by Tom Clancy
She grinned. “I like a man who can keep up. Go ahead.”
“You want to get married?”
“To you? Yes.”
He thought his face might break, he grinned so big.
Later, when they were lying on the floor between the two pictures in a state of dress the same as the painting of her grandmother, Marissa said, “So, how’s the thing in China going?”
“In the grand cosmic scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter to me right now. Not in the least. Not at all.”
She laughed. “You are waay too easy, Tommy.”
He laughed with her. She was smart, funny, and beautiful, and she wanted to be with him.
He didn’t see how it could get any better than this.
Penha Hill
Near the A-Ma Temple Macao, China
The rendezvous was at the warehouse where Locke waited, but even with what was supposedly an unbreakable cipher program in Wu’s and Locke’s telephones, the general never said anything that could identify them, or specific times and places, over a wireless connection. What was not spoken could not be intercepted.
Wu was in his command car, and the driver was one of his hand-selected elite robbery team. Too bad the man would be dead soon. He would last longer than some of the others — all the way to Taipei, but then, alas, he would have to become food for the worms. Regrettable, but necessary. The new Wu did not need any such baggage.
True, the People’s Government would want his head, but he had already begun making sure that anything they said about him would fall on less-than-interested ears in Taiwan. Of course they would offer all manner of slanders. He would be, after all, a defector. And if his new friends believed the story of the theft of millions — and certainly some of them would — one could buy a lot of goodwill with enough well-placed bribes. It was a very large pie, after all, and the reason he had baked it was to share it.
There were things that money could not buy, but poor and venal officials were seldom among these things. There was always a man who wanted more than he had, and you had but to find him and determine his price to make him yours.
Wu glanced at his watch. He was a little nervous — who wouldn’t be? His life was about to change, very much and forever, no matter what happened. If things went badly, then he would suffer. Prison would be the best for which he could hope, death a much more likely end. But if all went well — and it should — then Wu would be one giant step farther down the road to greatness, with the sun shining and not a tiger in sight.
He had found one weakness in the technological might of the United States. Shing was captured, and that secret lost to Wu, but what he had found once, he could find again, with enough money and power at his beck and call.
Wu was a man with large mountain ahead of him, and in his heart, he knew he would not fail to reach and climb it. To stand in the dragon’s lair…
He smiled as the driver honked at a wooden cart crossing the road ahead of them, a cart with automobile wheels and bald tires on it, being drawn by a pair of oxen, driven by an old man in a straw coolie hat. Here they were, in the twenty-first century, in a city thick with all the aspects of modern civilization, just down the hill from the Ritz Hotel, where a good, but not the best, room would cost HK$2,000 a night, and still such things as ox carts were not only possible, they were not even uncommon.
Wu laughed. He was on his way to becoming the man he was always destined to become, a man of the future, and here he was slowing for something out of history. How amusing.
Life did not get any better than this.
38
Zhujiang Kou Bay
East of Macao, West of Hong Kong
The plane was an old PS-1 ASW Flying Boat, a Shin Meiwa, made in Japan forty or fifty years ago, but registered to a Chinese tourist-transport company owned by the CIA. It wasn’t the most spacious craft for a full platoon, but it worked well enough, and it was what was available.
The Chinese pilot landed the plane in the bay not three miles away from Macao, and did a slow taxi to a dock on the northeast side of the city. Macao was small geographically, even with something more than half a million locals living there — but the plane’s dock was out of the way, and Kent and his team were able to leave in plain sight, disguised as tourists. They were strung with cameras, they carried overnight bags or day packs, there were women and men, and they looked like any other group of Westerners on a charter flight, come to lose money at the casinos.
The officials at the dock who were to check passports belonged to the Company, Kent had been told, and a uniformed and armed guard smiled and waved at them as they walked along the dock to where a chartered bus awaited them, so that seemed to be true.
On the bus, which was not air-conditioned, and which had all the windows down to allow the semitropical heat and breeze in, Fernandez, dressed in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts and sandals, said, “That seemed awful easy.”
Kent shrugged. “Who wants to sneak into China?”
“I guess.”
The CIA liaison, a tall and thin man with carroty red hair who called himself Rusty, dropped into the seat in front of Kent and turned to look at him. “We have your staging area set up, Colonel.”
“Any problems?”
“With the Chairman of JCS and the Director of the Company breathing down our necks? Not hardly. If I had a red carpet, I’d have rolled it out for you and saluted as you strolled by.”
Kent smiled. It was good to have a boss with clout when you needed it.
The ride didn’t take long, and ended at a small hotel, the Golden Road.
“Company owns this, too?”
“Enough of it so the co-owners don’t complain when we book conventions of rich tourists.”
“And we are…?”
“American dentists,” Rusty said.
“Dentists?”
“It was that or lawyers.”
Fernandez shook his head. “My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. She was afraid of dentists.”
“Everybody is afraid of dentists,” the CIA man said. “Given a choice, most people would rather sit on a hot stove than go to the dentist. People are less afraid of death than dentists. Makes good cover.”
“Any word on Wu?” Kent asked.
“The last we heard, he had left the base with his driver in his staff car. But we lost him in the warehouse district, and we don’t have electronics on his vehicle. He’ll turn up again pretty soon. It’s not that big a town.”
“Good.”
Kent and his troops went into the hotel and were assigned rooms. He arranged to meet backup with the unit in a meeting room reserved for them in an hour, which gave everybody time to settle in and drop off their gear.
An hour later, as Kent strolled toward the meeting room, he was stopped at the door by Fernandez.
“Sir, I just got word from the spooks. We, uh, have a… situation on the ground here.”
Kent looked at him. “Which is…?”
“Apparently there has been some kind of terrorist attack on several of the local casinos. The Army has moved in to deal with it.”
“And…?”
“Wu himself is leading the troops.”
Kent nodded. “I can understand that. Some men don’t like to be armchair commanders.”
“It appears they have the problem in hand, but we can’t tell for sure — all communications from the sites have been jammed.”
“That would be standard—” He stopped. “Oh, my God.”
“Sir?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“What is that, Colonel?” Fernandez looked puzzled. Kent himself was feeling more than a little stupid.
“Wu. That’s what it’s all about. The misdirection — the computer attacks, trying to buy bombs — those were cover.”
“To do what? Rob some casinos?”
“Exactly!”
“Are you sure, sir?”
“Yes. It makes perfect sense.”
&nbs
p; Fernandez frowned. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble just to knock off a few casinos.”
“We’re not talking about lunch money, are we? Got to be tens, maybe hundreds of millions involved.”
Kent could see as it sank in.
After a moment, Fernandez said, “He can’t get away with it.”
“Who is going to stop him, Captain?” Kent asked. “He’s the Army! He can outgun anybody who’d try — at least in the short run. Damn, why didn’t I see this before?”
Fernandez didn’t say anything.
“Get the teams ready,” Kent said. “He’ll have to move the money somehow. If we follow that, we can get him.”
Fernandez hesitated, then asked, “Do we really need to get him?”
Kent looked at him. “What are you talking about, Julio?”
“Well, Colonel, if all the computer attacks were to set up a robbery, we know what he’s up to now, don’t we? It’s not our money.”
“True. But he still pulled off those attacks, which means he could do it again, if he had a reason to. And a man this complicated has to have more on his agenda. What is he going to do with all this money?”
Fernandez shrugged. “Buy a new car?”
“Not around here, he won’t. And if he’s the guy trying to get hold of surplus Soviet nukes? We sure need to know about that. No, Captain, it was a good thought, but we continue with the operation. We have questions, and this is the man with the answers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go!”
“Gone, sir.”
Once Julio was in the wind, Kent considered his next move. He could make a secure uplink with a Marine comsat and put in a call to General Hadden, though he knew what the man would tell him. You don’t stop in the middle of a battle because you think you know what the enemy is planning. Yes, it would be wise to apprise the commander of the situation, but Kent was the man on the ground and he had the best picture. What the general didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. No point in stirring up those waters just yet.
39
House of Good Fortune Casino
Macao, China
The House of Good Fortune — now there was an appropriate name. The question was, of course, who enjoyed the good fortune. At the moment, it wasn’t the House — and they had no idea how bad it was yet to become.
Locke grinned. So far, his plan had worked like a fine Swiss watch. So simple, when you knew how. Almost an anticlimax.
When the heavily armed paramilitary “terrorists” had started their assaults on two casinos, firing submachine guns into the ceilings and throwing flash-bangs all around, it had been bedlam. The two casino security heads, who had been carefully primed earlier by Locke in his colonel’s disguise, warning of this very thing, had taken one look and done just as they had been told — they called the People’s Army antiterrorist hotline. They believed that the local police would be outgunned, just as Locke had told them. And even if they had called the police, Locke had that covered as well.
Everything was covered.
A few guards were killed or wounded, but then the People’s Army charged in and saved the day, shooting, spraying tear gas, capturing the dozen terrorists in the House of Good Fortune, and being ever so heroic in the process. And how fortunate, no tourists had been slain!
When the second casino — the Palace of Jade — was hit, Wu had declared a state of emergency, then quickly surrounded and occupied the Jade and three more of the major casinos with his troops. The second “terrorist” team was captured as easily as the first. Then Wu had explained to the casino managers that such a large-scale raid indicated a major threat, and that it was better to be safe than sorry. Nobody argued with him.
The owners and managers had been more than grateful. It never occurred to them that Comrade General Wu was the one about whom they should be worried — that the “terrorists” were no more than a sham.
With the cooperation of the security people and the blessings of the owners, Wu temporarily shut down all casino and hotel communications from the gambling palaces, so, he said, any hidden confederates inside could not aid the robbers. Massive and powerful jammers blanketed each place so that not even cell phones would work.
Time was critical. A few hours was all they would have, and then higher powers would want to know what the devil was going on.
For now, Wu had control of the buildings, and even if those inside had worried and thought to call for help — which they would not — they couldn’t make that call.
So they held five casinos, with an average of over sixty million dollars U.S. each on hand: yen, dollars, euros, pesos, pataca, pounds, dinars, rupees, rubles… Most of the money was used and unmarked, some of it in computer-accessible draw-upon accounts or certified flashmem deposited in the casinos’ computers.
A third of a billion dollars, at least.
It could not have gone any better. Locke was ecstatic.
But, of course, this was the easy part. The hard part— getting away with the loot? That was where Locke was going to earn his money. And his cut, a mere twenty percent, would be enough to let him buy first-class accommodations in a number of countries around the world by the time they did figure it out.
The plan was pure genius, if he did say so himself.
The only small beetle left in the pudding was Net Force. Leigh was recently buried in a shallow grave in a local park, and would aid no one. But Net Force did have a faint trail, and Locke wasn’t sure how far along it they actually were.
They almost certainly had Shing, who knew that Wu was behind the military computer attacks, but Shing didn’t know about this part of it. Locke didn’t think they were that close — and what could they do against Wu’s trained troops anyhow? — but he couldn’t be sure — he’d been more than a little busy here, setting up the score.
Well. He’d worry about Net Force later. Even if they knew more than he thought, knowing it and proving it were two different beasts. By the time they might be in position to cause any problems, the party would be long over.
Locke’s com button chirped. He tapped the tiny button on the device, which was small enough to fit entirely in his left ear. It operated on one of the very few frequencies not blanketed by the jammers.
“Here.”
“Stage Two?” came Wu’s voice.
“Yes.”
Locke tapped the com device’s control again. He went and found the casino’s manager.
“Ah, Colonel,” the man said, his face full of relief. “We are forever in your debt. Is everything okay?”
“Actually, no, sir,” Locke said. “We have uncovered a major problem. The terrorists claim they have set dirty bombs in several of the casinos.”
“Set what?”
“Explosive devices rigged with small amounts of radioactive material.”
“An atomic bomb? Here?”
Locke thought the man might bolt in a dead run for the doors.
“No, sir, not an atomic bomb — it’s a conventional explosive, probably C-4, could even be dynamite. Low-yield. It probably wouldn’t begin to knock your building down, or even cause major damage by itself. But around the explosive core is something radioactive — medical-grade material, or low-level uranium, most likely. If those go off, they will contaminate the buildings — everything — and everybody — in them. Nobody will be able to come back into any of the casinos for a long time, and nothing in them will be salvageable.”
Locke didn’t know if dirty bombs worked exactly that way or not, but the story sounded both plausible and dramatic, and that was all that mattered. Besides, it was highly unlikely that the casino manager was any kind of expert in radiation poisoning and contamination.
Locke let the manager get there ahead of him, and it didn’t take him long. “Our money! We’ve got to get it out, to a safe place!”
The idea of sixty million dollars that nobody could touch, much less spend? What a horrible idea to a casino manager!
“Yes, sir. Get yo
ur guards to help my men. We’ll move all the cash and credit tabs to a secure location and come back to find the bomb. We’ll force the terrorists to tell us eventually, but we might not have much time—”
“Yes, yes, of course. Wong!”
The head of the casino’s security hurried to where Locke and the manager stood. “Go with the colonel — there’s a radioactive bomb here, we need to get our money out, now!”
“And have your people evacuate the building,” Locke said. “If that bomb goes off, everybody in here could be contaminated.”
Wong pulled his walkie-talkie and began speaking rapidly into it.
Pure genius, Locke thought. The best plan he’d ever come up with.
“Where will you take the funds?” the manager asked.
Locke pretended to think. “There is a small steamship in the harbor that belongs to the People, a cargo freighter used for Army supplies. It will be easier to guard with water all around it, and the river is upwind from the casinos. If there is an explosion at one of the casinos, the money will be safer there than anywhere else. We’ll take it to that ship. Your security chief will stay with it.”
“Yes, yes. Hurry!”
Hurry and steal all our money! Locke had to hold his smile in check. Indeed, he would hurry.
The freighter was a red-herring — the money would indeed go up a ladder on the starboard side — but without pause, it would go down another ramp on the port side, where a trio of fast boats would be waiting. These in turn would go but a short distance to a makeshift airfield where much faster airplanes were standing by.
Wong the security man would be clouted on the head and dumped into the bay, as would the other security people invited along to allay even the most remote suspicion. The boats would be roaring away as soon as they were unloaded, and the freighter rigged with explosives — nothing radioactive, just enough to make a very large bang and to sink it — and when eventually someone came looking for their money, the freighter would blow up.
After transferring the money to the aircraft, the empty boats would head for Taiwan. These might or might not escape detection, and too bad for the men running them if they did not.