Brooks clearly hadn’t been invited to the party where they handed out golden tickets. Then again, she hoped they choked on their damned caviar while they watched the world burn from inside their (undoubtedly) gilded cages.

So yeah, maybe her lack of an invite wasn’t that surprising.

The military still thought China was behind all of it, of course…including the blackout cities, even those inside the United States. Military Intelligence now had a working theory that China had used the disease along with their financial clout as a double-whammy of colonization and genocide, using seer armies to block off cities for their “friends” and (presumably) to begin the process of colonization after the disease wiped out any resistance.

They thought China had decided to take over the world, in other words.

According to that theory, the disease merely paved the way. It had the added bonus of freeing up natural resources for the eventual mass relocation of Chinese nationals into the newly-depopulated areas. However-many billion Chinese might be crouching behind those walls, waiting for the rest of the world to die, they would have to eat and they would need fresh water and housing and jobs…or so the logic went.

There was only one problem with that scenario.

Brooks didn’t believe it.

If the reports Brooks had been getting via back channels were in any way accurate, the Chinese had wiped out almost two-thirds of their own population in the process. To Brooks, that was a little hard to swallow, no matter how many generals tried to convince her that a) those reports were bogus, or b) the Chinese simply didn’t “value life” like Westerners did.

Again, Brooks had her doubts.

Moreover she’d gotten that back channel intel from sources who’d claimed to be recording events actually
occurring
on mainland China. Many of the seer feeds backed that data up, notably
Drahk,
probably the most reputable of those. Another, slightly more anti-Western feed run by some kind of seer mafia out of Macau said essentially the same thing.

The Chinese were dying in droves according to those sources. Faster than they were in the United States…faster than they were anyplace other than India.

Of course, her intelligence people thought it was all crap.

Fabricated data. Doctored feeds. Propaganda.

“Image captures” created wholesale in virtual studios.

Both her Homeland Security Chief and the head of the CIA argued vehemently that it was all just a smoke screen to fool the world into seeing China as another victim of the disease. They speculated that those false reports would continue until no one remained to fight back.

They claimed further that the satellite blackout over mainland China was proof enough that the Chinese government had engineered the blackouts over individual cities in the rest of the world. They called it “preserving prime real estate” and postulated that the Chinese intended to use surviving locals as cheap labor, slaves to the Chinese Empire that would rise from the ashes.

Since the shields over China seemed heaviest over Tibet, there was some speculation that Lhasa would end up being the new capital for a new China. It made sense, in a perverse sort of way. With the rising water levels, Lhasa would outlast many of the older, coastal cities.

Still, Brooks remained skeptical.

Well, she was until the threat arrived that morning…a threat which seemed to have come directly from Beijing.

Sighing at the reminder, Brooks threaded a few stray chunks of her curly, black-threaded-with-gray hair back into the messy upsweep she’d clipped together earlier. The more formal aspects of her presidential comportment had gone by the wayside in the past months, but she didn’t much care about that, truthfully. She’d tied her hair back casually earlier that day mainly for practical purposes, since she’d been working over the security board with the NSA and CIA analysts and leaders after receiving the threat from Beijing’s acting president, Xiao Ming Fa.

She couldn’t believe Jo Sathorn killed himself.

The shock continued to reverberate through her, making it difficult to think about anything else, even with the bigger issues currently on her plate. Sathorn was an old-school hawk, and racist to the core when it came to seers, but Brooks had at least known where she stood with him. Moreover, she’d trusted him, even when she didn’t agree with him. He had good instincts and didn’t play games…well, other than those that were par for the course in this job. Brooks hadn’t realized how much she’d depended on his blunt advice until about two seconds after that Marine told her he was dead.

Had he cracked up? Not like that should be surprising really, but somehow it was.

He’d seemed so…solid.

Bullet to the brain. Self-inflicted.

And that lizard-faced Justice found him. Novak.

Of all people, that fucking reptile had to be the one to find Jo’s body. Sathorn had made no bones about disliking that old witch, and he wasn’t alone. The three of them, Sathorn, Brooks and her Chief of Staff, Javier Garcia, called Novak “Dr. Mengele” behind her back. Brooks knew they shouldn’t do it, that it would likely get back to Novak at some point, but she couldn’t seem to make herself stop, or make the others cut it out, either.

Hell, they needed to whistle in the dark sometimes, especially now.

Damn Jo all to hell. How could he do this?

How could he do this to
her?

No one in her team could take his place, not even Javier. She’d been just about to go find Jo, for crying out loud…to ask his opinion on this latest move from China. She wanted to talk to more than just the intelligence hawks and paranoid cases before she pulled the trigger on nuking an entire fucking continent. Jo might be a hawk, but he wasn’t rash…or stupid.

She had to make a decision, and soon.

Focusing back on the main screen, Brooks frowned.

The images there were of America, her home…and they were brutal.

She’d seen feed recordings of people––people who might have been “normal” citizens once, sitting in restaurants and sports bars, having barbecues and birthday parties––beating one another with tire irons over cans of worm-ridden dog food.

She’d seen tribal-like conditions run by private armies both in the countryside and the inner cities. Many of those modern-variety warlords and “territory bosses” had probably been career criminals in the past. Others, Brooks suspected, had not been criminals, but perhaps had the types of personalities designed to capitalize on the chaos anyway.

Weapons got stockpiled, of course.

None of that happened equally, either.

Things were most grim for women and children, as was often the case. Brooks struggled to even watch some of those images. They didn’t have the people or the firepower to intervene, not now. Truthfully, Brooks knew it made the most sense at this point to do what she suspected was being done in China and the other surviving cities, including the blackout zones.

Meaning, simply wait out the disease. Let it kill off those it was going to kill before attempting to pull the civilization back together.

Sighing again, Brooks gripped the metal balcony in front of her, rocking on her low pumps as she stared down at that row of screens.

She had to make a decision.

She had to do it soon.

If she didn’t, there might be nothing of her country and people left to save.

8

GOING OUT WITH A BANG

“Nuclear?” I stared at Wreg, feeling something in my gut clench. I looked at Yumi, realizing this information had to come from her people. “You’re sure?”

Yumi was looking at my clothes though.

I fought to ignore her stare.

It’d been a few days now, and I knew they’d all heard what happened with Chandre up on that wall. They also knew Revik hadn’t thrown me out, although some probably thought he should have. I could tell a fair few at least thought he’d let me off easy. I’d overheard whispers of theories on that, too, including guilt around his own infidelities.

Truthfully, I didn’t much care about any of that. It struck me as trivial now.

That being said, I couldn’t focus on what Yumi had just told me, either. Not now. Not tonight. I couldn’t think about this now. This would have to wait.

Until tomorrow at least.

As I thought it, I made a dismissive gesture with one hand.