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  “So…there are…causes, beyond the scope of any mechanical failure or pilot error, that are nonetheless relevant to the crash.”

  “Right! The hacker who attacked all those Thunderbolts that—”

  “Wait! What?” Taz sat bolt upright and shoved her hair out of her face. “I never heard those crashes were related.”

  Holly just pointed at him. Jeremy could feel the heat rising to his own face.

  “You did that?”

  Holly snorted. “Oh yeah. Because there are so many vicious bones in Jeremy’s body. Oh, no, wait, there aren’t any. Those are all mine. Jeremy’s the one who fixed it.”

  56

  Taz had never been so out of her depth before. The loss of so many A-10 Thunderbolts in just twenty-four hours was a disaster of epic proportions that the Air Force had covered up so deeply that she didn’t even know they were related.

  Jeremy was blushing fiercely. “I just did the software. Miranda’s the one who—”

  “Just shut up and bow, young Padawan.” Holly laughed and punched his shoulder hard enough that only his seatbelt kept him from launching out into the cargo bay. The cards he’d still been holding flew into the air and fluttered down all around them.

  “But—” Taz didn’t know “but” what. Jeremy hadn’t just been involved, but had stopped the devastation?

  Jeremy unbuckled, carefully removing his headset to avoid throttling himself with it again, and began picking up the cards.

  “It really was mostly his doing.” With Jeremy temporarily out of the circuit, Holly’s tone was suddenly completely serious. “He has a truly exceptional mind. Me? I’m just really good at blowing shit up or seeing how it was blown.”

  “He’s just full of surprises,” Mike’s smile was all-knowing. As if he enjoyed that they were messing with her head.

  “You people are a bad influence!”

  Mike just grinned when she snapped at him.

  “We are?” Miranda sounded worried.

  Shit! She’d forgotten about the intercom connecting all five of them. Six, Jeremy was back in his seat with his headset on and counting the cards.

  Taz handed him the three that had landed in her lap, then he looked very relieved as if his cards were as important as saving manned jets.

  And Miranda…was looking both confused and upset.

  Get your shit together, Taz. “Sorry, Miranda. Your team is making me feel exceedingly small.”

  “But you are small. Even smaller than me. How do you think that affects your world view? I’ve often wondered about being taller, but I never thought to consider the ramifications of being shorter.” Miranda had pulled out a small notebook and appeared ready to take notes. In fact, Taz could just see her own name in front of a question in Miranda’s neat printing.

  “That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” but Taz had dealt with enough engineer-types to know it was better to answer their question before trying to move forward. “I find the main advantage is that people discount me.”

  “I don’t,” Jeremy looked up at her.

  Which was also an odd truth. From the very first moment, he’d seen her as if she was a person, without her having to prove herself.

  She stretched out a foot to press it momentarily against his knee across the gap between the two rows of seats, but couldn’t quite reach.

  “And there’s a disadvantage.”

  “What?” Miranda’s pen was poised.

  “It’s harder to play footsie with someone.”

  Holly stretched out her forever long legs and rested them easily on Mike’s thigh. Her smile said she was enjoying showing off. Taz had always wanted legs like that, not that they’d fit the rest of her.

  Then she saw that Miranda was actually writing down her footsie observation. If she hung around with these people, she’d have to remember how literally Miranda took everything. Nothing was of more or less importance. One moment they were trying to analyze international political gamesmanship, and the next what it was like to be short.

  “Miranda,” Taz waited until she had her full attention, or at least her left ear did. “Being as short as me versus being as short as you or as tall as Mike and Holly isn’t all that different. I’m still me. Some things, like kitchen cabinets, are designed for taller people, so I use a step stool, but otherwise I don’t notice it much. It’s the size I’ve been since I was fifteen and joined the Air Force.”

  And that required a whole explanation she hadn’t meant to give about her multiple identity and name changes as she’d aged at crossing the border illegally, and then lost those years and more after her supposed death.

  “So you’re not Vicki Cortez?” Oddly, everyone, even Miranda, had simply accepted all of it—except Jeremy.

  “Are you Jeremy Trahn?”

  “Since the day I was born.”

  Taz nodded. “I’ve been me since the day I was born. My name hasn’t changed me: Vicki Cortez, Tanya Roberts—”

  Mike snorted out a laugh at that one, then left it to Taz to sidetrack into the topic of tall, redheaded 1980s Hollywood sex kittens.

  “And now Tasia Vicki Flores,” she finally returned to the point. “Those are all still the same me.”

  Except they weren’t.

  Consuela, the child always afraid. Vicki, the teenaged lethal survivor in a street-level war. The Taser who’d spent two decades as an Air Force general’s enforcer. Taz, briefly a hotshot. And now…

  Who the hell was she, anyway?

  She tugged out General Martinez’s challenge coin and rubbed it in her fingers for a moment. For all its familiarity, it now felt foreign as well. If she was no longer that person either…

  Well, this was no time to add to the confusion. Maybe, if all of the plates that were in the air stopped spinning for a moment, she could figure out who she was.

  But not right now.

  She stuffed the coin back out of sight.

  “I think we need to focus on Jeremy’s ‘mission card’ or, by another name, Miranda’s ‘causal sphere.’ We need to understand what we’re getting into before we land in Taiwan.”

  But for all of the debate that followed, they ended up little wiser.

  57

  Private Specialist Huan De knew she’d been given the single most boring job in the entire Republic of China Air Force. When the People’s Republic attacked, they’d be coming from the west, crossing the Taiwan Strait in overwhelming numbers.

  Being perched at the tedious end of nowhere was not why she had volunteered.

  Yes, someone must watch the east, but why did it have to be her?

  And why from here?

  Keelung City to the north had excellent clubs. Luodong Township to the south offered nothing except the only real town for a long distance.

  But she was halfway in between and could not take easy advantage of either.

  Nor was she down at Fulong Beach, where she could try out her new bikini during lunchtime or the long summer evenings. No, she was stuck atop Ling Jiou Mountain in an isolated shack. Her companions atop the mountain? Two Taoist temples and a Buddhist Monastery.

  It was the highest point overlooking the easternmost tip of the country, but that didn’t mean anything had happened here since the Japanese invasion of 1895.

  She glared at the monitors, because there was absolutely nothing else to do except wonder if Shao Cai would finally introduce her to his older brother, rather than slobbering after her himself—Shao Yating was…delicious to look at.

  Maybe this weekend at the beach, in her killer bikini, she’d find the confidence to introduce herself. Better yet, maybe her bikini would make him introduce himself.

  This weekend when the annual Hohaiyan Rock Festival took over the beach, it would be a constant party. If she then—

  A dark blip caught her attention on the Sandiaojiao Lighthouse camera. Too high to be a distant ocean freighter, but too low to be a flight descending into Taipei Songshan Airport thirty kilometers to the northwest.

&n
bsp; Radar showed nothing, but the dot was definitely there.

  And growing—fast!

  She flipped up the protective Lucite cover and punched the alarm.

  “Report!” A voice snapped out over her radio within seconds.

  “A low-flying aircraft approaching Sandiaojiao Lighthouse at less than a hundred meters. Negative radar image.”

  “Repeat that last.”

  “Negative radar image. It’s—”

  It flashed by the lighthouse camera, clearing it by less than ten meters.

  The image appeared to fracture, as if struck with a hammer.

  Four seconds later the jet flashed over her lookout atop Ling Jiou Mountain with an earthshattering roar. Her small window was blasted into a thousand pieces, scattering glass over all of her equipment as De covered her ears.

  Somewhere in the background was a voice demanding her attention, but it sounded faint and far away.

  “Supersonic!” she called into the microphone. Careful of the glass shards, she scrolled back the camera recording from the lighthouse, and froze the image the moment before the jet had passed over, then smashed the camera’s lens with a sonic boom.

  The image was blurred, but she’d been tediously well trained in plane spotting, and knew it immediately.

  Still, she checked the poster on her shack’s wall.

  “It’s a Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon.” Then she swallowed hard.

  If she said the next words, nothing else could matter. Not her new bikini, not Shao Yating. Nothing.

  But she must.

  For seventy years her country had prepared for only one thing: an invasion from the mainland.

  She keyed the microphone.

  “It has begun.”

  Her hearing was starting to return. A sonic boom could break glass above eleven pounds-per-square-inch overpressure, and the loudest ever recorded was a hundred-and-forty-four psi at such close range. Training had assured her that there would be no permanent hearing loss below seven hundred psi.

  However, next to her observer’s shack, a nineteen-meter Fagus hayatae—Taiwanese beech—had been swaying from the hammer-blow of the massive wind pressure. For an instant, its future remained held in the balance by a thin root that had burrowed under a neighboring Quercus myrsinifolia—bamboo-leaf oak.

  Unable to take the strain and right the beech, the root snapped.

  The towering, multi-trunked tree gained momentum as it fell until it crashed through the shack’s roof, shattering everything within.

  The Buddhist monks of the Wu Sheng Monastery didn’t find the only Taiwanese fatality of the attack for several hours.

  58

  “Nǐ niú shǔn fèifèi húndàn, Zhang Ru!” Captain Chen Bo cursed General Zhang Ru. The automatic cockpit voice recorder would pick that up, of course. It was the first words he’d spoken aloud since the message he had dutifully spoken aloud shortly after departing Mainland Chinese airspace.

  Not that it mattered any longer.

  Silently, he offered a few more words of imprecation, first upon Zhang Ru’s many ancestors—may they roast on a fiery spit and be eaten by weasels—and then upon himself.

  Bo bemoaned the day he’d signed up for the PLAAF. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force, as if that was not some great irony that even the Buddha himself could never unravel.

  Liberation? Not if it put his life into the hands of a man like Zhang Ru.

  Zhang had promised that if Bo would do his bidding, he would be picked up by a quiet fishing boat just off the Taiwanese coast after ditching the J-20 aircraft on Fulong Beach.

  Except when he had tuned to the frequency, all he’d heard was the Voice of America shortwave broadcast from the Philippines.

  Ru’s idea of a grand joke.

  Bo was fast running out of options. He’d circled back out to sea hoping to spot a fishing boat of any size, but all he saw were tiny local boats that wouldn’t serve beyond a kilometer offshore, and ocean-going freighters.

  He tried a call on the VOA frequency anyway.

  Nothing except more propaganda about the grand nation’s achievements, worse than the headlines on the People’s Daily newspaper.

  However, he had other problems. His long-distance radar showed two four-bird flights lifting out of Songshan Airport. They would be on him in under two minutes.

  Ru had trapped him so perfectly.

  If you do this, I won’t send your wife and daughter to the Xinjiang prison camps as whores for the guards’ entertainment.

  If he tried to return, the government would do even worse to him. No amount of claiming he just wanted to “test their newest fighter against the weak Taiwanese defenses” would save him. Even without Ru labeling him as a traitor, which he’d be sure to do to protect himself.

  And without rescue, he’d never leave Taiwan alive.

  If he landed the J-20 intact as a bargaining chip, then claimed political asylum, perhaps—

  A new blip on the radar, closely followed by two more, told him that option had just been closed off.

  If he had merely crossed the midline of the Taiwan Strait, the Taiwanese Air Force would merely have threatened him or tried to crowd him back over the line. He’d flown enough authorized “system test” missions across the Strait that the PLAAF now had an accurate map of Taiwan’s tactics and response times.

  But that wasn’t what he’d done.

  Under Ru’s orders, he’d circled the island, and crossed over their land as well. That would be unforgivable in Taiwan’s mind, as the trio of blips showed only too well.

  They were closing at Mach 6. That meant they were Sky Sword II air-to-air missiles with a range of a hundred kilometers. His window of opportunity had just shrunk from two minutes to twenty seconds.

  The Chengdu J-20 was a stealth jet in more than one way. Not only did it have an incredibly low radar profile, its exhaust also had an extremely low heat signature. The Sky Sword II was an infrared tracker.

  Bo turned once more for the land, pointing his exhaust out to sea and aiming for the beach.

  The missiles overshot, picked up his heat signature again, and turned to follow. They were even better than reported. That was unbelievably bad news.

  As the first missile closed within five seconds of contact, he released a cloud of chaff and flares. His plane had plenty of glide, so he killed the J-20’s engines as well, removing his heat signature entirely.

  The leading Sky Sword II reached the infrared heat of the flares. Reading the chaff as a close-proximity range, the pulse doppler radar ignited the warhead, exploding harmlessly behind him. The second missile targeted the explosion of the first, but the third twisted to follow him.

  Bo hit the fuel dump—not much left to spill. Definitely not enough to return home.

  General Zhang had ordered that the plane not be flyable after the crash, but neither could it be utterly destroyed. The final missile seemed determined to negate that. Knowing he’d been tricked, Chen Bo didn’t care, except the explosion might kill him even as he ejected.

  The final Sky Sword II was less than two seconds behind him.

  A thousand meters to the beach, Bo armed the LS-6 bombs and pressed the emergency release on all four of them.

  They plunged into the waves.

  Two thousand kilos of high explosive ignited on impact, launching a massive fountain of water close behind him. Hopefully the last of the Taiwanese Sky Sword II missiles would fire its warhead upon reaching it, or drown.

  Either way, it never came out the other side. He was safe—from that.

  Skimming the waves, Bo waited until he was sure that the jet would impact the beach hard enough to be broken apart without being destroyed.

  Then he pulled the emergency handles on the ejection seat and braced himself.

  Nothing happened.

  He pulled them again.

  The beach lay less than three seconds ahead.

  Again.

  Ejection seats didn’t fail.

 
It just didn’t happen.

  Unless…Zhang Ru didn’t want him telling his story to anybody.

  Bo reached for the control stick to ease the nose up, perhaps smooth out the landing and make it survivable, but there was something in his way.

  “Ó, xióngmāo niào.” It was the last thing he’d ever say.

  A massive, temporary bandshell stood on the beach directly in his path. It towered six stories high. He couldn’t climb fast enough without his engines. He was too low to turn aside without catching a wingtip in the water that would send him cartwheeling and guarantee his death.

  The Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon skimmed onto Fulong beach traveling at four hundred and seventeen kilometers per hour.

  It plowed into the scaffolding that formed the bandshell, ripping off both wings.

  Whatever Zhang Ru had done to sabotage the ejection seat was knocked loose by the impact.

  The cockpit canopy bolts fired. The canopy drove upward, creating a momentary bubble in the collapsing structure. Four milliseconds later, the seat’s rocket fired. Because the seat’s independent altitude-sensing system determined that the aircraft was at ground level, it fired with its full force to lift the pilot to a safe altitude before the parachute opened.

  Captain Chen Bo was launched upward with a force of fourteen gravities. Normally, the g-force would permanently compress his spine by as much as two inches, making him that much shorter.

  Instead, he was launched through the center stage point of the platform. The impact pulverized every bone in his body above his solar plexus. The trajectory of his body and, after the first point-six seconds, his body parts impacted eighty-three separate elements of the stage’s structure. His remains would not be recognized as such until his boots were found three days later.

  Without its canopy or pilot, the J-20’s fuselage continued through a channel formed by the scaffolding’s structure and out the far side. After teetering for a long moment, the bandshell folded in on itself and collapsed into the area that would have been crowded with tens of thousands of concert-goers tomorrow night.