Heart of Danger (15 page)

And then there was the question of the weird effect she had on him. She was way too beautiful for her own good. Certainly for his own good. Everything about her made him edgy, restless. No
way
was she—

“Fantastic,” Sam blurted out. He grabbed her hand and started running.

Chapter Nine

email from Special Projects Section
Ministry of Science and Technology, Beijing

Operation Warrior

Dr. Lee—We have followed with great disappointment the latest experiment. The People’s Republic is negotiating with the Burundian government for access to their iridium deposits. The rebel Army is active in the area of maximum concentration of the iridium deposits. We were hoping to implement Operation Warrior very soon. The failure of SL-58 means a delay of another six months at least.

In the meantime, Dr. Huang Wu of the ministry has requested funding for large-scale weaponry which includes sonic waves that have been shown to disable humans in experiments conducted on prisoners in Haerbin. Funding has been granted. It has been decided at the highest levels of government that the Red Army will either pursue your protocol of enhanced abilities or a protocol of enhanced weaponry. The decision will be taken in six months’ time, after which no matter what your results, you will not find an infrastructure in place in the military to achieve your project.

Do not disappoint me and the ministry. The People’s Republic is moving inexorably toward its destiny.

Minister Zhang Wei

email from Chao Yu

The Minister is truly angry. Do something fast.

Lee stared at the screen long after the information had been understood. Understood but not absorbed. From childhood he had trained himself to control his emotions but something stirred deep inside him, something that could not be instantly repressed as unproductive.

Rage.

Rage was not productive but it was what he felt behind the barriers he’d erected between himself and the world.

Sonic waves.

He sat, staring ahead, feeling hot surges of shame and anger pulse through him. Sonic waves were
toys
. Weapons out of science fiction comics from the thirties. Mechanical, uninteresting. Once the weapons were used once or twice, the enemy could easily find a way to block the sounds and the vibrations and the People’s Army would be just as exposed as before.

It was unthinkable that the Minister did not understand that. A child could understand it. No, the only possible way to leverage the power of the PLA was to make each soldier as effective as ten.

Hardware wouldn’t do it. Neither would software. But meatware would.

He sat, frozen, for over an hour, steeping in the unfairness.

He was risking everything—his career, even his life—to develop the ultimate weapon for his homeland. And they treated him like a lackey. He was going to make China the world’s dominant leader for the next thousand years and this was how he was treated?

The Minister would rue this day. Lee would see to it personally.

In the meantime, he had another protocol to use on the Captain and the others. Then the Captain would be harvested, his brain studied in molecular detail. Much information would come from that.

That eased the tightness in his chest a little. The Captain had proved the most retractable of the test subjects, by a factor of ten, yet experiments on him were yielding extraordinary data, notwithstanding the man’s resistance.

Lee considered it a sign of his superior scientific detachment that he hadn’t had the man put to death yet. He was a scientist, not a mortal who exacted revenge at the cost of scientific progress.

But—soon the harvested brain cells of Captain Ward would be more useful than his beating heart.

And Lee looked forward to that day.

Mount Blue

“Push. Push now. We’re almost there.” Catherine kept her voice low and calm but a rush of excitement prickled her veins. The baby was coming! After four very intense, at times frightening hours, the baby was coming.

Arriving at the infirmary, she’d seen two terrified future parents, lost and scared and excited, in equal measure.

There had been some hemorrhaging but she had stopped it. So far, it had been a healthy, easy birth. The parents had been scared because the nurses they trusted to deliver the baby weren’t here. The only person here was a stranger their leader didn’t trust.

Mac’s body language had been clear on that. He rarely took his eyes off her and was always within a hand’s span of her. However, for someone so large, he managed to never be in the way. He was simply . . . there. Like a huge guard dog.

He didn’t interfere but he didn’t stand around like a lump of protoplasm as most men would have, either. She had to give him that. Actually, he’d helped, handing her instruments whose name he knew, keeping close to her without in any way impeding her movements.

The woman—Bridget—had been in labor for two hours before they called Catherine in but was barely dilated. Effacement was almost complete and contractions had been coming every twenty minutes when Catherine entered the room. They soon started coming harder and faster. It took Bridget three hours to dilate to 7 centimeters, huffing and puffing and clinging to her husband’s hand.

Catherine moved carefully, making sure her movements were calm and reassuring. It wasn’t hard. From somewhere deep inside came a vast assurance, an ease she’d never felt during medical school or her internship. Medical school had been training scenarios and the internship had been mostly observation. This wasn’t a training scenario or observation, this was the real thing.

Bridget
needed
her.

When she’d walked into the infirmary, the first thing Catherine had done was take Bridget’s hand and tell her she was here to help. A tidal wave of emotion had washed through her, and for the first time in her life, it hadn’t hurt. Bridget was scared and excited, in love with her child and with its father, who was holding her other hand.

No dark swirls, no hidden hatred or aggression waiting like chunks of barbed wire to hook and hurt Catherine. There was nothing there that hurt at all, nothing to recoil from, just the bright colors of Bridget’s love and fear, the echo of her husband’s love for her and their unborn child, and at the very heart of it all, a bright, shining light that was the baby, working hard to be born.

“We’re close, Bridget,” Catherine murmured, and the woman blew locks of sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes. Catherine shot a glance at Mac. A moment later, a sponge soaked in cold water was pressed into Red’s hand and he started wiping the sweat away from Bridget’s face and neck. “Very close.”

It was time now. Bridget was almost fully dilated. Beneath her hands, Catherine could feel a vast strength gathering, something bigger than Bridget, something that connected to the earth and transited through one small woman and one tiny, powerful source of light inside her belly.

The power swirled and pulsed.

The fetal heart monitor showed the tiny heart beating perfectly, and when Catherine switched on the speakers, there it was—a healthy 140 beats a minute. As if the baby’s heart were beating fast with excitement at entering the world.

Bridget’s husband, Red, never let her hand go, not once, not even when she was insulting him, screaming at him, promising no sex for the rest of their lives. Ever. He hadn’t even blinked, just held her hand tightly and breathed with her.

Touching Bridget—
oh man
.

Catherine was nearly overwhelmed by the emotions of the woman. Joy. Pain. Love. Excitement. Fear. But above all, love. Love for the child being born and for the man whose hand she was holding as if it were a lifeline and whom she was insulting with every word that popped out of her mouth.

And behind all that—the faintest echo of something else. Another set of emotions. Almost—another soul. Like an angel hovering, like a sun spreading light and warmth. Steady and sure.

Suddenly, Bridget’s belly rippled and she groaned through clenched teeth. She clutched Red’s hand so strongly her knuckles were white.

Between Bridget’s legs, Catherine saw a tuft of dark red hair.
The baby!
Every single thought fled her mind as she concentrated on bringing a new life into the world. She knew what she was doing. The instructors in OB-GYN had been thorough and strict. But more than the scientific knowledge of how babies were born, she was imbued with some magical substance that led her through the process as if she’d been born to it. Something that steadied her hands and heart and voice. As if she were plugging into some arcane knowledge base connected with the very earth.

Her hands moved of their own accord, quick and sure. Bridget was panting now, the ripples coming faster and faster, one closely following another. Her face was ferociously scrunched up in concentration. Red’s eyes never left her face. Bridget’s entire body worked hard, seized by some outside force working its way through her.

“You’re doing fine, Bridget. That’s right, the baby’s crowning, another few pushes and we’re done and you’ll have yourself a beautiful new baby to love, just a few more, that’s good, concentrate on your breathing, excellent, you’re being very brave, that’s right . . .” Catherine was barely conscious of what she was saying, she just knew that as she spoke, as she touched Bridget’s thighs and belly, Bridget’s fear diminished, as if each word Catherine said whisked some of the fear and pain away.

She could feel the effect of her words, the effect of her presence, feel how reassured Bridget was because she was there. A force was being handed back and forth, power surging between them.

The infirmary was superbly well-equipped. Someone who knew what they were doing, someone with a lot of money to spend, had bought just about everything that could be necessary. If you needed open-heart surgery or brain surgery you should probably go elsewhere, but otherwise, the infirmary had what you needed, including episiotomy scissors.

She made a tiny, controlled cut to help Bridget. They had Derma-Glue, which eliminated stitches that often carried infections, for after the baby was born. It was a miracle that was saving lives in the few hospitals where it was available. This small outlaw infirmary seemed to have an unlimited supply.

Bridget was red-faced, trying to control her panting, face contorted as her belly rippled again. “How. Much. Longer.” She puffed between contractions.

Catherine smiled at her. “Not long now. Do you know what you’re expecting?”

Red answered. “No. We wanted the surprise.”

Another huge contraction. Catherine could hear Bridget’s teeth grinding. Another inch of dilation. A little more and the baby would come out.

The room was cold, as infirmaries should be, but Catherine was sweating. She tried to wipe the sweat from her brow on her sleeve but it was awkward. A handkerchief appeared and wiped her face.

Startled, she looked up at Mac. His face was grim, as always. But the gesture had been kind.

“Thanks,” she whispered. He nodded, stepped back slightly. There, without being too close.

Bridget gave a controlled scream and Catherine concentrated on the new life coming out of the woman. In a few minutes of blood, sweat and tears, a miracle happened, and a little baby girl with bright red fuzz covering her head slid into her waiting arms and started wailing.

And the world stopped. Simply stopped.

Catherine looked down into the small red face, eyes scrunched closed, mouth open, and felt her entire being suffused with light. Pure golden light, spearing through her. This little girl was hope and joy and innocence. Was light in darkness, joy in sorrow, hope in despair.

There was no precedent in her life for what Catherine was feeling, holding the tiny baby girl in her arms.

She was connected to the earth, to the sun, to every human being who had ever walked the earth. All their hopes and dreams—everything a human could be—was contained in this tiny little creature.

“Hello,” Catherine whispered, dazzled beyond bearing. Her cheeks were wet and her vision was blurred, but she didn’t realize she was crying until that handkerchief appeared again.

There was no thought in her of the origin of that handkerchief, of who wiped her face. Of the fact that she was in a hidden location. She might have days—hours—to live. The man behind her was powerful in every way there was. Physically and mentally. He was armed and dangerous and that didn’t even cross her mind until later because right now she was holding everything good and true about the world in her arms.

Red bent forward and kissed Bridget and that small act broke her out of her reverie.

“What is it?” Bridget asked, eyes half-closed. She must have been exhausted, but she had a dreamy smile on her face.

“A girl. A beautiful, healthy little red-haired girl. Ten on the Apgar Scale. Probably fifteen, actually, on the scale of one to ten.” Catherine laughed from the sheer joy of it. “What are you going to call her?”

“Mac,” Bridget and Red said together, and the big man behind her made a low sound in his throat.

“Mac.” Catherine cleared her throat discreetly. “That’s, um, an original name. For a girl.”

Bridget met Red’s eyes and spoke. “She would have been Mac if she’d been a three-headed Martian. We owe Mac our lives. There’s never been any question of what to call our baby.” Darkness crossed her tired features. “Not that her birth will ever be officially registered.”

Oh. If the little girl’s birth wasn’t going to be registered, that meant—that meant they were on the run. One more secret of this secretive place to tuck away. But secrets didn’t matter right now. What mattered was the tiny creature in her arms.

Catherine walked over to the basin, carefully washed the baby. Mac. It was really hard to think of her by the name of the huge dark warrior in the room. She wrapped Mac up in another clean blanket and walked over to Bridget, who was sitting up, Red’s hand supporting her back, and placed Mac in her arms.