The pain had been intense, but he had aimed at her shoulder and the bullet had failed to lodge itself in her body. Emergency treatment had been given to her, and she was now almost fully recovered – although the scars from her torture at the hands of racist thugs at the Tucson ranch house were a terrible reminder of even worse pains.
She thought about her father again, still conflicted despite herself. She had tried to kill him, and failed. Why? Did she really want to do it or not?
And why had he not killed her? If he was the violent criminal she had always believed him to be, why hadn’t he fired a fatal shot?
She shook her head sadly. Trapped here, in this room, perhaps she would never know.
But she held onto the fact that – as she lay in the dirt, semi-conscious after being shot – she had told Mark Cole that she was his daughter.
Perhaps he might come and find her?
But the odds were far too long on that ever happening, she thought sadly.
But what if he did?
And again she wondered, as she had for hour upon hour, what she would do if he came.
Would she welcome her father with open arms, or would she try to kill him?
Mark Cole felt the giant airplane accelerate hard across the runway, its twin engines capable of generating an incredible one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds of thrust; more than enough to propel the three hundred and fifty thousand kilogram vehicle up to its cruising altitude of more than forty thousand feet.
The figures for the Boeing 777 were certainly impressive, but the ‘Triple Seven’ had other talents which Cole couldn’t help but appreciate as the aircraft left the tarmac for the start of its fourteen hour flight across the Pacific – namely, the thirty inch wide seat in which he was currently ensconced, a seat which could fold flat into a bed.
Cole had flown millions of miles around the world over the course of his life, but a great deal of it had been on military transport planes where the incredible noise competed savagely with the terrific discomfort. Whenever he’d parachuted out of the back of a C-130, the blessed relief of leaving the aircraft had always overridden any natural fear of jumping.
But in business class on the Singapore Airlines flight from Washington Dulles to Tokyo Narita in Japan, luxury was a given, and Cole felt his body melt into the soft upholstery.
He still wasn’t in perfect form after the recent events in China, but he’d had a few weeks to heal and was now feeling much better. He was definitely glad of the comfortable airline seat, though; there was no point in being uncomfortable if you didn’t have to be. And his position as an expert in international affairs with the Paradigm Group – a leading Washington think tank – paid him well. And, he thought sadly, what else did he really have to spend money on? His work was his life.
But – although a bona fide expert in world affairs simply through vast practical experience – his real work was somewhat different from that of his Paradigm Group persona. In fact, that role was a mere front for his real job as commander of Force One, an ultra-secretive covert unit which performed deniable operations for the US government. His command was an extension of the role he had played all his life – the tip of the military spear for Washington policy makers. Once upon a time he had been an assassin, codenamed the ‘Asset’ and responsible for an incredible amount of destruction and mayhem for enemies of the United States. It was only later that he’d found out that some of these missions hadn’t been officially sanctioned, and he had in effect been the personal attack dog of Charles Hansard, once the Director of National Intelligence.
Hansard had betrayed his country, declared Cole a rogue agent, and had even ordered the deaths of Cole’s wife and two young children. Cole had taken his revenge, but had felt adrift ever since – until being brought back into the fold by Ellen Abrams, the President of the United States herself.
Although he had finally accepted the deaths of his family, and had even learned to accept himself, the kind of man he was – a hunter, a predator, unable to rest, a man for whom a normal life was all but impossible – recent events had served to remind him of certain feelings associated with family life.
He had discovered that he had a daughter, one he had never known about; or, rather, she had discovered him. She had tracked him down, confronted him back in Tucson, Arizona.
Cole had been undercover, aiming to dismantle a home-grown terrorist organization known as Aryan Ultra, when they’d first met. The men whose gang he’d infiltrated had seen the girl snooping round, and had then kidnapped and tortured her. Under duress, she had revealed Cole’s true identity to Aryan Ultra’s ruthless leader, and Cole had been strung up in a barn for the feral pigs to eat.
He had been forced to fight his way off the ranch, taking the girl with him. But as they ran, a strange thing had happened; she had tried to shoot him.
In return, Cole had shot her; not fatally, but in the shoulder, just to wound her. At the time he hadn’t known why he’d not killed the girl; after all, she’d fired at him first, and hesitation in killing was not something that normally occurred for him.
But he’d let her live, and then – before she’d passed out – she’d told him that she was his daughter.
Aoki Michiko, daughter of Aoki Asami – a woman with whom he’d had a brief, passionate affair during leave in Bangkok, back when he’d still been in the Navy SEALs. That had been after a tour of Iraq back in 2003; the girl was seventeen now.
How she had tracked him down, Cole had no idea; almost nobody in the world knew his real identity. Back in 2003, he’d still been known by his real name, Mark Kowalski. How she’d traced him was a source of mystery, and one Cole wanted to nail down. If she could find him, perhaps others could too.
This was one of the reasons for his ‘vacation’ to Tokyo. He wasn’t traveling to Japan on business, but purely for a personal matter – to find his daughter.
When the police had turned up at the ranch in Tucson, Cole had been put into jail – subsequently released and transported back to Washington – and Michiko had received medical attention. But when he’d followed up on the girl with the authorities a few days later, he’d been told that she’d been designated an illegal alien who’d outstayed her visa, and had been escorted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement back to Japan, her apparent country of residence.
The situation with China was exploding at the same time, and Cole had been forced to postpone his enquiries while Force One was sent into Beijing. But – as he was off work recovering from the injuries he’d received on that mission – he had started his investigations again.
He’d been into the Paradigm Group’s offices in Forest Hills to sit in on essential briefings – Russia was still a powder keg ready to explode – and to make sure everything was running smoothly. Jake Navarone, Cole’s top man in the unit, was already on his way to Moscow to infiltrate the Kremlin and surreptitiously monitor the behavior of Mikhail Emelienenko, Russian’s new president, and other operators were deployed around the globe on various other missions.
But Cole was still not one hundred percent fit for duty, and most of the day-today running of Force One was left to Bruce Vinson, director of the Paradigm Group and Cole’s chief-of-staff. The situation – while not ideal for Cole – had left him with plenty of time to try and trace Michiko.
The seatbelt lights went off in the business class cabin, and within seconds a pretty stewardess appeared next to him, what looked to be a genuinely friendly smile on her face.
She asked him if he wanted anything to drink, and Cole ordered himself a nice brandy. It was only ten o’clock in the morning, but what the hell; it was midnight in Japan.
Cole’s mind drifted as he waited for the drink to appear, taking in the layout of the cabin, the appearance and demeanor of the other passengers, the cabin staff. He’d already formed opinions back in the waiting lounge, in the boarding line, when they were all being seated; it was a force of habit, and one which Cole was unable – and unwilling – to break.
Back in the airport, he had tried to guess which passengers would be boarding in which class – a mental exercise to keep him sharp. He had been pleased to see he’d been right in about eighty percent of the cases.
It was attention to detail that separated Cole from most men; if anything happened on board the aircraft, he would be ready to respond in an instant, based on the information he’d already built up. It was what had kept him alive for so long – a natural instinct which had been recognized, taken and trained to perfection, and then honed through years of operational experience.
But Cole saw nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that raised his danger radar, and he gratefully accepted the brandy from the stewardess as she returned with his glass and another smile.
He took a sip of the brandy, and started to think once more about Michiko, pondering what he really knew about her.
He’d used the computer system at the Paradigm Group to access files from the girl’s initial police contact at the ranch in Tucson, her hospitalization at the University of Arizona Medical Center for the gunshot wound to her shoulder, and the subsequent investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Identity papers provided various details – the name on her passport was Aoki Asami, and she had been born July 1st, 2004. Currently a Japanese citizen, there was no indication of place of birth on the passport, and Cole didn’t know whether she’d been born there, or naturalized at a later date. It gave her current registered domicile as Tokyo, but a brief report hidden in the ICE computer documents indicated that she had been out of Japan since 2018. It appeared that she had been living in Paris before flying to the United States just a few short months before. There was nothing to indicate where she’d been living, or what she’d been doing since entering the US.
Details from UMAC in Tucson confirmed that she had been hit with a 9mm round to the left shoulder. Cole was pleased to see that the bullet hadn’t passed through her body, but had instead deeply grazed up the anterior deltoid muscle; it had caused bleeding and shock, and would take a short while to rehab, not something that was overly serious. It made Cole feel a little better; after all, it had been he that had shot her, and he would have felt terrible if she’d been left with any permanent disability. He hadn’t known she was his daughter at the time – and still didn’t really know, not for sure – but he would have been wracked with guilt nevertheless.
As it was, he felt pretty bad about having shot her at all. But, he reminded himself, defensive shooting was an instinct for him, and he’d had to override his conditioning not to kill her outright.
What was more disturbing were the other wounds noted by the emergency room doctors – the injuries she had sustained during her torture by the thugs of Aryan Ultra.
Cigarette burns were found across various parts of her body – her neck, her abdomen, the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees, and even on the inside of her legs – and there were severe ligature marks around her neck, wrists and ankles from being tied and restrained. There were shallow, partially healed cuts across her throat caused by bladed weapons – presumably knives held to her neck, with threats to slit her throat if she didn’t talk – and also red welts on her back which indicated that she had been whipped by a lash.
There was bruising to her face and torso, and Cole remembered seeing her puffy face in the barn, knowing instantly that she had been beaten; remembered, too, the sick revulsion he had felt at what had happened to her.
That sick revulsion was back, and he pondered why she had held out for so long, when it was clear that she’d wanted him dead anyway. The only reason that made sense was that she’d wanted to kill him herself. Or else surely she’d have just given up his identity immediately and let Aryan Ultra do the rest?
But what on earth would her motivation be? How strongly must she have wanted to kill him, to suffer torture in order to get her chance?
And – perhaps more importantly from Cole’s point of view – why did she want to kill him so badly? What did she think he’d done?
Was she justified? Had he done anything?
It was a question that he’d asked himself a thousand times over the past few weeks, and he still hadn’t come up with any satisfactory answers.
His relationship with the mother could be a part of it, he supposed – it had been short-lived and violent. Not that he’d been violent towards her, of course; but their whole time together had been marred by bloodshed.
It had started from the moment he’d first seen – or, rather, heard her – whimpering in pain down a Bangkok alleyway. Cole had saved her from the gang of street thugs who’d been assaulting her, and their relationship had blossomed from there. He’d all but forgotten about his SEAL team buddies he’d been staying with on R&R, and had become completely besotted with Aoki Asami.
She had shown him a different, a more cultured, way of life, and opened his mind to things he had never dreamed of. He’d already been making plans for their future when their hotel was invaded by machete-wielding gang members out for revenge, and Cole had been forced into a display of monstrous hand-to-hand violence that had changed him forever.
In the ensuing chaos, the lovers had become separated, and eventually – after searching for Asami for several days with no luck – he had been presented with a simple note. She had asked for his forgiveness, told him she was safe, and explained that their relationship was too dangerous to continue. They had loved one another, but it had not been enough; the world had simply got in the way.
And that was the last contact Cole had ever had with her; presumably she had found out she was pregnant soon after. She had never let him know about the child, and Cole had no way to know if she’d even tried. Maybe she had?
But Cole knew he was a hard man to track down; after Bangkok, he’d started training with SEAL Team Six and had been posted all over the world. Perhaps she’d even made it as far as Dam Neck, Virginia – his home base – and found that he’d since been married, and didn’t want to interfere with his domestic life.
Cole put the brandy glass to his lips and discovered it was empty. He turned to the aisle, impressed to see his stewardess already approaching him. He agreed quickly to her offer of a refill; it was a long flight, and it had barely started.
As he waited for his drink, amazed at the near-silence of the cabin as it cruised across the Pacific, he considered the fact that he didn’t even know if Asami was still alive. He turned in his seat, looked down at the clouds below and thought about what he’d managed to find out about Asami, which was almost literally nothing.
Whatever she’d done after Bangkok, wherever she’d gone, she obviously hadn’t wanted anyone to find her. Cole remembered thinking at the time that she might have been fleeing an abusive husband – she’d given her surname as Aoki at the hospital they’d visited after her beating by the gang members, but Cole had seen that the name on her passport was Yamaguchi. Had she been trying to start a new life in Thailand? Is that what she was scared of, why she didn’t want to risk a relationship with Cole? If he was right about Asami having a husband, was the man dangerous?
Cole had tried to find out about her, but – even with the resources of Force One and the Paradigm Group at his disposal – he had found little of value. It was a long time ago, he was working off scant memories and guesswork, and – even with the most sophisticated translating programs available – the computerized symbols of the Japanese language were a minefield which he couldn’t navigate.
He could ordinarily turn to experts in such areas, but the trouble was that he didn’t really want anyone to know what he was doing, or why.
It wasn’t that he was ashamed of having an illegitimate child; rather, it was his desire to avoid questions about his own past, his own identity, which might arise if he asked anyone for help with the matter. Cole was a man who kept his past to himself, and was loathe to open himself up in any way. His search for his daughter was his own affair, and not one he wanted to involve his organiza
tion in.
The pretty stewardess brought his drink, and he relaxed further back into the huge seat, accepting it gratefully. He’d had no success in finding out anything about Asami, and he’d had the same luck with his inquiries into Michiko. In fact, details about his daughter – outside of the records he’d accessed from the American agencies that had been involved – had been even harder to come by, given that she was still classified as a minor and more heavily protected by law.
But Cole had managed to get a name from the ICE files, a contact from within the Japanese Keisatsu-cho, its National Police Agency. Captain Wakayama Kanei worked for the Keibi-kyoku, the NPA’s Security Bureau which was the closest thing Japan had to ICE.
Posing as a journalist following up on leads from the Aryan Ultra story in Tucson – the same cover he’d used to get the initial information about Michiko from the Tucson PD – he called the Security Bureau and asked for Wakayama. It was a tortuous process, but eventually he managed to speak to the man, who’d immediately told him that his department had just arranged for the paperwork for Aoki Michiko’s return to Japan – it was another department entirely that had organized for her to be met at the airport.
That department, it turned out, had been the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, the Keiji-kyoku. Cole had been surprised, to say the least. What was their interest in Michiko? Was she a fugitive? Is that why she’d left Japan in the first place? Or perhaps, Cole mused, she was a witness? But then he thought back to how she had handled the submachine gun back on that Arizonan ranch – not a typical skill for a Japanese citizen, with its ultra-tight firearms regulations. Where would she have learned to use one?
Cole’s thoughts had often drifted back to Asami’s surname, as printed on her passport – Yamaguchi. Could she have been connected to the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s – hell, the world’s – largest and most powerful crime family? It would explain why she had been terrified, why she felt Cole was in danger, and why that Thai gang had attacked her – possibly at the request of criminal colleagues in Japan. But Cole knew it was just conjecture, and he had no proof of anything. Besides which, Yamaguchi was a very common Japanese surname
NEVER SAY DIE: Mark Cole Takes On the Yakuza in His Most Thrilling Adventure Yet! Page 4