by Rob Aspinall
Philippe didn’t question it; he just came with.
The bar was varnished wood with two high, leather stools in front and a row of optics behind, along with a fridge full of beers and snacks.
I peered around one end of the bar, Philippe around the other. JPAC were almost on Su. Still unseen. Like ninjas. The female of the two slowly unzipped a side pocket of a compact rucksack strapped to her back. She brought out a white cloth. Chloroform?
She didn’t get to use it. The guard on the balcony stepped back inside and fixed his eyes on JPAC. They froze. Su and the girls kept on singing. The guard pulled his machine gun from beneath his jacket and shouted for Su to get out. The JPAC team dove behind one of the sofas just as the guard opened fire.
Sumo appeared from the bathroom, doing up his fly. He pushed Su and the girls into the master bedroom. JPAC lady tossed a grenade at the guard’s feet. I covered my ears, shut my eyes and held my breath. It flashed and smoked. When I opened my eyes, JPAC were rising out from behind the sofa, firing into the thinning cloud. The guard dropped, plugged with holes. Just Sumo left now behind that bedroom door.
Philippe gave me the thumbs up again. I let myself breathe and we ran from bar to sofa, unseen by JPAC as they listened in to the panicking voices behind the door. The smoke was getting up my nostrils. I twitched my nose, trying to shake off an itch. Philippe pointed two fingers in the direction of the JPAC agents and ran a thumb across his throat. He counted down one, two, three with his fingers.
We rose and raised our guns in tandem. I’d shoot the woman in the back of the head. Philippe would take out the man. Could I really kill someone in cold blood this time?
“Either you end them or they’ll end you,” Philippe had told me during basic training.
Before it got to that, I ballsed up anyway. Yep, I guess I kinda sneezed.
For real, this time.
25
Shadow Team
What a klutz I was.
The pair of us fired.
The pair of us missed.
Well, Philippe hit the man in the arm, but only a flesh wound. As soon as I let out that high-pitched girly achoo, JPAC had reacted. And we’d lost the element of surprise. JPAC man clicked empty, but dived on Philippe and wrestled him to the floor.
The woman didn’t have time to change clips, but she wasn’t about to stand still like those shooting-range targets. I panicked and missed again. She spin-kicked the gun out of my hand with one foot, bringing the other foot round to catch me hard in the chest. I flew back over the sofa, but rebounded to my feet.
Philippe and JPAC man were still wrestling in a frantic, grunting stalemate. JPAC lady moved to pick up my pistol, but I rugby-tackled her before she could reach it. We crashed through the top of a glass coffee table, JPAC lady taking the mean end of the impact. We hit the carpet beneath in a glass crunch and a desperate tangle of black spandex and self-defence. She battled to get on top. I fought to keep her down. She grabbed a shard of glass and tried to give me a skin peel, cutting a shoulder strap off my vest. I used a new move Philippe had taught me and made her wrist crack, the glass falling from her hand, now dripping with blood from a cut in her palm.
She used her knee to flip me off across the carpet. I forward-rolled up onto my feet in time to block a tornado of follow-up blows.
Meanwhile, Philippe’s fight hadn’t gotten any further than the floor. Lots of ultimate fighting moves, wrestling in and out of different death-holds.
As we all fought back and forth, “Like A Virgin” switched to “Gangnam Style” on the karaoke.
“You have to be joking,” said the woman in a familiar accent. “I hate this song.”
She seemed to take it out on me, stronger, faster and more skilled than before. For all the crash-course training I’d had lately, it was instinct keeping me in the fight.
Still, I had one advantage. She fought like Philippe. As if they’d had exactly the same training. And in those sparring sessions on the crash mat, I’d learned to anticipate a lot of his moves. I did the same here, counter-attacking each punch and kick. Using her own power and speed against her before covering up. Staying in it. Frustrating her. Until she made a mistake. She left herself open as she swung with a right. I countered with an open palm beneath her jaw, followed by an elbow and a judo throw across the room, all in one flowing move. She landed on her spine on a wide, shallow set of steps leading up to the balcony area.
Ooh, that had to hurt. No crash mat for you, love.
Okay, she was pissed. She pulled off her ski mask and shook out her blonde hair. Inge. #shouldaknown.
She spat blood, cracked her neck one way and then the next, not taking her eyes off me for a nanosecond. I wasn’t taking a single eyeball off her either, but out the corner of one I could see Philippe winning his own personal battle. He had the guy’s neck between both legs. He had the leverage and the guy had nothing left to do but die.
I thought I had the measure of Inge, too, until she ripped a Velcro strap off her belt and pulled out a knife. She came at me in a blur. I twisted out of the way, but she was getting closer. A couple of rips were slashed into the belly of my vest, blood dripping onto the carpet. Superficial wounds, but stinging like a mo-fo.
She was backing me into a corner. Nowhere to go. I really should have packed a knife.
I heard a sickening snap under the music. JPAC man lay limp on the floor, his head and neck twisted the wrong way, his tongue hanging out of the corner of his mouth like a stunned abattoir cow.
Philippe was up on his feet, flanking Inge from the left.
She appeared to rethink the situation, backing up the steps, tucking away the knife. The balcony door was halfway open, twenty floors of Taiwanese breeze toying with the drapes. She spat blood on the floor, bolted out onto the balcony and vaulted over the edge. I ran out after her, expecting to see her body splatting on the street below. All I saw was a dark chute opening out around halfway down. The crazy bitch had only gone and base-jumped. She glided silently between glass towers a block away. I returned inside, scooping my gun off the floor. Philippe fired a couple of bullets into the home-cinema system, putting an abrupt, smouldering end to the karaoke. I unhooked one of the weapons from the dead guards and followed him to the bedroom door. Philippe shouted something in Chinese. A deep, gravelly voice shouted back. Philippe kicked the door open and shouted again. We made our way into the bedroom where Sumo stood in front of a glossy white sliding door, submachine gun in hands. Philippe barked at him again to drop his weapon (I think). Whatever he was saying, he kept repeating it. I had Sumo in my sights across the bedroom. It was a stand-off. Who would flinch first?
Sumo sized up the pair of us and lowered his weapon. “Who are you two?” he asked in English. “What happened to the others?”
“Rogue assets we’ve been tracking,” Philippe said. “We let them do the dirty work and then stepped in. The woman got away. We’ll have a team pick her up.”
“Well, you’re late,” Sumo said.
“Traffic,” Philippe said.
Sumo grunted in recognition. “Taipei.”
So Sumo was an inside man. Another JPAC pawn.
“Where’s your boss?” I asked him.
Sumo slid the door open. The great Chien Hung Su cowered inside a walk-in wardrobe with the girls, little bundles of terror holding on to their boobs.
This was who they’d come to kill? Captain Chicken Legs, shaking in his pervy little underpants? Philippe said something to the girls and waved his gun towards the bedroom door. The girls picked up their clothes and ran out of the bedroom, muted screams coming from the living room, no doubt as they stepped around dead bodies and blood.
“Put some clothes on,” Philippe told the old man. “You’re coming with us.”
Sumo helped Su get dressed – all the time, the minister cursing his chief bodyguard for his treachery. Or, at least, that’s the way it came across. I really had to learn Chinese. Or remember how to speak it. I hated not knowing
what people were saying.
Sumo was left to make his own escape. He chose an elevator down to the lobby. Meanwhile, we hit the roof to the cry of police sirens. A red-and-blue train of lights coming down the street. Philippe strapped the old man to his front and went first across the wire, hooking himself on with a buckle to a short cord attached to his belt. The way back between buildings was on an ascent. This meant we had to hook our legs over and hang upside down, going hand over hand across that head-spinning drop, only a tiny graphite buckle between safety and certain doom.
Philippe worked his way back up the wire. It seemed to take an age. The cops hit the kerb outside the front of the hotel. Tiny insect men cordoned off the street and filed into the building. SWAT would be hot on their heels, for sure. At last, Philippe reached the other side with Su. I hooked my own safety cord onto the wire and lowered myself backwards over the hell-drop below.
I hooked both feet over the wire and shuffled off, one hand at a time, the carbon wire digging raw into my palms.
It was tough going. Not least because the wind had picked up.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down.
Around halfway across, my arms on fire, I looked down.
The streetlights spun and I began to sway on the wire.
Worse than that, I started to feel faint, my hard pounding harder.
Oh, come on. Not now.
“It’s okay,” Philippe said calmly into my right ear. “Take a breath …”
I sucked in some air, let it out slow.
“Now,” he said, “you’ve got twenty seconds to make it over here before I cut the wire.”
“What? You can’t—”
“Twenty …” he said.
“Hey, wait—”
“Nineteen …”
Shit, shit, shit!
I moved as fast as I could, one hand over the other, over and over, no time to worry about the forty-storey fall, the burning in my arms or the raw skin on my palms.
“Ten, nine, eight,” Philippe counted.
I’d had enough countdowns to last me a lifetime.
“Six, five, four …”
I was nearly there, but nearly wasn’t enough.
“Don’t you cut that wire,” I said.
“Three, two, one …”
Suddenly I felt a pair of vice-like hands grip me under the armpits. Philippe hoisted me up off the wire and plonked me unceremoniously on the roof of the empty office building.
“What the fuck was that?” I shouted, shoving him in the chest.
“Got you over here, didn’t it?” Philippe said.
The police broke out onto the roof of the hotel. “Just try not to sneeze next time,” he said.
I gave Philippe a snide look, detached myself from the line and pulled Su low out of sight. Philippe reverse-drilled the grappling gun from the concrete roof. He wound the zip cord back in through the muzzle a second or two before the police reached the edge of the hotel roof. There was nothing for them to see other than a penthouse floor full of dead bodies, a smashed coffee table and one smoking karaoke system. We collected our things and slunk back into the deserted office building, escaping out of the rear into a Mazda SUV we’d parked in an alley that afternoon. I bundled Su into the back and pushed his face down onto the seat. Philippe snatched the parking ticket left on the windscreen, scrunched it up and chucked it on top of an overflowing bin. We screeched our way out of there, fast.
“I have to ask,” I said as Philippe navigated the narrow backstreets of Taipei, “what the hell are we doing?”
“You can let Mr Su up now,” Philippe said.
As the minister sat upright and adjusted himself, Philippe threw a bottle of water and a phone over his shoulder. I caught them both, unscrewed the top on the bottle and handed the water to Su. He took a long, shaky drink. I helped him steady the bottle. It was good to be the calm one for a change.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He said something that might have been thank you.
“English please, Mr Su,” Philippe said.
“Who are you working for?” asked Su. “The Chinese?”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Philippe said, steering the SUV out onto the main roads, swarming with taxis and scooters.
“We weren’t with the people trying to kill you,” I said.
“Then who was trying to kill me?”
“The Joint Peace Alliance Committee,” I said. “You heard of them?”
Su shook his head. “No.”
“Then we can rule out internal politics,” Philippe said.
He gave Su a quick rundown on JPAC, Su shaking his head with every revelation.
“I think my assassination was meant to start a war,” Su said.
“A cold one, at least,” said Philippe.
“Okay, timeout,” I said. “What war?”
“Between China and the US,” Philippe said.
Su nutshelled it out for me. “Taiwan has a protection agreement with the US. Any perceived act of aggression from China means the US would have to respond on our behalf.”
“Why would JPAC want a stand-off?” I asked.
“Unsettle the two biggest superpowers?” Philippe said, getting us off the city streets and out onto the freeway. “JPAC all over. I’m just not sure why.”
“Where do you two fit in?” Su asked.
“Somewhere in the middle,” I said.
“It’s a long story, Mr Su,” said Philippe. “Is there someone you can meet? Someone you trust?”
“I’ll make a call,” he said, pulling a mobile out of his suit jacket and holding it to his ear.
“Not on your phone,” I said, handing Su a burner – a throwaway handset we knew for sure wasn’t bugged, tracked or traceable. “Here, use this.”
Su punched in a number from his contacts list. He held a brief conversation in Chinese while the Mazda cruised the slow lane and I picked tiny bits of coffee table glass out of my hair.
“Okay,” Su said, coming off the phone. “Take the next exit.”
26
Peeing In Public
Taoyuan Airbase. We rolled to a stop at the entrance – a large gate with foreboding signs and stern guards with German shepherds and mirrors on sticks to check for car bombs.
Philippe wound down his window and spoke in English. “General Yu is expecting us.”
The guard in charge of talking scanned a list attached to a clipboard. “Nothing on schedule,” he said as one of his mates shone a high-powered torch inside the car, trying his best to blind me.
“Out of car, please,” Clipboard said, opening Philippe’s door.
Su wound down his window. He barked something in Chinese. The guards snapped to attention and saluted, the colour draining from their faces. I could swear, even the sniffer dogs sharpened up. Clipboard grovelled, bowed and shouted for the gate to be opened.
“That’s right,” I said as we drove on through, “we’re on the guest list, bitches!”
Landing lights aside, the base was dark as a hole. We followed the red tail lights of the army jeep in front of us, chewing up a good mile of concrete before we came to a stop next to a helipad just off the main runway. The guards turned around and sped off back to their post, scared of offending the big boss with their presence. We sat and waited. General Yu was to chopper in and pick up Su. We’d then be guaranteed safe passage out of Taiwan on a private plane to the destination of our choice.
After what seemed like hours of waiting, I badly needed to pee.
Hamster bladders and black ops didn’t mix.
“In future, when we have a secret meeting,” I said, “can we make sure there are toilets?”
My complaints fell on deaf ears. Su was deep in thought, no doubt about the attempt on his life and the political fallout. Philippe was deep in ignoring me, as usual.
“I mean, if not a toilet, at least some other facilities,” I said. “We come to a super hi-tech country like Taiwan and we manage to find the on
e spot where there’s no bathroom or Wi-Fi.”
Su let out a big sigh. “Is she always like this?”
“I hope not,” Philippe said.
“That’s it,” I said. “I can’t hold on any longer.”
I pushed open the door and stepped halfway out, greeted by a wall of humidity.
“No watching me go,” I said.
Philippe glared at me in the rear view.
“I know some of the stuff you’re into,” I said, making strangling gestures with my hands. “Freak-aaaay.”
“I’m not freaky,” he said to Mr Su.
“Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “I’ve got some of your memories, remember?”
Su snapped. “Just go pee!” He shook his head. “You two are weird.”
I ran across the tarmac, into the grass that divided each section of runway.
Sweet effing relief.
If only it lasted.
I was startled mid-tinkle by a huge roar in the sky – a cargo plane punching a hole in the clouds and touching down with a screech on the far end of the runway. The ground rumbled as it got closer and closer towards my, um, position, shall we say.
Wasn’t General Yu supposed to be turning up in a helicopter? A cargo plane seemed a bit much.
It was only the tip of the nightmare berg.
Headlights shunted on from every direction. Heavy weapons locked and loaded. I pulled up my knickers, surrounded by Taiwanese army troops in their jeeps. They’d snuck up on us in the dark, the sneaky, stealthy bastards.
“Every time I go to pee …” I grumbled to myself, backing up slowly towards the SUV.
I expected someone to shout stop, but no one did. I climbed in the backseat.
“A bit OTT, don’t you think?” I said to Su.
The plane rolled to a stop no more than fifty feet away. Philippe looked left to right, front to back. He turned the engine on.
“What are you doing?” Su asked.
“I’m not sure this is a handover,” Philippe said.
