Page 37 of Heart of Danger
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. Nowaywas she?—
“Fantastic,” Sam blurted. He grabbed her hand and started running.
CHAPTEREIGHT
Email from Special Projects Section
Operation Warrior
Ministry of Science and Technology
Beijing
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 Liberation 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 which 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 soldiers or 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 towards its destiny.
Minister Zhang Wei
Lee staredat 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 waves of shame and anger pulse through him. Sonic waves were toys. Weapons from science fiction comics from the 1930s. 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 is how he was treated?
The Minister would rue this day. Lee would see to it personally.
In the meantime, he had one more protocol to use on the Colonel and the others. Then Colonel Lucius Ward 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 Colonel had proved the most intractable 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 extracted revenge at the cost of scientific progress.
But—soon the harvested brain cells of the Colonel 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.
