32
Nick Lesko by nature was not an inquisitive individual, at least not beyond the scope of whatever he happened to be working on at the moment. This was not to say he was incurious, it was that his mind was active if narrowly focused. It was a survival instinct he’d developed over decades of performing sensitive work for sometimes dangerous individuals—it was never good to be the guy who knew too much.
His recent isolation, in space and on the ground, had begun to change that. His need to be mentally occupied led him down paths he normally wouldn’t have followed, whether out of disinterest or self-preservation.
Whether by necessity or accident, the control software they’d loaded on his laptop had provided a window into the full scope of the “project” he’d been hired for. And there was more, no doubt being controlled by someone else and partitioned from his piece of the pie. This he deduced from the news feeds he’d been following, searching for something to fill his mind besides the inane blather of daytime television.
Put simply, the space between Earth and Moon was getting dicey. Not only were all sorts of commercial satellites going dark, there were rumors that at least one high-priority US spy sat was out of contact. Putting the cherry on top, the military craft that rescued him, the one that was supposed to protect all this stuff in orbit, was now out of the picture.
So who profited from that? He wondered.
What most grabbed his attention was something that felt more personal. Lunar mining shipments which had been predictably arriving in their oceanic drop zones in a remote area of the South Pacific called Point Nemo were all of sudden not showing up in their drop zones. Someone was hacking and intercepting them—how? It would have to be early in their journey home. He’d learned enough to know that a small push one way in the beginning can lead to dramatic course changes at the end.
But it was what the news announcer had called that particular spot of ocean: the “spacecraft graveyard,” the single point on the globe most distant from any land. That was supposed to have been their recovery zone after reentry. There would have been a trawler waiting to pick them out of the ocean, well clear of any prying eyes that might be interested in them.
A chill shot through him. Had it been intended to be more than just a spacecraft graveyard? He was supposed to eliminate his teammates with a carefully planned “accident” during recovery, but what if that itself had been a ruse? First rule of a conspiracy is to eliminate the low-level conspirators. So how “low-level” was Nicholas Lesko if this heist was as big as he now thought? Was that even the right way to think about it?
Disrupted lunar mining shipments, owned by the same billionaire couple who’d gone missing on their way to that crackpot flyby of Mars. And the American ship sent to look for them was now disabled itself, with a Chinese ship on its way to help.
He returned to the map and the concentration of hijacked satellites. Besides the fact that his sponsors were making a killing off it, someone had just made themselves a nice little surveillance network by hijacking other people’s satellites—at least one of which had apparently belonged to the US military.
He hadn’t given any thought to the regions their zombie sats were working in until now. South America and the Indian Ocean. Who gave a shit about either, really?
About ten minutes of internet sleuthing later, he had a good idea, both of Chinese strategic interests in both regions and their use of front companies in industries like telecom and banking to leverage their presence, so to speak.
Did that include holding companies run by casino operators in Macau? He decided it probably did. That explained the high-grade encryption and near-unlimited budget.
If a foreign government was involved, then just calling it a heist was thinking too small. What would the military call it?
An operation.
Lesko felt himself breaking into a sweat. He shut down the encryption key and snapped the laptop shut.