by James Rosone
Wu just nodded and went back to preparing his notes for his eventual meeting with Zhang. He wanted to make sure he brought up the possibility of approaching the Russians about letting China mine inside Siberia for certain materials that would help keep their manufacturing base running at full capacity. If they could get the Russians to cede control of certain mines, the Chinese could increase production of war materials, and in turn help the Russians by manufacturing certain pieces of equipment, just as India would be doing for them.
* * *
An hour later, their aircraft landed to little fanfare at the small airport outside of Lhasa. The pilot came into the cabin and spoke to Wu directly. “Sir, it will take the mechanic approximately four hours to check the engine and various sensors to make sure there is not a problem.”
Wu was annoyed at being temporarily stranded in Tibet but recognized that it was better to be cautious with a mechanical problem than try to press their luck and end up crashing.
Seeing that it was nearly lunchtime, Wu decided he would head into Lhasa and get something to eat. “I’ve never actually been to Lhasa. Perhaps there is a nice restaurant to eat at here. Look on the bright side — I’ll get a chance to see another side of China I wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” he thought as his stomach grumbled.
He caught the attention of one of his bodyguards. “Find a vehicle we can use to head into town for some lunch,” he ordered.
In short order, the group of four men were in the vehicle and on their way to Lhasa while the pilot stayed behind with the aircraft and the mechanics.
Twenty minutes into their drive, they spotted a small checkpoint manned by several PLA soldiers. There were a couple of cars being stopped and then waved through, nothing out of the ordinary. Wu’s vehicle slowed down, and the bodyguard driving it lowered his window and produced his Politburo security credentials, letting the guards know that they were escorting an important person and to let them pass.
Deputy Director Wu was busy reading a message on his smartphone, completely oblivious to the fact that two of the three soldiers at the roadblock were moving towards each side of the vehicle. The bodyguards, however, caught this deviation from what they had observed with the vehicles that had been stopped prior to them and tensed up. The guard sitting next to Wu said something to his partners in the front seat, and they immediately reached inside their jackets for their sidearms.
In one swift and fluid motion, the three army soldiers moved their rifles to the ready position and opened fire on the car. The windshield and the side windows of the car shattered, spraying the individuals in the vehicle with small glass shards. The guard sitting next to Wu tried to raise his pistol to fire at the attackers but was suddenly pumped full of lead as half a dozen bullets hit him in the chest and one round met its mark in the center of his forehead.
The driver, who had already been hit by multiple bullets, immediately smashed his foot down on the accelerator in an attempt to get his charge and comrades out of the ambush taking place. The vehicle lurched forward maybe ten feet, nearly running down one of the attackers before a large-caliber round hit the engine compartment, causing the vehicle to stop almost instantaneously. The attackers shot the driver several more times, and he slumped forward onto the steering wheel. The horn blared under his weight.
The guard in the front passenger seat managed to get his pistol up and fired two quick shots off, hitting one of the attackers before his head exploded in a red mist, spewing blood, brain matter, and bone fragments across the entire car, splashing Wu in the face and dirtying his fancy designer suit.
Before Wu knew what was happening, one of the soldiers had reached his side of the vehicle, opened the door, and grabbed him firmly by his suit jacket, yanking him out of the car. Wu felt himself being spun around and thrown to the ground face-first, as if he were some little girl’s ragdoll. He hit the ground with a loud thud as the wind was knocked out him.
“What on earth is happening?” he wondered, still dazed by the speed of the events unfolding around him.
Suddenly, he felt the pinch of what felt like a needle in his right thigh. In seconds, he felt a slight burning sensation, and then his world began to turn black as all the pain he had just been experiencing faded into the darkness of his mind.
* * *
Once CW4 Lee had slammed the autoinjector syringe into the right thigh of Deputy Director Wu, he felt the man stop struggling as he began to drift off to sleep. Prior to their mission, the CIA operative had given them the syringe, telling them to just slam it into their subject’s leg and the drug would do the rest. Director Wu would wake up 24-hours later, a little groggy but otherwise unharmed.
As the body below him went limp, Chucky radioed Maverick, speaking in Chinese to keep up their cover. “Take out the blue truck before he gets away. Spike, Bonefish — grab the civilians from the other vehicles and get them lined up on the road facing the ditch now! We have to move quick and get this done. We don’t have long before this gunfire is reported!” he yelled to his other teammates.
Spike and Bonefish immediately ran to the two other vehicles that had been in line behind Wu’s car. They grabbed the two old men and a young couple out of the two vehicles, dragged them to Wu’s now-bullet-riddled vehicle, and had them drop to their knees, facing the ditch.
While this was happening, Maverick fired a single shot from his Chinese-made .50-caliber rifle directly into the engine block of a blue truck that had turned around and begun to race to the closest village to seek help. Once his vehicle came to a halt, the man jumped out of the truck and made a run for it on foot. Maverick sighted him in and gently squeezed the trigger, sending a single round 800 meters away, where it slammed into the man’s back. He tumbled over then ceased moving; the round had pierced his heart.
As the sound of Maverick’s shots echoed off the surrounding ridges, it only heightened the team’s awareness that they didn’t have a lot of time to execute their plan and get out of there. One of the ODA members unfurled a black Islamic State flag and draped it across Wu’s shot-up vehicle with the four civilians kneeing in front of it.
One of the soldiers pulled out a smartphone, and CW4 Lee got himself ready as he stood behind the civilians. He pulled out a postcard with a brief statement that had been prepared for him by the CIA’s ISIS group. The language, phrases, and demands on that card were all in line with rhetoric ISIS had used inside China in the past. While Chucky read off the statement, Spike filmed it and Bonefish continued to guard the hostages.
While Lee and the ODA members were filming their video, Maverick took one last look down both sides of the highway to make sure there was no unwanted attention heading their way before he grabbed his remaining gear and started running down the hill towards his ODA team members. He needed to move quickly as their ride would be landing soon.
“I can’t believe we’re pulling this off,” Maverick thought as he began to pick up speed.
As he ran, he heard the four single shots and knew Lee had just completed his part of the deception. Just then, he heard the thump, thump, thump of the helicopter blades as their Eurocopter rose above the ridge where he had just been set up, racing towards the Special Forces soldiers and their high-value individual or HVI.
Less than a minute later, the chopper landed, and the ODA members loaded up their HVI and any evidence that could be linked to them. They made sure to leave behind a copy of the video they had just made, along with a written list of demands, ordering the freeing of Islamic militants who had recently been captured or were being held by the Chinese government, along with a few other requests they knew the government would never accede to.
Within minutes of landing, the helicopter was already fully loaded and lifted off, heading back towards Bhutan as quickly as possible. It would not be long before local police or an army unit was dispatched to the ambush site and discovered what had happened. They needed to place as much distance as possible between themselves and the Lhasa Airport. There were still so
me PLA Air Force fighters at the base that could hunt down their helicopter, if they knew where to look.
Maverick looked at Chucky with a wicked grin on his face. “Did you ever think you’d make a terrorist execution video, Chief?”
The other two operators both laughed at the reference. For his part, Lee just smiled and shook his head.
Two hours later, their helicopter landed at the base camp they had left more than five hours before. The CIA agent ran up to the helicopter, eager to see if they had succeeded in capturing their HVI. Once he saw Wu was indeed on the chopper, he took possession of the four others they had brought with them.
Another man drove a small fuel truck towards the helicopter to get them refueled. Once he got close enough to use the hose, he ran it out to the chopper, filling up the tank with the engine still running.
The Americans had no idea if the Chinese had been able to track them back to the base camp just across the border in Bhutan, so they planned on getting their HVI as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. Once they arrived at the capital, they would transfer everyone to a waiting executive jet that would whisk them away to a safe house in Singapore, where they would finally debrief Wu.
Dr. Roberts
Singapore
CIA Safe House
Placing the manila folder marked TOP SECRET on the table in front of him, Sebastian Roberts closed his eyes and brought his right hand up to rub his eyes and the bridge of his nose. The marathon flight from Langley across Europe to the Middle East, and then eventually across the Indian Ocean to bring him to Singapore, had been no small feat. Had he not been flying in a luxurious Learjet that had a couch he could lie down and sleep on, he might have been even more exhausted than he already was.
Looking briefly out the window, and then at the flight map on the wall, he saw he had less than an hour before they landed. Sebastian closed his eyes and began to go over the case file the Agency had built on Wu, calculating how he would exploit that information to get the answers they were after.
Sebastian was both a psychologist and a psychiatrist, and he had studied at some of the finest institutions the world had to offer. He was a master of understanding the mind, and more importantly, what made people tick. He was also adept at employing the chemical mixtures that regulated and controlled both the mind and emotions. Between his pharmaceutical concoctions and his clever choice of words, Dr. Roberts could have the most hardened person babbling like a baby in minutes, spilling their guts out during an interrogation.
While serving a myriad of deployments with the US government in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a myriad of other countries, Sebastian had developed an extremely effective method of obtaining critical information quickly from even the most uncooperative prisoners. Much to the horror of those in his chosen profession of psychiatry, he had pioneered the term “medical interrogations” and had become the most sought-after subject matter expert in the field by both governments and academia. After the war with Russia had started, Sebastian had once again been contacted by the government and asked to perform his services.
“For a price and anonymity, anything is possible,” he had learned at the outset of the War on Terror.
His current subject, Wu Bangguo, was a bit of an enigma. Having read everything that had been provided to him by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency on the flight here, he had come to his own conclusions. Wu had left little in the way of an electronic footprint, and what trail he did leave had been carefully constructed by the Chinese State Security Service, making it difficult to know what was true versus planted information.
“It won’t matter how much information we have or don’t have on Mr. Wu,” Dr. Roberts thought. “In a few hours, he will tell us everything we want to know.” A wry smile spread across his lips; he had yet to find a person who did not give up the goods once they had been injected with his drug cocktail of choice.
After what felt like an eternity in the air, the plane ferrying Sebastian finally landed at the Changi International Airport in Singapore. Once the lone flight attendant opened the outer door, the hot, humid air began to waft into the aircraft, assaulting his nostrils and lungs with the thick moisture and the exotic smells of the city. Exiting the aircraft, he placed his white fedora on his head and draped his sports jacket over his shoulder. A black unmarked car was waiting near the bottom of the stairs, along with a man in his mid-fifties wearing khaki pants, a Hawaiian shirt, and sunglasses.
“Sebastian, it’s good to see you again,” Jonah Chang said with a warm smile as he walked forward to greet his friend. Jonah was the station chief for Singapore and was the lead CIA agent for Southeast Asia. If there was a secret mission or operation going on in Asia, chances were, Jonah either was involved or knew about it. His group had done a superb job in snatching Wu from Tibet. Staging the snatch-and-grab to look like a terrorist abduction was simply brilliant. The Chinese government was in an absolute tizzy right now over what they called the most brazen terrorist attack on their soil in decades. The fact that a junior Politburo member had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom incensed them to no end.
“Jonah, it’s been too long since we last met. How are the wife and kids doing these days?” replied Dr. Roberts warmly.
“Oh, they are doing good,” Jonah answered. “My oldest is in his second year of college, and my youngest is a junior in high school. Linda is also doing great. She loves being here in Singapore. You know, we’re just an hour flight from Phuket, Thailand. She makes us take nearly all our vacation days in Thailand; it’s simply beautiful.”
The two men made their way into the car. Almost as soon as they were seated, the driver took off towards the CIA safe house.
After the vehicle started moving, Sebastian leaned over towards Jonah. In a low voice, he asked, “How long has Mr. Wu been exposed to the sensory deprivation goggle therapy?”
SDGs were a relatively new tool that had been incorporated into the interrogation process. They were essentially a virtual reality headset that flooded a person’s eyes with various types of lights — strobes, pulses, bright and then fading lights in a multitude of colors. While the visual effects were happening, the noise-cancelling headsets began their own assault on the individual’s auditory sense in conjunction with this. The person would hear a series of noises: crying babies, nails being scratched across a chalkboard, etc. The subject’s brain was bombarded with more stimulation at one time than a person could hope to deal with, leading to sensory overload. Ten minutes of this treatment would feel like hours to the average person — an hour with this headset on and anyone would feel like they had been dealing with it for a day or more. It completely and utterly wore the mind out.
Jonah smiled at the question. “Mr. Wu has been undergoing the SDG therapy now for the past 48 hours. Not all at once, of course. We don’t want the poor man to become insane before you arrive. We’ve given him the therapy for roughly ten minutes every hour. At this point, he now believes several days or even a week has passed since he was abducted.”
To anyone listening in on their conversation, it almost sounded like this was a conversation between two doctors as they discussed a patient, and in a way, it was almost like that — only Sebastian was the doctor, and Wu was the patient.
“Have the soldiers remained in character the whole time?” Sebastian asked.
Because they had staged the entire abduction to appear as if it had been Islamic militants who had abducted him, they wanted to keep that storyline going for as long as possible. It was imperative that they keep Wu believing he was being held by the terrorists for a while longer. Once he realized he was being held by the Americans, his resolve might strengthen, and that was not something they wanted to allow.
“Yes,” Jonah confirmed. “They have done an exceptional job pretending to be terrorists, by the way. The mock execution of the civilians with the Islamic State flag in the background and the bullet-riddled vehicle was superb. You would not believe the hornets’ nest they’v
e stirred up with the Chinese in Tibet and other western regions. Our source, the pilot who arranged for the plane to land in Tibet, said his superiors are going crazy trying to find Wu.” Jonah said, almost giddy at the chaos their little operation had sown.
“Any distraction or drain of resources from the fight against US forces is a welcome distraction as far as I’m concerned,” thought Jonah. “I just hope the PLA won’t look to invade Thailand next.”
Thirty minutes later, their vehicle arrived at the safe house and Jonah led Sebastian up the stairs to the second-story office where they were holding Wu. As they entered the hallway, a secretary seated below a corporate sign that read Southeast Shipping smiled and hit a buzzer under her desk, which unlocked a door to her right. The two of them walked through the opening towards the two rooms they had set up for the interrogation. Jonah led Sebastian into the first room, the observation area, where a multitude of computer monitors and other equipment was carefully arranged. From here, they could watch everything happening inside the interrogation room.
Mr. Wu’s hands and feet were taped to a chair that was suspended in the air by a chain anchored to the ceiling. This technique caused Mr. Wu to be tilted forward at a 45-degree angle, causing a sense of weightlessness and further adding to the confusion that their subject would be experiencing. Inside the SDG, it would feel as if he were floating or falling, depending on how his mind was reacting to the images and sounds being thrown at it.
“I want Mr. Wu lowered back to the ground and his restraints removed,” Sebastian ordered. “Take the SDG off him as well and have someone prepare some tea. Now it’s time for me to earn my keep and have a discussion with Mr. Wu.”
While several agents began to get Wu set up, a pot of tea was heated up in the observation room. Dr. Roberts prepared his concoction of drugs. He had two methods of introducing the drug into a person: through a shot, or in a drink of some sort. Knowing that Wu would most likely be thirsty and that he would be eager to eat and drink something, Sebastian opted to introduce the drug via the tea he was having prepared.