by Fritz Galt
He studied the interior of the room. It was a rudimentary examination room, turned into a sickbay.
So why the continuous string of firecrackers?
A door opened to the outside and he heard men shouting in Chinese. Boots stomped into the building along with the rustle of coats and some heavy breathing.
The firecrackers began to sound more like automatic weapons. Then the door whooshed closed. Several soldiers in green wool overcoats hauled a wounded comrade into the room, and an old man in a lab coat directed them where to lay the victim on the floor. Blood was oozing from the poor man’s mouth that was contorted with pain.
Sean eased himself into a sitting position. “Badger,” he whispered. “Wake up!”
He reached over and shook Badger’s arm. Then he noticed that his own arms were exposed. Both forearms were covered with tiny needles as were his calves, making him look like he had been attacked by a porcupine. More likely he was part of some diabolical doctor’s experiment. He began to pluck the prickly needles out of his skin.
“Take it easy,” the doctor said, rushing over to help Sean.
“What are all these needles for?”
“To relieve the pain,” the doctor explained, his voice kind, but weary.
“Am I injured?” Sean asked, testing out his arms and legs.
“No bone damage. Just some stitches here and there.”
Again, the front door opened in the corridor. This time Sean could tell for sure that a battle was raging outside.
Two Chinese soldiers charged into the small room. One was carrying a makeshift white flag. He thrust it into Sean’s hands and pulled him to the edge of his table. The doctor began helping Sean put on his shoes.
Badger was beginning to stir as if reluctant to give up a pleasant dream.
“Badger, what are they doing to us?” Sean shouted.
The poor guy seemed so out of it, he wouldn’t know any more than Sean did. So he had to leave Badger lying prostrate on the other examination table. As he was pulled to his feet, Sean got a better look at the two other members of Harry Black’s team. They had fared worse in the car crash, having flown into the front seat and against the windshield.
Sean turned to the doctor as his shoes hit the floor. “Where’s my family?”
The old man offered a kind smile and turned his head, indicating the back of the building.
“I won’t go anywhere without them!” Sean cried.
“Leave, please,” the doctor said, holding out his hands imploringly.
“Is my family okay?” Sean shouted over his shoulder as the soldiers shoved him out of the room.
“In perfect health!” the doctor called after him.
All concerns for his safety disappeared. They were still alive!
The soldiers pushed at the front door, exposing him to the cold air and din of battle.
He could see soldiers crouching at positions along the top of a wall and firing toward the roadway. Shots volleyed back just as fast.
He tried to hold onto the doorframe. Wooden splinters gouged into his fingers, calloused from a week at sea. After coming so far, he wasn’t going to die in a hailstorm of bullets and leave his family to fend for themselves.
A firm hand, thick as a farmer’s, tried to pry his fingers away from the building.
Sean leaned into the back of the soldier’s hand and sank his teeth into the flesh. The man howled with pain and leaped back.
“That’s for holding my family in this freezing dump,” Sean said, and spat a chunk of skin back at the man who was doubled over in pain.
Several rounds of hot lead flew through the air and seared into the door behind his head. He turned with his improvised white flag to strike the next soldier in line.
But the man grimly caught his arm, blunted the blow and wrested the crude weapon away. Sean could tell from the fear in his eyes, that the man wanted him out of the prison in order to stop the bloodshed.
“Go on, Sean,” came a shout through gritted teeth. Sean looked back and saw Badger McGlade, his distant form leaning against the darkened hallway. Even Badger wanted to bring the senseless violence to an end.
A soldier screamed in agony and fell from the compound wall, landing with a bone-breaking crunch at Sean’s feet.
Sean felt his resistance quickly ebbing away.
He allowed the grim soldier to hustle him across the compound. The guy thrust the white flag back in his hands. Another soldier opened a small wooden door beside a larger swinging gate for vehicles.
Sean closed his eyes and pushed the white flag out through the parted door. The gunfire came to a temporary stop. He looked back at the soldiers. Relief was etched in their broad, Manchurian features.
“It’s me,” Sean called across the expanse of snow that was packed hard by tire tracks. A dilapidated tourist bus stood smoldering twenty yards away. “Hold your fire.”
“Come out!” a familiar voice rang from behind the bus. It was Harry Black.
It was a voice he could trust.
He took a step out the door, then another. Waving the flag above his head, he advanced toward the bus. As he neared it, he could see that it was riddled with bullet holes. Halfway there, he broke into a run and ducked for cover behind the engine block. There, Harry threw a parka around him.
“Ouch!”
“What?”
Sean removed the coat to show both arms, still covered with the gleaming needles.
“Why all the needles?” Harry asked.
“There’s a doctor in there who thinks acupuncture is the cure for everything.”
Harry rolled his eyes. Carmen stepped around him and began picking the needles out of his skin.
“Who else is in there?” Harry asked impatiently.
“Badger and your other two men. They appear hurt, but at least they survived.”
“Survived what?” asked Boris, the tall member of the team.
“We had a major accident on the highway. Our car overturned and apparently the prison guards carried us here to see their doctor. I spoke with the old guy and he confirmed that my family is being held inside—”
Just then his eyes fell on a fourth person that he recognized—Merle Stevens. The strapping young diplomat was standing unarmed with his back to the bus, hoping not to be recognized.
His cover blown, Merle produced a broad smile—the same reassuring smile that he had displayed when he picked Sean off the pavement at the Beijing Airport, when he handed Sean his family’s ashes, when they had met again in Shanghai, and when he had given Sean the account number where he could stash the president’s ill-gotten gains.
The only thing Sean was reassured of now was the bastard’s guilt.
With a sudden, terrible vengeance that he had never felt before, Sean ran toward the supercilious secret agent and threw a shoulder into his chest. Merle staggered sideways, his feet scraping futilely on the ice and landed far from the rear of the bus.
An eruption of gunfire from the compound tore the agent’s body apart. It spun in pinwheels of blood that sprayed in spirals across the snow. Merle’s body finally came to rest twenty feet away, sprawled on its back for all the world to see, the limbs unmoving, steam no longer emerging from the lips.
“Way to go, Sean!” Carmen said.
“They’ve got my family!” Sean cried, turning on the prison with an overpowering sense of rage.
“Easy now, Superman,” Harry said, preventing him from leaving the protection of the bus.
Just then a woman’s cry arose from the rear of the compound. That was followed by the screams of two children as they were forced to fall a great distance.
At first, they sounded vaguely familiar, like an auditory hallucination. They were cries he had heard so long ago, coming from the back of an ambulance, that they couldn’t be real. Nor could anybody still exist who uttered them. Yet, in his heart, he recognized the voices instantly. And they came piercing through his consciousness like a spasm of pleasure. The individual per
sonality of each cry was so familiar to him, he could visualize the fear on their faces. His family was calling out to him in need.
“What’s on the other side of that metal fence?” he asked the others.
Harry looked at Boris, then Carmen, then directly at him. Deep growls emanated from the neighboring property as the family thrashed through trees and stumbled across the snow.
“Your family’s in a Siberian tiger preserve,” Harry told Sean, as if his wind had been knocked out of him.
Chapter 37
Harry Black listened to the sounds and voices of a woman and two children thrashing through trees on the opposite side of the fence. There was also what sounded like a tiny baby’s cry rising in the frozen air. Then there came the deep growl of hungry tigers. He was under no illusions as to their safety. They had jumped out of a prison and into the jungle.
“The prison guards released your family into a wild tiger preserve,” he tried to explain calmly to Sean Cooper. His wife and children were in danger of being torn apart by fangs and claws.
“Where did that little cry come from?” the disoriented Sean cried.
Harry thought for a moment. He and his men were pinned down behind a bus by prison guards. There was no way to clear the tiger preserve fence from their position. They would have to drive around on the icy highway to the entrance of the preserve.
He looked hopelessly around for some means of escape.
Suddenly gunfire erupted from inside the prison compound. A truck’s engine coughed several times, then started up inside. No bullets whizzed in their direction or embedded themselves in the side of the bus.
“What the—” Harry said.
Gunfire crackled in the brittle air, temporarily covering the roar of the frenzied tigers.
“It’s Badger and your men!” Sean exclaimed. “They’re breaking out. Hold your fire!”
At that very moment, a Chinese personnel carrier broke through the front gate of the prison. It was pursued by a hail of bullets from guards along the wall of the compound.
Badger’s head was bent down for cover behind the steering wheel. The two other heavily bandaged team members sat beside him, one firing back through an open window.
Harry made out the distant sound of scores of people scrambling over a wall at the back of the prison, away from the tiger preserve. Who were they?
Badger was about to zoom past him.
Harry jumped out from behind the bus and waved his arms. Badger saw him and jammed on the brakes, sliding several yards to a halt beside the punctured shell of the bus.
Harry made a mental note to give Badger a raise the next pay period.
He waved for Sean, Carmen and Boris to follow him. Carmen and Boris rushed in front of the personnel carrier for protection, but Sean lingered behind.
What was keeping him?
Then Harry saw why.
Sean stood slump-shouldered over the body of Merle Stevens. With a vicious kick, he struck deep into the fallen spy’s side. The only response was a dull thud, not even an involuntary muscle twitch. The bastard was a corpse.
Satisfied that he had finally laid the cause of his nightmares to rest, Sean came loping back. A rueful, pained expression filled his face. Behind a violent flurry of loud smacking bullets that ripped into the sides of the personnel carrier, Harry led the team at a trot toward the highway.
The moving truck proved a perfect shield for blocking bullets, and they reached the four-lane without injury. At that great distance from the prison, gunfire no longer sought them out.
“I’ll drive,” he said. “Everybody else in back.”
He opened the shredded canvas flap at the back of the personnel carrier. In the dwindling light, his team members scrambled out of the cab and up into the enclosed flatbed. Bandaged and contorted in pain, they had suffered from no additional injuries. He gave Sean, Carmen and Boris a boost and they all piled in.
Then he circled around to the front where Badger had already moved into the passenger seat.
“Good job, old man,” Harry told the youngster.
Like Sean, Badger was wearing a layer of needles, and they didn’t look very comfortable. He needed Carmen’s gentle touch to remove them.
“You jump in back, too, and have Carmen treat you. I’m taking us into the tiger preserve.”
Sean Cooper reached out and hauled Badger McGlade into the rear of the personnel carrier. Then the truck fishtailed across a sheet of ice as they raced to the entrance of the tiger preserve.
“Did you see Sean’s family?” Carmen calmly asked the young Badger.
“Yes, I did see them,” Badger replied, as he settled into the wooden bench and let Carmen pluck the needles out of his skin.
Sean closed his eyes. Finally…human contact with his family, proof that they still lived. He nodded to Badger in thanks.
But that was ten long minutes ago. Were they still alive in the dangerous tiger preserve?
“The Chinese are desperately trying to get rid of all the evidence,” Badger explained. “We have to get inside the tiger preserve and pick them up.”
“Can tigers climb trees?” Sean asked, trying to visualize how his family might escape danger.
“I don’t know,” Badger said, the thought lingering in the icy air.
A sudden swerve brought half the occupants flying toward the other side of the truck. Harry was sparing nothing in his determination to save Sean’s family.
The rumble of their tires drowned out any sound of tigers.
Sean felt sick with anxiety. Not since he first received the mysterious message in his hotel room in Hainan had he felt such desire to see them. And the closer he got to them, the stronger the craving became.
Perhaps, as before in Beijing, it was his own presence that endangered them.
He shook off the thought. He watched through the open flap in the canvas at the back of the personnel carrier as they swung off the highway. They began to streak through sparse, wind-gnarled conifer trees that poked up randomly as if a child had stuck matchsticks in the snow. They were not trees his family could climb to safety.
Then the high fence came into view, like a cheap, snowy version of Jurassic Park. Somewhere within that enclosure, the wild cats were circling Kate, Jane and Sammy…drawing closer.
In an extremely short day, the long shadows were disappearing in the dusk.
Sean pulled off the last remaining needles from his legs and rolled his pants down. The short, stabbing pain of the needles was nothing compared with what Kate must be going through. He would gladly endure greater pain to spring his family free. He would throw himself into the path of a tiger.
The personnel carrier took a sudden turn and veered toward the fence. Harry was picking up more speed.
“Hold on tight!” Badger shouted.
A moment later, Sean heard wood cracking, then splintering. Wires scraped against the sides of the vehicle.
They had bashed through the front gate.
Harry gunned the engine and Sean was rocked back by another collision. Then he heard a same scraping sound of wire, some tearing apart the canvas roof overhead.
Sean held the rear flap open. The shattered remains of a double-entrance gate lay in twisted tatters in the snow.
They were inside the park!
“Kate!” Sean screamed. “Jane! Sammy!”
His voice vanished quickly in the open land. The others kept silent, letting their ears search for a response.
Through the rear flap, he made out a huge tiger licking blood from his paws. His breath was icy, but he seemed utterly warm in his coat of orange, black and white stripes.
There were more tigers, stretching their gargantuan lengths against the trunks of trees. Others prowled, heads lowered, their noses seeking out their next dinner. A white Siberian tiger, stood out against the darkening sky, its bright chest catching the last glow of warmth from the sun.
He had never seen so many tigers in his entire life, much less in one place. The comp
ound, with its stripped-down trees and artificial mountains, was crawling with the creatures, which were clearly in their element.
Still no sound of his family!
As the personnel carrier rumbled over a snowy track in the general direction of the prison, a tiger charged them. It aimed right at Sean’s position by the back flap. For a heart-stopping moment, he tried to tie the canvas flap down. The tiger’s claws ripped through the fabric with a malicious swipe.
The foul breath of the beast felt hot on Sean’s face. One of the team drew out a pistol, but never fired. Through the ripped covering, Sean could see the exhausted tiger pull up short, confident that he had frightened off the intruding vehicle.
Oh, where were Kate and the kids?
They passed one big cat in a gully feasting his catch. Sean stood up to look as it sank its teeth into the flesh. It came up with a mouth full of chicken feathers.
He sank back onto the floor with relief.
Suddenly a weapon discharged from the cabin. It was Harry, shooting madly out the window.
“Hey, you!” Harry screamed, trying to shoo some large beast away.
Had he found some tigers stalking his family? If so, that meant that his wife and kids were still alive!
Sean could feel his heart racing in his chest. His adrenaline had reached a new peak. He was on the verge of rescuing the loves of his life.
The personnel carrier lurched off the level track and began to grind up a snowy slope. The bumps threw Sean and the others into the air. His foot came crashing down atop someone else’s boot, and he slipped sideways, hitting the floor hard on one elbow. The next bump shook him into a sitting position on the compartment floor. Badger dragged him up onto the bench.
The gunfire continued unabated from the front cabin.
Sean rushed forward in the troop compartment and tried to catch a glimpse of what was happening up ahead. A piece of plywood had been screwed into the former window’s frame. He couldn’t view into the cab. He yanked at the board with his fingers.
