Read Online Subterrene War 03: Chimera by T.C. McCarthy - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: T.C. McCarthy
Tags: cyberpunk
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been a million times worse than anything else I could’ve done.
“Finish up with her,” I said.
“How?”
“Get names and addresses of her coworkers in Wonsan, information that seems innocuous, anything that might be of value down the road, like her favorite restaurants and bars, where people go to relax in her division. We can’t get anything on Sunshine, but maybe we can get something useful
now
that we won’t recognize until
later
.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I need to think.” And I knew even as I said it that thinking wouldn’t do any good at all.
The apartment had a small porch, and I lay on the concrete slab, looking up at the few stars I could see through Madrid’s light pollution. The cigarette burned.From inside came Jihoon’s muffled shouts, and it reminded me of being a kid, of my old man hollering at my mom in their room after he came home from a twelve-hour shift at the Navy Yard, a sound sometimes accompanied by slaps. I was getting close to forty, and it worried me. There was no longevity in the Special Forces and a promotion at my age to lieutenant was only a token or something required to gain me access to Strategic Operations; it didn’t mean that they wanted me forever. So where would I be in five years? It was easy to predict the arc of someone like Ji, whose problem was being Asian. I knew he thought I was prejudiced from what I’d said to him earlier, but that couldn’t be further from the truth because I’d just been trying to piss him off, to get him to come at me, and to teach him a lesson. Most in the military didn’t trust Asians, and to those kind it wouldn’t matter that he was Korean. Korean, Japanese, Filipino, or Thai—they were the best friends we had in the Pacific. But to the military, these were the same bastards who had tricked us fifty years ago into sending our forces into one of the hairiest wars in history, the Asian Wars, where a quarter of the world’s population, along with fifty million Americans, had disappeared overnight in nuclear fire. But even that wouldn’t stop Jihoon from career advancement. You could tell from just looking at him that he had a million tricks up his sleeve.
I must be getting old,
I thought,
because I never used to think this way
.
The immediate concern, though, was La Tumba. It meant that Spanish investigators were already combing the place for hair and skin, anything that might provide a DNA sample of the killer so they could find the person who had done it. I had backup plans if they got a hit. Butnone of them were optimal, and these events gave me a first taste of what it meant to be in the open, unprotected by the umbrella of the US military and operating as an independent. They
meant
it too. If we got caught, the Army would shrug it off and scream that they knew we were no good in the first place and that’s why they kicked us out. So why hadn’t I tried for these kinds of ops twenty years ago, when I was eighteen? Back then, the adrenaline would have been no more than a rush, something to savor, but there on that balcony?
It just made me think, while trying to ignore the sounds of torture from inside, and wonder:
What am I even doing on this op?
I’d been wrong when I thought that killing people would be easy; satos didn’t die like this. The Korean woman trembled in my hands, crying while she bled from her mouth, and my concentration broke when thoughts of Bea forced their way in. It pissed me off; nobody would sign up for torturing a human woman. My old assignments in war, training insurgents and fighting on the line, were a dream in comparison, and even killing satos wasn’t so bad; they didn’t whimper and cry, weren’t worth any sympathy even if they did, and although the chick was speaking Korean, you knew what she was saying and that she had a million reasons to live. Jihoon had squeezed everything he could out of her, and the local news had just announced that the police made a
“Finish up with her,” I said.
“How?”
“Get names and addresses of her coworkers in Wonsan, information that seems innocuous, anything that might be of value down the road, like her favorite restaurants and bars, where people go to relax in her division. We can’t get anything on Sunshine, but maybe we can get something useful
now
that we won’t recognize until
later
.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I need to think.” And I knew even as I said it that thinking wouldn’t do any good at all.
The apartment had a small porch, and I lay on the concrete slab, looking up at the few stars I could see through Madrid’s light pollution. The cigarette burned.From inside came Jihoon’s muffled shouts, and it reminded me of being a kid, of my old man hollering at my mom in their room after he came home from a twelve-hour shift at the Navy Yard, a sound sometimes accompanied by slaps. I was getting close to forty, and it worried me. There was no longevity in the Special Forces and a promotion at my age to lieutenant was only a token or something required to gain me access to Strategic Operations; it didn’t mean that they wanted me forever. So where would I be in five years? It was easy to predict the arc of someone like Ji, whose problem was being Asian. I knew he thought I was prejudiced from what I’d said to him earlier, but that couldn’t be further from the truth because I’d just been trying to piss him off, to get him to come at me, and to teach him a lesson. Most in the military didn’t trust Asians, and to those kind it wouldn’t matter that he was Korean. Korean, Japanese, Filipino, or Thai—they were the best friends we had in the Pacific. But to the military, these were the same bastards who had tricked us fifty years ago into sending our forces into one of the hairiest wars in history, the Asian Wars, where a quarter of the world’s population, along with fifty million Americans, had disappeared overnight in nuclear fire. But even that wouldn’t stop Jihoon from career advancement. You could tell from just looking at him that he had a million tricks up his sleeve.
I must be getting old,
I thought,
because I never used to think this way
.
The immediate concern, though, was La Tumba. It meant that Spanish investigators were already combing the place for hair and skin, anything that might provide a DNA sample of the killer so they could find the person who had done it. I had backup plans if they got a hit. Butnone of them were optimal, and these events gave me a first taste of what it meant to be in the open, unprotected by the umbrella of the US military and operating as an independent. They
meant
it too. If we got caught, the Army would shrug it off and scream that they knew we were no good in the first place and that’s why they kicked us out. So why hadn’t I tried for these kinds of ops twenty years ago, when I was eighteen? Back then, the adrenaline would have been no more than a rush, something to savor, but there on that balcony?
It just made me think, while trying to ignore the sounds of torture from inside, and wonder:
What am I even doing on this op?
I’d been wrong when I thought that killing people would be easy; satos didn’t die like this. The Korean woman trembled in my hands, crying while she bled from her mouth, and my concentration broke when thoughts of Bea forced their way in. It pissed me off; nobody would sign up for torturing a human woman. My old assignments in war, training insurgents and fighting on the line, were a dream in comparison, and even killing satos wasn’t so bad; they didn’t whimper and cry, weren’t worth any sympathy even if they did, and although the chick was speaking Korean, you knew what she was saying and that she had a million reasons to live. Jihoon had squeezed everything he could out of her, and the local news had just announced that the police made a
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