“I’ve come for Peter Shizong.”
Jiying looked beyond McGarvey toward the empty driveway. “Did you come alone, on foot?”
“I have a van waiting on the road below. But we don’t have much time. There’s a PRC delegation along with a Taiwanese police escort on its way up here from the airport to arrest him.”
Jiying’s expression didn’t change except that his eyes narrowed slightly. “That’s news to me.”
“They didn’t want you to do something stupid, like try to take off or barricade yourselves up here.”
“My people would have warned me by now.”
“Maybe not if they were ordered by someone high enough to stay out of it.” McGarvey could see that Jiying didn’t want to believe what he was being told, and yet he could see the truth to it. “If I can get him out of here in time, the PRC won’t be able to take him.”
“They’d turn Taiwan upside down.”
“They probably would. And if you knew where he was, you’d be made to tell them. You know that.”
Jiying shook his head, more in anger and frustration than in denial. “There’s too much at stake, dammit. We’re winning. We’re finally starting to make points. We’re the good guys here—”
One of his men appeared at his elbow, looked pointedly at McGarvey, then told something to his boss. McGarvey did not understand the Chinese, but he caught the urgency. The expression on Jiying’s face changed to one of anger and resignation.
“There was no reason for you to come all this way in secret to lie to me, was there,” he said. “There are seven Taipei Special Services Police Humvees on the Keelung Highway.” He said something to his man that clearly upset him. He tried to argue, but Jiying barked a command at him, and he left.
“How close?”
“They just turned onto Grass Mountain Road. I hope the van is well hidden.”
“It’s just past the driveway. Is there another way down from here for me?”
“There’s a path on the other side of the house. It’s steep, but you should be able to make it.”
“There’s room in the van for all of us.”
Jiying shook his head again. “You’ll need time to make it down the hill and then get the hell out. We can delay the bastards all night if need be.”
McGarvey understood that it was the only way. “All we need is a couple of hours, Captain. After that give it up. Don’t get yourselves killed.”
A faint smile curled his lips. “Believe me I’ll do my best to make sure I die an old man in my own bed.”
The commando returned with a bemused Peter Shizong. Jiying said something to him in rapid-fire Mandarin. Shizong looked at McGarvey, asked Jiying a question, and when he was given the answer he nodded.
“It seems as if I am to go with you, sir,” he said.
“I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of spying on the United States for the People’s Republic of China.”
“You’ve come all this way,” Shizong said with a hint of amusement. “Will you read me my Miranda rights?”
McGarvey had to smile. “If you wish, and if I can remember them from watching NYPD Blue.”
“Beijing has sent someone to arrest you,” Jiying said seriously. “And my government has agreed to hand you over. Tonight.”
Shizong suddenly understood the gravity of the situation. “I see.”
“You need to go right now, Peter,” Jiying said. He brought his heels together, placed his hands at his sides, and bowed formally.
Shizong did the same. When he rose he said something in Mandarin to Jiying, and then turned to McGarvey. “I have no idea how you mean to get me out of here in one piece, but then some really extraordinary things have happened to me in the last couple of months.”
Jiying hustled them to a broad veranda on the west side of the house, where the rock-strewn hill plunged steeply a couple hundred feet to a line of trees.
“The road is just below the trees,” Jiying told them.
It was finally starting to get dark. The city of Taipei was coming alive with a million pinpricks of light. What sounded like a fighter jet passed overhead to the south.
One of the commandos called something from inside the house. It sounded urgent.
“We’re out of time. Take it easy going down and good luck,” Jiying said.
McGarvey started down the hill first, and once they were out from under the veranda it was a little easier to pick out the path. At first he went slowly for Shizong’s sake, but within thirty feet he realized that the much younger man was in very good shape and as surefooted as a mountain climber, so he picked up the pace.
They reached the bottom in five minutes and made their way through the dense stand of trees. They came out about twenty yards beyond where the Fiat was parked at the side of the road, facing downhill. McGarvey could not see the van, but he suspected that Preston had pulled into the driveway another thirty or forty yards farther down the hill. The road up to Lee’s house was just beyond it.
“Is that our transportation?” Shizong whispered.
“No, they followed us up from Taipei. There’s two of them.”
“PRC supporters?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to kill them unless I have no other choice.”
“They wouldn’t return the favor, believe me,” Shizong said. “What are we going to do?”
“Wait until the delegation from the airport arrives. These guys might follow them up the hill.”
“They might not—” Shizong said when they spotted lights coming up the road around the curve. They could hear the Humvees’ exhausts hammering off the side of the hill, and after they had all turned up Lee’s driveway the night got relatively quiet again. But the Fiat did not move.
“Shit,” McGarvey said, half under his breath. He took out his pistol. “Wait here,” he told Shizong, and he stepped out on the road. Keeping his eye on the car for any sign of movement, and his pistol hidden behind his leg, he walked down to the Fiat. As he got closer he could see the two men inside, but they were not moving, and it wasn’t until he was on top of them that he saw why.
They were both alive and frantic with rage. Hanrahan and Preston had gotten the drop on them and had duct-taped them to their seats. They were covered head to toe except for their noses and eyes.
McGarvey motioned for Shizong to come ahead when Hanrahan stepped out of the darkness below and waved them on. Shizong stopped in his tracks, suddenly not sure what was happening.
“Get the van,” McGarvey called down to Hanrahan, keeping his voice as low as possible. He hurried back to where Shizong was about ready to bolt.
“I don’t know—”
“It’s okay, Mr. Shizong,” McGarvey said. The man was only in his twenties, and despite his intelligence, training and charisma he was still just a young man faced with a very uncertain and potentially deadly situation. “There’s a submarine waiting for us off Keelung. If we can get you aboard, we’ll take you to Honolulu. It’s either that or Beijing. But you can’t stay here any longer.”
The van, its headlights off, nosed out from the driveway.
Shizong looked at the van and then back at McGarvey. “Do you think that I can find some old Superman comics in a shop there?”
McGarvey spread his hands, at a loss. “I imagine you can.”
“It’s a present for someone,” Shizong said, and he motioned toward the van. “I believe that our ride is waiting for us.”
Hanrahan was holding the side door open for them. Just as they reached the van they heard gunshots from above, and again Shizong was stopped in his tracks. He turned back, and McGarvey grabbed his arm.
“We have to go now,” McGarvey said urgently.
“Those are my friends up there.” Shizong tried to pull away.
“And they’re also Taiwanese intelligence officers who risked their lives to pull you out of Xiamen. They’re buying us some time.”
“They might be killed.”
“Yes, they might
be,” McGarvey said harshly. “So might we.”
Shizong gave him a look of genuine anguish, and McGarvey wanted to tell him: Welcome to the club. You now have blood on your hands like the rest of us. But he didn’t say it because it was too cruel, too without feeling or compassion. It was this business; it made people into its own terrible mold, not the other way around. Shizong still had his idealism. McGarvey hoped that it would last at least a little longer.
They clambered into the van and even before Hanrahan had the door shut, Preston took off down the hill like a rocket, the sounds of gunfire up at Lee’s mansion intensifying.
2120 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
Harding was in the control room studying the chart. The water didn’t get deep for another five miles offshore, and the Han-class submarine blocked the way. There was no real contest if it came to a battle. But he didn’t think that the Chinese skipper wanted to start a shooting war any more than the rest of them did.
He glanced at the boat’s master clock. McGarvey had given himself until midnight local before he should be considered overdue. There was no way to tell what was happening ashore. Technically that wasn’t his responsibility. His boat and his crew were.
He grabbed the growler phone. “Sonar, this is the captain,” he said.
“Sonar, aye.”
“What’s our friend doing?”
“He’s still back there, skipper. Trying to be real quiet. But he’s got a noisy motor somewhere. Probably in his air-circulation system.”
“Any sign of the outboard?”
“Nothing yet.”
“How’s traffic topside?”
“That’s some good news, Captain. It’s thinned out.”
“Keep me posted, Fisher,” Harding said. He hung up the phone. He had to think it out for only a moment, then he looked up. “Come to battle stations, torpedo,” he said calmly.
“Aye, sir, battle stations, torpedo,” a startled Chief of Boat responded, and he began issuing orders.
“Load tubes one, two, three, and four, but do not open the outer doors.”
“Do we have a target, sir?” the weapons control officer asked.
“Start a TMA on Sierra Twenty-one. I want a continuous solution on the target, and I don’t want to lose it no matter what happens.”
“Yes, sir,” the officer said, impressed. It was the first time he’d ever heard the captain speak that sharply. But God help the poor sorry Chinese son of a bitch if he so much as twitched a whisker.
Keelung
McGarvey watched the road from where he sat in the rear of the van. Traffic had slowed to a crawl outside Keelung because of a military roadblock. Some people tried crossing the fields in the steady rain to reach the railroad tracks, but soon got stuck because of the deep mud. Soldiers went on foot to arrest them.
“There were no roadblocks this morning,” Hanrahan said.
It had taken them more than an hour to drive the twelve miles from the Grass Mountain road. Time enough, McGarvey wondered, for the battle at Lee’s house to be finished, the house searched, and the PRC spies duct-taped inside of their car to be released and give them the description of the van? If that was the case, they would somehow have to bluff their way through because there was no turning back, the highway was impossibly clogged; and he wasn’t going to get into a shooting battle with Taiwanese soldiers doing their legitimate duties.
“What do you want to do?” Preston asked. “In the mood these guys are in it won’t take much to set them off.”
“We’re going to talk our way past them,” McGarvey said, an idea turning over in his mind.
“If they’re looking for us specifically, it’s going to be all over but the shouting once we get up there,” Hanrahan pointed out unnecessarily. They all knew it.
McGarvey turned and looked at Shizong who was hunched down in the darkness in the back. Their eyes met, and Shizong nodded and smiled. McGarvey turned back. “I’ll do the talking,” he told Preston and Hanrahan. “No matter what happens, there’ll be no gunplay. Understood?”
They both nodded.
It was another twenty minutes before their turn came. The highway was blocked in both directions, and there was just as big a traffic jam trying to get out of the city as there was trying to get in. Most of it was trucks trying to pick up or deliver goods.
A pair of APCs were parked beside the highway, their fifty-caliber machine guns covering both directions. There were at least five Humvees and a couple of dozen soldiers in battle fatigues, all of them armed with M16s and very serious-looking. There were two lanes of traffic in each direction, each lane with its own cadre of soldiers.
A sergeant and PFC came to the driver’s window. McGarvey reached over Preston’s shoulder and handed the sergeant his military ID, “I need to talk to your CO.”
The sergeant looked at the ID and then looked up at McGarvey. “Get out of the van, all of you,” he ordered.
“You’re going to be in a world of shit, Sergeant, if you don’t get your CO over here on the double. We have something here he’s got to see.”
“Get out of the vehicle—”
“Call him,” McGarvey ordered. “Now!”
The sergeant, a little less certain, checked McGarvey’s ID again, which identified him as a captain in the U.S. Navy. He stepped back and said something into his lapel mike. A minute later a young lieutenant wearing camos charged over, said something to the sergeant, and then came over to the van.
“Get out now,” he shouted.
“As you wish,” McGarvey said. “But there’s a friend of yours in back who wants to tell you something.” He pulled back and slid open the side door. His eye caught Shizong’s. The young man nodded. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do.
McGarvey and Hanrahan climbed out of the van as the lieutenant came around from the driver’s side where Preston had dismounted.
There were soldiers all over the place, sensing that something was going on, their weapons at the ready.
“Step away from the vehicle—” the lieutenant said, as Shizong appeared at the open door. Recognition dawned on the lieutenant’s face instantly. He was visibly shaken. Shizong had been on Taiwan television for more than six weeks. He’d become a celebrity.
“Lieutenant, come here for a moment, please, I would like to ask you something,” Shizong said. Then he switched to Mandarin.
The lieutenant, who had taken out his pistol, lowered it and walked over to the open door. He and Shizong shook hands, and Shizong began to speak, softly, slowly, his voice calm, reasonable, and sympathetic.
Some of the soldiers drifted closer so that they could hear. All of them recognized Shizong. Civilians from the trucks and cars came up, and soon there were at least one hundred people gathered in the chill rain to listen to Shizong, who never once raised his voice. It was, as Hanrahan would later recall, as if he was whispering in your ear; as if he was talking to you personally. It was clear that he affected everybody that way. It was the reason that the old men of Beijing were so frightened of him that they were willing to risk nuclear war to silence him.
At one point the lieutenant looked sheepishly at the pistol still in his hand. He holstered it, then bowed stiffly in front of Shizong. Without looking at McGarvey or the others, he turned and walked away, taking his soldiers with him.
“We may go now,” Shizong said. “There will be no further roadblocks.”
As McGarvey and the others were climbing back into the van, the APCs were already pulling back, and the soldiers were breaking off from their duties and hustling to the Humvees.
Preston started out, slowly at first but gaining speed as the traffic began to spread out. The rain and overcast deepened the night so that coming into a city that was under military blackout orders was like coming into some medieval settlement before electric lights had been invented.
McGarvey directed Preston past the railroad station to the vicinity of the fisheries warehouse and dock where they had come ashore. They parked the va
n in a dark narrow side alley and walked back to the still-unattended gate into the net yard.
As before there was no activity there, and this time they didn’t even see the guard. Fifteen minutes after leaving the van, they’d made their way down the ladder and scrambled aboard the inflatable, which was tied exactly where they’d left it. They pulled themselves out from under the long dock and began rowing directly out to sea, the rain flattening even the small ripples and hiding everything farther out than twenty yards behind a fine dark veil.
A half mile offshore Hanrahan shipped the oars, lowered the outboard, and started the highly muffled engine; the only question left was how four men were going to get aboard the submerged submarine with only three sets of closed circuit diving equipment.
2305 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
“Conn, sonar, I’ve got the outboard,” Fisher reported excitedly. “Bearing zero-one-zero, range four thousand four hundred yards and closing.”
“Okay, prepare to surface,” Harding told the diving officer. Paradise looked up from the chart he was studying and came over.
“We’re going to make a lot of noise,” he said. “The PRC captain will know that something is going on.”
“That’s right, Rod. But he won’t know what,” Harding replied. He wasn’t in the mood to explain what he was doing, not even to his XO. He had a good idea what McGarvey was facing and what he was trying to accomplish, and he was going to give the man all the help he could.
The diving officer relayed the captain’s orders, and the boat was made ready to come to periscope depth for a look-see before they actually surfaced. It was SOP.
“Keep a sharp watch on the target,” Harding told sonar.
“Aye, skipper.”
“Flood tubes one through four and open the outer doors as soon as we start up.”
“Aye, skipper,” the weapons-control officer responded.
“Bring the boat to sixty feet.”
“Bring the boat to six-zero feet, sir,” the diving officer said crisply, and they began noisly venting high-pressure air into the ballast tanks. Seawolf started up.
Combat Page 61
