Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

by Cameron, Marc

  Clark’s eye flicked open at the sound of shuffling footsteps—too big and heavy to be a rat. The room was hazy with the muted gray light of an overcast dawn outside the tiny window. He moved slowly, feeling the familiar pops and cracks that greeted each morning even when he slept in a soft bed. A cloud of white vapor blossomed around his face when he breathed.

  The sound bounced off the clay walls, making it difficult to pinpoint where it was coming from. He caught movement in the shadows, tensed, then relaxed a hair, falling back into his blanket when Hala’s silhouette came into focus, her small face framed by the white fake fur ruff of her coat.

  “You okay?”

  “John …”

  The urgency in her voice brought him fully awake. He sat upright, throwing off his blanket.

  “What is it?” he whispered, still raspy from his sleep.

  Hala went to the window. She had to tiptoe to peek out. She ducked her head away as soon as she’d looked. “He’s coming!”

  Clark rolled to his feet and drew the girl near so she could explain quietly. “Who’s coming?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I had to pee. There was a man driving by on the road. I think he had stopped to pee as well. I did not think he saw me at first, but then he called out. I’m very sorry. It was an accident—”

  “It’s okay,” Clark said. “Is he a policeman?”

  She shook her head. “No. I do not think so.”

  “Is he alone?”

  She nodded. “I saw his car. There was no one else. Maybe he is—”

  A wary voice called from outside the walls of the caravanserai. She was right. The man was Uyghur—and he was close.

  Clark held up his hand to shush her while the man spoke, then leaned in so she could whisper in his ear to translate.

  “He … He wants to know what I am doing out here all by myself.”

  The man outside spoke again, louder this time, bolder, more demanding.

  Hala gasped and began to shake at what she heard.

  “What is it?” Clark asked.

  “He knows the Bingtuan are looking for a runaway child,” she said. “He said he will not call them if I do not fight him.” She looked up at Clark. “He is a very bad man.”

  “Yes, he is,” Clark said. He stood, stepping sideways inch by inch, “cutting the pie” until he brought the shadowed figure outside into view.

  He was dressed like a workingman—dark trousers, white shirt, dark sport jacket under a heavier wool coat. He wore a black fur hat with the earflaps down against the morning cold. Clark estimated him to be in his early thirties, but it was difficult to tell in this part of the world. Life in western China tended to age people beyond their years. He could just as easily have been twenty-five.

  Clark assessed the man quickly as an opponent. He didn’t appear to have a weapon. His hands were empty. No cell phone at the ready. He could have already called and reported his find, but Clark doubted that. Not if he wanted to be alone with his newly found young treasure. No, he’d wait until he was done—or, more likely, he’d forgo calling the police at all. He’d just do what he wanted and leave. Fugitives didn’t call the police, if he even let her live.

  The man called out again, whistling as if summoning a pet.

  Hala’s hand shot to her lips, covering a gasp. “He said he’s coming in. He warned me not to run …”

  Clark scanned the room. There’d been nothing to use as a weapon when they’d come in, but maybe he’d missed something.

  Nope.

  Clark dropped to his knees in front of Hala, taking her by both shoulders. “I need you to trust me.”

  She nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

  Clark stood and took the little douk-douk out of his pocket, opening the scimitar blade. He placed it on the ground, and then stepped on the handle, pinching the two metal sides together, effectively turning it into a fixed-blade knife. The cutting edge was just four inches long, not optimal for stabbing, but there were other ways to cause chaos and doom with a knife.

  Clark nodded toward the entrance. The place where the wall had collapsed formed a natural funnel that would send the man to them.

  “He’s going to come from there,” Clark whispered. “I will stand by the door. When I raise my hand, you make a noise. Don’t call to him, but let him hear you. Do you understand?”

  She looked up with brown doe eyes, nodded around a mouthful of shirt collar.

  “When you see him at the door, I want you to run.” Clark pointed to the far corner of the room.

  “Run where?” Hala whispered, terrified. “There is nowhere to go.”

  Clark gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “True,” he said. “But he does not know that. He will not be able to resist chasing you.”

  “What if he catches—”

  “He won’t,” Clark said, already moving to the door. None of this would work if the man saw or heard him.

  Clark had the newcomer in height and weight, but that whole vitality-of-youth thing would be a problem. Fortunately, Clark had what Ding called “old-man strength,” which was really not strength at all, but cunning and pure meanness in the face of battle. He didn’t intend to let this evolve into a contest of strength or determination. In fact, if Clark did this right, there would be no fight at all. It would be an assassination.

  Clark stood to the right of the door, opposite where the man’s sight line would be when he heard Hala. He held the douk-douk in his right hand, firmly but relaxed. A clenched fist moved much too slowly for what he needed to do.

  He raised his left hand, listening for the tentative footsteps. The man called out again, just a few feet down the dark hall. Clark couldn’t understand a word, but the cruel intent came through clearly enough.

  Clark let his left hand drop.

  At the signal, Hala gave a gasp, shuffling her feet on the ground as if scrambling to get away.

  The man laughed, whistling again, calling out. Clark imagined him saying, “I have you now …”

  Clark caught movement to his left, checked his breathing, lowered his center, ready to move.

  Hala sprang from her spot, digging in as though she intended to run straight through the far wall of the earthen chamber. Clark hadn’t told her to scream, but she did, and it only added to the effect.

  The man’s predatory drive kicked in immediately at the sight of his fleeing quarry. He shouted at her to stop and bolted after her, thinking there must be a door in the shadows, and unwilling to let her slip away.

  Clark stepped sideways, snaking his left hand behind the man’s neck and around his face, forearm to forehead, yanking him backward as his legs tried to run out from under him. At the same moment, Clark buried the blade into the side of the man’s exposed neck, impacting the brachial nerve so hard that his body jolted as if hit with an electric shock. The little douk-douk’s scimitar point slid in as if the flesh were butter, just behind the windpipe. Clark felt a sudden pulse of blood slap his arm, moist and hot. This wasn’t his first rodeo, and he’d rolled his sleeve above the elbow in anticipation of this to keep it clean.

  With the edge of the blade facing forward, Clark pushed at the same time he gave a sharp backward tug on the man’s forehead, severing the trachea with a sickening pop.

  The man struggled, but only for a moment, before becoming heavy. Clark let go, allowing him to pitch forward, face-planting on the floor.

  Hala ran to him, ignoring the dying man’s agonal gasps, to grab Clark’s arm with both tiny hands. She was frantic with worry at the blood dripping from his elbow.

  “John, you are hurt!”

  He took a deep breath. “No,” he said, turning so she faced away from the gore. “I’m fine. It’s his. Not mine.”

  “Okay,” she said, panting, lifting his arm to check it thoroughly, unconvinced.

  He switched the open douk-douk to his left hand to keep from accidentally cutting her.

  “Really,” he said, “I’m okay.”
/>   Clark rubbed as much of the blood off his arm as he could with a blanket, and then went to look out the window. He’d thought to move the man’s car before anyone noticed it, but there was too much traffic for that. A steady line of open trucks and trailers filled with camels, cattle, goats, donkeys, and the odd, fat-bottomed sheep of the region formed an early-morning parade line toward the market grounds. None of them paid any heed to the thirty-year-old Dongfeng sedan that had apparently broken down on the side of the road.

  Clark turned to see the girl standing over the dead man.

  “Gather your things,” he said. “We should find another place to wait. It’s only six thirty. Still over two hours until we can meet my friend. This will be difficult to explain if anyone else happens along.”

  Hala didn’t move until he took her gently by the shoulder and herded her into the corridor.

  “I’m sorry you had to see such awful things,” he said.

  She leaned against his leg and sighed. Still trembling, she spoke matter-of-factly, like a woman twice her age. “It was awful, that is true, but if you had not been here, it would have been much worse.”

  39

  Midas Jankowski was pretty damned certain that no one in the history of history had ever calmed down because someone else told them to “calm down.” Fortunately, no matter what Gerry Hendley was reading into his tone, Midas wasn’t spun up, he was just surrounded by camels and goats and weird-looking big-assed sheep.

  A Uyghur with four goats stacked like cordwood on the back of a three-wheeled motorcycle truck barked “bosh-bosh, bosh-bosh” as he nosed Midas aside with the front tire and rode past. Hendley must have heard the change in Midas’s voice and was doing his level best to try and talk him off some ledge.

  A woman’s voice playing an incessant loop over a loudspeaker forced him to cup his hand over the phone in order to be heard.

  “Seriously, Boss,” Midas said. “I’m fine. Just got bosh-boshed out of the way.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?”

  Midas thought of telling Hendley to think about calming down, but decided being a wiseass to the boss’s boss was not the smartest thing to do.

  “Not sure,” Midas said. “Probably ‘get out of my way.’ Anyway, something’s come up with our mutual friend.” The line was presumed secure, but he still refrained from using names.

  “All right,” Hendley said. “Let’s have it.”

  “Everyone’s intact,” Midas said. “Our problem is egress. Our friend’s message said he has the package.”

  “Has the package? With him?”

  “Sounds like it,” Midas said. “From the sound of things, something really bad went down in the neighborhood he was looking at. I’m not sure about the details, but I’m hearing three dead.”

  “Our friend?” Hendley asked.

  “Well enough to send the message,” Midas said. “He must have rescued the package.”

  Midas’s plane had arrived in the middle of the night, really in the wee hours of the morning, when he would have been getting up to do PT during his days as a lieutenant colonel in the Unit, commonly known as Delta Force. Halfway around the world, Gerry Hendley was hungry to know what was going on.

  They spoke over an encrypted Internet connection, the virtual IP address bouncing around the globe to discourage local authorities in Kashgar from monitoring the call or tracking his signal. This had been the first opportunity Midas had been in the clear enough to call in with a report.

  He’d done his usual TSCM—Technical Surveillance Countermeasures—sweeps covertly as soon as he arrived in the hotel room, always assuming the walls were bugged and equipped with at least one camera. Chinese security services surveilled everyone on the street, and it stood to reason that they wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to bug the rooms where foreigners spent the night. He’d found two listening devices, one in the lamp by the house phone—too obvious—and another at the corner of the bathroom mirror. Those wily MSS guys, assuming people might conduct their nefarious conversations while sitting on the john. Midas had used enough laser listening devices himself that he left the draperies closed to keep anyone from picking up the subtle vibrations of his voice against the window glass.

  In case anyone happened to be watching, he’d used his phone to take the obligatory YouTube video of his Chinese vacation, getting a 360 of his room. Pinhole cameras in the walls would show up as shiny dots. Lenses in other objects—smoke alarms, wall hangings—might or might not give themselves away.

  Even so, covert phone conversations from a hotel room in Communist China were too big a risk, so Midas waited until he got to the market—Rally Point Bravo, where Clark’s message had said to meet.

  He’d just begun to bring Hendley up to speed on the new turn of events when the goatherd bosh-boshed his way past.

  “We’ve got an emergency bugout plan,” Midas said. “But it didn’t take the package into account. We should be meeting up soon.”

  “Very well,” Hendley said, obviously not wanting to end the connection and be left in the dark. “Three dead, you say?”

  “As far as I know,” Midas said. “We passed a bunch of XPCC armored personnel carriers and troop trucks rolling into the neighborhoods behind Jiafang market this morning on the way in from the airport. My driver said he heard through the cabbie network that three officials were murdered with knives. XPCC and cops are saying it was Uyghur terrorists. I guess they’re already rounding up the usual suspects, at least the ones who aren’t already in detention camps.”

  “Any word that a foreigner might be involved?”

  “None so far,” Midas said, sidestepping a fresh pile of what he believed to be camel shit. “You need to cut back on the fruit, Mister,” he said under his breath.

  “Pardon?”

  “Sorry. Nothing,” Midas said. “The most important point is, our friend says he’s intact. Knowing him, I’m sure he has some kind of plan worked …”

  Midas’s voice trailed off as he watched a half-dozen SWAT officers in black BDUs and helmets swagger through the crowd. Each had a small rifle Midas recognized as a QCW-05, a Chinese-made SMG, slung diagonally across his chest. Long wooden riot clubs hung from rings on their Sam Browne belts. The mass of marketgoers parted in front of them. Midas glanced to his left, and saw another group of officers, this one moving down the next aisle where food vendors sold grilled versions of the same animals that were still on the hoof just a few feet away.

  It was clear from the way they scrutinized the crowds that these officers weren’t just out on patrol. They were looking for someone in particular.

  At the other end of the line, Hendley grew agitated at the long silence. “What is it?”

  “Have to go, Boss,” Midas said. “I got officers in hats and bats strolling around hunting for somebody. I need to make sure it’s not our mutual friend.”

  Midas promised to check in soon and ended the connection, stuffing the phone into his coat pocket. Strolling slowly, he checked out the different livestock and food vendors, keeping tabs on the nearest group of XPCC troops out of the corner of his eye. A grizzled little man in a dark suit coat and four-cornered doppa hat stroked a wispy beard with one hand and held up a straight razor with the other, offering to give Midas a shave. Midas smiled and shook his head. Yeah, sitting down in these crowds and letting a stranger put a blade to his throat didn’t seem very tactical at the moment. A woman selling hot soup called him over with a flick of her wrist and held out a steaming cardboard cup. He figured soup from a boiling cauldron was about the best chance he had not to catch street-meat two-step. It was good, salty, with a few more globules of fat floating on the surface than he was used to, but it warmed his hands, and carrying it made him look like a tourist. Just yards from the soup lady, a man in a ratty military-surplus coat butchered a black goat. A pool of fresh blood in the dust said he’d just killed the thing. When Midas drew closer, he realized the hatchet that the man used to cut the animal was connected to
a concrete block with a length of chain—one of the Bingtuan’s prohibitions about Uyghurs possessing weapons.

  He checked his watch. Almost 0900.

  While the bulk of the livestock market visitors were Uyghurs, there were plenty of tourists, Han Chinese and European alike, oohing and aahing and snapping photos at every camel and sheep. The guy with the chained hatchet got a lot of attention. Midas took a photo there, too, more to get a pic of the officers behind the man than the bloody carnage.

  At first Midas thought the troops were singling out European tourists specifically, but further study made him realize they weren’t zeroed in on any particular ethnicity at all. Their focus appeared to be on taller men who happened to be with children. It made sense. Clark would have worn a hat that covered his face, but they must have security camera footage that showed a big guy in the company of Hala Tohti.

  One of the policemen caught Midas looking in his direction and glared, a challenge to come closer. Midas smiled, ducked his head subserviently like a nervous tourist would—all the while thinking he could surely take this skinny dude, body armor and all. The real problem was Rally Point Bravo, where he was supposed to meet Clark, was on the other side of this officer and his heavily armed friends. With any luck, Clark had seen the patrols and was staying away.

  Midas made a right, nearly running into a different patrol. He smiled again, stifling the urge to speed up. That would look like he was trying to avoid them. Instead, he worked his way in the opposite direction from the rally point, taking the long way around. Clark would wait fifteen minutes before he left the area. Midas would stand off and watch, approaching only if they were in the clear—which wasn’t looking very likely, since the place was crawling with XPCC cops.

  Midas stopped to look at a rack of colorful pashmina scarves as two more officers sauntered by, chatting with each other like they were at the beach instead of an occupying force. Their wooden batons rattled against black riot armor.

  The Uyghur woman behind the scarves smiled at him, covering her sales bases. “Three for five euro. Two for five dollar.”