Left for Dead

by Sean Parnell

  “We can have B-1Bs in the air from Guam on an out-and-back rotation, whenever you say, Mr. President,” she said. “And we’ve got F-35s and F-15s in Japan.”

  “Very good.” He slung his big jaw at General Wheeler. “Max?”

  “If the balloon goes up, first in would be 1st Special Forces group out of South Korea,” General Wheeler said, “but I can crank up the 82nd and deploy them forward.”

  “Marine Corps elements?” the president asked.

  “South Korea,” Admiral McCormack said, “but I’d work up a landing exercise on Taiwan right now, Mr. President, with Taipei’s invitation, of course. Show of force.”

  Rockford nodded. He knew that his military forces were still the finest in the world, and he could have them rocketing toward the South China Sea within twenty-four hours. But they were all playing with fire, and at the moment the only ace in the hole he had was a half resurrected, deep black special operations program, and one hard-core operator named Eric Steele.

  “Well, what are your recommendations, people?” he said.

  “Satellite recon, sir,” said Dr. Pressfield. “Let’s move some Keyholes and see what they’re doing.”

  “Skirmish line,” said Admiral McCormack. “Let’s get a small vessel tripwire in the water off Taiwan’s west coast.”

  “They might not hit from the sea,” General Myberg said. “They’ve got Xi’an Y-20 heavy transport aircraft. They could launch an airborne assault before our first marines step ashore.”

  “Signals,” said General Efron of NSA. “I’ll triple our focus on traffic intercepts.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs had his big arms folded and was looking at the ceiling, as if his comrades were a bunch of timid kickball players on a kindergarten school playground.

  “Mr. President,” Wheeler said as he puffed up his chestful of medals. “This is all weak-kneed stuff. The best defense is a kick-ass offense. I say we go preemptive. The Chinese have been angling for a fight for decades. I say we give it to them and strike first.”

  Rockford stabbed Wheeler with an iron gaze from his cool blue eyes.

  “Not on your life, General.” The president shook his big blond head. “We prepare, move assets, and sop up the intel . . . but we wait. We’re not going to pull the trigger first. I didn’t take this job to start new wars. I took it to stop them.”

  Chapter 33

  Pingtung, Taiwan

  It was close to dawn when the Gulfstream’s wheels bounced on the landing strip at the southern thumb of Taiwan.

  Steele felt like he’d been beaten with a bamboo kendo practice sword. He’d hardly slept on the plane, even after they’d gone feet wet over the Sea of Japan and he’d sent his flash to Ralphy—the point after a mission when he’d usually relax. His joints were aching, his temples pounding, and even his scalp felt like it had been shrunken in a clothes dryer. He actually checked himself over to see if he’d missed a bullet wound, but he was all in one piece and decided it was simply his mind.

  You’re getting to be like an old skydiver . . . odds are catching up . . .

  Something was nagging at him. Something looming in his future. He hated having that kind of internal radar, because it was always on the money.

  Everyone else on the jet had slept like an overfed puppy. Colonel Dr. Liang was curled up on one of the seats under a blanket, still in her PLA uniform, though she’d pulled off her combat boots. Goodhill was plugged into something on his earbuds—Travis Tritt crooning “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)”—and snoring. Shane Wiley had slept sitting upright, fingers laced over his stomach like a mummified corpse, while Tenzin perched cross-legged on another seat like a cliché monk. Slick was out cold, wearing her balaclava pulled down over her eyes like a hostage, and Miles Turner was too big for the seats, so he’d stretched out prone on the carpeted floor.

  Allie was up forward talking airplane smack with the pilots. Come to think of it, Steele couldn’t remember ever seeing her sleep, except for that one time in Bagram after they’d gotten drunk and . . . he struck that image from his mind.

  The touchdown on the eight-thousand-foot runway was like somebody driving a Ford F-150 off the half-lowered ramp of a C-130. The landing gear squealed, a coffeepot went flying out of the forward galley, and Dalton “Blade” Goodhill snapped awake, tore off his earbuds, and bellowed, “Jesus H. Christ.” Everyone else stirred, groaned, and cursed—in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese—and Goodhill looked across the aisle at Steele and said, “You shoulda shot that flyboy when you had the chance.”

  “He did it on purpose,” Steele said. “Just to bruise my ass.”

  He looked out his porthole window to see a blacked-out strip. They’d arrived at Pingtung air base, where the independent Republic of China’s Airborne Special Service Company—comparable to the U.K.’s SAS or the U.S. Army’s Delta—resided behind concrete barriers, concertina wire, and attack dogs, in a no-nonsense restricted headquarters and training facility. Over the course of his career with Special Forces and the Program, Steele had operated with many of the world’s top-tier units, but he’d never come face-to-face with these particular badasses. They had a reputation for being among the world’s top twenty special operations and counterterror units, including Russia’s Spetsnaz or Poland’s GROM.

  Ted Lansky had allegedly arranged an “invitation” for Steele and his team from the ASSC commander—safe passage, as it were, for allies of the Republic of China, aka Taiwan. But what Steele saw now didn’t look like a welcome wagon. All sorts of armored vehicles were circling the aircraft and screeching into stakeout positions, headlights and spotlights blazing. Serious-looking troops, all gunned up, were spilling from their carriages and owning the strip. They were black clad from head to foot, with nothing visible but angry eyes. They looked very much like the Swords of Qing militants that he and his mates had taken down in Mongolia just a few hours before.

  Did we take a wrong turn somewhere?

  The Gulfstream’s navy steward opened the hatchway and deployed the short stairway. A sharp voice in heavily accented English called from outside.

  “Come out. Show your hands.”

  Steele got up, looked around at his blinking compatriots, and said, “No gloves, palms up, one at a time.”

  He squeezed through the hatch and onto the tarmac. It was humid and still pitch-black outside, though the birds were starting to chirp in the palms just off the runway and tall waves of elephant grass clicked in a thick breeze. He was still wearing his tactical uniform, sticky with sweat, and more than anything he wanted a shower and a nap.

  Strange thought, dude, when a sneeze can get you shot.

  He took a few steps forward, keeping his hands waist high in plain sight. Squinting in the arc lights, he could see the ASSC commandos holding Taiwanese XT-97 assault rifles, similar to the FN SCAR, but at least with good trigger discipline and no trembling digits. He heard the Gulfstream’s engines wind down as his teammates, guests, and the air crew came down and lined up behind him in front of the fuselage.

  “Feels like a firing squad,” Slick muttered.

  “It’s cool as long as you signed your last will,” Goodhill said.

  “Hope they’ve seen a brother before,” said Miles.

  “No sweat,” said Shane Wiley. “They look like Oprah fans.”

  Tenzin muttered something in Chinese.

  “Silence!” the man with the sharp voice snapped. He looked to Steele like a young squadron commander, but he didn’t seem to be the boss.

  Then a gleaming dark green jeep pulled up, no top, with its uniformed ROC driver sitting erect as a mannequin. A man climbed out from the other side and walked through the high beams toward Steele.

  He was short and wide as a Greco-Roman wrestler, with thick black hair, “unibrow” eyebrows, and a jaw like a German beer stein. He was wearing a sterile black tactical uniform, except for a pair of gold ROC airborne wings over his left pocket, and a nametape in Chinese. He had a large pist
ol in a thigh rig. He smiled with big teeth and offered Steele a handshake that felt like gripping a ham hock.

  “I am told to call you Seven,” the man said in baritone, well-studied English.

  “You can call me Steele, Commander.”

  “Very good. I am Colonel Wi Lung Chun, but my English friends call me Panther.”

  And I’ll bet you earned that moniker, Steele thought.

  “An honor to meet you, Panther.”

  “Yes. Where are your weapons?”

  “In the cargo hold.” Steele poked a thumb back over his shoulder.

  “Sou suo ta men.” Search them, Panther said to his lieutenant in Mandarin.

  Five of the commandos slung their rifles, stomped past Steele, and frisked the nine people behind him, from ankles to crotches, waists, armpits, and hair. He heard Allie titter, “You’re turning me on,” but he kept his smile inside. The commandos finished and returned to their positions.

  “My apologies,” Panther said to Steele. “We must be careful in our part of the world.”

  “No worries,” Steele said. “You can search me too if you like.”

  “I am not worried.” Panther smiled. “If you move too fast I will just kill you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Panther waved a ham hand toward Steele’s group. “My men will care for your people. Come.”

  The colonel walked to the jeep, snapped something to the driver, and the young soldier jumped out, saluted, and marched off. Panther climbed into the driver’s seat, cocked his big head at Steele, and Steele went around and slid up into the passenger seat. Panther gunned the engine and handed Steele a travel mug emblazoned with ASSC airborne wings.

  “Coffee. Black. The way you like it.”

  Steele didn’t ask how he knew that, but he nodded and took a grateful swig as Panther made a screeching U-turn and headed back down the strip. Steele saw a series of low concrete buildings hulking far away in the rising dawn, but Panther soon turned off the strip, trundled along a dirt road between sparkling bulrushes, and headed somewhere north.

  It wasn’t the first time that Steele had dropped out of the sky in some strange land and been greeted by heavily armed suspicious men. He’d done that often before and knew he had to play it with class and cool. Professionals like this colonel were like jungle animals—if they smelled fear on you, it would ring their alarms. That was the game. He hated it, loved it, was tired of it, craved it, and knew that someday soon, he should quit. That made him think briefly of Meg, and he struck her too from his mind.

  They broke from a thick grove of elephant grass and climbed onto a slim dirt lane alongside a muddy green river. The early sun was glistening on the distant waves of the East China Sea, where it flowed south through the Taiwanese strait, just a 140-mile barrier between the island and mainland China. The river beside them was bordered on the far side by rice paddies, where already farmers were bent low, wearing frothy white tunics, baggy pantaloons, and conical hats, harvesting Asia’s culinary treasure just as they’d done for eons. It was bucolic, but the vision didn’t ease Steele’s disquiet.

  “I like your Theodore Lansky,” Panther said over the engine rumble and the bouncing tires.

  “I like him too,” Steele said.

  “Do you know a man named McHugh?”

  “No.”

  Panther smiled and donned a pair of pilot’s Ray-Bans.

  “You lie well. Very smooth.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  They drove a bit farther in silence, then Panther said, “It is not far.”

  “What’s not far, Colonel?”

  “The Fo Guang Shan monastery. The place where we go.”

  “Why are we going there?”

  “You have a rendezvous.”

  Steele didn’t have anything on him. Not his 1911, or even a knife. He cast his fate to the wind.

  Then he saw it, beyond a bend in the river ahead. The monastery rose from a vast plateau of gentle grasses, a pinkish stone structure of one great castle-like cube in the center, with wings and buttresses on both flanks, all topped by sloping red roofs like the hats of the rice farmers, turned up at the brims. Its walls were blank with only slim window slits like the pupils of cats, as if too much light inside might disturb the monks’ meditations.

  Panther took the jeep off the riverside path, down through a shallow valley, and up onto a slim paved roadway. It wasn’t yet six in the morning, but already there were Taiwanese ranchers clucking at cattle and tapping their rumps with switches, and the bicycles were gathering like flocks of ducklings and an old bus spewed oil smoke. The colonel turned off the roadway again into a wide empty parking lot, where the walls of the monastery loomed high above, like China’s Forbidden City.

  He stopped the jeep and gestured at a set of stone stairs that rose up in seven stages.

  “Up there,” he said. “In the garden of Buddhas. I will wait for you here.”

  Steele got out. He could have taken the stairs two at a time, but he somehow didn’t want to take them at all. He saw no one else around, except for one monk in long black robes at the top, who slipped inside an enormous red door. And then he saw the first Buddha, like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  It was standing rather than sitting in the traditional sculpted form, and it looked like it was a hundred feet high and weighed thirty tons. It had long fat earlobes drooping to its golden shoulders, its palms extended in welcome, and it smiled down at a great oval below of red brick cobblestones. The great Buddha stood among a copse of lush green trees, and the garden was surrounded, in perfect order, by rows and rows of smaller golden Buddhas, each the size of a man.

  Steele had witnessed many wondrous things in the world, but what caught his breath wasn’t the spiritual grace or beauty of the deity garden. It was the figure of a man, standing at the other end.

  He was tall, gray haired, wearing a safari-type bush jacket and jeans. His back was turned as he looked out over the river valley beyond the garden’s south end, and Steele saw he was carrying a silver Zero Halliburton briefcase. This wasn’t the first time either that he’d met a stranger somewhere for a drop, and he figured it wouldn’t be the last. He checked his surroundings, then walked toward the man and stopped.

  Something about him. Something in his form, or maybe the energy buzzing in the air.

  He knew it was his father as soon as the man turned and pushed his sunglasses up onto his thick, spiky gray hair. They had the same green eyes. They had the same mouth. Hank walked toward him as Steele’s heart pounded in his chest, his fists balled, and he felt like he might pass out, or scream some primitive war cry, or charge him and choke him to death, or hug him and weep. But he was rooted to the spot, frozen like one of the lifeless gold Buddhas. He could barely breathe as his father stopped ten feet away.

  Neither of them said a thing for an endless minute as only the birds chirped in the trees. Then Steele, in a voice that sounded to him like the whine of a lost child, said, “Why did you come here?”

  Hank put the silver briefcase down next to his African desert boots and said, “To give you a hand.”

  Chapter 34

  Manchuria, China

  A priceless Qing Dynasty vase exploded in a hundred shards on the wall of Zaifeng’s zŏng bù. It had been a beautiful, white, crackle glaze piece adorned with raised black dragons until Zaifeng had hurled it in a detonation of rage. Now it was merely the shrapnel of history.

  “Escaped!” Zaifeng boomed as he paced back and forth in his headquarters. He was dressed again all in black, with only the red of his turtleneck sewn with the Swords of Qing emblem hugging the bulging veins in his neck. His mountain boots boomed on the teakwood. “How did you let her escape?”

  The scout called Feng shivered where he knelt on the floor. His tactical uniform was stiff with snow and ice crusts, and torn in one shoulder and hip. His wild wet hair was matted with dried blood where a bullet had grazed his skull, and he clutched his fur hat in his lap with raw red h
ands.

  “We were ambushed, Xian Sheng.” Feng’s ragged breaths streamed from his nostrils.

  “Ambushed?” Zaifeng stopped pacing and looked across Feng’s prostrate form at Po. The lieutenant was standing at attention a good ten paces behind his scout, as if avoiding what could soon be the splatter of Feng’s blood. “By whom?”

  “American commandos, Xian Sheng,” Feng whispered, ashamed.

  “Americans? From where?”

  “From the sky. I believe they parachuted. Their airplane attacked us too.”

  Zaifeng raised his chin. His posture and bunched muscles eased. At the very least, if his men had been defeated in battle, it had been at the hands of worthy adversaries in superior numbers.

  “How many of these commandos, Feng?”

  Feng swallowed. “Three.”

  “Three? Did you say three?”

  “And some Mongols also, Xian Sheng,” Feng sputtered. “On horseback and—”

  “Three Americans and some medieval horsemen?” Zaifeng exploded again, whipping his hand through the air. “You and fifteen of our best men, defeated by a trio of Western dogs? Pienzeh!” he shouted. It was not good to be called a liar by Zaifeng.

  “They . . . they had many weapons, Xian Sheng, and grenades from—”

  “Where are the rest of you?”

  “Dead.” Feng’s eyes began to stream. His tears were like mercury rivulets on his frozen face.

  “And your horses?”

  “Some fell . . . some ran . . .” He didn’t dare tell Zaifeng that so many of his horses were now in enemy hands.

  Zaifeng fell silent, looked at the ceiling of his zŏng bù, then quietly walked past the puddle of melting snow around Feng’s knees to his desk. Behind it, in a tall crimson vase, was a double-edged Chinese sword called the jian in a lacquered scabbard. He drew the jian, swept the blade twice across his thigh as if stropping a straight razor, and walked back toward Feng. Po closed his eyes. He did not want to see this.

  “Tell me how you know what you know, Feng,” Zaifeng demanded. “Tell me how you saw what you saw. Tell me you are not a liar and a coward, and why I should let you live.”