looks at Hilal.
“To Endgame, my Player.”
“To Endgame, Master.”
Shiver.
He is free.
But exactly where he is free he does not know.
He inspects the instrument panel of the Lynx, locates the navigation system and the autopilot. Punches a few buttons on the touch screen and sees the English Channel. The lights to the north are Dover. He does not want to return to England, not ever, not ever blinkSHIVERblink ever blinkSHIVER ever blinkblinkSHIVERBLINKBLINKBLINK not ever.
An punches himself in the cheek to knock away the tics.
It works. “Chiyoko Takeda,” he whispers. “Chiyoko Takeda.”
Blood drips from his nose.
Shiver.
He blows out his cheeks. The adrenaline from the escape dissipates. The pain soaked into every cubic centimeter of his head revs like an engine.
He grabs the stick and arcs the Lynx low over the water, until his heading is 202?13' 35". He passes the still-burning destroyer three kilometers to the east, and prays that they don’t see him and that their guns are disabled, or that they’re too distracted by the burning ship to even bother with the guns.
And that’s when he notices a section of the controls that he isn’t familiar with, and realizes why the chopper was taking off dark, and why he is not at the moment being shot out of the air by a pair of F/A-18s.
It took off dark because it could.
The strange controls are a stealth array, and they are already active.
An can use this bird to disappear.
Blink. Shiver.
Why would stealth be active in the first place? If he had been on the Lynx as their prisoner, that would have made sense—he is a Player of Endgame, one of the deadliest people on the planet—but it was scrambling to take off before he’d even reached the flight deck.
So why take off dark?
Blink. Shiver. Blink.
And then he lurches forward, as if someone hit him in the back of the neck.
The metal box in the cargo hold.
The metal box the size of a coffin.
CHIYOKO TAKEDA.
An brings the chopper up 50 meters to keep a safe distance from the water and activates the autopilot, punching in a new heading of 140° 22' 07".
He spins out of the copilot’s seat and lands right in front of the box.
Shiver.
He takes a step forward and places his hands on it.
He doesn’t have to open it to know.
He falls forward on top of the casket, his ear and jaw cold on the metal, his arms draped over the sides.
“Chiyoko Takeda.”
The tics have stopped.
He stands, the internal world of the helicopter loud and pressing in on all sides, pain drilling the wound on his head, and he gets his fingers under the lid. It comes up more easily than he expects. He flips it away and peers inside. In the faint light he can just make out the wavy reflections of a rubber body bag. Next to the body bag is a small stuff sack.
An snatches a flashlight from a charging dock by the door and flicks it on.
The body bag looks as if it contains a broad-shouldered child.
An grabs the stuff sack first. Works his fingers into the cinched opening and pulls it open. A black analog watch, a leather sleeve containing assorted shuriken, a small knife, a ball of black silk, an eyeglasses case, some inch-long paper tubes that look like straws, a small plastic container. A thumb drive. A pen. A thin leather billfold.
Chiyoko’s things.
He closes the sack and sets it next to his feet.
The body bag.
He takes a breath and hooks the metal hoop of the zipper with his finger and slides it down 43 centimeters. The flashlight tumbles into the casket. It shines hard on the face of Chiyoko Takeda. One of her eyes is open and lifeless, dry, the pupil large and black. He touches it with his fingers and closes it. Her skin is pale and tinged blue. Purple capillaries crack over her right cheek in a fractal of jagged lines. Her lips are the color of the sea. They’re parted slightly. An sees the dark within, and the thin line of her front incisors. Her hair, black and straight and unchanged, has been combed and pinned away from her face. He puts his hands on her cheeks. Runs his hands over her neck and her collarbones and over the balls of her shoulders, covered in a pale green cotton hospital gown.
An whimpers.
He collapses into the box and his face lands on hers and the moonlight streams through the windows of the darkened chopper churning south-southwest to Normandy and he is blinking back tears and he can see the black filigrees of his wet eyelashes like a shroud of lace that is draped over him, over her, over them.
He works his arms under the rubber bag and squeezes. Hugs her.
“Chiyoko,” he says.
A beeping sound from the nav computer.
An kisses Chiyoko’s blue lips, her eyes, the little saddle where her eyebrows and nose meet. He smells her hair—it smells alive, unlike the rest of her—and he pirouettes into the copilot’s chair. He takes the stick and throttles back, looks out the port window past the pilot’s slumped body.
There, 500 meters away, is France. The beach and land rising above it is dark, hardly populated. Not far away, he knows, is the town of Saint-Lô. And in Saint-Lô is a Shang resupply cache. The world is littered with them. He just happens to be near one.
He is lucky.
He brings the Lynx to a hover and punches a new course into the autopilot but doesn’t activate it. He pulls on a life vest but will wait until he’s in the water to inflate it. He grabs a dry bag. Throws in the stuff sack of Chiyoko’s things, four MREs, the pilot’s Browning Hi-Power Mark III, extra ammo, a field kit, a GPS, a headlamp. Takes the pilot’s knife. Grabs another life vest and a coil of rope. Cuts a long section and
