by Mike Maden
It was Jack’s turn to smile. You’re Iron Syndicate. How else could Cluzet know about the deal Clark cut with the Czech last year? “I’m sure that won’t be a problem.”
“Excellent. Now come over here.” Cluzet nodded toward the rail.
Jack stepped over to the rail as instructed, Cluzet’s men close at hand. He looked over the side. The ship was making an easy nine knots or so, judging by its small, luminous wake in the coal-black water.
“Are you a strong swimmer, Jack?”
“Good enough.”
“But here’s the problem. That water is five degrees Celsius. Even a strong swimmer can’t last more than ten minutes at that temperature. Your muscles would seize up, you’d start to feel numb, and your waterlogged clothes would begin to weigh you down. It’s also quite likely a jump from this high up will knock the breath out of you, and you’ll wind up dying with a belly full of seawater before you make your first stroke.”
“Or I could die of boredom listening to you run your pie hole all night.”
The German lunged toward Jack with a cocked fist, but one look from Cluzet stopped him in his tracks.
“You are worth quite a bit of money to me, so perhaps we will make our deal. But I need a promise from you first—that you won’t try to escape before we reach port, so that I can turn you over to Senator Hendley at a place and time of my choosing. So don’t even think about jumping overboard. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I’m not an idiot. Why would I do that?”
Cluzet frowned. “Yes, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”
“What about Liliana?”
“Oh, yes. Poor Liliana. We mustn’t forget about her.”
Cluzet marched over to her barrel and laid the pry bar on the lid. He stopped and glanced up at Jack with a puzzled look on his face.
“Liliana can live, too. But first you must choose.”
Cluzet tossed the pry bar to Jack in a high arc like a baton.
As the pry bar reached its apogee, Cluzet turned and shoved Liliana’s barrel over the side, her fading screams echoing inside.
62
BALTIC SEA
LIL!”
Jack surged forward on wobbly legs. He snagged the falling pry bar out of the air with one hand and charged toward the empty space where the barrel had been.
And jumped.
“Good luck, Jack! I mean it!” Cluzet called after him, but Jack didn’t hear a word as he plummeted toward the water.
His long fall through the cold air felt like a HALO jump, feet first. He pulled his arms in tight, locked his knees, pointed his toes down, and prayed he’d be able to keep his grip on the pry bar when he hit.
His feet hit so hard he thought he’d fallen through a plate-glass window. The momentum of weight and speed shot him beneath the surface like an arrow, blasting salt water into his nose and battering his already fragile skull. The pry bar loosened in his grip, but sheer will kept his fingers wrapped around it.
As soon as he felt his downward plunge begin to slow, he started crawling furiously toward the surface and broke it several strokes later, blowing out snot and seawater before gasping for air.
He turned his head just in time to see all of the lights of the Baltic Princess snap off. She was now a giant steel shadow slipping away into the dark, only the luminescent ribbon of churning water behind her twin screws to mark her way.
Jack whipped back around and spotted the barrel a hundred yards distant, upright in the water but already half submerged. He clawed through the water like a man possessed, the pry bar retarding the stroke of his right hand. He couldn’t drop it to speed his pace, or even take the time to pull off his jacket or kick off his shoes. He kicked furiously, churning the cold water all around him, numbing his skin, especially his face.
Over the splashing of his strokes he suddenly heard Liliana’s anguished cries up ahead.
“LIL! I’m coming!” he shouted as he swam, her desperate voice ramping up his already furious sprint. Digging even harder with each stroke, salt stinging his eyes, lungs gasping for air, he pushed beyond his agony until his left hand suddenly crashed into the barrel, which was already three-quarters submerged and sinking fast, air bubbles frothing the water.
“LIL! HOLD ON!”
“JACK? JACK!”
Only seconds left.
“HOLD YOUR BREATH!” he shouted, as his left hand seized the latch and his right hand jammed the pry bar claw under it.
But the barrel kept sinking, and the claw slipped out as the lid breached just below the surface, pulling Jack under with it. He grabbed a half-breath just before the cold water slapped his face, the last air bubbles from the barrel sweeping past his ears.
The rising momentum pushed the pry bar away from the latch. Jack’s iron grip welded him to the barrel, but in the growing dark it gave him his main point of reference. He jammed the pry bar claw beneath the latch again as the barrel plummeted deeper, the pressure stabbing his eardrums like jagged ice picks. His lungs burned as he worked the pry bar against the latch, but it didn’t catch and the claw slipped out again.
The cold water turned to freezing as he shoved the claw back under the latch a third time, his aching skull crushed like a vise by the water pressure. He strained his exhausted arm, trying to work enough leverage against the steel-tight latch, but the effort was stealing away his last oxygen until—
A sharp, metallic pop rang in the water and the lid gave way.
Liliana shoved it aside with bleeding fingers.
Jack dropped the pry bar and grabbed her hands, his lungs straining to hold their last, stale breath, her wide eyes hopeful in the moonlit gloom.
Suddenly her body jerked in his hands and her face spasmed with terror.
Jack’s salt-burned eyes could barely see the weighted barrel far below her and the glimmering chain stretching from its black mouth to her ankle.
Her left hand slipped out of his, but he held the other one tight. The two of them plunged deeper into the abyss. He didn’t care.
He would never let go.
But in a desperate burst of strength, she did, with a sharp yank of her small, slippery hand.
He panicked. His hand grabbed back out at hers, but she was already too far below him.
The triumph in her eyes turned to horror.
She screamed a word at Jack.
He couldn’t understand it.
She reached up to him with both hands like a grasping prayer, the billowing halo of her blond hair shrouding her pleading eyes as she vanished into the eternal black.
63
It was Jack’s turn to die.
He hung suspended in the bone-chilling waters beneath the surface of the Baltic Sea. His oxygen-starved mind began to dim and his burning lungs begged for a last, watery breath.
But he refused.
The shimmering half-moon beckoned him like an angel. Jack began clawing at the black water. His heavy clothes were body weights pulling him back and his cramping legs could hardly move, but he dug and pulled and kicked, still twenty feet below the surface.
Straining with every fiber, he thrashed his way upward, but the effort robbed him of his last ounce of oxygen. His mouth spasmed open, causing him to inhale a gulp of salt water just as he broke the surface. His coughed out the vile liquid, choking and spewing. He rolled onto his back for relief, gasping for air.
He scanned the black horizon, his teeth chattering. Nothing, save a light in the distance. How big? How far? It didn’t matter. His only choice was to shiver in the dark and drown right here or swim a little and die.
Might as well swim.
He shouted once, then twice, and finally a third time. No telling if he was heard. His voice carried over water, but without someone to hear him, it didn’t really matter.
He coughed up more wat
er; his sinuses burned with salt. He started to pull off his coat but couldn’t do it. Taking off his shoes wasn’t going to be any easier, and as he thought about it, exposing more flesh to the freezing water wasn’t a good idea.
“How fast can you run?” he said out loud in a bad Australian accent as he began his first labored strokes toward the distant light. “Fast as a leopard,” he replied in a bare whisper. “Then let’s see ya do it.” His favorite lines from Gallipoli, the first movie that ever made him weep.
A few strokes later his dim spirits faded. He had exhausted himself in the sprint toward Liliana’s barrel and was now completely spent. The only thing that kept his aching arms and cramping legs moving at all was the sheer force of his will.
He shouted hoarsely a few more times between weakening strokes, and cupped his hands to make more noise even though it slowed him down. He could hardly feel his hands anyway now, and he hoped his numbed feet were still attached to the bottom of his legs, heavy as lead weights pulling on his torso.
He lifted his left arm in the air but dropped it—it was too heavy to even try now. He switched to a pathetic breaststroke, but he couldn’t raise his head up high enough between strokes to keep his mouth out of the water. A few frog kicks brought on cramps that seized his legs like a roped calf.
He rolled onto his back one last time, stretching his arms out wide as if crucified, rotating his wrists to generate enough momentum to keep him barely afloat.
His shivering torso ached, spasming the muscles across his back and chest. The pain didn’t matter now. His blurred eyes filled with the infinite sky of endless stars. He wasn’t afraid of death, now that it was inevitable.
His numbing mind began to race. A life flashed before his eyes—but not his.
Liliana.
He saw her face as it fell away into the darkness. She shouted a word.
What was it?
He began to despair.
What was it?
His hands barely turned in the water. It wasn’t enough. The sea lapped at his chin.
Any minute now.
Please, God. I’ve got to know.
A word.
A word.
A word . . .
* * *
—
And then he knew.
Of course.
The only word that mattered.
His salt-burned eyes began to weep.
Tomasz.
He smiled.
So tired.
He closed his eyes.
Time to sleep.
64
CABINDA PROVINCE, ANGOLA
The NFLA compound near the shore of Lagoa de Massabi was only a cluster of three simple cinder-block buildings hidden beneath a thick canopy of dense palm trees. The local farmers and lagoon fishermen they lived among in the remote wilderness provided both protection and an early warning system.
In recent years, inhospitable and insular Chinese workers had flooded the poor province, especially along the coast, where the offshore oil rigs were located. The NFLA fighters, including an ex-Portuguese foreign intelligence (SIED) operator who coordinated their assaults, were already local heroes for their efforts to “liberate Angola from the corruption of the state and Chinese hegemony here and throughout the continent,” as their hand-printed flyers stated.
But the assault four days earlier on the Chinese compound at Lobito had raised the status of the NFLA even further as a genuine liberation movement fully committed to the advancement of democratic ideals, income equality, and the overthrow of the thieving politicians in Luanda.
The small commando unit had been on high alert since the attack, but yesterday their informants in the capital reported that the hopelessly corrupt and incompetent Angolan security bureaucracies knew nothing about the identities of NFLA personnel or its location.
Their sources also gleefully described the Chinese alternately throwing cash or threats at whoever they thought might provide them with a lead to the “butchers, killers, and murderers” they sought in vain.
It was understandable, then, that the NFLA unit allowed themselves the smallest of celebrations that evening, amounting to no more than a few beers and a plate of roasted pig before turning in.
* * *
—
The twenty-four men of the PLA “Swift Sword” special operations group came in by foot, guided by satellite images provided by Chinese intelligence and their night-vision goggles. Dropped off ten kilometers back by a single, French-designed Harbin Z-9 transport helicopter, each of the superbly conditioned fighters sped effortlessly through the trees toward the NFLA compound, eager for enemy contact.
Not even the lake fishermen were awake at this hour. The one dog they encountered was dispatched with a single shot to the skull by a suppressed .22-caliber pistol before he could bark.
Otherwise, they arrived undetected, bypassing the primitive dwellings of the other villagers, making their way to the three designated buildings.
Flash-bangs through the windows tossed on a single command instantly disabled the eleven NFLA fighters and the women who were bedded with them. Well-placed 5.8×42-millimeter rounds fired by suppressed QBZ-95B-1 carbines tore into unprotected flesh and shattered brainpans. Digital photos and fingerprints were recorded; personal effects and other artifacts with potential intelligence value were bagged.
The entire operation from flash-bang to exfil was under seven minutes, in exact accordance with their training drills. An hour and thirty-one minutes later, the Z-9 touched down at the Luanda Air Base, home to the Angolan 23rd Air Transportation Regiment.
Proof of concept number four, by request.
BEIJING, CHINA
Chen’s encrypted Huawei (“To Serve China”) smartphone rang. It was a direct call from the Swift Sword unit commander calling on his satellite phone. The noise of the Z-9 turbines whirred in the background as the commander shouted his report.
Chen was relieved to hear that all eleven identified NFLA fighters, including the five that participated in the Lobito-1 slaughter, were killed in the attack, with no Chinese casualties. The captured Portuguese operative would be interrogated with prejudice in Luanda regarding the murder of Fan Min, and his participation in the slaughter of Chinese nationals used as leverage against Lisbon to negotiate better terms in a trade summit next week.
Altogether, it was a textbook operation—one that would be taught at the Special Forces training academy soon enough. He thanked the commander and his team profusely and hung up, privately thanking the gods in whom he did not believe for not needing to use the Z-19 Black Whirlwind attack/recon helicopters that had also been deployed for cover. The bird’s Red Arrow missiles were as effective as the American Hellfire but hardly a surgical instrument. He needed boots on the ground to confirm both the NFLA kills and their identities for his report to his superiors in the Lobito Working Group.
Most important, the intelligence provided by CHIBI had proven both accurate and invaluable to both China and, more significantly, his own career. Clearly he had misjudged the potential of CHIBI’s original offer. He would rectify that immediately.
Chen dialed the number of the woman who headed his elite cloud-hacking unit APT15, aka JADE SMOKE, a “privately owned” Hong Kong–based company secretly funded by his department. She picked up on the first ring.
“Sir?”
Chen asked, “Have you ever been to London?”
65
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Foley read over the last report again. Something wasn’t adding up. The numbers were there, but she couldn’t make the algebra work.
She spoke Russian fluently. Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley had learned the elegant form of the language at her grandfather’s knee, and was a field agent in Moscow while her husband, Ed, served as Moscow chief of station. She knew the language, the people, and the politics as well as a
ny outsider could ever understand the place Churchill described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
As a Russia expert during the Cold War, she knew its operational history in Africa. Angola had fallen to the indigenous Communists with Moscow’s support, but the country—a former Portuguese colony—was Castro’s play on the continent, a massive Cuban military intervention. At the time, America feared the Domino Theory in Africa. The worry seemed frivolous now, in hindsight. She’d never heard of Lobito, or the NFLA. But dead Chinese nationals in Angola were a red flag. Her intuition was flashing DEFCON 3.
Ten days earlier, an Argentinian special operations team had been shot out of the sky by Iranian-backed Hezbollah operatives. That had been a head scratcher, too. So was the killing of the Turkish Maroon Berets in Syria—a hell of a provocation by the Russians.
And then the NFLA, discovered, located, and utterly wiped out in a single, surgical strike in a matter of days. Chinese intel in Africa couldn’t be that good, could it? Hell, the CIA didn’t even know anything about the NFLA until Portuguese foreign intelligence reached out for a NATO consult just a few days ago.
Unlike the spy movies, the real Game wasn’t usually played for keeps. In peacetime, killing the opposition was a serious escalation of the stakes and an open invitation for a retaliatory strike, usually disproportional in its violence and damage, to discourage future incivility. That’s why the killing of the German BKA agent by an unknown agency was so disturbing. But the three other attacks were equally problematic.
The four attacks were geographically separated—South America, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The three military operations by Iran, Russia, and China were against a state police force, the Turkish military, and an indigenous rebel group, respectively. The fourth attack—technically, the first on the calendar—was a street murder of an undercover agent working on a drug case by knifing him in the back.