“Run!” Taleb needed no encouragement from Douglas’s radio call. He sped down the stairs, crashed into the ground level door, his pistol still drawn. With Dietrich and Volodya in hot pursuit, Taleb burst out the front of the building just as Douglas, Fei and I pulled up in front of the building in our van. Fei was at the wheel, Douglas and I taking the easier job of quickly opening the rear doors.
The three mercenaries sprinted to the van. Dietrich was the last to arrive, throwing the patient in first and clambering in after him. Dietrich had barely shut the door when Fei hit the gas hard, barely avoiding a loud squeal-out as our van rejoined the light midday Quanzhou traffic, just one more anonymous white van in a city full of them.
While the security cameras at the hospital would have seen our vehicle, it would be hours before they straightened out exactly what had happened and got a description of the van to anyone who would be able to stop us. By that point, we would be long gone.
For seemingly the first time in five minutes, I took a breath. Looking to Volodya, Taleb and Dietrich, I said, “Excellent work, gentlemen.”
Douglas snorted. “Like hell. You all should have been out of there a minute earlier. You dawdled. And, Taleb, tell your raghead terrorist mates to send us a bloody shooter next time. Couldn’t even hit a Chicom in the head from ten bloody meters! And you, Ivanov, the next time you…”
The tirade continued and I tuned it out. In addition to being a perfectionist, I suspected Douglas held a little too much pride in his British SAS, not wanting to admit that other organizations in other countries could produce equally talented commandos.
I turned my attention to the patient on the floor of the van. He was groggily returning to consciousness. Though he had doubtless been only semi-conscious for much of the past two weeks, he still looked solid and formidable underneath his patient gown. His dirty blond hair had been neatly combed, his face kept shaven by his Chinese captors. Though he was only twenty-six, his face bore wrinkle lines around the mouth and forehead. Probably the war, I thought.
“Where am I?” His weak voice still had a faint midwestern accent, flattening out the “a” in “am” into a nasally sound that people around the world had heard in YouTube videos over the past couple months.
I answered, “Quanzhou.”
“Who are you?”
“Sergeant McCormick, I am your new boss.”
With that, Clay McCormick, formerly of the Knights of Taipei, fell back into unconsciousness.
Chapter 11
"Where am I?" McCormick sat upright in his bed and rubbed his eyes, which struggled to adjust to the white glare of the fluorescent light in his bedroom.
He looked a bit gaunt after three weeks of bed rest, but his eyes were the same hard blue that had burned across TVs and computer screens around the world.
The presence of such a worldwide celebrity was intimidating, even for a billionaire like me. I was, of course, a celebrity of sorts as well, though of a much more pedestrian nature. To flatter myself, my fame might be compared to Jeff Bezos, Jack Welch or the like. Not quite Steve Jobs, but known well in business circles. McCormick, on the other hand, was a household name. Not since World War II and Audie Murphy had there been a soldier whose fame had been anywhere near as widespread.
What made his celebrity unique was that it was earned the hard way. Clay himself probably didn't really understand how famous he was.
I answered his question. "You're in a little town called Qiaogangzhen, about a dozen miles north of the Vietnam border. We took you here yesterday after we freed you from the hospital. You've been asleep for twenty hours. Once you got here, we had our Dr. Chao give you a complete examination, and he thinks you should be one-hundred percent in a day or two. The Chinese must have fixed any of the major organ failures you had, but they either don't have or didn't want to give you the latest nano-med treatments to nurse you to health faster."
McCormick said, "But you do have access to the latest nano treatments."
"The CEO of Merck-Chang is an old friend; he donated a batch of their newest prototypes. Dr. Chao gave you an injection of nanos right when you arrived."
McCormick looked at his hands, then rubbed his arms as if unused to having his hands free of restraints. "I do feel much better than I did in that hospital."
Doulgas, standing next to me, snorted and said, "As well you might, young man. Do you recall being shot five times by Marshal Deng?”
McCormick muttered, “A bullet for every one of that dead bastard's stars." He asked, "The video of the attack got out then?"
I nodded. "That was two weeks ago. I think it's not overstating matters to say that at least a third of the people on the planet have seen the video by now.”
If that fact surprised McCormick, he hid it well. “Did it have any effect on public opinion?”
A laugh escaped my lips involuntarily. “Yeah, you could say that. I think it was about thirty hours after you killed Marshal Deng when Congress approved the declaration of war against the People's Republic.”
“So are you CIA or something?”
“Not quite.”
“Well you're sure as hell not military.”
“Why do you say that?”
Flatly, McCormick responded, "If you were U.S. military, you wouldn't need to know the CEO of Merck-Chang to get your meds. And, of course, you also wouldn't know him personally because you'd just be one colonel in an ocean of careerists at the Pentagon."
McCormick folded his hands on his lap. "So, who are you?"
"Ding Cortez, CEO of Merlin Printing."
McCormick stared at me blankly. "Are you selling the Chinese fucking paper or something?"
I laughed politely. "No, at the moment I'm on a temporary leave of absence from Merlin, my prerogative as the founder. I have funded and organized a force of elite defense contractors to act as a special forces unit within China to help Taiwan."
McCormick asked deadpan, "So it's like the Dirty Dozen meet Howard Hughes?"
I smiled tolerantly. "Something like that, yes."
"Is that how you pitched it to the Pentagon? Because that sure doesn't sound like something they'd approve."
I answered, "I was at the Pentagon getting permission to set this outfit up when the Chinese wrecked the U.S. Pacific fleet. That defeat made them a little more accepting of… unorthodox ideas."
Already pale, McCormick's face grew a touch whiter. “The Chinese wrecked our Pacific fleet?”
Nodding, I said, “Sank three carriers and severely damaged another. Wrecked most of the Navy's ASPIS ships in the process too.”
"Shit.” McCormick paused a moment, considering the death of so many American sailors. Finally, he asked, “What help is the U.S. sending to Taiwan now?"
“The Navy's out. They have a few more carriers, but without the ASPIS ships, the carriers would be fish in a barrel for Chinese ballistic missiles. Last I heard, the Air Force was going to surge as many fighter aircraft as they could to Guam to try to neutralize Chinese air forces. Until they do that, there's no easy way to get ground units to Taiwan to do the fighting.”
McCormick paused, then asked quietly, "Did any other Knights survive the last attack?"
"No. The Chinese brought the reporter and the other civilians out of the Institute, but you are the only Knight they found alive that I've heard about."
McCormick took the news stoically, his face growing tighter with the effort to control his emotions, as one would expect from a soldier. "That was always the plan, I suppose. Still, I thought maybe if I made it…"
Douglas said, “You were damn lucky, laddie. In fact, you've got to be the luckiest son of a bitch in this war."