“Just do it. Noncompliance will cost you one of your sons.”
“Alright, alright.”
Fong put his hand over the receiver and whispered something to the shorter man, who looked around the terminal. The shorter man then withdrew the kukri blade and held it in front of him.”
Fong asked, “Satisfied, sergeant?”
“Tell him to put the kukri back in its sheath.”
Fong whispered to Gurung, who put the knife directly back in the sheath. Exasperated, Fong asked, “Should I have him bend over and touch his toes now, sergeant?”
“Have him do whatever you want, Captain, he's your man, not mine. You have fifty-five minutes to get the real Corporal Gurung to his flight. And if you try to put up another imposter… you'll witness my resolve.” McCormick killed the phone call.
Douglas instantly asked over the radio, “What the bloody hell was that, sergeant?”
“The Gurkha have a rule, Colonel Douglas, an ancient tribal custom. Whenever they draw the kukri, they have to draw blood before they put it back in. Usually they'll prick a finger or give themselves a little cut on the arm. I've seen the real Gurung do it dozens of times. If that had been the real Corporal Gurung, he would have known precisely why I was asking him to unsheathe the kukri. We caught Captain Fong trying to be clever.”
Sure enough, Captain Fong dialed a number on his phone, barked an agitated, insistent order, and hung up. He glanced at his watch and rubbed his forehead anxiously.
Ten minutes later, another car pulled up and out came another short Asian man with a strong build. Captain Fong went out to meet the man and handed him the kukri scabbard, taken from the imposter. Then Fong escorted the man through the terminal. Douglas notified McCormick of the arrival, and McCormick again called Captain Fong.
McCormick asked patronizingly, “Well, Captain, have we found the right Gurkha yet?”
“Please believe me, Sergeant, I told my superiors that you would have some way of verifying Corporal Gurung's identity. I told them you were too professional to be fooled by such an obvious trick.”
“As long as the real Gurung is on the plane in forty minutes, I don't care how many fake ones you bring out. Would you please put this Corporal Gurung on the phone?”
Fong handed the phone over to the corporal.
Gurung said, “Sergeant McCormick?”
“We don't have much time, Corporal. Captain Fong just tried to pass off an imposter, and I need to make sure you're you. So, quick, tell me what the best dessert was back at the base in Colorado.”
“The desserts were all terrible, Sergeant. You yourself complained about it many times.”
McCormick laughed, betraying a hint of emotion at his first chance to talk to a fellow Knight since their final battle in Taipei. “Thaman, it's great to hear your voice. Now get on the damn plane.”
“It's good to hear from you too, Sergeant. Good bye.”
Gurung handed the phone back to Captain Fong, who said, “I swear on my oath as an officer that this is the real Gurung.”
“Yes, I know that now, thank you. Get him through security and onto the plane. It should take the plane about three hours to reach international airspace. When I have confirmation that the plane is out of China, I will release your family.”
“Alright, Sergeant.” Fong hesitated. “You know I'm going to enjoy hunting you down for this.”
“I'm going to enjoy seeing if Unit One fights a little better than Unit Zero, captain.” McCormick cut off the call.
Gurung's flight departed on time and, when Swissair's data tracker showed the plane had left Chinese airspace, McCormick and Volodya released Captain Fong's family in a suburb south of Quanzhou, where it would take Fong's wife little time to find a phone from which to call her husband.
I had a Merlin Printing representative meet Gurung at the airport in Geneva and hand him a phone. Inside of three minutes, Gurung had agreed to join the Lafayette Initiative. Within an hour, he had boarded a flight to Australia. The young Gurkha would be thoroughly sick of flying by that point. He would need a week to recover from the injuries he had sustained during the Battle of Taipei with the Knights, but inside of four days, he would board a Pelican flight for Taiwan. By that point, however, the entire war had changed.
Chapter 16
By the time McCormick and Volodya had returned, it was nearly dusk. We still had about sixteen hours before we would need to rendezvous with the stealth boat to be dropped off by a Pelican. The men largely used the time to catch up on needed sleep, but even soldiers could only rest for so long. Eventually, someone produced a deck of cards, and a game of poker broke out.
I may be a successful businessman, but I have never been an adept poker player. I was the first one wiped out, followed fifteen minutes later by the two British lieutenants, Grant and Brook. While everyone else in the house followed the game, I took the opportunity to talk to the two members of the Lafayette Initiative I had hitherto paid the least attention to.
"Poker's all bloody luck anyway, don't let anyone tell you different," Grant mumbled.
Brook took up the thread. "Of course it ain't all luck, there's a flipping World Series of Poker where the same people always win. Don’t blame luck just because you’re incompetent. Me, I got a better excuse. The missus doesn't let me play in the weekly game back at the base in Hereford on account of how terribly the Ministry of Defense pays us, so I'm inexperienced."
I asked incredulously, "You're married?"
"Yes, sir, five months in."
Grant groaned. "Don't get him started on his marital bliss, sir. He's completely whipped. That Reichsmarshall wife of his won't let him do shite."
Brook laughed. "Lieutenant Grant is just jealous, sir, because my wife is a former Miss Hereford. Grant can't even get a date with the base secretary's assistant."
Annoyed, I said, “I told Douglas not to bring any married men.”
Brook answered, "Well, you'd have to take that up with 'im, sir. I know my wife's fine with the risk. Don't suppose I'd be the same person if I couldn't take a risk to be in the fight. If my wife wanted a boring bloke, she'd have married a banker."
I turned my gaze to Grant. "How did Douglas pick you two from the SAS regiment?"
"It was like this, see. Our commander says an old friend of his, an ex-SAS chap, is coming to pitch us a business proposition. That's totally against regs, but we all went anyway.
"So we all gather in the auditorium and Colonel Douglas is up there in a CEO-style business suit, gold cufflinks, thousand−dollar haircut, the whole works. He says, 'Not gonna waste time on bullshit, lads. $5 million for you if you volunteer for a covert op. Can't tell you where it is, but squeeze your neurons real hard and you can guess. The job will be a couple months, most likely, then you're set for life. Who's up for it?'"
Grant smiled. "Half the bloody regiment wanted to volunteer. But me and Brook knew we were in the top few candidates; we were officers and had high scores in training exercises. There were only two or three better candidates. Well, we offered 'em twenty thousand quid each when we got back from the war if they didn't volunteer. That pretty well ensured that we'd be the picks.”
“So I guess you two are here more for the money?” I asked Grant.
He shrugged. “I wouldn't be here without it, that's for sure. Brook here might be, but he's a much more sentimental bastard than I am, sir.” Seeing my look of distaste, Grant hastened to add, “Don't get me wrong, sir, I also wouldn't be here fighting for the Chinese if they had made me the same offer. I think it's a job worth doing, I'm just not doing it as charity.”