War of Eagles

THIRTY

After ten years in the business, Shek had talked his way out of a job. He was happy it turned out that way.

When he was a boy, Yuan “the Emperor” Shek used to look forward to his mother coming to his room and singing him a good night song. His favorite was “The World Beneath the Stone of Farmer Woo.” It seems the farmer had to move a large stone in his field in order to plant corn. But when he did so, he found all manner of insects and tunnels, nests and roots, and even a family of field mice. Food came and went in organized supply lines, “Many ants with many legs in service of the empress.” At the end of the song the farmer replaced the rock and grew his crops around it.

Young Shek lived in the back of the schoolhouse where his mother was the only teacher. His father was a soldier who was rarely home. There were plenty of rocks in a field behind the school. Most of them were too small to conceal more than a few bugs or small snakes. Shek was not strong enough to move the larger rocks, where he imagined the riches to be much greater.

One day, when his father was home, the older man showed his son how to get the rock to move. Not with a lever but with gunpowder. Carefully placed in cracks or under the edges, the tiny charges made Shek the master of the field. He even wrote a little song about himself, “The Emperor of the Empress Ant.”

Explosives became a very big — and profitable — part of Shek’s life. From a soldier friend who sometimes visited with his father, the boy learned how to manufacture explosives using fertilizer and other ingredients. Shek put them to work moving rocks for fun, creating popping toys to celebrate birthdays or holidays, and even for pest control. He taught himself how to set off charges using a slight amount of pressure applied to a trigger plate — in this case, pieces of bark peeled from trees. His small Emperor Mousetraps were a big seller in the village. He pedaled them from a small, flat rock along the main road until his mother found out what he was doing. She lent him a card table from the school.

She believed in doing things right.

Shek’s father died in a truck accident when the boy was twelve. Teaching had never been very profitable for his mother, and the widow’s pension from the military was extremely meager. Shek’s sideline became an important part of their income. He made increasingly sophisticated fireworks, flares, and even custom demolitions for local builders. Without the benefit of an education, Emperor Shek became a master of his craft. Best of all, there was no record of his skill in military or scholastic records. He was what the intelligence trade called an invisible.

When Chou Shin learned of this talented young man, he hired him for the 8341 Unit. Chou immediately set Shek and his mother up in a small but comfortable cottage in Yu Xian, a Beijing suburb. The structure was isolated and had a shed out back for Shek’s work, which was building bombs for the Central Security Regiment. The explosives were not simply for use by the CSR. Many of them were employed by the military for covert land and sea mines, illegal armaments that would not be traced to Beijing. Even more were given over for off-the-books ballistics. These were passed to rebels fighting in foreign lands, where destabilization benefited Beijing by involving enemy forces in distracting struggles at home.

Shek was always busy, though he was never rushed. His employer recognized that he was an artist who could hide explosives inside donuts for transport or bake them into ceramic goods that would explode spectacularly in a microwave oven or conventional oven. Those were good for assassinations.

Director Chou — who never made his requests by phone or computer but always visited the laboratory personally — had commissioned Shek to make very specific bombs over the last week. He wanted something small and powerful that could blow out the hull of a thirty-thousand-ton freighter. He wanted something else that would detonate cold: destroy a room on top of a high-rise structure without setting a fire or causing collateral devastation below. That required a briefcase-sized device with interior deflectors, steel ribs, and titanium mesh that would release the explosion without scattering superheated debris. Shek never knew where these devices were headed, nor did he care. Chou took care of him and his aging mother. Like his father, Chou was a military man and a loyal Communist. That was all Shek had to know.

A few days ago, however, Shek received a visit from someone else. Another military man who had learned of his work for Chou and needed a secret device of his own. He asked if an explosive could be prepared that would endure heat reaching 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit without detonating. Shek told him the real problem was not detonation but evaporation. At that temperature the medium carrying the chemicals would vaporize, causing the explosive to malfunction. Shek said it would be possible if the package were encased in a low-density, high-purity silica 99.8-percent amorphous fiber similar to the material used in the thermal tiles of the American space shuttle. Shek said he had something similar to that in his equipment closet. By that time Shek had guessed that the explosive would be used on a rocket, probably a ballistic missile, and foresaw a more difficult problem.

“The charge itself can be small, but the added weight of thermal shielding will immediately cause a missile or rocket to shift course,” Shek told him. “Even some of the larger fireworks I built had no tolerance for imbalance.”

“Added weight will not matter,” the individual said, smiling broadly and showing a gold tooth.

“But sir, it will cause the rocket to veer.”

“Mr. Shek, I want you to create the device. How long will it take?”

“Ten hours, maybe a little longer.”

“Good. I will return then. You will be generously rewarded.”

Shek did not care abut that. He did not mind killing people here and there, anonymously. They were enemies of the state or they would not be targets. But ever since he began making fireworks, Shek had been a student and devotee of space flight. He did not know what kind of rocket the man wanted to destroy, or why. But he did not want to be a part of it, whatever nations were involved.

“You will do it,” the visitor replied coldly. “If you refuse, your mother will be brought here and shot in front of you. In the legs first. Then the arms.”

Shek began assembling the man’s bomb. He finished it on time. He did not ask what it was for. He did not want to know.

Now, however, he was watching television while he worked on a design to inject fuel into a lightbulb so it would explode when it was turned on. He saw a television newscast about the next launch from Xichang. It would take place the following afternoon, on National Day. A Long March 4 rocket would be used to carry a communications satellite aloft. Shek used his low-level security password to look up the project on-line. He read that the manufacturer was the Unexus Corporation and that the power source was plutonium.

Shek felt sudden nausea unrelated to the gas fumes. At a height of seven miles, as originally proposed, the destruction of the satellite would have caused the resultant radiation to remain primarily in the upper atmosphere. There, air currents would have diluted the effect and disbursed it over a wide area. An explosion under three miles would cause extensive fallout, much of that directed downward by the blast.

What this man planned was worse.

Far, far worse.