China Strike

by Matt Rees

  “He started out in infantry. But he went into Special Forces. Same as you and Captain America back there.” She jerked her thumb at the backseat. Frisch snored and grumbled. “I understand the price you pay.”

  His openness ebbed away. Everybody always told him they understood. The only one who didn’t had been his wife when he tried to explain himself. He remembered Melanie’s slow headshake of incomprehension, her features twisted with disgust. “What price is that?”

  “The price you pay for other people’s mistakes.”

  “Who said anything about mistakes?”

  She took the car through the barrier into the drop-off zone. “Well, you know, everyone makes mistakes.”

  “There’s a difference between the consequences of an accounting error and a failure in the Special Forces.”

  She licked her lips nervously. She must have heard the resentment in his voice. “Based on what Frisch said, you were involved in something more than an accounting error.”

  “Based on what Frisch said?”

  “I mean, you haven’t told me what you—”

  “You want to know about me?”

  “I just thought I—”

  “You want to know about my mistakes?”

  “No. Yes. Why are you—?”

  “I killed a woman in front of her kid because my commanding officer told me to do it. No, that’s not enough. The truth—I did it because I believed she had information that could be a threat to me, and so I silenced her.”

  The car rocked slowly on its soft suspension as Jahn rolled over a speed bump and halted behind a blue Honda. She spoke quietly. “You couldn’t live that down.” It wasn’t a question.

  He shook his head. He couldn’t tell her the true scope of what he had done. Before he murdered Maryam Ghattas, there was the death of the prime minister. An assassination that killed off a peace deal the man had been about to strike with Israel. That had been Verrazzano’s real mistake. Maryam Ghattas was the cleanup afterward.

  “I’m sorry.” Jahn shook her head. “What the hell do I know? I mean I—”

  “The thing is,” he said, “the worst thing I ever did was also the best-conceived, most perfectly executed operation I carried out. I was absolutely the best operative there was. And I used my skills to kill someone who could have made a difference in people’s lives. A positive difference to millions of people.”

  She shut off the engine. “The place was screwed up. Whatever you did, there’d still be trouble there.”

  He ran their conversation back through his head. He hadn’t mentioned Lebanon or the Middle East. He turned to her slowly. “What place?”

  “The place you did the operation.”

  “I didn’t tell you where it was.”

  “Do you have to? I figure, where do you go to do assassinations? Not Topeka, Kansas, right? It was in some screwed-up place, surely.” She watched him with a strange desperation on her face.

  He considered that look for a moment. Then he saw that it was her knowledge of her husband’s work that informed it. “You said your husband was military.”

  “My husband was, period. He was on an operation and he went missing. Two years ago. He’s presumed dead.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I hope he’s dead. The alternative is that for two years he’s been—” Her voice quavered and cut off. She cleared her throat and took the keys from the ignition. “I’m going to drop these off.”

  She got out of the car and crossed the parking lot to the rental office. He turned away. I hope he’s dead. He had heard spouses and parents say that about missing soldiers. It was never true. They didn’t mean it. Torture and suffering could come to an end, and there could be a reunion and maybe even psychological healing. People held onto that chance until they were as gone as the loved one they mourned.

  Frisch coughed and snorted and came awake. “What’s next, hombre?”

  “You go back to jail, that’s what’s next.”

  “That’s a damned shame. Where are you going?”

  “Germany.”

  “They make a lot of cars over there. You found another car company?”

  Verrazzano nodded.

  “Down south?” Frisch said. “Where they make the Wolfwagen?”

  Verrazzano shook his head. “You shouldn’t waste brain cells on this. You should be working on your defense for the UN attack.”

  “What about our deal? Where’s the ticket to Caracas you promised me?”

  “Sue me.”

  Another car company in Germany, Verrazzano thought. Another computer programmer. He had to find out whether there was another day of destruction coming. He had to stop it before it happened. Maybe once he’d done that, he could find out who was truly behind the whole thing. He thought of the music at the scene of the Su couple’s murder. Even if Johnny Cash hadn’t been his old commander’s favorite singer, Verrazzano would have known it was meant for him. He had gravel in his guts and spit in his eye.

  “Wyatt’s waiting for me,” he said.

  “I figured he would be.” Frisch rolled his shoulders. “Don’t worry, Sergeant Major. I’m going to be there with you, and I’m ready for the son of a bitch.”

  “Forget it. When I bring him in, I’ll see to it that you get adjoining cells.”

  “Sergeant Major, I’m not going back to a jail cell, and you and I both know there’s no prison could hold Colonel Wyatt.”

  A text came over Verrazzano’s phone from Haddad. He read it. German Immigration confirmed a Chinese national named Du An worked at Jansen Trapp in Rüsselsheim. He wrote back, telling her to set up a government plane to fly him and Jahn from New York to Frankfurt.

  “What’re you going to do when he finds us?” Frisch said.

  Us. Verrazzano ignored that. Instead, he pictured the moment. Imagined Wyatt’s face, a few years older than when he saw him last, new tensions marking his face. “I’m going to find him first.”

  Frisch lifted a finger and wagged it at Verrazzano. “You’re going to kill him. You’re after revenge, Sergeant Major. That’s my boy.”

  Verrazzano’s cell phone hummed in his pocket. He took it out and swiped the screen. A text message, from a scrambled address. It read: “Dinner at Odin’s table for you soon, son.” The muscles in his arm trembled as he held the phone. It was from Wyatt. That was the line the colonel used before every mission. It meant that death in action was not to be feared, because it would be followed by a feast at the side of the Viking gods in the resting place of the heroes, Valhalla. Right now, the message signaled that Wyatt knew Verrazzano was on the case.

  Some swift motion in the corner of his eye caught Verrazzano’s attention. He looked across the parking lot to the rental office forty yards away. Jahn was against the wall, face first. A man twisted her arm high in a half nelson. With his other hand, he held a pistol to her head.

  Verrazzano leapt from the car and ran. Jahn’s eyes were wide, staring over her shoulder toward the man who threatened her.

  “Step away from her,” Verrazzano called out. He drew his H&K and leveled it as he sprinted. “Put the gun down.”

  The man swiveled toward the ICE agent. His skin was red and scaly. The Krokodil man who had killed the Chinese engineer. The gunman spoke emphatically into Jahn’s ear, as he watched Verrazzano approach. Verrazzano read his lips: “You understand? You understand me?”

  Jahn twitched her head to signal that she understood.

  The Krokodil man stepped back and hammered Jahn’s neck with the butt of his pistol. He fired two rounds at Verrazzano and dodged behind the rental office.

  Verrazzano reached Jahn. She was out cold, spread across the low, dry bushes outside the office. He ran around the building. As he came into the alley between the office and the chain link fence by the runway, a Toyota sedan sped around the corner with the Krokodil at the wheel. Verrazzano jumped out of the way and dropped into a crouch. He squeezed off four shots, but the Toyota squealed to the right a
nd was gone toward the gate.

  He came quickly back to Jahn. She blinked hard as he lifted her. “I’ll be back for you,” Verrazzano said. Jahn groaned.

  Verrazzano was running for his car, when it started away through the parking lot. Frisch weaved it between the parked vehicles and headed for the gate. Verrazzano waved for the security guard to drop the barrier, but Frisch was out of the compound before the guard saw him. He went fast down the access road toward the highway, the same direction as the Krokodil. Verrazzano watched the two cars disappear in the heat shimmer as the security guard came out of the gate hut.

  Verrazzano rushed into the rental office. The staff of four were behind their counters in their green blazers. They lifted their hands in surrender. “Keys, give me a set of keys right now,” Verrazzano shouted.

  “He took them.” A bronzed woman with hair dyed to a deep black pointed through the window toward the gate. “The guy with the ugly skin.”

  “All of them?” Verrazzano leaned over the counter. There had to be a set of keys among the rental contracts and credit card machines.

  “All that was out here,” the woman said. “The rest are in an electric lock box in the back office, and he pulled the cord out of the wall. It won’t open until that’s fixed.”

  Verrazzano ran into the parking lot. He scanned the roadway in case a client was returning a car that he might commandeer. The blacktop was empty. He was stuck.

  The gate guard jogged heavily toward him, calling into his walkie-talkie. He glanced at Verrazzano’s ICE ID. Jahn wavered to her feet and showed her FBI card.

  “Who are those guys?” The guard gestured over his shoulder in the direction the Krokodil and Frisch had fled.

  “Fugitives. You need to track these cars.” Verrazzano reeled off the plate number he had committed to memory on the Krokodil’s car as it sped away from him, then he called out the registration of the car Jahn had rented.

  “Fugitives from ICE or FBI?” the guard asked. “I mean, it might be important. I don’t know.”

  Verrazzano squinted hard toward the highway. “Fugitives from me. That’s what’s important.”

  Jahn stumbled. He reached for her and held her head so he could check her for a concussion, examining her pupils for dilation. She tried to turn away from his gaze.

  “We have to get after them,” she mumbled.

  “What did the Krokodil say to you? When he had you with a gun to your head?”

  She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t remember. When he hit me on the head, I guess I—I just don’t remember now. Come on, let’s get going.”

  “We don’t have a vehicle. The Krokodil took all the keys.”

  “All of them. But we have to—”

  “We need to stay focused on tracking the crash software through these Chinese guys and stopping any further incidents. We’re going to leave Frisch and the Krokodil for the FBI Detroit field office to track.”

  “They’re going to have a lot of work right now, with the Darien crash. They might not be able to find resources for Frisch and the Krokodil.”

  Verrazzano watched an airport security cruiser roll through the gate of the rental company’s parking lot and turn toward them. “They’re going to have to try.”

  Jahn called the Detroit field office. After she hung up, they waited impatiently for an agent to arrive.

  “Thanks,” she muttered. “I mean, he could have killed me just now.”

  If the Krokodil had wanted to kill her, she would be dead. Verrazzano knew that. He wondered why she was still alive. “He could have. That’s correct.”

  “You don’t sound like you’d be too upset, if he had.”

  “It’s a hypothetical. I’m more concerned with the people who are dead and the others who soon will be.”

  She scratched at her lower lip and stared toward the approach road, watching for a black FBI sedan. “You live out on the Island?”

  “No, I don’t.” Home was a tiny basement room Kinsella let him have for nothing in her row house in Astoria, Queens. He visited it once a week, when he needed to stare at a familiar, blank wall.

  “Why were you out on the Island this morning, then? When the crash happened, and you came upon that guy, Anthony—”

  “Gibson.”

  “Right.”

  “I was taking my niece to school.”

  “You have a niece?” Jahn raised her hands. “Sorry, I just didn’t see you as a guy who had a niece. I guess I didn’t think of you as—well, you know, human.”

  “Today has been full of surprises for you. My sister is a single mother. She spends a lot of time looking after my dad. So I stay over a couple nights a week to help her out with her daughter.”

  “What does your wife think of that?”

  “Wife? I’m not that human.”

  A black Chevrolet rolled along the approach road. “That’ll be Agent Hemming. I’ve worked with him before. He’s our best chance if the Detroit field office is going to get Frisch and the Krokodil.”

  Verrazzano shook his head. “We’ll see Frisch in Germany.”

  “You told him we were going to Germany?”

  “That’s on me.”

  “Did you tell him where in Germany?”

  “Makes no difference. Frisch will find us. The Krokodil too, I bet. Same as they’ll find a way out of the US. Frisch has in mind to kill someone.”

  “Who?”

  He waved his hand to signal that he’d tell her later. “The only way for him to track his target is to shadow us.”

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 10

  They drove him around the teeming warren of Beirut’s southern slums for a half hour so that he wouldn’t know where he was. Wyatt didn’t care. He knew where he was going.

  The cinder-block apartment houses cut out the sun, towering over the narrow streets, dropping his vision into darkness behind his Persol shades. Then light burst through where a building lay in ruins, destroyed by an Israeli raid a decade before. Suddenly it illuminated jostling traffic and bustling women swathed in abayas and children moving in erratic, excited packs. On each wall was a poster of the martyrs or of Sheikh Hassan, the dead and the soon to be dead, Hezbollah’s pantheon of the gone. They’re living it up in Jannah with Allah and Muhammad and the dark-eyed houris. Enjoy it while you can, guys, Wyatt thought. Nothing lasts, not even heaven.

  The two-inch-long metal cylinder taped to the back of his testicles grew warm. It was like wearing a shot glass full of the worst thing the world had ever seen. He wasn’t scared, only a little constricted by its position. He shifted his weight to make it less uncomfortable.

  The burly gunman beside Wyatt in the backseat sweated heavily through his black T-shirt. He held a Makarov pistol across his stomach, training it on the American. He rubbed at the perspiration beading in his beard, nervous and losing focus. The man in the passenger seat twisted toward Wyatt, a Kalashnikov aimed at the colonel’s face. The windows of the old Mercedes sedan were rolled down. Dust and heat wafted through them from the unpaved streets. Wyatt ignored the guns twitching at him. No wonder the poor bastards were sweating so hard: they knew who he was.

  The driver turned on his tape deck. The sound of an imam reciting the one hundred and third sura of The Koran blasted through the car, high and nasal and hanging onto the vowels. “By the mysteries of the dimensions of time, truly man is lost,” he recited. There are more reasons than that, Wyatt thought. The gunman in the passenger seat reached for the tape deck and turned down the volume. The driver gave him an accusing look.

  “It’s too loud,” the man with the Kalashnikov shouted.

  The driver waved his hand angrily. “Don’t yell at me.”

  They swung into a side street and dropped down a slope, cutting into a short access and then making a sharp turn into an underground garage. Wyatt noticed that the street outside the building was empty. The locals knew that Hezbollah wanted to see who was coming and they kept the road clear for the surveillance cameras on each cor
ner. Three gunmen with the build of Turkish wrestlers rolled the heavy iron door closed behind the car.

  Inside the parking lot, the darkness was absolute. Wyatt let them drag him out of the car. With each step, the short metal cylinder nipped at his testicles. Everything worth accomplishing demanded a price in pain, and Wyatt had endured suffering much more horrible than a brief discomfort in his nuts.

  His eyes adjusted as they climbed the stairs, picking out the uneven surface of the gray, unfinished steps. They took him into a room decorated with embroidered images of the golden Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and verses of the Koran. The sun crept through the shutters and the thin curtains and lit the opaque yellow of the walls. One of the wrestler-types gestured for him to sit on a thin mattress in the corner. He lowered himself down. Then the gunman kicked Wyatt in the head.

  As Wyatt lifted himself back into a sitting position, he savored the impact. When he boxed or fought a karate bout, he savored being hit as much as he enjoyed delivering a blow. He sucked in the other man’s aggression and added it to his own considerable store. That’s why he had let the Hezbollah guy kick him. He had seen it coming. He could have avoided it and snapped the guy’s ankle. But that wasn’t where he was at. Not yet.

  “Who told you the American was here?” Another man spoke, not the bully boy, a slighter figure emerging through the doorway. He wore a burgundy suit and a collarless shirt done up to the top button in the Iranian style. He was strong, but fat in the middle. Wyatt sized him up. This was one of the group’s thinkers, a policy guy. Kidnapping, of course, was a policy matter in Beirut. The man moved toward Wyatt and frowned down upon him. “Speak. Who told you the American was here?”

  “The hell do you care?” Wyatt rubbed his head, pretending the kick had truly hurt him. “You want what I’ve got, and I want the American. It’s a trade.”

  “This is the Middle East, Colonel Wyatt. We must bargain a long time before we strike a deal.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Which is why I prefer to take a lot of time to make our bargain. To increase the pressure on you, no?”