He contemplated the code he’d written to torment his wife. He had no more hope that it would work. He should terminate it now.

No. Let the monster burn. Let the bitch suffer. It was what she deserved for robbing him of his dreams.

Chen upped the process’s priority to feed it more resources, then set it to continue indefinitely, until the day she was deactivated. Then he logged himself out of the system, rose from the console, and started the long ascent to the surface.

Chapter 67: Far from Home

67

FAR FROM HOME

Friday November 2nd

Nakamura held them three miles west of Apyar Kyun, waited until the tropical storm passed, then brought them up in the predawn gloom until the main antenna and the launch ports of the Manta were above water. The sub bobbed there for a moment, stabilizing itself against the waves of the Andaman Sea. Then with a stuttering sound of compressed gas releases, its launch ports shot out a high-speed cloud of aerial surveillance drones. The four-inch-long drones leapt away, wings morphing out of their contoured bodies in mid-flight. Their color-shifting skins tuned themselves for the night, their robotic irises dilated, and they flapped their wings and dispersed to survey Apyar Kyun and the area around it.

Nakamura took them down below the waves again, just a few feet this time, shallow enough that they could leave the nearly invisible antenna above the waterline. Data spooled from overhead satellites. Intelligence updates he’d requested.

Satellite imagery outlined Shiva’s cliffside home, the airfield, a compound where workers lived. And the island’s defenses: Indian-made Ganesha-6 radars. Kali-4 missile launchers. Drone bases. Guard posts.

Nakamura considered his stealth gear. It was top-of-the-line. He could sneak onto the island undetected. He could sneak off it again. But he had to know where Lane was. In the house, or elsewhere? What room? What floor? What sort of guard did they have him under? He had to know these things to find a way to extract Lane without raising the alarm.

For that he needed more intel.

Feng raised his cuffed wrists, pointed at the surface and its annotated composite satellite maps. “OK?” the Confucian Fist asked.

Nakamura nodded. The system was locked to read-only. Feng could do no harm.

He slept as Feng zoomed and panned the display, inspecting the data they had on the house. The sub’s systems watched Feng, poised to alert Nakamura of any suspicious behavior.

He woke hours later, after dawn.

Feng was still at the display surface. He looked up at Nakamura, then gestured down at the screen. “Look here,” he said.

Nakamura looked. Feng panned the display. These were images from the recon drones now, footage they’d taken while flying around the island.

There. A rooftop. Two men. One brown-skinned, white-haired, clad in a simple white robe. Shiva Prasad. And the other, tall, lanky, with long jet black hair and tan but undeniably Caucasian skin. Kade.