The sad part was that Fang knew he was right. The central government didn’t care about excuses or reasons why something hadn’t worked; they only cared about getting results. If a person didn’t accomplish the results the government wanted, that person was removed and another person was installed with the same orders.
With a start, he realized the same thing could happen to him. He looked up at Wen. “How long ago did this happen?”
The warden shrugged. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
Fang nodded. “I have to get back to the city. Thanks for—” He wasn’t sure what he could thank the other man for, as this mission had been almost a complete failure. “I’ll be in touch.”
Wen lifted a hand in a weak farewell as he stared morosely at the ruins of his once proud fiefdom crumbling around him.
Fang ran outside, through the front gate and to his car, jumping in the backseat. “Get me back to the apartment building right now!”
As the car sped down the road, he pulled out his cell phone and pressed one button. “He’s coming. Tonight. Be ready. I want him taken alive.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After reaching the truck, Bolan jumped in and drove until he found the nearest public restroom. Like many on the outskirts of the city, it was very simple, with squat toilets, barely operational sinks and watered-down pink soap. Bolan didn’t care about any of that, and after what he had just gone through, he barely noticed the overpowering combination of urine and cheap incense.
Parking in the back to avoid any cameras, he kept his head down and carried his bag in. He swept through the stalls, making sure they were unoccupied, then stripped and threw away his clothes and boots, being careful to clean out his pockets beforehand to avoid leaving anything incriminating.
Running all the sinks, he cleaned himself with antibacterial soap, paying particular attention to any part of him that had come in contact with the raw sewage. After drying himself with scratchy paper, he dressed in clean clothes, finally feeling more or less his old self. Afterward, he drove a few more miles toward the city, then found a public parking garage and drove up to the roof, which contained only a few vehicles. Making sure no one was around, he turned on his phone and checked the mailbox for messages.
One was waiting for him: an encrypted data file. He transferred it to the tablet, then turned off the phone and turned off the tablet’s wireless capability before opening the file. In it was everything he would need to recover the Liao family— Except for their father, he mused.
There was one odd bit attached to the file: a request to reply with the time he expected to begin the rescue op. There was no explanation as to why, but he figured there must be a good reason. Doing a bit of inner city navigating, he estimated it would take about forty minutes in normal traffic to get to the address. Bolan tacked on fifteen more minutes for unforeseen traffic and upped his estimate to a flat hour. He sent the reply immediately, figuring it would be better to do it from this location instead of right outside the target building. He also included the following about the blown op:
Could not meet with uncle—address incorrect.
Dogs near house were very angry. Will look for him in city. Assistance appreciated.
With that gone, he headed down to rejoin the sluggish, never-ending stream of cars and trucks winding their way through the city streets.
*
FIFTY-SEVEN MINUTES later the high-rise was in sight.
As he drove past the sleek glass-and-concrete building he noticed one of the metal garage gates slide up. On the way over, he had been pondering how best to gain access the building, but it looked as though his way in was being smoothed by the powers-that-be.
Those powers being Bear and Akira, no doubt, he said to himself as he realized why they had asked for the mission start time. Cranking the wheel, he turned into the lane and drove down into the parking level beneath the building.
Sure hope they can smooth the way out just as easily, he thought while parking the truck. There were no spots near the bank of elevators, which was fine, since he wasn’t planning to take an elevator anyway. Finding a shadowed corner far away from the stairs, Bolan backed his truck into a parking space and turned the engine off.
Mission prep consisted of loading three magazines for the submachine gun and three magazines for the pistol, along with the Beretta’s magazine. Loading each weapon and chambering a round in each, he placed the Type 79 gun back inside the nylon bag and slung it over his shoulder, with the top zipper open just enough for easy access. The Type 59 pistol was small enough to fit into his jacket pocket, with the Beretta tucked into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. An additional magazine for each weapon went into his back pockets, with the third ones in side-zippered pockets on the bag itself. Finally he put the stun gun into his other jacket pocket. When all was said and done, he looked like an everyday man heading home after a hard day’s work—or at least he would have in America. He pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves.
Easing out of the pickup, Bolan made sure his ball cap was secure and kept his head down as he crossed the parking garage and headed toward the stairs. He noted that the garage door had closed.
The door to the stairs required a key card, but as he approached, the light on the card reader changed from red to green, and he heard a click from the door itself. Trying the handle, he smiled when it opened at his slight pull.
Bolan looked up at the seemingly endless flights of stairs going around and around in a rising square above his head. He stopped on the first landing and listened, knowing that most stairwells were like huge echo chambers and the smallest sound was often magnified along its entire length. The whole space was as quiet as a tomb. Pulling off his baseball cap, he pulled a thin, black balaclava over his head, covering everything but his eyes and mouth. Shaking his head to make sure it was comfortable, he glanced up one more time and began to climb.
The steps were a bit shorter than he was used to, and it took a couple flights until he got into a comfortable rhythm. Once he did, his legs ate up the distance with surprising quickness. On the way up, he reviewed the plan.
With Stony Man now clearing the way, he hoped to gain entrance to the penthouse without alerting any of the guards. If necessary, he would shoot his way out, but if he could at least get in without firing a shot, so much the better.
With two floors to go, he slowed and slipped a hand into his pocket to flick off the safety on the Type 59 pistol.
With one floor to go, he slowed to a walk. On the landing below his target floor, he stopped and listened for a minute, trying to hear any noise from the nearby hallway. Hearing nothing, he slowly ascended the last flight of stairs, every sense alert, checking the next flight above him just in case his hearing had been affected by the blasting traffic and street noise he’d been subjected to. He still didn’t hear any noise from either the stairs or the hallway. There was no security on the access door. He reached for the handle, his other hand tight on the butt of his pistol, and began to pull the door open— only to hear the soft chime of the elevator door opening a few yards away. Voices speaking Mandarin carried to his ears and Bolan quickly let the door fall closed. Leaping to the upper staircase, he headed up two flights before he stopped.
The door to the stairwell opened and a two-man team in suits checked both up and down, although they only gave a cursory glance at the upper level, as Bolan suspected they would. In the absence of a sighting-verified threat, even the best counterintelligence teams tended to concentrate on the most obvious entrance points, often showing a characteristic lack of imagination about ways enemy operatives could gain access to areas—as he had just done.
However, this definitely complicated his mission, as the team didn’t seem to be executing a standard sweep-and-clear. They looked to be on a higher level of alertness, as if specifically looking for someone. As though he had somehow been made. Bolan had no idea how that might have happened, since no one outside the handful of people
at Stony Man knew he was in China. It was theoretically possible, though practically impossible, that someone might have detected Kurtzman’s and Tokaido’s hacking of the apartment building’s security system, but whatever had occurred didn’t change his mission parameters. How it was to be accomplished, however…that might be a different story.
Stepping slowly, carefully, back down the stairs, Bolan edged low enough to glimpse the doorway. A flash of movement made him pull back, but he’d seen enough to confirm his suspicion: one of the men was stationed on the landing by the hallway entrance.
Shooting the man was out of the question. The echo would bring every agent in the building running. The trick would be to subdue him without allowing him to raise the alarm. Bolan crouched and listened for the next fifteen minutes, long enough to establish that the security team was on a five-minute checkin cycle.
Bolan ran through several plans to take out the guard, but they all either relied on equipment he didn’t have or were impossible to execute in the space. After ditching the idea of trying to drop on the guy from the space between the stairwells—it would have been a tight but not impossible fit—he realized there was no other way to do it. He would have to rely on speed, strength and skill.
That said, the only thing left was to wait until the man checked in again. Bolan used that time to slowly remove his nylon bag and set it down beside him. Three minutes later the man returned.
Hearing the murmur as the agent replied to one of the other team members, Bolan waited until the stairwell fell silent again, then made his move by noiselessly creeping down two more steps, enough to be able to vault the chest-high barrier that ran alongside each flight of stairs. The real problem would be making sure he landed fully on a step. If he missed and sprained his ankle, it would be all over. Glancing behind him to gauge where the proper step would be, Bolan moved.
Planting his hands on the sloping railing, he flung his legs over and landed lightly on the third step down, exactly where he’d intended. Crouching to absorb the impact, he immediately leaped forward again, sailing down the rest of the flight of steps to land directly in front of the man.
The Chinese agent reacted immediately, one hand darting inside his suit jacket, the other going up to his earpiece.
Stepping forward, Bolan whipped around the butt of the Beretta and dealt a savage blow to the man’s cheek, snapping the bone and sending the agent staggering across the small landing to the wall, where he managed to stop himself from hitting headfirst. It didn’t help, however, because before he could activate his transceiver or cry out for help, Bolan was on him again and a hard blow to the back of the head put him down for good.
Pulling the radio receiver out of his former adversary’s ear, Bolan stripped him of his pistol, used his own handcuffs to secure the unconscious man to the railing, and gagged him with a handkerchief taken from the agent’s pocket.
He then ran upstairs for his gear, headed back to the door, listened for any signs that the alarm had been raised, then opened it just enough to glance down the hallway.
The floor plan placed the stairs in an alcove next to the elevators, with the doors to the large apartments on this floor on either side of the hallway’s T-intersection. Working carefully, Bolan was able to ease himself through the door into the alcove.
Peeking out into the hallway, he saw two men at the far end, walking around and watching the elevators. Pulling back before they could spot him, he tried to figure out a way to incapacitate both men. Aware of the countdown ticking away in his head until the next checkin period, Bolan prepared to take down the pair, ready to shoot if he had to.
The chime of an arriving elevator caught his attention and he heard footsteps on the tiled floor as the men approached it. Hoping these weren’t more reinforcements, Bolan listened as the two conferred quietly. The doors slid open. They chuckled and then started heading back to the other end of the hallway.
A second chime, on the far side of the hallway from the stairway, made them pause. Bolan peeked out again to see them watch the second arriving elevator, their hands also going under their suit jackets.
The elevator chimed and Bolan drew the Type 59 pistol as the doors slid open. When this one was also revealed to be empty, the two men frowned and one of them reached up to his ear.
That was when Bolan moved. Stepping out from the alcove, he walked up behind both men in two large strides and rammed each one on the back of the head with the pistol butt. Both collapsed to the floor and he quickly pulled out the earpieces, removed their pistols and handcuffed them together. Dragging the agents back into the elevator, he hit every button between the twenty-fifth floor and the fifth, then got out and let the elevator start its long ride down.
With a silent thanks to Kurtzman and Tokaido, he started down the hallway, searching for the door of the apartment where the Liaos were being held.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“That was inspired thinking with the elevators, Akira.”
“Thanks. Maintenance programs are the best, aren’t they?” The young hacker rubbed his eyes, then returned his attention to the screen showing Striker taking out the two Ministry of State Security men on the other side of the world. “Locking that elevator between floors…now. Okay, those two guys will be out of commission even after they wake up.”
Everyone had different reactions when the email from Striker had arrived. Tokaido had pumped his fist in the air, while Kurtzman had simply nodded soberly, as if he had already known the outcome. Brognola, who had returned from the farmhouse, merely grinned.
And behind the three men, Price had simply thanked the powers-that-be that Mack Bolan was still alive.
She caught Kurtzman looking at her and she nodded. He nodded back and then returned to what he had been doing.
Now she, along with the three men, watched Bolan neutralize the guards around the Liao apartment.
Pinpointing his location from the last brief email they had received, Kurtzman had picked him up on a traffic camera. He’d tagged him so that the cameras along his route would automatically show him on their feed as soon as he appeared in their view, then scrub the data afterward on every camera that had caught him to remove any trace of his presence. Since they were already on-site in preparation to scrub the building’s security data as well, they’d assisted with getting him inside and also overridden the elevators to provide the crucial moment’s distraction that had allowed him to take out the guards.
“Keep in mind we can also lock the elevators so any incoming reinforcements have to take the stairs. Or, even better, we can trap them inside one, like I just did, to allow Striker to get the targets out,” Tokaido noted.
“Great thinking. Since you’re already there, you might as well assist him into the apartment,” Price replied. “As long as he can maintain the element of surprise, he should be able to take out those guards and get our targets out and away quickly.”
“I can get him through the door no problem, but the rest of it will be up to him.”
“When you have a moment, Bear, check in with our extraction team to make sure they’re ready to go,” Brognola said. A thumbs-up was the bearded man’s only reply and it didn’t interrupt his typing in the slightest. Ever since Bolan’s email had come in, he had been busy trying to locate Zhang Liao. So far, he has having no luck.
“How do you want to handle this complication with Washington?” Price asked. “If the President gets wind that Liao’s missing, he’ll probably want to scrub the op.”
“He probably would, which is why I’m not updating him until absolutely necessary,” Brognola replied. “If Striker can pull the family out, that should be enough leverage for us to keep the mission green. Of course, none of that will matter if we can’t find him.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Price replied. “Too bad about the guards.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘risks of the job,’ but if you try to set a trap for a lion, you’d better damn well expect a lion to show up.
” Brognola grinned. “They’re lucky he didn’t burn them all down.”
“I just heard from the extraction crew. Stony Air touched down fourteen minutes ago and is awaiting arrival of cargo,” Kurtzman said.
“Thanks, Aaron,” the big Fed replied. Under the guise of a test flight, Brognola had sent Jack Grimaldi and Charlie Mott the other way around the world, flying to the West Coast and over the Pacific to Kunsan Air Base, on the west coast of South Korea. They had been cooling their heels there until their mission window had opened, at which point they had taken off and flown across the Yellow Sea to Beijing’s Xijiao Airport, a military airport that, oddly, also accepted charter flights. They were sitting on the tarmac right now, awaiting Bolan’s arrival with the Liaos. The moment they received any members of the family, they were to go wheels up and get them out of Chinese airspace ASAP.
“I just hope this ‘hide under their very noses’ plan is going to work,” Price mused. “It was tricky enough getting Jack and Charlie into the country in the first place.
“Worked so far, hasn’t it?” Brognola grunted. “Those boys know how to keep their heads down.”
“Damn! You might want to see what just went out over the Beijing police wire,” Tokaido said, making all eyes turn to him. “Remember that nightclub where we set the meet for Striker to pick up his weapons? Well, from the looks of things we chose the same night that a rival gang made a hit on the place. Apparently, Striker got caught in the middle of it somehow and is now wanted in connection with the incident.”
“How so?” Price asked, staring at the digital sketch of a man with Bolan’s jawline and face shape, partially obscured by a ball cap and sunglasses.
Tokaido squinted at the screen. “It doesn’t give a lot of details, just that he’s wanted for questioning. If it makes you feel any better, it’s for internal dissemination only. Apparently they’re not releasing this to the public yet.”
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