“You’re looking a little pale, mate,” McCarter said. “Starting to feel a chill in the air? That’s your body running out of blood. Look down at the floor, Wijeya. There’s an awful lot of you down there. And it’s only going to keep running.”
Wijeya flailed, desperate now. The combination of the wounds he was taking and McCarter’s relentless verbal manipulations was becoming too much for him. He started rushing, and in rushing, he made a mistake. McCarter came past him dragging the blade behind, and the curved edge took Wijeya in the guts. He screamed and fell to his knees, holding his insides. The expression on his face, when he looked once more at McCarter, was pale and indignant, shocked and surprised.
“You…” huffed Wijeya. “You should not have been able to beat me.” He dropped his kerambit, as it was interfering with the ongoing task of holding his intestines in his body. “It isn’t fair. I worked so hard. My parents…”
“Nobody cares, mate,” McCarter said. He looked around the control console until he found the portable microphone attached to the PA system. This he put in front of Wijeya’s face as the pirate captain swayed on his knees. McCarter switched the microphone on but then put his thumb on the mute button.
“You’re going to make an announcement, Captain Wijeya,” McCarter said. “You’re going to tell the remainder of your forces, if there are any left alive, that you’re surrendering. I want them to know that they are fighting alone now. That there’s nobody left to serve. Do it.”
“I cannot control my crew,” Wijeya said. “They have…lost respect in me.” He began to sway on his knees.
“Just make the announcement,” McCarter said.
The pirate captain leaned toward the microphone. McCarter took his thumb off the mute button. Wijeya looked up at the ceiling, then down at his entrails spilling out of his body. “This…is Captain Wijeya,” he rasped. His voice echoed throughout the oil rig platform. “I am announcing…my unconditional surrender. All forces, all of my crew, any security men who can still hear my voice, I surrender. They are taking me into custody. If you fight on, know that you fight for nothing and no one. Know that it is over. Know that I am over. Goodbye. This is Wijeya. I go to be with the gods. I go at the hands of a warrior. And I am sorry to my family for hurting them.”
Wijeya seemed ready to collapse. He looked up at McCarter. “I thought you would shoot me,” he said. “I thought you would tell me you had no patience for honor. That you were—what is the word?—practical. A practical man would take my knife and pretend to duel me, but then simply shoot me anyway.”
“It has been done,” McCarter said. “By others and by me.”
“I do not wish to linger here,” Wijeya said. “I can feel the life slowly ebbing out of me. This is…not dignified. I want you to give me the gift.”
“You’re asking a lot, friend, given that just a little while ago you were trying to kill me and every member of my squad.”
“This is what is done among warriors, yes?”
“You’re not a warrior,” McCarter argued.
“Then…please,” the pirate said. “An act of kindness for a foolish man. A man who now sees that he should have died long ago. Free me, British.”
“Well,” McCarter said. “If you’re going to ask nicely.” The Briton removed his Hi-Power from his belt, cocked the hammer and put the barrel of the gun up to Wijeya’s temple. Wijeya bowed his head. His skin was ashen. Blood continue to gush from the wound in his abdomen.
“I was not a good man,” Wijeya said quietly.
“No,” McCarter said. “But I can help.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Carl Lyons smashed in the door to Rhemsen’s office with his shoulder. It was a big, heavy door, and it made a big, heavy crash when it landed. The ghastly plastic face of Harold Rhemsen was waiting to meet Able Team from behind the corrupt businessman’s desk.
“Gentlemen,” he said, smiling. “Come in. Have a seat.” He gestured to the chairs in front of him. “I think you’ll find me hospitable. I’m ready to cooperate. I hereby renounce violence and apologize sincerely for my involvement in the events you have been investigating. May I get you some coffee? Please, please, sit. There’s no need for any further rancor among us.”
“No, thanks,” Lyons said. “We’ll stand. Been that kind of day. Now, Rhemsen, you get up from behind that desk. Any funny business, any bombs strapped to your chest, any self-destruct codes or dead man’s switches or freaking bear-trap masks, and I promise you, as all that is good and pure in the world is my witness, I will beat you so hard your unborn children will feel it, and I will not stop until every inch of your body is a giant, aching bruise.”
“How delightfully graphic,” Rhemsen said. “But as I said, there’s no need for that. I’m a businessman. This is a business transaction. I would like very much if you and I could come to some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement. And I think you’ll find that I can be very generous with my money if the right opportunity presents itself.
“Gentlemen,” Rhemsen said again, “I assure you that it was all, every bit of it, just business. Maybe not good business. Maybe not even advisable business. But everything I did, I did for money. The profit motive is my only god.”
“Who, exactly, are you trying to convince?” Lyons said. “This speech sounds a little too rehearsed to me.”
“Please, gentlemen,” Rhemsen said. “You’ve caught me. I wish only to surrender. To confess. And I wish to do so on camera.”
“Can’t help you there,” Lyons said.
“Oh, but you don’t have to,” Rhemsen said. “This entire office is wired for sound and video. I have activated the digital recording device. I am ready to give my statement.”
“I’m listening,” Lyons said.
“I am Harold Rhemsen,” he said. “I wish to state, for the record, my unequivocal confession. I have conspired with forces hired by me, including the Blackstar security corporation, to implicate the People’s Republic of China in schemes that were the result of my own doing in the South China Sea. I have arranged to have armed men conduct terrorist and pirate raids on assets in the region. I have done this all in the hope of discrediting China—”
“Rhemsen,” Lyons said, moving quickly to stand over the businessman behind his desk, “I am really tired of your crap.” Lyons’s hand shot out and he grabbed Rhemsen’s right wrist. The RhemCorp founder had been reaching for a revolver in his desk drawer.
“I…I…” Rhemsen stammered.
“Oh, I know,” Lyons said, still applying a death grip to Rhemsen’s wrist. “You figured you’d keep us busy with a confession while you worked your way around to gunning us down. That’s just great, man. That’s just the perfect cap to a lousy couple of days. Shut off the recording.”
With difficulty because of the pain in his gun-hand wrist, Rhemsen shut off the device. “I…I wasn’t going to try to shoot you,” he lied. Lyons could read the lie in the man’s frozen mask of a face. “I was going to make my confession and then take my own life. I don’t think you realize the kind of pressure a man in my position is in. The danger of suicide is ever-present. So many men like me take their own lives at moments of adversity.”
“Well, great,” Lyons said.
Rhemsen’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said,” Lyons said. “I think that’s a fine idea. Because, Harold, as long as you’re alive, people’s lives are in danger. You’ll find some way to set off a bomb, or you’ll clamp another death trap over one of my buddies, or you’ll pull a lever and drop us all into your pit of alligators and lawyers, or whatever it is a guy like you would keep in a secret pit under his office. And, really, the only thing that’s going to put a stop to that is if you do commit suicide. Plus, I like the postscript that puts on your story. Wraps it up nice and neat.”
“You are mad,” Rhemsen said.
“Oh, I’m mad, all right,” Lyons said, now gripping Rhemsen’s arm tight enough to make the bones of Rhemsen�
��s wrist grate together. “I’m furious, in fact. And I’m also completely serious.”
Lyons started moving Rhemsen’s gun arm. The barrel of the .38 revolver Rhemsen held started to move, inexorably, toward Rhemsen’s face.
“You cannot do this!” Rhemsen shouted. “I have rights! I have rights!”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” Lyons said. “This isn’t about your rights, Harold. This is about payback for repeated attempts to murder us. And, even though the people I answer to could and would never give me this order, I happen to think that all the trouble you’ve caused justifies helping you wrap things up a little more neatly now that we’re at the end of it. So, you killing yourself? Best idea you’ve had yet, and by a big margin. Now hold still.”
“No! Stop! Stop!” Rhemsen cried.
Lyons folded Rhemsen’s arm. The smaller man screamed in pain. Lyons jammed the barrel of the .38, with Rhemsen’s hand wrapped around it and enveloped by Lyons’s own huge mitt, up under Rhemsen’s chin.
“Hey, what’s that?” Lyons said, looking into the open desk drawer. “That looks like a diary. I’ll bet there’s some juicy stuff in there. Don’t worry. We won’t read through it. Not while you’re alive, anyway.”
“I beg you!” Rhemsen screamed. “Spare my life! I meant no harm! I only wanted to…wanted to…”
“Make money, blah, blah, blah, evils of capitalism, yadda, yadda,” Lyons said, his tone mocking. “Yeah. We got that much. And I’ve got to tell you, Harold, I’m not buying it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to not talk to you for the rest of your life.”
“Hey,” Schwarz said, lifting Rhemsen’s briefcase off the floor. “This has, like, a ballistic panel in it,” he said. “Nothing else could make it this heavy.”
“Check it for tons of money,” Blancanales said.
“Nope,” Schwarz said. “Just a ballistic panel, as I said.”
“Bet that would have come in handy,” Lyons said, “if we’d come in here shooting.”
“Yeah,” Schwarz said, suddenly excited. “Like, he would have dove for the floor with it, absorbing our gunfire, and then somehow gotten off a shot that let him escape.”
“I guess bad guys can dream,” Lyons said. He started to close his hand over Rhemsen’s. “Dogs do it, and I like dogs a hell of a lot more than people.”
“Anything you want!” Rhemsen pleaded. “I will give you anything you want! Spare my life! I will give you intelligence, money. I will reveal my worst secrets!”
“Looks like we’ve already got those,” Lyons said. “And I thought I told you to keep your mouth shut forever.”
Rhemsen let out one last, blood-curdling scream.
Lyons made a fist. The gun went off, spraying Harold Rhemsen’s brains all over the wall behind his desk.
EPILOGUE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
Hal Brognola’s image filled the flat-screen monitor on one wall of the briefing room. Seated at the conference table, the men of Able Team sat drinking coffee. Phoenix Force was once more using a satellite connection to join the meeting remotely, but this time they were transmitting from a Ford-class supercarrier leaving the area of the South China Sea. Kurtzman noted that as he watched the smaller screens and other displays in the high-tech briefing room, adjusting the gain on the various feeds as required.
“Go ahead, Hal,” Price said. “What have we learned?”
“China has declared ‘Harold Rhemsen,’ born one Cheung Yeong, a rogue agent. Likewise a character officially identified as Feng “Simon” Lao, whom we know to be a black-ops veteran instrumental in their most covert intelligence operations for the past ten years. The Chinese government has disclaimed any involvement in, or knowledge of, Rhemsen’s plot—first, to make it look as though China was behind the attacks in the South China Sea, and then to discredit those attacks as fabricated. The idea, as explained in the journal we found on Rhemsen’s body, was to make critics of China look foolish and help deflect very real concern over Chinese grabs for territory.”
“Rhemsen’s journal, which Able Team recovered, is the reason the Chinese have backed off so quickly,” Price put in. “Apparently every facet of the Chinese black-ops plan, sponsored by Lao and coordinated by Rhemsen, was detailed in the journal, right down to how a Chinese sleeper agent named Cheung Yeong killed the real Rhemsen and assumed his identity.”
“So the guy was never an American at all,” said Lyons. “He was a Chinese-born spook?”
“Evidently,” Brognola returned. “If you hadn’t found the journal, it’s possible his manufactured identity might have held. We had to dig pretty deep to verify the details ‘Rhemsen’ hinted at in his journal. And it was the second of two journals recovered.”
“The other one was in Jason Fitzpatrick’s possession,” Price explained. “After Able Team took down Fitzpatrick, Justice got a warrant to search his apartment. He had hidden a briefcase there filled with a million dollars in counterfeit US currency. An equally fake journal, which we believe was also written by Cheung Yeong, was inside the briefcase, as well. As confirmed by the real journal, the fake journal details a nefarious plot by an American businessman, namely Rhemsen, to profit by making China look bad and stirring fear against it.”
“So he was a double reverse backhand agent,” Schwarz said. “This is getting complicated.”
“We think his last-minute confession to Able Team was an attempt to preserve his cover and the operation,” Price continued. “Maybe he even feared reprisals to his family back home for his failure, if he still has family. We don’t really know. Getting caught wasn’t part of his plan, but he obviously thought that playing the role of corrupt capitalist would benefit him in the long run once you had his back against the wall. Maybe, with the right lawyer, he could even have wrangled some kind of sweet plea or immunity deal. Stranger things have happened. And if he ever did make his way back to Beijing, he would have been able to say, with video evidence, that he rode the operation down to the last, trying like hell to make it work. But his unscheduled suicide—” she looked at Lyons, who nodded “—makes things that much more difficult for the Chinese. Rhemsen isn’t here to stir up trouble by adding to his lies. We have his body, and we control the narrative now.”
“Obviously the nation that stood to benefit from all this was China itself,” Brognola said. “Had Cheung Yeong and Lao succeeded in first framing, then discrediting China, the nation’s further territorial advancements could have enjoyed more freedom of movement. You know how politically correct bureaucrats tend to be. Everybody would be afraid to look like they were jumping on the bash-China train. And the engines of China’s political propaganda would have plenty of fodder, with yet another corrupt American war profiteer as the star of the narrative.”
“Where does that leave us with regard to our relations with China?” Encizo asked through the video link.
“It’s about where it was,” Brognola said. “They’re pretending they don’t know anything about it, we know they do, they also know we know they do, and we’re pretending we don’t know that they know that we know.”
“Wow,” Schwarz said. “Just…wow.”
Brognola shot the electronics expert a sour look. “At any rate, our government and those of our allied nations will be looking at China pretty hard in the coming months. The incident has heightened suspicion about their activities, which is the opposite of what they wanted. And thanks to both of you, Able Team and Phoenix Force, both this group of Chinese sleeper agents and a mercenary force that was supporting them have been eliminated.”
“Blackstar has been officially designated corporation non grata with the Department of Defense,” Price said. “Justice is having their assets seized. It’s going to take a few years to wind its way through the courts, but chances are good that most of the people involved in the company will be swept up in the endless investigation that follows. Thanks to you all, most of Blackstar’s combat operatives are already dead. We’ve tracked down a few tha
t managed to survive and make it to area hospitals near the zones of engagement. They’ll end up in prison before it’s over, and that’s if they’re lucky.”
“If they’re not,” Brognola said, “they’ll end up in a black-site prison without possibility of appeal, and disappear accordingly.” He massaged the bridge of his nose with two thick fingers. “China’s government is scrambling to contain the political fallout. I’ve got meetings all afternoon with politicians who, in turn, have meetings with the Chinese. It’s going to be a long night. Communist China remains hungry to expand. That threat was dealt a setback today, but the danger is no less than it was before. It may even be greater, as you know how the Chinese get when they feel their national honor has been affronted.”
“The Farm will closely monitor the territories in and around China, and especially these zones of expansion on which Beijing has been focusing,” Price said. “We’ll respond accordingly as circumstances dictate.”
“All right, then,” Brognola concluded. “Wish me luck. And, team? Good work out there, as always.”
“Thanks, Hal,” Price said. “Farm, out.”
Brognola’s image disappeared. “We’ll be seeing you soon,” McCarter said. “It’s going to be good to grab a little rest.”
“Don’t count on getting much,” Price said. “You know how it goes.”
“Do I ever, Barb,” McCarter said. “Do I ever. Phoenix, out.” His image, too, disappeared.
“Able,” Price said. “I assume you’ll be taking your downtime here at the Farm. You’ll find your accounts flush with combat pay.”
“Then I’m off to the nearest diner to spend it,” Lyons said. “I’m starved.” He rose and walked out of the room. Blancanales followed. Schwarz, however, lingered.
“Uh,” the electronics expert said. “About that. I can’t seem to find my smartphone.”
“Oh, that…” Kurtzman said. He produced a satellite smartphone from a pocket of his chair and passed it across the table to Schwarz. “You dropped it in the armory when you checked in your gear. Cowboy was kind enough to pass it along.”
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