“I said get the fuck out of—”
A simultaneous volley of four rocket-propelled grenades raced out of the jungle to the south and hit the area around the men at the back door, and, within a half second, four more RPGs struck the entrance to the building coming from the northeast, decimating Team Two just as they were stepping down from the large porch.
Ten of Dai’s men were dead or horribly wounded in the blink of an eye.
And then, around the cleared portion of the large estate, large wooden boards arced up from the ground on buried hinges, each covered with straw or recently felled brush, and neat rows of camouflaged men stood from hidden trenches and fired Kalashnikovs at the jungle around them.
As Dai watched, some six or seven different groups of men around the property engaged his remaining forces, sending men sprawling, spinning, dying in the clearing or in the jungle, or retreating for their lives back to the fence line.
Up on the overwatch where Dai was positioned, the two sniper teams were preparing to engage with their bolt-action rifles, but Dai called out to them before they fired their first round. “No!” he said. “There must be fifty or more of them. We will just draw fire on ourselves, and we can do nothing for our comrades below.”
The battle lasted over ten minutes, but nine of those minutes were just mopping up, because the result had been decided in the opening seconds. Twenty PLA special forces operators were cut down while the six men on the hillside watched: stunned, dismayed, and yet overjoyed to be up on the hill and not down there.
Kulap Chamroon observed it all from the upper stern deck of the Medusa, more than a mile and a half to the south of his family compound on Phuket. He had binoculars in his hands, as did several of the Italians at the long table around him, and they drank and ate and enjoyed the show as if they were watching a fireworks display.
They also had wireless cameras set up in both the front and the back of the big home on the estate, and through these views, projected on the large-screen TV in the upper-deck salon there next to the big table full of men, they could all see plainly that the Chinese invaders were being slaughtered.
The fighters dug into Kulap’s estate were not Chamroon Syndicate men. No, the syndicate gunmen, other than the security detail used by the Chamroon family, were poorly armed gangsters, great in a bar fight or a back-alley mugging but hopeless for this kind of an affair. No, for tonight he had brought in members of Barisan Revolusi Nasional, the National Revolutionary Front, an insurgent group in southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. BRN had no quarrel with these Chinese, and they knew absolutely nothing of a Chinese computer hacker named Fan Jiang who had been forced into servitude by the Chamroon Syndicate, but they did know the Chamroon Syndicate, because the organization had provided the BRN with weapons and funding over the past few years, as a simple foil to the Thai government.
For tonight Kulap had simply rented fifty-six of the BRN’s best fighters, paid their commanders for their services, and moved them up north via a coastal barge here to his compound on Phuket.
The BRN guerrillas dug in with orders to wait for an attack that would surely come.
Two days after they arrived and prepared positions, the Chinese hit and, from all appearances, the Chinese had all either died or retreated.
When it was over, one of the Italians sitting with Kulap at the stern of the yacht turned away from the television and looked at his Thai business associate. “Those savages you hired blew up your house. Was that in your plan?” He said it with unmistakable mirth. He was ’Ndrangheta, a millionaire dozens of times over. The loss of one of his properties would have been nothing to him, and he presumed the same of his little Thai business associate.
Kulap laughed himself, then downed a huge gulp of Sangiovese. “I told them to do what they had to do… but you’re right, Paolo. It seemed to me like they enjoyed firing those RPGs a little too much!” He laughed again. “Dirty fuckers.”
Another man watching the video said, “Looks like the Chinese killed about five of the rebels.”
Kulap shrugged. “I have to pay their commanders the same amount of money, no matter how many live or die.”
Everyone at the table laughed now.
Half a football field ahead of the conversation at the stern, Zoya Zakharova climbed the anchor chain of the Medusa, hanging upside down, her rippling muscles tightening with each pull upwards.
She was a supremely fit woman, but this wasn’t an easy task for her. The salt water had taken no time finding its way into every tiny little cut she’d earned descending the cliff face, but she pushed the pain and the ache of her fatigued and bruised muscles out of her mind as she climbed out of the water and towards the hull of the ship where the anchor chain disappeared into the chain locker. She couldn’t see up on the bow at all from her position, but she knew Court was floating in the water, just far back enough to see the bow, waiting with the pistol taken from the guard on the balcony at the Chinese safe house. If anyone saw Zoya boarding the Medusa, Court would fire on them before they could kill her, giving her time to simply drop from the chain back into the water.
This would ruin tonight’s plan, but from the sounds of the small jungle war that was petering out to the north, Zoya thought it likely that Colonel Dai and his men would only continue to be a threat to Sir Donald Fitzroy. Not to Fan, not to her, and not to Court.
This mission was all about getting Fan, and getting Fan was all she cared about now.
Zoya made it to the bow, then turned back to look at Court, hoping to see him in the black water. He was just outside the glow of the yacht’s bow lighting, floating with her scuba gear next to him, and he swam forward a few feet and raised his gun arm straight in the air: their signal that all was clear.
She climbed around the chain now and used it to stand on as she looked over the bow itself. It was pitch-black here at the foredeck, but above on the higher decks she could hear voices and see lights. The Medusa’s bow faced out to sea, clearly so those partying at the stern could see the shoreline and the battle raging inland, but Zoya used the darkness to move silently to a place to hide in front of a forehatch.
Two minutes later Court came over the bow at the anchor chain, rolled onto the deck, and crawled forward to her. She was impressed with his stealth and skill; the Zaslon men she had worked with — on and off — had been some of the best on Earth at clandestine movement, but Court was as good as she’d ever seen.
He knelt next to her, took the pistol out of a mesh bag he’d worn over his shoulder, and let the water drip from the barrel. He whispered, “Two sentries on the top deck. They can’t see us from here. The rest of the action on deck is at the stern.”
She touched the forehatch in front of her with the tip of her .38 revolver. “Where do you think this leads?”
“Belowdecks will be a hallway, the engine room, quarters for the crew. All the staterooms and public areas will be on the upper decks with all the glass.”
Zoya said, “If you were keeping Fan here, do you think you’d keep him down here, or up there?”
Court said, “Let’s try below. Even if we don’t find Fan there, someone in the crew will know where he is.” Court pulled a screwdriver out of the bag and got to work on the forehatch. It was locked from the inside, but he was able to remove the hinges and pull it open just a few inches. Looking down, he saw a dimly lit hall, and he could hear the sounds of electric generators. He looked back to Zoya and nodded, then struggled for another minute to reach in and flip the hatch lever open from the inside with the screwdriver.