by Randy Moffat
The locals displayed a fine flair for self preservation at the sound and sight of weapons. What had previously been turning into a street fair intent on fleecing the gormless Yangguizi was within seconds a scene of desolation that might only be matched by standing in the middle of a dry lake bed in the heart of the Mojave.
Thermite briskly obliterated the locks on the target building’s front door, melting right through the metal. The Brutus team flowed into the corridor beyond the front and dropped the guard at the far end with smooth efficiency. They slammed into the interior of the building right behind the flash-bang stun grenades that exploded three seconds before the warriors did the same thing and swept into the interior like a wave entering a harbor—their weapons tracking to corners and walls of the room beyond.
The second team, Murray’s intelligence operatives mainly, were labeled ‘wet-boy one’. They were less practiced in their motions and with each other. It took them thirteen seconds longer to breech their door at the back of the building. Then they repeated the Brutus tactics, swarming through their own entrance.
At an almost leisurely pace Murray, his three specialists, Wong, Craig and two more very capable TESS security men with military experience followed the lead assault at a distance. They called themselves simply ‘team three.’
Their plan was intentionally simple. While the Brutus team and Wet-boy. created maximum confusion at front and back and shut down the maximum number of potential defenders, team three would go straight to and enter a particular door identified in Murray’s Li provided videos. The door was being guarded. The rationale assumed that something worth guarding was high on their list of probable locales for finding Jeeter.
For once things broke TESS’ way and it proved a sound theory.
Hú’s head of security and interrogation cursed and shook his unlovely head slightly trying to get his retina’s working fully again. He had not been looking directly at the grenade, but his eyes were only now functioning again and large bright spots danced across his vision. He still could not hear. He was familiar with the technology but that did not make it any more comfortable to be on the receiving end of a flash-bang and the intruders had been dropping them profligately. At least two had gone off in this room alone. The weapon’s flash overpowered the photoreceptor cells in the eyes for five seconds while the sound of the blast caused temporary loss of hearing. He felt dizzy too. The huge volume of sound had been reflected off the surrounding walls and created nauseating waves in the fluid of his ears and Eustachian tubes. The shake of his head only made this worse and gave him an urge to vomit.
He could see enough though to have spotted two men racing into the room behind the grenades and he had lain doggo on the floor as if unconscious. The men who were assaulting the headquarters were professionals. They had shot the single man in a fatigues still on all fours right next to him and the corpse had landed half on top. The blood and body made excellent camouflage for his possum. The attackers had swept through the room shouting “Stay on the floor… !” repeatedly in Mandarin and English as they moved on. They could have shot everyone, but they were not here to pile up body counts… they had other objectives.
He could guess what they were.
He rose and staggered—leaning on a wall to hold himself upright. A couple others were stirring in the room, but they were clerical or radio watch monitors—not warriors and just sat there moaning or shouting stupidly for help they did not really need. With difficulty he made his way to a small door that led through a cellar full of HVAC and boilers to a little known exit that came out in the building across the street. He had spent a life in action and understood he had an imperative. He must act quickly to head off these attackers who clearly knew a great deal to be able to assault this particular nondescript building in such a little known quarter of the city. From what he had seen many of them were foreigners too. It implied that an international effort was being made here. Their professionalism was also clear. They had struck like lightening in a well orchestrated movement that stank of intense training in anti-terror skills. Distant gunfire told him that resistance still existed from the building’s security team, but he must reinforce it quickly if he was going to accomplish his full mission. His assignment from leader Hú had been to bring the old man Jeeter away from Shanghai to Chongqing. He had considered it a routine mission. No hurry required. He had simply been waiting here with his feet on a desk, drinking tea and nodding off quietly until his route was secured through the Lau CCP Loyalists in the city that were busily clamping down on free travel. After waiting a day for arrangements to be finalized he had been planning to move tonight. Some feral corner of his mind informed him without a doubt that these attackers could only be here for that same old man. They were now between him and Jeeter and he was unarmed. He could not get to the man by himself. He must gather more guns to reinforce the building security elements and wrest Jeeter away from them by main force. Help might not be far away. The Militia for Work had a headquarters only four blocks away. If he could reach the Militia he might still salvage the situation. He tried to run with limited success, staggering badly and only just keeping his feet.
As team three entered the critical door identified on their intelligence footage they saw two guards who had abandoned their guard positions high tailing away up a short corridor. The TESS security guys and the TESS intelligence personnel all sent rounds after them instantly, simultaneously stopping both. As they ran forward another guard popped out of a door ahead and fired twice at them with a pistol. The rounds staggered one of the Intelligence guys who fell to the floor. Team three was hyper vigilant on adrenaline by then and before he could hide himself behind the door frame again two rifle bullets found him too and he collapsed in a boneless heap.
Wong used the opportunity of his spectacular fall to sprint forward of the other TESS guys and reach the doorway first. He jumped over the guard’s inert form only to see a Chinese guy in white who was bending over an IV drip bag tube that went into the arm of a man handcuffed to the bed frame. The medical man was poising a thumb onto the plunger of a syringe to inject something into the bag and therefore into the veins of the patient. Wong shot him without compunction to stop him pushing the plunger home. Whatever was in the syringe was prevented from going like a bullet into the arm it was aimed at. It might have been pain killer. It might have been rat poison. Better safe than sorry.
The man in the bed was Jeeter. Wong stayed cool.
“Craig! Clear this area. Murray with me!” He commanded. The security and intelligence guys raced past the door without hesitation. Shots were fired further along the corridor. Yells and a shriek or two provided background music, but Wong did not hear it as he was busy checking Jeeter’s vitals. The old man was alive. Murray panted in. His cover of being out of shape was real enough. He was out of shape. Too many big Macs.
“Murray… search these nearest guys. We need handcuff keys!”
Murray took the nearest guard, but it was Wong who found them in the dead orderly’s pants pocket. He un-cuffed the old man who was pretty out of it and looked like hell. His face a black and blue mass of hematomas. Wong became more and more furious as he evaluated each bruise on the old man’s face and saw they went on down his body somewhere under the hospital gown he wore. Craig skidded in then and materialized at Wong’s side. He surprised Wong as he bent over Jeeter, pulled an amyl nitrate capsule out of his pocket and broke it under Jeeter’s nose. Wong realized he should have thought of that. The old man jerked and his eyes blinked open and he looked blurrily up.
“Heh, ‘Crash!’” Craig leaned in closer still and put his face near the old man’s and shouted into Jeeter’s ear. “Ya old koot! Quit lying around. We gotta make tracks!”
Jeeter pulled his upper lip up to show his freshly broken teeth in a ghastly grin.
“Uppity rent-a-cop.” He slurred. His eyes drooped shut again.
Craig glanced at Wong.
“He’ll be fine!” Craig said.
“Murray!” Wong barked. “Two men here now! Two man fireman’s carry. We are out of here.”
Murray himself grabbed one of his intel men, they slung weapons over their backs and they interlocked their hands to each other’s wrists in a clover leaf while Wong lifted Jeeter and dumped his bottom onto their hand basket and draped his limp arms over their shoulders. The old man’s head lolled forward and bobbled at each movement. Whatever drugs he was on at least meant he was feeling no pain.
Wong stepped out then and waved armed men in front of the group and behind the group and started speaking in terse phrases into his radio as they moved to exit the building with weapons swinging side to side, protecting their precious cargo. A cargo they had come a long way to get.
Hú’s Security head raced into the old store front where the Militia had their headquarters. Typically it doubled as their drinking den.
The local Militia head man was a suspicious shopkeeper type. He had done the right thing. When shots were fired in the neighborhood he had put out a call for Militia members to congregate at a run. As they arrived he had issued those who did not already have them their rifles. He had eighteen men armed and present when their fearless leader’s chief of security staggered in and demanded they all accompany him to support their master Hú at his headquarters.
The Militia were para-military. Which meant that they were Military only in their imagination. A handful had some reserve experience and one was a former soldier, but repeated training, contingency planning and discipline were not their strong points. They were essentially thugs or unemployed cowboys looking for free booze, friends to hang out with and some kind of action. Now with weapons added, they were thugs with guns and they caressed and squeezed them, feeling their own strength and power expand in chemistry with the cold steel to magnify their bravery and the size of their manhood.
Quite suddenly they pounded out of their club based on some signal tied more to pheromones and less to intellect. The Militia bolted as a group and raced pell-mell for the mall with all the tactics and coordination of a herd of bison. Hú’s suddenly ignored security man followed. He kept shrieking at them, trying to slow them down and bring some semblance of order out of the cluster. They regarded him as an outsider though and ignored him. Busy either running or screaming battle cries to get their blood up, none of them ever noticed one of Murray’s Shanghai local agents dressed as a bicycle messenger and posted outside the HQ for the exact purpose as he radioed news of their departure to the TESS leadership.
As fate would have it the Militia’s non-tactics worked to some extent. Murray was just relaying his report of the enemy having left their headquarters when the impetuosity of the Militia’s charge allowed them to reach and half-surprise the Brutus Team and Team Three who were up-loading Jeeter like doting mothers. They had just laid him onto a mattress they’d placed in the bed of a truck. The TESS men had been expecting a much more cautious and tactically reasoned approach altogether. Both sides were therefore forced to dive for cover and blaze hastily away at each other. Wong kept his cool from his new hide on the high ground he had ‘found’ by diving desperately into a cell phone shop in the strip mall. He began to coordinate over his headset while glancing occasionally at a Shanghai high-school kid who had been manning the sales counter a moment before and was now curling into a tighter and tighter ball and whimpering like a hungry spaniel as AK-47 rounds occasionally wandered into the shop to knock a Motorola or Nokia off the walls to fall in pieces like cellular rain. Wong quickly ordered his Wet-Boy team to sweep around from behind the building where they’d been occupying their position by the back door and hit the Militia in their flank. Simultaneously Wong commanded his Taiwanese mercenaries to pull-in the unused members of their taxi-based perimeter and swing in to strike the Militia on the opposite side. The Taiwanese mercenaries were bored. They snatched weapons up and raced to the fight like gazelles. Wet-Boy opened fire at almost the same moment the Taiwanese did.
After a warm action of about three minutes duration with ever increasing amounts of lead flying about the neighborhood, the superior tactics of the TESS personnel told. In the beginning the Militia had liberally sprayed bullets at their perceived enemy with some effect until now. Now they were being fired on from three sides. After a minute or two fifteen of the Militia were down dead or seriously wounded and the remaining three still ambulatory men turned and fled with conviction. Hú’s man went with them back the way they had come with no more than a departing look of diabolical hatred. Because he was unarmed everyone on the TESS side just took him for some local who’d gotten embroiled accidentally in the fracas and failed even to shoot seriously at him. The priorities of combat are simple… first people shooting at you and then ugly neighborhood guys with scars. He got away and TESS never knew who he was.
Explosive charges placed earlier in both entrances to the building blew up within seconds of the end of the gun fight with the Militia and the rubble dropped to block the exits which decisively prevented any remaining security personnel inside the building from exiting or interfering further with the TESS retreat.
As the TESS team’s reloaded into their vehicles Wong got his reports. Wet-boy had one walking wounded and one very ambulatory light wound. Predictably the Mercenaries reported no dead and only one lightly wounded. Brutus had two light injuries, a shoulder wound and a serious hit with two bullets in a single man’s leg that required him to be carried. Casualties were highest among the least combat trained. Two of Murray’s intelligence men were down, badly wounded with a head injury and a groin shot. Worse; Craig had copped it. A bullet in the gut.
The convoy left and headed south with Wong personally nursing Craig’s head in his lap as best he could in the back of the swaying lorry.
The escape convoy wove at a pace designed not to attract attention through the southern reaches of Shanghai. At least they hoped they would not attract attention. The bitch called luck hated them though.
The sun was almost setting as they passed under the 1501 highway and were spotted in the still bright crepuscular light from a road block high up on the raised hardball. If the TESS force had more time they would have broken up into smaller segments to disguise themselves better still, but their daylight was running out. This meant that their convoy stayed together and appeared to the wary as a group movement. Large group movements in time of civil strife like China was currently going through were a cause for some alarm. Several of the troops at the roadblock had suffered militia attacks at other checkpoints over recent days by similar groups who were also moving together. Their instincts for these things were sharp by now and they radioed in an alarm, calling up the local rapid reaction force to investigate what smelled like a convoy of unmarked vehicles headed south looking for a target. Minutes later the TESS row of vehicles maneuvered to pass the Haitang New Village to the west and went straight for Jintao Road that ran onto the seawall that enclosed the big manufactured harbor on the western side of the bay. The Lau loyalist army chose that moment to appear in hot pursuit.
Two companies of Lau’s Army soldiers came tearing up as the TESS trucks and cars sped along the sea wall. Running fast the military almost caught up just as the TESS personnel reached a point where there was an elbow in the sea wall where it turned abruptly to the northeast. The last truck in the TESS convoy swerved purposefully sideways two hundred yards short of that turn to block the road and slow the Army’s pursuit. The rest of the TESS convoy drove a few hundred yards further along to stop themselves in a mini-traffic jam. Here the wounded and rest of the team were hustled out of the ground vehicles and transferred as rapidly as possible into two boats; actual Chinese junks that were tied to the bollards on the sea side of the jetty, bobbing up and down in the easy surf and hidden from the Army guns behind the sea-wall’s massive concrete blocks. The Army pursuit vehicles were stymied by the truck parked sideways across the road and f
irmly in their way. They ignored the boats and began to shoot at the closest target. It was perhaps not the smartest strategy as the tires on the outside were shot out in seconds and their deflation would only make it harder to move. The four unhurt inhabitants of this final truck clustered on the far side of it. The TESS personnel would jerk a head and hand over the hood or around the rear of the vehicle and fire at the army units to encourage them to stay halted. The Army obligingly obeyed and stayed in place, but began to raise the stakes by using their heavy machine guns mounted on the vehicles energetically, reducing the truck still further into in-animation until it was an unusable heap of metal, rubber and holes.