by Sean Parnell
Two of Taki’s fishermen had already been on Fijimoru when the helicopters arrived. Keening and crawling around on their hands and knees, they’d managed to fire up the diesel engine, made it into the wheelhouse, and were trying to work the throttles and old-fashioned wheel. But the boat only whined and sputtered as its props churned up water. In their panic they’d forgotten to pull in the anchor.
It didn’t matter. Zaifeng’s second helicopter was already hovering just off the bow. From its cargo bay, a door gunner with a Type 67 general purpose machine gun shattered the wheelhouse windshield, then blew the two men into clouds of blood and splintering bone.
The last surviving fisherman had fled from the carnage in the other direction, back toward the beach. He was an older man in his fifties and he was crying and completely spent. He collapsed in the shallows and crawled up onto the bed of sea-polished stones and sand, slinging tears and mucus.
Zaifeng holstered his pistol, took Taki’s marlin pike, walked over to the exhausted man, drove the pike through his back and pinned him to the ground like a butterfly. He left the wooden handle twanging upright in the air.
The rest was silence. There were no more screams or gunfire, just the sounds of the breeze and the waves and the helicopters as they circled back in from the sea. Po emerged from the water and approached Zaifeng. There was blood and gobs of something like pink mayonnaise on his balaclava, and he pulled it off, soaked it in the salt water and wrung it out with his hands. Zaifeng nodded in approval at his work, and Po tapped the module of his headset, which was plugged in his ear.
“I have just heard from Miko,” he said. “He has arrived in Taiwan.”
“Very good. Now have the crews camouflage the aircraft,” Zaifeng said, then he turned and pointed at the island’s crest. “The main cave is there at the centerline. Have two men explore it to the end and see if there is an exit on the other side. If there is not, make one.”
“Yes, Xian Sheng,” Po said. Ziafeng had taught him that there must always be an exit. That’s why they carried plenty of explosives.
“After that, post two men on top of that ridge with the QW-18s.” He was referring to their pair of Chinese surface-to-air, shoulder-fired missiles. He traversed his finger from left to right, pointing out two formations of rock. “And they should set up the machine guns, there and there.”
He took Po’s elbow and locked his eyes to make sure he was focused. “The Gantu-62 canister must be moved, very carefully, into the cave. The men must suit up to do that. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Zaifeng turned him back toward the water and jutted his chin at the floundering Fijimoru. “Have Feng and one other swim out to the boat. The engine is still turning. They should take it out a kilometer or so, sink it, and swim back. I do not want to see any of its detritus.”
“Of course.”
“When all of that is done, make contact with Scarlet again. We need to know where the Roosevelt is.”
Then Zaifeng looked at the water. The shallows were pink with blood and the corpses floated and turned in the waves.
“It is a shame,” Zaifeng said.
Po was surprised at his commander’s expression of pity.
“Perhaps we should have kept some alive?” Po asked. “Perhaps as hostages?”
Zaifeng looked at his lieutenant and his black eyes narrowed.
“They were Japanese, Po. Do you not remember the rape of Nanking? I meant it is a shame there weren’t more of them to kill.”
Chapter 38
Crystal City, Virginia
At two o’clock in the morning, Central Intelligence Agency analyst Felicia Min should have been fast asleep. She was not.
Instead, she was perched on a cushy office chair in the dark spare bedroom of a luxury high-rise apartment, in one of the most coveted neighborhoods of Arlington, just across the river from the nation’s capital. Crystal City was a tight sprawl of luxury residences, effete fashion stores, overpriced restaurants, and the offices of numerous government agencies, including the United States Marshals Service and the EPA. The city’s twenty-two thousand spoiled residents enjoyed weather-protected underground passages to traverse from their homes to shopping or their places of work. The parking garages were packed with Audis and Volvos. You had to be a well-heeled senator, congressman, or defense establishment lobbyist to afford the ridiculous rents.
Tonight, Felicia, whose code name “Scarlet” was known only to Zaifeng and Po of the Swords of Qing, didn’t look like the frumpy analyst who’d briefed President Rockford just days before. Her thick-framed glasses were gone, the tips of her bangs teased penciled eyebrows, her mouth was glossed in lipstick, and she was wearing an obscenely short sheer purple nightgown.
She hated the getup. She was much more comfortable in sweats or jeans, but the needs of the mission precluded good taste.
On the desk before her were two smartphones. One was her CIA issue, fully secure, which she wasn’t going to touch—activity on that phone was always tracked by Langley, and likely the NSA. The other was her personal iPhone X. Just beyond the phones was an open MacBook Air laptop. That was also a secure device, but it wasn’t hers. The laptop had a fingerprint reader, and since none of Felicia’s fingertips would pass muster with its CCD detector, she wasn’t going to try.
Instead, she pulled a tiny USB dongle from her Gucci purse, which contained a black hat program called PoisonTap, and plugged it into the laptop’s Thunderbolt drive. She waited the prescribed two minutes, then removed the dongle, confident that PoisonTap had inserted a backdoor into the laptop’s cache, creating undetectable access points to top secret files and real time government feeds. But the best part was full emulation with an injection of Reflector 3, turning her iPhone into the laptop’s mirror image. She opened the PoisonTap app on her cell—disguised as a Bloomingdale’s shopping icon—pressed her thumb down, and voilá, she was in.
What Felicia needed now was access to that morning’s PDB, the intelligence community’s presidential daily briefing. The document was highly classified but was shared with certain members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Somewhere within that daily tome was the current location of the U.S. Navy’s Roosevelt strike group. As one of the CIA’s top Asia analysts, she could have simply searched for those details at her desk at Langley, but all of her keystrokes there were logged. Here, with PoisonTap and her iPhone, she could snoop like a wraith and no one would ever know. If later on by some chance her probing was discovered, the laptop’s owner would be blamed.
It took another few minutes until she found the aircraft carrier’s current location in the Philippine Sea, about 750 miles east-northeast of Manila. She memorized its latitude and longitude—18.21 x 130.17 on the World Geodetic System—then switched over on her iPhone to WhatsApp, where a friend named “Betty” had just texted her to ask about her upcoming plans for vacation.
Betty was Zaifeng’s lieutenant, Po.
Felicia thought about the coordinates for a half a minute, then thumbed her return message.
“I’m thinking around the 18th. They’re giving me three weeks, but I gotta lose some weight before I’ll wear a bikini, lol. I’m up to 130, haven’t been this fat since I was seventeen!”
“Okay, girlfriend!” Po tapped back. “Hit the gym and I’ll see you then! xox.”
It was done, at least for tonight. She might have to do it all again in a day or so, but she pushed that out of her mind. One day at a time was her mantra, though the days of this double life and its pressures were getting to be very long.
Just two days before, on the ride back to Langley from the White House, CIA director Tina Harcourt had indiscreetly shared her suspicion with Felicia that President Rockford had some sort of black operations program on the side. Harcourt’s station chief in Taipei had reported American assets landing in Pingtung, and the director thought the president was mounting a “side bet” kinetic action to move against the Swords of Qing, in case t
hey were real.
Felicia had feigned a stomach flu that afternoon, left her cubicle at Langley, and reported that intel to Po.
She was taking too many chances. She was drinking too much, and smoking cigarettes too. Langley didn’t teach you how to be a coldblooded traitor at the Farm, although in fact she felt like an American patriot. Someone had to save this country from the megalomaniacal CCP.
She switched to the PoisonTap app and closed it down, making the program’s worms dormant, for now. Then she stuffed both smartphones into her purse, sat back in the chair, blew her bangs off her forehead with an exasperated sigh, and thought about sneaking out of the flat and going home. But she knew she couldn’t do that. Instead she got up, opened the bedroom door, leaned against the jamb with her arms folded, and stared at the mess in the living room.
Congressman Richard Stillwell was lying there on his back. Unfortunately, he wasn’t dead. He was snoring, in fact, in the middle of a huge pullout couch. He was also naked except for half a sheet thrown across his thighs and crotch, arms askew to both sides, and the various bottles of beer and vodka and the empty pizza boxes on the coffee table seemed apt decor for his postcoital sloth. The air stank of alcohol, weed, and sex.
Felicia had never asked him why they always made love on the pullout and never in his bedroom, but she assumed it had something to do with his wife, who visited every couple of months from L.A. Maybe he thought Mrs. Stillwell would sense he was banging some young intern in his home away from home, or maybe he was just kinky that way—one bed for one woman, another for the other. In truth, Felicia didn’t care.
He was one of the most egotistical, corrupt, and moronic politicians she’d ever met, and she’d met quite a few. She stood there with her back against the jamb and thought, Maybe I have to act like a slut to get what I need, Richard, but you’re the real whore. He spent half his time being wooed by Communist assets from the CCP, turning a blind eye to their thefts of American intellectual property, and crying crocodile tears on TV whenever his political opponents called out Beijing. “Racists!” he’d scold them, then laugh about the whole thing an hour later while he dragged Felicia out for drinks at some showy saloon in D.C.
He was so dumb he didn’t even realize she was CIA and believed she was a grad student at Georgetown. Once he’d even walked right past her workstation at Langley during one of those silly congressional tours. Probably didn’t recognize her with her clothes on. Pig.
Stillwell stirred in the smoky dim light of the living room and snorted. He had strange blank eyes and a weird little mouth, as if he’d been hit in the face with a baseball bat as a kid—Felicia assumed that was the case, and probably justified. He raised his head and looked at her, gave her that creepy crooked smile, and patted the sheet.
“Come back to bed, baby,” he crooned in a tenor slur that he probably thought was manly. “There’s still time for one more ride!”
He pulled the sheet away from his crotch and Felicia’s stomach turned, but she sauntered toward the bed. Very soon now, if everything worked according to plan, the Chinese Communist Party would be decimated from an all-out war. And then she’d secretly out Mr. Stillwell as one of their assets, and she’d do it anonymously through one of his “friends” in the mainstream media.
They’d turn on him in a flash.
As she crawled up onto the bed, she thought about the best part of it all. When this whole thing was over, she’d never have to kiss him again.
Chapter 39
No Acknowledged Location
EYES ONLY
SAP (Alphas/Support/OCO EAST) - FLASH
From: SAWTOOTH MAIN
To: All OCONUS EAST ASIA PAX
Subj: Displace
Source: Staff Ops/Duty Officer
Confidence: Highest
IMMEDIATE, all OCONUS EAST PAX, inc ALPHAS, KEEPERS, SUPPORT, AIR: Withdraw SAWTOOTH immediate, on site transport mode cleared.
Emphasis: Exceptions; Seven/Blade/Geek1.
STATUS: DEFCON Red.
Operational window: Immediate Execute
Chapter 40
Pingtung, Taiwan
The sight of Panther’s commandos smashing their foreheads into large slabs of brick made Ralphy Persko cover his eyes. It was the sound of it too, their wolflike karate screams, the impact of flesh and bone on stone, a horrid aural experience he knew he’d never forget. But he didn’t have enough fingers to blind himself while also plugging his ears.
The commandos, in three rows of nine on the Pingtung parade ground, were dressed in snug black tactical utilities and kneeling before twenty-seven sets of upright cinder blocks, across which their red brick targets had been laid. All of those bricks were now cracked in half, and as the commandos stood up and snapped to parade rest, their faces were blank as if all they’d done was head-butt paper walls. Two had trickles of blood running off the tips of their noses, which they ignored.
“Those boys are hard,” said Eric Steele.
“Hard?” Ralphy groaned. “They’re insane.”
Steele and Persko were sitting on a set of bleachers on the north side of the training square, which was about half the size of a soccer field and bulldozed flat with gravel and crushed cement—the kind of thing that would never pass muster on a military base in the States because some troop’s mommy would complain. Beyond that was the ASSC parachute training hangar and chute shed, braced by a low concrete barracks, the armory, motor pool, a comms shack bristling with antennas, and a TOC. With the rows of razor wire and the palm trees waving their lush fronds in the humid breeze, it looked like a Florida prison with an exercise yard.
“Are we supposed to clap?” Ralphy asked Steele.
“No. It isn’t a show for us. They probably do this every day.”
“Every day? They must all have TBIs,” Ralphy said, meaning traumatic brain injuries.
“You don’t need a lot of cerebrum for this kind of work,” Steele said. “Just need to know where to shoot, and when, and who to kill, and how.”
“Sorta like you.”
“Yeah, like me.”
The commandos had now cleared all their blocks and brick shards from the pitch, and were working through martial arts forms that appeared to be tae kwon do katas at third-degree black belt level. They were punching, kicking, and scything the air so fast with whipping knife hands that they looked like they could march straight into the elephant grass and mow it all down.
“Allie woulda loved this,” Ralphy remarked. “She’s always saying a hard man is good to find.”
Steele smirked. She’d said that same thing to him a few times when they were back at Bagram doing things that were strictly nonregulation.
“Well, make a video for her,” he said.
Ralphy pulled his smartphone from his cargo pocket, but Steele grabbed his wrist and said, “I was kidding, numb nuts. Want Panther to cut off your hand?”
Ralphy put the smartphone away.
Allie Whirly was no longer in Taiwan, nor were Slick, Shane Wiley, Miles Turner, or Tenzin the monk. They hadn’t gone quietly and had made a fuss until Steele had shown them the flash from Sawtooth Main and said he supported Lansky’s call. Orders were orders, and Lansky’s disposition of assets made sense. The Progam was just getting back on its feet and it was his call to decide who was expendable, and who was not.
The only one who was happy to reboard the Gulfstream for Washington, D.C., was Tenzin. He’d dreamed his whole life about making it to the States someday, and more than anything wanted to have at least one last face-to-face with the man he called Hua Chang Mao, who, given his age at this point, might soon “kick the bucket” (another of Tenzin’s quirky English expressions). Steele had lobbied for Tenzin with Lansky, claiming that without the monk’s intervention, Colonel Dr. Liang would now be dead. Lansky had at last relented and said Tenzin could get on the plane. Lansky wasn’t a people person, but he had a weakness for spies.
The commandos were now fetching training implements from two large
rattan trunks, including nunchakus, polymer knives, bo staffs, and wooden Bokken swords.
“What are they gonna do now?” Ralphy asked Steele.
“They’re going to hurt each other.”
“Oh God, I can’t watch this.”
“Relax, Ralphy. They like it.”
Steele heard low laughter coming from over his left shoulder, but he didn’t turn. Up there on the last bench of the bleachers, his father and Dalton Goodhill, who hadn’t seen each other in two and a half decades, were reliving events of the past. It felt strange having them both there while he was prepping a mission—sort of like having your parents watching while you were trying to impress a girl.
Steele and his father had raced back to Pingtung from the monastery the night before, ready to jump on a secure horn in Panther’s HQ and shout at Lansky that the Roosevelt had to be turned around. But halfway back through the rice paddies, they’d both realized that they couldn’t single out one vessel just because Kristin was aboard. Every ship in that carrier strike group was in peril, and there was no way to know which of them would be targeted by the Swords of Qing. All they could do was tell Lansky about Dr. Liang’s revelation that Gantu-62 had been designed—and now successfully tested in Africa—to take out warships, and probably a lot more.
Lansky didn’t tell them that a CIA subject matter expert on China had briefed the president that the whole thing might be a CCP ruse—a false flag op to cover for an invasion of Taiwan. Either way, he needed the Swords of Qing terminated.
The only problem was, nobody knew where they were.
At the top of the bleachers, Hank Steele was smoking his pipe and Dalton Goodhill chewed on a cigar. In their blue jeans, boots, and short-sleeved shirts, they looked like old stunt doubles for Lee Marvin and Bruce Willis.
