And He Saith, Break Up the Mountains Where the Hermit-Folk Can Hide

“The Americans will call it a moral failing that of the three ideological blocs in the world today, only their liberal-capitalist bloc never signed an alliance with a regime known as Nazi Germany. The Soviets and our Austro-Hungarian allies will call it realpolitik. If the Nazis had not been lulled into a false sense of security early on in their campaigns, the German Crisis may well have escalated outside of Europe and become a second Great War. As it stands, their mutant pseudo-traditionalist ideology was crushed before its genocidal agenda could be carried out to any meaningful degree, we benefited by the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the thrones of France and Spain with non-parliamentary systems, and the Communists imposed their ideology on most of Eastern Europe. As a result, Europe is now divided between monarchist and Communist, with the liberals having no presence on the mainland outside of Scandinavia and the Northwest German Bundesrepublik.”

–Date Sunakuni, Shogun of California, in a speech to an assembly of Shinobi Corps apprentices, 1974.

If Alejandra Montoya hadn’t suspected MSI had bugged both her car and her office in the Shogunate’s Bogotá embassy, she would have given her supervisor back in Shinkyo an elated phone call on her way back from this afternoon’s meeting. After a long dry spell for the Shinobi Corps in the Colombian capital, she had just recruited two magnificently placed informants in a single day: a waiter in a restaurant favored by the head of MSI for informal meetings with other Politburo members, and a bodyguard from another, more junior member’s personal detail. Both had given her accounts of the same meeting in their initial reports, both citing it as the breaking point that made them willing to sell their country’s secrets.

And hot damn, was it juicy. It confirmed the suspicion Earp at Security had relayed to them from the Duelist pilot: MSI had technical data from Project Lepanto, which probably meant a source within the team. This would set her priorities for the next three months, at least: closing the gap on Captain Hernandez’s information disadvantage, and, if the Gendarmerie didn’t crack the case first, sniffing out the rat bastard traitor who had caused it. She had given the waiter a list of keywords to listen for– Project Windmill, Project Lepanto, Duelist, source, blueprints, etc.– but the more interesting source for the moment was the bodyguard. His principal, Rear Admiral Castro, was scheduled to visit the Project Windmill maintenance site this week, with any luck taking Montoya’s new informant in tow.

She waved to the man outside the embassy gate who wore the uniform of the Bogotá Militia, pretending for a moment that she didn’t know he was really MSI, and that he didn’t suspect her diplomatic position was a cover for a Shinobi. Did he have any inkling she was the station chief, queen spook in the lion’s den? Probably not. Early thirties, covered as a diplomatic secretary, heavy-handed with her makeup, and quite practiced in acting hopelessly ditzy, he probably assumed she was, if a spy, only good for running a honeypot.

That evening, an coded message went out from her embassy laptop disguised as a cupcake recipe, on a forum trawled all hours of the day by Shinobi HQ in Shinkyo. The next afternoon, a short handwritten message found its way to her from a dead drop:

“Mountain and Squire going on a camping trip to see Knight. Departure ~48hrs. Unknown duration.”

A set of coordinates for a location high in the Andes followed.

Mountain was the informant’s codename, Squire his principal, and Knight could refer to Major Quispe or to Project Windmill generally– the choice of the phrase camping trip made it clear which. He'd found it already.

Two days later, Rear Admiral Castro set off for the mountains in a spacious SUV of Californian make, taking with him a driver/valet and a bodyguard. Inside his suitcoat, clipped to a strap of his shoulder holster where it disappeared among the wires of his radio and earpiece, Mountain wore the device his handler had left at his dead drop: a lavalier microphone with a plastic body about half the size of a 9V battery, containing a tiny motherboard, a SIM card, and a drive with about a terabyte of capacity. The thing was set to record constantly, and was sensitive enough to pick up Mountain’s heartbeat. This acted as a dead man’s switch– it sent out no cell signal by default, so as to avoid the remote chance of detection or downstream interception, but could be manually induced to send its entire contents straight to Shinkyo as soon as it had a network connection, and would do so automatically if it ceased to hear Mountain’s heartbeat for thirty seconds, unless a manual override code was entered on its four small buttons as soon as it was removed from his person. Given that huge numbers of satellites had largely replaced cell towers since Colombia, the League of Vienna and NATO had all constructed lunar mining operations and orbital fabrication plants at different Earth-Moon Lagrange points, this transmission would be instantaneous unless he were killed deep underground and dragged up later.

Other than wearing this and keeping an eye out for any noteworthy sights, he just had to keep doing the same job he’d been on for the last five years, and watch Squire’s ass. Admiral Castro was a fine boss, and not a bad man, just distastefully willing to go along with Minister Fernandez’s schemes. Not that many of them had much choice– Fernandez had the dirt to destroy any of their reputations on a whim, and making one disappear would not be much harder. Officially, Colombia had no single head of state, and people often regarded the General Secretary of the Party as an unofficial one, but under the current status quo, it was Fernandez who ruled the nation.

Well, Mountain had sat in on enough private exchanges among the Politburo to have a sense of what really happened after the “liberation” of Bolivia– largely by Fernandez’s design– and whether or not his boss would be cowed, he would do what little he could to stop it happening again in Mexico City.

They left Bogotá early in the afternoon, spent a night in a lavish hotel in Nieva, then arrived the next afternoon at a remote site tucked away in the mountains along the internal border between the New Granadan and Ecuadorian People’s Republics.

There was a heliport along the drive up rather than on-site, which spoke to the altitude, if Mountain's labored breathing wasn't sign enough. The facility had brick walls topped with razor wire, and one look at the cabins inside told him it was as much to keep people in as out.

The prisoners muttered to each other as the admiral and his two attendants parked and were escorted through by Interior Ministry guards, their Spanish sounding vaguely Peruvian in some mouths, Argentinian in others, in aggregate unmistakably Bolivian. Though they had wary, brooding looks, like dogs whose master kicked them frequently and wantonly, they at least looked strong and decently-fed. Most likely, they had been sent here, rather than to some mine or cornfield, because they were experienced welders, machinists, tool and die makers, perhaps even some engineers. The sort of people whose skills were valuable, too valuable to be stymied by hunger and malnutrition.

He considered asking one of the Interior Ministry grunts, an ill-shaven man in a trench coat with a banged-up FAM-95 slung over his shoulder, about the prisoners– from the standpoint of risk to his principal, of course– but the guard helpfully volunteered a spoken record of the prisoners without being nudged.

“Aw, relax, the Bolivians haven't made any real trouble in months. Interior's better at dangling a carrot than we're given credit for, we don't just rely on the stick. A few have been… integrated into the People at large, started working under supervision in Lima and Medellín. Enough to give the rest hope, despite the executions.”

As grim a confirmation as the comment was, of everything he feared his country was doing just out of the public eye, it was a stroke of luck as an informant.

His luck continued when they came to a long hangar deeper in. The whole structure was set up as a factory, and towering above the line were five man-shaped scaffoldings, twenty-five meters tall and inset with motors and hydraulics. He recognized one as the frame he had seen Major Quispe piloting on television, complete with the melted shoulder where an incendiary shell had struck it. This frame was stripped bare, however, its autocannon, cockpit, and backpack removed. The cockpit was being mounted on a thicker, bulkier frame, with the autocannon hanging from an overhead conveyor hook above and the backpack separated into two parts at its feet– a multiple rocket launcher for the top section, and now that he got a better look at the bottom, warning labels marked it clearly as a fission reactor. Not all the steam blowing out of it during the match, it seemed, was backblast from the rockets.

An engineer ran up to Admiral Castro and immediately explained the sight, loud and clear.

“Comrade Admiral, we extrapolated some performance metrics for the Don Juan’s incendiary shells from the damage to the shoulder, and concluded that a center-mass hit to Frame B would have caused a complete structural failure. I’ve taken the liberty of transferring the existing cockpit, reactor, and weapons modules to Frame C, which should be able to maintain integrity after several hits.”

“Very good, comrade. Given how Frame B performed, we can afford to sacrifice some mobility. I do not think we need to build any more weapons modules before the next match, but I should like to review our choice of missile warheads…”

As the two walked along the production line, Mountain in tow, they passed an ongoing inspection on a batch of missile fuselages. The inspector held a no-go gauge in one hand and a bright flashlight in the other, squinting as a prisoner-technician waited nervously and eyed a pistol on the inspector’s hip– a worn Makarov, from when Colombia was still copying Soviet designs. The gauge slipped into a gap where it was not meant to fit. The inspector checked a clipboard on a nearby workbench, then sighed.

“Strike three.” Mountain heard him mutter.

He drew the handgun, and planted a bullet in the technician’s chest. None of the others looked up from their work, and an Interior Ministry guard silently hauled the corpse from the line.