Warriors (50 page)

Moon smiled the smile of a beneficent uncle, pressed his hands together as if in prayer, and continued smoothly.

“On your seats tonight, you found a sealed envelope. Do not open your envelopes until you have left the auditorium. Inside each envelope is a picture of one additional target. Do not be surprised if you recognize the face. It is the face of one of your instructors or perhaps one of your classmates upon whom I look with distrust and disfavor.”

At that moment, one of the elderly instructors, his face distorted with fear and panic, leaped from his seat and raced up the aisle toward the doors at the rear.

“Let him go,” Moon said, chuckling softly. “He won’t get far. Now, one final word. In exactly one hour, some of my fiercest ground commandos will parachute into this compound to defend me and this military installation. So you have until the first army boot hits the ground to complete your final exam. Good luck. It has been my profound pleasure to lead you all these years. Shall you serve?”

“We shall serve!” they cried.

“Shall China rule?”

“China shall rule!”

General Moon bowed deeply from the waist and then stood tall. He raised his right fist in triumph and his words rang out and filled the hall: “Then bring me the head of Alexander Hawke!”

C
H A P T E R
  7 0

T
heir footsteps crunched in companionable unison over the hard-packed sand. They were kitted out in the latest ceramic exoskeleton combat suits; they were black, hot, and heavy, but for a close-quarters interior firefight like Hawke anticipated, they offered the best protection available on the planet.

The eighteen men had agreed to a rendezvous at a small building in the shadows of the Weapons Design Center. Fitz, on a prelim recon, had found the Annex, separate but connected to the main building where they believed they would find Dr. Chase. At 0400 hours, the building showed not a single light, the sharp square angles a black silhouette against the starry sky.

The Annex was unlit and unlocked and would offer them brief cover while Hawke and Stokely gave the troops a final brief before they stormed the WDC.

“Huddle up, guys,” Stoke said into his headset, holding up a cell phone. “On me.”

They all gathered around him. He raised the iPhone so they could all see the screen.

“What is it, Stoke?” Hawke asked.

“Something our comms guy, Elvis Peete, here just downloaded from Langley. A thermal-imaging fly-by video CIA wanted us to see. Good timing, huh? I just watched it and now I know why. See the time code? Shot just one hour ago. Take a look.”

He pushed play. The video was grainy black and white but remarkably clear for something shot from so high above. They were looking down at the target building. The Weapons Design Center was dark, not a window lit on any of the floors. Just like now. Five seconds into the film, a white panel truck skidded to a stop in front of the building’s entrance. The driver and a passenger jumped out and went around to the back of the truck. They opened the rear doors and one man climbed inside. The driver reached in and started pulling. Out came the limp body of a male. Unconscious. Or dead. The driver had the ankles, the other man had the wrists.

“Holy fuck, it’s him!” Harry Brock said.

“How do you know?” Stoke asked him, hitting the pause button.

“Bill Chase is six foot four, remember? Look at that guy. At least that tall. How many guys over six feet tall you think holiday here on Xinbu fucking Island, Stoke?”

“Harry’s right,” Hawke said. “That’s Chase. Play the rest of it, Stoke.”

On the screen, the two men carried the sagging body up the broad steps and into the building. Lights on the ground floor went on. Six figures came outside and stood guard at the entrance, three to either side. All holding automatic rifles. They stood aside as the body was carried in.

A minute later, long enough for an elevator ride, the lights on the top floor illuminated. A minute later, the lights were extinguished. Right after that, the two men exited, climbed inside the panel truck, and drove out of the frame. The six who’d guarded the door in their absence moved back inside the darkened building. The lights shut down and remained off. Just like they were now.

Stoke said, “Target is lying unconscious, possibly dead, in a room on the top floor, left side front, end of the corridor of the central elevator bank. Thank you, gods of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Modern warfare,” Brock said proudly. “My guys are the shit, right?”

“Damn straight,” Stoke agreed. The video was literally a gift from above.

“Shitfire,” Chief Rainwater said. He was standing in the open doorway of the Annex.

“What is it, Chief?” Hawke asked, putting a hand on the big man’s shoulder and peering out.

“Two armored troop vehicles. They must have heard us blowing shit up, and now I’d say they’ve seen us. Both headed this way at full tilt.”

Both men screwed up their eyes in automatic reflex as the fierce glare of powerful oncoming headlights struck them, the flare path arrowing out into the darkness.

“Fitz! Froggy! Take an RPG position behind that pumping station out there. Wait until both trucks close to within a hundred yards and then take them out simultaneously. Don’t let one veer away. We don’t have time to bloody deal with those assholes now.”

The two men hefted their RPG tubes and raced off into the darkness. Two minutes later, two fiery and nearly simultaneous explosions blossomed up into the star-dusted darkness.

“Good shooting,” Hawke murmured under his breath as Fitz and Froggy reappeared on the run.

“Chief,” Hawke said, looking carefully at Rainwater, “you and Froggy ready to go blow that sub base off its foundation?”

“You can be fairly sure we ain’t taking a couple of hundred pounds of Semtex and C-4 home with us, Commander Hawke.”

“Good. How long will it take you to rig the complex?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“You’ve got forty minutes. Figure thirty. Set the timers to blow the complex exactly at 0430 hours. Got it? Move out!”

The two saboteurs, the big Comanche and the squat little Frenchman, ran off into the darkness.

Stoke said, “Only six guys waiting in there in the dark to guard our guy? I’m not sure I buy that.”

Hawke said, “I don’t buy it either.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “We’ve got fifty-four minutes to find and identify the hostage, dead or alive, blow up that sub pen, and get the bloody hell out to the far end of that rocky point. Alive enough to rendezvous with the sub. And hopefully before that planeload of commie commandos lands on our bloody noggins. Let’s move.”

THEY DOUBLE-TIMED IT UP THE
steps to the entrance, splitting at the double doors, Hawke’s team going right, Stoke and his going left. The men flipped their night-vision goggles down and waited for the two squad leaders to enter the blacked-out building. The plan was simple. Hawke and Stoke would clear the ground floor before anyone else entered as they’d done it countless times before.

Stoke kicked the thick glass-and-stainless-steel doors inward. He and Hawke went in together, avoiding the doorway’s kill zone at the center. They dove left and right, hitting the floor in a roll. They came out of it, back on their feet, with their automatic weapons ready to fire, sweeping left to right and back again. It looked empty. There was a wide center staircase to the first floor and—

“Oh, hullo,” a disembodied voice said, in perfect Oxbridge English.

Hawke swung around, his finger tightening on the trigger. Somehow someone, a woman, had gotten behind them! Early thirties, close-cropped black hair. A BBC, his mind insisted. A British-born-Chinese. She smiled and said, “Sorry, the power’s out. May I help you?”

Some kind of receptionist?
Hawke wondered. Bizarre. And then he thought,
She looks oddly familiar. Where? When?
He focused on that but couldn’t pull it up, nor had he time to worry about it.

“Show us where to find Dr. Chase. Now.” Hawke took three menacing steps forward and lowered his MP5 barrel until it was opposite her defiant heart.

“Who? I’m sorry. We have no one here by that name.” Incredibly cool and confident under the circumstances. Definitely not a receptionist.

“I have zero time for you. Tell me where he is now or I cannot guarantee your safety.”

She just smiled.

“Lock down on that woman,” Hawke said to Stokely before turning away. “Shoot her.”

“No problem,” Stoke said and raised his silenced automatic.

“Last chance,” he said to the woman. “Where is he?”

There was a muffled
pfft
from above. A bullet grazed Stoke’s hand and the 9mm pistol flew from Stoke’s bloodied hand and clattered across the marble floor. At the same instant, Hawke felt a stinging sensation in his right earlobe. He put his hand to it and came away with a bloody smear.

“Up there!” Stoke shouted as he and Hawke peered up into the darkness. They were in some kind of open atrium, like those Hyatt airport hotels, open center to the roof, balconies going all the way around the inside of the building on every floor.

The lobby lights went on with a bang, like a master switch had been thrown.

Hawke swung back around. The young woman was now standing, half hidden by an open door, still smiling at him in oddest way.

Hawke hesitated a beat; then he saw her hand dive inside her jacket.

“Gun!” Hawke shouted.

The space filled with the jackhammer chatter of his weapon. He fired a four-round burst that almost chopped her in half and she pitched forward to the floor, the gun in her right hand. Hawke flinched at the sight. He killed his enemies for a living and he did it with a ruthless efficiency appalling in its single-mindedness and thoroughness of execution. But he rarely killed without regret, nor without the most bitter self-condemnation. Still, he carried on, consoled by the knowledge he killed simply that better men might live.

HE’D SEEN SIX FIGURES EMERGE
from the entrance when Chase’s body was delivered. If the scientist was dead, his mission was over; he needed only to confirm the death and they could get the hell off the island. He’d knocked one enemy down, so five remained up there.

“Chase is up here,” a man’s voice echoed from the top floor. Again, English. They looked up again. No one there.

Hawke signaled to Fitz, five fingers for the number believed to be waiting for them upstairs.

The squad moved inside the lobby behind Fitz like a rolling black tide of utter destruction. “A bloody tomb in here, ain’t it?” Fitz said, looking up at all the white marble.

No one replied to that.

“Bad choice of words, maybe,” Fitz muttered.

C
H A P T E R
  7 1

W
atch out!” the scrawny Tennessee mountain boy, Elvis Peete, cried out in pain. “Someone’s up there on the third level with a gun and—”

Elvis hit the floor, already dead, gouts of blood pumping from a stomach wound.

Stoke got a glimpse of the guy up there, just a kid, really, trying too late to duck away. He put one through his forehead. Guy fell forward over the railing and plummeted downward. Three of his guys had to step aside to avoid being hit by the falling body.

He landed with a sickening thud at their feet, spattering their combat boots with soupy blood. He was on his back, blood seeping from his mouth and nostrils, his dead eyes staring up at nothing.

“What the fuck?” Brock said. “This dumb shit’s wearing a coat and tie!”

Hawke nodded imperceptibly at Stokely. The two men each plucked a dangling pineapple from their web belts, heaving the two stun grenades simultaneously on the count of two, up to the second-floor balcony.

The twin blasts, the horrific
BOOM,
and the blinding flash of light were deafening within the marble interior. And disorienting to anyone within immediate range of the blast.

“Okay. Let’s move,” Stoke said, starting up the stairs after Hawke.

“Go right,” Hawke said, going left himself at the top.

As he mounted the top step he saw someone to his left dart back inside an opened door. He tossed a smoke grenade, bouncing and rolling it; it stopped just outside the door, the fuse loudly hissing. Another well-dressed figure, male, stepped out in order to kick the grenade away when Hawke shot him through the heart, swung the still-chattering M5 machine gun upward to a man firing down on his troops from the balcony above, saw him crumple, half his chest torn away by the tearing slugs.

Suddenly, it came to him.

He stepped to the rail and shouted across the open atrium to Stoke and his men.

“These guards? All bloody Te-Wu, Stoke!” he said. “Assassins from the Academy! So you men mind your heads.”

Stoke answered with a long burst from his weapon.

There was an open door at the corner.

He could see armed folks, men and women, all stacked up, waiting to come out and engage the invaders. Did it make any sense? Maybe they were highly motivated, crack shots, expert marksmen. But he saw fear. Terror. And panic on their youthful faces. Some kind of suicide do, or something? But they were trying to kill him and his guys, and so he opened fire.

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

The first guy to die fell back against the next in line. Stoke fired again. The man fell back against a young woman who pointed a gun at Stoke. And so he continued to shoot, his teeth clenched tight until his jaw ached.

Suddenly another door was flung open, then another and another. More of them. Like the others, armed with pistols, few machine guns. Boys wearing coats and ties fighting highly trained commandos wearing full body armor! Nuts! A guy fired at Stoke just as he took a knee and one of Stoke’s guys went down, his throat making horrible gurgling noises. What could they do? Kill or be killed, that’s all. He and his men returned a withering barrage.

Stoke was beginning to wonder how many more of these kids were in the building. They were everywhere. These kids were outgunned and obviously not at all used to close-quarters combat. Well, assassination was a one-on-one kind of killing. In the privacy of a hotel room or a dark alley. Not this kind of shit.