"Where is the guard?" Li managed to stammer.
"He met with an unfortunate accident. His neck snapped," the blond man said quietly as he stared at a photograph. "It must have been when I twisted it." Choi swallowed, rubbed his eyes, and stared again at the man. The man's accent was obviously American. He stood tall, a shade over six feet. If Choi had to guess his weight, he would place him at just over two hundred pounds. Judging from his biceps, which thrusted from the sleeves of his shirt, very little of that weight was fat. The glacial blue eyes beneath his thick blond hair stared at Choi with a barely concealed danger. The blond man's lips were sculptured and his strong chin had a thin scar that ran along the left side like an exclamation mark. He was dressed in khaki pants with a multipocketed shirt that matched. The buttons on the clothes were made from a sharp-edged metal of dull finish. His feet were covered with paratrooper boots. The clothing bore no insignias, and other than a watch, the man wore no jewelry. like a caged tiger, he seemed to be emitting waves of heat and impending motion from the aura surrounding his body.
"Index finger, please," the man said.
"But I just…" Choi stuttered.
"I'd love to stand here and chat, but I think someone might be along soon to check on the guard. Since he's dead, and I have no intention of joining you for eternity in this cell," the man said easily, "let me print you and see if we have a match. If we do, the time has come for you to leave."
"My family, they said they'd kill my family," Choi said, sitting upright on the cot, wondering why the unreal aspect of this encounter was barely diminishing. The man nodded, then pressed Choi's finger to an ink pad, then a slip of paper. He fed the paper into a black plastic box roughly the size of a sandwich and waited until a light flashed green.
"Who would have thought?" the man said as he pushed a series of buttons on his wristwatch. "It is you."
Less than a minute later, the numerical code Taft had entered into his wristwatch was beamed through space to an orbiting satellite and then back down to an NSA facility in Maryland.
"Confirmed as a valid transmission," the intelligence officer said to his partner, who was standing with a telephone in his hand. "Contact General Benson. His man is inside and has verified the target's identity."
Without another word the man removed the black nylon pack from his back and began to dig around. From a zippered pocket he extracted a single photo and handed it to Choi. The picture showed Choi's wife, Chun, and his son, Li Jr. They were standing next to the blond-haired man in front of Disneyland. Mrs. Choi held a copy of a newspaper in her hands.
"What is today's date?" Choi asked, squinting to read the newspaper's date.
"September 21st, 1999," the man answered.
The picture had been taken less than a week before.
"How did you…" Choi began.
"Listen, I'll explain later. Right now we've got to get out of here," the blond-haired man said as he repacked his equipment, then walked over and helped Choi off the cot to his feet. "What's your physical condition?'
"I'm weak and one of my eyes is blurry from being beaten," Choi said. "My kidnappers wanted me to renounce the United States. They said since China paid for my education I became no more than a common thief the minute I filed my immigration papers."
The man nodded and reached back into his pack. He took out a thermometer and placed it under Choi's tongue, then set two fingers on Choi's wrist. He stared at his watch as he took Choi's pulse, then removed and read the thermometer.
"You'll live, I expect," the blond-haired man said.
Choi watched as the man placed the pack on his back; then he followed him into the hallway outside the cell.
The man turned to Choi and whispered, "So did you… did you withdraw your citizen papers?"
"No damn way," Choi said proudly.
"Good," the blond-haired man said. "Now, if you'll just remain quiet and let me do my job, I'll get you out of here and back to the States."
Stepping over the body of the guard, whose head was twisted at a grotesque angle, the two men walked to the far end of the hallway and stopped at an outer security door. Beyond the door rose a stairway that led to the ground above and freedom. The blondhaired man removed a suction cup sporting wires from one of the pockets on his shirt and stuck it to the door. Placing a small speaker in his ear he listened for a second.
"All clear," the man said. "Get ready."
"One question," Choi said. "What is your name?"
"John Taft," the man said, peering through the glass in the door. "My name is John Taft." Opening the door, he led Choi outside.
CHAPTER 4
Although the remoteness of the Qinghai Advanced Weapons Facility afforded it a natural defense against infiltration, the Chinese had taken no chances. The grounds were peppered with buried motion detectors, and detailed radar scanned the grounds for anything out of place. Trained guard dogs patrolled the perimeter on regular intervals and the fence was electrified to an intensity that caused it to hum as if a series of hornets'
nests lay just to the other side.
Taft glanced down at his watch.
"This is going to get hairy," he whispered to Choi.
"What do…" Choi began to say.
Twenty miles to the southwest, along an ancient but still active fault line, the last of a series of carefully measured explosive charges Taft had set in place ignited. An earthen dike along the Qargan River blew, flooding the ugly scar in the land with millions of gallons of water. The plates in the earth bordering the fault line, loosened by the explosions and now lubricated by the water, shifted.
With help from man the forces deep in the earth were unleashed. At that instant the ground began to shake lightly. The tremors increased their intensity until undulating waves shook the building Taft and Choi stood alongside. And then, like a series of giant Christmas lights run amok, the electrical transformers at the corners of the facility exploded with blinding blue flashes and the grounds were plunged into darkness and chaos.
Taft was slipping on a pair of goggles as the ground first shook. He stared out on the darkness through a comforting green glow.
"I guess what they say is true," he said as he reached out to a trembling Choi. "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature."
Tugging at Choi's shoulder, he motioned for him to follow. One hundred yards north of the building that housed Choi's cell the pair paused and crouched in a ditch.
"I'm sure they have an emergency generator, so watch for a spotlight any second," Taft said.
As if Taft had willed it, a beam of light bobbled on the ground, then began to sweep the grounds.
"When the light sweeps east in a few seconds, you're going to follow me to the fence," Taft said.
Choi watched the searchlight begin its swing to the east. The spotlight passed over the top of the ditch and continued on its path. Taft grabbed Choi's arm, yanking him easily to his feet.
"Now," Taft whispered, pulling the scientist along by his arm. At the edge of the fence Taft spit on the wires. Finding it dead, he motioned to Choi.
"Go under, I'm right behind you."
Choi squirmed into the depression Taft had dug through the sand under the fence on the way into the compound. He watched from the other side as Taft picked up an electric jammer hung on the fence. Designed to temporarily defeat the motion sensors on his way into the facility, the box had served its crude purpose.
Quickly collecting several tumbleweeds from the ground, he slipped into the hole, covering the entrance behind. Taft climbed out the other side just as the light began to sweep back to where they crouched.