RW14 - Dictator's Ransom

by Richard Marcinko

  Trace was in a state of shock, but I doubt she would have left the helicopter voluntarily, even with the gun pointed at her. The door opened behind her and two arms reached in to pull her out. Trace, still stunned, began to fight back, but found her face filled with tear gas.

  I was all choked up myself. Six men in black coveralls and gas masks had emerged from the garage on the other side of the field after we landed, firing the gas point-blank at and into the chopper. Instinctually, I tried to cover my face, then I realized that was the wrong thing to do.

  But it was too late. One of the men had already grabbed Yong Shin Jong from my grip and thrown him to the back of the helicopter. Before I could turn around, the helo was airborne.

  14 The possibility exists that he obtained this information using means that would not meet the approval of the U.S. justice system. But since I wasn’t there, I am convinced that the data simply fell from the sky, and you should be, too.

  PART TWO

  DEEPER & DEEPER

  “We are opposed to the line of compromise with

  imperialism. At the same time, we cannot tolerate the

  practice of only shouting against imperialism, but in

  actual fact, being afraid to fight it.”

  —KIM IL SUNG

  5

  [ I ]

  YONG SHIN JONG, Polorski, and the six ninjas were all gone. Tears streaming from my eyes, I yelled at Shotgun and Mongoose to shoot the damn helo down. Then I ran toward the other helicopter, hoping to go after them.

  By the time Mongoose and Shotgun realized what was going on, Polorski had put two hundred yards between them and the helicopter. Just as Shotgun raised his gun to fire, the helo started banking back in his direction. He couldn’t believe his good luck and started emptying his magazine at it.

  Mongoose grabbed his friend’s shirt and pulled him down just in time to avoid the RPG round that flew from the door of the helicopter. The rocket-propelled grenade exploded close enough to shower them with dirt, though fortunately far enough away not to hurt them.

  I had just about reached the other helo when a second RPG round flew from Polorski’s craft and struck the tail. At first, it looked as if the grenade had only passed through the metal and not exploded. Then there was a burst of light and the tail flew to the ground, the rotor still spinning. Lo Po, who’d been securing the cockpit, dove out headfirst, rolling on the ground as the grenade sparked a fire. Two of his employees, the last men in the chopper, jumped out as well. One of the men’s pant legs was on fire, but he patted it out before it spread to the rest of his clothes.

  Miraculously, Polorski’s ambush hadn’t cost us any serious injuries. What really hurt my pride was the fact that I had not seen this coming. I should have known better than to trust a dumb Polack. As a crazy-ass Slovak myself, I should have learned that long before.

  But if I was mad, imagine what Trace Dahlgren felt. Her rage went beyond volcanic. Beyond nuclear. Beyond supernova.

  “I am going to kill that motherfucker with my bare hands,” she said softly when I caught up to her in the field.

  And that was all she said on the subject, which is what really worried me. (Remember her artful performance on a SEAL turncoat in Vengeance? Imagine something worse . . . )

  “Into the bus, into the bus,” I told her.

  “We can’t let him go.”

  For the moment, though, we had to. I tugged Trace with me toward the bus. I’ve pissed off a lot of women in my life, but I’ve never seen one as angry as Trace was. The only sign of it, though, was in her eyes—they looked as if they could burn a hole through granite.

  Despite the fact that he had caught a good dose of tear gas himself, Doc had taken the wheel of the bus. Not necessarily the best driver under good circumstances, Doc is even worse when he’s having trouble seeing. We careened through the dust as he found the hard-packed road, bouncing through the ruts and scraping the stone fences on either side as we went. Lo Po stood up next to him, providing directions via his GPS device. We were about ten miles from the airport, but the roads we’d mapped out were narrow and mostly dirt, so it was going to be a long drive.

  The jet that had harassed us earlier took another pass but seemed to lose interest. Doc’s driving got progressively better as we went; finally we hit a macadam roadway.

  “Two miles, straight on,” said Lo Po.

  Doc ground the gears and began to accelerate. I started to relax, thinking of how we might track Polorski, when I heard the sound of a jet streaking nearby.

  Awful close, I thought.

  “Watch out!” yelled Lo Po as the fighter appeared in front of us.

  Whatever constraints he’d been under earlier not to use his weapons apparently no longer applied—he lit his cannon. The bullets tore through the road alongside us.

  “Enough of this bullshit!” yelled Shotgun, jumping up from his seat.

  He ran to the front of the bus, pushed open the door, and held his submachine gun up toward the sky. Doc swerved sharply as the plane came into view for another pass. Shotgun nearly flew out into the road but Mongoose, who’d trailed him to the front, leaped over the forward passenger rail and caught him, clinging to the restraining pole with his foot. Shotgun began firing, emptying a mag and slamming another in while halfway out of the bus.

  You know and I know that Shotgun’s gunfire was a wasted gesture; those 9mm bullets had about as much chance of hitting the plane as spit, and probably wouldn’t have done much more damage. It’s likely the pilot never even saw Shotgun firing at him. But I’ll be damned if the plane didn’t turn off and not come back.

  Mongoose pulled Shotgun back into the bus, cursing at him for being a fool. Shotgun got a shit-eating grin on his face and asked for more bullets.

  “Here we go again!” yelled Trace from the back of the bus as another plane came up from the rear, guns blazing. Doc pushed the bus right, out of the path of the bullets, but into a huge ditch, where we stalled out. The airport was a few hundred yards away.

  “Out, everybody out!” I yelled. “Run for the plane!”

  Pushing out through the doors and windows, we spread out across the field and sprinted in the direction of the airstrip. The ground had recently been plowed and fertilized; the fresh dung gave a sweet fragrance to the proceedings, mixing deliciously with the scent of burning gasoline and metal as the Chinese pilot doused the bus with more bullets. A red and black fireball shot upward, exploding with a pronounced crack.

  They say there’s a silver lining inside of every dark cloud. I’ve never been able to verify that myself, but this dark cloud was definitely an asset—the smoke made it hard for the J-7’s pilot to aim his guns on the next pass. He fired anyway, which had a laudatory effect on our stragglers, the bullets just close enough to convince even Doc that the quarter mile was a sprint, not a jog.

  The Embraer EMB-120 was owned by a friend of mine named Buzz Sawyer, who used to be a pilot for Air America—the CIA’s favorite airline. Now based in Thailand, Buzz is an old hand at sticky situations, not to mention ducking J-7s. He’d apparently kicked his engines off as soon as he saw the Chinese fighters in the air, and was now idling at the end of the runway, impatiently waiting for us.

  Not exactly idle. Buzz was hard at work, using his cell phone to set off a series of smoke grenades he had wired around the airport. They shrouded us in a fog thicker than the pea soup you can get at my local diner. This confused the Chinese pilot who was shooting at us, but it also made it harder to see the plane. I finally found it by running toward the turboprop’s whine, stopping just before the engine’s blades would have sliced me into chop suey.

  “This way, this way,” I yelled, ushering the troops toward the aircraft. I counted as they hustled in; Buzz was straining at the brakes when I realized we were one short.

  Trace.

  “Pilot says we gotta go!” yelled Mongoose as I leaned out the door, looking for her in the haze. “There are more fighters on the way.”

  N
o way I was leaving Trace. “Go without me,” I told him. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Dick!”

  “Go. That’s an order, asshole,” I told him, adding several other terms of endearment to make sure he knew I was serious as I jumped.

  The plane was already rolling forward. The fact that he couldn’t see anything on the ground didn’t stop the F-7 from firing anyway. The Chinese fighter pilot missed the Embraer by a good margin, but his bullets were close enough to me to send a hail of rock and asphalt against my back.

  I was worried that Trace had decided to stay behind and somehow track Polorski to get revenge. It would have been understandable, though not particularly bright. In fact, she had simply tripped and become disoriented in the smoke. Finally recovering, she raced forward, going fast enough to bowl me over in the man-made fog. I landed on my back near the edge of the runway. The smoke cleared, and I had a perfect view of the airplane as it left the ground.

  “Now what?” asked Trace.

  “Looks like we’ll have to pay your bill at the Regis after all,” I told her.

  [ II ]

  LET’S TIE UP a thread before it gets lost instead of loose . . .

  THE F-7 PURSUED the Embraer, trying to stay with it as it jinked hard to the south. The Chinese fighter pilot had spent most of his bullets and a good part of his fuel already, and had to turn away within five minutes. By the time reinforcements arrived, Buzz had pointed the airplane southwest and was flying at low altitude and top speed toward the water. With the Embraer off their radars because it was so low, the new fighters set up a time-consuming standard search pattern. They never did find the Embraer.

  Buzz ran into trouble near the coast, though. By that time he’d climbed to a more reasonable altitude, trying to sneak into the Yellow Sea as a “real” passenger plane. Queried by a pair of Chinese air force Su-27s on patrol, Buzz’s story began to fall apart with his lousy Chinese—he had a great vocabulary, but unfortunately his accent strayed closer to Brooklyn than Beijing when he got excited, and being in the bull’s-eye of two Su-27s tends to make even the calmest pilot’s heart race.

  Especially when they fire heat-seeking missiles at you.

  Buzz’s business often brought him interesting assignments, and he was prepared for all possibilities. His Embraer was equipped with a variety of warning systems. It also had decoy flares and a laser detonating system to ward off IR missiles. He fired the flares, then pushed the plane hard to the right, hoping the decoys would suck the missiles away. That didn’t work—these must have been the latest Russian Vempel heat-seekers—and Buzz quickly hit the lasers. By the time the missiles exploded, they were so close that they peppered the aircraft with shrapnel. The blast pushed the plane downward; Doc swore later that he could have grabbed a fish if he hadn’t had his eyes closed.

  Buzz pulled back on the stick and leveled off about five inches above the waves, give or take a spritz. Odds are, he and everyone aboard the plane would have been toast, except for the timely arrival of a flight of American F/A-18 Super Hornets, which just happened to be on a routine training mission in the northern China Sea off Korea.

  We all know there’s no such thing as a coincidence—Jimmy Zim had arranged for the flights and told me about them before I left Japan. But there was one coincidence, or at least a convenience—the carrier was the Ronald Reagan, and among its crew was a chief petty officer who’d had the misfortune of serving under yours truly when he was still young and virginal. I ruined him for life, and he’s been grateful ever since, as have the aviators whom he trusts with his aircraft. I’d sent him an e-mail from Tokyo to make sure his planes were in top shape, and while I’m sure the pilots would have done a good job in any event, knowing we had a personal connection to the Hornet drivers helped Doc breathe a little easier.

  WHILE THE EMBRAER flew south, Trace and I were making our way north to Beijing.

  We smelled like all hell, thanks to our roll in the freshly manured fields, and our first order of business was to get cleaned up and changed. We found fresh clothes for Trace neatly displayed on a peasant’s clothesline about two miles to the north. Trace pinned some yuan notes in their place, then took them over to a nearby pond, where after making me promise not to peek, she stripped down and took a bath.

  Of course I peeked. Who keeps a promise like that?

  I washed the makeup off my face but didn’t have anything strong enough to remove the dye from my beard and hair. I dunked my head in anyway, and was doing my best to wash out the white when something bumped up against my hand, then slipped up my forearm, tickling me. I thought it was Trace, getting back at me for looking at her, so I grabbed it. As I pulled it out of the water, I realized it was too light and small to be attached to her. I opened my eyes and looked into the slimy green slits of a water snake.

  I hurled it across the pond without thinking. A second later, I heard a shriek. Trace ran out of the water, grabbing for her clothes.

  “What happened?” I asked, knowing that if I didn’t play dumb my life would be in danger.

  “Snake,” she said.

  “You’re not afraid of snakes, are you?”

  “The human kind I can handle,” she said. Then she blushed, and turned around to get dressed.

  Finding something that would fit was a bit harder for me than it had been for Trace, and it wasn’t until very late afternoon that we were able to find some clothes at a small market in a village about ten miles northeast of the airfield. I had only a few yuan on me, but the proprietor’s inclination to haggle was overpowered by my scent and a deal was quickly struck.

  Our next problem was to get to Beijing. Between us we knew maybe a dozen words, none of them repeatable in polite company. We had a few yuan and might have tried puzzling out the arrangements for a bus, but we didn’t see one. Bicycles, on the other hand, were in good supply, especially in the village, where people left them without locks. But when I started toward two I saw leaning up against the side of a building, Trace immediately objected.

  “We can’t steal their bikes. That’s probably all they have.”

  “We’re not stealing,” I told her. “We’re borrowing.”

  I got the Apache death stare in response.

  “We’ll send them back when we’re done,” I told her.

  “How?”

  “We’ll use Western Union or something. UPS them. I don’t know.”

  Trace gave me another stare, though this was less mortal. Her standards for fairness have become higher since she agreed to become a kind of godmother for a young girl in her Chihauhua Apache tribe, but it was obvious that we had to get to the city.

  “How are you going to remember their address?” she asked.

  Easy solution—just grab the nameplate next to the door. That done, we took the bikes and set out. Once we found a highway, figuring out the direction to Beijing was easy. Even before we saw the English language sign, we knew all we had to do was head for the smog and we’d get there.

  There was no way of knowing how much of an alert the people guarding Yong Shin Jong had put out because of our picnic there. While I’d initially thought we would simply return to Trace’s hotel, as I pedaled north, the more I thought better of the idea. The hotel wasn’t exactly low-key. It would be better to stay in a smaller place, one not likely to host foreigners, and even less likely to ask questions. Fortunately Beijing, like all large cities, has plenty.

  I suppose we could have gone directly to the U.S. Embassy and asked them to call Jimmy Zim for us, but that would have meant dealing with the officious State Department bureaucrats, and made me more beholden to Fogglebottom than I really cared to be. Besides, when faced with a choice of dealing with faceless bureaucrats or risking life and limb by weaseling past the Red Army, I’ll take the Chinese every time.

  Discretion is generally paid for in cash. With dusk falling as we arrived at the city, we headed for the Red Cell International version of an ATM—a hidden stash of cash, IDs, and bank cards secreted in a
drop at the Lugou Qiao bridge. Known to us round eyes as the Marco Polo Bridge, it’s located about ten miles from the center of town, on the southwestern side of the city. If you’ve ever been to Beijing, you’ve probably been over the bridge. The Lugou Qiao crosses the Yongding River—or the marshy field of grass the river turns into when it isn’t flooding.

  Forget the reference to Marco Polo that foreigners are fed. The bridge has a much more interesting, and tragic, history. Its eleven stone arches were built in the late seventeenth century and have withstood countless floods, revolutions, and wars. In 1937, the bridge was the scene of a battle between local troops and Japanese soldiers looking for a pretext to invade Beijing. (Since they’d already taken over a good hunk of the country north of the city, they didn’t need much of a pretext. Nevertheless they came up with one, saying they wanted to search for a deserter in a Beijing whorehouse.) The Chinese forces won the first battle for the bridge, but within a few days were overwhelmed; all of north China was soon in Japanese hands. The Japanese were not gracious in victory.

  The bridge is made out of granite—something you may not realize because of the grime. It’s guarded by stone lions, who are reputed to come to life at night. I hoped the legend wasn’t true—our money was hidden under the paw of one of them.

  The bridge is primarily a tourist attraction these days, and in the early evening there weren’t many people around to ask us just what the hell we were doing. On the other hand, there wasn’t much light, either. The lions are heavy—five or six hundred pounds, I’d guess, and most are carved or otherwise attached right into the posts of the walls. But number sixteen, counting from the western end, had a loose paw, and that’s where the envelope with our money was.

  Or so Doc said. The paw wouldn’t budge when I pushed at it.

  I went across to the other side, and checked that lion. But it seemed even more reluctant to move than the first.