“Then why not pick him up? Any chance that the locals don’t really know?”
“Maybe, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Pioneer called it, not me,” Mitchell said. “And it could explain why the package wasn’t at the drop site.”
“That means there’s a high probability that you’ve been burned too,” Barron said. “Betcha the MSS had a microcamera inside that bathroom or outside pointing at the door.”
“Probably a safe bet,” Mitchell admitted. “Sorry you’re going to have to find a new station chief. Makes me wonder why they didn’t pick me up.”
“They’re still trying to pull apart the entire network, most likely,” Barron said. “We don’t know how long he’s been under surveillance. They could have been watching him for a year now, for all we know.”
“We can’t leave him hanging, boss,” Mitchell pleaded, his voice rising. “Twenty-five years has gotta count for something. We’ve gotta get him out.” His own emotion surprised him. He wasn’t a young man and thought he had mastered the art of keeping his feelings out of the way of his professional judgment a long time ago. It was a dangerous weakness and it disturbed him to see it in himself.
“It counts for a lot. We won’t hang him out to dry,” Barron said.
“I want to run the exfil to get him out.”
“No promises,” Barron said. “We don’t play the game stupid. When in doubt, get out. Live to fight another day.”
Mitchell frowned. The mantra had sounded smart the first time he’d heard it. Now it felt like a coward’s motto. “Words to stay out of jail by,” he said, not feeling the truth of them.
On the other side of the world, Barron nodded. Mitchell wasn’t a stupid man. He was always professional. “We’ll make sure Pioneer stays that way. I don’t care what anyone says, yes or no, we owe him. I’ll talk to Cooke.”
Captain Wu Tai-cheng stared down at the bow of the Ma Kong, sucked in a lungful of the cold open air, and enjoyed the swell of pride that rose in his chest. The ship was lit up by the dockside lights, and the hard metal structures of the vessel’s radar masts made for a frightening image illuminated against the black sky as he turned his head to look up. His pride was entirely justified. This was a vessel to be feared. He knew it and the Chinese knew it. There were only four Kidd-class destroyers in the entire world, Taiwan owned them all, and he commanded one of them. The Americans had built them for the shah of Iran, but that corrupt old tyrant had lost his throne to the mullahs before taking delivery. So their builders had put them to use, calling them the Ayatollah-class as a joke. Wu’s ship had once been called the USS Chandler before the Taiwanese government bought it and its sister ships years before.
Ma Kong was not as capable as the Arleigh Burke—class destroyers that the Americans wouldn’t sell out of fear that the Chinese would be upset, but it was a deadly vessel in its own right. Its engines were quiet enough that it could hunt submarines, it carried the Harpoon missiles that could crack an enemy surface ship in half, and any plane within range of Ma Kong’s RIM-66 missiles and Phalanx guns lived only by Captain Wu’s good graces. Together, the four ships gave his country a considerable defense against the PLA’s air and naval forces. It irked Wu that the Americans still refused to sell his country its very best weapons, but Ma Kong still made the Chinese think twice, he was certain.
As Wu stared out past the dockyard perimeter toward the city lights, an entirely different emotion rose up inside him. Fools, he thought. The PLA had taken Kinmen in a day and the stupid fools who ran his country were cowering in their comfortable offices, dithering about what to do. “President” Liang — the man didn’t deserve the title in Wu’s opinion — was a fool. His arrogance had cost his people dearly, and now his fear of the Chinese was just raising the price they would have to pay to free their countrymen.
The dock to the ship’s port side was busy as the workers loaded ammunition, fuel, and other supplies aboard, but the process was going far too slowly. It had taken too long for even those orders to come down from Navy General Headquarters. Ma Kong should be in the Strait already, he thought, churning through the water at thirty knots toward that sacred island with her sisters and planes overhead to lay waste to any Chinese soldiers they could catch out in the open. He had ordered his chief engineer to fire up the ship’s four General Electric turbines in anticipation of that very order, which had yet to come. The other captains in port were acting more cautiously, but Wu was not such a man. The order would come, he was sure. It had to come. To let the Chinese have Kinmen without a fight would be inexcusable.
And if the order didn’t come before, the Americans would come to Taiwan with one or more of their carrier strike groups and then the order would come. With American ships and planes strengthening the rubber spines of the government bureaucrats, Ma Kong would finally put to sea and lend her strength to the US Navy’s strike groups, fighting alongside her former family of ships, and then the PLA would see the terrible mistake they had made.
He turned his back and walked aft toward the ship’s stern, stepping in and around the crates that were stacked up on the deck. He passed through the maze, enlisted men and junior officers parting before him to let him pass without a word, and finally arrived at the helipad, where deckhands were securing one of the ship’s two helicopters for transport, this one a Sikorsky S-70B Seahawk. Two of the Ma Kong’s RIM missile launchers were just beyond with a pair of engineers checking and double-checking them. Wu had told his crew in plain terms that very morning that their lives depended on those weapons in more ways than one. Wu set his course for them.
The deck was noisy tonight and so he didn’t hear the whistling sound until the last second. And then the night was lit up as the ship bucked underneath, tossing him across the deck along with boxes, crates, ropes, and bits of the men that were once part of his crew.
Wu crashed down flat on his back, almost at the stern, lucky his spine hadn’t broken, and it took him several seconds to realize that he could hear nothing. His eardrums were ruptured and his ears and nose were bleeding in a gusher. He pushed himself onto his side, mildly surprised that his arms were still working, and he tried to stagger to his feet. It took him three tries and he succeeded only when his blind groping led him to the stern railing. Then he managed to open his eyes.
The explosion had erupted amidship, just forward of the helipad, starboard side, tearing a hole in Ma Kong so large that he thought it might have ripped the ship almost in half. A fire blazed out of the hole, smoke rolling skyward into the deck lights, but he knew that wouldn’t last long. Part of the hole was below the waterline. Ma Kong was flooding. He prayed that the crew below was closing the watertight doors and starting the pumps, if they still worked. He couldn’t hear his own men screaming as they moved around the deck. He tried to yell an order but no one responded. Wu couldn’t hear his own voice and he wondered if the rest of his men were as deaf as he was.
He staggered forward and fell to his knees. His sense of balance was destroyed along with his eardrums, and he wondered whether Ma Kong wasn’t listing. If she had taken on that much water that fast, then she was surely dying, on her way to the bottom of the harbor, and some of his men caught below would drown. He pushed himself back to his feet and tried to move forward again to help the wounded, to organize the damage control parties or give the order to abandon ship. Then he began to fall forward again. An ensign caught him as he dropped to one knee.