by Mike Ramon
Chapter Thirty-Five
Beijing, People’s Republic of China
June 22 -- 15:16 UTC/11:16 pm local time
In the green glow of the night vision goggles, the house looked like just any ordinary home, like a million others in the city. The windows were bright squares of flaring light. The large house was set back on a side street, and the nearest house was at least five hundred yards away and looked as if nobody was currently living there. There was little traffic along that street, which was as good as Lu Ping could have hoped for--isolation, where she and her team could carry out their operation without interference or prying eyes. She lowered the googles from her eyes and handed them to Wu Lei, her second-in-command for the operation. With them was Jimmy Chen, as well as Lin and Song, one of the men and one of the women from the meeting at the clothing store. Yeung and the others from the meeting had moved off two minutes before to sneak around the back of the house, where they would hunker down until the order was given to make entry.
Their target was Li Hong, the man Lu Ping had had Wu tail after the meeting of the top officers of the Recovery Team days before. It was Jimmy’s snooping that had made her suspicious of the man, and a tap on the man’s phone had confirmed her suspicions. She didn’t know the identity of the person Li Hong was meeting that night, but the taps let her know that, whoever it was, he was connected with Violet Dawn. Her team was small, but she felt confident that they could take the men and their bodyguards down.
“I think when this is over we need to renegotiate my fee,” Jimmy whispered. “This is way more danger than I am comfortable with.”
Wu shook his head and rolled his eyes. Lu Ping just smiled.
“Isn’t the gratitude of your country payment enough?” she asked.
“No,” Jimmy said flatly.
“Just remember to stay back until I call for you,” Lu Ping said. “Keep your radio low, but pay attention. If you hear the order to abort, or if things go really wrong, make your way back to the van and wait for three minutes. At that time you leave with anyone who has made it back by then. The second van will still be there for any stragglers.”
“Yes, I remember the plan perfectly well,” Jimmy said.
The radio that Lu Ping held in one hand crackled to life. It was Yeung’s voice:
“Team Two is in position. Over.”
“Hold tight for a moment, and be ready to move on my signal,” Lu Ping returned. “Over.”
She looked back at the crew assembled around her. She looked at Wu Lei.
“Are you certain the message was sent?” she asked.
“I am certain.”
She nodded. Fifteen minutes earlier, just before Team Two had broken off to move around to the back of the house, she had given Wu Lei the order to send an encrypted message directly to General Zhang Jianguo. The message was marked Red Code, giving it the highest priority. When decrypted--which would take less than fifteen seconds once General Zhang handed it over to a staff cryptographer--the message would let the General know about the raid, and the reasons why Lu Ping had kept him in the dark until the last possible moment. The message would let him know that Lu Ping and her people would secure the scene until the General could rush reinforcements to them.
“All right. Helmets on and weapons check,” she said.
They all put on dark blue helmets and checked to make sure that their weapons were loaded and ready for action. When everyone was ready, Lu Ping took one more look at the target house. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly before lifting the radio to her lips. She depressed the button on the side of the radio and spoke one word:
“Move!”
She clipped the radio to her belt and started forward in a running crouch. Her team followed, while Jimmy Chen hung back as had been planned. They moved quickly and silently, shadows in the darkness. They crossed a well-kept front yard and stopped on the stone path leading to the front door of the house.
Lu Ping stepped aside, allowing Lin to move to the front with his battering ram. He looked to her, and she gave him a nod. Lin lifted the heavy steel ram up in the air, his trunk-like arms bulging with the effort, and swung it forward. The door splintered inward with the force of the blow. Lin stepped back and in one motion tossed the ram free and pulled out his weapon. By the time he turned back Lu Ping and the rest of Team One were already rushing into the house, and he followed.
At the moment that Team One was entering through the front of the house, Team Two was entering through the back. Yeung led Feng and Han to a back door made of glass rectangles set into a wooden frame. Yeung and Han made way for Feng, Han keeping her eyes out for anyone approaching from their rear. Feng, the biggest of the three, had the honors of carrying the ram. He took care to bring it down into the wooden part of the door, but as the door swung inward the glass shattered anyway, littering the floor with a hundred little diamonds, as well as nasty jagged pieces big enough to kill a man with. The three of them rushed in, immediately running into a bodyguard, who they had caught by surprise. Yeung put two bullets in him, and the guard collapsed to the floor before he even had a chance to pull out his own weapon.
They came upon two more guards as they made their way through a series of hallways. Since their weapons were all equipped with silencers, these guards were unaware that shots had been fired, and were caught as unaware as the first guard had been.
At the front of the house Lu Ping and her team had managed to take out four guards without taking any casualties themselves. They had the element of surprise in their favor. Eventually they came to the dining room, where thy found two men sitting across from each other at a table; one of the men was Li Hong. Instead of dinner, the men were sitting with papers scattered on the table in front of them. Their eyes went wide as Lu Ping and Team One burst into the room, and the two guards who stood at the edges of the room reacted quickly, pulling out pistols and firing on the interlopers.
Lu Ping and the rest of her team returned fire as Wu Lei went down with a grunt. The two guards were both taken down as the men seated at the table watched in a mix of shock and horror.
“Echo,” came a voice from behind a door at the far end of the dining room.
“Flash!” Lu Ping called out, giving Team Two the code word meaning Team One had the room under control.
The door swung open and Yeung and the rest of Team Two filed into the dining room, their weapons focused on the men at the table, who still hadn’t moved from their seats.
“Lin, Song and Han,” Lu Ping said. “You three clear the rest of the house.”
The three of them left the dining room to do as they were ordered. Lu Ping was able to turn her attention to Wu Lei, who lay sprawled on the ground, unmoving. She knelt beside him and turned him over. The bullet had caught him in the throat, a vulnerable spot where his ballistic vest offered no protection, and the flesh there was a mangled ruin. The front of his vest was wet with dark blood. Lu Ping knew there was no need to call for an ambulance; Wu Lei was dead.
“Hey! Stop that!”
Lu Ping whipped around, bringing her gun up to meet any threat. Feng and Yeung were wrestling with Li Hong. He had tried to swallow one of the papers from the table, but all he was managing to do so far was to choke on it. Yeung pulled the paper out of the man’s mouth and swatted him on the side of the head. Li Hong held his head, looking at Yeung with a hurt, confused expression on his face, as if he could fathom why he had been struck.
Lu Ping stood up and walked over to the table. She noticed a laptop sitting on the table, and was grateful that she had brought Jimmy Chen along. She would have to put him to work searching the machine for anything useful.
“Look at me, traitor scum!” she said with venom. “You’re done. Do you hear me?”
Li Hong did not respond.
Lin, Song and Han filed back into the kitchen.
“The house is clear,” Lin reported.
Lu Ping nodded in acknowledgment. She turned her attention to the man sitting across from Li Hong. I
t was the first time she had gotten a chance to really look at him, and immediately she realized that he looked familiar.
“Where have I seen you before?” she asked.
The man turned away from her.
“I have never seen you before, Madame,” he said in a low voice.
Lu Ping thought hard, studying the man’s face. Then a memory came to her. She remembered the afternoon in May when she had gone to see General Zhang after being summoned by him. It was the day she had learned that she was to take over as head of the Recovery Team. Before her meeting with the General a man had come out from his own meeting with Zhang. This was the man.
“How do you know General Zhang?” Lu Ping asked.
“I have no idea who that is,” he answered.
She moved to his side of the table.
“Backup will be here soon,” she said. “I wonder how much pain I can cause you. I wonder how much pain you can take before you give me straight answers.”
The man didn’t respond to the threat; he didn’t even look at Lu Ping when she spoke to him. A flash of anger--no doubt brought on by the all too fresh memory of Wu Lei’s ruined throat--rose inside of Lu Ping, and she pistol-whipped the stubborn man. He screamed and grabbed his head, and when he took his hand away there was blood on it.
“You bitch, I will make you pay for that,” he spit.
“Tell me your name,” Lu Ping demanded.
The man simply looked back at her defiantly, and she raised her pistol to hit him again, causing him to flinch back.
“Hu Qi!” Li Hong shouted out.
Lu Ping lowered the pistol and looked at Li Hong.
“His name is Hu Qi,” Li Hong repeated.
“Shut your mouth, Li,” Hu Qi warned.
“How do you know the General?” Lu Ping asked Hu Qi again.
“Does he know that you are here?” he asked in return.
She pondered whether or not she should answer the question, and if so, if she should answer honestly. It didn’t seem to matter much, now that these men were entirely under her control.
“Yes,” she said. “I kept him in the dark about my operation, but I sent him a message just before we moved in on you. I expect reinforcements to arrive shortly.”
Hu Qi laughed. It was a deep, grating sound that seemed to move through his throat reluctantly, as if he was unaccustomed to laughter.
“If he knows that you are here,” Hu Qi said, “then you are already a dead woman.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
He just laughed again, and it sounded even more unpleasant than the last time.
“This guy is crazy,” Yeung said. “I would rather not listen to him speak. We should just wait for backup to arrive, and you can interrogate him back at the Ministry.”
But Lu Ping had a bad feeling, and she wanted to know what it was that Hu Qi thought was so funny. She looked at Li Hong, who wore on his face the defeated look of a man walking to the gallows.
“What did he mean by that?” Lu Ping asked Li Hong.
Before Li Hong could answer, there was an explosion at the front of the house. The force of the blast was enough to send Lu Ping flailing to the ground, and for a terrible moment that seemed to stretch on forever she lay on the ground, unable to hear anything above the ringing in her ears, wondering just what in the hell was happening.
