The all-too-familiar sound of rotor blades.
The helicopters had arrived.
And — exposed now on the open rooftops — Cole realized that he had turned himself into a sitting duck.
7
‘Where is he?’ asked General Wu, two assistants offering him towels to rub down his rain-soaked skin as he paced furiously around the operations center underneath the Zhongnonhai compound.
‘We don’t know,’ answered Zhou’s aide, Major Wang Lijun. ‘He managed to get a boat up into Qianhai Lake, which we found abandoned. We’re tracking him into the streets around Houhai, and we’ve got the choppers up now, so it shouldn’t be long.’
‘It better not be,’ Wu growled, his anger having grown with every passing minute. Yes, he could use the incident to his benefit; but he also hungered for revenge, his perfect afternoon ruined. And it wasn’t just the assassin; there was the explosion at the Forbidden City to consider too.
‘What about the Politburo?’ Wu asked next.
Again, Wang was forced to shake his head in sorrow. ‘The entire area is a no-go zone for now,’ he explained. ‘Most of the Outer Eastern Palace has been damaged, and the Hall of Imperial Supremacy has been completely destroyed, we have teams there now, still trying to put out the fires.’
‘Is it contained?’
‘For now,’ Wang said, ‘and we should be grateful for the rain, it’s helping to stop the fires from spreading. But I’m afraid we won’t know the fate of the people who were being kept there for quite some time. However, given the extent of the damage, it is highly unlikely that anyone survived.’
Wu bowed his head, considering the matter. What could have caused such an event? His immediate thought was that it was an American attack. Despite Beijing’s near-impenetrable anti-aircraft capabilities, an American stealth bomber had an outside chance of beating it, getting in close enough to drop a precision-guided bomb, and getting out again undetected.
‘I want air surveillance increased immediately, all personnel to be working on it,’ Wu demanded, ‘pull everyone you can off whatever else they’re working on and concentrate on radar coverage of this area.’ He gestured to another uniformed officer. ‘Get all of our surveillance aircraft up in the air,’ he said, ‘and do it immediately. Any other aircraft we have, get them looking too.’ He turned to a naval officer. ‘Put the word out to the fleet, we have a possible enemy aircraft in the area, possibly a US stealth plane, get them all looking.’
The officers snapped at the commands and rushed away to implement them. It made Wu feel better, but only slightly. What if the Americans had some new weapon of which he was not even aware? He had heard rumors about space-based weapons, which — depending on who you talked to — relied upon laser, radar or electromagnetic pulse technology for their effects.
But if President Abrams had use of such a weapon, why target the Hall of Imperial Supremacy? If the attack had been carried out by the Americans — and only the Americans had the technology that could have beaten his country’s defenses like that — then why would they have wanted to kill the entire Politburo? What was in it for them? Surely it would have made more sense to target the Zhongnonhai?
Unless it was a simple error — either US intelligence had suggested that a different set of people were in the target building, or else the bomb had been aimed at the Zhongnonhai, and had hit the Forbidden City by mistake?
None of it made any sense whatsoever.
The chaos of the basement control room — dozens, maybe hundreds of personnel, both military and civilian rushing around, updating maps, monitoring computer screens, barking orders, checking satellite feeds, observing radar and sonar systems, everyone in a frantic rush to combat the threat to China’s national territory while at the same time preparing for the incredibly complex operation to invade Japan — faded out of General Wu’s consciousness as he thought hard about what had happened that day.
Dietrich Hoffmeyer — who had he been, really? Supposedly a Dutch businessman, a negotiator for the firm TransNat Drilling; a man who had already been in Beijing when Wu had assumed power. Could it be that he was a sleeper agent? A member of the CIA? Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service? Or else the real Hoffmeyer was somewhere else, replaced after the coup by a lookalike, a Western assassin in disguise. Photographic analysis would be used to help answer that question, and right now Wu also had teams going through Hoffmeyer’s hotel room, searching for evidence of the man’s real identity.
Capturing the man, of course, would be the perfect outcome; under ‘tactical interrogation’, Wu was sure the assassin would break, and he could learn everything there was to know about him, including the most important question of all — who did he work for?
Of course, Wu could claim the assassin worked for any nation in the world — the real national culprit would only deny it anyway.
Wu was just beginning to chart out his future actions — deciding when and how to go public with his accusations — when he noticed Wang gesturing towards him excitedly, talking on his radio to someone.
Wu rushed across the busy control room. ‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘You have news?’
Wang nodded his head, signing off the radio and turning to his general. ‘Yes sir,’ he said breathlessly. ‘One of our helicopters has seen him.’
‘Where?’
‘On the rooftops in Houhai,’ Wang responded. ‘He is exposed, and we have police moving in on foot and more choppers on the way.’
Wu nodded his head. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Alert all local units, military as well as police, secure the area, cordon it all off. We’ll make sure the bastard doesn’t get away again.’
‘Yes sir,’ Wang acknowledged, getting back on his radio to relay the orders.
For the first time since the incident began, Wu allowed himself to smile.
Soon he would be able to ask all of his questions to the man himself.
Navarone moved as casually as he could along the underground subway tunnel, headed towards Qianmen Station, the nearest to the group’s exit point from the sewers.
He was aware that — as a Westerner — he would be under greater scrutiny than the other commuters who flowed through the busy tunnel corridors, but he was trained to blend in no matter what the circumstances. And he knew that — if stopped — his ID should stand up to scrutiny.
He couldn’t even see the other members of Force One, who were spread out throughout the tunnel, and took this to be a good sign — if he couldn’t see them, then it was unlikely that a poorly trained subway security guard would notice them either.
The only member of his team that he could see was Julie Barrington, and that was only because she was supposed to be visible.
Dressed in a conservative grey suit with glasses, hair tied back in severe style — they had all washed and changed back in the sewers before emerging through an abandoned staff locker room — Barrington looked exactly as she should in her new role as professional tour guide.
Her tour group was following dutifully behind her as she led them with an identifying flag held high — the sign for the Shanghai League of Women in Business and Industry.
Navarone watched the group, twenty-one middle-aged ‘women’ in business suits marching purposefully along towards Qianmen Station.
He almost smiled. The Politburo members — despite their earlier protestations — were pulling off their disguises pretty well. In fact, the men didn’t look all that different from the three genuine women in the group. Even Liang Huanjia was getting into the swing of it, and Navarone couldn’t help but wonder what had happened at that party three years ago that Chang had mentioned.