“I can wrap up the paperwork in three months,” said Garret. “Everything connected with Golden Asia is so clean, it squeaks. It will be easy.”
“Excellent. Actually, I have been thinking of getting out of the business, too.”
“You have?” asked Tommy in shock.
“Well, it’s either that or expand. I am no good at standing still. Never have been.”
“Where would you expand to?” asked Garret.
“United States. Canada. Philippines. Germany. England. I don’t know. But I guess that doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”
It was a rhetorical question.
Chin folded his hands. “Anything else?”
Neither Garret nor Tommy said a word.
“Good,” announced Chin, “because we have a lot of work to finish off in the next three months.”
***
Garret looked out the window of the Hong Kong Business Aviation Centre, a smaller airfield that catered to an exclusive clientele where private planes could get in and out discreetly and quickly.
“Is that the one, Daddy?” asked eleven-year-old, skinny blonde Olivia, pointing to a plane taxiing on the runway.
“No, not that one. But it will be soon,” said Garret.
Tommy approached with ten-year-old Abby. Abby was the Chinese version of Olivia. Both girls were jail bait at that point and, in a few years, Garret and Tommy were going to need baseball bats to fend off all the guys that were going to be chasing their daughters.
Abby saw Olivia and ran to her in delight.
“Olivia. Olivia! What are you doing here?”
Olivia hugged Abby. “I’m here to see my mommy.”
“Me, too!”
Garret looked at the sky and pointed. “Well, we won’t have to wait too long. I’m pretty sure that’s her plane landing over there.”
He turned to Tommy and said quietly, “I thought Jocelyn was coming in tomorrow.”
Tommy shrugged. “Chin pulled a rabbit out of his hat. This flight was fully booked, but somehow he got her on board.”
Garret hid his sudden chill. “I wish our wives would stop trying to save the world. Going to Thailand right after a tsunami was hardly a smart idea. They could have had a building fall on them or gotten typhoid.”
“Would you rather they stayed home and played mahjong?” Tommy grinned. “Besides, what’s the point of having a trophy wife if you can’t show her off? Having them do charity work is good for business.”
“You’re incorrigible, Tommy.”
“As if I knew what that meant, Mr. Fancy Lawyer,” snorted high-school dropout Tommy.
“It means…” But, before Garret could finish, Olivia and Abby began waving and jumping in delight as the plane taxied closer to the arrival bay.
“Hi, Mommy. Hi! Welcome back,” called the excited young girls in their high-pitched voices.
“It’s about time,” muttered Garret. “We have some things to discuss.”
He looked at Tommy, who nodded solemnly in agreement. “Yes, we do. Does Mary know?”
“She will soon. Jocelyn?”
“Same here.” Tommy shook his head. “This was a bad idea from the beginning.”
“The plane’s coming. It’s almost here,” shouted Abby.
All turned their eyes and focused on the plane gradually making its way toward them. It seemed like an eternity to the young, screaming girls who hadn’t seen their mothers for seventeen days.
Suddenly, BOOM! BOOM! The plane exploded! Instead of a plane on the tarmac, there was a long cylindrical inferno burning out of control. Pandemonium burst inside and outside the terminal.
Olivia screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!”
Garret held her close to his chest.
Abby dived into Tommy’s arms, sobbing. “No, that’s not Mommy. It’s not Mommy! That’s the wrong plane.”
BOOM! The plane split in half.
BOOM! The plane exploded into smithereens.
The two men looked at each other, each worried, suspicious and afraid. No, it was not the wrong plane. It was exactly the right one. They both knew it, but damned if they were going to say anything to anybody at any time.
An explosion of this magnitude had likely destroyed everything, including the supposedly indestructible black box. But, even if the flight data recorder survived, it would never be found.
***
Garret and Tommy knocked on the door of the Good Shepherd School.
George opened the door. “May I help you?”
“We’d like to speak to Master Wu, please,” said Garret.
“He’s meditating.”
“It’s urgent,” Tommy added. “And we need privacy.”
“I understand. Please come in.”
***
Garret and Tommy sat at the kitchen table with Master Wu. It was the first time in years that Garret and Tommy had seen Master Wu, and yet it was like they never left. Master was still Master, and disciple was still disciple.
“We should have listened to you,” said Garret.
“The past is no more. What is important is to preserve the living,” said Master Wu.
“We want to go after Chin, and we need you to help us,” Tommy stated emphatically. “Now.”
Master Wu shook his head. “Patience. Now is not the time. Your daughters need you. Who will look after them if you are dead?”
“When then, Master Wu?” they asked.
“Not until your daughters are grown and can look after themselves if you are not here.”
Master Wu poured some tea for Garret and Tommy.
“And you have to go back to work for Chin,” he told them.
“What?” exploded Garret.
“That’s crazy,” said Tommy.
“Can you defeat Chin now?” asked Master Wu.
“We can never amass what is needed to battle Chin,” stated Garret practically. “And look at us. Tommy has eaten half of Hong Kong, and I haven’t done anything to keep in shape since law school.”
“Which is why you need to go back to work for him. If you don’t, don’t you think your daughters would be next?”
Garret tapped his little Chinese teacup on the table, then stopped. “I can’t do it.”
“If you don’t wait, then both you and your daughters will die,” Master Wu said, compassion in his voice. “Is that what you want to happen?”
Garret exhaled. He knew Master Wu was right.
“What do we do for fifteen years then?”
“You train.”
“Won’t work for me. If I go back, eating and drinking is about all I do,” said Tommy.
“How about you, Garret?”
“I could make time. No, I will make time if that’s what it takes.” His voice hardened.
“Good. We start training again after we finish tea.”
“But by then, I’ll be over fifty. I couldn’t keep up with Chin. He hasn’t let up, and I’ll never catch up with him.”
“Not you,” said Master Wu. “Me.”
Tommy laughed. “You’ll be seventy-something.”
Master Wu pointed to a thirteen-year-old boy practicing his forms in the living room by himself. There was nothing remarkable about his style or strength that they could see.
“Not me personally. I will train him.”
“He looks so… ordinary,” said Garret pensively.
“But he has the heart of a true Shaolin. He is righteous, and he understands.”
Focused eyes on the boy only brought more doubt. But to Garret and Tommy, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice but to trust Master Wu.
“What’s his name?”
“Noah. Noah Reid,” said Master Wu. “I will teach him the way of the Shaolin and, at the right time, he will unleash the Tiger.”
“God, I hope you’re right,” said Garret.
THE END… I hope you enjoyed EVIL RISES. Now it’s time to move on to the full-length novels in the series! We’re going to fast forward a couple of decades to
Terror Unleashed!
TERROR UNLEASHED
Introduction
New attorney Noah Reid is catapulted into a brutal Shaolin underworld when his boss is discovered to have bilked billions from Chin, the firm’s biggest client, a psychopathic Kung Fu Master.
This is not a nonfiction work, so please do not use anything you find here in a school paper or company report or to impress a certain somebody. You might be unpleasantly surprised if you do. For example, driving from Hong Kong to Macau is presently impractical. And whatever you do, please don’t engage in battle with a Bengal tiger.
Enjoy the ride... and the read.
Chapter 1
Inside the cargo hold of a Cessna Super Cargomaster EX.
Four hundred and twenty-seven cubic feet of moody, fleeting shadows.
Dark, confined quarters packed with pallets of specialized goods, crates and boxes of all sizes.
From somewhere in the belly of the turboprop come low, intense, feral, gnashing growls.
Wading through the tightly packed cargo revealed the source of the sound—a caged Bengal tiger stirring in fitful slumber. One hundred inches long, the powerful, endangered golden feline with ink-black stripes twitched as guttural sounds of hostility emanated from its throat.
The animal stretched, opening its mouth to reveal that one of the two long upper canine teeth is missing. While biting at the door trying to free itself from the metal cage, the tiger lodged a tooth in the door’s keyhole. Deep indentations from bite marks on the bars of the cage showed the cat’s desperate struggle to be unleashed.
Menacing... ominous... foreboding... Four hundred and fifty pounds of pained fury.
A sudden, brutal turbulence caused the turboprop to rock furiously.
Cargo topples against the feline’s cage. The big cat pounces to its feet, exploding with a roar that permeates the air.
***
In the sky, coming from a different direction and far from the Cargomaster, the same turbulence affected a wide-body commercial Boeing 747 airliner. Inside the darkened passenger cabin, completely oblivious to the unsteady, jolting movements, was twenty-eight-year-old Noah Reid. While other passengers gripped their seats tightly or emitted cries of fear, the lean, handsome and hard-bodied young man in jeans and a wrinkled white linen shirt slept, cramped up by an economy window seat.
A frightened five-year-old girl sitting beside him, wearing glasses with Coke bottle lenses, stuck her index finger repeatedly into Noah’s side, whispering, “Mister? Mister?”
However, Noah remained lifeless to the world as the restless girl kept poking. “Hello? Mister?”
When there was still no response, the girl unbuckled her seat belt, climbed onto his lap and pinched his cheeks. Noah finally awoke and quickly surveyed the young Shirley Temple sitting on him. “You’re not supposed to do this. Why are you here?” he asked.
Throwing her arms around Noah’s neck and gripping tightly, she whimpered, “I’m scared.”
“Where are your parents?”
She pointed to an out-of-shape man in a blue velvet tracksuit sleeping in the aisle seat. There were more than a few empty little bottles of brandy rolling around on his passenger tray.
“He’s sleeping,” said the child, stating the blatantly obvious. “I didn’t want to wake him up.”
“But you’re happy to wake me out of the best sleep I’ve had in three months,” Noah said drily.
“Mommy says never to bother Daddy when he’s been drinking.”
She squeezed Noah’s fatigued body with a ferocious grip worthy of a person five times her age. “I’m scared, Mister.”
“There’s nothing to be...”
The words died in midsentence as suddenly a nerve-racking jolt rocked the plane―and was that the wind, some terrified passenger or possibly the faint sound of some animal howling?
The stormy bumpiness swelled to an all-out rockiness. The girl screamed with primal terror. “There! Did you hear that? Someone’s trying to kill a bear!”
“No one’s trying to kill anybody.” Noah hugged the little girl tight, trying to comfort her. “My mom used to say, ‘Whenever there’s a storm, it gets a whole lot worse before it gets better.’”
The plane rocked perilously, and the animal sounds built to a crescendo for thirty seconds. It was probably the first time in history that every white-knuckled passenger had obeyed the seat belt sign.
The spooked young cherub pointed out the window. In the far distance was the faint glimmer of lights from the Cessna. “I think the bear is over there.”
“There aren’t any bears flying here or anywhere,” Noah assured her. “Just relax. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“If it’s not a bear, then it’s a tiger.”
“You have a wild imagination.” Noah sat back in his seat, trying to relax.
Then, just as suddenly as the violent masses of air movement began, calmness arrived. Debris was strewn down the aisle and by the passengers’ feet, but it appeared there was no damage otherwise. Oblivion was averted, replaced by an oasis of calm.
“Didn’t I tell you? There was no need to be afraid,” soothed Noah, placing the young girl back in her own seat beside her passed-out father.
“There’s always something to be scared about, Mister.”
***
The wide-bodied commercial airliner landed smoothly in the growing darkness at the Hong Kong International Airport. Flanked by glowing red lights, the metal behemoth ambled down the runway like a giant sloth, slowing until it reached the arrival gate.
As passengers made their way off the 747, a loading vehicle pulled up to the cargo hold. The pallets automatically moved from the cargo hold onto the waiting loader.
At another part of the airport, unloading the cargo off the Cessna Cargomaster was not as smooth.
Four husky men were in the cargo hold, wearing thick Kevlar-reinforced gloves and jackets, carrying out the caged tiger. Now fully awake, the feline thrashed about, trying to bite at the men and roaring as they gingerly carried the savage, imprisoned booty. With only one of its two canine teeth left, the cat looked especially menacing as the men loaded it onto a special flatbed truck.
***
Noah knew nothing of the other offloading as he exited the plane directly into the terminal, entirely at home in the sea of Asians. He’d been born and bred on the continent and switched between English, Mandarin and Cantonese without missing a beat. He walked a couple of hundred yards, cleared customs easily, picked up his huge duffel bag from the baggage carousel, then stood outside in the taxi line.
Totally exhausted, he groaned when he saw the line-up of twenty fares ahead of him in the taxi queue. Sighing in resignation, he shook his head, eyes wandering throughout the airport. And then, he saw a jaw-dropping sight: four men with ravaged faces and battle-scarred forearms riding on a flatbed truck, carefully holding onto a cage that contained an angry Bengal tiger thrashing in its prison. Even more astounding was the person standing erect on top of the truck’s cab overseeing the proceedings: a superbly conditioned Chinese man in his fifties, wearing an impeccably tailored navy blue Chinese suit. It was Chin Chee Fok, more commonly known just by his surname: Chin. Absolutely in control, there was something about his presence that was both sinister and demanding of respect. If martial arts superstar Bruce Lee had lived to his fifties, he would have looked like Chin. While Noah didn’t know who he was, his image and aura burned into his brain’s temporal lobes—this was not someone he would easily forget.
Noah stood transfixed, watching the surly feline pace and gnash at the cautious and fearful handlers.
“Hey, hey! Rajiv, at your service. You coming in or not?” shouted a voice with a strong Indian accent.
Noah twisted his head to see a turbaned young man holding the door open to an old aptly named Yellow Cab. “Sorry about that. Sure.” Noah entered, but before he could settle down and tell the cabbie his destination, mayhem erupted.
The driver of the fla
tbed truck hit a rare pothole, knocking the cage off balance. To keep it from tipping, one of the men grabbed the cage to steady it. That split second of thoughtlessness was all the tiger needed. With one swift bite, the tiger chomped through the handler’s Kevlar glove, severing several of his fingers.
The feline’s victim started screaming and let go of its barred prison. The howl caused the truck’s driver to slam on the brakes. With some deft footwork, Chin managed to stay on top of the truck’s cab, but the momentum of the cage carried it forward and it smacked the other handlers. Those unfortunates reacted and frantically pushed the cage away with a freaked sense of self-preservation.
It was a big mistake. What the men didn’t know was that the tiger’s attempts to bite its way free from the cage were partially successful—the lock had been broken with one of the animal’s bone-crunching bites. However, the tooth stuck in the keyhole kept the door closed. Until now.
One handler inadvertently yanked on the door of the iron coop while trying to stabilize himself. That loosened the tooth, and it dropped to the ground. The gentle sound of enamel hitting asphalt was the thunderous toll of catastrophe. The cage’s door burst open.
With a primal surge, the freed beast escaped its incarceration, biting the arm of one of the hapless minions, severing it, then making an electrifying dash to freedom. The handlers and onlookers shrieked and screamed as they haphazardly dashed off in all directions, trying to evade the striped ball of fury.
Not so for Chin. Instead of running away, he did the exact opposite. He leapt from the top of the cab to the ground. With amazing agility, he transformed from respectable businessman to mammalian stalker. He chased the raging beast down the walkway of the airport terminal, weaving around all the bystanders.
The Noah Reid Series: Books 1-3: The Noah Reid Action Thriller Series Boxset Page 4
