by Sean Parnell
“I remember when you made that cash drop in the Mog,” Hank said. “That was all balls.”
“I remember when you and Jerry Ginder dropped from that Huey skid in Cambodia,” Goodhill said, “and nobody heard from either of you for half a friggin’ year.”
“Whatever happened to Ginder?” Hank asked.
“Covid,” Goodhill said and shook his head.
“Seriously? Fifth group guy, two thousand jumps, three bronze stars, and he gets taken by the Chinese virus?”
“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,” Goodhill murmured, “and I hate very much to leave it.”
Hank looked at him through a halo of smoke. “That’s Hemingway.”
“Yup.” Goodhill examined the end of his burning cigar.
“Hell, I didn’t even know you could read.”
They both smiled at that, then Hank looked down at his son’s wide back. “How’s the kid doing?”
“Best operator I’ve ever seen. Don’t tell him I said so.”
“Your secret’s safe,” Hank said.
“He broke every Program protocol and tried to rescue your sorry ass from Siberia.”
“So I heard.”
“My kids barely talk to me,” Goodhill complained.
“Maybe you need to go missing.”
“If I stay in this game I probably will.”
Panther arrived in his jeep with Ralphy’s big black Pelican case in the back. He was followed by another jeep, empty except for its driver. He barked something at his squadron leader, who snapped an order to the twenty-seven commandos. They quickly packed up their training gear and marched off down toward the Pingtung firing range.
Panther summoned Steele with a downward wave of his slabby hand. He was wearing his Ray-Bans, a black ball cap with the ROC special forces insignia, and had a cigarette tucked behind one ear.
“Colonel Liang has passed her debriefing with the NSB,” he grunted. “She is clean.”
“But is she still in one piece, Panther?” Steele asked.
“No one touched her. She talked freely for four hours.”
“Good. My people back in the States will want to talk to her too.”
Panther’s smile curled. “She is worth her weight in gold.”
“That won’t be much. I’ve seen German shepherds that weigh more.”
Panther laughed and called to the rest, “Okay, Yankees, get in. We do not know how much time we have.”
“That sounds ominously existential,” Ralphy mumbled, and Goodhill flicked him on the back of the head.
The firing range was half a klick past the end of the compound, with ten shooting stations facing a fifteen-foot berm and man-size targets at fifty yards. Steele noted that all the cardboard targets were caricatures of Mao Zedong—these people did not like Communists. To the left was a maze of plywood walls on stanchions, with doors and windows so Panther’s men could practice close-quarters battle. They were peppered with bullet holes and grenade shrapnel.
The commandos had arrived first on the run and were already banging away with XT-105 assault rifles in 5.56 mm and a few nasty-looking XT-104 9 mm submachine guns. Spinning brass shell casings flew through the air, the smoke smelled like burnt hair, and all the men were wearing black caps like Panther’s, Oakley sunglasses, and looked like killer clones from The Matrix.
Panther stopped his small convoy behind the stations, got out, jammed his big paw in a pail full of earplugs, and handed them out to his guests. Then he took Steele’s elbow and walked him over to his squadron leader, who was punching a very tight grouping dead center at his distant target.
“You like to try a Taiwanese weapon, Steele?” he offered.
“Sure.”
Panther’s officer made the weapon safe and handed it over to Steele. Behind them, Ralphy nudged Hank and said, “Watch this, papa.”
Steele raised the rifle, leaned forward, and before he’d settled his eye in the reflex site, punched three tight rounds in the target’s upper left quadrant, three more in the upper right, then two nostril holes beneath the squadron leader’s grouping, and beneath that a short curving burst, finishing a perfect smiley face.
The squadron leader retrieved his rifle and grunted something in Mandarin.
“What did he say?” Steele asked Panther.
“He said he is taking his weapon back before you write your name.”
“Hope I didn’t offend him.”
“Jackson will not like you now, but it is important that he knows you can shoot.”
“Jackson?”
“He attended Boston University. They could not pronounce Jae Ki Swon.”
Panther’s jeep drivers had pulled Ralphy’s Pelican case out and set it down on the ground. Panther called a ceasefire, Jackson had his commandos clear and safe their weapons, and they all formed up in a semicircle to watch.
Ralphy punched a digital lock and opened the case. A pair of strange-looking handheld weapons were nestled in packing foam on the left. They were gunmetal blue and looked like fat semiautomatics, except their barrels were nine-inch-long tubes with open horizontal slots from the fore-end sights to the breech. To the right were “dishwasher” racks, holding two dozen five-inch-diameter disks that looked like razor-sharp buzz saw blades. In the center of each disk was a black golf ball. There were also two boxes of blank .44 magnum ammunition.
“What the hell’s this?” Hank Steele muttered. “Looks like some Star Trek thing.”
“Boomer,” Goodhill snorted.
“These look like shuriken.” Panther pointed at the disks, meaning the Japanese ninja throwing stars that could be hurled like mini Frisbees and impale human chests.
“Pretty much the same,” Ralphy said as he picked up a pistol and one of the disks, “except this ball in the middle is packed with Semtex.” He slid the wicked-looking disk into the pistol’s front slot and pushed it back to the breech, where it locked into a revolving sprocket. “The magazine holds ten blanks for launching the disks, and the charge only arms when the thing reaches maximum velocity.”
“You hope,” Steele said.
“Well, that’s what S said. I trust her.”
“Good, then you can go first, Ralphy.”
“I will try it,” Panther volunteered, but Steele gripped his thick bicep and shook his head.
“You’re our host, Panther. It might blow up.”
“Okay, Steele, then who is expendable?”
Ralphy looked up at Dalton Goodhill.
“Shit, of course,” Goodhill said.
Panther had his men suit Goodhill up with Kevlar. Then they gave him a helmet and ballistic goggles and walked him over to the CQB range. Everyone else stepped back, plugged their ears, and held their breaths.
Goodhill took aim at a thick wooden door at fifty yards. He squeezed the trigger, the blank charge boomed like a shotgun, the disk went spinning with a wicked whistle, chunked its blades in the door, then exploded like an M26 grenade that left nothing there but a piece of frame.
“Wicked!” Goodhill grinned as he walked back over to the crew. “What’s this little shit called?”
“Whipsaw,” Ralphy said. “Told ya it was cool.”
“Hate to waste it on the Swords of Qing,” Steele said. “There’re so many deserving politicians.”
Panther’s commandos were thrilled with the deadly device and swarmed around Ralphy and the case, wanting to give it a go. Ralphy tried to wave them off, protesting that the Pelican’s contents were all he had.
Someone tapped Steele’s shoulder, and he turned to find Colonel Dr. Liang. He didn’t know how she’d arrived, but she was dressed in civilian clothes—blue jeans, running shoes, and a loose white blouse—and he thought she looked pretty as an off-duty Singapore Airlines flight attendant. But her expression was troubled and she was holding three green plastic tubes that looked like military diazepam injectors. Panther walked over and pulled her and Steele aside.
“Will it work?” Panther said to
Liang in English.
“Will what work?” Steele asked.
“The doctor’s countermeasure to the Gantu-62,” Panther said. “My men will not fight in MOPP suits, Steele. It is not honorable.”
“Panther has been very helpful.” Dr. Liang nodded at the colonel. “He had the biochemical battalion deliver materials, and I have been working on a temporary antidote.”
“Temporary?” Steele said.
“Yes. I can modify these EpiPens, with shocks of adrenaline as well as rapid anticoagulants, plus their already inclusive antiseizure properties. But if you and the commandos are exposed to Gantu-62, it will not save you.”
“What will it do?” Steele said.
“It will only delay your deaths.”
Steele raised an eyebrow at Dr. Liang. “If you’re thinking about a career in advertising,” he said, “you might want to reconsider.”
Chapter 41
Fo Guang Shan Monastery, Taiwan
Zaifeng’s assassin murdered Dr. Liang that night in her bed, and Steele wasn’t fast enough to stop him.
It was Panther’s tactical error, something the special forces commander would curse himself for and regret till his end of days. Panther had decided that his musky concrete barracks at Pingtung weren’t fitting for honored guests, especially the petite and courageous PLA colonel, for whom he had growing respect and affection. So, in the evening he’d arranged for better accommodations. The monastery’s labyrinth of structures included a small bed-and-breakfast for visiting tourists who wanted to experience deific devotion, and it so happened that Panther’s sister was the bed-and-breakfast’s bookkeeper and accountant. The reservations were easily made.
Panther’s squadron leader, Jackson, who’d made his peace with Steele after challenging him to a pistol match—which Steele had intentionally lost—had escorted Steele and his small crew to the check-in desk. Jackson made it clear to the monk on duty that these were guests of Colonel Wi Lung Chun and the Airborne Special Service Company, and that he’d return for the five after breakfast.
No one imagined the worst of all nightmares, that in the morning they’d only be four.
Dinner at the monastery was stark and hardly a four-star repast. A brown-robed monk fetched the four Americans and the Chinese woman, escorted them through the Garden of Meditations, and before admitting them into a vast dining hall, smiled and crossed his lips with a finger, indicating absolute silence. Inside there were twenty tables, each forty feet long, where already five hundred monks in black vestments sat. They sipped tea and ate mounds of rice and vegetables using chopsticks, without uttering a word, reminding Steele of a punitive meal for plebes he’d once witnessed at West Point.
Steele, Hank, Ralphy, Goodhill, and Dr. Liang took their seats at a separate table reserved for guests. They were served by a pair of novice brothers, and they nodded thanks and pretended to enjoy their tasteless supper, having no inkling that Zaifeng’s assassin, Miko, was also there.
Disguised as a student monk from the Nung Chan farming monastery outside Taipei, Miko had already been at Fo Guang Shan for more than a day. His commander, Zaifeng, had received an encrypted message from Scarlet that an American strike team had arrived at Pingtung, and had concluded that these were likely the very same commandos who’d rescued the PLA colonel in Mongolia and had slaughtered so many of his Swords. These operators were a mortal danger to Zaifeng’s plans, so he’d dispatched Miko to Taiwan to blunt their spear with murder.
Miko was a compact beast and an expert killer with knives and barehanded kuntao kung fu, but he’d shaved his head, bought wire-rimmed glasses, and affected a studious hunch in his baggy robes. The special operations base at Pingtung was only three kilometers away, but it wouldn’t be easy to infiltrate. He knew he’d have to find a way, quickly, yet suddenly he was saved the trouble by a remarkable turn of fortune.
Sitting among a row of monks, he was bobbing in silent prayer and eating his meal, when he glanced up, saw the foreign guests arrive, and his killer instincts raised the hairs on his neck. He knew right away who they were. These three large muscular Americans didn’t look anything like religious tourists, except perhaps for the small fat one. They were clearly men on a mission, and he instantly recognized the female Chinese colonel who he’d chased through Toqui-13—the one he’d failed to kill.
He took it as a dharmic blessing upon Zaifeng’s imperial designs. He would not fail again. He would terminate all of them, but she would be first.
Dinner was brief. Without conversation there was no reason to dawdle, and there was also no dessert. Steele and his crew walked back toward the bed-and-breakfast. The day had been long and hot, they exchanged a few comments about the cooler evening weather and how they wished there was a hotel bar, but they really didn’t have much to say. Dr. Liang tripped over a stone in the dark, Goodhill grabbed her elbow to steady her, and she smiled at him and he blushed.
When they arrived at the bed-and-breakfast’s front desk, each was given a key, and they parted for their sparse single rooms, which were all in a row like dorm rooms in a low-budget college. Each room had one wooden bed with a slim foam mattress and pillow, one headboard lamp, one latched window that looked out on the grounds, and a television that broadcast only prayers from the monastery’s great shrine.
Separately, they all folded their clothes, lay down on their beds, and looked at the blank stucco walls until the lights were extinguished by automated curfew. Ralphy had his Alienware laptop, but there was no Wi-Fi, so instead he thought about Frankie, and missed her. Hank lay there ruminating about his reunion with Eric and the pride he felt for his son. Goodhill thought about a woman in Virginia, then fell asleep snoring. Steele thought about his reunion with his father, with conflicting emotions about whether he should be glad about that, or forever angry, and he drifted off with the words of an old Harry Chapin tune in his head.
When you comin’ home, Dad? I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, son. We’ll get together then. . . .
Dr. Liang lay awake for a while, torn with guilt about all the things she’d done for the Party, yet hopeful that she might make a good life for herself in America, atone for all of it, and someday be happy again. At last she fell asleep.
Hers was the first window that Miko pried open.
At midnight he slipped out of the monks’ dormitory, taking his clothing satchel, and in the garden shed his robes and donned a hooded black track suit. He was barefoot and carried a wicked tanto blade. He didn’t know which of the guest rooms was hers, but he slinked along the outside wall, pulled himself up to the first windowsill, peered inside, saw only a large male form, and dropped back down. At the next window he spotted her small white feet poking up from the end of a blanket. He whispered “shehsheh” to the gods of war, and with a twist of his blade in the simple lock, he was in.
Liang’s scream was muffled when something like a giant nightmare spider straddled her small body, crushed down onto her chest, and a hand slammed over her mouth. Another hand gripped her throat, and she arched her back and scrambled for something, anything, and her fingers found the lamp behind her head and she smashed it into that awful face and the bulb exploded. She twisted and choked as she kicked, and with everything left in her burning lungs tried to throw him off. Then her eyes went horribly wide when she saw the blade in his upraised fist, and when he plunged it right through her ribs and into her heart, Steele heard it.
He was in the room next to Liang’s and sprang to his feet, wearing only his jeans, and he grabbed his father’s 1911 and flew out into the hallway. The door to her room was locked and without thinking he angle fired, split the lock and the wood, kicked it open with the ball of his bare foot, and charged inside into blackness. The pistol was instantly kicked from his fist and clanged off a wall, and a bullet-shaped head rammed him in his solar plexus.
Steele slammed backward into the doorjamb, saw a gleaming blade lancing straight for his throat, jerked to the left, smashed the knife hand wit
h a right sudo strike, and kicked Miko into the television set with a whipping left roundhouse. The old TV’s cathode ray tube burst in a flash and he saw Liang’s bloody corpse on the bed, and the rage burst in his brain like typhoon lightning.
Miko charged him again. Steele punched his face, first with his left, cracking his cheekbone, then with his right, straight on, and saw black blood gush from his nose. He broke Miko’s left knee with a stomping side kick, making him scream, then arm barred his knife hand and wrenched the blade away. He grabbed the front of Miko’s track suit with his left hand, hurled him right off his feet into the wall under the window, and he was raising the knife and just about to flay the bastard in half, when his father grabbed his arm, spun him around, and said, “Dead men don’t talk, son.”
Goodhill burst into the room. He saw Dr. Liang sprawled on her back, went right over to her, sat on the edge of the bed, touched her throat with his fingers, then dropped his big bald head and whispered, “Motherfucker.”
Ralphy arrived at the room, panting, and he wheezed, “I just called Panther.” Then a light flicked on in the hallway behind him and he saw what had happened inside. He staggered over to the wall by the foot of the bed, slid to the floor, covered his eyes, and wept.
No one said a word while they waited for Panther. Miko sat there where he’d fallen, his broken leg twisted like a rag doll’s, snorting through his smashed nose, and staring at Steele, who was still gripping his bloody blade. Miko didn’t dare move because this man wanted only to kill him. It took Panther ten minutes.
He stormed into the room with Jackson and pushed Steele and his father aside. The Taiwanese commandos were in untucked uniforms and breathing hard. Panther saw Dr. Liang’s corpse, made a sound like a wolverine who’d just lost a pup to a heartless hunter, then saw her killer slumped in the corner and stabbed a sausage finger at Miko’s wild feral eyes.
“We will take this bastard back to Pingtung,” he snarled. “And we will soon know everything he knows. This is not Washington.”
