The Weakness They Think They've Found
The year Louis graduated, the Military Academy's 31st class was judged the finest cohort among every class that had passed through its gates. For several years afterward the rebels never truly managed to run rampant. From the day he was first given a platoon as a second lieutenant, Louis had put down rebel after rebel, and the swift rise to major had been possible for one reason alone: he had stacked too much distinguished service on the battlefield for the army to ignore.
In recent years, though, the rebels had begun, slowly, to take the advantage again. All of it because of the woman named in the documents on his desk. Lieutenant Sophia Yu.
Had Tony Brown, planted among them as a spy, not been exposed by an absurd blunder of his own, Lieutenant Sophia would have gone on aiding the rebels and running their operations for years more. The Bunker's fall would have come that much sooner. Unfortunately for them, Tony Brown was caught—and in the end even Wilson, who had kept his mouth shut to the last, spilled what he knew.
What he had explained to Lieutenant Jiyeon Yu was the truth. Operation Cuckoo, which should have been the largest operation of the year, had ended in failure. The rebel team built around Aiden Miller had been taken, and her younger sister had been taken with them.
If there was one thing he had not told her…….
"Major. The Battalion Commander is summoning you."
His aide's voice came from beyond the door. Louis pushed the documents across the desk and locked the drawer. When he stepped into the corridor, Second Lieutenant Thomas was waiting in full uniform.
They walked the hall without a word. Every soldier they met snapped rigid and saluted. The major returned the greetings with his usual dry courtesy and kept on toward his destination. He knew perfectly well that the moment those soldiers turned their backs they traded loaded looks, and he gave no sign of it. Louis was not the bearish sort. If anything, he read a room quickly and judged a situation with a razor's edge. The foul rumor thickening through the unit had not escaped him.
"Everyone's talking about it, sir."
Thomas, silent until then, spoke all at once. Louis flicked a glance sideways and offered nothing in return.
"Do you really think something like this will work?"
"That isn't a second lieutenant's call."
"But—!"
They were already outside the Battalion Commander's office. The aide at the door dipped his head. Permission to enter came almost at once. Louis did not look again at Thomas, standing there with a furrowed brow, and stepped inside.
The office was thick with cigarette smoke. It was not only the Battalion Commander and the battalion staff officer waiting. An unexpected man had come as well. The Regiment Commander.
"Well, well—look who it is. If it isn't the ace of our division, Major Louis himself!"
The Regiment Commander rose with a glad face and came toward him, already drunk. Louis saluted. When the man clapped him on the arm, he dropped the posture and took in the room. Liquor bottles and paper packets of pills lay scattered across the table. Narcotic hallucinogens moved openly through the army, on the pretext that they lifted morale and burned fear away.
Every time Louis saw his commanders like this, he felt it in his bones: the Bunker's end was not far off. The leadership scrambled desperately to hide it, but a team of researchers had already fled, and the food was running out. Worse, the men at the top could not pull in one direction, so every meeting collapsed into a brawl.
Even if the rebels never came, the Bunker would slowly destroy itself. Humanity stood once again at a dead end. They could not simply barricade themselves inside and wait; someone had to go out and look for a way through. Shutting your eyes did not erase a ruin already written.
"Rumors are flying all over the unit these days. Word is you've finally learned what real fun is."
At the deliberate choice of words, Louis smiled at an angle.
"Never thought I'd see Major Louis make a request like that."
The Battalion Commander let out a booming laugh.
"Makes him look a little human at last, doesn't it?"
Louis knew they feared him, and that they watched his every move with keen interest. They had raised a dog to bite the rebels, and now the dog's masters were afraid they might not be able to hold the leash.
"So. Anything new? When did we say we were moving out?"
The Regiment Commander dropped back into his seat and asked as if it hardly mattered. He meant the intelligence coming out of Aiden Miller. The man was far too free with his tongue. The rebel base's location had already been given up in full—the size of the force, the list of its leadership, even the next operation, all of it emptied out without remainder.
They were watching the rebels against that information, and they had finished confirming that what Aiden confessed was true. The Bunker's upper ranks were giddy now, thrilled at the prospect of sweeping away, in a single stroke, the group that had unsettled and tormented them for so long. They had no idea that every piece of intelligence in their hands had been thoroughly sorted and censored by Louis Kane.
"Departure is mid-October. Given the rebels' numbers, the 5th Battalion will need to prepare to deploy. For the security of headquarters, it would be reasonable to leave the 1st Company behind."
They were drawing up a plan to hit the rebels by surprise. After that the four of them talked the operation through at length, but in truth it came to nothing more than listening to Louis Kane and agreeing with him.
Just as he finished the last of his report and turned to go, the Battalion Commander spoke, a slick smile on his face.
"So. Orientals any different? Sophia was famous for that face even back when she was a second lieutenant. A waste of a face, rotting away as a soldier."
The Battalion Commander smacked his lips, the look on him revolting. Louis stared back without a trace of a smile.
"It sounds as though the Battalion Commander is curious himself."
At the unruffled reply the Battalion Commander's face froze—only for a moment.
"Ha—as if. A woman the major has his eye on."
He denied it quickly, but the air had already soured. In a war that had dragged on too long, the army's chain of command had been a wreck for ages. A primitive order, where strength and ability came before everything else, was arriving by degrees. In that order, Louis Kane was unmistakably a predator.
He mixed no further words with them. He saluted and stepped out. He had already given them the picture they wanted; he had no wish to humor them past the line. Once he was gone, the men drunk on liquor and pills would tear into him with relish, without catching a single thing out of place. That was enough.
From the moment Tony Brown was exposed and poured out every operational plan, and Wilson too began to open his mouth, Louis had bargained with the senior officers: he would keep Lieutenant Sophia's person in his own hands. When he offered, as the reason for so outrageous a request, a private and filthy lust, they were if anything delighted. Perhaps they thought they had finally seized a weakness in Louis Kane.
And in truth, Lieutenant Jiyeon Yu was Major Louis's weakness.
That Jiyeon had held a central role in the rebels' operations—and that even before that she had been the ace who turned their plans, great and small, into fact—had been buried very deep, past anything the senior officers knew. When Aiden Miller was caught and Louis learned that Jiyeon's younger sister was with them, he buried that just as thoroughly.
He fed the upper ranks just enough to whet their appetite, while what he actually meant to protect he kept clenched in his fist. For a man who had never once stepped past proper measure, it was a move that could be called reckless.
Loyalty to the government had never been there to begin with. He was no fool. He had no wish to be buried in a land of the dead alongside a collapsing Bunker, and no intention of spending his life as the dog of half-wits, biting rebels on command.
Of course…… this resolve might have hardened because of a single person.
Second Lieutenant Thomas, who had been waiting, fell in at his side. Thomas was the only man who knew the whole of Louis's plan. He wanted to follow the researchers who had left the Bunker. Their aims ran the same way, so coming to an understanding had been easy.
On the way back to the office, Louis recalled the first time he had met Jiyeon Yu.