The sun was up now, but the signal from Liu meant that the coast must be clear, so Cole moved quickly through the noxious, slimy garbage, pulling himself mercifully out of the truck, checking the back alley around him for a moment, and then rolling back underneath the truck in one smooth action.
Once underneath the large vehicle, Cole took hold of the manhole cover in front of him and pulled hard. It moved instantly — Liu had been ordered to make sure it wasn’t welded or rusted tightly shut the day before — and he slid it across to one side, dropping down into the dark hole beyond.
He dropped five feet and landed in ankle-deep water, knees bending to take the impact. He immediately moved to one side and lit his high-powered torch, illuminating the cavern-like sewer tunnel around him as Grayson dropped down, followed by Barrington, Collins and Davis.
Davis stayed where he was, and Cole watched as Navarone levered himself down onto the giant’s shoulders, holding himself there as he pulled the manhole cover back into position above him. The task completed, Navarone dropped to the ground beside Davis, the sound of the truck rumbling off down the alleyway muted above them.
‘Well, it might be a sewer,’ Davis said as he breathed in the air, ‘but I’d take it over that garbage truck any day of the week.’
Cole smiled. ‘We got here in one piece didn’t we?’
Davis acknowledged that fact with a grunt, and then everyone stared to move as one, following Cole’s lead down the sewer tunnel, headed west.
After ten minutes of slow, arduous movement through the thick, sludgy water which at times rose above their knees, they came to a stop at a larger area with a raised concrete platform to one side, the tunnel breaking off in three different directions.
Cole held up his hand for the team to stop.
‘We’ll lay up here for now,’ he said. ‘Check comms, weapons and equipment. Then we go our separate ways.’
The team immediately started their checks, making sure everything was still operational after their long, tortuous journey.
Navarone moved up to Cole, gesturing with his head to move to one side.
Cole did as he was asked, Navarone’s mouth going to his ear. ‘Wu’s not here,’ he said.
‘What?’ Cole asked in surprise.
‘Liu tells me he made a speech from Taipei just last night. The Politburo are still in place, Liu’s got me an updated position, and he’s got a secure cell to confirm just before we launch, but he can’t confirm Wu will be there this afternoon.’
Cole nodded his head, thinking even as he went through his own weapons checks. Just because Wu was in Taiwan last night didn’t mean he would still be there now; he could still make the Dragon Boat races that afternoon.
But even if he didn’t, Cole was here now; if Wu wasn’t here today, he would just wait. It would make things a lot more difficult — the plan was to coordinate his assassination and the rescue of the Politburo on the same day — but not impossible.
Nothing was ever impossible.
It made things awkward, but there was no reason that Navarone’s part of the operation couldn’t go exactly as planned. If the PRC government ministers were rescued before Wu was killed, that would still be okay; it would be more problematic the other way around, as Wu’s death might cause fatal reprisals if the Politburo were still being held.
Cole had planned on extracting with the rest of team, but that too wasn’t an absolute necessity; if needed, he could make his own way home.
‘Continue as planned,’ Cole said. ‘I’ll know beforehand whether he’s going to be there and I’ll let you know via secure comms. But even if he’s not, it doesn’t affect you at all.’
‘Will you extract with us?’
Cole shook his head. ‘Not if I don’t get a shot at him, no. I’ll stay until the job’s finished. You go without me, I’ll get back by myself.’
Navarone nodded, accepting Cole’s statement with total faith.
‘Okay,’ he said, clapping Navarone’s shoulder and addressing the rest of the group, ‘let’s do a final comms check.’
Everyone tested their devices, confirming that all frequencies were working and that they were still secure. Synchronization of the team’s watches came next, and then Cole looked at each member of Force One in turn.
‘Okay. I’m not one for speeches, but we all know what’s at stake here. We know what to do, so let’s get on and do it. Good luck.’
And with that, Cole was gone, travelling down the easternmost tunnel to his final destination.
He knew his team wouldn’t let him down; but, Navarone’s words still on his mind, he could only hope that he would be able to fulfil his own part of the mission.
PART FOUR
1
Graham ‘Ace’ Anderson wasn’t a happy man.
As CIA Chief of Station Beijing, he had leant his support to the infiltration of the unknown covert ops team, organizing for one of his own agents — the truck driver Yuan Ziyang — to deliver the personnel into Beijing.
And now he was being told that the team leader had directed Yuan to some random junkyard outside of the city limits and told him to go take a hike. And just like that, the team had disappeared.
Where they were, or what they were up to, was anybody’s guess.
The thing that made Anderson so annoyed about the whole affair was his own lack of knowledge. He could count the things he did know on the fingers of one hand — an American covert ops team was infiltrating into Beijing; one of the agents would be assuming an identity that Anderson’s team had set up, in order to meet with General Wu; the other members of the team would be tackling another, unknown, target; and an exfiltration plan had been set up by his station for as many as thirty people.
He hadn’t been told, but it was obvious what was going on; the team would try and rescue the surviving members of the Politburo, while the single agent would attempt to find out what he could about Wu’s future plans. Anderson had considered the fact that the man might try and assassinate the general, but such a move would be suicidal; and as far as Anderson knew, it wasn’t the policy of the US government to endorse suicidal missions. Dangerous missions certainly, missions where the operators could be killed, absolutely; but out-and-out suicidal? Not really.
He appreciated the fact that he couldn’t be told everything even at the same time that he was angered by it. Compartmentalization was the cornerstone of secrecy, after all; and he understood why the team might want to do its own thing.
But where did that leave him and his own agency? Anything that the covert unit did would reflect on him in some way, and he was unsure of what the ramifications would be. The Chinese intelligence services knew who he was, it was no secret. He had been watched like a hawk since the first second he’d set foot in China, which was why he left much of the boot work to his subordinate agents. For this one, he’d made the necessary arrangements through a series of cut-outs; primarily so that things could get done without the government knowing about it, but secondarily so that things would be harder to trace if things went wrong.
But he was under no illusions — if General Wu realized that an American unit had been operating in Beijing, then he would be called in for immediate questioning, and his diplomatic status be damned. Wu obviously held little respect for international law — you only had to look at the situation with the USS Ford to see that. Anderson dreaded to think what would happen in the subterranean dungeons underneath the Zhongnonhai.
Of course, if it came to that, Anderson would attempt to make his own way out of the city; and if he was caught, then it would be the classic cyanide capsule, a version of which he had carried with him for the past thirty-seven years. And he certainly didn’t want that.