Lethal Risk

by Don Pendleton

  SHADOW CHASE

  A high-ranking Chinese official has arranged to defect to the United States and reveal war crimes his country has perpetrated throughout Asia. But while en route to discreetly bring the official to American soil, Mack Bolan learns the man has been arrested, and the mission becomes much more urgent. And dangerous.

  Bolan’s first stop, the notorious prison where the official is being held, is a trap he barely escapes. On the run through the streets of Beijing, with intelligence agents hot on his trail, time is running out to recover the defector. And when his search-and-rescue leads him to a government-sanctioned organ-harvesting facility, the Executioner adds search-and-destroy to his list of things to do before his trip to China is complete.

  Diving into the back, Bolan yelled, “Go, go, go!”

  Liao hit the gas, and the truck leaped forward. “They’ll never catch us now!” he shouted.

  Bolan slumped against the tailgate. His leg twitched, and he felt his phone vibrating. He dug it out and answered. “We’re—”

  Tokaido’s voice screamed in his ear. “Missile! They’ve locked-on an antitank missile!”

  “Stop! Right now!” Bolan yelled as he shoved the phone into his pocket and grabbed the machine gun with his other hand.

  The truck skidded to a halt and, as Liao turned to him, Bolan yelled, “Incoming missile—get out now!”

  Liao scrabbled at the door handle and got it open as Bolan hit the ground. He made sure Liao was racing from the truck before running himself.

  Bolan saw the bright flash of a missile launch and shouted, “Hit the dirt!” as he threw himself forward.

  Two seconds later, the world exploded.

  Other titles available in this series:

  Renegade

  Survival Reflex

  Path to War

  Blood Dynasty

  Ultimate Stakes

  State of Evil

  Force Lines

  Contagion Option

  Hellfire Code

  War Drums

  Ripple Effect

  Devil’s Playground

  The Killing Rule

  Patriot Play

  Appointment in Baghdad

  Havana Five

  The Judas Project

  Plains of Fire

  Colony of Evil

  Hard Passage

  Interception

  Cold War Reprise

  Mission: Apocalypse

  Altered State

  Killing Game

  Diplomacy Directive

  Betrayed

  Sabotage

  Conflict Zone

  Blood Play

  Desert Fallout

  Extraordinary Rendition

  Devil’s Mark

  Savage Rule

  Infiltration

  Resurgence

  Kill Shot

  Stealth Sweep

  Grave Mercy

  Treason Play

  Assassin’s Code

  Shadow Strike

  Decision Point

  Road of Bones

  Radical Edge

  Fireburst

  Oblivion Pact

  Enemy Arsenal

  State of War

  Ballistic

  Escalation Tactic

  Crisis Diplomacy

  Apocalypse Ark

  Lethal Stakes

  Illicit Supply

  Explosive Demand

  Ground Zero

  Jungle Firestorm

  Terror Ballot

  Death Metal

  Justice Run

  China White

  Payback

  Chain Reaction

  Nightmare Army

  Critical Exposure

  Insurrection

  Armed Response

  Desert Falcons

  Ninja Assault

  LETHAL RISK

  A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

  —Lao Tzu

  A single person can change the course of history, and when one of these people needs help, I’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen—and go through anyone who stands in my way.

  —Mack Bolan

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  Edward Carstairs couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the worsted wool of his navy blue dress slacks. Barely containing his impatient sigh, he peered through the thick, gray smog at the bumper-to-bumper traffic inching along the eight-lane superhighway. Although there was still an hour before sunset, the cloud of pollution lent a hazy, unreal appearance to the world outside.

  We’ll never get there at this rate, he worried. “How long now?” he asked his driver in flawless Mandarin.

  “Ten, fifteen minutes,” the man replied.

  Rolling his eyes, Carstairs ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. It was the exact same answer he’d gotten the last three times he’d asked—inflection and all—over the past forty-five minutes.

  He took a deep breath, tasting the pervasive, acrid odor of Beijing’s polluted air, and stared out the window, pondering what the successful completion of this assignment could mean to his career.

  Carstairs had only been in China for eight weeks, and was still figuring things out at the US Embassy. So far the capital city had been a constant swirl of contradictions, delightful one day, maddening the next. But when a coded message had arrived from Washington, DC, instructing his superior to send a car and an escort with a stated “low profile” to pick up a family from an exclusive address in a gated community and bring them back to the embassy, Ambassador Balcius had picked Edward to carry out the task.

  “It should be a simple pickup,” he’d said. “No one knows you’re coming, and the neighborhood is fairly close to your home. Your background and recent arrival make you perfect for the job, as no one has gotten a bead on you yet—at least, as far as we know. I’m sorry I can’t give you more information other than the minimum need-to-know, just know that this assignment has repercussions far beyond its seeming mundanity. Above all, be careful—the government here has its hand in everything. Take nothing for granted, and above all, trust no one.”

  His superior’s words ran th
rough Carstairs’s mind again and he patted his right pocket, feeling the small tube of metal there. If he was caught carrying it, or even worse, using it, it would be a diplomatic incident at the least, and get him expelled from the country and possibly even end his career at the worst.

  But Edward Carstairs was well prepared to handle just about anything that might happen; three years in the US Army had seen to that. He would have gone into Ranger School but for the accident that had blown out his knee; however, his ASVAB score had allowed him to move to intelligence. After his four-year hitch was up, his flawless command of Mandarin made him a top recruit of the State Department, and Carstairs soon found himself swimming in the murky waters of international diplomacy on the other side of the world.

  With a lurch, the traffic knot untangled itself and as quickly as they’d been blocked, the nondescript sedan sped up and took the next exit to the neighborhood and the address Carstairs was heading to. As they left the jam-packed main streets behind and entered the rarified neighborhood, his breathing quickened. He already knew that this was more than just a simple pickup—whoever he was going to collect was important to the United States, which meant there could be trouble before the night was over.

  His sedan motored down wide, empty streets with homes built like Italian villas on either side. He stared, eyebrows raised, at the Western-style grounds that made the neighborhood even more surreal. To buy a house out here took real money, even considering China’s artificially inflated economy. Whatever was going on, it was bigger than anything in which Carstairs had previously been involved.

  In a few minutes the car stopped in front of a more modest, Tudor-influenced house several blocks inside the neighborhood. His driver pointed to the home. “This is address.”

  Carstairs looked up from his smartphone, which had confirmed his driver’s words, and down the block. There was no one else in sight. His car was the only one here. “Keep the engine running. I’ll be back with three other people very soon.”

  His driver nodded and grunted a response. Edward slipped his paper mask over his nose and mouth, then stepped out into the night air.

  It was a little easier to breathe out here. Glancing up he was surprised to be able to barely make out the night sky amid the smog and light pollution. Carstairs trotted up the flagstone-inlaid walk to the large, double front doors made of some sort of exotic wood he didn’t recognize, complete with a small, inset door for seeing who was outside. Scanning the area one last time, he noticed there were no lights on inside as he raised his fist and knocked on the door. There was no answer at first and Carstairs was just about to knock again when the viewing portal cracked open. A woman’s eyes stared at him.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Liao,” Edward began, “My name is Edward Carstairs, and I am from the United States Embassy—”

  He had only gotten to “United” when the portal closed and he heard locks being opened on the other side. The door cracked open just wide enough for him to enter, and a woman’s hand shot out, grabbed his arm and pulled him inside.

  Before he could react, Carstairs found himself standing in an opulent vestibule. The floor was white marble, and an unlit, massive, blackened-iron candelabrum hung overhead. The woman who had yanked him inside was also wearing a breathing mask, and dressed all in subdued gray and black. She was younger than he expected, somewhere around thirty years old, and clutched a dark green leather Hermès satchel purse, her only apparent nod to fashion. Two children stood in the doorway, a girl of about ten years old and a boy about eight, both wearing backpacks. The boy stared at him silently. The girl had her nose buried in some kind of portable game console.

  “You are American,” she said. “From the embassy?” The second sentence was practically a statement, with the barest upward inflection at the end to hint at uncertainty.

  Carstairs nodded. “Yes, I’ve been sent to get you and your family and to take you back to our compound.” He looked over the children’s heads into what appeared to be a richly appointed dining room.

  “Where is your husband?”

  “He is—not home.”

  The pause in her words told him more than she could have possibly known. He was most likely the real target, but the United States was securing his family so the Chinese couldn’t get to them and use them as leverage. “Are you ready to go?”

  She nodded then turned to check her children. “Zhou, put that away. I need you to pay attention to me now.” To Carstairs’s surprise, the girl tucked her game into her backpack and regarded her mother and him steadily.

  “All right, here’s what’s going to happen.” Turning to the portal, Carstairs cracked it open enough to see up and down the block. His car, idling at the curb, was still the only one outside. “I’ll go out first. You give me three steps, then take the children’s hands and follow me. If anything happens, get them inside the car. The driver will take you to the embassy. Understand?” She nodded tightly. “All right, let’s go.”

  Slipping his right hand into his pocket as he opened the door, Carstairs swept his practiced gaze left then right as he strode confidently outside and down the walk. Even while sending a brief, coded text to the embassy telling them he’d made the pickup, every sense was on overwatch, searching their surroundings for the slightest hint of a threat. Carstairs was aware of the woman and her children two steps behind him as they walked toward the idling car. Five steps away, four, three—

  Headlights bloomed down the street as a large sedan with government plates rounded the corner and headed toward them.

  “Keep moving,” he said as he stood at the rear of the car, shielding her and the kids with his body. “Get inside.”

  Mrs. Liao did exactly that, efficiently shuttling her two children into the backseat, then sliding in after them. The sedan pulled to a stop in front of Carstairs’s vehicle, and a man got out of the passenger’s side. He was dressed in a simple black suit with a white shirt and black tie, and screamed government intelligence to the American. Not local police—probably someone from the Ministry of State Security.

  Carstairs casually slipped his hand out of his pocket and held it at his side, fingers loosely curled to conceal what he was holding.

  The man had no doubt spotted the diplomatic plates on the embassy car—and Carstairs knew that if they wanted Liao’s family that badly, the plates wouldn’t mean dick. Even so, he tried feigning innocence; it was possible, although improbable, that these guys had spotted the diplomatic plates and were just out for an evening shakedown.

  “Can I help you?” he asked as the man walked up to him.

  The man didn’t answer for long seconds, his gaze raking the sedan as a tendril of smoke curled up from his crooked butt. Carstairs waited patiently, already aware that the men knew who he was and why he was there. “You are from the US Embassy.” He didn’t even try to make it a question.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing in this neighborhood at this hour?”

  Carstairs had had more than enough time to come up with a plausible cover story for this trip—as long as his accuser didn’t know what was really going on. The problem was that in China, even one wrong word could be misconstrued as an insult, or even worse, evidence of something improper or illegal occurring. “I’m helping a friend of mine—Mr. Liao. He asked me to look in on his family while he’s away. We’re going to dinner.” It was about as simple as he could make it, and reasonably plausible. The fact that he was an American might raise an eyebrow or two, but usually the weight of his being with the embassy silenced any questions.

  Not, however, this time.

  The man shook his head curtly. “These three are wanted for questioning by the Ministry of State Security. They will have to come with us.” He turned to the car door even as Carstairs interposed himself between the man and the vehicle.

  “I’m afraid that I cannot allow you to do that, sir. These people are now in a United States Embassy vehicle, and as such, are under the protection of my country.”r />
  It was a major gamble Carstairs was trying, and he knew it. He’d seen the “diplomatic protection” gambit used in a movie when he was a child, and he knew that US Navy ships were considered sovereign territory, but he wasn’t aware of any official laws rendering a car to be defined as sovereign US territory. However, he was determined to play as many cards as he could before resorting to any kind of violence.

  His words actually stopped the man for a moment and he regarded Carstairs with a quizzical expression. “Do not make this into trouble for yourself and your country. Surrender the three people inside to me and go home.” He pushed back his rumpled coat to reveal a matte-black pistol Carstairs didn’t recognize on his hip.

  The novice diplomat sighed and turned to the car door. “Very well. However, I want your name and identification number, as my superiors—” Instead of reaching for the door, however, he whirled and sprayed the man in the face with his pocket pepper spray canister. The man stumbled away, coughing and clutching his face with both hands, unable to even think about drawing his gun.

  Carstairs yanked open the front passenger door and got in as the driver’s side door of the MSS car opened.

  “Go! Get us out of here!” He turned to the woman and children in the backseat. “Get down and stay down!”

  The driver put his car in Reverse and backed down the street as Carstairs turned back in time to see the MSS driver with his pistol out and aimed at them. He hunched in his seat as the flat cracks of the firing pistol were heard over the racing car engine. The front windshield starred as a bullet hit it, but it didn’t penetrate, ricocheting off into the night.