Zhou popped to his feet and spun around. Jiang was already there, lunging at him with a knife he carried on his belt. Zhou saw the glint as the blade thrust toward his chest. He tried twisting away, but the tip caught his sleeve, and he felt it slice across his right bicep.
He ignored the cut and hurled a left cross into Jiang’s temple. Jiang let out a curse, realizing he was battling the man who had crushed his head the night before.
Zhou gave him no time to contemplate that. The Makarov was too far away to retrieve, so he did the unexpected and pressed the attack. He followed his punch with a roundhouse kick that struck Jiang in the thigh. It was designed less to punish than to incite a response, and it succeeded. Jiang pulled back the knife and recklessly thrust toward his opponent’s stomach.
Zhou was ready. He threw his left hand on Jiang’s wrist, easily shoving the parry aside. Using Jiang’s momentum, he pulled and twisted the knife-wielding wrist, propelling Jiang forward. Zhou continued the spinning motion, driving his opposite shoulder against Jiang’s arm with his full weight.
Jiang’s arm felt like it was being yanked from its socket, and he stumbled forward in agony. The knife dropped free, and he fell to the ground. In the blink of an eye, the knife was in Zhou’s hand, driving toward Jiang’s head. Zhou wanted to kill the man, and could have done so easily, but he resisted the impulse. Jiang would suffer more by rotting in a jail cell. He reversed the blade, striking Jiang below the ear with the butt of the knife. Jiang’s world turned black as the blow to his carotid artery cut the flow of blood to his brain. Zhou stood over him, catching his breath. A phone call to the People’s Armed Police would ensure the bully an unpleasant welcome when he awoke. But first Zhou had to catch the caravan.
The trucks had disappeared down the street. Zhou found the Makarov and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he flipped Jiang on his stomach and stripped off his jacket. With the man’s knife, he sliced off a strip of Jiang’s shirt for a bandage. Zhou’s right arm was wet and sticky, but the bleeding had already stopped. He’d have to mend himself on the fly.
Zhou jumped into the truck and gunned the motor, spraying the two prone men with a blanket of dust as he rumbled out of the lot toward Bayan Obo’s main highway. The mine was north of town, so he turned that direction and mashed the accelerator.
Cutting through traffic and passing wildly, he raised a symphony of honking horns and angry shouts. The traffic lessened as he neared the city’s northern limits, and the road began climbing through dry scrub hills. Cresting a ridge, he spotted the caravan a mile ahead, and he soon closed ranks with the last truck.
With Zhou tailing the crowded pickup, the line of cargo trucks drove past the main entrance to the Bayan Obo Mine, then turned onto a rutted dirt road two miles beyond that. Circling back to the south, they crossed a downed section of fence and entered the mine site. A pair of massive open pits appeared ahead. The trucks skirted them and approached the main operational area. The pickup veered away, leading the cargo trucks to a fire-damaged warehouse that looked abandoned. They pulled to a stop in back of the building, where a massive mound of crushed ore was piled high.
The theft operation was simple. On certain night shifts, every third dump truck transporting crushed ore to the extraction plant would get lost along the way and dump its load behind the old warehouse. All it took was a few large bribes to select drivers and administrators, who adjusted the mine’s production records, and the ore was there for the taking. Every few days, the truck convoy would haul it away to market.
The men from the pickup opened a back door to the warehouse, where a portable conveyor was stored. They rolled it to the mound of ore and connected a portable generator. Zhou watched as the lead cargo truck backed up until the end of the conveyor poked over the truck bed. The work crew began shoveling the ore onto the belt, which carried it into the truck. It took less than fifteen minutes to fill the bed, then the next vehicle backed in.
Zhou wiped his arm and rewrapped the makeshift bandage around the knife wound. Feeling light-headed from the loss of blood, he replenished himself with some rice balls he found in a paper sack on the seat. He swapped jackets with the one he’d taken from Jiang and raised the collar. Breathing heavily onto his side window, he fogged up the glass so the others couldn’t see him while he waited his turn.
When the fourth truck pulled clear, Xao waved him over and guided him to the conveyor. Zhou kept his hands high on the steering wheel to obscure his face as Xao walked in front of the hood and waved him backward.
The ore spilled into the truck bed with the roar of an avalanche. The minutes trickled by as Zhou held his breath, fearful someone would try to speak with him. Finally, the rumbling ceased, and the conveyor fell silent. Zhou looked in the side-view mirror and saw the crew drag the conveyor back to the warehouse. Xao rapped his knuckles on the fender, then continued to his own vehicle. The convoy leader climbed into the first truck, stuck his arm out the window, and pointed ahead. The rest of the trucks started their engines and followed Xao.
The heavily loaded trucks moved slowly down the rough road until they reached the main highway, then they rolled south through the dusty town that was built by the mining operation. Leaving behind that small bastion of civilization, they drove across the same barren steppes of Inner Mongolia that Genghis Khan had conquered eight centuries earlier. Zhou figured they would off-load their cargo at the nearest railroad depot. When they reached the populous city of Baotou several hours later and turned east, he knew otherwise.
The convoy rolled onto the busy Jingzhang Expressway, which ran to Beijing. Outside of the capital city, they paused at a truck stop in the suburb of Changping as dusk was settling. A light wind had picked up, blowing swirls of sand from the Gobi Desert. Zhou wrapped his face with a scarf he found in Jiang’s coat pocket and stretched his legs away from the others while the trucks were refueled.
The trucks moved off slowly, fighting their way through the thickening city traffic. They looped around the west side of Beijing to avoid the worst of the congestion and continued southeast. It took the better part of two hours before they reached the port city of Tianjin. Xao led the trucks through a maze of streets to the center of the large commercial docks.
They reached an old dockside warehouse and pulled down a side alley. Two men appeared from the shadows and accepted a sack filled with yuan that Xao passed out the window. A gate opened at the end of the alley, and the trucks rumbled through, entering a cavernous warehouse that opened to a dock on the far side. The trucks drove through the building and stopped beside a moderate-sized freighter whose lights illuminated the pier.
A large conveyor system stretched from the dock to an open hold on the ship, and Xao backed his truck to the end of it. A work crew appeared with shovels and began emptying the truck’s load of ore. As Zhou watched from the end of the line, he realized he’d seen all he needed. He slipped out the passenger door and crept toward the back of the truck.
A deck officer from the freighter, who was standing on the dock checking the ship’s lines, glanced over at Zhou. Playing the part of a tired driver, Zhou stretched his arms and yawned as he stepped toward the officer.
“Good evening,” he said with a slight bow. “A fine ship you have here.”
“The Graz is old and tired, but she still plows through the sea like a hefty ox.”
“Where are you headed?”
“We do a cargo swap in Shanghai, then we’re off to Singapore.”
He looked at Zhou closely under the lights, noticing a damp streak of red on the sleeve of his jacket.
“Are you okay?”
Zhou glanced at the blood and grinned.
“It’s transmission fluid. I spilled it, adding some to the truck.”
Zhou saw Xao’s truck was finished unloading and the next truck in line was moving to take its place. He nodded at the officer and smiled. “Have
a safe voyage,” he said, turning his back on the loading operations and walking away.
The officer looked at him oddly. “What about your truck?”
Zhou ignored the query, sauntering away from the dock until he vanished into the night.
34
THE SEA ARROW’S PROPULSION MOTOR LOOKED like a stretch limousine driven through an oversized tire. The limousine part, in fact, was a rectangular induction housing that drew in water and expelled it through a trio of gimbaled exhaust outlets in the back. Just forward of it, at the motor’s midpoint, a donut-shaped nacelle contained the sophisticated jet pump that could push the submarine to high speeds. The entire motor was coated in a slippery black substance, which deflected water and gave the entire device a cold, futuristic appearance.
High overhead lights shined starkly on the prototype propulsion motor as a crane lifted it from its floor blocks and placed it on a large flatbed trailer. An army of workmen secured it with steel cables and covered it with canvas tarps. A semi-truck, operated by a company that specialized in hauling secure freight, was backed in and hitched to the trailer.
It was half past six in the morning when the truck pulled out of the Naval Research Laboratory’s facility at Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. As it drove inland from the bay, the surrounding woods and fields were damp with morning dew, while a leaden sky obscured the sunrise.
“What’s our ETA to Groton?” the codriver asked, suppressing a yawn.
The truck’s driver glanced at his watch. “The GPS says seven hours. Probably longer if we don’t beat the worst of the Beltway traffic.”
In the lightly populated region of southern Maryland, the early-morning traffic leading toward Washington was almost nonexistent. As they rounded a sweeping curve, the two men noticed a wisp of black smoke rising ahead. When it became apparent that the smoke originated from the road, the driver downshifted.
“Is that a car on fire?” his codriver asked.
“I think so. Looks like some old clunker.”
It was in fact a twenty-year-old Toyota Camry that had been severely wrecked at some point in its life. Now it sat in the middle of the road on four bald tires, flames sprouting from beneath its crumpled hood.
The truck driver eased the flatbed to a stop a few yards away and searched the road for victims. A white van was pulled off the road a short distance ahead, but there were no signs of life around it or the burning car.
“We better call this in,” the driver said as his partner reached behind the seat for a fire extinguisher.
A crash jarred them out of their seats as the head of a sledgehammer burst through the passenger-side window. A gloved hand thrust through the shattered glass and dropped a smoking canister of tear gas in the cab.
In an instant, the truck’s interior was filled with an acrid white smoke that made the men gag. Their eyes burned as if hot lava had been poured under their lids, and they groped for the door handles to escape the agony.
The driver made it out first, leaping from the cab onto the roadway. A man wearing a ski mask zapped him with a stun gun, sending him to the ground, convulsing. On the other side of the truck, the codriver had managed to pull out his gun as he exited the cab. But with his eyes clenched shut from the gas, he failed to see the second assailant strike him with another stun gun.
A third man, wearing a gas mask, climbed into the cab and hurled the still-smoking canister out into an adjacent field. He slid behind the wheel and jabbed a knife into the cab’s headliner. He pulled away the fabric until spotting a wire, which he deftly sliced, disabling the roof-mounted GPS transmitter that allowed the shipping company to track the vehicle. Jamming the truck into gear, he eased it forward until its broad chrome bumper kissed the burning car. Then he floored the accelerator while nudging the steering wheel to the right. The torque-strong truck brushed the Toyota aside like an insect and flipped it into a ditch.
Straightening back onto the small road, the new driver shifted gears and lowered his side window. Within seconds, the last remnants of gas had been flushed out. Pablo pulled off the uncomfortable gas mask and tossed it on the seat beside him.
He glanced at his watch and smiled. In just two minutes he had taken one of America’s most secret technologies. He pulled out a cell phone, dialed a long string of numbers, and smiled, thinking about his payoff to come.
35
PABLO DROVE THE LONG FLATBED ANOTHER MILE before maneuvering it off the highway and onto a small dirt road. The narrow, rutted track crossed a large pasture dotted with sleepy-eyed cows. A half mile in, the road passed a large pond, then ended at an abandoned farm just beyond.
The charred remnants of the farmhouse were still visible, scorched by a fire decades earlier. Nearby, a large weathered barn leaned to one side as if the next nor’easter would send it tumbling. Pablo drove to the barn and guided the truck into an opening at one end of it.
Inside he found a high stack of freshly cut bales of hay guarded by a mini forklift. At the opposite end of the barn stood another semi-truck cab. He pulled the flatbed alongside the bales, parked the truck, and climbed out to examine the object under the tarps.
A few minutes later, the white panel van pulled in, and two large black men jumped out.
“You take care of the drivers?” Pablo asked.
The first man nodded. “Clarence cuffed them together around a big oak off the highway. Some farmer will find them in a day or two.”
“Good. Now, let’s get to work. I’m on a tight schedule.”
The two hired thugs pulled away the tarps covering the Sea Arrow’s motor. Then they donned heavy gloves and went to work on the bales of hay. Clarence started up the forklift, and using an attached device called a bale squeeze, he began hoisting blocks of multiple bales onto the flatbed. The second man stood on the bed, guiding the bales into place around the motor.
Meanwhile, Pablo unhitched the truck from the flatbed. He parked the truck off to the side and returned with the other big rig, a blue Kenworth. In ten minutes he had the new truck hitched to the trailer. He scrutinized the flatbed for a second GPS tracking device. Finding none, he swapped the rear license plate.
The other two men had nearly finished building a wall of hay around the Sea Arrow’s power plant. Pablo helped them pull a tarp across the top of the bales and tie it to the sides of the trailer, completing its disguise as a hay truck.
Clarence, the larger of the two men, pulled off his gloves and approached Pablo. “That concludes our part of the job,” he said in his raspy voice. “You have our pay?”
“Yes,” Pablo said. “And you have the plans?”
“In the back of the van. Along with an added present for you,” he said, grinning.
“Bring the documents to the truck. I’ll get your money.”
Clarence opened the back of the van and pulled out the plastic bin containing Heiland’s supercavitation plans. He followed Pablo to the Kenworth and placed it on the passenger seat. Pablo reached behind the seat and handed the hired thug a thick envelope. The big man ripped off one end, revealing several bound stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
“My, that does look pretty.” He folded the envelope closed. “Now, if you’d be kind enough to retrieve your gift, we’ll be on our way.”
Pablo gave him a puzzled look. Clarence jerked his thumb toward the van and led Pablo to the open back doors, where the other man stood, smiling.
As Pablo peered past him into the van’s interior, his eyes flared in anger. Coiled on the van’s floor was the bound-and-gagged Ann Bennett.
A look of rage seared her face until her eyes met Pablo’s, then the shock of recognition hit home. The Colombian terrorist was the last person she expected to see here. Her brazenness evaporated, and she wriggled farther into the confines of the van.
Pablo turned to Clarence. “What is she doing here?”
>
“We got a call to pick her up,” Clarence said. “We were told not to waste her, so here she is.”
Pablo reached under his jacket, pulled out a Glock pistol, and aimed it into the back of the van.
“Yo, man, don’t do her in the back of the van,” Clarence said. “It’s a rental.”
“Okay.”
Pablo wheeled around and fired the Glock point-blank in Clarence’s face. As he fell back dead, his partner lunged at Pablo. But the Colombian was quicker. He turned and pumped three shots into the man’s chest. The dying thug could only grip Pablo’s collar and pull him to his knees before collapsing.
Ann screamed, but her cry was muffled by a band of duct tape. Pablo gazed at her a moment, then calmly holstered the Glock. He reached into the van, yanked Ann out, and tossed her onto a leftover bale of hay. “I’m afraid it won’t do to kill you here.”
As she watched in terror, he hoisted the two dead bodies into the back of the van and closed the doors. Tossing the now bloodied cash envelope toward Ann, he looked at her and said, “Don’t move.”
An instant later, Pablo peeled the van out of the barn, spraying dust and loose hay. He drove just a short distance, then stopped and carefully positioned the van. He lowered the windows, removed all the keys from the fob except for the ignition key, then walked around searching for a large flat rock. Finding one, he placed it on the accelerator pedal and mashed it down flat. Climbing out of the truck, he reached in through the open window and started the engine. Before the revolutions could skyrocket, he pulled the column shift into drive and jumped away.
The rear tires spun in the loose dirt, and the van shot down the road. It traveled less than fifty feet before it angled off the road and careened through a small ditch. Its momentum carried it up the opposite side and over a small embankment, where it lunged into the pond.
Poseidon's Arrow Page 18
