by Tom Clancy
Ding nodded slowly. “I’m not going to lie to you, kid. I am aware that you wear two hats.”
“Are you going to tell me the real reason you guys are here?”
“No mystery to that. We’re here to find out who the hell Zha is. He is trying to get into our network.”
“Trying to? He has not succeeded?”
“Not that we know of.” They had lied to Yao about that. “Sorry, kid. We needed your help, and we wanted to help you. I fed you a little bullshit along the way.”
“Fed me a little bullshit? So you came all the way to Hong Kong to tail a hacker who is trying to hack your network? It sounds like you have me on a steady diet of bullshit.”
Chavez sighed. “That’s part of the reason. We are also aware he is a person of interest in the UAV attack. We see our interests, and America’s interests, dovetailing nicely here, and we wanted to support you in your investigation.”
“How do you know he was involved in the UAV attack?”
Chavez just shook his head. “Word gets around.”
Yao did not seem satisfied by this answer, but he moved on. “What is Jack Junior’s role in this?”
“He’s an analyst at Hendley Associates. Simple as that.”
Yao nodded. He didn’t know what to make of Hendley Associates, but he knew Domingo Chavez had as much or more credibility than anyone who had ever worked in the U.S. intelligence community. Chavez and company were providing him with the assets he needed to tail and, he hoped, identify some of the people working with Zha. He needed these guys, despite the fact they weren’t exactly part of his team.
“The Agency is not buying into the fact that Zha is part of the UAV attack. They think it was a state actor of some sort, maybe China, maybe Iran, and since Zha clearly isn’t working for either of them over here, they figure he’s not involved.”
“We figure differently, and, apparently, so do you.”
“I do.”
Just then Gavin Biery called Chavez, and Ding turned on his speakerphone so Yao could hear. “Bingo. We have a match on one of the young men, the guy in the black shirt. His name is Chen Ma Long. It says he lives in Shaoxing, on the mainland. He was a known member of an organization called the Tong Dynasty.”
“The Tong Dynasty?” Yao said with surprise.
“What’s that?” asked Chavez.
“That’s an unofficial name the NSA gave to an organization that was around from about 2005 to 2010. It was run by Dr. K. K. Tong, sort of the father of China’s offensive cyberwar systems. He used tens of thousands of civilian hackers, developed them into a kind of army. This kid must have been part of that group.”
“Where is Tong now?”
“He was thrown in prison in China for corruption but escaped. No one has heard from him in a couple of years. Word is the Chicoms want him dead.”
“Interesting. Thanks, Gavin,” said Chavez. He ended the call with Biery and then turned his attention back to Yao.
“We aren’t going to learn anything more than what we already know about whatever the hell is going on over here, because it’s not going to take any time at all for the Triads to pick up on the fact that Zha has grown a really long tail. Once they see these guys following Zha, Zha is going to disappear.”
“I know.”
“You need to check with Langley one more time. If they want him, they better take him right fucking now, because he will either run to the mainland, in which case you’ll never find him, or else the Marshals Service is going to arrest him, in which case he’ll enter the justice system. If he does that he’ll get a lawyer, a pat on the ass, and three hots and a cot. The Agency won’t learn a damn thing about who he’s working with.”
Adam nodded. Chavez could tell the prospect of losing Zha Shu Hai was eating the young NOC up.
“I already talked to Langley. They said they didn’t think Zha was involved, but they would kick it over to the Pentagon, since it was their system that got hacked,” said Adam.
“And what did the Pentagon say?”
“I have no idea. I try and communicate with Langley as little as possible.”
“Why is that?”
“Pretty much everybody knows that there is a leak at Beijing Station. The Pentagon is aware CIA is compromised in its affairs in China, too, so I doubt they would let us know if they were interested in Zha.”
“A leak?”
“I have been living with that reality for a while. Too many Agency initiatives involving China have foundered in ways that we can only figure were due to inside information about our activities. I try to keep most of my activity very low-profile. I don’t like letting Langley know what I’m up to, in case the Chicoms do something to stop me. Even though HK isn’t the mainland, per se, there are Chinese spies all over.”
Chavez said, “Maybe that leak is the reason Fourteen-K doubled their guard on Zha and started doing SDRs every couple of hours.”
Yao said, “That only makes sense if the Fourteen-K are working with the Chicoms, and that just does not track with everything I’ve seen or heard about the Triads.”
—
Ding’s phone beeped. It was Ryan, and Ding put the call on speaker.
“What’s up, Jack?”
“The two younger Americans, the guys I saw on the ferry, just paid their tab and hit the road.”
“Good. Maybe they are calling it a night. And the two suits?”
“Still in the same place, still glancing over at Zha and company every thirty seconds like clockwork. Pretty obvious.”
“Okay,” said Ding. “I’m heading back in. Wait for me to take the eye, and then you can go back out front.”
“Roger that,” said Jack.
Chavez entered the club through the back door. It led to a long narrow staircase that descended to a hallway. Chavez passed doors to bathrooms and a kitchen area, and then he stepped back into the club, walked past Zha and his entourage in the corner, and returned to the bar. Ryan left through the front entrance and went back to the noodle shop on Jaffe and ordered a Tsingtao beer.
A minute after Ryan returned to his post he announced, “Here come the Fourteen-K. I’ve got close to a dozen goons who just got out of a pair of silver SUVs; they are all wearing jackets and it’s eighty degrees, so I’m going to guess they are packing. They are heading through Club Stylish’s door.”
Yao said, “Shit. Ding, you think we should back out of the area?”
Chavez replied, “It is your call, but I am not compromised at all here at the bar, other than the fact I’ve been mumbling to myself every few minutes. How ’bout I just sit tight to make sure the consulate guys don’t get into any trouble with all the new muscle around.”
“Roger that, but be careful.”
After a few moments the Triad presence increased all around Club Stylish. A dozen obvious gunmen fanned out and took up positions in the corners and around the bar.
Ding spoke softly behind his beer. “Yep . . . the new goons are eyeballing the two guys in the suits. This might get ugly, Adam; let me stick around for a minute in case someone needs to call in the cavalry.”
Adam Yao did not respond.
“Ding for Adam, do you read?”
Nothing.
“Yao, you receiving?”
After a long moment, Adam Yao responded in a whisper. “Guys . . . Things are about to get really ugly.”
FORTY
Adam Yao had lowered the backrest of his driver’s seat in the Mitsubishi minivan all the way back, and he lay flat, his body out of the sight line of the windows. He did not move a muscle, but his mind raced.
Just thirty seconds earlier, a large twelve-passenger van had rolled up with its lights off, forty feet away in the alley, not far from Yao’s position in the parking lot. Adam ducked down before
the driver noticed him in the minivan, but Adam did get a look at the man behind the wheel. He looked American, he wore a baseball cap and had a radio headset, and behind him in the vehicle Yao saw several other dark figures.
“Adam, what’s going on?” It was Ding’s voice in his earpiece, but Adam did not answer. Instead he reached for his backpack in the front passenger seat. He pulled out a rectangular hand mirror, and carefully raised it above the driver’s-side window. Through it he could see the twelve-passenger van. It had stopped near the exit to the strip club, and the side door had opened up. Seven men slipped out silently; they all held black rifles close to their bodies, and they wore small backpacks, sidearms, and body armor.
As he lay silent and still, Ding’s voice came over his earpiece yet again. “What is it, Adam?”
Yao replied, “There’s a fucking A-Team back here. Not Marshals, not CIA. These guys are probably Jay-Sock.” JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, and pronounced “Jay-Sock” by those aware of the organization, was the Department of Defense’s direct-action special-mission units, SEAL Team Six or Delta Force. Yao knew that the Pentagon would not send anyone else to do this job but JSOC. “I think they are about to come in through the back door, and it sure doesn’t look like they’re heading in to watch boobs jiggle.”
“Shit,” Ding said. “How many?”
“I count seven operators,” Adam said.
Jack said, “There are probably four or five times that number of armed Triads in there. You need to stop them before they get slaughtered.”
“Right,” Adam said, and he quickly opened his door and slid out of the Mitsubishi. The Americans at the back door were facing the other direction, seconds away from moving into Club Stylish. Yao decided to call out to them, but he’d taken no more than one step when he was knocked to the ground from behind. His earpiece flew from his ear and he crashed face-first onto the wet alleyway, his breath knocked from his lungs.
He did not see the man who took him down, but he felt the weight of a knee on his back, he felt the burn in his shoulders as his arms were yanked roughly behind him, and the sting in his wrists as his hands were secured with flexi-cuffs. Before he could speak, he heard someone tearing electrical tape from a roll, and the tape was wrapped tightly around his head several times at the mouth, gagging him roughly.
He was dragged by his feet in the parking lot; he fought to keep his face from rubbing against the asphalt. In seconds he found himself on the other side of the Mitsubishi van, shoved into a sitting position, the back of his head slammed against the side of the minivan. Only then did he see that a single person had done all this to him. A blond-haired man with a beard and tactical pants, a combat vest of body armor and ammo mags and an automatic pistol, and a short-barreled rifle that hung over his shoulder. Adam tried to speak through the tape, but the American just patted him on the head and slipped a hood over him.
The last image Yao had was of the man’s forearm, and his “Cowboy Up” tattoo.
Adam heard the man run off, around the van, obviously to join his mates near the door.
—
Chavez had spent ten of the past twenty seconds trying to raise Adam Yao on the conference call, two more seconds cussing violently to himself, and finally the last eight seconds barking soft but authoritative orders into his headset as he walked through the strip club toward the restroom in the back.
“Gavin, listen up. I need you in a cab on your way over to our position. Wave every scrap of money on your person to get the cabbie to haul ass!”
“Me? You want me out there with—”
“Do it! I’ll update you when you get close.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m on the way.”
“Ryan, I want you to hotfoot it around back to see what happened to Adam. Put your mask on.”
“Understood.”
Chavez passed several Triads standing around the bustling nightclub as he headed toward the restroom by the back door. He knew he would have to try to stop the men here to snatch Zha before they walked right into a bloodbath.
It was clear to him what had happened. The two young men Ryan spotted on the ferry and then here in the club were spotters for this team of SEALs, or Delta, or whoever the hell they were. They’d seen Zha and a manageable crew of security men sitting in a booth by the hallway that led to the back door and they’d radioed the snatch team to tell them that now was the time to make the grab.
The spotters left the area at the last possible moment, probably to get geared up and armed to take part in the hit. This was not standard operating procedure; but they surely weren’t expecting a crew of 14K reinforcements to show up in that tiny time window when Zha was without coverage.
This was a clusterfuck in the making, Chavez knew, and the only way he could stop it was to get to the back door before it start—
From the darkness of the hall that led to the stairs at the back of the club, a group of armed men appeared in a tight neat row, their weapons’ laser targeting devices causing red pinpricks of light to move around ahead of them, dancing through the dim amber lighting of the club like the twinkling sparkles of the disco ball hanging from the ceiling.
Chavez was caught in the center of the club, too far away to stop the men but not back far enough to be clear of the impending gun battle. Just twenty feet ahead and to his right, Zha sat at a table full of his computer-crime colleagues and armed 14K gunmen. In front of Ding to his left, the lighted stage was full of naked women, and all around him, a dozen 14K sentries were standing around, most of them looming over two very uncomfortable-looking men from the U.S. consulate who, Ding was certain, had no idea a team of commandos was about to fly into the room with guns high and voices loud.
Chavez spoke into his mic, and he made a solemn announcement: “It’s on.”
—
Chief Petty Officer Michael Meyer, team leader of this DEVGRU (SEAL Team Six) JSOC element, was second in line in the tactical train, his HK MP7 Personal Defense Weapon aimed just over the left shoulder of the special warfare operator in front of him. They broke into teams as they left the hallway and entered the nightclub, with Meyer and the first man breaking right, shining their lasers on the dance floor and the patrons in front of it.
Just to his left, two operators covered the club toward the rear bar, and directly behind him now, three of his men were taking down Zha and holding their guns on his protection detail.
Meyer felt almost immediately that his zone was clear of danger. There were strippers and a few businessmen, but the action was back by the bar and behind him at Zha’s table, so he left the other SEAL and turned around to help with the takedown.
The team had hoped to execute this takedown after Zha left the club with his minders, and they had been waiting a few blocks up the street to do just that. But the two men Meyer had tasked with following Zha had reported that another pair of Americans were here, two suited and blow-dried guys from the consulate, by the looks of them, and they worried that Zha would be rushed away under heavy guard.
So Meyer exerted his execute authority to do the unexpected and snatch the target right here in the back of the club by the alley.
It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a perfect situation. DEVGRU normally operated with a much larger force, with better command and control and communications, and a much better sight picture of the target area. But this was what was referred to in the business as an “in extremis op,” a rush job, to be sure, and the first rule of in extremis ops was to make the best of an imperfect situation.
The two-man SEAL recon team had left the building not five minutes earlier, but it became clear to Meyer almost instantly that things had changed in the past five minutes. Where he expected to see four or five bodyguards at the round corner booth, he now saw ten.
They were tough, jacketed men with short haircuts and hard stares, men standing around the t
able with no drinks in their hands.
Meyer then heard a shout from one of his men on the right, and it was the last thing he had hoped to hear tonight from his men scanning the crowd.
“Contact front!”
Things went bad quickly. A single 14K soldier back by the bar near the entrance was partially shielded by a group of businessmen standing there, and he took the opportunity to yank a .45 pistol from his waistband. With the protection of the cover provided by the civilians, he raised his weapon and squeezed off two rounds at the first armed gunman through the door, grazing the man once on the left arm and once squarely on the ceramic body-armor plate on his chest.
The Navy SEAL closest to the wounded operator dispatched the Chinese shooter with a three-round burst of tiny but hard-hitting 4.6x30-millimeter bullets to the forehead, blowing the top of the man’s head off and over the crowd of men around him.
Within the next two seconds, throughout the strip club some twenty 14K Triads went for their guns.
And all hell broke loose.
—
When Chavez found himself in no-man’s-land as the firefight started, he did the only thing he could—he went into self-preservation mode. He dropped flat on the floor, rolled to his left, knocking chairs and people down along the way, trying like hell to get himself out of the crossfire between the Americans and the Triads. Along with other men who had been sitting along the raised dance floor, he made his way through the tables there and then pressed himself tight against the edge of the riser.
He wished like hell he had a pistol. He could pick off some of the opposition and help the JSOC men in their mission. But instead he covered his head as men in tailored suits and dancers in thongs and body glitter crashed on top of him, desperately trying to scramble away from the gunfire.
Through this he did what he could to maintain his situational awareness. He peered into the crazed crowd, saw pistols and sub-guns firing here and there, and heard the mammoth boom of a shotgun blast from up near the bar. The crowd looked like rats scattering in the amber lighting, with the SEALs’ red laser targeting devices and the sparkle from the disco ball providing additional frantic movement to the scene.
