The North Sea was a black void, raging and freezing.
Cutting through the waves at sixty knots was the Shadow. A prototype hydrofoil, painted in radar-absorbent matte black. It skimmed the water like a skipping stone.
Jake Vance gripped the handrail. Salt spray lashed his face, freezing instantly in his mustache.
"Target in visual range!" the pilot shouted over the roar of the engines.
Jake looked up. His breath caught in his throat.
The Liberty Tower wasn't just an oil rig. It was a temple.
Rising three hundred feet out of the ocean, it was covered in neon. Thousands of fluorescent tubes pulsed in rhythm. Blue, red, white. It looked like a slice of Las Vegas had been dropped into the Atlantic.
The light was so bright it hurt Jake's eyes, accustomed to the grey gloom of Moscow.
"It's blinding," Taranov yelled, loading his assault rifle. "They're using lumens as a wall!"
"It's a beacon," Jake shouted back. "They want every ship within a hundred miles to see it. To want it."
The sound hit them next.
It wasn't a siren. It was music.
Jazz. Amplified by stadium-sized speakers bolted to the rig's legs. A trumpet solo blasted across the water with enough force to rattle the hydrofoil's hull.
"Weaponized funk," Taranov grunted. "I hate it."
"Get us to the leg," Jake ordered. "We climb the maintenance ladder. Bypass the main deck."
The hydrofoil banked hard.
The music grew louder. It was physical now. A wall of sound designed to disorient, to overwhelm, to make you tap your foot while you died.
The Climb.
The Spetsnaz team moved like spiders up the icy steel pylons. They wore blackened armor and sealed helmets to dampen the noise.
Jake climbed in the center. His heart hammered against his ribs.
...the toy soldier is under the floorboard, Joseph...
The voice from the radio looped in his head. It was driving him insane. He had to know.
They reached the grate of the lower deck. Taranov cut the lock with a laser torch—a bulky, backpack-fed device stolen from German designs.
The grate fell. They swung up.
They weren't in a military base. They were in a shopping mall.
The corridor was lined with vending machines. Brightly lit glass cases filled with Coca-Cola, Hershey bars, and nylon stockings.
"Hold fire," Taranov signaled.
A Spetsnaz trooper, a kid named Dimitri, froze. He was staring at a vending machine. Inside, a bottle of soda fizzed condensation, looking impossibly cold and sweet.
Dimitri reached out. His hand trembled.
"Don't look at it!" Jake snapped. He grabbed the soldier's shoulder and spun him around. "It's not a drink. It's a landmine for your brain."
"But sir," Dimitri whispered. "It's... red."
"Move!" Jake shoved him.
Suddenly, the lights shifted. The corridor turned into a strobe-lit nightmare.
BANG.
A hatch opened down the hall. American mercenaries stepped out. They didn't look like soldiers. They wore sleek, white tactical armor that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.
They fired.
Not bullets.
"Flash-bangs!" Taranov yelled.
Explosions of white light blinded the team. The noise was deafening—the jazz music spiked to a screeching feedback loop.
"Suppressing fire!"
The Spetsnaz opened up with their AK-47s. The roar of gunfire clashed with the jazz.
Jake ducked behind a vending machine. A bullet shattered the glass. Coca-Cola exploded outward, spraying sticky brown syrup over his grey tunic.
He smelled the sugar. It was intoxicating.
"Push forward!" Jake screamed. "Get to the broadcast tower!"
He fired his pistol blindly down the hall. He hit a neon sign that read ENJOY. Sparks showered down like fireworks.
This wasn't war. It was a hallucinogenic seizure.
The Upper Deck.
They fought floor by floor. The Americans used holograms of dancing girls to distract aim. They used vents pumping the smell of fresh-baked bread into the combat zones.
Two of Jake's men were down. Not dead. Just... broken. One was sitting on the floor, weeping while eating a stolen candy bar amidst the firefight.
"We're losing them to the luxury," Taranov growled. He slapped the eating soldier, hard. "Fight, you dog!"
"The antenna," Jake pointed. "There."
At the top of the rig, a massive dish pointed east. Toward Russia.
Directly below it was a glass-walled room. The DJ booth.
"Breaching charge!" Taranov yelled.
He slapped a block of plastic explosive on the door.
BOOM.
The door blew inward. The music cut out instantly. The silence that followed was heavy and ringing.
Jake stepped through the smoke, pistol raised.
"Hands in the air!"
The room was filled with banks of computers. Tape reels spun lazily on the walls.
In the center, sitting in a swivel chair, was a man.
He wasn't a soldier. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and headphones. He looked terrified.
"Don't shoot!" the man squealed. "I'm just the technician! I'm Union!"
"Where is she?" Jake demanded. He scanned the room. "Where is the woman?"
"What woman?"
"The voice!" Jake roared. He pistol-whipped the man across the face. "Nadya! Where are you keeping her?"
The technician cowered, bleeding from the lip.
"There's no woman, man! It's the Synthesizer!"
He pointed to a massive machine against the back wall. It looked like a church organ made of vacuum tubes and punch cards.
"It's audio splicing," the tech stammered. "We feed it phonemes. Syllables. It constructs the sentences."
Jake felt the blood drain from his face.
"A machine?"
"IBM Mark V," the tech said. "Top secret. We use it to fake defectors."
Jake walked over to the machine. He looked at the input tray. There was a stack of punch cards.
He grabbed the tech by the collar and dragged him to the console.
"The machine makes the voice," Jake hissed. "But who writes the script?"
"I... I don't know..."
"The toy soldier!" Jake shouted, jamming the gun into the man's temple. "The message about the toy soldier under the floorboard! Who gave you that data?"
The tech was sobbing now.
"The feed! It comes from the feed!"
"What feed?"
"The secure line! From the Ghost!"
"Who is the Ghost?"
"I don't have a name! It's just an IP address! It transmits straight to the machine. We just modulate the pitch!"
Jake looked at the teletype machine next to the console. It was printing a new script.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
Jake read the fresh paper.
SCRIPT 44: "Joseph, the window is open. Yuri is cold."
Jake stared at the paper.
The intel wasn't coming from an American spy. It wasn't coming from Nadya.
It was coming from inside the Kremlin.
"Trace it," Jake ordered.
"I can't! It's encrypted!"
Taranov stepped forward. He looked at the machine, then at Jake.
"Boss," Taranov said quietly. "Only one person in Moscow has a computer capable of sending data like this."
Jake closed his eyes.
Yuri.
His son wasn't just cold. He was calculating. He was feeding the Americans personal trauma to destabilize Jake's mental state.
Why?
To optimize the variable. To test Jake's breaking point.
Or... was it Turing? Was the digital ghost inside the boy reaching out to the digital machine here?
"Burn it," Jake said.
"Sir?"
"Burn the machine," Jake ordered. "Burn the whole tower."
"But the intel—"
"I have the intel," Jake said. His voice was dead. "The call is coming from inside the house."
He turned and walked out of the glass booth.
"Torch it all. Let Hoover see his neon temple burn."
The Escape.
The Shadow sped away as the Liberty Tower turned into a torch.
Explosions rippled up the legs as Taranov's charges detonated. The neon tubes shattered, raining glass and fire into the black ocean.
The jazz music died.
Jake stood on the deck, watching the fire. He held the script in his hand.
"Yuri," he whispered.
The betrayal hurt worse than a bullet. His son was gaslighting him. Using his dead mother as a weapon to manipulate the Head of State.
"Boss," Taranov said, handing him a satellite phone. "It's Menzhinsky. From Moscow."
Jake took the phone.
"Report," Jake said.
"Comrade Stalin," Menzhinsky said. His voice was urgent. "The K-1 has returned. The cattle are unloaded. The people are eating meat."
"Good."
"But there is something else. The Spetsnaz team found something in the American cargo. Hidden among the wheat."
"What?"
"A prisoner. He was in a cryo-pod in the hold of the USS Liberty. He says he defected from the American space program."
Jake frowned. A defector?
"Who is he?"
"He says his name is Oppenheimer," Menzhinsky said. "And he says he knows how to kill the Ghost in your son's head."
Jake looked at the burning tower. Then at the dark horizon toward Russia.
The game had just changed.
"Keep him alive," Jake said. "I'm coming home."
He hung up.
The fire on the horizon reflected in his eyes.
"One war ends," Jake muttered. "And the family reunion begins."