“Stop right where you are.”
The vehicle on the road stopped.
“Flash your lights.”
The lights flashed.
“Good. We’ve got you. Pull up about two hundred yards on the double, then scoot into the back. Make room, we’ve got to fit a dozen bodies in there.”
“A dozen?”
Chavez was behind the wheel now and heading northeast, following Yao’s instructions from the front passenger seat. In the back, nine living men and one body were pressed together like cordwood. The men grunted and groaned with each jolting bump in the road, and every turn pressed air from the lungs of the men at the bottom. SO Lipinski, the ST6 medic, valiantly fought to check bandages on any wound he could access with his one free hand in the scrum. The rest of the wounds just had to remain unattended.
Ding kept his speed down and his lane-switching to a minimum, but at a red light on Gloucester Road a 14K spotter walked into the street and looked right at him. The man pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket and brought it to his ear.
Chavez looked straight ahead. He said, “Damn. This isn’t over yet.”
As the light turned green he accelerated forward, doing his best to not just haul ass, hoping against hope that the spotter would make the decision that the maroon minivan was not, in fact, full of armed gweilos escaping the scene.
But his hopes were in vain.
As they moved east through the rain on a side street running parallel to King’s Road, a small two-door car rolled into the intersection with its headlights off. Chavez was forced to swerve to avoid being sideswiped.
As the car drove alongside Chavez’s side of the minivan, a man rose out of the passenger-side window, sat on the door, and then swung an AK-47 rifle over the roof of the car, pointing it toward Chavez.
Ding drew the Beretta pistol in his waistband and fired through his window, across his body, while he held the wheel with his left hand.
Several AK rounds tore into the minivan before Chavez struck the driver of the two-door with a bullet into the side of the neck. The car swerved violently and slammed into the wall of an office building.
“Who’s hit? Who’s hit?” Chavez yelled, certain that, with this many men in this small vehicle, multiple men would have been struck by the powerful 7.62-millimeter rounds.
Everyone checked in, the wounded men proclaimed they were in no more pain than before, and even FastByte22 answered Adam that he was okay when he asked him if he’d been shot.
It was a small miracle that the four rounds that hit the side of the minivan struck the dead special warfare operator pressed against the wall of the vehicle.
Chavez raced to the east faster than before, but still he was careful to not draw any more attention than was necessary.
After consulting with Adam Yao about the best place to be picked up by boat that was far enough away from the site of the hit, Meyer struggled to get his radio mic to his mouth under the crushing weight of the other bodies on top of him. Finally he established comms with his extraction and told them they would do the pickup several miles to the east in Chai Wan.
Chavez made it to the location just after three a.m., found a secluded rocky beach, and everyone struggled to get out of the tight minivan.
Here, behind the cover of high boulders, Lipinski, the element’s medic, rebandaged all the wounded men. Both Reynosa and Bannerman had lost a lot of blood, but they were stable for now.
While they waited for the SEALs’ rigid inflatable boats to come for the pickup, Jack leaned over to Ding and spoke softly: “How about we hold on to FastByte’s little computer?”
Chavez just looked at him. “Way ahead of you, kid. We’ll give Gavin a crack at it and then find a way to get it over to DoD.”
Suddenly three Zodiac boats materialized in the black water at the shoreline.
Chief Petty Officer Michael Meyer got his men together, both the living and the dead, and quickly shook Yao’s hand. “Wish we worked with you from the beginning.”
Adam said, “You would have had more problems that way. We are leaking like a sieve. Glad we were able to help. Sure as hell wish we could have done more.”
Meyer nodded, thanked Ryan and Chavez, and then joined his men as they loaded into the RIBs.
The Zodiacs turned away from the beach and disappeared in the night.
As soon as the SEALs were gone, Gavin Biery called out to Adam Yao, “Any idea where a guy can get some pancakes around here?”
Yao, Ryan, and Chavez just chuckled exhaustedly as they climbed back into the Mitsubishi.
FORTY-TWO
Dr. K. K. Tong, code-named Center, sat at his desk and watched the recorded feeds from dozens of security cameras, both municipal and privately held. It was a video montage created by his Ghost Ship security staff showing the events of the previous evening.
From inside Club Stylish he watched the white men appear from the hallway, he watched a crazed, disjointed crowd react to the gun battle, and he watched young Zha being dragged over the top of the table, tied up, and pulled back into the dark.
From a 7-Eleven security camera pointed toward the street he watched the crash of the black van, the men climbing out and pulling Zha and a dead commando from the wreckage, and then rushing into a dark alley.
He watched the feed from a traffic camera at the intersection off King’s Road that showed the maroon minivan as it swerved to avoid the two-door with the armed man, and then he saw the car veer off and crash, and the minivan holding Zha and his kidnappers race off into the night.
Tong exhibited no emotion over any of this.
Standing over his shoulder and watching the violent montage was the leader of the Ghost Ship’s own security staff. He was not a Triad, but he was responsible for coordinating with the Triads. He said, “Twenty-nine members of Fourteen-K were killed or wounded. As you can see from the feeds here, members of the opposition force suffered casualties as well, but none of them turned up in any local hospitals.”
Tong did not comment on this. He only said, “CIA.”
“Yes, sir, their local man, Adam Yao, the one we have been aware of for the past week, is clearly captured here on the video.”
“We are reading CIA communications. We know Yao is present in HK and operating surveillance on our operation. Why did you not prevent this?”
“If the CIA used CIA paramilitary forces or coordinated this kidnapping directly, we would have been aware of it and we would have been prepared. But the Pentagon used American military forces, apparently members of their Joint Special Operations Command. We do not have deep persistent access into JSOC communications.”
“Why did CIA use JSOC? Do they suspect a leak in their cable traffic?”
“Negative. From what we’ve determined monitoring CIA cable traffic after this hit, this element of commandos happened to be training in South Korea and was able to move over here very quickly yesterday when an in extremis opportunity arose to kidnap Zha. No one at JSOC told the CIA they were coming.”
“And yet the local CIA operative was present.”
“I… I have not determined how that occurred.”
Tong said, “I am very dissatisfied that this happened.”
The security manager said, “I understand, sir. Visualization of the kidnapping after the fact does not help us much. Preventing it would have been ideal.”
“Have you reported this to our colleagues in Beijing?” Tong asked.
“Yes, sir. They ask you to contact them as soon as you can.”
Tong nodded. “Our time in Hong Kong is over.”
He watched the violent movie on his main monitor a second time. Quickly he reached out and pressed a button, stopping as the driver of the minivan fired a handgun out the driver’s-side window. As the window shattered, a brief but relatively clear image of the driver emerged as the vehicle passed close to the camera.