“No, thanks,” Max said.
Tom took one and opened it. He bit into it, turned to Max, and asked, “What’ve you got against moon pies?”
Max thought for a moment. “I just hate ’em.”
“Why?”
“They’re evil.”
Tom shook his head before eating the rest of his.
During the twenty-hour flight, Max and Tom reviewed the mission: weather, visibility, surf conditions, terrain, enemy forces, fortifications, friendlies, execution of the mission, extraction, communication, cover stories, and anything else they could think of. They agreed that they wouldn’t don heavy body armor; rather, they would rely on stealth and speed. Max drank as much water as he could, not knowing when he’d be able to hydrate after hitting the ground. Preparation breeds luck.
Having drunk so much water, now he had to relieve himself. He went to the head. Although the bathroom was small, it was luxurious, especially compared to pissing into a tube on the bulkhead of a military C-130 transport.
Max and Tom returned to their seats. Tom fidgeted. Max reclined his soft seat flat and extended the footrest to stretch out his legs. The air in the cabin was highly pressurized, so even though they were flying at forty-one thousand feet, it felt like cruising at three thousand. As a result, his heart and lungs didn’t have to work as hard to oxygenate his blood. Every two minutes, the Gulfstream replenished the cabin air, making it fresh. He inhaled long and deep and exhaled long and slow—then repeated. Soon he thought he heard himself snoring.
When he opened his eyes, the cabin was dark. He looked over at Tom, who was sleeping soundly. Max checked his watch—he’d slept for over three hours. He closed his eyes and drifted off once more.
A voice called to him. For a moment he thought he was a child again, and his father was waking him for school. Max opened his eyes.
It was Willy, dressed in a business suit. “Time to suit up, gents,” he said.
Max rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and looked over at Tom, who rubbed his eyes, too.
Tom complimented Willy on his threads. “You clean up well.”
“Shut up,” Willy snapped. “You know damn well I hate wearing this monkey suit.”
The brothers stood and walked to the back of the aircraft. Max stripped down to his black silk boxer shorts and merino wool socks. The style of his shorts was conservative enough that he could pose as a beachgoer if needed, and the silk was comfortable and dried easily when wet. The fit also gave him enough support so as to not break any family jewels while running. The airy fibers in his wool socks facilitated sweat evaporation in hot weather, causing a cooling action that also kept his skin dry. During cold weather, the wool insulated his feet by retaining warm air.
Max and Tom’s uniforms and weapons were sterile, free of serial numbers or tags that could be traced to the United States, just in case they were killed and their bodies found by the Chinese. Max slipped into Chinese olive-drab cargo pants and a black shirt that would help camouflage him at night but could also double for civilian wear. In an abdomen holster, he concealed a CF07, a Chinese compact pistol. It fired 9mm rounds, and CIA’s armorers had fitted it with a German match-grade barrel. In a pocket, he carried a Chinese knockoff of a British inflatable life jacket and flare in case the primary extraction failed and he needed to swim out to sea. This was his primary gear that he’d carry until death, or until the mission was complete—whichever came first.
His secondary gear included concealed ear and throat mic comms, customized Chinese sound-suppressed CS/LS3 submachine gun (a clone of Germany’s Heckler & Koch MP5), and armor-piercing hollow-point ammo. For his third line of gear, Max strapped on his parachute, which after landing would be the first piece of equipment he’d ditch.
Tom was outfitted similarly.
Soon Willy made radio comms with their agent Bruce on the ground. Then Willy turned to the brothers and said, “On the drop zone the rain is causing poor visibility and winds are blowing at thirty knots. This jump is outside of safety parameters.”
“Parameters?” Max said incredulously. “I can piss through thirty knots.” Both Max and Tom had jumped in worse conditions, and with their father’s life in the balance, this jump was a no-brainer.
Tom grinned. “Just don’t stand next to me when you start pissing into the wind.”
Max smiled. “Let’s do it.”
Willy breathed oxygen from a tube in the overhead, unlike a military plane, where the oxygen supply was in the bulkhead. The brothers followed his lead. The pure oxygen purged the nitrogen from their bloodstreams, helping them avoid the possibility of decompression sickness when the cabin depressurized at high altitude.
A mist of air roared into the cabin. Through the fog, Max watched as the elevation on his altimeter moved to the same altitude as outside the plane—twelve thousand feet.
Their plane continued to descend until Willy gave the “five minutes” warning. Then he released his breathing tube and went aft to the cargo hatch to make final preps for the jump.
Max and Tom returned their breathing tubes to the overhead and walked back to join Willy, who had hooked himself to a cable so he wouldn’t fall out of the plane. Willy opened the hatch.
Max and Tom huddled up next to the door and grabbed the railing so they wouldn’t fall out too soon. Frigid wind sucked and howled hard at them, and the Gulfstream’s engines became louder, making verbal communication difficult. Max ignored the wind and the noise and focused on taking deep, slow breaths. His respiration and heart rate slowed to a crawl.
Willy signaled with three fingers—three minutes.
The three men were close enough to see each other, but Max passed the signal back to Tom to make sure he got it. Max continued to focus on his breathing, and the core of his body seemed to fill with Herculean strength.
Then Willy signaled with his index finger and thumb together—thirty seconds.
Max repeated the message for Tom, who acknowledged. Max glanced at his altimeter. They neared seven hundred feet.
Willy slapped Max on the leg. “Go, go, go!” he shouted.
“Go, go, go!” Max repeated as he stepped toward the opening and released his grip on the rail. He hurtled through the black air, heated by the Gulfstream’s engines. Max arched his back hard so he wouldn’t somersault out of control. He hoped the turbulence didn’t crack his back. Then he counted off three seconds before he pulled his ripcord. The bowels of his parachute pack opened up and excreted the spring-loaded chute above him. He winced in anticipation of the violent deceleration of over a hundred miles an hour to almost a complete stop. But he was still falling. He didn’t remember a chute deployment taking this long before. Uh-oh.
An unseen force gripped him, yanking him upward and cinching the straps tight around his groin. Glancing above, he saw his chute fully open. He breathed deeply, relieved there was no malfunction. Higher up, the shadowy silhouette of the Gulfstream continued its night flight to Sanya Phoenix International Airport. Beneath him, speckles of Hainan lights blurred up through the driving rain.
Max recognized the lights of the resort area below and the unlit expanse as the forest. He could even make out the illumination of a ship on the sea.
Max flipped on his panoramic night vision goggles. The four intensifier tubes doubled his field of vision from standard NVGs. He searched for his brother until he spied the infrared glow stick on the back of his helmet. Great. Tom must’ve delayed opening his chute, because he was already below Max in altitude.
When Max was five years old and Tom wasn’t even a year old yet, their mother was killed, and Max often had to take care of Tommy. Even now that Tom was twenty-three years old and not so little anymore, Max still felt responsible for him.
From the ebony mass of trees came an infrared signal—Bruce. Yes!
The temperature near the ground was in the seventies, and Max was grateful they didn’t have to jump from higher up, where it was literally freezing. He took hold of the toggles for his
risers and steered toward the infrared light signaling up from the woods. I hope this guy chose a big enough clearing and isn’t slamming us into the trees. Lightning flashed. Compared to getting struck by lightning, slamming into a tree didn’t seem so bad.
The earth approached slowly, but the lower Max descended, the faster the ground seemed to come up at him. The man with the infrared light appeared in an open meadow—more than enough space to land in. Tom was on target but came down hard and had to do a parachute landing fall.
Max tugged on the riser toggles and flared his chute. His feet touched the ground lightly. Bruce’s night vision faced in Max’s direction, and Max imagined how impressed Bruce must be with his perfect landing. Pride filled the frogman’s chest. But before his chute collapsed, a gust of wind filled it, jerked him off his feet, and bounced him on his derriere. Then it dragged him across sharp rocks and stabbing branches, knocking his noggin. He tucked his chin to his chest to avoid further injury to his skull. The wind and his chute dribbled him across the dirt. He slipped off his main chute, and the dribbling stopped. The silky fabric blew away, but he couldn’t leave it for the Chinese to find, so he chased it down. The trees stopped his fleeing chute, and he grabbed hold of it before it could run away again. He bundled it up and returned to Tom and Bruce, who’d stepped out of the clearing and into the trees where they’d be less visible if any uninvited visitors arrived.
Tom tapped his foot impatiently, and Bruce wasn’t smiling.
Instead of the Jedi knight Max was supposed to be, he’d just performed like a rodeo clown. His pride hurt more than his body. But all that meant little compared to the fact that time wasn’t ticking on Dad’s side.
2
Under a moonless sky, Tom and Bruce stood guard while Max dug a hole to conceal the parachutes. After Max covered the chutes in dirt, Bruce escorted them through the wilderness. In Max’s green night vision, the trees stood like sleeping sentinels, and he walked quietly as if to avoid disturbing their slumber. Several minutes later, the trio arrived at a dark-colored van parked beside a dirt road. They jumped inside—the vehicle’s interior lights had been disabled. Bruce fired up the engine, and without using his headlights, he rolled onto the road, which bent and curved like a snake.
Max began the conversation by providing their bona fides. “Max and Tom.” They used their first names because they were easier to remember. And if they found themselves in the dicey situation of being in the presence of two or more people who knew them by different covers, at least their first names would be consistent. When they needed last names, they gave aliases.
“Bruce.”
“Great to meet you,” Max said. Like other ops where a special operator met an agent for the first time, their bona fides seemed simple and natural, but they were predetermined phrases—codes—to verify they were indeed who they were supposed to be.
Bruce completed the exchange: “Welcome to China.” With their identities verified, they could get down to business. “We are already on the clock, so I will skip the small talk and give you the update.” Bruce spoke Hong Kong English, pronouncing the like tuh, and he didn’t use contractions. Even so, he was easy to understand. “Years ago, CIA asked me to gather intel on China’s submarine base, so I hired a married couple to rent a beach house close by and keep it under surveillance. Because we were also within sight of Seven Ball’s residence, CIA asked us to keep an eye on that, too. And I recruited Seven Ball’s live-in maid to feed me information. Personally I did close target recces on the outer perimeter. The perimeter walls to Seven Ball’s residence are eight meters tall, too high to scale, so the guards are mostly focused on the main gate. As for the wall facing the sea, we have never seen the guards check back there.
“When Seven Ball had some construction going on in the main residence, after a couple days, the workers hammered and sawed late into the night, probably trying to meet a deadline, so I used the noise and darkness to plant some spikes on the outside of the wall facing the sea. CIA thought it was too risky but I had already done it, and the spikes were painted the same color as the wall, so even if one of the guards did go back there, he would not see the spikes unless he knew what he was looking for. Seven Ball seemed to keep most of his work locked up in Hanoi, so we could never find out much here.
“Tonight we will climb the spikes to the top of the wall and lower ourselves inside by rope. Next, we will link up with the maid, who will take us to Seven Ball. Finally, we will snatch him and take him out the same way we came in.”
“How much do you trust this maid?” Max asked.
Bruce drove out of the forest. “She hates Seven Ball, but she has mouths to feed, so she needs the work. And I pay her a lot more than Seven Ball does.”
After cruising on a series of streets and then along a coastal road, they passed a row of resorts before Bruce pulled off the pavement and onto a dirt road. He parked in a coconut grove mixed with short evergreens tucked between the coastal road to the north and the ocean south.
“Seven Ball’s place is a little over a klick east of here.” Bruce turned off the ignition.
The three exited the van and started hiking. Soon vertical spaces opened up between the trees, and a massive wall appeared—the perimeter of Seven Ball’s estate. At least one sentry would be protecting the front, but Max’s team wouldn’t be entering from there. As they neared the estate, Bruce led them to the back wall, taking them out of the cover and concealment of the trees. The whole rear wall sat in the ocean. Max, Tom, and Bruce crouched as they waded into seawater above their ankles. Max decided he must’ve scraped an ankle because the saltwater stung it, but the sting made him feel alive. The salt would disinfect the scrape, and the tingle kept him alert. Once a frogman, always a frogman—the ocean is your mother.
They followed the back wall, its surface composed of baked brick and interstices filled with mortar. Max looked for the spikes, but even with his night vision, he couldn’t spot them. He hoped this op wasn’t a goat screw. Max had been surprised before, and he didn’t like surprises. But Bruce was doing well so far, so Max had no reason to doubt him. Yet.
Max felt like a kid about to sneak into the candy store. His blood pumped with anticipation as Bruce stepped up onto the first rod. He reached up and grabbed another and continued to climb.
Max tightened the sling on his submachine gun, keeping it close to his body, and followed Bruce while Tom held his weapon at the ready and covered them from the rear. In the pouring rain, Max had to be careful not to slip and let his muzzle strike the wall. Unlike the natural splash of seawater against the wall, the unnatural metal ching of a gun barrel against stone could alert Seven Ball’s men. Bruce disappeared over the top of the wall.
Surprise, speed, and violence of action were key. Soon Max cleared the top, too. There he discovered that the wall was as thick as a twin bed was wide. He lay down flat on top of the wall to keep a low profile. Inside the compound, the ground had been built up, so Max would only have to hang down off the ledge, let go, and drop the remaining inches to the ground. Bruce was already waiting below. Before joining him, Max stayed on top of the wall and kept an eye on Tom to make sure no one ambushed him during his climb.
As Tom neared the top, Max dropped down inside of enemy central. There was no need for elaborate hand signals. They were big boys who played by big boy rules. Max and Tom had done this type of work enough that they knew what had to be done, and they’d been together enough to be able to read each other’s movements—and if necessary, read each other’s shooting.
Footsteps sounded from around the corner.
Damn.
Tom stretched flat on top of the wall. Max hoped its height and thickness would keep him out of view.
This could get up close and personal fast. The footsteps grew louder, and Max’s heightened senses amped up the volume. It was too wet outside for a midnight stroll. This walker had to be a roving patrol. Bruce vanished into an alcove that was empty except for a large potted hibiscus. Max
followed. Bruce squatted down behind the pot. It was big enough for him to hide behind but not big enough to conceal Max, too. Damn.
Max’s heart hammered inside his chest, reverberating in his neck and ears. With his hand on his sound-suppressed submachine gun and his finger near the trigger, he aimed the attached laser in the direction where he expected the guard to appear. Shooting with a laser was different than lining up one’s sights and shooting. Sight shooting was more dependent on consistency in body positions, such as foot placement, cheek to the stock, and so on, but using a laser was more like a video game—point and shoot. Without night vision, the laser would be invisible to the guard.
For men like Max and Tom, such violence was controlled like the volume on a music player. They knew when to turn it up and when to turn it down. Engaging in a firefight at this moment would take away the critical element of surprise and likely take away Seven Ball before they reached him. Turn down the volume. With the flick of a switch, Max and Tom could crank the sound up to full blast, if necessary.
Even if the guard didn’t see Max, he might sense him. Some people’s senses were better than others—touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. Likewise, his father had pointed out that some people’s sixth sense was more developed than others. As a child, Max had confirmed this to be true. He sat in class and got a feeling that someone was looking at him. When he turned around, he caught a girl watching him. At another time, he’d be staring at another classmate, and she’d turn around to catch him.
He breathed in deep and slow and exhaled long, clearing his mind of Dad, Tom, Bruce, the mission, the approaching guard, and everything else. If the advancing guard had a sensitive sixth sense, Max didn’t want to show up on his radar. He hugged the wall and repeated in his mind, I am a wall, I am a wall … Max united himself with the solid brick wall he embraced. He imagined its weight and steadfastness. As he blended into the wall, he experienced the vague sense of footsteps and a shadow. Then they dissipated.
Autumn Assassins: [#3] A Special Operations Group Thriller Page 3
