“I…, Lynn… I’m…sorry…” He lowered his head and began to sob.
Sheng raised his chin and looked at Han with something that might have resembled respect in a man with any humanity. Then, with no further thought he snapped his fingers a final time and Luk and the Lotus launched Lynn Han over the side of the building. They all heard her screams recede into the busy Beijing bustle. Moments later the sound of car horns and sirens.
Han collapsed and screamed with rage on the concrete roof of the skyscraper. Hawke clenched his jaw and fixed his eyes on the monster who had ordered an innocent woman’s death right in front of him.
“I can see your psychological training is indomitable, monk,” Sheng said. “But if I cannot break the mind, I will break the body.”
He ordered Luk and the Lotus over to Han, where they roughly hauled him to his feet and Hawke saw the monk’s tear-streaked face in the bright sunshine. His neck muscles were bulging with rage as he began screaming at Sheng in Mandarin, but Hawke needed no translation to understand what was being said.
Before Han could finish his threat, Luk punched him in the back of his head and knocked him out. Moments later they were tying him to the side of an industrial air-conditioning unit. Then, Luk tore the shirt from the monk’s back as the Lotus pulled a horsewhip from her belt and prepared to whip him until he gave the location of the missing text.
A wave of crushing disappointment and anger rushed over Hawke as he watched the eyes of Sheng, Luk and the Lotus settle on the monk’s back for the first time and behold the elaborate tattoo. Sheng smirked. They had what they wanted, and when Han awoke from his unconsciousness, he would know he had lost his sister for nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jason Lao had turned the top floor of an abandoned office building into a temporary HQ and Scarlet was silently impressed as she watched a group of men in boiler suits add the finishing touches to the office — wifi routers — telephones and laptops.
They had landed back in Shanghai less than one hour ago and after a rendezvous with Ryan, Sophie and Commodore Hart they travelled across the city in a private SUV to meet Lao. Scarlet was used to working fast and moving even faster, but even she had found a moment on the plane to think about what fate might have dealt Hawke, Lea and Han since their kidnapping back in the capital.
Now, somewhere in the distance she recognized General Frank McShain as he stood among a small group of American and Chinese military personnel. She considered how big and real a threat had to be to bring the American and Chinese military top brass together like this, and the conclusion was an unsettling one.
Lao and Lexi shared a few words of Mandarin before they were all invited to sit down for the briefing, which would be delivered by General McShain in English first. Scarlet took a seat at the back — an old habit — and Hart joined her, along with Ryan and Sophie. She watched Bradley Karlsson with more than a little suspicion as he took a seat at the front alongside Lexi Zhang and Jason Lao.
“As you know,” McShain began. “We are here to neutralize a serious threat that is jeopardizing both our nations and many others. That threat is the billionaire telecoms magnate and people trafficker Sheng Fang.”
Scarlet watched a ripple of excitement, tinged with apprehension go around the office. Something told her she was about to get the fight of her life.
“It has come to our attention that Sheng Fang is seeking a very ancient power the likes of which no one on Earth has experienced for millennia. We don’t know exactly what form this power will come in, but we do know…” McShain took a breath and looked anxiously around the room. All eyes were on him, hanging on his every word.
“He can hardly believe he’s about to say it,” Scarlet said.
McShain cleared his throat. “But we do know it more than likely contains the power to greatly extend a man’s life, possibly infinitely.”
The room erupted with agitation when the general delivered these words, with American and Chinese intelligence operatives and military personnel hardly able to believe their own ears.
“Everyone calm down!” McShain said firmly. “That’s enough!”
The room settled.
“I know what it sounds like, but there it is. We have very good intel on this, part of which came from a recent attempt to secure the…ah… power that I just described by a man named Hugo Zaugg, who thanks to British intelligence we now believe was being used as a sort of puppet by Sheng.”
“And what about the burning sky reference?” Scarlet called out from the back.
McShain looked at her with irritation as another wave of concern rippled through the room.
“That is nothing to be concerned about.”
“What does she mean?” shouted a man in the front row.
“It's nothing, like I said,” the general repeated. “There is a peripheral reference to the sky setting on fire if the source of eternal life is ever manipulated by mortal man, but that is not our concern right now. We don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all — and it’s just another reason for us to redouble our efforts to stop Sheng from getting his hands on the map that leads to this power, at all costs.”
Ryan smirked. “Nice work. You really put him on the spot.”
“Yeah, but I bet he’s not going to mention the Tesla device,” Scarlet said with a palpable lack of surprise in her voice.
“Hardly a shocker,” Hart said.
“Very funny,” Sophie said.
Scarlet remembered that only she, Hawke and Lexi had been at that meeting back in Hong Kong. “But Lao knows. I was in the office when McShain told us about someone swiping it from the American transport vessel. We now know that was Sheng.”
McShain ran through a raft of tactical details about Sheng’s retreat on Dragon Island, most of it garnered by on-going satellite surveillance, others gathered by spies posing as fishermen or tourists in the water park. He explained how Sir Richard Eden had confirmed that Lea’s tracker showed they were in the air, and sat-surveillance showed the airfield on Dragon Island was being readied for the flight so the inference was they would land on the island, not Shanghai.
“Another thing we all need to be aware of is that a few hours ago Sheng took two of our people and a third man hostage. They are Joe Hawke, a former British Special Forces man with considerable experience, and Lea Donovan, a former Ranger with the Irish Army. Both are very capable people who are able to look after themselves in grim situations like this but at this moment in time we have no idea if they are alive or not. The same goes for the monk. All personnel need to be aware of these three friendlies during the assault. The last thing I want to hear about is their deaths from friendly fire.”
Upon hearing McShain’s terse words and grim analysis, Scarlet thought about Hawke and Lea and whether Sheng had killed them or not. She thought not, because they would be good to barter if things got really sticky during a firefight and he was backed into a corner. But then second-guessing the logic of egomaniacs was never a great idea.
She wondered how Hawke would react if anything happened to Lea, knowing the terrible impact that Liz’s death in Hanoi had made on him all that time ago. She had heard about the murder when she returned from a joint SAS-SBS operation to rescue two kidnapped journalists in Iraq.
That was a good mission. They arrived by helicopter and marched for six hours in order to conduct a surprise attack on a compound near the Jabal Kumar mountain. They rescued both the hostages and killed all fourteen of the kidnappers in less than four minutes. Scarlet was disappointed. She had made a bet it could be done in less than three.