Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  As he walked past the group, he smiled at a pretty Asian girl who had just joined the group. She had looked into his eyes and smiled at him, as if she liked him. He had seen her around the campus a few times but she was not on his list. Probably a non-player, but wow, great boots! Nick thought to himself, feeling excited at having some more faces to link to his primary subject – known accomplices – he had already categorized them as in his mind.

  With the Nancy Sinatra song playing in his head, he made his way back to his apartment in good spirits. These boots were made for walking….

  Once settled at his desk, he logged onto the secure server and began to run searches on the subject’s associates. He found that there were similarities in the unusual behaviour, particularly for three of the subject’s friends, who had made similar vehicle and hotel arrangements. All had booked themselves into comfortable, kitchen-equipped suites at resorts well outside of the Sydney area, and all had rented large, expensive SUVs.

  Nick was just spell-checking the final draft of an executive summary of his findings and excitedly added some new information – that they had all been spending a great deal of money at the Mountain Equipment Co-op, Columbia Sportswear, and Trek & Travel when he heard a knock at the door.

  Distracted by his thoughts, he failed to follow his normal security protocols and simply peeked through the keyhole. Seeing an attractive young co-ed that looked familiar and very cheerful, Nick pulled the door open immediately.

  He suddenly regretted not having his Glock 27 in hand, as he became aware of three men he had not seen through the keyhole. They pushed past the pretty Chinese girl and shoved Lenko backwards into his Macquarie University Village apartment. As he struggled to get free and the men pinned him to the floor and covered his mouth, the young woman checked to see that nobody had noticed.

  Facing sideways on the floor, he watched as her high-heeled boots danced back into his suite, the door closing behind her with a solid ‘clunk’ that punctuated the suddenness of his change of circumstances.

  He finally placed the girl’s face in his mind’s eye, and the boots confirmed it. The song was no longer in his head, as he had nothing to be cheerful about any longer. He had gone from hunter to prey, and he knew it.

  He knew that he was going to get laid. That sexy little bitch from Beijing, Jiao, always dancing around in her high boots, she’s really getting turned on by all of this. Letting her come along for the ride on this abduction is going to seal the deal! She’s going to be so wet, thought the Dragonfly who had been pleased to see his own name feature so prominently in the cop’s report.

  Sitting in the passenger seat while a more junior Dragonfly drove the van, he enjoyed riding shotgun on the caper. Three others of his cell rode in the back along with Jiao on the bench opposite the cop, taunting him mercilessly while he sat, hooded, and chained to the floor.

  At one point Lenko began to struggle, and became difficult to subdue. They over-did it a bit with the kicks to the anonymous lump under the hood, and knocked him unconscious.

  As Lenko lay on the floor of the van, wetness and blood darkening the fabric under his mouth, they soon arrived at their destination.

  They took Lenko to the abandoned Dunlop factory in Alexandria, a few kilometers west of Bondi Beach, in Sydney. One of the Dragonflies was a photographer, and had discovered the location online as a great place to shoot pictures of urban decay, graffiti, and acres of abandoned industrial buildings.

  It was also a great place to find some privacy, where a man’s screams may be heard, but would not draw all that much attention. Even if the police were called, it would take them hours upon hours to search the sprawling wasteland, even if there were a good reason to waste precious resources on such a call. More likely, the Dragonflies knew, the police would not come at all.

  The Little Dragon at the centre of a group of two dozen Dragonflies at Macquarrie University had picked up on Lenko’s surveillance when he saw the man pretend to be ignoring him while taking his picture with a smart phone. Trained in spotting counter-intelligence, he had long suspected the man was a cop, by the way he watched everybody and everything that was going on in the lecture hall, his eyes always moving like a sentry. So when the Little Dragon had checked in with his regional commander, Scarface, as he thought of the Major from the PLA, he was aware of the seriousness of his discovery.

  In less than an hour, Major Goulong Fang had dispatched two other Little Dragons to reinforce the Macquarie University agent, and had given him clear instructions.

  After hours of torturing Leading Special Constable Nick Lenko, they knew a great deal of his mission and his operational practices. The Macquarie University Little Dragon personally returned to Lenko’s suite to mitigate the potential damage. He soon discovered that Lenko had been truthful in giving up his log-in codes and passwords in the course of his torture.

  After reading the draft report on Lenko’s laptop, he set to work. First he deleted his name, and three others from his group, ensuring that he removed all supporting documents and other data about their grades, spending habits and credit card transactions. He then inserted alternative names and some additional narrative about there being some cross-over between the now wholly revised list of suspects and their activities in the Bondi Beach and Exchange districts. He rewrote Lenko’s conclusion to state that the subjects do not appear to be foreign intelligence operatives at all, but rather part of a network of international students who buy and sell research papers, essays and other academic materials which they fraudulently submit as their own work. His final recommendation now read that their names and the evidence should be provided to the legal advisor for the university, and that further surveillance within Macquarie University does not appear to be warranted.

  But then he hit a brick wall, and had to call the men holding Lenko at the Abandoned Dunlop Factory site. After hanging up, they forced Lenko to tell them how he sent in his reports. By this time the torturers had figured out Lenko’s weakness – his attachment to his testicles – which gave them a quick and easy lever they could pull on, or in this case drive nails into, when they needed Lenko to be more detailed.

  Knowing that he had betrayed his country by giving in to the torture, and after having experienced unimaginable physical and psychological pain, Lenko seemed to welcome death when it finally came. His tormentors enjoyed taunting him, telling him something of the changes made to his report as they tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to beg for his death.

  What the Little Dragons did not see in the tortured expression on his face was the deep satisfaction that Nick Lenko had hidden from view. He knew that they had not considered that he would have a duress code procedure. A special trick taught to him by one of his instructors in OGSU was to leave a duress word in a report, in this case the phrase "she was tardy", and not to remove the phrase until the moment before sending the report.

  Lenko knew that when the analysts in Canberra picked up on his duress code as still being in place they would flag his report as having been sent under duress. That he would be long dead before the Immediate Response Team was sent to check up on him in his flat in Macquarie University Village was of no consequence to Nick. He knew that he was going to die; it came with the territory. But that fact was made easier by the knowledge that the preliminary draft of his report, sent a half hour before he had been interrupted, was without the duress code. It was already in the hopper in his secure cloud account.

  So what these fuckers deleted from the report, and what they inserted into the falsified final report, would provide useful intel, he thought, as he saw a man who had recently joined his torturers, a man with an ugly scar on his face - not one of his Macquarie University subjects - moving towards him brandishing a knife.

  Nick Lenko did not feel the blade cut across his throat, but he felt a change in the tension in his neck with his cheeks and tongue suddenly feeling as though they had been lifted or were free-floating. The hot, wet, feeling of his own blood pouring over
his chest was the final sensation.

  General Bing, as always, paid close attention to the briefing. But by the look on his face, he was pleased, despite the news presented to him by Xu.

  Of the hundreds of Little Dragons inserted into Australia in the months and weeks before the Yinglong signal, and the six other regional Little Dragon commanders, only two had gotten themselves into any serious trouble. One, assigned to monitor personnel at the RAAF base at Edinburgh, South Australia, had chosen his accommodations poorly and had elected to set up shop in a four-star hotel rather than to rent a modest apartment as per his orders. The fact that he had been given cash, gold coins, and a couple of virtually infinite credit cards had gone to his head and he had decided that his mission meant that he was important enough to warrant the additional expense. He had booked himself into the prestigious Thistle & Clarke Vineyard Hotel, in the Barossa Valley, some 25 km northeast of Adelaide, South Australia.

  He had done a fine job documenting the order of battle of the RAAF base at Edinburgh, just west of Adelaide, and even plotting out the residential addresses of the Wing Commander and senior staff as well as each and every one of the Aircraft Commanders from the P3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft of No. 92 Wing, the experimental aircraft crews of the Aerospace Operational Support Group, and the senior officers of the land forces unit co-located with the air base, the 7th Btn, Royal Australian Regiment. His photographs and notes on the fuel farm, engineering plant and other support infrastructure were first rate, and the sixteen Dragonflies he had recruited were loyal to the cause, ready to strike the dispersion airfield which the Australian aircrew were expected to be deployed to when Adelaide is destroyed.

  The problem was that he had pinned all of his tactical materials onto the wall, in an impressive montage of espionage. And when the cleaning staff of the hotel had become sick and tired of his rudeness, and the fact that he had kept a “do not disturb” tag hanging off his doorknob for several weeks, they had brought their complaint to the owner, Mr. Clarke himself.

  Mr. Clarke didf not knock when he opened Mr. Kuang’s suite. He had previously noticed the strange comings and goings of a parade of thuggish looking Chinese in the past two weeks, and had had enough of it. A Chinese thug attempted to stop him from entering the suite, but Mr. Clarke, a former soldier, having served in Iraq with The Australian Army’s 2nd Division, had no problem pushing the little Chinese aside and walking into the suite to look for himself and see what was going on in his fine establishment. Mr. Kuang was not in the suite.

  When Clarke saw the intelligence materials on the wall, he recognized its importance and took immediate action. The Dragonfly was no match for the big man, who trussed him up like a sheep, tying his hands and legs together with a telephone cord before speed-dialing the South Australia Police with his cell-phone.

  “Mackie, it’s Jocko Clarke. Better get a bunch of coppers out here to the hotel. And call in the military. I’ve come across a right nasty bunch of Red Chinese who mean to do us harm.”

  “You’re not taking the Mickey out of me, are you?”

  “No. God’s honest truth, Mate. Real spies. I’m looking at pictures of the base at Edinburgh. Maps with all sorts of military symbols, pictures of our Air Force personnel, and of 7Th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. Heck, here’s one of Wing Commander Rawlings, looking fat as ever!”

  Two hours later, when he strolled into the hotel foyer and several unfamiliar faces locked onto him, Kuang, the Little Dragon, knew that he had screwed up royally. His mind raced, thinking of what to do, whether it was time to bite down on his suicide tooth or if he should try to link up with some of his Dragonflies and attempt to carry out his mission anyhow.

  He chose poorly, electing to turn around and attempt to flee rather than to kill himself while he still had the chance. Caught by his arm as he darted forward, he was spun around and sent crashing into the wall. As he got to his feet, the last thing he saw before he passed out was a big fist smashing into his head.

  When he came to, he looked up into the meaty face of an Intelligence Officer from the Royal Australian Army.

  “Where am I?” He asked, feeling a strange void where the suicide tooth had been.

  “You’re in the Base Hospital, Mr. Kuang. And you are in a lot of trouble,” said the Intelligence Officer, smiling at the contorted expression on the Chinese spy’s face. “What’s the matter, missing something?” he said, holding up a plastic bag with the suicide tooth in it.

  Kuang jerked his hands in a futile attempt to get his hands on the tooth, only to feel his hands yanked back to the side of the bed by the steel hand-cuffs linked to the bedside rails. He tried to kick and squirm, only to find his legs also bound to the bed frame.

  “I’m not telling you anything!” he said, angrily, but the Intelligence Officer only smiled.

  “No worries, Mate. You’ve already told us enough. We’ve already tracked down most of your thugs. We still haven’t figured out what you’re on about, but it seems clear to me that you’re not here to study agriculture, so we’ve got you for immigration fraud, to say the least.”

  Agent Kuang relaxed a bit at that. Maybe they don’t know what’s going on. Maybe I can hold out long enough, and it won’t matter. The loss of my suicide tooth may not even be such a problem - I could be freed in a matter of days, Kuang thought.

  After seeing the momentary look of hope on his prisoner’s face, the intelligence officer took it all away.

  “Oh, I guess there’s also that espionage thing. Sorry, but we’re going to have to send you back to China, hopefully along with that list of names you left for us in your hotel. What are they, a network of spies? PLA? Or some other branch of the Chinese government?” he asked, rhetorically. “So when were you going to make your move? What were your intentions here? You gathering intelligence on our P3s? Or is it our Army you’re here to spy on? No matter, we’ll know soon enough.”

  The RAAF intelligence officer was not as confident as he had put on. Despite all the photographs and other material the Chinese spy had left for them to discover in his hotel room, there was nothing there that told them what his actual objective was. Well, there might be, he corrected himself, once they come back from translation services at HQ in Canberra. For now, all he knew was that the man was a Chinese national who appeared to be collecting information on the military units in the Adelaide area, and appeared to be part of an extensive network of “Little Dragons” and “Dragonflies”.

  The few available Chinese-speaking officers in the South Australia Police Force had been overwhelmed with the sheer volume of the documents, but had determined that Kuang was part of a major espionage operation. Until more Chinese speaking resources could be brought to bear on the documents, all they could do was try to sweat some information out by ‘interviewing’ the prisoner.

  Other than the indecipherable Chinese documents, the one thing that the RAA Intelligence Officer and the South Australia Police officers on site had been able to determine was that the man had gathered a considerable stash of survival gear, firearms & ammunition, and, strangely, winter weather gear. The rented SUV he had been driving was loaded to the gills with food supplies, fuel canisters and camping gear. It was as if the man was prepared for an extended stay in the wilderness of northern Canada in January, not Australia in May.

  Clearly the capture of the Chinese agent was important. How long has China been doing this? Are they doing it all over Australia? What does it all mean? the Intelligence Officer wondered, but he knew that it would take some time to properly interrogate the subject and analyze the documents discovered in his suite. And whatever they learned would probably be suppressed, for diplomatic reasons, just as the incidents of Chinese hacking of Department of Defense computers in the USA had been for years. It seemed to him that the Americans, and therefore the Australians, were afraid to provoke China by raising the issue of what was clearly a major state-sponsored effort to hack into military and business computer systems without restrain
t. Why do we sit down and take it up the arse from these buggers? he thought, as he contemplated the implications of such a concerted network of spies.

  It made him think of the level of espionage and counter-espionage he had read about war-time Europe. Perhaps this would prove to be the ‘red-handed’ discovery that would break it all wide open, put Chinese espionage onto the national agenda. Time will tell.

  In the mean-time, a Priority Intelligence Report had gone up the Australian military chain of command and had been promptly shared with the CIA chaps up in Pine Gap. Maybe the Americans could put it together with whatever else they had on China, he thought, as he looked down on the worried looking spy.

  5 DRAGONFLIES

  This is the most critical phase, thought Colonel Hua, as he scanned the bank of television feeds and computer displays from his central workstation in General Bing’s command post, forty meters under the Jinan Military District Headquarters. Once OP PLAN LIWU, “The Gift” began in earnest, and the shooting started, the future emperor of China and his staff, including Hua, would have to monitor events from the much more secure site east of the Shihe Reservoir in the Shihekou Delta region. Colonel Hua, as General Bing’s Executive Assistant, the ‘Command EA’ – equivalent to a western general’s Chief of Staff - had been to the snakes-den site many times in the past three years as OPERATION WINTER SNAKE took shape.

  Each time he entered the complex he felt an almost religious sense of awe, not at the great accomplishment in engineering, but at the role that the facility would play in history. The humility he gave himself credit for was a false one, however, as Colonel Hua was far more than a mere sycophant – he was a zealot. He had taken the notion that General Bing would become the greatest Emperor in history, revived the ancient Chinese glory and morphed it into an incipient religion, a cult of personality centered on General Bing. He saw himself as a future spokesman for the movement; a high priest, in a sense.