Frigid water lapped at his belly, driving the air from his lungs as surely as a hammer to his chest — but easing the ever-present ache in his kidney. He folded his arms tight and clenched his muscles, much like the grunt of the Hick maneuver fighter pilots used to counteract the effects of g-forces in flight. Compressing blood to the core of his body around his vital organs, he gave his system a quick five count to get over the initial shock of the cold.
With water temperatures just fifteen degrees above freezing, Quinn figured he had maybe ten minutes before his hands began to cramp into unusable claws. The fish house was a little over half a football field away. Ventilating with a couple of deep breaths, Quinn slipped noiselessly into the swirling currents, his body a toothpick in the jaws of the mighty Yukon.
He floated more than swam, navigating with just his head above the water, conserving energy as best he could, tensing to keep blood and vital warmth in his core. Rather than fighting the unyielding grip of the huge river, he used small strokes, adjusting his direction of travel instead of trying to make speed. The current was far faster than he could possibly swim and his puny efforts would do nothing but make him tired and colder than he already was. Quinn had learned as a small boy that, in the wilderness, a man is merely a hairless, clawless bear — weak and inconsequential without his wits. There was nothing like floating nearly naked in a river the size of the Yukon to drive that point home.
Roughly two minutes after entering the river, Quinn rounded the new barge docks and leaned toward the bank. Thirty seconds later, he grabbed the transom of an aluminum skiff that was tethered alongside the fish house.
Rain pattered on the surface of the river.
Arms shaking with cold, Quinn tucked the length of hose back into his belt in case he was discovered and needed it to slip away underwater. He grabbed the wooden rungs of the newly built two-by-four ladder on the wooden dock that ran the length of the Kwikpac building, adjacent to the skiff. Still half in, half out of the water, he waited, his head just below the bottom of the dock. Another minute of intense shivering and Quinn wondered if he’d even be able to haul himself up the ladder at all, let alone fight.
Water dripped from his eyes as he glanced down at the Tag Aquaracer on his wrist. Six minutes since he’d left the fuel shed. He felt sure the men in the building directly above him would be able to hear his chattering teeth, even over the constant slosh of the river. Clenching his jaws in an effort to stop the noise, he prayed for Ukka to start shooting soon.
Chapter 13
The humorless government machine that was TSA prodded Tang along as it had his wife, demanding he stand just so in order to scan his body for weapons. He had no doubt that the chemical sensors would scan his camera bag, but the portion of the device he carried was small and innocuous by itself — barely five ounces of material.
He made it through security with little more than a condescending nod from the harried TSA officers.
Ma Zhen called their plan the Honey Plot, pointing out that it took twelve bees, each bringing in a small droplet of nectar at a time, to produce one teaspoon of honey. Like Tang, Ma was Hui — Muslim Chinese. He was also a gifted bomb maker.
The five members of Tang’s group would each pass through security with only a small portion of the device. That meant five chances for discovery, but the minuscule amount of contraband made the odds that any individual would be caught extremely low.
Tang and Ma Zhen and a half-Uyghur man named Hu all carried PETN, a powerful, but low-vapor explosive secreted away in specialized Ni-Cad camcorder batteries. The batteries had been sealed by the man from Pakistan to Ma Zhen’s specifications. Earlier that day, they had laid out all the components on the bed at the hotel. Tang had marveled at the workmanship of the batteries. They even had enough juice to power the camera for a few minutes if officials wanted to make certain they were operable. These were not batteries from some backroom workshop. The man from Pakistan had contacts in the manufacturing company or possibly even a government. They had now proven they could hide small quantities of PETN and were certainly good enough to conceal the powdered metal carried by Gao Jianguo, the fifth and final member of the team. He was a thuggish brute with a sloping forehead that hinted at the diminished capacity of his brain. He spoke of jihad in vague terms that made Tang wonder if he even knew what the word meant.
Tang stopped just past the screening checkpoint long enough to put on his belt and replace his wallet and wristwatch. A hundred feet from the gate, he could see the forlorn face of his wife as she sat facing the window, staring blankly at the plane that would see them out of their despair.
Ma Zhen sat alone on the row of black chairs behind Lin. He stooped forward, making notations in a small notebook. He was always writing something, as if he knew he should be in a university taking notes rather than masterminding the destruction of a commercial airliner.
Ma was a young man with thick, black-framed glasses and the large goiter of one who’d missed some vital element of his diet when he was a child. When he was just seventeen, Ma had seen his father and grandfather dragged into the street and executed by Chinese troops for the crime of nonviolent protest against majority Han Chinese encroachment in the traditionally Muslim Hui regions of Xinjiang. According to the man from Pakistan, both of the older men had been scholars, learned but quiet souls who espoused compromise and believed in a peaceful solution to all things.
After the murders, Ma’s maternal grandfather — a man with only two fingers on his right hand and copious scarring on his neck and face had taken him aside and taught him the ways of bomb making. Ma had excelled at chemistry and physics and so was able to build on the concepts the old man taught him, making devices that were smaller and far easier to conceal. They were also much more powerful. His mother passed away from grief the following year, her dying wish that he would avenge his father.
The man from Pakistan had found him while he was still in mourning. Ma had seen the opportunity to be a dutiful son and followed without question on the path that had led him here, with Tang and the others.
Exhausted all the way to his bones, Tang dropped his camera bag on the floor and collapsed into a seat beside his wife. There was no consoling the poor woman, so he did not even try. He let his gaze wander down the wide terminal hallway past the shopping kiosks and milling crowds. The final member of their group, Hu Qi, would clear security soon and be along with his portion of the explosive for the device. Fifty meters away, the dimwitted Gao slouched in front of a slot machine. Tang watched as the muscular stub of a man dropped coin after coin into the machine, pressing buttons and spending money as fast as he could.
A strange sense of peace fell over Tang as he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. Soon, they would all board flight 224 for Los Angeles with all their portions of the device — and none of them would ever need money again.
Chapter 14
Trailing streams of frigid water, Quinn hauled himself up the ladder the moment the methodic flat cracks of Ukka’s Winchester began to moan across the surface of the river. Feet shuffled on the plywood floor above, tromping to the uphill side of the fish house as the men inside moved to see what was happening, surely hoping their cohort had bagged their intended target.
Quinn took a moment to flex his hands open and shut in an effort to make certain they still worked before he moved at a crouch across the back receiving deck. Unfortunately for him, one of the contractors, a young man with sharp features and beard as dark as Quinn’s, was savvy enough to periodically check over his shoulder during the sound of gunfire.