Lethal Risk

by Don Pendleton

  “So, add ‘do not approach, may be armed and dangerous’?”

  “Depends—how many guns do you estimate he took with him?”

  Wei ticked off the count on his fingers. “At least four that we know of.”

  “Then, yes, add it to the notice.” Fang looked at the stairs. “Let’s go up there. I want to see what happened where and how.”

  “Right this way.” The sergeant led him up the stairs. At the landing, they stopped while another police team busily wrapped up that part of the crime scene, zipping a body into a black plastic bag. A large dark puddle had soaked into the cheap carpet.

  “Chou Lang, a member of the Chaos Demons for three years,” Wei stated. “Armed robbery, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, extortion. He was blasting at someone with a .357 Magnum, took three in the chest and bled out right here.”

  Fang looked back, checking out the shot that had killed the hostage taker. It was a difficult one—in the dim light, with all the yelling and craziness that would have been going on. Fang wasn’t sure he could have made it, and he practiced on the range three times a week. Whoever this person is, he knows his way around firearms, he thought.

  The hallway looked like a war zone, with lights blown, bullet holes in the walls and the open door at the end missing its knob. Fang took it all in with a quick glance, then looked at Wei, who was standing by the third room down on the right.

  “According to our eyewitness, he was getting his dance in here when the other gang busted in and starting tearing the place up. One came in here. He took out the man and left.”

  Fang surveyed the room, taking in the crumpled body of the man lying half atop a padded bench seat to his right. Two bloodstains on the floor near the door caught his attention. “Not enough here for deaths. Five people in this room at once?”

  Wei smiled briefly. “There are elements of her story that don’t quite check out.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” The two cops shared a wry grin.

  “Those two wounded men being carried out of here were Jun Lu and An Zou, both White Lotus lieutenants. We found them in this room with her.”

  “Seems like an awful lot of security for just a lap dance,” Fang commented.

  Wei nodded. “We’re thinking drugs or guns. Probably guns, since we’ve found no evidence of drugs anywhere, either in here or nearby.”

  “Plus, if the buyer felt he was being double-crossed or threatened, I doubt he would have much compunction about drawing a weapon and trying to shoot his way out.”

  The sergeant nodded again. “Indeed. Preliminary evidence puts him—” Wei pointed at the body “—as the shooter of the two men, who then got taken out by our unknown subject. If you’ll follow me…” He stepped aside to allow Fang to exit into the hallway. “He comes out here and either takes out the gunman at the end of the hallway and then shoots the hostage taker or vice versa, we’re not sure which yet.”

  Fang walked back to check the stairs. “No footprints in Lang’s blood, and none on the landing. He killed the hostage taker first, then the gunman at the end of the hall when he came up to shoot his fellow gangster’s killer. Also, I assume Lu and Zou were both armed?”

  Wei nodded. “Both had empty holsters on them.”

  “So, our unknown assailant took their pistols, as well. Interesting. Where to next?”

  “He walked down this hallway and was assaulted by another Chaos Demon hiding in this room.” Wei stopped at the last door on the left, next to the broken one at the end of the hall. “One shot was fired and the man—Bao Tan, Demon member for about nine months—is subdued with a broken nose and battery to the forehead. His pistol is taken, as well. The unknown subject then goes through this door and takes the computer that was storing the illegal media files the White Lotus was taking of their customers.”

  Fang nodded as the two men stepped into the crowded space. “Being very careful to remove any recorded trace of himself.” So far, the evidence about this mystery Caucasian wasn’t adding up to anything good. “Then he went to the ladder over there?” The major pointed at a brightly lit ladder with two uniformed police officers standing near it. A six-foot section of ladder, its jagged ends revealing where it had been broken, leaned against the nearby wall.

  “Yes, sir. We’ve been working on rigging a replacement ladder to the trapdoor above,” Wei told him.

  “How’s it going in here?” he asked, his tone indicating there was only one acceptable answer.

  The upside-down head of a third man popped out from the hole in the ceiling. “Oh—hello, Sergeant. We’ve got a rope line secured to the top and were just about to open the trapdoor.”

  “This is Agent Deshi Fang, with the Ministry of State Security,” Wei said, his tone neutral. “He is also working on the investigation.” Which meant all of the men involved would now defer to Fang instead of Wei.

  “The ministry appreciates your diligence in this matter, Officers,” Fang said. “Now, I’d like to take a look at the upper level myself.”

  “We haven’t opened the trapdoor yet, sir. Would you like us to do that before your inspection?” the man above him asked.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to examine the scene for myself,” Fang replied. “I’ll handle the door.”

  With a nod, the third officer pulled his head back above the ceiling, then reappeared a few seconds later, climbing down the ladder. “Be careful, sir, it’s pretty rickety.”

  “Thank you for the warning, Officer.” Fang climbed hand over hand, the ladder creaking and groaning under his weight, until he was at the broken part. The officers’ solution to the missing portion was ingenious—they’d created a rope ladder and nailed it to the wall. He tested it first—just because they had built it didn’t necessarily mean it was safe—but it held him easily. Climbing to the very top, he pushed at the trapdoor, only to find it stuck. He braced himself on the rope rungs and shoved with all his strength until the trapdoor creaked open.

  Taking a small flashlight from his pocket, Fang climbed high enough to be able to peek over the lip of the floor but remained crouched below the opening. He turned the light on and raised the flashlight into the space, playing the beam all around. It wouldn’t have been the first time a police officer had been caught by surprise by a criminal he thought had left an area, only to find him still hiding there. When no shot rang out, he poked his head above the floor edge and looked around.

  The space around him was empty. The night breezes came in through a broken ventilation grate at the far end. Fang climbed up high enough to stand, and carefully walked to the square hole in the wall. He poked his head out again and looked down at the three-story drop into a narrow alleyway below, then up at the edge of the roof a couple meters overhead. One of the red tiles was crooked. That was all he needed to see.

  He walked back to the ladder and climbed down to the men. “Sergeant Wei.”

  “Sir?”

  “Getting that composite picture completed and distributed is your top priority this evening,” Fang said as he pulled out his phone. “Also, once your men are done here, I want them to canvas the area in a one-block radius, every club, every apartment, looking for anyone who saw anything unusual. The unknown subject we are looking for is a professional, either police or military, or a former one or the other. He remains calm under fire, is able to engage and subdue multiple assailants and is careful to remove as much trace of his passage as possible. If he is spotted, I want to know about it immediately. Under no circumstances is any officer to approach him directly. Instead, they will call for backup and simply watch him discreetly. I will bring in the appropriate resources to apprehend him. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll have the composite sketch forwarded to you as well, for dissemination as soon as it’s finished.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Keep me apprised of your progress on this case, as well.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Excellent work, men, carry on.” Fang headed to the main f
loor and out the door, where his car was waiting. Thumbing in a number as he got in, he told the driver to head to the safehouse, and made sure the door was closed before talking to the person on the other end of his call.

  “I want the guard on Mrs. Liao and her children doubled tonight… I believe there’s going to be an attempt to free her sometime this evening… I’m on my way there now… Notify all agents currently on duty there to report anything unusual, no matter how small, and include me in their five-minute checkins… No, I have another matter to attend to first, so I won’t be there until—” he caught his driver’s gaze in the mirror, wincing as the man held up two fingers “—two hours from now… Yes, once I’m on-site, I’ll oversee them personally this evening.”

  As the car pulled into traffic he ended the call and made another call, waking a sleepy-voiced man on the other end. “Da? It’s Fang. The trap is still in place? Good, make sure your men are on alert tonight. I think the Americans are going to try something… I’m on my way right now… I know, they are crazy for wanting to break into a prison… See you soon.”

  After hanging up, Fang sat back in the seat and pulled out his pistol to check it. Although he had been on the job for almost eight years, this was the first time he was ever faced with the possibility of actually firing it in the line of duty.

  I’m probably overreacting over nothing, he thought. I’ll get there, and all of the men will have been on high alert all night for no reason.

  On the surface, it was insane to try to break into a heavily guarded prison to free one man.

  But as the car drove through the night, the nagging feeling in his gut told him otherwise. Fang leaned forward.

  “Drive faster.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If I didn’t know it was a prison, I would have thought it was some kind of retreat for the wealthy, Bolan thought as he stared through binoculars at the prison a quarter of a mile away in the foothills of the Yan Mountains.

  After hauling himself onto the nightclub’s rooftop, he’d crossed to the other side and leaped a five-foot alleyway to the adjoining building, which didn’t have any kind of fire escape but did have a large drainpipe on its far side that he used to clamber down to the street. Bolan had been prepared to keep crossing roofs until he’d found a way to get down from the outside; the last thing he’d wanted was to go inside a building and possibly encounter any witnesses who might remember him later.

  Once on the ground, he’d still been close enough to see the flashing lights from the police cars as they’d blocked off the street and to hear the shouts of the cops as they’d entered the building. By then he was at his truck and got inside, slouching in an attempt to disguise his height. He’d started the vehicle and pulled out into traffic, heading the opposite way before the streets became completely choked with stopped cars.

  A few miles away he’d stopped at an overflowing garbage bin. Using a hammer he’d found in the pickup, he’d smashed open the computer from the nightclub and destroyed the hard drive, shoving the remains deep into the bags of garbage. Only then had he finally driven out of town, heading for the isolated prison a half hour north of the city.

  Leaving the truck parked amid a stand of trees off the road a short distance from his insertion point, he made sure it was concealed from any casual passerby, repacked his equipment bag for this mission, got out and started to walk.

  It was a good night for a walk in the country; the air wasn’t quite as choked with pollution out here—it was bad, but not nearly as bad as the city proper. Bolan even heard some crickets, and once thought he saw a bat fly overhead, snatching insects out of the air as it went.

  He kept his eye on his target as he moved. Unlike most modern prisons, Qincheng didn’t have razor wire or guard towers. Instead, its primary fortification was a fifteen-foot wall, so wide that the guards patrolled the perimeter on top of it. The entire place was surrounded by fruit orchards—his data didn’t say what kind—and there was even a fish pond on the land in front of the large iron gate.

  Fortunately, Bolan wasn’t entering the complex that way. The cyber team’s research had come up with a more covert—although quite smelly—entrance, which he now stood in front of.

  As with much of China’s infrastructure from the middle of the past century, the prison’s sewer system was rudimentary at best. The roughly five-foot-high pipe emitted a steady stream of waste onto a hillside that flowed out into a waste-slicked hill, with the runoff eventually flowing into the ditch and along the road below and meeting up with the nearest waterway. The pipe was blocked by thin metal bars. There had been concern they would be reinforced steel, but they turned out to be standard rebar.

  Taking one last look around, Bolan took out a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on, then removed a butane torch from his bag and lit it, adjusting the flame until it was bright blue. It was short work to cut through two of the bars at their bottoms. He bent them just enough to slip through, then pulled them back into place so they would pass a casual inspection.

  Bolan stuck his head back to the opening to take one last deep breath of the night air. After sending a short message to let Stony Man know he was in, he pulled on a black balaclava and a small, head-mounted flashlight.

  He turned and started wading through the ankle-deep current of human excrement, counting his steps as he went.

  After a while his nose acclimated to the stench and it became just one of the irritants in the pipe. There was also the fact that his height forced him to walk bent forward. The farther in he went, the higher the temperature, so he was soon dripping with sweat. All in all, it was one of the most unpleasant insertions he’d ever undertaken. Finally the pipe opened up into the sewer’s main junction point underneath the prison. Streams of waste from the prison’s various buildings collected here, pouring into a large pool that was slowly drained into the pipe from which he had just emerged. Although Bolan thought he had gotten used to the smell, the stench here was enough to make his eyes water.

  Accessing his memorized map of the tunnels, Bolan counted off from his entry pipe four down, and sighed at the smaller pipe he had to traverse to reach his final destination. Roughly three feet in diameter, as all the others, it leaked a steady stream of waste. It was fifty yards to where Bolan could access the prison floor, and there was only one way to get there.

  After finding a relatively dry spot to stash his gear bag, Bolan crouched and crawled inside, trying not to squirm at the warm stream of human waste that flowed over his hands and immediately soaked his pants from the knees down. He put it out of his mind and began crawling forward, remembering to glance up every so often to count the vertical shafts above him so he could come out as close to Liao’s cell as possible. The pipe doglegged about twenty yards in, which was good, since it meant he’d only have to get that far for cover if someone was shooting at him.

  This pipe was even more cramped, hotter and smellier than the first one, the combination teaming up to sap his stamina. Still, Bolan kept moving doggedly forward. When he reached the fourth vertical drain, he stood and used the crude rebar rungs set into the concrete to climb up to the grate in the floor.

  He stood there listening for a few minutes, trying to see if any guards were on duty in the wing. Intel had showed that most worked outside, but they also conducted spot checks on prisoners during the night, making them sleep facing the peepholes in the door.

  Even though the floor appeared quiet, he took out a small mirror and raised it high enough to see down the main hallway, then the other way. There was no one in sight in either direction.

  The iron grate wasn’t locked, but most of his strength was required to move it. He also had to be careful to not make a lot of noise, as he didn’t want to alert any other prisoners to what was going on. After a couple of minutes of pushing it out of the way, he’d made a hole large enough for him to slip through. All that remained now was one padlocked door and he could grab Liao, take him back down the pipe and out.

 
Bolan hoped he wouldn’t protest about their extraction route—it would be an ordeal to try to haul an unconscious body down that smaller pipe. Hoisting himself up, Bolan crept to the door to the cell Liao was supposed to be in and looked through the peephole. The light was on inside, showing a man lying on the bed, his hands above the covers as proscribed by the guards. He looked as though he was sleeping, with one arm over his face. Even though he already knew the dimensions of the room, Bolan was still surprised at how large it was, about twenty square yards. The bed was on the far side of the room, making a positive identification difficult.

  Only one way to find out, Bolan mused as he went to work on the padlock securing the door. Working as quietly as he could took longer, but eventually the lock opened with a click.

  He removed it and quietly opened the door, wincing at the high-pitched squeal. Easing inside, he crossed to the thin mattress and covered the sleeping man’s mouth so he wouldn’t shout when awakened.

  The man’s eyes flew open and widened at seeing the face of a masked man right above him.

  “Zhang Liao?” Bolan asked. The man nodded. “I’m here to get you out. Do exactly as I say and we’ll be clear of the prison in about twenty minutes. Do you understand?”

  He nodded again and Bolan took his hand away from his mouth.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” he whispered. “You have no idea what this means!”

  “You can thank me once we’re out of here,” Bolan said, grabbing his arm and pulling him up. “Come on, we don’t have much time—”

  “No, just enough to hold you until the guards arrive,” the man said, his hand diving under the blanket and coming up with a small pistol that he pointed at Bolan.

  “I’ve caught him!” he shouted. “Guards! In here! Guards!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Trying to keep his breathing steady, Liao lay back on his pillow and pulled the thin cover up to his neck.

  Over the past day he had repeated the fecal matter treatment on his open wound three times. He had also managed to pass two health appointments, although once he swore the nurse wrinkled her nose and sniffed the air around him. He had immediately clamped his legs shut in the hope of cutting off any odor of waste she might have smelled. If they learned what he was doing before the infection could take hold, they’d probably install an armed guard to watch him around the clock or even worse, drug him so he couldn’t do any harm against himself.