Brute Force (5 page)

The Cajun turned to Quinn.

“What do you think the odds are we find these Uyghur bastards without getting ourselves cooked in a Chinese pot?”

“Well,” Quinn said as they climbed into the helicopter, “the Feng brothers blew up a train before they were arrested, so everyone in the People’s Liberation Army who isn’t aiming missiles at the US will focus their resources on tracking them down. You’re practically AWOL, and I’m being hunted by every police organization known to mankind. Beyond that, we’re members of the United States military sneaking across the border of a country with which we are on the brink of war—out of uniform and with no official documents. That makes us spies in anybody’s book.”

“So . . .” Thibodaux winked his good eye. “You’re sayin’ we have a chance.”

“Yep.” Quinn buckled his harness and was pressed back in his seat as Mandeep added power to lift the Alouette off the gravel. He watched the glaciers and rock cliffs blur by the window of the chopper as they headed toward Khunjareb Pass—and wondered if the Chinese would bother to take him into custody, or put a pistol to his head and shoot him on sight. “I’d say our odds are outstanding.”

 

V
ice President Lee McKeon shooed his secretary out of his small West Wing office so he could take the incoming call. Nearing sixty, Natalie Romano had been with him since his days as governor of Oregon. Though she knew nothing of his true background and plans, she was savvy enough not to snoop in affairs that didn’t affect her directly. Had that not been the case, she would have been dead long before and that would have been a shame because good secretaries were difficult to find. She shut the door on her way out.

The cell in McKeon’s pocket was not connected to the administration and, as such, was less of a problem should one of the many bothersome anti-administration groups that were springing up in Congress want to subpoena records. Even the President did not know about this phone.

A self-proclaimed Chindian, the former governor of Oregon was actually of Chinese and Pakistani descent, adopted and raised by a couple named McKeon. He was a tall and lanky man, and his resemblance to Abraham Lincoln was not lost on the American public. His political opponents often described him as cadaverous. He found it impossible to fold his long legs under the desk for any length of time and had to push the chair away so he could stretch out as he answered the call.

“Hello,” he said, dispensing with his official title. Anyone who had this number knew who he really was.

“Peace be unto you,” the caller said. It was Qasim Ranjhani, McKeon’s distant cousin and right-hand man. Though both men used prepaid “burner” phones, they were careful to keep from using names in their conversations.

“And peace be unto to you,” McKeon returned the traditional greeting.

“Our very good friend AK passed away during his recent struggle,” Ranjhani said, a faint tightness in his voice conveying the emotion at the loss. McKeon knew AK was Ali Kadir and the “recent struggle” was the prison break at Dera Ismail Khan.

“That is unfortunate,” the Vice President said, meaning it. Kadir was a trusted friend, dedicated to their cause—pious and unafraid.

“Indeed,” Ranjhani said. “But that is not my reason for calling. I received a message from a friend in Pakistan only moments ago. He saw a man today who resembles the American fugitive you have been looking for.”

“In Pakistan?” McKeon sat up straighter. The fugitive Ranjhani spoke of had to be Jericho Quinn.

“Yes, a short time ago in the mountains near Skardu,” Ranjhani said. “Gaunt, athletic, with the eyes of a killer.”

“That would be him,” McKeon said. “And he is in custody then?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Ranjhani drew a long, whistling breath through his nose, as he often did when he was about to divulge some new piece of great and important information. “He was last seen boarding a helicopter bound for China with my friend’s America-loving wing commander.”

“Does this friend of yours know where the fugitive was going in China?”

“Kashgar, he believes,” Ranjhani said. “I have a contact there who can help us put an end to this problem.”

“That would be welcome news.” McKeon drummed long fingers on the desk, thinking. “Any word on our shipment from China?” Of all the things that occupied his mind as the Vice President, the shipment of the Black Dragon was at the very top. Apart from being the trigger in his overall plan, the weapon would also take care of an extremely bothersome nuisance once and for all.

“Indeed,” Ranjhani said, the smile almost evident in his voice. “It is en route and on schedule. I do not anticipate any problems.”

“Good to hear,” McKeon said. His mind was already jumping back to the nagging problem of Jericho Quinn. “I have a thought. Your man in Kashgar should go forward, but we should not rely on him alone. This particular fugitive has proven too slippery for that. I’ll get word to the Chinese that they have a dangerous killer hiding out in the Western provinces.”

“The Chinese?” Ranjhani scoffed. “They do not trust anyone in your administration.”

“Back channels, my friend,” McKeon said. “Back channels. We’ll nudge our friends in Pakistan to make the Chinese government aware of this trained assassin. Even now he’s certainly plotting some evil terrorist act against their sovereignty and it’s our duty to make them aware. The Chinese may believe him to be an agent of the American government, or they may think he’s working in concert with the Fengs. I don’t particularly care as long as they hunt him down and kill him.”

 

D
ickey Ng leaned on the painted steel railing alongside the raised house of the 900-foot mega ship, watching a wispy line of black smoke twist up from among the stacked containers on the deck below. Off the bow of the huge vessel, the surface of the indigo water jumped with small, confused waves, as if Neptune held his great cup of ocean with a shaky hand. Ng stood still for a long moment, pondering his four rules, the inviolable laws that had kept him alive and in business for the last eleven years.

Rule Four seemed all the more pertinent considering the development of this new plume of smoke. He made his way forward, padding down the metal stairs toward the rows and stacks of multicolored metal containers that took up the bulk of the ship. They were known as TEUs—or Twenty Foot Equivalent Units—and the CCC Loadstar carried over 13,000 of these ubiquitous metal shipping boxes.

Dickey Ng only cared about one of them. He’d followed PVMU 526604-1 from the time it had been loaded with palletized tractor parts in Guangzhou. A little money in the right hands made certain he was the one charged with “stuffing” the container, to ensure that the contents could not shift during the movement of the ship while in transit—and thus the last person to see it before it was sealed. He didn’t know what was in the wooden crate marked with the red peony flower that he’d strapped to a wooden pallet of parts for small garden tractors, but he was fairly certain it was some sort of weapon. Weapons and art were his two most common assignments. There was no law against smugglers profiling their clients, and considering all the
inshal-lahs
and
alaikums
going on between the men who’d set up the transportation arrangements, he had a pretty good idea that he wasn’t moving a piece of art. He was being paid two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars to see that the crate was delivered safely to the United States. His four rules made sure that would happen.

Making his way forward the length of two football fields without drawing the attention of the bridge watch took time. Ng moved slowly, staying low and out of sight in the narrow walkways between the towering stacks of metal boxes. He told himself the smoke was nothing. Perhaps it was only one of the sailors hiding out to smoke a cigar, or even some vent in one of the ship’s systems that he was unaware of. He was, after all, a smuggler, not a sailor, and the only paying customer on the CCC Loadstar.

Flying the flag of the Marshall Islands, the mega ship operated with a crew of twenty-six but kept four cabins open for world travelers and adventure seekers. Ng had signed on in Guangzhou, staying out of the way during the frenetic first few days of the journey as the ship stopped to load more TEUs in several more Chinese ports, then Hong Kong, and finally Kogo-shima in southern Japan before heading out to open sea. For the last ten days, life on the ship had settled into a comfortable routine of watches and chores for the crew—made up of primarily Malaysian sailors—and cigarettes and boredom for Ng.

Raised in the teeming streets of Singapore, Dickey Ng found it difficult to breathe with all the fresh air of the open sea. While it wasn’t exactly quiet, the sounds were far too one-dimensional for him. He missed the frantic honk of traffic and the constant buzz of people milling in the back streets. Singapore was a nanny state, but it was his nanny state. Even in a place where nearly everything was against the law, there were so many people stacked on top of each other that a person could blend in, get lost in the crowd.

This was the same sentiment—and the reasoning—he used to complete every job he accepted.

There were plenty of people who could fill a shipping container with plastic dolls that were stuffed with Korean Ecstasy or teddy bears packed with Baggies of uncut heroin. Flat crates of Russian AK-47s fit perfectly in the hollow walls of refrigerated containers.

But customs officials knew all that as well as any smuggler. They tore apart a large cross section of Chinese-made dolls and ripped the stuffing out of the bears. The first place inspectors looked for hidden weapons were the hollow walls of reefer units. Every up-and-coming customs inspector he’d ever seen was looking, not so much for contraband, as to make a name for him or herself—to find that big haul of illicit goods that would garner them a fat promotion. If those goods had something to do with terrorism, their hero status would be set in stone. In the East, customs officials looked for bribes. In North America, they wanted to make the news.

So, Dickey Ng followed Rule One and got himself and whatever he happened to be moving lost amid the thirteen thousand twenty-foot-equivalent metal containers stacked on the CCC Loadstar—all part of the eight million moved from Asia to the United States every year.

Ng was around the corner, still fifty feet away from the origin of the smoke and unit PVMU 526604-1, when he smelled cooking fish. He smiled to himself. Azmin, the skinny deckhand, was well known for never getting enough to eat. Ng rounded the stacks to find the young Malay squatting on his haunches beside a can of burning Sterno, grilling a flying fish he must have found on the deck.

Ng began to relax, until Azmin looked up and met his eye.

“You are a watcher,” the young man said, using the grease from his cooked fish to smooth his ridiculously sparse mustache. “I thought the smoke might bring you so we could have a talk. You don’t remember me, do you?” He looked altogether too smug for Dickey Ng’s taste. “But we met five years ago in Hong Kong. I was supposed to be on that ship but I got sick. You were a passenger then too, but you had a different name.” Azmin shook his head and rose to his full height, doing his best to intimidate Ng. “I can’t remember what your name was then, but it was different.”

“What do you want, Azmin?” Ng said, pretending to be frightened.

The young sailor grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I want a piece of whatever you are getting for whatever it is you are doing. My family is poor. I only do this sailing shit to support my wife and kid, you know. I figure you must have something big going since you travel with a fake name and all. What is it? Gold? Precious stones? Cut me in and your secret’s safe with me.”

“How was the fish, Azmin?” Ng asked, cocking his head to one side.

Azmin just stared at him. “The fish?”

Ng struck fast, slamming the web of his hand into the young Malay’s Adam’s apple, stunning him and making him lift both hands defensively.

“Fish bones,” Ng said. Shoving one shoulder at the same moment he pulled on the other, Ng spun the panicked sailor and snaked an arm around his neck, drawing him in like a constricting snake to squeeze the life out of him.

“I heard,” Ng said, holding the young man firmly while he struggled, “that some people are so embarrassed when they begin to choke that they wander off and die alone. Such a pity . . .” Ng jerked his arm tighter across the faltering sailor’s throat. “You were all the way out here in the stacks with no one to hear or see you or come help when you choked on a fish bone. It must have been awful to die . . . so alone.” Feeling Azmin go limp in his arms, Ng held him for another full minute, and then slammed his head backwards against the edge of a container, just to be sure. “It’s a violent thing,” he muttered, “choking to death.”

Ng stooped down beside the body and grabbed a handful of cooked fish from the makeshift grill. Prying open Azmin’s jaws, he shoved it in, using his finger to push it far back into the dead man’s throat.

Finished, he wiped the grease from his hands on Azmin’s filthy shirt and stood to make his way back to his cabin.

“Rule Five,” he whispered to himself. “Never enter into a smuggling agreement with a fool.”

 

M
inister of State Security Wen Shou folded strong hands in the lap of his navy blue suit and listened to the leader of China vent about the impetuous actions of the United States. Wen rolled his lips slightly, keeping a passive face. A bitter word or even a frown at the wrong moment could very well become the match that lit the fuse of war. General Sun, the commander of the People’s Liberation Army’s Second Artillery Corps—and thus, China’s ballistic nuclear missiles—and Admiral Jiang, commander of the PLA Navy Submarine Force, sat across the office from Wen, side by side in matching golden chairs to the right of the President’s desk. The two military men were among the few leaders not presently under investigation for some sort of graft. It was not the lack of technology, weaponry, or troops that threatened his country’s military. It was corruption.

The presidential office seemed meant to make visitors feel small. There was nothing to clutter the center of the spacious room—no busy coffee table or cozy couches as in the American President’s Oval Office—just thirty feet of empty red carpet, plush and smooth but for the faint outlines of footprints that had stood in exactly the same spot in front of the President’s antique
huanghuali
wood desk. Wen found himself wondering about the fate of the men who had worn those spots in the carpet. To stand in front of the desk of a man as powerful as the President—who simultaneously held the offices of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and Chairman of the Central Military Committee—seemed a perilous endeavor.

As the leader of the Ministry of State Security—patterned after the former Soviet Union’s KGB—Wen had nearly unfettered power to jostle and manipulate the lives of a billion citizens if he’d had the notion to do such things—but President Chen Min could manipulate the lives of the manipulators themselves. And yet, the man appeared to like him, telling Wen he valued his “direct and unfiltered” counsel. Wen did not admit it, but when a wise man spoke to the paramount leader of The Peoples Republic of China, he always filtered his counsel. A consummate diplomat and spy, Minister Wen just did it better than the military men in the room.

Both General Sun and Admiral Jiang nodded thoughtfully at each word Chen spoke, as if they could not have possibly said it better. The President paused for a long moment, looking at his counselors over pursed lips, as if he had a touch of indigestion.

Taking the silence as a cue to speak rather than ponder, General Sun leaned forward in his chair to drive home his point. “My soldiers stand ready,” he said. A well-fed and jowly man, his thick fingers clutched a large dress hat above his belly, next to the ribbons festooning his chest. “As a proud nation, we cannot be expected to suffer the indignities and bullying from the United States.”

The minister kept a file on all of the most powerful military leaders. General Sun had not always been so fat. Before being promoted to the Second Artillery, he’d been fit enough to lead the Southern Broadswords, an elite group of special operations commandos based in Guangzhou. The pampered living of a general officer may have softened his body, but Wen had no doubt the man had retained his flint-hard resolve and tactical sensibilities.

“Perhaps,” Wen interjected from his spot across the room, “they mean to goad us into firing the first shot—to make us the aggressors in a devastating war.” He spoke to the President, unconcerned as to whether he convinced the general of anything or not. A sword, after all, was not meant to stay sheathed. Advice from the military would always contain a military option. It was the way of things.

“
Zh
xí
Chen,” General Sun continued, using the word that had meant
chairman
during Mao’s day, but was now commonly translated as
president
. “The United States is well aware that it could not win a protracted war in our battle space. They are stretched thin with Korea and have neither the stomach nor means to occupy anything else east of Japan for any length of time, not with the world such as it is. They will try to utilize their carriers and submarine fleets to attack us from afar. So far, we have planned for little beyond denying them access to our waters. But Mr. President, national honor demands we take the fight—”

The President raised his hand, waving away the assault of words. General Sun fell silent immediately.

“I understand our national honor,” Chen said, more contemplative than angry. “And I am more than aware of the tactics the US will use in an air-sea battle. What I need are options—and a cogent plan of what to do in the face of this open hostility from the US. I cannot understand what is going on in the American President’s head. It seems to me as though he is bent on war. The President is practically in bed with the Japanese. Two of the most notorious terrorists in our nation were handed over to the Pakistanis—who conveniently let them escape.” He gazed out of the floor-to-ceiling windows to his left, breathing deeply, thinking on each word. “I wonder what the Americans would have done if we’d had bin Laden and handed him over to France. I have to tell you, gentlemen, even if I did not want a war, there are plenty in the Central Committee who think it is the wisest course of action—blood and treasure notwithstanding.”

Wen had no love lost for the United States, but chose to look at things as they were, rather than as nationalist fervor wished them to be.

“Sir,” he said, speaking evenly, mirroring the President’s demeanor. “I agree with the general’s point that after decades of fighting in the Middle East, Americans have no stomach for war—but I assure you, they have much less stomach for defeat. Even if our strikes disable US communications satellites and cripple their naval assets with the first salvo of nuclear missiles—a relatively blind and wounded United States would counterstrike with enough force from their surviving submarines and carriers that our losses would be in the millions.”

“Perhaps it would be millions.” General Sun sniffed dismissively. “But are those lives not a small price to pay to chase the US out of our waters for good?”

“Any victory would be a Pyrrhic one,” Wen said, “At the cost of so much blood and treasure that our economy would crumble—”

“Or perhaps the economy would grow.” Admiral Jiang nodded thoughtfully. At sixty-six, he was the oldest man in the room by a decade. He was fit for his age, had a square jaw and military bearing—but he parted his jet-black hair in the middle, a habit that Wen found off-putting and distinctly un-Chinese. “The Americans flaunt their perceived power in our noses at every turn,” the admiral said. “They appear to want a war. I do not need to remind you that though the side that shoots first, so to speak, may be judged the aggressor in the court of public opinion, that side will also have a considerable advantage in the fight.”

General Sun leaned farther forward. “In an air-and-sea battle with the United States, first strike would be a necessity, sir. I believe, as do many of my colleagues, that we could endure the heavy losses sustained in such a conflict—even a nuclear war—as long as we make the primary move.”

“Are these colleagues that agree with your assessment the same wise men who allowed a sensitive prototype weapon to be stolen from a poorly guarded warehouse in Penggu?” The President tipped his head slightly to one side, eyes locked on the general while he waited. This was not a rhetorical question.

Wen decided to step in, more to let the President know the status of the stolen weapon than to let the bloviating general off the hook. If Sun had his way, nuclear missiles would arc westward by nightfall.

“We have information that may lead us to the Black Dragon, sir,” he said, careful not to give himself an impossible deadline to find something that was lost because of the military’s inept security measures.

General Sun glared at the interruption and the news that MSS possessed information that had not been shared with the army.

“This thing you’ve lost.” The President leaned back in his chair addressing the question to anyone with an answer. “This Black Dragon. It’s not nuclear, correct?”

“That is true,” General Sun said. “But thermobaric weapons are sometimes called the ‘poor man’s nuclear device.’ The effects are devastating.”

Chen Min gave a thoughtful nod. “I understand the Americans do not have such a device.”

“Not as such,” Minister Wen said. “The US arsenal includes many thermobaric bombs. Their Javelin for instance is a shoulder-fired missile much like this one. But for its size, the Black Dragon is much more powerful. An ugly weapon.”

“Ugly and useful,” the general said.

“Ugly, useful, and small enough to make it difficult to locate, I’d imagine,” the President said. “Please work in concert on this, gentlemen. I do not need to tell you what sort of problems it will cause if our own Black Dragon, say, made its way here to Beijing. There are those who would be happy to see such a thing deployed against this very office.”

“Understood, sir,” General Sun said. He took a deep breath, holding his hat in both hands. “Mr. President, I must speak frankly. I hold Minister Wen in the greatest of all possible esteem, but regarding our clear victory over the United States during a possible conflict, I have more faith in our country than he does. The minister’s world is one of spies and deceit—which, I freely admit, is necessary for the security of our nation. The admiral and I operate in a world of honor and duty—a world of direct attack. We have a plan in place that will allow China more than any Pyrrhic victory.” He looked at Jiang, who nodded in forceful agreement.

“Even as we speak, Mr. President,” the admiral said, “if the Americans want war, we have assets in position to crush them.”

“Very well,” Chen Min said. He gave a flick of his hand as he stood, knocking a silver teapot off his desk in the process. All three men moved at once to pick up the pot, nearly knocking each other over in the process. The President stopped them with a look.

“Tea and blood are both impossible to retrieve once they have been spilled,” he said. “Trust that I am not above spilling either if I see that it is the right move. In the meantime, someone find out what is going on in the mind of that fool America has for a President. And while you are at it, capture the Feng brothers and locate our missing weapon.”

Wen did not say it in front of the others, but he had someone working on that very plan. He looked across the spacious office at the fallen teapot. The admiral caught his eye and gave him a pleasant nod. There was no doubt that he and the general had a plan of their own.