Drone Command (22 page)

It was his only hope.

FOUR SEASONS HOTEL AT MARUNOUCHI

TOKYO, JAPAN

14 MAY 2017

S
till no luck.”

Ian's charming brogue had softened recently, Myers noticed. Too long in the States. “Can't you do anything?”

The Scotsman shook his head solemnly. “If Troy is behind a thick wall or underground, we'll never find his tracker signal, and unless they move him quickly out in the open, he'll be lost for a while. We're losing the satellite feed in ten more minutes.”

Myers paced the room, hardly noticing the plush carpet beneath her bare feet. She'd lost her husband and her son, and nearly lost Pearce almost two years ago in the Sahara. She'd cradled his unconscious body in her lap as Judy Hopper corkscrewed the plane through the air, making their escape. She couldn't bear the thought of seeing him like that again.

Her laptop dinged. She raced over to it.

“Found her!” Myers shouted. An automated search of a classified photo database finally identified the woman in the video. Ian made a screen grab and tossed it into the NSA search engine. Maybe Lane couldn't do anything to rescue Pearce at the moment, but at least the president could open up classified government resources for them with a phone call.

Ian rolled his chair over to the coffee table serving as Myers's desk. “Dr. Weng Litong. Yes, I've heard of her. She runs the PLA's robotic-weapons development program.”

“Makes sense she'd be in the same building with the Wu-14,” Myers said. “What's her beef with Troy?”

“There's no telling.” Ian tapped a few keys. Ran a loop of Myers's video showing Weng whispering into Feng's ear and Feng's reaction. “Whatever she said to Feng sent him up. The question remains, what did she say?”

Myers shook her head. “Too bad my video camera couldn't capture audio.”

“Bollocks! My head is up my proverbial arse. We don't need audio.” Ian stood on his robotic legs and rushed over to his laptop on the dining-room table. The original video clip was on his hard drive. As he pulled it up, Myers came up behind him.

“What are you looking for?”

Ian paused the video clip just as Weng's face came into view. He enlarged the image so that the faces of Weng and Feng filled the screen. He played the video again. Watched her lean over, whisper in his ear. Her face slid behind Feng's head then slid back into view. Feng frowned violently, whispered back. Weng nodded. Spoke again, turned aside, hiding her face.

“She didn't want anyone else but Feng to hear what she was saying,” Myers said. “Too bad we can't hear it, too.”

Ian grinned. “Oh, but we can.” Ian clicked his mouse and pulled up another program. A translucent square popped up in the middle of the screen. He dragged it over to Weng's mouth and tapped a couple of keys. “That will lock the target to Weng's mouth.”

“What for?”

“A lip-reading software program.”

“Are you serious?”

“MI5 has been using one for years in coordination with the nationwide CCTV network. I suspect the FBI uses one, too.”

Myers knew that the Brits had installed millions of closed-circuit television cameras in public areas like subway stations, airports, and street intersections over the years, and millions more were in private use. She read one estimate that there was one CCTV camera for every eleven
British citizens. Like her own miniature video camera, however, those systems often didn't have audio. Lip-reading software was the next best thing, and maybe better, since it allowed the observer to pick and choose the conversations they wanted to hear.

Ian clicked on a few icons and the Feng-Weng loop ran again with the lip-reading software window automatically tracking Weng's mouth.

“Not sure how this is going to help unless you speak Mandarin,” Myers said.

“Not a problem. I have a—”

“Translation program, of course.” She patted him on the shoulder.

A few minutes later, Ian pulled up the transcript. “Sorry, ma'am, it reads like gibberish. But there are some useful fragments.”

Ian was right. The lip-reading program obviously didn't function when Weng's mouth was turned away or was hidden behind Feng's head, but it managed to grab a few words: Zhao, Mali, Pearce, Guo, Congo.

“Those make any sense to you?” Ian asked.

“Troy was in Mali, certainly. I don't know about Congo. I assume Zhao and Guo are names of people? Or places?”

“Good question. Let me try a couple of searches.” Ian ran a search program that sought links between the names Feng, Zhao, and Guo. Myers popped a K-Cup into a Keurig brewing machine while she waited. “What would you like to drink, Ian?”

“Oil,” Ian finally said. “And blood.”

“Excuse me?”

Ian strode over to her with a sheet of paper in his hands. “It appears as if Feng and Zhao were both close relatives in the oil industry. Feng was his uncle. Tea, if there is any, thank you.”

Myers pulled another K-Cup for tea and popped it into the brewer. “Was?”

“Zhao Yi is dead. Killed in an elevator accident in Mali in 2015.”

“What's that got to do with Troy?”

“Zhao was heading up the Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation in Bamako, Mali, when he was killed.”

“Where Troy was. If Zhao was connected in any way to Mike Early's death—”

Ian nodded grimly. “My thoughts exactly.”

“But it was an accident, right?”

“A particularly violent one, apparently.” Ian knew that Pearce wouldn't leave any evidence behind unless he wanted to send a message. Otherwise, an apparent accident made perfect sense.

Myers took a thoughtful sip of coffee. Troy never told Myers about any kind of revenge killings after Mike Early's death, but she knew Pearce had killed Ambassador Britnev for his role in her son's murder a few years earlier—a violent, foolish act on Troy's part, but one for which she was eternally grateful. Troy's fierce sense of loyalty was only superseded by his thirst for justice, particularly for those to whom he was loyal.

“And this Guo person?”

“Nothing's come up yet. Maybe it's not a person, or not a person easily found.”

“Like a special operative?”

“As good a guess as any.”

“There were Chinese special forces operators in the desert. They're the ones who killed Mike and Mossa.” Myers had never met the fearsome Tuareg chieftain, but she felt she had after Troy's colorful and emotional description of him.

“Then there's the other link, if any. If Guo was an operator involved in their deaths, Troy would have taken him out, too.”

“So if Weng fingered Troy for the deaths of those two men, it still doesn't make sense that Feng would grab him, does it? It's a ballsy move just to get revenge.”

“Revenge, honor, hate. Pick one or all. Feng knows there's nothing we can do about it.”

“You don't think Feng would hurt Troy, do you?”

“Why not? What would President Lane do about it?”

“Nothing, at least for the moment.” Myers had already spoken to
Lane. He recounted his conversation with President Sun. He was apologetic but firm. He wouldn't leave Pearce behind, but Pearce needed to sit tight for now. Time was against them. They both knew Pearce would agree. But then again, time wasn't exactly Pearce's friend, either, Myers realized.

“What about the CIA?” Ian asked. “Pearce was one of theirs. Could they mount some kind of operation? Kidnap a Chinese agent, offer a trade?”

“Troy isn't one of them anymore. He quit the Company, and they don't forget that kind of thing. And when it comes to the Russian and Chinese security services, the CIA never wants to go to the mattresses.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, a
Godfather
reference. ‘Going to the mattresses' means going to war. The spooks never want to play roughhouse. Spying is a gentlemen's game despite what you see in the movies. More like hide-and-seek, not MMA cage fighting. If the CIA snatches one of theirs, then they snatch one of ours, and back and forth it escalates until some real damage gets done. Best to avoid that kind of thing, or so they believe.”

“But if Pearce is a private citizen, then shouldn't he be afforded some kind of diplomatic protection?”

“Did you forget why he was really there? If they suspect him of spying, he won't have any protection.”

“He's in for a rough time of it. President Lane understands that, certainly?”

“Of course he does. If I was president, I'd be forced to leave Troy in Chinese hands, too. At least, until everything else got sorted out.”

“I suppose you're right,” Ian conceded, as he took a sip of hot tea.

“But then again, I'm no longer the president of the United States, am I?”

“Sorry, ma'am, I'm not following you.”

“There's a phone number I need you to get for me. It's a long shot, but it just might work.”

JAPAN'S PACIFIC COAST

WADA, CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN

15 MAY 2017

T
wenty wide-eyed schoolchildren oohed and aahed with grim curiosity as the whalers' sharp pole blades sliced thirty-foot-long slabs of pink blubber. Other whalers pulled back the thick strips of skin and fat with their hands as if they were peeling a twelve-ton banana, only this banana was gray, with eyes and a wry smile.

It was the annual harvest of Baird's beaked whales in a small Japanese whaling village on the Pacific coast. The children in their bright-blue school uniforms and yellow caps chattered excitedly. Another whale had been dragged up the bloody cement ramp from the water to the open-walled slaughterhouse.

“That's disgusting.” The forty-three-year-old vegan and nuclear physicist scrunched up her pretty California surfer-girl face.

Yamada shrugged. “It's a four-hundred-year-old tradition.”

“Tell that to the whale.”

“I would, but I don't think he'd hear me.” Yamada watched two of his American graduate students wolfing down fried whale morsels and guzzling ice-cold bottles of Asahi beer.

“For a world-class whale researcher, you don't have much empathy for the poor things,” the woman said.

“I've devoted my life to them, but I don't value them above people. A small local harvest like this is no threat to the species. It's the big floating
kill factories that need to be stopped.” Yamada didn't tell her that in his radical youth he had sabotaged Soviet whaling boats.

A whaler sliced deeper into the carcass, revealing the dark meat and viscera.

“I'm think I'm gonna be sick.” The blonde researcher stepped away, looking for a bottled water to soothe her queasy stomach.

Dr. Kenji Yamada looked more like a surf bum than a world-class marine scientist, with his dark tan and long silver pony tail. His handsome face was framed by a well-groomed platinum beard. He had been born in Japan to Japanese parents who immigrated to Hawaii when he was a young child, but he was thoroughly American and a naturalized citizen. His parents, now long since dead, were buried in a lonely Japanese cemetery on Kauai. They raised him proudly steeped in Japanese culture, tradition, and language, all three of which he closely embraced in his middle age. He was their only child, and he was childless—an unspoken disappointment for his parents, who wished for grandchildren to tend their graves and join them in the next life.

An old fisherman shuffled up with a whale fin neatly wrapped in folded paper. Yamada bowed his gratitude. The two men conversed happily in Japanese. Yamada felt the warm sun on his face, smelled the sea and the salt air. The life of the happy little village coursed in his blood. For a moment it felt like home.

—

Y
amada listened to the soft snoring of his vegan physicist sound asleep next to him and the water chucking against the cabin bulkhead.

Yamada's research boat was owned by Pearce Systems, but he leased the vessel for a dollar a year from Troy under a special arrangement. Yamada and his lab was Pearce Systems' primary UUV development team, building and testing new underwater drones for use in oceanographic research, especially whale migration. Drones that Pearce Systems later sold or deployed in both civilian and military applications.

Yamada hadn't spoken to Pearce in months. Their friendship was strong enough to weather any storm, but watching Pearce kill Jasmine
Bath with one of his own turtle-shaped UUVs had wounded Yamada deeply. Yamada accepted the use of his vehicles for security purposes, though he was a pacifist. But murder for revenge was something else. He knew Pearce was a violent man, but he had never seen it up close. Bath deserved her fate, no doubt, but Yamada still couldn't condone it. He feared it was bad karma for his old friend.

Earlier that day, the vegan researcher had threatened to blow chunks all over him if he didn't break down the whale fin sample for her to do an assay, so he did. There was no question now. The whale meat was laced with cesium-137 and the fin bones contained strontium-90, notorious for mimicking calcium. These were just two of several known radioactive isotopes dumped into the air, ground, and waters around the Fukushima nuclear facility that were turning up in fish, plant, and even human subjects all over the Pacific, even as far as the west coast of the United States. Cesium had been found as far as two thousand kilometers away and more than five thousand meters deep just thirty days after the accident. How much more, how far, and how pervasive the subsequent nuclear contamination had been hotly debated. His contracted research mission was to try to answer those questions more definitively.

It would take her some time, but the vegan physicist would be able to determine if the nuclear contaminants came from Fukushima once they got back to the university. Before coming to the University of Hawaii, she had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the technical nuclear forensics (TNF) department, but since the surfing was better in Hawaii than in New Mexico, she decided to move. She had her priorities.

When the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and resulting forty-six-foot-tall tsunami struck the six reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility on March 11, 2011, all hell broke loose. By any measure, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe was the worst peacetime nuclear event in history, surpassing Three Mile Island and even Chernobyl. The magnitude of the damage was such that Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry, ordered all of Germany's nuclear plants to be shut down and deconstructed as soon as feasible.

Within just a few days of the catastrophe, celebrity physicists and
antinuclear activists called Fukushima a planet-killing event. Three of the six nuclear cores had melted down—down into the Earth's crust, some speculated. Of course, no one knew for sure. It was too dangerous and too difficult to get inside any of these wrecked facilities, even with robotics systems. But all three cores contained plutonium-239, one of the most toxic substances on the planet, a radioisotope with a half-life of twenty-four thousand years. More than fourteen hundred fuel rods, also loaded with plutonium, were at risk of fire and explosion. The fuel rods alone could pump fourteen thousand times more radiation into the atmosphere than was released by the Hiroshima bomb.

The dire warnings gained credence as the incompetence and deceit of both TEPCO (the utility company managing Fukushima Daiichi) and the Japanese government became apparent. Revelation after revelation proved at least some of the fears. Three hundred tons of groundwater passed through the contaminated facility every day straight into the Pacific Ocean, and the level of radiation of the groundwater was exploding exponentially. More than eighty thousand gallons of highly contaminated water from within the facility had been pouring into the Pacific every day since the earthquake. A dime-size bit of cesium-137 evenly distributed over a metropolis like New York City would render it uninhabitable.

Yamada devoured everything he could about the catastrophe when it first occurred, especially the Japanese sources, but also the scientific articles as they began to emerge. It was a very mixed picture. Even environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace said that concerns over Fukushima were grossly exaggerated, and other sources he trusted said that the massive amounts of radiation released into the Pacific were being safely diffused and that little environmental damage had or would ever occur.

And yet . . . he wondered. In Hawaii, he had caught a few fish that tested for low levels of radiation—nothing dangerous. But the concentrations of cesium were far higher than he had ever seen before. And there were other reports of high rates of cancer suddenly occurring in people around Fukushima and even among the crew of the USS
Ronald Reagan
, which had been dispatched to Fukushima for disaster-relief
efforts. Independent sources—unknown, unaccredited—reported much higher levels of radiological contamination on the American west coast than “reliable” sources stated, and they further documented birth defects in animals and fish in a wide variety of regions.

Most disturbing, antinuclear activists in Japan were receiving death threats from right-wing opponents even as the Japanese government was cracking down on “irresponsible” reporting of Fukushima events. And the conspiracy theorists had one argument in their favor. If Fukushima really was a planet-killing event, would the governments of the world even admit it? If they did, the resulting global panic would crash markets, collapse economies, and ignite civil chaos. Governments had every reason to hide the truth until a solution could be found. Or so the alarmists concluded.

But Yamada discounted alarmists in general. Too many science debates today were being driven by political orthodoxies and other agendas rather than scientific inquiry—and even credible “deniers” were ruined. Yamada believed the facts should determine the argument rather than the other way around. As far as he was concerned, the world had enough real problems to deal with. The truth about the real dangers of Fukushima would be eventually known, but only if dedicated marine scientists like him used their skills to pursue that truth, and the truth was always to be found in the hard data.

When a private nonprofit environmental organization requested Yamada and his team do some independent radiological survey work in Japan's Pacific waters, Yamada agreed. So far, what they had discovered was worrisome. Fukushima radiation was definitely pluming throughout the region, popping up in a number of locations and species that hadn't been reported before.

Radioisotopes had fingerprints. With the comparison samples they had already collected, his vegan physicist could determine if the butchered whale had picked up cesium and strontium from Fukushima or some other source. She explained to him that a TNF physicist was like a good sommelier who can determine not only the vintage of a great wine, but also the exact field it came from because of the soil composition.

Several anonymous tips from sources within the Japanese government and even TEPCO had aided their detective work in the last few weeks as their efforts became more widely known. At first, the anonymity of the sources bothered Yamada, but he understood. Fearful of losing their high-paying jobs—an increasingly scarce commodity in Japan—these concerned engineers and bureaucrats were also worried about appearing to defy the consensus on TEPCO's handling of the crisis—or the government's.

Yamada sighed. He couldn't go back to sleep. Thinking about Fukushima made him think about death, which made him think about his parents, whom he'd come to miss terribly in the last few years. He had an active social life—his married friends, many of them younger, envied his carefree childless lifestyle—but in truth he was alone in the world, a middle-aged man facing his mortality for the first time. He resolved to visit his parents' graves when he got back home, and even pray over them and burn incense, and find some way to console their spirits. Until then, he had work to do. He checked his watch. It was still an hour before dawn.

He slipped out of bed as quietly as possible and padded in his bare feet toward the galley to make coffee. His cell phone buzzed. He checked it. Another text message, anonymous as usual. GPS coordinates.

And the promise of an unbelievable discovery.