Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  As they approached a shuttered row of shops at the foot of a skyscraper under construction and cocooned in a latticework of bamboo, Bannerman called out, “Contact left!” and Meyer fixed his laser onto three young men running up a side street with rifles in their hands. One of the toughs fired a wild burst from a folding-stock AK, sending sparks and asphalt off the street and into the air near the SEAL element, but Meyer and Petty Officer Wade Lipinski each opened fire with their MP7s, killing all three combatants in a matter of seconds.

  The threat was eliminated, but the gunfire from the AK and the eruption of car alarms on the street were bad news for Meyer and his team. The roving bands of Triads would be able to pinpoint them easily.

  They kept moving, heading north toward the water and doing everything they could to stay under cover, as thumping jet-powered helicopters circled overhead and spotlights whipped across the high buildings all around them.

  —

  It seemed to Jack Ryan as if every damn siren in Hong Kong was now in operation in or around Wan Chai. Even before the short barking of rifle fire echoed through the canyons of skyscrapers a few seconds ago, Jack’s ears were ringing from police and fire department sirens, as well as from his firing the shotgun back in the alley behind the club.

  He ran on through the pedestrian walkway, following Adam, who had taken the lead, and he felt the weight and bite of the Beretta 9-millimeter tucked inside his belt. Without Adam, Ding and Jack would have run straight into police roadblocks and racing gangs of 14K crews every few seconds. So far they had passed only one group of five or six men, whom Adam identified as probable 14K gunmen. Jack wondered if he would see these guys again when and if he made contact with the JSOC operators who had kidnapped FastByte.

  From the sound of a new volley of shooting it was clear the American direct-action team was still heading north. They were just a few blocks from Victoria Harbour.

  As they ran, Jack asked, “A boat? Should we get them a boat?”

  Ding turned to Yao, “What’s closest to us at the shoreline?”

  Yao said, “There’s a private marina over there, but forget about it. There will be twenty-five harbor-patrol craft with spotlights ready to stop them as soon as they go to the water, and the choppers overhead will have a perfect line of sight. Those guys aren’t going to Jet Ski out of this shit.”

  Chavez tapped his earpiece as he jogged. A moment later, Gavin answered.

  “Where are you?” Chavez asked.

  “I’m approaching the rear of the club, but there are a lot of people back there. Some of them are going to be Fourteen-K.”

  “Gavin, we need those wheels.”

  “Okay, but no promises. I’m not even sure I—”

  “This is life and death! Do what you have to do.”

  “But there are police and—”

  “Figure it out and call me back!” Chavez hung up.

  Suddenly all three men stopped running. Just up ahead they heard a weapon firing cyclic. It was a suppressed HK MP7; both Ding and Jack were familiar with the sound.

  The JSOC operators were close.

  Jack stepped into a small concrete courtyard between four identical buildings. The only light illuminating the scene was from red Chinese lamps strung across the courtyard over metal picnic tables and a small fenced-in playground. Just on the other side of the courtyard, Jack watched the group of men he saw back at the girlie bar emerge from a breezeway that passed under one of the buildings.

  Ryan stepped back around the corner, knelt down, and took another peek.

  The men looked like they’d just hit Omaha Beach. Every man Ryan could see was either seriously wounded or assisting someone who was. Two men carried what appeared to be a dead body.

  Ding looked out quickly, and then pulled himself and Ryan back around the corner to cover. Keeping himself shielded, Chavez whistled loudly, then shouted, “Listen up! You’ve got friendlies over here! A three-man OGA unit! We’re ready to help if you can use us!” OGA was how CIA personnel often referred to themselves in the field. It stood for Other Governmental Agency, and it was safer than saying “Agency” or “Company,” common nicknames for CIA.

  Chavez knew, whether these guys were JSOC or CIA or any other U.S. paramilitary unit, they would understand this term.

  —

  Meyer looked down to Reynosa to make sure he had actually heard what he thought he heard. The wounded operator nodded distantly, then propped himself against the wall of the courtyard and raised his gun to cover the area in case it was a trap.

  Meyer shouted back, “Step out, one at a time, hands high and empty!”

  “Coming out,” shouted Chavez, and he raised his hands and stepped into the dim light under the paper lanterns.

  Jack Ryan and Adam Yao did the same, and within thirty seconds the SEALs had help from three able-bodied men.

  Meyer said, “We can talk while we move.”

  Ryan rushed over to grab the man with the bloody bandages around his left calf, and Adam Yao relieved the ashen-faced SEAL with the broken shoulder from his responsibility, helping the man with the bullet wound in his knee.

  Chavez lifted the dead SEAL off the ground in a fireman’s carry, so the two men carrying his body could once again wield their HKs.

  Together the ten surviving Americans and the flexi-cuffed and hooded Zha Shu Hai started again for the north. They still moved way too slow, but they were faster now than before.

  Police sirens wailed all around and lights flashed in all directions; helicopters flew high overhead and spotlights reflected off windows. Fortunately for the SEALs, the two Campus operators, and Adam Yao, the high apartment buildings kept the helos from getting their spotlights near the action.

  —

  Five minutes later they had found refuge hiding in the trees and darkness in Tung Lo Wan Garden. All around them on the street, police cars raced by in all directions, and several cars full of young tough-looking men passed by, often slowing to shine flashlights in the park.

  All the men lay flat in the grass, though Petty Officer Jim Shipley kept half of his body over Zha Shu Hai to keep him still and quiet.

  Chavez called Biery and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the IT director had managed to pass his first challenge in the field. He’d argued his way past a police barrier to get “his” minivan out of the parking lot, and Ding directed him to their position.

  CPO Michael Meyer checked on his wounded men and then crawled over to the three new guys in his group. He did not know who these men were, really. The short Hispanic guy was oldest, he was doing all the talking; the tall younger American kept a sweat-soaked paper mask over his face; and the Asian guy looked both worn-out and freaked-out.

  Meyer motioned to Yao. “We saw you behind the target location. I had Poteet bag you. Didn’t know you were OGA. Sorry about that.”

  Yao shook his head. “No problem.”

  “Wish we could have hooked up with you from the beginning, but we were told you guys have a massive breach over here, so there would be no coordination.”

  Yao said, “Can’t argue with the thinking on that. There is a breach, but it’s not out of Hong Kong. Trust me, no one knows where I am or what I’m doing right now.”

  Meyer raised an eyebrow behind his ballistic eye protection. “Okay.”

  Chavez asked, “Who are you guys?”

  “DEVGRU.”

  Chavez knew that U.S. Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, was the organization formerly known as SEAL Team Six. He wasn’t surprised to learn this element was pulled from one of America’s most elite special-mission units. Hell, even with all the damage they’d taken, they’d probably wasted twenty enemy in the past twenty minutes and were on the way to completing their mission objective, though Ding had been around enough to know that Meyer would r
emember this event only as the mission where he lost a man.

  The Navy team leader reloaded his HK. “With all our injuries and all the helos in the air, our exfil is going to be a bitch. You boys know the area better than we do. You got any bright ideas about extricating ourselves from this bullshit?”

  Now Chavez leaned over. “I’ve got a guy on the way in a minivan. If we squeeze we can fit everyone. Where is your rally point for the exfil?”

  The SEAL said, “North Point Ferry Pier. A couple klicks from here. We’ve got RIBs coming to pick us up.”

  Chavez realized these guys must have come into the harbor via boat or submarine, and then had their guy already on the shore pick them up in the van, while their other two colleagues kept their eyes on Zha. It was a pretty quick and dirty op for a busy city like Hong Kong, but Ding knew the DoD was desperate to stop the cyberthreat that was plaguing their network.

  Meyer turned to Chavez. “I pulled my two guys out of the bar because I wanted to do the takedown with seven operators, and one man behind the wheel. They said there were four or five armed guards and that was it.”

  Ding said, “There were only four, but things went tits-up pretty quickly. Some suits from the consulate came into the club, probably watching Zha for the DOJ. They spooked Zha’s protection detail of Triads, so the Fourteen-K called in a van-load of backup right before you guys hit the back door.”

  “Shit,” Meyer said. “We should have known.”

  Chavez shook his head. “Murphy’s Law.”

  Meyer nodded. “Gets you every time.”

  Just then the headlights of a vehicle entered the road that ran through the little park. The vehicle slowed down to a crawl but continued closer.

  Ding called to Gavin, “Where are you?”

  “I’m heading east. I . . . I am really turned around. I don’t know where the hell I am.”

  “Stop right where you are.”

  The vehicle on the road stopped.

  “Flash your lights.”

  The lights flashed.

  “Good. We’ve got you. Pull up about two hundred yards on the double, then scoot into the back. Make room, we’ve got to fit a dozen bodies in there.”

  “A dozen?”

  —

  Chavez was behind the wheel now and heading northeast, following Yao’s instructions from the front passenger seat. In the back, nine living men and one body were pressed together like cordwood. The men grunted and groaned with each jolting bump in the road, and every turn pressed air from the lungs of the men at the bottom. SO Lipinski, the ST6 medic, valiantly fought to check bandages on any wound he could access with his one free hand in the scrum. The rest of the wounds just had to remain unattended.

  Ding kept his speed down and his lane-switching to a minimum, but at a red light on Gloucester Road a 14K spotter walked into the street and looked right at him. The man pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket and brought it to his ear.

  Chavez looked straight ahead. He said, “Damn. This isn’t over yet.”

  As the light turned green he accelerated forward, doing his best to not just haul ass, hoping against hope that the spotter would make the decision that the maroon minivan was not, in fact, full of armed gweilos escaping the scene.

  But his hopes were in vain.

  As they moved east through the rain on a side street running parallel to King’s Road, a small two-door car rolled into the intersection with its headlights off. Chavez was forced to swerve to avoid being sideswiped.

  As the car drove alongside Chavez’s side of the minivan, a man rose out of the passenger-side window, sat on the door, and then swung an AK-47 rifle over the roof of the car, pointing it toward Chavez.

  Ding drew the Beretta pistol in his waistband and fired through his window, across his body, while he held the wheel with his left hand.

  Several AK rounds tore into the minivan before Chavez struck the driver of the two-door with a bullet into the side of the neck. The car swerved violently and slammed into the wall of an office building.

  “Who’s hit? Who’s hit?” Chavez yelled, certain that, with this many men in this small vehicle, multiple men would have been struck by the powerful 7.62-millimeter rounds.

  Everyone checked in, the wounded men proclaimed they were in no more pain than before, and even FastByte22 answered Adam that he was okay when he asked him if he’d been shot.

  It was a small miracle that the four rounds that hit the side of the minivan struck the dead special warfare operator pressed against the wall of the vehicle.

  Chavez raced to the east faster than before, but still he was careful to not draw any more attention than was necessary.

  —

  After consulting with Adam Yao about the best place to be picked up by boat that was far enough away from the site of the hit, Meyer struggled to get his radio mic to his mouth under the crushing weight of the other bodies on top of him. Finally he established comms with his extraction and told them they would do the pickup several miles to the east in Chai Wan.

  Chavez made it to the location just after three a.m., found a secluded rocky beach, and everyone struggled to get out of the tight minivan.

  Here, behind the cover of high boulders, Lipinski, the element’s medic, rebandaged all the wounded men. Both Reynosa and Bannerman had lost a lot of blood, but they were stable for now.

  While they waited for the SEALs’ rigid inflatable boats to come for the pickup, Jack leaned over to Ding and spoke softly: “How about we hold on to FastByte’s little computer?”

  Chavez just looked at him. “Way ahead of you, kid. We’ll give Gavin a crack at it and then find a way to get it over to DoD.”

  Suddenly three Zodiac boats materialized in the black water at the shoreline.

  Chief Petty Officer Michael Meyer got his men together, both the living and the dead, and quickly shook Yao’s hand. “Wish we worked with you from the beginning.”

  Adam said, “You would have had more problems that way. We are leaking like a sieve. Glad we were able to help. Sure as hell wish we could have done more.”

  Meyer nodded, thanked Ryan and Chavez, and then joined his men as they loaded into the RIBs.

  The Zodiacs turned away from the beach and disappeared in the night.

  As soon as the SEALs were gone, Gavin Biery called out to Adam Yao, “Any idea where a guy can get some pancakes around here?”

  Yao, Ryan, and Chavez just chuckled exhaustedly as they climbed back into the Mitsubishi.

  FORTY-TWO

  Dr. K. K. Tong, code-named Center, sat at his desk and watched the recorded feeds from dozens of security cameras, both municipal and privately held. It was a video montage created by his Ghost Ship security staff showing the events of the previous evening.

  From inside Club Stylish he watched the white men appear from the hallway, he watched a crazed, disjointed crowd react to the gun battle, and he watched young Zha being dragged over the top of the table, tied up, and pulled back into the dark.

  From a 7-Eleven security camera pointed toward the street he watched the crash of the black van, the men climbing out and pulling Zha and a dead commando from the wreckage, and then rushing into a dark alley.

  He watched the feed from a traffic camera at the intersection off King’s Road that showed the maroon minivan as it swerved to avoid the two-door with the armed man, and then he saw the car veer off and crash, and the minivan holding Zha and his kidnappers race off into the night.

  Tong exhibited no emotion over any of this.

  Standing over his shoulder and watching the violent montage was the leader of the Ghost Ship’s own security staff. He was not a Triad, but he was responsible for coordinating with the Triads. He said, “Twenty-nine members of Fourteen-K were killed or wounded. As you can see from the feeds here, members of the
opposition force suffered casualties as well, but none of them turned up in any local hospitals.”

  Tong did not comment on this. He only said, “CIA.”

  “Yes, sir, their local man, Adam Yao, the one we have been aware of for the past week, is clearly captured here on the video.”

  “We are reading CIA communications. We know Yao is present in HK and operating surveillance on our operation. Why did you not prevent this?”

  “If the CIA used CIA paramilitary forces or coordinated this kidnapping directly, we would have been aware of it and we would have been prepared. But the Pentagon used American military forces, apparently members of their Joint Special Operations Command. We do not have deep persistent access into JSOC communications.”

  “Why did CIA use JSOC? Do they suspect a leak in their cable traffic?”

  “Negative. From what we’ve determined monitoring CIA cable traffic after this hit, this element of commandos happened to be training in South Korea and was able to move over here very quickly yesterday when an in extremis opportunity arose to kidnap Zha. No one at JSOC told the CIA they were coming.”

  “And yet the local CIA operative was present.”

  “I . . . I have not determined how that occurred.”

  Tong said, “I am very dissatisfied that this happened.”

  The security manager said, “I understand, sir. Visualization of the kidnapping after the fact does not help us much. Preventing it would have been ideal.”

  “Have you reported this to our colleagues in Beijing?” Tong asked.

  “Yes, sir. They ask you to contact them as soon as you can.”

  Tong nodded. “Our time in Hong Kong is over.”

  He watched the violent movie on his main monitor a second time. Quickly he reached out and pressed a button, stopping as the driver of the minivan fired a handgun out the driver’s-side window. As the window shattered, a brief but relatively clear image of the driver emerged as the vehicle passed close to the camera.