Ding spoke softly behind his beer. “Yep… the new goons are eyeballing the two guys in the suits. This might get ugly, Adam; let me stick around for a minute in case someone needs to call in the cavalry.”
Adam Yao did not respond.
“Ding for Adam, do you read?”
Nothing.
“Yao, you receiving?”
After a long moment, Adam Yao responded in a whisper. “Guys… Things are about to get really ugly.”
FORTY
Adam Yao had lowered the backrest of his driver’s seat in the Mitsubishi minivan all the way back, and he lay flat, his body out of the sight line of the windows. He did not move a muscle, but his mind raced.
Just thirty seconds earlier, a large twelve-passenger van had rolled up with its lights off, forty feet away in the alley, not far from Yao’s position in the parking lot. Adam ducked down before the driver noticed him in the minivan, but Adam did get a look at the man behind the wheel. He looked American, he wore a baseball cap and had a radio headset, and behind him in the vehicle Yao saw several other dark figures.
“Adam, what’s going on?” It was Ding’s voice in his earpiece, but Adam did not answer. Instead he reached for his backpack in the front passenger seat. He pulled out a rectangular hand mirror, and carefully raised it above the driver’s-side window. Through it he could see the twelve-passenger van. It had stopped near the exit to the strip club, and the side door had opened up. Seven men slipped out silently; they all held black rifles close to their bodies, and they wore small backpacks, sidearms, and body armor.
As he lay silent and still, Ding’s voice came over his earpiece yet again. “What is it, Adam?”
Yao replied, “There’s a fucking A-Team back here. Not Marshals, not CIA. These guys are probably Jay-Sock.” JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, and pronounced “Jay-Sock” by those aware of the organization, was the Department of Defense’s direct-action special-mission units, SEAL Team Six or Delta Force. Yao knew that the Pentagon would not send anyone else to do this job but JSOC. “I think they are about to come in through the back door, and it sure doesn’t look like they’re heading in to watch boobs jiggle.”
“Shit,” Ding said. “How many?”
“I count seven operators,” Adam said.
Jack said, “There are probably four or five times that number of armed Triads in there. You need to stop them before they get slaughtered.”
“Right,” Adam said, and he quickly opened his door and slid out of the Mitsubishi. The Americans at the back door were facing the other direction, seconds away from moving into Club Stylish. Yao decided to call out to them, but he’d taken no more than one step when he was knocked to the ground from behind. His earpiece flew from his ear and he crashed face-first onto the wet alleyway, his breath knocked from his lungs.
He did not see the man who took him down, but he felt the weight of a knee on his back, he felt the burn in his shoulders as his arms were yanked roughly behind him, and the sting in his wrists as his hands were secured with flexi-cuffs. Before he could speak, he heard someone tearing electrical tape from a roll, and the tape was wrapped tightly around his head several times at the mouth, gagging him roughly.
He was dragged by his feet in the parking lot; he fought to keep his face from rubbing against the asphalt. In seconds he found himself on the other side of the Mitsubishi van, shoved into a sitting position, the back of his head slammed against the side of the minivan. Only then did he see that a single person had done all this to him. A blond-haired man with a beard and tactical pants, a combat vest of body armor and ammo mags and an automatic pistol, and a short-barreled rifle that hung over his shoulder. Adam tried to speak through the tape, but the American just patted him on the head and slipped a hood over him.
The last image Yao had was of the man’s forearm, and his “Cowboy Up” tattoo.
Adam heard the man run off, around the van, obviously to join his mates near the door.
Chavez had spent ten of the past twenty seconds trying to raise Adam Yao on the conference call, two more seconds cussing violently to himself, and finally the last eight seconds barking soft but authoritative orders into his headset as he walked through the strip club toward the restroom in the back.
“Gavin, listen up. I need you in a cab on your way over to our position. Wave every scrap of money on your person to get the cabbie to haul ass!”
“Me? You want me out there with—”
“Do it! I’ll update you when you get close.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m on the way.”
“Ryan, I want you to hotfoot it around back to see what happened to Adam. Put your mask on.”
“Understood.”
Chavez passed several Triads standing around the bustling nightclub as he headed toward the restroom by the back door. He knew he would have to try to stop the men here to snatch Zha before they walked right into a bloodbath.
It was clear to him what had happened. The two young men Ryan spotted on the ferry and then here in the club were spotters for this team of SEALs, or Delta, or whoever the hell they were. They’d seen Zha and a manageable crew of security men sitting in a booth by the hallway that led to the back door and they’d radioed the snatch team to tell them that now was the time to make the grab.
The spotters left the area at the last possible moment, probably to get geared up and armed to take part in the hit. This was not standard operating procedure; but they surely weren’t expecting a crew of 14K reinforcements to show up in that tiny time window when Zha was without coverage.
This was a clusterfuck in the making, Chavez knew, and the only way he could stop it was to get to the back door before it start—
From the darkness of the hall that led to the stairs at the back of the club, a group of armed men appeared in a tight neat row, their weapons’ laser targeting devices causing red pinpricks of light to move around ahead of them, dancing through the dim amber lighting of the club like the twinkling sparkles of the disco ball hanging from the ceiling.
Chavez was caught in the center of the club, too far away to stop the men but not back far enough to be clear of the impending gun battle. Just twenty feet ahead and to his right, Zha sat at a table full of his computer-crime colleagues and armed 14K gunmen. In front of Ding to his left, the lighted stage was full of naked women, and all around him, a dozen 14K sentries were standing around, most of them looming over two very uncomfortable-looking men from the U.S. consulate who, Ding was certain, had no idea a team of commandos was about to fly into the room with guns high and voices loud.
Chavez spoke into his mic, and he made a solemn announcement: “It’s on.”
Chief Petty Officer Michael Meyer, team leader of this DEVGRU (SEAL Team Six) JSOC element, was second in line in the tactical train, his HK MP7 Personal Defense Weapon aimed just over the left shoulder of the special warfare operator in front of him. They broke into teams as they left the hallway and entered the nightclub, with Meyer and the first man breaking right, shining their lasers on the dance floor and the patrons in front of it.
Just to his left, two operators covered the club toward the rear bar, and directly behind him now, three of his men were taking down Zha and holding their guns on his protection detail.
Meyer felt almost immediately that his zone was clear of danger. There were strippers and a few businessmen, but the action was back by the bar and behind him at Zha’s table, so he left the other SEAL and turned around to help with the takedown.