As Liu watched the helicopter accelerate off across Beijing, he already started to calculate his options should the man somehow miraculously survive.
Because it was now becoming a possibility that Liu had to seriously consider.
There were only twenty feet to go until the chopper passed over the curved roof of the performing arts center, and Cole knew he just had to hang on for a few moments longer, just a few short, painful moments…
But in those few moments, time seemed to distort, fractions of a second turning to minutes of pain and anguish, until Cole wondered if he could truly hang on long enough to see his plan through to the end, or if his grip would give up too soon, his body plummeting to the lake below, breaking apart when it hit water as hard as concrete.
His mind continued to play tricks on him in those moments, questioning the height of the chopper’s approach, its angle, where his own body truly was in space — too high, too low — and whether instead of clearing the roof, he would instead by dashed against it, legs and pelvis shattered by the impact; or else the entire helicopter itself would hit the structure in a suicide mission by the enraged pilot.
But then those fleeting instants were over, and the helicopter was over the roof, still accelerating onwards, and soon the roof would be gone, left far behind, and…
Cole released his grip without conscious thought as he let his instincts take over completely, guiding his body, taking advantage of the perfect time, the one and only opportunity he had left.
His body sailed down through the air and he felt the familiar lurch in his stomach as gravity pushed him savagely earthwards, and then the roof was there, right there at this feet, and he buckled at the ankles, the knees, the hips, his body rolling just as he’d been taught in jump school at Fort Bragg all those years before, the same way he had landed after his hundreds of parachute jumps; but this time the landing was on curved metal and glass, and — the breath knocked out of him — he was suddenly tumbling and spinning down the arched surface, falling uncontrollably down the elliptical building.
But then his instinct — hardwired and unassailable — prevailed again, and his hands, still weak from his grip in the helicopter door, had to go to work one more time, grasping out for the raised titanium frame which held the darkened glass in place, fingertips working to gain a hold of the rain-slicked metal.
They grasped, failed, and grasped again; and then again, and then again, his body all the while continuing its inexorable slide down the side of the building; but then his fingers grasped and held and his body finally, mercifully, came to a stop, a third of the way down the curved glass slope.
Cole breathed hard, gasping, almost unable to believe he had finally stopped his fatal descent.
But stop it he had, and now — with the sounds of the other choppers moving in towards him — all he had to do was find some way of getting inside the damned building.
General Wu looked at the monitors which showed the progress of the East China Fleet towards the coast of Japan. The entire battle group was still undetected, still far enough away from the target so that their radar would be ineffective.
But soon, Wu knew, everyone in the entire world would be aware of his plans. Would America intervene?
He hadn’t previously thought so, but today’s events were causing him to reconsider; they had already tried to intervene in his affairs, hadn’t they? At the moment he had no proof, but he felt sure that the dual incidents that had occurred that afternoon — the foiled assassination attempt on his own life, and the destruction of the Hall of Imperial Supremacy and the Politburo within — must have been the work of the Americans. Who else, realistically, could it have been?
Did that indicate that their resolve was greater than he had anticipated? Would they risk the four thousand sailors and aircrew of the USS Ford, the tens of thousands of their citizens trapped inside China’s borders, to help their ally?
Wu still couldn’t believe they had the stomach for it; what had happened today was low-key, a covert operation which reflected a last-ditch, desperate attempt on the part of President Abrams to avoid an all-out war. But when that war reared its ugly head — as it would do any day now — Wu was in no doubt that Abrams would back down.
He had leaked enough information to US intelligence sources so that they would have a vague idea of the massive nuclear arsenal Wu had under his command, and he was sure that the psychological profile they had on him would suggest that he would be willing to use that arsenal if pushed.
Which, of course, he was. Why have it otherwise?
The tunnels under the Taihang Mountains were so deep, so well protected, that no military airstrike could have a chance of taking them out. The Americans would know this, just as they would know that China could easily target the pitifully small US stockpile that remained. It was a one-sided affair if ever there was one, and was the major reason for Wu’s unshakeable confidence in attacking Japan.
And attacking Japan was something he had always wanted to do, something he had felt compelled to do, something he had fantasized over and dreamed about ever since he’d heard stories as a child of the atrocities visited upon his people by Japan’s imperialist armies. His own grandmother had been brutalized during the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, his grandfather bayoneted to death after being forced to watch her gang raped. His uncle was later beaten to death by Japanese officials in occupied Shanghai, which was when his own parents had fled north to Chengdu. They had hated the Japanese with a hot, burning passion, and had instilled the same vehement hatred in their son.
Now Wu felt close to finally making that nation pay for its atrocities, to finally bring it under Chinese control, to make it yet one more province of the Chinese empire. He would subjugate its people and take over their industrial base, achieving a huge propaganda victory for his new regime while also vastly increasing the wealth of his own nation.
And, he thought with a smile, vastly increasing his own personal wealth in the process.
He thought momentarily of his old friend Kang Xing, Minister of National Defense and — Wu could now admit — perhaps the true mastermind behind recent events. He had certainly seeded the ideas in Wu’s mind, given him the confidence to go through with his plans, made suggestions for an overall strategic direction to follow.
But now Kang was dead, killed by the bomb — or space-based weapons attack, they still didn’t really know — which had destroyed much of the Outer Eastern Palace. His emotions were mixed — the man had proved to be a good friend over the years, and a valuable mentor. But at the end of the day, he knew too much, and if Wu was ever going to step out of Kang’s shadow and become his own man, he would have ultimately had to get rid of his old friend anyway.
He had to admit, in a way the Americans had actually done him a favor, and the thought made him smile.
His head snapped round at the call of one of the officers monitoring the situation with the assassin, a situation that Wu had stopped following when it became clear it was degenerating into chaos; he had instructed the officers to only tell him when it was sorted out, and the man was dead or in custody.
Wu strode over to the excited officer. ‘Has he been captured?’
‘Not yet,’ the officer replied, ‘but we have him trapped. He has managed to get inside the National Center for Performing Arts, but he’s trapped himself. We have air coverage blanketing the area and ground troops moving in right now. There is no chance for him to escape whatsoever.’