Jade Sky (2 page)

Matt ran his tongue over his teeth. "They knew we were coming. We'd all be dead if it weren't for the spidey-sense."

Jeff shook his head. "If they knew you were coming, they wouldn't have been here."

Matt turned his head and spat, but didn't raise his voice. "I'm not saying you're wrong, Jeff, but twelve dead agents, man. Three from the bonk, and the rest from these pricks." He gestured to the dead bodies behind him. "Since when can seventeen normals take out four augs, if they didn't know beforehand?"

The bonk lay on the ground next to the other bodies, a headless, eleven-foot-tall humanoid mass of muscle, bone, and bad attitude. Its head lay twenty feet away. Conor sat on it, katana on his knees, polishing the blade with meticulous care. The basketball-sized hole in the bonk's torso showed ribs fused to form a solid plate and a heart the size of a human head. The bonk was half-again bigger than even Russian military augs; Matt couldn't understand why anyone would augment themselves to the level of inevitable insanity.

Jeff said nothing for a moment, then nodded his head. "Okay. Say you're right, and they knew you were coming. Anybody sane would have run. Why didn't they?"

"Don't know." Matt looked at the bodies of his squad-mates, then at the two prisoners, one barbequed beyond recognition and strapped to a gurney, the other unconscious with a bandaged leg. His brain felt glad they'd lived to be questioned and prosecuted, but his heart wanted to tear them limb from limb. "Why don't we ask them?"

"We'll get them healed up and schedule an interrogation for oh-nine-hundred." Jeff put a hand on Matt’s shoulder. "Meantime, why don't we find out what this butcher's bill bought us?" Matt closed his eyes against an onslaught of whispers, the mindless, unintelligible side effect to Gerstner Augmentation. "Matt? They died soldiers."

Matt opened his eyes. He felt numb, just as he had in the Siege of Baghdad. These men were older than those kids had been, but they were fathers, brothers, husbands, snuffed out in an orgy of violence. He exhaled, and realized he'd been holding his breath. The shakes, the crying, the hopeless rage, they would all come later. Meantime, he had work to do. "Yeah."

Akash sauntered up, REC7 slung from his back, helmet under his arm. "What are we talking about, eh?" Though he was a soft-spoken, first-generation Canadian, his north-of-the-border accent clashed with his chocolate skin, short black hair, and dark brown eyes.

Jeff nodded toward the bodies and wandered away, giving the soldiers space.

They stood in silence for a moment. Akash licked his lips, then said, "They died heroes."

Matt grunted. "That's what Jeff said. It won't bring them back." He turned to walk away, and Akash grabbed his arm.

"It's not your fault it was an ambush, Matt."

"I know." And part of him even understood it. But a deeper, softer part would howl in terror and sadness, drowned under the need for men like him to do their jobs.

Akash opened his mouth to reply, but Matt cut him off.

"Just don't, Rastogi." He forced his tone softer than he wanted to. "I know what you're going to say, and I appreciate it. But I'd rather not hear it."

"Sure," Akash said, and turned with him to watch the growing, well-ordered bedlam.

A legion of technicians, forensics staff, and scientists joined the squads of soldiers, and they got to work. It didn’t take long to find what intel told them they would: algae vats, centrifuges, distillation equipment, dehydration tanks, and countless glassware, all the components of a world-class chemistry and biology lab. The third building they opened had four tractor trailers parked inside, each with a different logo: Joe's Meats, Lynne's Dairy, C.E.L. Trucking, and Midwest Cargo, Inc.

Conor ran a hand over his shaved head. "Bet you a pint what's inside."

"Jade?" Akash asked.

"Nothing."

They cut the lock and opened the first truck. Shrink-wrapped pallets packed two high and two across stretched as far as he could see.

Matt hopped up and tore the wrapping off the front-most pallet. He lifted off a wire crate and pulled out a plastic bag. He admired the emerald green crystalline powder. He tossed it to Conor, who handed it to Jeff.

"I owe you a pint, Rastogi," Conor said.

Matt ignored them. "Call it two kilos per bag, ten bags per crate, eighty crates per pallet, and," he peered into the back of the truck, "looks like twenty-four pallets. So, forty thousand kilos? That's a lot of Jade."

One of the soldiers let out a low whistle. "What's the value on this stuff, sir?"

Jeff snapped out of a slack-jawed stupor. "Uncut? Twenty bucks a gram wholesale, more or less. That's . . . Jesus, that's . . . ."

"An eight with a lot of zeroes," the soldier said, holding out the calculator on his phone's screen for them to see.

Akash let out a low whistle. "You owe me eight hundred million pints, Conor."

"Open the other trucks," Jeff said. The soldiers jumped to work. As the doors slid up, their incredulity grew. The first three were full, the last nearly so.

Matt snorted, then walked outside. The red sky heralded impending dawn, and the Atlantic looked like a sea of blood. It fit his mood.

Shoes crunched on gravel. A lighter flared next to him.

Jeff took a deep draw of his cigarette, held it, then blew the smoke downwind. "What's on your mind, soldier?"

"Puzzles. If they knew we were coming, two full squads of augged agents and a platoon of regulars, with choppers and planes and the wrath of God behind us, why leave behind three billion dollars of Jade?"

"Fifteen billion, once it's cut."

"Okay, then, fifteen. But the question remains—why leave behind that much?"

Jeff took another draw on his smoke. "Maybe they didn't have time to take it?"

"Okay, why protect it with so few guys? This place is set up for a garrison of what, two hundred? They could have met us in real force, turned it into a battle."

"If they knew they didn't stand a chance—"

"—then why protect it at all? Cut your losses and run. They've got boats, a plane, trucks . . . Dawkins had to know that nobody was getting off this island once we showed up." He gestured toward the legion of soldiers outside. "Seventeen guys against an army. It's just all wrong."

Jeff sighed, and they sat in silence as the sun freed itself from the horizon. An osprey danced through the light, hovered for a split second, then dove feet-first into the water, rising again with a fish in its talons.

Jeff opened his mouth, and Matt slammed his fist into the wall. The cinder block caved in a puff of dust, and Matt let the pain fuel his anger. "But they did know, dammit!" He locked eyes with his boss and realized that Jeff hadn't spoken.
The only explanation is that they didn't know you were coming.
Matt hadn't read his mind—he'd seen the future and reacted to it before it happened.

Jeff's face held the slightest of smirks. "That stuff really works." He dropped the smirk and put his arm on Matt's shoulder. "Anyway, I think you guys should have some leave time, after you talk to the shrinks." Matt didn't bother to complain, but Jeff kept on anyway. "No use whining about it, even if it is a pain in the ass. I'll keep you posted."

Matt looked down at his knuckles. The skin had already healed over little specks of cinderblock—he'd have to clean it out later. "Yeah."

Two days later, Matt stepped out of the car into a cool August morning. The pine forest shadowed his two-story log cabin. Squirrels rustled in the low thickets, and a blue jay squawked its displeasure as he closed the door. He walked up the porch to the front door of his seventeen-hundred square feet of heaven. The third step creaked, and he added it to the mental list of things to repair.

Monica flashed a groggy smile as she opened the door. Her curly chestnut hair matched his but fell to her shoulders, and her soft blue eyes were glazed with sleep. His Blake Shelton shirt enveloped her, a tent that almost concealed the baby bump as she leaned against the doorframe. Her well-muscled, tan legs didn't show the slightest hint of pregnancy.

"Hey, sugar. You weren't getting back until next week." She must have seen something in his expression, because her eyes widened in concern. "You okay?"

He stepped inside and kissed her, ignoring morning breath the coffee didn't quite mask. He pulled back and kissed her forehead, breathing in her scent. She kept herself in great shape
—
they'd met as pre-teens in a children's kung fu class, and she hadn't let up with her training
—
but in the past two years he'd grown strong enough to crush a person with his bare hands and had to mind his strength. He squeezed her just hard enough, and the cross between her breasts jabbed him in the sternum. "No, I'm not," he whispered into her hair. "But I can't talk about it. Not yet."

She snuggled into him. "Is it . . . Baghdad bad?"

It wasn't, but the immediacy of the loss made it worse. Not trusting his voice, he nodded and looked at the plain wooden cross on the living room wall. She squeezed him tighter, and they stood in the foyer like that, frozen in time, until a whine interrupted them. Matt smiled, let her go, and dropped to one knee. He grabbed the Basset hound by the ears and kissed his nose. "How's my boy?" Ted's tail thumped against the floor as he licked Matt's nose. His breath stank worse than Monica's.

"Coffee?" she asked.

"Yeah."

She stepped into the kitchen, sniffed the dregs in the bottom of the pot, and poured it into the sink. "I'll make a fresh one." She puttered in the kitchen, and he couldn't help but try to catch a peek under the T-shirt when she reached up for the can of Folgers. Granny-panties, white cotton, fraying elastic.
Every husband's dream.

They talked about nothing over breakfast
—
Deputy Drake had arrested Kevin Bartell for screaming drunken poetry at his ex-girlfriend's house again, Jen and Bill found out they're having twins, and PanTex laid off twenty more people. Nothing changed in White Spruce; it just got older, more tired. As Monica cleared the dishes she paused at the sink. "Are you home long?"

He nodded. "I reckon a week or two at least. I'll have paperwork, but I can do it from here, or if needs be, down at the local." ICAP didn't have an office in White Spruce, or anywhere else outside Washington, D.C., but the Clifford Davis Federal Building in Memphis wasn't too awful a commute once or twice a week.

"Good. Pastor Joe's been asking about you, and you can take me to my appointment on Thursday."

Matt polished off the last of his coffee. "I'd love to." A strong, proud, intelligent, willful woman, Monica remained . . . brittle. She'd lost their first baby just out of high school, ten months after their honeymoon, while he fought half a world away with the Third Infantry. They'd been "trying again" for eight years, and in that time his beautiful, loving wife had lurched in and out of depression and dependency. Now pregnant again, she lived in constant terror of losing their boy. "Hmph."

"What?" She put the dishes in the sink and turned on the water.

He opened his mouth and wasn't sure what to say. At that moment he knew that she carried their son as sure as he knew his own name. "Do we find out the sex this week?"

She nodded, defensive. "If we want to, and the bean cooperates on the ultrasound."

He smiled at her. "Whatever you want to do, babe."

She put a fingertip to her lips and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. "Um . . . I'll think about it." Her dazzling smile emerged from the uncertainty. "It'll be fun to bounce around some names."

*   *   *

The conference call leached away two monotonous hours of Matt's life before anyone said anything interesting. He sat in his living room, staring aghast at his laptop, as Jeff defended the intelligence and their actions despite countless, repetitive questions that made it clear in no uncertain terms that the powers that be considered losing two squads of ICAP agents politically unacceptable.

Matt's mind leapt to dozens of choice comments about civilians in general and bureaucrats in particular, but he would never say them. It wasn't that he'd lose his job
—
the Six Million Dollar Man had nothing on your average aug
—
he just knew that it wouldn't help.

"Can't some of your men read minds, Agent Hannes?" the jowly pencil-pusher from Belgium asked.

Conor, onscreen next to Jeff, rolled his eyes. Jeff scowled for the millionth time. "No. Late-second precognitive therapy has enabled a few select agents to utilize short-term prediction, so they can predict what someone is about to say or do, but only the barest moment beforehand. Think of it like ultra-fast reflexes. Nobody can read anybody's mind."

Though the chances of anyone even looking at him were remote, Matt schooled his face into a blank mask. So-called "late-second" precognition, no more than a second or two out, happened all the time. Sometimes, beyond his control, his ability to predict future events would extend out two minutes or more. Or maybe months, if Monica carried a boy in her womb.

Mr. Jowly-guy continued. "What about this interrogation, then?"

Finally
.

Jeff folded his hands on the tabletop. "The prisoners were recalcitrant. We were able to ascertain that they are a part of Dawkins's cartel and that they knew we were coming."

The gray-haired Dutchman leaned toward his screen. "How did they know this?"

"They claim to have been tipped off an hour before we touched down."

"Tipped off by whom? Do we have a leak?"