by Tom Clancy
The money by then would be flying along just over the sea, in stealth-gear-ensheathed airplanes painted to match the sky from below and the water from above.
All of this had been put together like a fine Swiss watch, every cog in place, jewels at every friction point, as slick as a film of oil on glass.
Wu had a hundred men in the operation, hand-picked and trained, and loyal to him, most of whom believed they would receive a quarter of a million U.S. dollars each for their help in the heist. In truth, ninety of them — including the twenty or so who played the role of terrorists — would get jacketed metal machine-gun bullets instead of money. Of the ten survivors, most thought they would get a million each. Eight of those would eventually join their fallen comrades, leaving only two who expected to receive five million apiece.
Greed was a wonderful motivator.
Wu would dispatch those last two, and then there would be none.
Well, save for Locke, and he had no intention of turning his back on anybody. He had his own plan. He would divert a portion of the money for himself — for there would be four fast boats opposite the freighter, instead of three, as well as a helicopter hidden elsewhere with a range sufficient to reach Taiwan or maybe even India — and Locke would be gone before anybody knew it, including Wu.
Especially Wu.
By the time whichever authority in charge got it all sorted out, Wu would be in Taipei, and Locke halfway to somewhere far, far away, the first leg of several flights and passport changes to leave a cold trail behind him.
Locke’s plan was so bold, nobody had ever considered it before. And, as everyone knew, fortune favored the bold…
Locke went to direct his team, who would be helped in the theft by the casino’s own guards and the blessing of its manager. In a few moments, Army trucks full of money were going to roll through the streets of Macao, with the enthusiastic assistance of those who were unknowingly being robbed.
Pure genius. No doubt about it…
40
The Golden Road Hotel
Macao, China
“Sir, it looks as if Wu’s men are clearing roads in the direction of the docks. Some from each casino. There also appears to be some kind of activity around a small freighter in the harbor.”
Kent frowned. “He’s planning to escape on a boat? That’s not very smart.”
“No, sir, it isn’t,” Fernandez said. “All this, just to get blown out of the water by the Chinese Navy? He’s got to have something else up his sleeve.”
“My guess is he does. Go get first squad on the way back to our aircraft and float it out where they can see what’s going on. Tell the CIA guy to get the cars here now, then load up second and third squads and get them rolling, radios on opchan alpha. Get us some other watercraft.”
“Yes, sir.” Fernandez started talking into his radio, issuing orders.
Kent considered his options. Julio was right, the money wasn’t important — let the Chinese worry about that. What they needed was Wu, and they needed to get him and get away before any of the locals figured out what was going on and who they were. They had to move quickly.
“Captain, which casino is Wu in?”
“The House of Good Fortune.”
“Get fourth squad and let’s go. Three cars. We are going to have to run and gun. No time for anything else.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kent grabbed a tactical radio unit and made sure it was tuned to the right opchan. He’d have to make it up as he went along. Sometimes that was the best battle plan you could manage. You had to make do with what you had.
“All squads, listen up. Here’s what we are going to do… ”
41
House of Good Fortune Casino
Macao, China
“I’ll see you at the airfield, comrade,” Wu said to Locke.
“Right.”
“Travel safe.” Wu clapped him on the shoulder, smiled, and turned to leave.
As soon as he was gone, Locke and his assistant loaded up the last six bags of loot into Locke’s Toyota Land Cruiser. That much money was heavy, even in large bills. About as much as what Locke was supposed to get for his part, he reckoned. Maybe a bit less, but he wasn’t going to get greedy about it. Stopping to pick up that last dime could get you caught or killed.
They climbed into the SUV and headed for the harbor. They’d beat Wu and the other trucks there — Locke would take the shortest route, do it at speed, and the official police light flashing on the vehicle’s dashboard would see that nobody stopped them. They’d be there ten minutes ahead of Wu. Plenty of time.
Locke’s assistant was actually Wu’s man — Locke knew this — but that didn’t matter. Not yet.
“Five minutes,” Locke said, looking at his watch. “We’ll be alone on the ship, first to get there. I want to be gone by the time the first truck arrives.”
The assistant was a muscular Mongolian named Khasar, which meant “terrible dog.” A tradition in that backward land, to name children for ugly things, to protect them from evil spirits. That trick wasn’t going to be enough keep him safe in this, though.
Khasar said, “Yes. We will hurry.”
He stepped on the gas pedal and the car surged forward.
The Streets of Macao
China
Kent pulled his car — a Volkswagen beetle, of all things — next to Fernandez’s car, a Korean compact he didn’t recognize.
Kent said, “Set up here, Captain. You’ve got three, maybe four minutes. I’m going on to the freighter, just in case.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good luck, Julio.”
“You, too, sir.”
Kent revved the VW’s engine and took off. Despite the hurry, and the absolute lack of time to do things properly, he realized he was grinning as he drove. A battle joined, plans unfolding fast, the end not at all certain, and lives on the line — but he was doing what he knew how to do best.
It didn’t get any better than this, did it?
42
Aboard the Freighter Shengfeng Hao
Macao Harbor, Macao, China
As part of his colonel’s uniform, Locke had a pistol. This was a QSZ-92, a no-nonsense black metal and plastic handgun made in a People’s Liberation Army arms factory outside Beijing, and chambered for the proprietary 5.8mm Chinese round, with the bottlenecked and pointed bullets. The gun held fifteen cartridges in the magazine, plus one in the chamber, and there was a spare magazine on his belt, so he had thirty-one shots. It was a semiautomatic double-action weapon, and all you needed to do was disengage the safety, aim, and pull the trigger each time you wanted it to go bang! A well-made military pistol, and if not the best in the world, certainly not the worst. Sufficient for his needs here, this gun.
Locke drew the side arm from its holster and clicked the safety off. He took a deep breath.
In front of him, Khasar, who was every centimeter Wu’s man, was not yet ready to begin his assigned task. The would-be assassin was halfway down the ramp from the freighter to Locke’s powerboat, with the last bags of cash in hand.
Wu would have told Khasar to hold off, to wait until they got the diverted money onto the getaway boat, to be sure of what Locke planned. To be certain the wily criminal did not have something nasty rigged to cover his escape. For Wu knew that Locke would try to sneak off, and well that he should — Locke had left plenty of clues lying around to make sure the general figured it out.
Locke shook his head. Did Wu really think he was that stupid? With Locke knowing that Wu would kill his own troops, that Locke would never think that he might be a target? Did Wu expect him to believe in honor among thieves?
Wu had his own kind of honor, but his goals did not include letting Locke — or anybody else — remain alive to be a potential problem. Wu was a burn-the-fields, salt-the-earth kind of general. If there was nobody left behind, there would be nobody to sneak up on you someday when you might not be expecting it.
Not that Locke himself
had a problem with that. He just wasn’t about to be a victim of it.
Locke waited until Khasar had stepped onto the boat. It was twelve or fifteen meters from the deck of the freighter, at a steep downward angle, but an easy shot.
Locke lined up the sights square between the man’s shoulder blades and fired twice.
Khasar the Mongol fell, no doubt surprised, and the last bags of cash thumped down onto the power boat’s deck. Neat.
But the Mongol was a big and strong man, and the bullets were small. Locke took careful aim at Khasar as he came unsteadily to his feet, and squeezed off one more round — into the man’s head.
It didn’t matter how strong he was, Khasar wasn’t going to shake that one off.
The Mongol fell again, going boneless in that way only the dead can achieve.
Locke lowered the pistol. He would descend the ramp now, shove the body into the bay, and be gone. Ten minutes away, his helicopter awaited, and once he got there, he would be essentially home free.
“Don’t turn around, Colonel,” came an unfamiliar man’s voice from behind him.
Locke froze. The speaker spoke badly intoned Chinese, and Locke guessed that whoever it was was probably British or American.
Another small boat churned into view then, and upon the craft, five men, dressed as tourists! — but armed with pistols and submachine guns — approached Locke’s getaway craft.
Locke’s heart fell.
Nobody down there but a dead man to stop them.
Who were they? They weren’t Chinese, he could see that.
And he had just murdered a man in plain view of whoever was behind him. This was bad.
He’d never be able to get down the ramp and outshoot those men below, who, even as he thought it, reached Locke’s boat and pulled alongside to board it.
Locke sighed.
It wasn’t the money so much. It stung, of course, knowing he’d had it in his grasp and now would not be able to collect on it, but then he hadn’t joined Wu for the money. Locke had enough — more than enough — for his own needs.
No, he had joined Wu for the challenge, for the thrill, for the knowledge that he had been able to stand up to the United States and to CyberNation, and to win.
But to do that he had to get off this boat alive.
This all ran through his mind very fast. He had to leave.
But first he had to deal with the problem behind him.
“Down put the gun,” came the voice, again in fractured Chinese.
“You’re CIA?” he asked, in English.
“Close enough,” the voice said in that same language. “Put your gun down, please. Slowly and carefully.”
An American. They weren’t ruthless, the Americans, they believed in fair play. The man wouldn’t shoot him in the back.
He had a chance.
Locke began to lower the pistol, slowly, as instructed. He marked the voice, guessed the speaker was no more than five or six meters directly behind him. The man would be aiming his weapon at Locke’s back. If he dropped and spun fast enough, it would take the American a second to adjust his aim. Locke knew how to shoot. He hadn’t done much of it in a long time, but it was like riding a bicycle, you never forgot how. Especially when your life depended on it.
“Take it easy,” Locke said. “Don’t shoot, I give up—”
With that, he dropped and turned at the same time, ending up in a tripod on the deck, on his knees, stretched out and supported on his left hand. He brought his right hand up and around fast, thrust the pistol out and fired — one-two—!
But even as he fired, he knew it was wrong — the man behind him wasn’t standing — he was prone!
Locke’s shots missed by a meter, too high, too high—!
The American was on his belly, his own handgun extended in front of him. Locke had time to see that the man was also dressed like a tourist — a bright orange and yellow shirt, shorts — and that he was old and gray-haired.
He tried to adjust his aim downward—
An icy hammer smashed into his chest, just below his neck. The shock was so unexpected that Locke’s supporting arm collapsed and he fell on his face. He had to let go of his pistol to push himself up, but halfway there, his strength failed, and he sprawled again.
The wooden grate over the metal deck felt very cold against his face.
This couldn’t be happening. Everything had been going so well!
He saw the man’s feet — he wore sandals, no socks — as he approached. Saw the shooter kick the fallen handgun away, then squat down.
Locke’s vision went gray, then faded. And it was suddenly so very, very cold… “All… wrong…” he managed.
“Colonel Abraham Kent of Net Force and the United States Marines,” he heard the man say.
And that was the last thing Jack Locke heard as the spirit fled his body.
43
The Streets of Macao
Wu’s car rolled through the streets, heading for the docks. It was incredible, he still couldn’t quite believe it, but it was all going exactly as they had intended. This was something new: a battle plan that survived first contact with the enemy!
Things could not have gone any better. Here he was, riding behind a heavy Daewoo truck made in Guangxi — and wasn’t that amusing? A Korean/Chinese venture — and that truck was full of money, a rich man’s fortune, all of which was his.
Locke expected one-fifth of the haul, and deserved as much for his excellent work in setting up and executing the plan. And Locke’s cut was not so much, not when such a vast sum was at hand. But even so, Locke was yet another loose end that had to be tied off, and besides, an extra fifty or sixty million dollars U.S. would go a long way to making sure Wu’s rise to power went smoothly.
Wu cared nothing for the money itself, nor the toys it could buy him, only the power that would allow him to do big things. It was but a tool. A very large hammer with which he could bludgeon any who stood in his way.
Wu’s terrible dog the Mongol would deal with Locke, and then Wu himself would deal with his dog. Hard, but necessary. A man sometimes had to do things for the greater good that were… distasteful.
Eventually, he would rule Taiwan. Eventually, he would have an army at his back. Eventually, he would find the precise place upon which to stand and insert his lever, and with it, he could topple the base government that ran his homeland. And then? Well, then, eventually, it would perhaps be time to test the Achilles’ heel of the Americans’ technological superiority in ways that really mattered.
Lofty goals, to be sure, but possible, possible—
Ahead, he could see the bay. Not long now—
The streets weren’t crowded — he’d had his men mostly clear this one, shoving pedestrians away from the street and moving vehicular traffic aside. But standing on the corner ahead and to his right were two Westerners, a man and a woman, tourists wearing cameras and those silly shorts and loud shirts and stupid, vacant expressions that marked them as such. Fools! Did they not see there were important things being done here?
One of the tourists, the woman, bent down and made a motion as if rolling a ball.
What was she doing—?
Just ahead of his car, the Daewoo truck lurched to one side. There was an orange flash, a loud explosion, and the truck skidded and stopped.
Wu’s driver slammed on his brakes, and Wu’s car also slewed to a halt, centimeters short of hitting the truck’s back bumper.
The two tourists ran off.
Yet another man in loud Western clothes came from around the corner of a building, and what he had on his shoulder was not something any tourist should have — it was a rocket launcher, looked like an old PF-89, an 80mm light antitank weapon—
Wu had time to frown, and then the tourist fired the launcher.
The money truck exploded.
The air was suddenly filled with colorful graffiti.
The most expensive graffiti the world had ever seen. Wu reached for his pisto
l—
Yet another pair of tourists appeared from nowhere and stood next to his car, submachine guns pointed at him.
“Don’t try it, General,” one of the tourists said, in English.
Wu’s driver pulled his own submachine gun from the seat, but before he could fire it, the man who had spoken fired his own weapon, a quick, three-round burst, 9mm.
The empty cartridges sparkled and fell in slow motion in the afternoon sunshine…
Wu’s driver jerked and slumped against the driver’s-side window, blood oozing from his shattered head.
This couldn’t be happening! Not in the middle of the street in Macao! Not in Wu’s own command territory! Not this close to victory!
“Step out of the car, sir. Now!”
Stunned, Wu obeyed.
Around him, various paper currencies fluttered like a flock of wounded birds, flying and wafting and settling upon the street and sidewalk.
There was no stopping people from rushing out to gather it in now.
44
Zhujiang Kou Bay
East of Macao, West of Hong Kong
The pilot said, “Boy, it sure hit the fan back there. The Chinese Air Traffic Control guys are going nuts on the air. They want everybody on the ground to stay there, and nobody is going to be landing any time soon.”
Kent, who stood next to him in the cockpit, said, “Can we get away?”
“If I can get us another couple of klicks away from shore before we take off, yeah,” the pilot said. “Their Navy hasn’t checked in yet, and I don’t think they have anything close enough to run us down.”
The Japanese seaplane’s engines were rumbling loudly, and the craft was bouncing along, jarring Kent’s teeth with every hit.
“Kinda choppy,” Kent observed.
“We can take off in three-foot waves, no problem,” the pilot said. “Better go sit down, though, it might get a little rough.”