“Your orders, Bo Lee, are to destroy the Raleigh airport with Deng. Then go north to your original position. We have engineers and troops flying in on two aircraft tomorrow night to reconstruct the three airports and harbor before our aircraft and ship arrivals. You are to report to our troops at the biggest airport. You need to be there in one week. It will be under our control. I will be there several days after you arrive, and I will communicate to you and Deng once you get to New York, not before. Good Luck!” said Wang, still feeling in his hollow and empty stomach that something was wrong.
*****
Carlos and Lee had been working hard since they had received the equipment from the dead Chinese. They had studied each piece and found all the equipment to be simple satellite communication electronics. Thousands of Americans had the same quality two-way systems with Hughes Internet. The only difference was that both sides could verbally chat to each other.
“Lee, I think we are ready for communication,” said Carlos to a worried-looking Lee Wang. “Remember to keep the cloth of the towel over the phone. It will hide most of your voice tone. Tell them that a platoon of 30 military troops killed your commander and many of the others. Ask for orders. Remember to state that you are in control. You can be nervous; you haven’t been a commander and you are only told stuff on a need-to-know basis. Remember, there were 30 troops, 20-odd pilots with guns, a lot of small airplanes. Other than that, buddy, just wing it. You need to get information from whoever is at the other end. Don’t be scared to ask and act stupid, Lee. It always works.”
They turned on one telephone and waited. It wasn’t 30 seconds before the phone rang—a sound they hadn’t heard in days! Lee Wang made sure that the cloth was covering the mouthpiece and he looked at Carlos. Carlos smiled, gave him the thumbs up, and Lee Wang answered the call.
“Control, this is Bo Lee Tang. Mi Lee is dead. This is Bo Lee Tang, Mi Lee’s Number Two in command,” answered Lee Wang. There was silence at the other end.
“Bo Lee Tang, you said your commander is dead?”
“Correct, Control. It was a bad fight but we won,” Lee Wang continued. Then he heard a voice he recognized from his days in China. It was the floor sweeper—the man who had recruited him. He looked up at Carlos, who was dialing another number on the second phone. Then Carlos remembered that he was holding a telephone and not a radio, and his brain suddenly clicked into gear. Anybody could use the system, and he wondered if the control center in China would notice a second phone being used at the same time. He scrambled through the pile of phone components and found one with a number written on the backside so that the owner wouldn’t forget it. He then found a second one and saw Lee looking at him. Carlos told him to keep going, but Carlos could see that Lee Wang was in shock for some reason. Then Carlos heard a voice on the other end fire off in rapid Chinese.
“Bo Lee Tang, this is Comrade Mo. Get one of the other commanders on the telephone to give me a full report.” Lee Wang looked at Carlos and his face told Carlos that he knew the man on the other end. Carlos whispered for him not to worry, that the cloth should hide his voice. “All commanders are dead. We have 23 dead men, Comrade Wang,” Lee Wang replied nervously.
“Don’t ever mention my name again! Or use my first name. Understand, Bo Lee Tang?” replied the man in Nanjing venomously.
“Sorry, but I need to know who is to be in control here. I will give you my report,” continued Lee, with Carlos showing numbers on his fingers. “We killed 30 American soldiers, 20 American pilots with guns, and all women and children are dead. We had 12 airplanes on fire, but the fires are now over. Two of the airplanes were American Air Force—not jets, but they had propellers, very old airplanes. We have 23 dead, three wounded. End of report.”
“Yes, I saw the small flickering of fires on our satellite screens. Good job, Bo Lee Tang. Wait five minutes and I will call back,” replied Comrade Wang in Nanjing and hung up. Lee put the phone down on the table in front of him and Carlos congratulated Lee for a job well done.
“I’m sure he has to go and get orders for you,” Carlos explained, looking at the back of Lee’s phone. There was its own black number printed in black ink on the back side as well as a second number printed in red ink. He checked the others; they all had it, one black number, different on every phone, and the same red number on each phone, and Carlos sighed with relief. Then he told Lee that he was going to dial a number while they were on the line to see if they got a response.
“I know Comrade Wang,” replied Lee. “He is the man who recruited me right at the very beginning. Remember the floor sweeper I told you about. That is him!”
“Don’t worry,” reassured Carlos. “Remember to act stupid, like you have a head wound or something. He must have recruited hundreds of people. Just don’t panic. We need all the information we can get. Remember, this guy hired you and then was prepared to kill you and your family. I’m going to see if they respond when I call one of these other phones. I will cover it up so that they can’t hear the ring if it goes off.”
Lee’s phone rang again.
“Bo Lee Tang, this is Control. Bo Lee Tang, Control,” stated the first voice over the telephone, and Lee tried to sound breathless.
“I can’t hear you well, we have a bad connection. This is Bo Lee Tang. We are burying our comrades.” Carlos phoned the third working phone from the second working phone, and he could hear the ring under the cloth. He switched the third phone on and spoke a few words of gibberish into it. He made funny sounds for several seconds and then turned both phones off. Lee Wang indicated that he had not received any notification about the phone being used.
Lee Wang ended his call and Carlos grabbed the second phone and dialed the red number. “Ask them if you should continue to bury the dead men and if it matters which phone you use,” instructed Carlos. The call was answered and Carlos listened to Lee speaking Chinese rapidly into the cell phone. Then Carlos ended his call.
“Control said not to phone them again, and that all the phones ring to him with the red number. I asked him if I could phone Deng, and he gave me his number. I asked if Control wanted to hear my conversation and he said that they couldn’t and did not have full control of who was using the telephones, so it wasn’t necessary.”
“Great!” replied Carlos.
“Carlos, I know Comrade Wang had reservations about my voice.” Carlos was looking for a clean piece of paper to write the information down.
“He asked me, or Bo Lee Tang, about the tattoo. He knew Bo was a boxer, and he was a good boxer before Mo Wang recruited him. I watched him fight often. I think we have won the war of hiding my identity, so far,” said Lee, now very relieved.
“Lee, call me on your phone. Talk stupid so that nobody can understand you. I want to see if they come back and complain about you using the phone. Say Zedong Electronics will lose in English or something stupid.” Lee did, and they spoke stupid talk for two minutes, sounding like a bunch of monkeys.
“Okay, let’s write down the Information we’ve collected,” stated Carlos, after they hung up. “First, we have 50 squads coming in from somewhere—where, your friend did not say—but after destroying RDU airport you are to head north, so I think that from the south or west is where this Comrade Deng is coming from. Does that sound correct?”
Lee Wang nodded. “I think a squad is four men in one vehicle. That is what I saw in the SUV when they passed me in Salt Lake City. That means that there are 200 men coming here in about two days and the next fight will be at the Raleigh airport,” replied Lee. “Then I, Bo Lee Tang, must go north in one week, under the command of Comrade Deng, who will take over from me if he survives the fight at the airport. Also, Wang said that engineers and troops were flying into somewhere tomorrow night and that I must report to the airport with Deng and my men. So I am expected somewhere in one week at an airport that is under their control. That is what I understand.”