by John Weisman
There was about a three-quarter-second lag. And then all three RPGs fired in rapid sequence into the ravine, shrieking away from the launchers, trailing white smoke.
Masland’s shot missed. The rocket struck the armored glass of the HIND’s forward cockpit. The impact shook the gunship but never penetrated the gunner’s thick protective cocoon.
Through his field glasses, X-Man followed the smoke trail as the second round went wide, detonating against the shell of the burning truck. He watched, frozen, screaming, “Oh, shit,” as the HIND’s gunner manipulated the Gatling’s muzzles up, up, up, and left, trying to swivel the gun in the direction the RPG rounds had come from.
And then Rowdy’s big forearm smacked the spook’s head from behind, the binoculars went flying, and X-Man was knocked to the ground.
Because Rowdy’s rocket had found its mark: the big crate holding the MADM, and the Chinese Pentolite detonated with an even bigger explosion than Rowdy had dared to hope for.
The blast caught the belly of the HIND, blowing the gunship’s stubby wing off. The chopper yawed right as the pilot reacted. Then a huge pressure wave hit the aircraft, and almost immediately, the HIND began to drop. Rowdy watched as the HIND’s pilot fought with the controls, trying to stabilize his aircraft. But he couldn’t. The Pentolite created a huge vortex of negative pressure, and the rotors couldn’t bite air because there was literally no air to bite.
The HIND bucked, then dropped rocklike onto the ravine floor. The rotor tips hit the ground, disintegrating as they cut themselves into shrapnel.
Rowdy loaded another round into the launcher’s muzzle, took aim, and fired at the chopper’s exhaust vent. The round went wide. But it hit the aft portion of the aircraft squarely, exploding in a great bright flash, knocking the tail rotor off. The HIND spun once, centrifugally. And then the chopper sideswiped the smoldering truck and exploded in a huge, orange ball of fire. The ordnance detonated, sending rockets and ammo spewing into the sky, trailing white smoke like so many fireworks. Rowdy could feel the intensity of the heat from where he lay. He rolled onto his side, looked over at Wei-Liu, and cracked a grin. “Nice work, Madam Deputy Assistant Secretary,” Rowdy said. “Glad to see we’re all still here—and ready to exfil.”
Wei-Liu wiped dust from her face. She looked at Rowdy Yates. His eyes, for the briefest of instants, displayed a look of such utter relief that it shocked her. And then, like a curtain drawn, the vulnerability faded. She started to say something, but remained silent; drained. Incapable of words or emotions. She was exhausted. She barely had the energy to blink. She shook her head vacantly and monotoned, vaguely in the sergeant major’s direction, “I’d really like a good night’s sleep.”
1013. Ritzik clambered to his feet, ducking involuntarily as half a dozen Gatling rounds popped like cherry bombs. He ran to the ridgeline and looked south, about four hundred yards, to where the HIP, resting precariously on its broken landing gear, idled. He raised both arms high above his head, fists clenched, thumbs extended. Then he turned, waved at the opposite ridge, and pressed his transmit button. “Rowdy, Loner. Get everybody over here so we can exfil ASAP.”
Ritzik listened as the sergeant major growled something. Then he said, “Roger that, Rowdy. We have to refuel.”
He turned toward the HIP. “Mick—did you copy that?” Ritzik watched as the big transport’s rotors gained speed, and then the aircraft levitated gingerly, rose into the sky, and nosed eastward, crossing the ridge to where Rowdy had prepositioned the fuel bladder.
Ritzik clapped his hand to his ear so he could hear the sergeant major’s transmission. “Roger that,” Ritzik said. “I’ll bring Ty with me.”
Ritzik scrambled back along the ridge to where he’d left the sniper. Ty was conscious. But it was obvious he was in tremendous pain. Ritzik looked down. “What’s the prob, Ty?”
The sniper blinked. “Broken ribs, I think,” he said between gritted teeth. “Oh, God, it hurts to breathe.”
“Pain’s good for you,” Ritzik said. “Tells you you’re still alive.”
“Then I must be alive,” Weaver said, “because I hurt like hell.”
“You’ll feel better when we get you to Dushanbe.”
“Is there beer in Dushanbe?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then you’re right: I’ll feel better in Dushanbe.”
“Time to move out.” Ritzik reached down. “Can you stand?”
The sniper grimaced. He took Ritzik’s hand. His grip was strong. “We’ll see, won’t we, Loner?”
Epilogue
Six Weeks Later. The Great Hall of the People, Beijing,
People’s Republic of China.
1540 Hours Local Time.
THE TREATY SIGNING was a bona fide media event, with 600 reporters and TV crews from all over the world. The White House downplayed the summit, bringing less than a hundred White House, State Department, and DOD staffers. Despite a last-minute plea from the president, a 150-person CODEL 26 flew in on four of the Air Force’s most luxurious transports to represent the House and Senate leadership—a shameless publicity stunt according to SECDEF Rockman, who did not accompany the president. In marked contrast, the Chinese made sure that more than 9,500 of its officials were present in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to witness the signing ceremony.
The American and Chinese presidents, the secretary of state, and the foreign minister of the People’s Republic sat behind a simple rosewood table that had been positioned in front of the speaker’s dais in the main auditorium. Behind them, six factotums hovered, ready to move the leather-bound copies of the treaty, printed on thick vellum, as they were signed and the seals were affixed.
Mike Ritzik, Tracy Wei-Liu, and Sam Phillips, wearing credentials identifying them as White House staff, sat in the rear echelon of the American delegation, on the right-hand side of the auditorium. Their inclusion in the official party had been Pete Forrest’s idea—a small but tangible reward for jobs well done. The sensors were working perfectly. And within days after SIE-1 had inserted them, the devices revealed that the Chinese were indeed testing ultra-low-yield nuclear weapons in the tunnels that ran thousands of feet below Lop Nur.
The summit and subsequent treaty signing was a one-day event. The president, wary of providing the Chinese with more than a limited diplomatic success, had insisted that his visit be brief. And so, Air Force One landed at Beijing’s international airport at precisely eight in the morning. The big plane would depart at six for New Delhi, and a two-day summit with Naresh Chowdhery, the Indian prime minister. By ten past eight, Pete Forrest, accompanied by the first lady and the secretary of state and his wife, had begun the forty-five-minute motorcade into the city through the acrid, yellow-tinged air that gave most first-time visitors a mild case of bronchitis.
Sam Phillips, Ritzik, and Wei-Liu touched down nineteen minutes after the president along with the rest of the White House and State Department staff on the big silver-and-blue 747 that served as a backup plane for Air Force One. Once they’d run a gauntlet of Chinese officials and received their summit credentials (which were laminated inside in bright red plastic sleeves emblazoned with gold and intertwined with U.S. and PRC flags), they—and the traveling press corps—were herded onto a half-dozen boxy diesel buses. It took more than an hour and a half to creep through the morning rush-hour traffic into the gridlocked center of the Chinese capital, despite the fact that the convoy had a motorcycle escort of Chinese national police outriders shepherding them to the west side of the hundred-acre Tiennanmen Square, where the Great Hall of the People was located.
Pulling up just beyond the wide portico, the three were struck by the sheer, incredible, gargantuan scale of the place. The Great Hall—Renmin Dahiutang in Chinese—was designed in the Soviet neoclassical monumental style. According to Sam Phillips, who’d done the most homework, the Great Hall had been built in only ten months, from October 1958 to the end of August 1959, during the time known as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap
Forward. The building and its immediate grounds covered thirty-seven acres. The main auditorium, where Wei-Liu, Ritzik, and Sam Phillips would watch the signing ceremony, could hold just over ten thousand people on the vast floor and tiered balconies. The huge, domed ceiling with its immense red Communist star soared more than a hundred feet. Below the star, row upon row of curved wooden desks held earphones for simultaneous translation of speeches.
On either side of the main entrance were hung huge red-and-white banners, pledging, according to Sam, eternal friendship and an endless supply of cross-training footgear from the slave labor of China, to benefit the proletarian masses of the United States. Wei-Liu, highly dubious, checked with one of their Chinese minders, who explained that the banners were five-year-old exhortations to increase domestic production and exports. Sam insisted the minders had been brainwashed and were not to be trusted.
The Americans made their way inside through an oversized polished brass revolving door. The wide, shallow staircase leading to the first floor was carpeted with Ming-dynasty antique rugs and lined with eight-foot-high cloisonné vases dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Above them hung a series of intricate crystal chandeliers two yards across. At the top of the stairs, the delegation was led into a lounge slightly smaller than the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where they were served a late breakfast while Pete Forrest and Wu Min, the Chinese leader, held the first of their two one-on-one meetings.
1547. The senior American delegates were ushered into the Great Hall’s main auditorium to the polite applause of the nine thousand Chinese government apparatchiks recruited as window dressing for the treaty signing. Ritzik scanned the rows of men in olive green and the big uniform hats reminiscent of Rittenhouse Square doormen for Major General Zhou Yi, whose face he’d memorized from a DIA briefing book. Zhou Yi was nowhere to be found. But his rival, Yin Zhong Liang, the commander of the Beijing Military District, was prominently positioned among the Chinese dignitaries. Ritzik spent a few minutes watching Yin. The general was obviously in a jovial mood, reflected by his animated expression, smiling and laughing as he sat with his Politburo colleagues waiting for the ceremony to begin.
And then, the murmuring stopped and there were perhaps five or six seconds of absolute silence as the Chinese and American presidents began the long march across the patterned beige-and-green carpet onto the wide platform. Before they’d gone three paces the ten thousand spectators in the big auditorium erupted into applause.
1556. Pete Forrest pulled his chair up to the rosewood table, turned his head to the left, and smiled warmly at Wu, who returned the gesture. But behind the crinkly-eyed smiles and the deferential manner, Pete Forrest knew the Chinese leader was tough as woodpecker lips. A survivor. As an economics student he’d been thrown out of a second-story window by rampaging Red Guards in the late 1960s during Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution. Wu still walked with a noticeable limp. Initially he’d been denied medical treatment because as a graduate student he was deemed an elitist and sent, compound fracture and all, to a reeducation camp in Hunan Province. In the late seventies, after the death of Mao Zedong, he was recruited by Deng Xiaoping’s son, with whom he had been in reeducation, to join the Ministry of State Security, China’s vast intelligence apparatus. Under Deng’s protection, he advanced quickly. He’d been ruthless during the 1989 Tiennanmen demonstrations. By the early nineties, Wu had become the MSS’s powerful vice-chairman.
Pete Forrest had seen a copy of Wu Min’s secret twenty-five-year plan for the PRC, so he knew the Chinese leader was committed to building the People’s Republic into a twenty-first-century military and economic superpower. That single-mindedness explained why Wu was already cheating on the treaty that was being put in front of them right now.
Wu’s rapid Chinese interrupted Pete Forrest’s thoughts. The American interpreter leaned into the president’s right ear. “President Wu says he is overcome with happiness that this historic day has finally arrived. It is a great leap forward between our two peoples.”
Pete Forrest noted the symbolism of the language, looked into the Chinese president’s opaque eyes, and said, “I, too, am delighted that this ceremony could finally take place after such long and ultimately fruitful negotiations.” He waited until the translation had finished, then rose and solemnly offered Wu his hand. The Chinese stood. Wu enveloped President Forrest’s hand between his own two. There was a flurry of shutters and a crescendo of applause as the two men, eye to eye, shook hands and smiled professionally for the cameras. Then, to a second rousing ovation, they were joined on the platform by the American secretary of state and the Chinese foreign minister.
At precisely four o’clock the leaders were presented with four copies of the treaty for signature. There were two in Chinese and two in English. Each nation would keep one copy in each language. The documents were secured in leather folders, stamped in gold with the Great Seals of the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
Pete Forrest laid two dozen pens, each bearing the presidential seal, on the table before him. He would use all of them to sign these worthless pieces of paper. A couple would be given to the senators who’d help to scuttle the treaty during the upcoming hearings. One would go to Rocky Rockman; another to Monica Wirth. One or two others would be slipped to big political contributors. But the majority would go to those covert warriors who’d returned safely from Tajikistan, having put their lives and their careers on the line in defense of the United States. It was the least he could do to demonstrate his gratitude—the nation’s gratitude.
Behind him, the factotums began to pass the documents out for signature. Pete Forrest looked out at the sea of faces. He glanced at Monica Wirth, prominent in the front row, her body language a cheerful, animated counterpoint to that of the glum, rumpled director of central intelligence sitting next to her. And then he scanned the crowd until he located Ritzik, Wei-Liu, and Sam Phillips. They sat at the very rear of the American delegation, directly in front of a cluster of taciturn, olive-clad Chinese military officers.
The president gazed for some seconds as the trio, in oblivious, animated conversation, peered around the cavernous auditorium like tourists. And then he experienced a sudden and decidedly unpresidential lump in his throat. Watching those youngsters overwhelmed Pete Forrest, nearly made him tear up, because he understood how clearly they represented the best America had to offer, and how much he respected their character and their integrity, qualities recently demonstrated with initiative, courage, and persistence.
Sam Phillips glanced in the president’s direction and caught him staring. The spook nudged Wei-Liu, who elbowed Ritzik. The three of them waved at him, all smiles. Impetuously, the president winked back. Ritzik threw him a thumbs-up. A split second later he was joined by Phillips and Wei-Liu.
A wide, spontaneous grin lit up Pete Forrest’s face. Then he raised his right arm and returned the gesture to a barrage of strobe lights.
From the New York Times bestselling author who “takes the reader into the very heart of CIA and Special Operations” (Robert Baer) comes
JACK IN THE BOX,
a knife-edge tale of international intrigue and covert spy craft and the chilling follow-up to SOAR.
Edward Lee Howard, the only CIA officer to defect to the KGB, redefects with incredible charges against the President of the United States. But, before the traitor’s stunning allegations can be verified, Howard disappears. Then he turns up dead. Are Howard’s accusations real? That’s the enigma former CIA Moscow station chief Sam Waterman must solve. Traveling to Moscow, Paris, and D.C., he struggles to unravel a conspiracy involving a mole in the highest reaches of government while friends and enemies die around him. Filled with cutting-edge tradecraft, Jack in the Box uses actual CIA operations and gets deep inside the Amercian intelligence community as few novels ever have.
1
Friday, October 23, 1998
Sam Waterman spent the morning of his forty-fifth birthday a hostage to his
profession, stuffed rudely onto the rear floorboard of one of the consulate’s 1985-vintage four-door Zil sedans, the driveshaft hump wedged uncomfortably against his kidneys, his long legs tucked fetal, his body hidden under a damp blanket. Even though he knew he couldn’t be seen through the dark-tinted windows, he still held his breath as the car clunked over the antiterrorist barriers just prior to passing the Russian police checkpoint outside the garage gate. He exhaled slowly when the drive-shaft under his side whined as the car merged into the late morning traffic.
“Keep going, keep going,” Sam instructed tersely from under musty cover. “Don’t check your mirrors. Just drive. Nice and easy.”
“Don’t have a cow, man.” That was Consular Officer Tom Kennedy, imitating Bart Simpson. Tom, who’d been recruited to do the driving, could impersonate Bart perfectly. He was still working on his Homer, though, running and rerunning the videotapes his sister sent him through the mail pouch, night after night after night. Which kind of told you what Moscow’s social life had to offer a reasonably good-looking African-American junior-grade diplomat, even in these post-Soviet days.
Sam grunted and shifted his position slightly, trying to reduce the pressure on his kidneys as the car turned left, heading west.
“We’re on Kutuzovsky Prospekt,” Homer told him. “Doh. Crossroads of the world.”
“Tom, put a cork in it.” Christ, he’d warned the kid this was serious business, and the youngster still wanted to talk. Not good. Because they weren’t safe. Not by a long shot. FSB, 1 the Russian internal security agency, had inherited the KGB’s elaborate passive surveillance system. Vizirs they were called—long-range, high-power telescopes mounted on sturdy tripods, positioned in buildings along Moscow’s major thoroughfares. The watchers would scan for diplomatic plates, and peer inside the cars. If they saw your lips moving, they’d take note. Were you talking to someone hidden in the car? Were you operating a burst transmitter in the open briefcase on the passenger seat? Were you broadcasting? If they thought you were up to no good, they’d dispatch one of the static counterintelligence teams that were all over the city to do a traffic stop—dip plates or no.