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The Alpha Mike men sounded off over the radio. All were alive; one had been injured but insisted he remain in the fight, though Mike couldn’t see him in all the smoke. Repult then checked with the other two TLs as he began reloading his weapon, pulling off the expended canvas magazine—affectionately known as the “nutsack”—and shoving it into a large dump pouch, then pulling another from his pack and seating it below the weapon.
As he yanked the end of the belt of ammunition out, he called to the individual TLs. “Mike One to Zulu Actual. Say status?”
“Zulu One.” The man sounded like he was in pain. “Zulu Two is KIA. Zulu One is WIA. Rest are up, ammo green.”
“You getting treatment, Freddie?”
“Yeah. Shrapnel to face, neck…both arms, I guess. Six is stabilizing me. I’m ambulatory.”
“Roger that.” As the smoke swirled around him, he called out again. “Quebec Actual. Status?”
“Quebec has three WIA. Two stable, one critical.”
Fuck, they hadn’t even made it up the first corridor of this building, and they were now surrounded by Cubans who certainly would circle the building, and maybe even hit it. Ground Branch had one dead, one badly wounded, and they’d probably just expended three hundred rounds.
“All right,” Repult said. “Everybody on your feet. We all need to advance, injured or not. We can barricade from the Cubans, if they enter the building, once we get underground. We need to separate, as well. Everybody move to the doors and find the stairs.”
They moved out into the now-dissipating smoke, listening for the sounds of more LAWs as they approached the double doors and the stairs beyond them that led to the subterranean levels.
SIXTY-FOUR
Anton Hinton raced down a sterile hallway in his super flashy but not terribly practical ten-thousand-dollar Nike “What the Dunk?” kicks, one story up from the subterranean passageways he’d been traveling for the past few minutes.
This area looked like an office corridor in a Fortune 100 company somewhere in the United States: pristine, brightly lit, with glass-walled conference rooms full of audiovisual equipment on both sides.
Twenty-five meters behind him he heard the stairwell door open, and he knew this would be his two pistol-wielding Sentry bots, who did their best to keep up with the forty-six-year-old man but didn’t have the speed.
Hinton barreled through the doors at the end of the corridor and into the Cluster Room, the name that Hinton Labs had given to the former command center of the entire Soviet SIGINT station here in Cuba. It was the size of a football field; hundreds of signals intelligence analysts had worked at desks in this room in its heyday, but now it was bright and sanitized, and the majority of the floor space was filled with 188 black cabinets, which were themselves each filled with four IBM Z16 mainframe computers.
Hinton sprinted between two rows of the machines towards the center of the room; his Sentries entered soon after, running much slower behind him.
He made a turn at the end of the long row of mainframes, and now he looked straight ahead at the area known as “the cage.”
A fenced-in workstation in the core of the cluster surrounded by all the black cabinets, the cage was ten meters square and four meters high, the fencing and top made of hardened steel mesh.
The digital combination lock on the door was known by only six people in the entire company, and for this reason Hinton was surprised to find the door open and two people inside.
Kimmie Lin stood next to Heinrich Schmidt, one of the lead engineers on the Cyrus Project, who sat at the workstation and furiously tapped keys.
Hinton entered, ran up behind them, then dropped his hands down to his knees and wheezed, winded from his escape. As his armed bots appeared behind him, coming around the mainframes, he asked, “What…what…are you doing?”
Kimmie Lin said, “Preparing the upload. Waiting for your order to send.”
Anton was perplexed by his assistant taking this initiative on her own. “Nobody told you to do that.”
“The Americans are here. This might be our only opportunity. We must release Cyrus straightaway.”
Hinton put his hands on his head, then screamed in frustration.
“We must upload it to China,” she said. “And then delete it so the CIA can’t access it.”
Hinton said nothing for several seconds. Schmidt kept working on the computer, and then finally the New Zealand native shouted again. “Bloody do it!” He considered Kimmie’s plan to be the better of two very bad options.
Heinrich didn’t look away from the screen as he typed. “We’ll begin upload in two minutes. Patching into the server address for Beijing.”
Kimmie said, “I just communicated with SSF. They acknowledge they are ready to deploy upon receipt.”
The Strategic Support Force was the Chinese People’s Liberation Army service branch in charge of military modernization, and Hinton had been working directly, but in secret, with them for nearly five years.
