There weren’t a lot of PLA near that first apartment building, but as we approached our target, they were denser on the ground. Most were officers, but some squads of enlisted men were present as well. With the rain and fog, they mostly stayed inside if they could, but a few were out on the street smoking. They paid no attention to us as we walked by.
Then one young man smoking with his friends about twenty meters away called a question in our direction as we walked by. I thought I might have a heart attack. I decided that the distance had been far enough that I could plausibly have not heard the man.
Don’t ask again. You don’t care where we’re going, what unit we’re from, or what we think about PLA rations. Just laugh it off and keep talking to your shithead friends, kid.
But he didn’t just laugh it off. I could see our target building ahead, but the question behind us was repeated, this time louder.
Fuck. I thought the word so loudly that for a second I was worried I had said it aloud. Summoning every ounce of courage, I half-turned and mumbled something unintelligible that sounded vaguely Chinese, almost the sort of thing you mumble to a beggar who asks you for money. Complementing that with a dismissive wave, I turned around and kept walking, surreptitiously slipping a hand in my pocket and making sure my silenced pistol was there and ready to use.
The man shouted a question back, but by that point we were a good thirty meters away and continuing to open the distance. It’s not that important, kid, I tried to tell him telepathically. Shut up and leave me alone.
My interlocutor apparently didn’t think the matter was worth interrupting his smoke for. I heard him say something with mild anger, probably something like, “Eh, screw that idiot.”
With relief, I continued toward the target building. I didn’t glance back to see how McCormick and Dietrich felt about the encounter, sure that they had been about half-a-second from swinging their Ak-2000’s around and cutting down every PLA soldier they could on that street.
And then we saw the target building. A full twenty stories tall, it was one of perhaps six apartment buildings of similar size in the area. But this one was special.
Hope you’re ready for some company, Colonel Fong, I thought.
The target building was right next to a large playground constructed for the children in the area, and across the street from a high school. That was not surprising.
The Chinese knew that the Taiwanese and Americans were unlikely to attack such a building with so many civilians — especially children — nearby. They had learned from the demise of the previous Chinese special forces unit, Unit Zero, which had established a local headquarters in a prison in Taipei. The Knights had wiped out Unit Zero, of course, McCormick himself having played an integral role in that battle.
Of course, Unit One didn’t advertise that it had established a local headquarters in a civilian area. The existence of the headquarters was a secret, one that Taiwanese intelligence had cracked by tracing radio and telephone calls, cracking into email accounts, and spying on the comings and goings of one Colonel Fong.
From Fong’s interviews with CNN, the Taiwanese had established roughly where he had been at a certain point in time. The Taiwanese mini satellites were recording virtually everything that happened within a few miles of Pinglin at that point, looking for any little advantage they could pass on to the American defenders. They traced Fong’s subsequent movement and found that he had been to one random apartment building in east Taipei five or six times over the past two days.
Establishing that Fong was at the building at that particular moment had taken an inspired bit of sleuthing. Fifteen minutes before we arrived, one of the Taiwanese spies in China working for the unit responsible for weather alteration had placed a call to Fong to notify him that they could guarantee a forecast of rain and fog for the next two days.
Fong used the best Chinese encryption systems to avoid tracking the phone’s signal to the apartment building, but the Taiwanese had managed to contact one of the civilians who actually still lived in the apartment building. The Chinese had not wanted to move the civilians out because that would have tipped off Taiwanese intelligence that something was going on in the building. Instead, they had shut down Internet and telephone lines into the building and jammed mobile frequencies. But they hadn’t thought about laser communications, which could be shot out the window at a specific receiver.
One of those civilians had set off a firecracker on his window-sill, three floors below where Fong was taking the call. The Taiwanese agent on the phone with Fong heard the pop — and just like that, Taiwanese intelligence could confirm that Fong was in the building. They had called in final confirmation of Fong’s location to McCormick just minutes earlier.
And now we were approaching the building.
This was where things became substantially less certain.
We didn’t know if identification would be needed to get inside the building; we didn’t know how many Unit One commandos were in the building; we didn’t know how many regular soldiers were in the building. We didn’t even know exactly where in the building Fong was. Taiwanese intelligence had estimated that he was on the ninth floor, but there were about thirty rooms per floor, and he could be in any of them. Our Taiwanese friend relayed that the firecracker had sounded distinctly loud over the phone, suggesting that the room was at least on the same side of the building as the civilian’s room.
First thing’s first, I remembered the American idiom. Let’s just get in the damn building.
I slowed our pace slightly to scope out the entrance. It appeared to be an unlocked door, no keycard access. That was good. We could have broken into any door, but it would have cost us in time and noise, and we didn’t want to spook the target too soon.
Strolling up to the building, I pulled the door open and entered a reception area with four regular PLA infantry and two Unit One soldiers. Their weapons were slung over their shoulders, and they were chatting quietly amongst themselves.
They saw us walk in and stood slowly, as if it were routine to see people enter.
Wordlessly, I pulled a silenced pistol and fired into the head of the nearest Unit One soldier. I wanted to get them out of the way first, since they were far more likely to react quickly than the ordinary PLA soldiers.
I shifted aim to one of the regular soldiers trusting that McCormick would get the other Unit One soldier. Two PLA soldiers were standing beside each other near the elevator bank, and I took those two out with four quick shots. Bringing my weapon back around, I saw that no Chinese soldiers were still standing.
We were in.
I strode to the elevator bank and pushed the up button while McCormick and Dietrich spent a moment dragging bodies behind furniture and the reception desk. It might buy us another minute or two if no one could see the bodies from the street.
One rule of urban combat you learn quickly is to always have a weapon up and raised when waiting for an elevator. The reason was obvious — when the doors open, there’s no promise that the elevator will be empty. This time, three Unit One soldiers had been riding down. I shot each in the head in two seconds, and the last one almost had enough time to get his weapon raised.
McCormick and Dietrich dragged their bodies to join those behind the reception desk and then ran back to the elevator bank. I pushed the button for the ninth floor, and the doors shut.