by David Archer
“Wrong answer,” Jenny said. “Next one costs you your life. Who on my team is working with you to sell us out? Remember, a wrong answer and you die right now!”
Soo Mi licked her lips quickly, then lowered her eyes. “It’s Mitchell,” she said. “He passed me the code name, Camelot, and the Chinese are screaming to get their hands on him.”
Jenny nodded. “One more answer and you’re home free. How do you call for us to be picked up and extracted?”
Soo Mi slowly pointed toward a cell phone lying on the kitchen table. Jenny glanced at it, then whispered, “Call it in now. Tell them two hours, pick us up here. Tell them we’ll be hot and that there will be no further communication tonight.” Soo Mi stared at her, and Jenny grinned. “You don’t think I’m going to leave you conscious, do you? Let you tip them off? Now, do it!”
Soo Mi picked up the phone and dialed a number. She spoke in broken English. “Ai, you get truck for eggs? Ai, eggs all ready, but I very tired, very tired. You come get eggs, two hour, okay? Okay, two hour! I sleep now!”
She ended the call and looked at Jenny. “That’s it. Eggs is the code for a pickup, they’ll be here in two hours. No problems, I promise.” Her eyes were still wide and tears were brimming over.
Jenny smiled at her. “Good girl,” she said. “And I said you’d live through this, right? Well, I lied.”
Soo Mi gasped and tensed, but Jenny spun the girl around and pulled her to the center of the room, holding her by her hair. The knife came from under her left arm, where she always kept it, and she thrust it forcefully into the small gap between the top cervical vertebra and the base of Soo Mi’s skull, then let the body fall where it stood. She reached down and drew the knife back out, wiped off the small amount of blood on the dead girl’s clothing, then slid it back into its sheath. A moment later, she had the body under covers in Soo Mi’s bed, and then slipped out the door.
“I had Soo Mi arrange for our ride out in two hours,” she said as she caught up to the men outside. “It’s all set.”
They moved out, still careful to watch for any possible observers, but still moving along fairly quickly. It took them slightly more than fifteen minutes to reach the point where they could see the building, and they were surprised to find no sign of any extra guard activity on its outside. Randy and Marco led them to the stand of trees where they had watched and waited, and they all settled in to catch a moment’s rest before the action began.
“Okay,” Jenny said after giving them time to catch their breath. “Those look like standard steel doors, so let’s go for the hinges and the doorknobs. Wrap C4 around each, and when it all goes off the doors will go flying. Ready? Let’s go.”
Jenny and Randy headed straight for the center door, and Dave and Jim took the one to its left, so Marco and Neil went to the right. They moved quickly, crouching low, and stopped just before making contact with the wall.
Marco pulled the C4 out of his pockets and broke it up, packing it around all three of the hinges on his door and then wrapping the rest around the doorknob. The detonator was set up with contact wires, so he stuck it into the putty on the doorknob to hold it in place and ran wires from it to each glob of the explosive. He looked up toward Jenny and held up a thumb, then took Neil twenty feet further down the wall. They crouched down on the ground beside the wall, with their backs to the door and covering their heads with their hands.
Jenny had the trigger, and as soon as she saw that Jim and Dave were also ready, she took Randy to the midpoint between her door and theirs, and they also crouched down and covered their ears.
Suddenly, a muffled screaming, several voices at once, could be heard coming from a lower level, and Jenny knew it had to be Noah’s doing. She grinned maniacally and dropped a thumb on the button.
The three blasts went off simultaneously and the doors flew dozens of feet away from the building. All six of them jumped instantly to their feet and ran toward the doors, then rushed inside. Jenny had taken the center door, the guard room, but the blast wave from the explosion had rendered the four men inside unconscious. She snatched open the inner door to the hallway, then she and Randy each thrust their heads out to look in both directions, yanking them back instantly.
“Looks clear,” Randy said, and Jenny nodded. She jumped through the door, deliberately placing herself against the far wall in the hallway and facing to the right, as Randy stepped out and faced left.
Jim and Dave appeared at their end of the hallway, just as two men burst out of the doorway that led to the stairs. Dave’s Tavor burped twice and they both fell, but voices could be heard shouting behind them. Both men put themselves against the wall and began moving toward the stairwell door.
At the other end of the building, Marco and Neil had rushed into the store room. There was no one inside, so they opened the inner door and looked out into the hallway. Jenny and Randy were already there, and a moment later they saw Dave and Jim. They started to look behind them just as the two soldiers came out of the stairwell, then spun as the sound of Dave’s gun caught them off guard.
Marco and Neil had each raised their weapons, but didn’t fire when they saw both men fall. Marco took a step toward Jenny, but Neil suddenly realized that he had glimpsed a door at the other end of the hall, and turned instinctively.
Sure enough, the door was only about fifteen feet away, in the short wall that made the end of the hallway. Neil took a step toward it and then froze as he saw the knob turning slowly. His Tavor came up instantly, so that it was aimed directly at the center of the door when it suddenly flew open.
Colonel Song stood there, dressed in gray slacks and a T-shirt, but incongruously without shoes or socks. He was holding a pistol in his hand, but he lowered it slowly when he realized there was a gun pointed at him.
Neil stared at him for a moment, then motioned quickly with the barrel of the gun for the man to get down. “Get down,” he shouted, “drop the gun and get down now!”
Song stood where he was and looked at Neil for a moment, but then Marco spun and added his own gun to the number of weapons aimed in his face. “All right,” Song said, then scowled and slowly knelt down. He laid the pistol on the floor beside his feet and then stretched himself out onto the floor with his hands behind his head.
Marco quickly stepped over him and checked the room he had come from, but there was no one else there. He snatched up the pistol and tucked it into his waistband, then grabbed Song by his collar and hoisted him to his feet. “How many downstairs?” he demanded, and then they heard gunfire from down below.
* * * * *
Noah had taken the can lid and looked at it closely, then folded a third of it over and knelt down. He rubbed the remaining edge on the concrete floor, putting the best edge on it that he could manage under the circumstances. “We’re going to put on a little act shortly,” he said. “Those guards are supposed to keep you in, but they’re also supposed to keep you safe. When I give the signal, I want all of you to start screaming. Unless those guys are really stupid, it will dawn on them that something bad happening to you will mean something bad happening to them. As soon as they come charging in here, I’ll take them out, but I want to give my team time to get here first. That should take about another forty minutes, so be ready.”
The three women continued to sit by the wall, but they were watching him intently. Dale knelt down beside him.
“You want those guys to think you’re killing us, right?” Dale asked.
“That’s the idea,” Noah said. “It’ll have to happen fast, so I hope nobody is squeamish.”
They looked down at the can lid. “You can only cut one throat at a time,” he said. “By the time you get the first one done, the other one is going to be ready to blow you away.”
“I don’t plan to give him the chance. As soon as they’re both in the room, I’m going to land on them hard, and I’ll worry about cutting them then. If I missed one or he gets away, it’s going to be up to you to get him down. Understoo
d?”
Dale nodded, and Noah kept working the edge. He kept rotating the lid as he shaved it across the concrete, tiny bits of metal glittering onto the floor.
Noah’s internal clock had been ticking off minutes and seconds since he had been grabbed, and he was making educated guesses about what Jenny and the others were doing. Unless something went terribly wrong, Marco and Randy would lead the rest of them back to the stand of trees they had watched from, and Noah had no doubt Jenny was planning to blow open the doors on the building. That would mean they split into three pairs, coming in through all three doors on the back of the building. With any luck, they would capture the first floor easily. All that would remain were the soldiers in the sub level, and Noah hoped to take at least some of them out before they could put up any serious resistance.
When he judged that it had been something close to an hour since his capture, he positioned himself behind the door and nodded to the others. All three women began screaming at once, and Dale let out a bellow that sounded like rage. They kept it up, and it was only a dozen seconds later when a key rattled in the lock and the door flew open.
The two guards rushed in, and then stared in surprise at the four people who were sitting on the floor and screaming. The scene was so ridiculous that it confused them, but before they could recover the ability to think, Noah grabbed both of them and spun them around, then took them down to the floor.
At that moment, a terrific explosion seemed to take place above them, but they didn’t have time to worry about it. Dale leapt up and pushed the door shut, then jumped on the soldiers as well, as Noah yanked back the first man’s head and dragged the makeshift blade across his throat, and then reached for the other one. It was over in less than thirty seconds, as the severed carotid and jugular drained the blood from their brains and took them into a sleep they would never awaken from.
TWELVE
They heard the chatter of gunfire upstairs, but it was muffled. Noah snatched up one of the assault rifles the guards had been carrying and pulled the door open, as Dale grabbed the other and stepped in behind him. A quick look around into the hallway showed Noah several soldiers huddled there, apparently focusing their attention on the stairs. He stepped out and flicked the assault rifle’s selector to full auto, then squeezed the trigger and sprayed thirty rounds into them.
Dale swung out and added his own fire to the fusillade, taking the soldiers so by surprise that not one of them managed to return fire. Dale checked the bunk room and found it empty, while Noah dropped his rifle and ran through the hallway, snatched up another from one of the fallen soldiers and looked into the stairwell. One man was halfway up, but he was looking back at Noah with eyes full of terror. When he saw Noah pointing the rifle at him, he quickly dropped his own and thrust his hands into the air, but Noah put a single bullet between his eyes.
“Jenny?” Noah shouted.
“Noah?” Jenny yelled back. “Is that you?”
“Yes. We’re all secure down here, how about you?”
“Secure, one prisoner. It’s safe to come up.”
Noah turned to Dale and told him to fetch the women, then made his way up the stairs. Jenny and her men were gathered where the stairs exited into the hallway, and he saw Marco and Neil coming toward them with Song.
“The targets?” Jenny asked.
“They’re alive and coming up. We’re taking them with us.”
Jenny’s eyes went wide as she looked up at him, but she didn’t argue. “Okay. What about our captive, here?”
Noah looked at Song. “This is Colonel Song, the interrogator. I don’t know how much he’s actually learned from his captives, but I don’t think it was anything important. I’ll fill you in later, but there is a lot more to this situation that we were led to believe. As for the Colonel, here, the question is whether he’s valuable enough to try to take with us, or if we should terminate him and leave him here.” He turned to Dale, who was just coming up the stairs behind him. “Any thoughts on that?”
Dale looked at Song and scowled. “I know he’s supposed to be some kind of bigwig in their intelligence,” he said. “Might be a feather in your cap if you bring him in, your call.”
Noah turned to the Korean. “I can put a bullet in your head, or you can go with us without resistance. Which way would you have it?”
Song glared at him for only a couple of seconds, then lowered his eyes. “I will not resist,” he said.
“See that you don’t, because I can kill you just as quickly in the field as I can here. Where’s my phone?”
Song pointed with his chin at the guard room, and Noah followed as Marco walked him into it. “It is in the top drawer of the desk,” Song said. Noah walked across the room and yanked the door open, then picked up the iPhone and shoved it into his pocket once more.
“All right, let’s go,” Noah said. “The explosions are going to bring somebody pretty soon, and we want to be as far away as possible before they get here. Randy, lead out. Marco, you take our guests and follow him, and the rest of us will be behind you. He tries anything, don’t hesitate to put a bullet in his brain.”
“Be my pleasure, boss,” Marco said. He slung the little rifle over his shoulder and pulled out the pistol Song had dropped. It had a large sound suppressor attached to it, and he waved it in front of the Colonel’s face. “Won’t even be noisy, now will it?” He poked Song in the back with it, and then he and the Colonel followed Randy out the door. Neil was next, followed by Dale and the women, and then Jim and Dave.
Noah kept Jenny back until the others were a few yards ahead. “I found out something interesting,” he said. “The CIA has a mole who’s been selling information to the Chinese, information related to US activities in its neighboring countries, and their liaison here, Soo Mi, was involved in selling these agents out. She might also have been the reason I was caught, because she knew I was Camelot.”
“Yeah, it was her,” Jenny said, “but not without help. Seems I was right about Randy. He told her who you were, and she dropped the dime to her contact with China or whoever, which is why they were waiting for you when you got here. She’s dead, by the way.”
“Okay,” Noah said without missing a beat, “but it seems that China has been trying to get particular information about me, Camelot. The mole might very well be connected to what happened to Sarah. CIA would’ve been involved in planning that mission, so the mole could have found out Sarah was the Camelot trans officer.”
“Unlikely. Allie doesn’t share that intel easily. She says she doesn’t want anyone out there trying to influence her teams, so the less they know, the better.”
“So the mole compromised Randy, you think? If he’s the one who sold out Sarah, then it had to have been after she was taken from the prison, rather than before.”
Jenny scowled. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Remember I told you he had a habit of disappearing now and then? I was thinking about it, and one of those times was the day she was snatched. We were all done, and getting ready to fly out the next morning, and Randy sort of went for a stroll. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, because I was used to it, but with all I know now, I have to figure he might have gotten a message. I know he’s been turned and is working with the CIA mole, so it all fits together.”
“Then we need to interrogate him now,” Noah said. “Find out if he knows where she was taken.”
“No, we need to get our asses out of hostile territory, first,” Jenny replied, “and check in with Neverland. The thing that bothers me is, if the Company knew it had a mole, why the hell weren’t we told?”
“That’s for Allison to figure out. It just strikes me that if the mole used Randy to sell Sarah out, then she’s almost certainly in China.”
“Yeah,” Jenny grumbled, “which only leaves the question of how the hell we find her and get her out!”
“Yeah, but I’ve got another hunch on that.”
Noah had been correct about the explosions bringing atten
tion, and they heard a number of sirens approaching the cement plant behind them. They hurried along as quickly as they could, and made it back to the safe house in just over thirteen minutes.
“We’ve got about thirty minutes before our pickup,” Jenny said to Noah as they gathered in the yard behind the shack. “Let’s get down in the hidey-hole.”
“Good idea,” Noah said, and lit the burner on the stove, then moved it aside.
Randy looked around. “Uh, where’s Soo Mi?” he asked.
“Catching some sleep,” Jenny said. “You can flirt with her later, when our ride gets here. Let’s get downstairs.”
Randy looked over toward the curtained area that was Soo Mi’s bedroom, and it was obvious he was getting nervous, but he climbed down the ladder after Marco, Neil and the rescued agents. Noah went down next, and Jenny, Dave and Jim followed.
Randy walked into the big room and stood in its center, and something in his face said he knew he was caught out. Noah leveled his assault rifle at him, and said, “Put the gun down slowly, Randy. Soo Mi gave you up, we know you told her who I was and to let the Chinese know.”
Randy let his Tavor slide down his arm on the strap and clatter onto the floor. “It isn’t like that,” he said. “I didn’t...”
“Don’t bother, Randy,” Jenny said. “Just tell us the truth, now, okay? Where is Sarah?”
Randy bit his bottom lip and ran his hands over his face, the sheer terror of his predicament showing in his eyes. “Jenny, I...”
“Oh, come on, Randy,” Jenny said. “Do I need to torture it out of you? Soo Mi owned right up, she didn’t even try to lie to me more than once. Don’t make me rip it out of you, man, please?”
There is an old phrase that is often used in stories to describe when someone has reached the point of accepting defeat: His countenance fell. At that moment, Randy Mitchell’s face would have served as a dictionary definition of that phrase.
“I don’t know where she is,” he said. “I was only told to see that a certain man found out about her being in the prison and that she worked for Team Camelot, and someone else would do the rest. I swear that’s all I know.”