Beyond all Limits (3 page)

His thoughts were interrupted by the frantic voice of Ellen Abrams.

‘Can you self-destruct the missile from your end?’ she asked, her voice shaking, knowing that this was truly their last chance.

Tsang cursed himself inwardly, turning to General Xi Yang, the commander of the Second Artillery Corps.

Why hadn’t this occurred to him already? He cursed himself again, then had a different thought entirely.

Why hadn’t it occurred to General Xi either?

If the launch was truly an error, surely the general would have leapt up to contact the errant truck himself?

He cleared his thoughts away; he nevertheless had to try.

‘General,’ he said to Xi Yang, ‘contact the crew of the truck
immediately
, order them to destroy the missile.’ When the general didn’t move, Tsang’s face contorted in rage. ‘
Now!
’ he screamed, all too aware that there were just seconds left.

In the end, it was General Wu De who answered, rising from his chair, his massive, imposing bulk moving slowly towards the Paramount Leader of the PRC.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said in mock deference, ‘but I rather think it’s too late for that.’

Meadows felt the impact, which – despite the colossal one hundred thousand ton steel bulk of the ship to soak it up – was still enough to bring him and everyone else on the bridge to their knees.

They received the report over the bridge’s communications system instants later, and Meadows’ first reaction was an instinctual sigh of relief – the missile hadn’t hit the island or the main crew quarters, but had instead dealt a glancing blow to the very rear of the ship.

The downward force at the rear had lifted the nose of the
Gerald R. Ford
clear of the water, and she settled back down with a tremendous crash which again brought everyone to their knees.

As damage reports came thick and fast – fires in the hangers, three airmen lost overboard, all rear units lost including an unknown number of sailors and aircrew – Meadows started to understand the reality of the situation.

A blow by a missile like the
Dong Feng
– however angled, however glancing – to the rear of the ship meant that the four thirty-ton, twenty-one foot bronze propellers that drove the
Ford
would now be nothing more than useless scrap metal.

He also accepted that the missile had been traveling too fast, its guidance systems were simply too good, for the target to have been accidentally missed; which meant that the Chinese intention had never been to destroy the aircraft carrier, but merely to disable her. With the ship compartmented and stabilized, Meadows hoped it would continue to float despite the damage to its rear end; but without the propellers, it wouldn’t be capable of moving anywhere.

The relief he had felt moments ago quickly wore off as he recognized his ship’s situation.

She was a sitting duck, Meadows and his crew of four and a half thousand now hostage to the Chinese military.

Tsang watched in incredulous horror as the huge wooden doors to the stateroom opened, armed soldiers pouring inside, quickly surrounding the council members with their assault rifles up and aimed.

A large man, who seemed to be the leader of the troops although he wasn’t in uniform, strolled through the room towards General Wu, stopping and bowing in front of him.

The big man worried Tsang more than the rest of the men combined; there was something in his eyes, a barely restrained violence that threatened to spill out on those around him at any moment. There was his sheer bulk as well, nearly three hundred pounds of muscle and hard fat. Tsang noticed then that one of his eyes was glass, scar tissue gathered around it from a wound of some sort. Tsang thought it might have been a bullet.

All of these thoughts occurred to Tsang in mere fleeting moments – the same time it took the huge man to approach Wu, pull out a semi-automatic pistol from his black robes, and hand it to the general.

General Wu De stepped in front of him then, aiming the weapon directly at Tsang’s heart.

The Chinese president quickly scanned the faces of the other members of the CMC but was met only with looks of stony silence.

Nobody was going to come to his aid, not even his loyal friend Kang Xing, the Minister of National Defense, who merely looked back at him through hooded eyes.

Tsang looked to his Vice President, Fang Zemin, but the man’s head was lowered in fear; although perhaps not a part of the coup himself, he obviously had no wish to try and stop it.

‘I am sorry,’ Wu said to Tsang with mock deference, ‘but I am in charge now.’

And before Tsang could respond, Wu pressed the trigger and sent a 5.42mm bullet ripping into the man’s heart at fourteen hundred feet per second.

Abrams listened incredulously to the gunshot over the open line to the Chinese CMC.

With one ear she listened to the damage reports from the
Gerald R. Ford
, relieved that it wasn’t more serious; with the other, she heard what could only be a murder.

There had been one shot, a slight pause, and then another.

A murder – and a military coup which could plummet the United States into war with the second most powerful nation on earth.

She snapped to attention as a voice came over the open line.

‘President Abrams,’ the smooth voice announced in perfect English, ‘please allow me to apologize for what has happened today, and introduce myself. My name is General Wu De, and I am the Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China, as duly empowered by the people I now serve. I will be in touch.’

Abrams was given no chance to reply before the line was disconnected; she could only hope it was all some terrible dream from which she would soon wake up.

General Wu stood with the smoking gun still in his hand as he coolly regarded the dead bodies of President Tsang Feng and Vice President Fang Zemin, the look of absolute shock still etched across Fang’s face. He envisioned his military forces across the country as they took control of the state and provincial government, and turned to the other men in the large room and smiled.

‘At last,’ he said, raising his arms high into the air, ‘the Dragon has awoken.’

PART ONE

1

Mark Cole flinched as the pigs sniffed around his bare feet, their feral snouts brushing his sweat-slicked skin.

The temperature in the barn was intense, the air dusty and cloying, and sweat also rolled down Cole’s cleanly shaved head; and Cole knew that it wasn’t just from the heat.

The fact was that – despite his years of training, a lifetime of covert operations – he was
scared.

The pigs that sniffed around his feet had been specially bred by the farm’s owner to have a taste for human flesh, and they had already eaten several people over the years, bones included; it was the owner’s way of disposing of people who had offended him. There weren’t many things that Cole was truly frightened of, but being eaten alive was high up on that short list.

It wasn’t too long ago, Cole thought unhappily, that it had been alligators trying their best to eat him; and again, the lunatic who’d organized
that
one had wanted the beasts to start with his feet. It was getting to be a habit; a bad one.

He scanned his surroundings, controlling his breathing and doing his best to ignore the pigs that gathered beneath him. He knew they wouldn’t start eating yet anyway; from the dried blood on their snouts, it looked like they’d had a decent meal recently, and they hopefully still weren’t hungry enough to eat another body.

But time, Cole knew, would change that.

The trouble with pigs was that they ate
anything
; and they were big enough, and powerful enough, to take on the big-ticket items.

Like people.

They could digest bones and tendons as well as the softer parts of the human body, which made them a perennial favorite of crime families everywhere. The really big bones such as the skull and the femurs were often too much for them in the end, but as body disposal units, pigs were a good deal overall.

Cole had first heard of such practices back when he was just seventeen years old, before he’d even joined the military, and then the intelligence underworld.

He’d been a bouncer at a local biker bar back in his home town of Hamtramck, Michigan; he’d had to lie about his age to get the job, but he’d looked old enough and the owner hadn’t asked too many questions. He’d just wanted someone who could handle themselves, and even at that age, Cole had fit the bill.

He remembered getting a regular lift to the bar from a neighbor called Jonny, a big man in his forties who’d done the job for longer than Cole had been alive. He was friendly but taciturn, and it wasn’t until he’d known the man for months that he started to hear the rumours.

Jonny’s day job was as a pig farmer, and it turned out that a lucrative side earner was feeding people to the pigs at the request of several Detroit drug gangs.

Cole had never known if the stories were true, but he had looked at Jonny in a new light for ever after.

He’d never seen pigs in quite the same way either, and now he was going to get firsthand experience of why.

But, he reminded himself as he had done so many times in the past, it wasn’t over yet. Despite the seriousness of his situation, there was always a chance. The day he stopped believing that would be the day he gave up this line of work forever.

For all the beatings the guards had heaped upon him, he was still capable of functioning. Nothing was broken and, although bruised and cut up, Cole could tell he’d suffered no real internal damage. It was all superficial, and nothing he hadn’t experienced before.

It was Jim Groves that had beaten him the worst, but Cole could understand that – it was Groves who had brought him here to the ranch that served as headquarters to the home-grown terrorist group known as Aryan Ultra, Groves who had introduced him to the AU’s secretive leader, Clive Haynes. Groves had vouched for him, promised Haynes that Cole was genuine. Cole could see why the man would take it personally.

But how had they found out?

Cole still didn’t understand what he
was doing here in the first place, hanging with aching shoulders from the rafters of the big barn, waiting for the pigs to start their feast.

His cover had been perfect. How had Clive Haynes found out who he really was?

The irony of the situation was that Cole had already achieved his mission – he had discovered who was behind next week’s suspected terrorist attack on Washington, learnt the plans, who was involved, he’d learnt
everything
President Ellen Abrams had wanted him to learn; but he had never had a chance to tell anybody.

Which meant that – unless he managed to escape from this pit of death before the pigs started chewing away on his feet, ankles and legs – the information would go to the grave with him, and Aryan Ultra would be free to blow the US Capitol Building off the face of the earth, along with a hefty portion of the American government.

He looked across the barn, past the skin-headed, scruffy guards who stared at him with hatred, to the big man himself, Clive Haynes.

Haynes was a sadistic killer who had joined the Aryan Brotherhood in San Quentin prison before deciding to go it alone and create his own, far more political movement. He believed that the Brotherhood was nothing more than a criminal gang, and wanted to pursue his own, more ideological purpose.

He’d established the AU several years ago, and it had already grown in size and strength at an unprecedented rate – Haynes’ willingness to indulge in the same criminal activities of narcotics, extortion and homicide as his old gang brought him in the money-minded side of the membership, while his neo-Nazi puritanism also engaged the more strictly white supremacist vote.

The result was a criminal gang which used its proceeds to attack the American government whenever it could – from the slayings of black politicians to the bombings of federal courts, the AU was a dangerous homegrown terrorist group that was now threatening Washington itself.

Despite his ideological ravings, drug money had made Haynes a rich man – this thousand acre ranch outside Tucson, Arizona, was proof enough of that. It was ideally placed between the Aryan criminal heartlands around San Quentin, and the lucrative narcotics routes from Mexico.

Up until four days ago, Cole had been incarcerated in San Quentin himself – leads from the intelligence agencies had linked a man called Jim Groves to the highly secretive AU, and he was serving a twenty-to-life sentence for a range of charges including robbery, rape, assault and homicide.

Cole had therefore entered the prison – complete with shaven head and a maze of bodily tattoos – in order to make friends with the man, distasteful though such an idea was, in the hopes that he could learn more about the AU’s organization and future plans.

It had been easy enough – such men respected strength and violence, and so Cole had wasted no time in establishing himself as someone to be wary of. His first night there, Cole had stabbed a man through the neck with a sharpened toothbrush, bringing him quickly to Groves’ attention. Cole hadn’t felt too bad about it; the man he’d almost killed had been serving life imprisonment for serial rape.

More acts of violence brought Cole closer and closer to the AU lieutenant, and soon they were on first name terms, Groves wanting to use Cole as his personal enforcer. Groves still hadn’t trusted Cole enough to tell him who the leader of the AU was, nor what they had planned in terms of future operations, but that had changed when Cole broke out of the prison, taking Groves with him.

Deeply indebted to Cole, Groves had taken him straight to the ranch in Tucson, where he’d introduced him to Clive Haynes, a fanatic in the Hitler mold. Haynes hadn’t been sure about Cole, but Groves was his second in command, and he eventually let himself be worn down by the man’s praise.

What Cole had then found out was frightening in the extreme; the AU was far better funded, organized and motivated than anyone in US intelligence or law enforcement could possibly have imagined. And their next order of business was to detonate enough explosives underneath the US Capitol to bring it crashing down around the gathered members of congress.

It would have seemed farfetched, except for the fact that the AU had infiltrated several government organizations, and already had the explosives within the city limits.

Cole sighed internally. What was he doing? There was no point wasting time thinking about the past; what was needed now was action, not mental distractions.

Without moving his head, careful that he appeared only semi-conscious and a lot more injured than he actually was, Cole took in his surroundings.

The barn was large, made of cedar wood with a long central track running past wood and steel-gated pens to large double doors at one end. Cole could see daylight beyond, and knew that outside was the main farm compound which consisted of several outbuildings, Haynes’ sprawling single-story home further up a spruce-covered hill on the western edge of the complex. There was a large, ten-vehicle garage near the house, but one of the other barns in the farm compound held tractors and other machinery. Cole remembered that there were quad bikes and trucks in there too.

Letting his eyes drift upwards, he saw a line of open windows running the length of the barn, below the beamed roof on either side of the central track.

Opposite the double doors at one end was a smaller door which Cole knew from a previous visit led to a small equipment room. Between both ends of the building was a dirt floor, already starting to become further covered in pig feces.

Behind the safety of the pen doors stood five members of Aryan Ultra, their tattooed, muscular bodies tense and ready. They held various weapons, from Magnum revolvers to shotguns, but Cole noticed they were more intent on defending themselves from the pigs than they were on making sure Cole didn’t go anywhere.

Cole himself was two thirds of the way through the barn, his wrists tied together with a length of twine, which had been passed over one of the ceiling beams. He had been hauled up, and the end of the rope had been tied off on one of the pillars which separated the pens.

Hanging from his wrists, the pain throughout his hands, wrists, arms and shoulders was intense, but Cole cut off the pain as best he could, using it instead to keep his mind sharp and focused.

The pigs continued to sniff around his feet, and Cole could see that their curiosity was getting stronger and stronger with each passing second. He knew that it wouldn’t be long before they took their first bite, their tusks brushing against his legs.

Just as Cole was considering his options, the double doors burst open and Clive Haynes himself walked in, Jim Groves right by his side. From the bruises on Groves’ face and the man’s busted nose, Cole could see that the AU lieutenant had received his own punishment for bringing him here.

‘Hi,’ Haynes said with a big smile, two other men entering with him, keeping the pigs at bay. ‘Glad to see I’m not too late. Wouldn’t want the hogs to get started without me, would we, Mark?’

Cole twitched involuntarily. How did Haynes know his name?

Haynes smiled. ‘Mark Cole, covert government operative. Working directly for the president.’ The grin spread across his face. ‘I wonder what she’ll say when we mail her the pieces that the pigs don’t want?’

Cole didn’t respond, his mind racing furiously. How did Haynes know so much? Cole’s identity was more than a secret; only a handful of men and women in the entire world knew who he was.

‘Or,’ Haynes continued, stalking steadily closer towards Cole, ‘should I call you Mark Kowalski?’

Cole’s blood ran cold; if only a handful of people knew him as Cole, even less knew him by his real name.

He shuddered. Mark Kowalski had been a Navy SEAL, seconded to the covert Systems Research Group before being declared Killed in Action after a disastrous mission in Pakistan. But he hadn’t been killed; instead, he had been found alive, and subsequently been asked to leave behind his previous life. To become a ‘contract laborer’ for the government, with a
new
life, a new identity. Mark Cole: codenamed ‘the Asset’, a deniable, highly-trained, unstoppable first-strike weapon against America’s enemies.

How the hell did Haynes know?

‘Surprised?’ Haynes asked with a grin, and Cole did his best to keep his face calm, impassive. Haynes nodded sagely. ‘You can try that tough guy act, but I know you must be just
dyin’
to find out how I know about you, right?’ Still Cole refused to respond. ‘Right, Kowalski?’ Haynes’ grin turned to a frown. ‘So you’re not talkin’. That ain’t no problem.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You know what, I don’t think you’ll even talk when I set the hogs on ya. And I’ve got so many questions,’ he said almost wistfully, still shaking his head. ‘So many. What you know. Who you’ve told. What other spies you’ve got out there, who else we might need to pick up and . . . talk to. You know?’

Haynes stared across the barn at Cole, saw the resolve in the captured man’s eyes and seemed to come to a decision. ‘Nah, you’re not gonna give me shit, right?’ He laughed. ‘I’m gonna let the hogs have you anyway though. But before they have
you
, I might let them have an appetizer.’

Cole worked hard to keep his face impassive. An appetizer? That must mean that Haynes had captured someone else. But who? Nobody else was working on this; Cole was in it alone. But someone had tipped off Haynes, and Cole wondered if it was this same person.