Planning Ahead

Lin Xiao switched off the computer screen, leaving only the faint moonlight filtering in through the window. Nightingale sat at the edge of the folding bed, her fingers unconsciously rubbing her knee. Su Ying walked over from the doorway and stood behind Lin Xiao, her shadow cast on the wall like a silent barrier. "Seventy-two hours," Lin Xiao said, his voice especially clear in the silence. "We need a plan." He went to the wall, took down the base map, and spread it across the table. The paper had yellowed beneath the desk lamp, its lines and markings like a spiderweb, and they stood at its center.

The map's edges were worn, and several tears along the creases had been barely held together with clear tape. Lin Xiao pressed a finger against the Third Action Squad's area in the center of the map, where a small square had been circled in red ink. His fingertip moved along several dashed lines—the base's underground pipeline system, marked with years and maintenance records, the writing already blurred.

"Wolf," Lin Xiao said without looking up. "Go get Grey Falcon. Avoid the patrol routes. Use the entrance to Ventilation Duct Three."

Wolf nodded, and his figure vanished through the door. The footsteps in the corridor receded, absorbed by the walls into dull echoes.

Su Ying went to the window and lifted one corner of the blinds. Outside lay the base's nighttime training ground. Several searchlights swept across the empty sand, their beams slicing through the darkness and stirring fine dust. In the distance, the command tower's outline stood like a tombstone against the night, a few lights glowing in its upper windows like sleepless eyes.

"Where will they strike?" Su Ying asked, keeping her voice low.

Lin Xiao's finger stopped at one location on the map—the armory. It was a semi-underground structure marked: "Zone A-7, Level Two Authorization Required." Beside it, several words had been written in pencil: Inventory updated last week. Assault rifles ×120, pistols ×80, ammunition crates ×300.

"Here," Lin Xiao said. "Control the armory, and you control the base's distribution of firepower. And here—" His finger moved to another location. "The command communications center. Cut this off, and the base becomes deaf and blind."

On the map, the command communications center was drawn as a hexagon, surrounded by the words: "Electromagnetic shielding layer, thickness 30 cm." Beside it was a handwritten note: Backup generators on Underground Level Two. Fuel reserves: 72 hours.

Nightingale rose from the folding bed and walked to the table. Her face looked pale in the desk lamp's light, but her eyes were bright. "I can try to infiltrate the security system," she said. "But I'll need a physical access point. The base's main server is on the third underground level beneath the command center. It has independent power and cooling systems."

"How risky?" Su Ying asked.

"Very," Nightingale said honestly. "The system has intrusion detection. The moment I trigger an alarm, they'll lock onto my location. But I can try to get in through peripheral devices—for example, the network nodes for the surveillance cameras. Those devices usually have weaker security protocols."

Lin Xiao nodded. "Start with that. We need to know the radicals' personnel movements, especially the Special Elimination Squad's."

A soft knock came from outside the door—three short knocks and one long one, their agreed signal.

Su Ying opened the door, and Wolf slipped in with another figure. It was Grey Falcon, a man around thirty with a scar running from his brow to his chin, making his expression seem perpetually grim. He wore the base's combat uniform, but its cuffs and knees were visibly worn, as if from frequent contact with rough surfaces.

Grey Falcon's gaze swept over the room, pausing on Nightingale for a second before turning to Lin Xiao. "Captain."

"Sit," Lin Xiao said. "We don't have much time, so I'll keep it brief."

The five of them gathered around the table, the circle of desk-lamp light just covering the map. Lin Xiao could smell several different scents—Su Ying's faint sweat mixed with gun oil and leather; the ozone-like smell of electronic equipment on Wolf; disinfectant and old paper on Nightingale; and earth and rust rising from Grey Falcon's combat uniform, as though he had just crawled out of some corner.

"We've been put on the purge list," Lin Xiao said bluntly. "It will be carried out within seventy-two hours. The executing unit is the Special Elimination Squad."

Grey Falcon's pupils contracted, but his face showed nothing. Wolf lightly tapped his fingers against the tabletop in a rapid rhythm. Nightingale's breathing became so shallow it was almost inaudible.

"Waiting passively only leads to death," Lin Xiao continued. "So we need a plan."

His finger tapped the map, his nail scraping the paper with a faint rustle.

"First, Nightingale will handle the technical infiltration." Lin Xiao looked at Nightingale. "You need to monitor the base security system, focusing on the radicals' communications and movement records. The Special Elimination Squad's roster, equipment loadout, operation schedule—any relevant information, get it immediately."

Nightingale nodded. "I need a better computer and network access equipment. The backup machine Wolf gave me before has a processor that's too old. It can't run deep scanning programs."

"Wolf," Lin Xiao said, "assist Nightingale. Dismantle the encrypted communications terminal in the warehouse and use its components to assemble a temporary workstation. Be discreet. Don't leave any traces."

Wolf licked his cracked lips. "That terminal was issued just last month. They'll notice if it goes missing."

"Replace the parts with old ones," Lin Xiao said. "Put the removed components back in and make it look like it malfunctioned. Write a maintenance report saying the equipment got water damage and shorted out, and needs to be sent back to the factory."

"Understood."

"Second." Lin Xiao's finger moved to another area of the map. "Wolf and Grey Falcon, you'll be responsible for spreading intelligence."

Grey Falcon raised his head, the scar on his face seeming deeper beneath the light. "Spreading what?"

"Word that the radicals are about to move," Lin Xiao said. "But be careful how you do it. Don't directly say 'purge list.' Just say the atmosphere has been strange lately, that someone saw the Special Elimination Squad gathering in secret with live ammunition. Target the conservatives and neutral soldiers, especially those with family outside the base."

Wolf frowned. "Won't that alert them?"

"That's exactly the point," Lin Xiao said. "We need to create panic and vigilance. If the conservatives and neutral soldiers all become wary, the radicals' actions will be constrained. They can't deal with everyone at once."

Grey Falcon fell silent for a few seconds, then said, "I can approach a few people. Old Jack from logistics—his son goes to school in New York. And Marianne, the nurse in the infirmary—her husband is a conservative major. If they learn their families may be in danger, they'll act."

"But be careful," Lin Xiao warned. "Don't expose the source of the information. Use phrases like 'I heard' and 'rumor has it.' Create the impression that everyone is talking about it. If anyone presses you, say it was idle chatter you heard in the cafeteria or showers."

Grey Falcon nodded, his fingers unconsciously rubbing the scar on his face. He had received it during a mission two years ago, when he had covered his teammates' retreat and an enemy knife had slashed his face. Since then, he had become quiet and reserved, but Lin Xiao knew this man's loyalty and execution were beyond question.

"Third." Lin Xiao looked at Su Ying. "You'll handle combat strength assessment and equipment preparation."

Su Ying leaned forward slightly, the muscles in her arms tightening like a leopard ready to pounce. "What do we need?"

"Emergency weapons," Lin Xiao said. "Pistols, knives, smoke grenades, flashbangs—portable, concealable equipment that can quickly neutralize targets at close range. Also, prepare several sets of civilian clothes and fake IDs. If we need to evacuate, we can't leave in base uniforms."

"The armory has supplies," Su Ying said. "But it requires authorization."

"Use my squad leader authorization." Lin Xiao took a magnetic card from his pocket and placed it on the table. "Every day at four in the afternoon, the armory conducts routine inventory and cleaning. That's when there are the fewest guards. Go in under the pretext of requisitioning training equipment. Take only one or two items each time, over multiple trips. Avoid the surveillance blind spots. I've already marked several locations."

Lin Xiao pointed to several spots on the map, each labeled in small print: Surveillance blind spot, duration approximately 3–5 minutes.

Su Ying picked up the magnetic card. Its metal surface reflected the desk lamp's glow, leaving a bright streak across her palm. "Where do we store the equipment?"

"Here." Lin Xiao pointed to a location on the map—the base's abandoned sewage treatment station on the fourth underground level, shut down for years. "The entrance is through the maintenance shaft behind the boiler room. The ladder is badly rusted, but still usable. There's a dry pipe room below, with enough space to hide the equipment."

Wolf cut in. "I inspected that place last year. The ventilation system is broken. The air doesn't circulate. Stay too long, and you'll run out of oxygen."

"It's only a temporary storage site," Lin Xiao said. "We won't stay there long. Also, Su Ying, assess the squad's current combat strength. How many people can we trust? How many have combat experience? How many will break under pressure?"

Su Ying closed her eyes, then opened them a few seconds later. "Including the five of us, there are eight people we can trust completely. That includes Old Gun—the sniper. He has a strange temperament, but he's a precise shot and mentally stable. There's also Anvil, a close-quarters combat expert, though he lacks tactical awareness. The other three are ordinary soldiers with average training, but their loyalty isn't an issue."

"Eight people," Lin Xiao repeated, tapping a finger against the table. "Against the Special Elimination Squad, and possibly the entire radical faction."

The room fell into brief silence. The desk lamp gave off a faint buzz, its unstable current making the light flicker slightly. Outside, the engine of a distant patrol vehicle rumbled low and continuously, like the breathing of some beast.

"Fourth," Lin Xiao said, breaking the silence. "I'll contact Fletcher."

Everyone's eyes turned to him.

Grey Falcon spoke first. "That's too risky. Fletcher is a high-ranking conservative, but no one can guarantee he isn't part of the purge plan. If he chooses self-preservation and hands us over—"

"Then we're dead," Lin Xiao said calmly. "But if we don't fight for allies, we're dead anyway."

He rose and walked to the window. A trace of cold wind slipped through the blinds, stirring the hair over his forehead. A searchlight swept past outside, briefly illuminating the side of his face before darkness swallowed it again.

"Fletcher isn't an idiot," Lin Xiao said. "He got where he is today not through loyalty, but instinct. He must have sensed the change in the atmosphere around the base. What I need to do isn't tell him about the purge plan directly. It's to give him a warning—one vague enough, but still sufficient to make him wary."

"What will you say?" Su Ying asked.

"I'll say I've heard some rumors lately." Lin Xiao turned around and leaned back against the windowsill. "The Special Elimination Squad has been training in secret and carrying non-standard weapons. Several radical officers have been meeting frequently, and their conversations involve 'disciplinary rectification' and 'resource redistribution.' I don't need him to believe it right away. I only need him to become suspicious and start investigating."

Wolf frowned. "What if he investigates and finds out we were the ones spreading the rumors?"

"Then it means he's on our side," Lin Xiao said. "Because if he chose to report us, he wouldn't need to investigate. He could simply bring people here and arrest us."

The logic was cruel, but flawless.

Nightingale suddenly spoke. Her voice was soft, yet especially clear in the silence. "There's another problem."

Everyone looked at her.

Nightingale slid her fingers across the laptop's touchpad. The screen lit up, displaying a string of complex code and waveform graphs. "When I tried to infiltrate the base system," she said, "I found some... anomalies."

She turned the screen toward the others.

On the waveform graph, several green streams of data ran steadily, representing the base's normal network activity. But deep beneath those green lines was a red line, so thin it was almost drowned out by background noise. It flickered in a regular rhythm, sending a tiny data packet every thirty seconds.

"What is that?" Su Ying asked.

"An independent subnet," Nightingale said. "It's isolated by multiple layers of encryption and hidden in the base system's underlying architecture. Its signal signature is... unusual."

She enlarged a portion of the waveform. The red data packets were broken down into smaller components, each with a unique encryption identifier. Nightingale pointed to one of them—a string of hexadecimal code: 0x48, 0x59, 0x44, 0x52, 0x41.

"HYDRA," Wolf murmured. "Hydra."

"There's more," Nightingale said. "The style of this encryption protocol is very similar to the data packets from the intercepted report I analyzed earlier. The same layered structure, the same routing algorithm, the same... aggressiveness."

She pulled up another file, a record from several days earlier when she had analyzed the interception of Lin Xiao's anonymous report. The two waveform graphs appeared side by side, their red data streams nearly overlapping.

"You're saying," Grey Falcon's voice lowered, "the force that hijacked the captain's report planted a backdoor in the base system?"

"It's more like a monitoring node," Nightingale corrected. "This independent subnet is actively scanning all data traffic inside the base. Including—" She paused. "Including our local communications just now."

The room suddenly felt cold.

Lin Xiao could feel his heartbeat accelerating, blood rushing against his eardrums with a buzzing sound. He looked at the map on the table. Its lines and markings seemed to come alive, turning into a real spiderweb. They were not only standing at its center—they were shrouded beneath another, even larger web.

"Scanning range?" Lin Xiao asked, keeping his voice steady.

"Uncertain," Nightingale said. "Judging from the data packets' size and frequency alone, it covers at least seventy percent of the base's network nodes. That could include communication records, surveillance footage, access logs... even encrypted-band radio traffic."

Su Ying's hand pressed against her waist, the hilt of a knife peeking from her sleeve. "Can they hear what we just said?"

"If our communications went through the base network, it's possible," Nightingale said. "But I used the encrypted equipment Wolf assembled. The signal goes through multiple hops and disguises. In theory, they can only detect that encrypted communications exist, but can't decrypt the contents."

"In theory," Grey Falcon repeated, sarcasm in his voice.

Wolf suddenly stood and walked to a corner of the room where several electronic devices were piled. He crouched and quickly began dismantling an old radio terminal, his nimble fingers pulling cables free and exposing the circuit board inside.

"What are you doing?" Su Ying asked.

"Checking," Wolf said without looking up. "If there's a monitoring node in the system, all our devices could have backdoors. This terminal, Nightingale's computer, even—" His movements suddenly stopped.

From a gap in the circuit board, he pinched out a tiny black speck.

It was no larger than a grain of rice, smooth on the surface and gleaming metallically beneath the light. Wolf placed it in his palm and examined it carefully through a magnifying glass. One end bore faint marks of an interface, as though it had been soldered into place.

"What is it?" Lin Xiao asked.

Wolf's face darkened. "A miniature signal transmitter. Its operating frequency... is outside the base's surveillance band. It's been transmitting the whole time, but our equipment couldn't detect this frequency before."

He walked to the window and raised the transmitter toward the night sky outside. A few seconds later, he lowered his hand, his voice dry. "The signal points... northeast. New York."

The room fell deathly silent.

The desk lamp seemed to grow dimmer, its buzzing turning shrill. Outside, the searchlight swept past again. Its beam cut through the gaps in the blinds, casting alternating stripes of light and dark over the floor like prison bars.

Lin Xiao stared at the black speck in Wolf's palm, feeling a chill rise from the soles of his feet and spread up his spine to the top of his head. Several images flashed through his mind: the anonymous report being intercepted, the encryption style pointing to a private project within S.H.I.E.L.D.; the purge list Nightingale had cracked, its order source marked "direct high-level authorization"; and now, the independent subnet deep inside the base system, along with this transmitter hidden in their equipment.

All the clues began connecting, like puzzle pieces gradually forming a complete picture.

But that picture was more complicated, and more dangerous, than he had imagined.

"They know we're here," Grey Falcon said, uncertainty appearing in his voice for the first time. "They've been watching us all along."

"Not just watching," Nightingale said, staring at the transmitter. "They're guiding us. This transmitter's signal is like a beacon, telling the people outside our exact location."

Su Ying gripped her knife, her knuckles turning white. "Who planted it?"

Wolf shook his head. "I don't know. This terminal was collected from the warehouse last month. It was in brand-new sealed packaging. But if someone tampered with it before it left the factory..."

"Then it means," Lin Xiao finished, "that from the day we entered this base, we've already been on someone else's chessboard."

He walked to the table and pressed his finger against the map. The paper was cold and rough beneath his touch. His gaze passed over the markings—the armory, the command center, the laboratory, the evacuation routes. Every plan, every arrangement, every precaution now seemed so fragile.

But fragile did not mean useless.

Lin Xiao raised his head, his gaze sweeping over everyone in the room. Su Ying's eyes were firm, like tempered steel. Wolf's brow was tightly furrowed, but his fingers had stopped trembling. The scar on Grey Falcon's face looked like a medal beneath the light. Nightingale's breathing was steady, her eyes fixed on the screen as her mind raced.

"The plan remains unchanged," Lin Xiao said, his voice clear and firm. "But we move up the timetable. Nightingale, how long will it take you to infiltrate that independent subnet?"

Nightingale calculated for a moment. "If I launch a full attack and bypass the encryption layers, approximately... six to eight hours. But it's very risky. If they trace me back—"

"Do it," Lin Xiao cut her off. "We need to know what they're looking for, who they're watching, and what their ultimate objective is. Wolf, assist Nightingale. At the same time, inspect every device and find out whether there are any other transmitters. Grey Falcon, begin the intelligence dissemination plan tonight. Don't wait until tomorrow. Su Ying, move up the equipment preparations as well. Complete the first round of collection within two hours."

He paused and took a deep breath.

"As for me," he said, "I'm going to find Fletcher right now."

Su Ying wanted to say something, but Lin Xiao raised a hand to stop her.

"There's no time to hesitate," he said. "If that independent subnet is truly scanning all communications, the purge operation may be closer than we thought. We need allies, authorization, everything that can increase our chances of survival."

He picked up the magnetic card from the table and slipped it into his pocket. Its metal edge pressed against his thigh, giving him a tangible sense of reality.

"Remember," Lin Xiao said, looking at everyone. "The seventy-two-hour countdown has begun. But the real battle may have started before we even realized it."

He walked to the door and placed his hand on the handle. The metal was cold, like a warning.

Then he pulled open the door and walked into the darkness of the corridor.