Rogue Commander

by Leo J. Maloney

  “Mm-hmm.”

  She walked along now in the hazy morning sunlight, the Meridian Gate looming before her at the end of a vast plaza of flat gray stones. The term gate was deceptive, as the southern entrance to the Forbidden City was composed of an enormous red building, with high-walled wings on either side—angled outboard and topped with double cupolas. With its arched opening in the center, the whole thing looked like an angry Chinese lion just waiting to swallow her up.

  For a moment, she wished she were a tourist, and could spend the day exploring the hundred square acres of 980 ancient buildings, its museums of treasures from the Zing and Qing dynasties, and its walls and ramparts and moats. But she wasn’t here for the view. She was here to track down Colonel Shin Kwan Hyo.

  CIDEX, the China International Defense Electronics Exhibition, was being held in the capital at the Exhibition Center, where hundreds of manufacturers from the around the world had come to pitch their wares to Beijing. Of course, given that the show was run by the Peoples Liberation Army, China’s purpose in throwing the party was to get their hands on all the latest drones, tactical communications packages and missile command and control.

  The PLA’s tactic was to charm and smile and purchase, for double the asking price, any new toy they thought worthy of reverse engineering. The people who attended knew this, but they all went home happy with bulging wallets. After all, the Chinese had invented piracy on the high seas a millennium ago. Why should they stop on the low ground?

  Lily, as Rosalind the sales rep for Thales, had arranged to meet with a PLA general named Deng Tao Kung, who she’d e-seduced into taking an interest in Thales’ most sensitive encrypted radio packages. Some careful research by Zeta had revealed that General Kung was a missile regiment commander and that Colonel Hyo was in the same game, so the odds were good that they’d be sharing tea.

  None of the serious business meetings were held at the convention center; too many prying eyes and ears. General Kung had chosen to hold court this morning in the Forbidden City and had invited “Rosalind Stone” for a brief, friendly chat. She was hoping that was all she’d need.

  Lily entered the entrance archway and headed straight for the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Then she walked left along a marble-lined moat for the Hall of Military Eminence, which was a modest red building with wooden-screened windows and a sloping orange roof. It had once housed thousands of ancient historical strategy books, which had all been burned in a conqueror’s fire. It was now simply an empty hall, perfect for quiet conferences. Unlike the other opulent structures, it held little attraction for tourists.

  Her heart rate picked up a little as she saw a small gathering on the slate walkway before the central door of the hall. They were mostly military officers—predominantly men, but there were a few women. And they were all Asian. Among them stood a few Westerners in business attire who she assumed were sales people like herself, or rather, like she was pretending to be. A pair of uniformed PLA military police stood between her and the throng, observing anyone who approached with their steely gazes.

  Nothing fancy now, lass, she told herself. All we want is a handshake with Hyo and to pique his interest in another meeting. Then we’re out.

  She had to remind herself that she wasn’t doing her usual “honey trap” thing today. She had to be absolutely sexless, which was a challenge for her.

  One of the MPs pushed out a palm and looked her over. “Yes, miss?”

  “I am here to meet General Deng Tao Kung. My name is Rosalind Stone.”

  The first MP nodded and pointed at her briefcase while the other one stepped in and extended his arms, palms up. Lily placed her briefcase on his palms and thumbed the catches. The first MP opened it, poked through the contents with a finger, closed it, and waved toward the doorway. She wasn’t surprised that they didn’t frisk her because that was a cultural no-no here. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because there was nothing under her suit but modest lingerie. Sometimes you just had to go weaponless, and pray.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The MPs nodded jerky head bows; she excused her way through the small crowd and stepped inside. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. The Hall of Military Eminence was a large rectangular space with a polished floor of teakwood planks lit only by the stream of diffused sunlight slanting in through the screen windows. The floor space had been carefully arranged with red brocade divans, thick wooden armchairs, and low tea tables.

  Military officers and business people occupied the sitting spaces, heads bent close, discussing catalogues and technical specs as translators hovered nearby. A small flock of young Chinese women in blue silk wraps moved around the floor carrying trays of teapots, cups, and small finger snacks.

  Looking around the room, Lily spotted General Kung by matching his face to the image she’d memorized. He was sitting on a divan against the far wall, sipping tea and chatting with a younger Chinese officer. A pair of bodyguards hovered nearby. He wore a sage-green dress uniform nearly identical to the older American “Class-A,” with brass buttons, five rows of ribbons over the left breast pocket, a light green dress shirt, and an olive tie.

  On his lap rested his officer’s “wheel hat,” with red piping and a large red star on the peak. His gray hair was cropped close, and his face appeared almost kindly, with smooth skin, half-smiling lips, and gentle eyebrows.

  She walked toward him as, to her left, she noticed a group of North Korean officers. They were easy to spot in their subdued, badly tailored, brown dress uniforms—with big red epaulets and huge hats the size of apple pies. She didn’t look at them again as she approached Kung’s low table. He looked up from his conversation, rose, and bowed.

  “Ah, Miss Stone.”

  “Yes, General.” Lily bowed slightly and offered him her business card, presenting it with both hands in the Japanese fashion. Although Sino-Japanese relations had always been, in the dry, pragmatic terms of the Communist Party, “interesting,” the Nippon ritual of two-handed, bowing, business card exchange was now the preferred norm throughout Asia.

  Kung took it and motioned to the empty chair beside the divan. They sat.

  “Tea?” He asked, but he didn’t wait for her answer and said something in Chinese to one of the passing tea ladies. The woman placed a steaming cup in front of Lily, and she nodded her thanks and sipped. “So, Miss Stone. I was intrigued by some of your offerings.” He had very fine English and a soft, reedy voice.

  “I rather hoped you might be interested,” she said, using her native, lightly lilting accent to her advantage. She placed her briefcase on the table, smoothly opened it as if exacting a choreographed ritual, and presented Kung with a brochure. He flipped through it quickly, then closed it, and smiled.

  “I am actually more interested in the items that are not in your catalog. The items that are, shall we say, in special limited editions.”

  Lily released her first smile, although she kept it tight, without teeth. She knew the man would not use words like restricted, embargoed, or prohibited. That was not the East Asian way. But limited edition was particularly deft. She only hoped she could be as adroit.

  “At Thales,” she said softly, “we are pleased to discuss anything. We are, after all, an ecumenical corporation.”

  Kung laughed, but only with his belly. His eyes, however, narrowed, his eyebrows taking on a position that could be seen as shrewd. “I like that word, ecumenical,” he said, although she interpreted his use of the word like as meaning anything but. “Does it mean you have no rules?”

  “Or that all rules are flexible,” she countered. She glanced up to find the North Korean contingent turned their way, but she ignored them—focusing only on the general. “We have some new guidance systems, both GPS and laser, that we have recently reclassified as, to borrow your most insightful term, strictly limited editions...in both number and availability.”

 
Kung’s head rose and then slowly lowered. “Then, I gather, that means time is of the essence.” The general sat back, sipped some more tea and gazed at the ceiling. “I recall this anecdote about Winston Churchill...It was something about morality and commerce.”

  “Yes,” Lily said slowly. "I think I know the one you refer to.” When Kung did not reply, “Miss Stone” cautiously continued. “Churchill was at a soiree, was he not, where he encountered a pretty woman and asked if she would sleep with him for a million pounds sterling. When she quickly agreed, he then asked if she would do it for a single pound. She asked if he thought her a whore, to which he replied, ‘We’ve already established that, madam. We’re simply negotiating the price’.”

  Kung’s smile widened, and at first, Lily thought he was having an adverse reaction to the tea. But she realized he was silently laughing—quaking.

  Lily resisted internally exulting herself, even though she felt certain she had him where she wanted him. But it was at that moment that she dared look away—to see Colonel Shin Kwan Hyo looking down at her.

  She hadn’t seen him up close in Seoul. His short black hair was so dense that she couldn’t discern its roots. He had thick arching eyebrows, black eyes, a flat nose, and to the left of his thin lips a white scar that curled up like one end of a handlebar moustache. He looked like a crouching tiger packed in a uniform. His officer’s cap was tucked under his right arm, his thick fingers tapping the brim.

  Lily dipped her head politely. Hyo did the same and pulled his gaze from her eyes. Instead, he looked at General Kung and said something in Chinese. The general gestured at the colonel and spoke to Lily in English.

  “Miss Stone, this is Colonel Hyo of the Korean People’s Army. Colonel, this is Rosalind Stone.”

  “A pleasure,” said Lily.

  “Bingo,” she heard Shepard whisper in her ear.

  “You are from?” Hyo asked in a tone that sounded like he regularly chewed glass.

  “Thales Group, sir.” She plucked out a business card and offered it up, again with both hands. He looked at it as if it were a particularly interesting fire ant and then retrieved it.

  “Yes. You make Starstreak.”

  “Yes, sir. From the Belfast office.”

  “Starstreak?” General Kung inquired.

  Lily turned to him. “It’s an HVM, General, a high-velocity missile used in the air defense role. It has multiple variants, such as man-portable, attack helicopter, vehicle, and so forth.”

  Kung looked very pleased, as if his own granddaughter had just passed her graduate exams. Colonel Hyo interrupted the exchange.

  “I would meet with you,” he said to Lily.

  She smiled. “At your convenience, Colonel.”

  He turned away, and strode back to his coterie of younger officers, who looked over his shoulder at her as he spoke to them. She saw him examining her business card and then take out his cell phone.

  Lily’s pulse started throbbing in her neck. He’s running a check on me. Bloody suspicious bastard’s smart.

  “He’s calling the main number,” Shepard whispered in her ear. “No biggie. I’ve got ambient office noise running and Charlotte’s handling the pickup.” Charlotte was another Brit working in Zeta’s back office.

  Lily turned her focus back to General Kung as she tried to control her adrenaline surge. “He seems...pleasant, General,” she said, lying with a smile.

  ...Kung snorted a short laugh. “The colonel is many things, Miss Stone, but pleasant is not one of them. However, he treats my guests well because I control his budget.”

  “Yes, I rather assumed so,” she said as she heard the drama at Zeta HQ playing out in her ear—the recorded sounds of office chatter, keyboards clicking, and Charlotte picking up a line.

  “Thales Group, London. How may I be of service?” There was a pause, and then, “Oh, I’m afraid Ms. Stone is overseas, Sir, at CIDEX in Beijing. I can put you through to her extension if you’d care to leave a message.” Another pause. “Yes, perhaps in a week. Thank you, sir.”

  The conversation ended, and Lily glanced at Hyo again. He was tucking his cell phone away, but a chill rippled up her spine as one of his officer’s blatantly snapped a photo of her with his own cell. Then Hyo turned around and came back, followed by two of his uniformed men. He stopped and loomed above the tea table.

  “When are you free?” he asked.

  “Well, I...” Lily looked at General Kung. “The general and I were going to discuss some potential acquisitions...”

  Hyo looked at his watch. “Today is good.”

  “Yes, of course.” Lily touched the bridge of her glasses and adjusted them on her nose. A trickle of sweat crawled down her armpit. The young officer who’d taken her photo was staring at his cell, and then he whispered something in Hyo’s ear. The colonel nodded, and his face turned to granite.

  “The Pentagon has very good surveillance cameras,” he hissed.

  General Kung laughed. “Well, of course it does, Colonel.”

  “Not that one, General,” Hyo said to him. “A different Pentagon.” And then he reached out, pulled Lily’s glasses from her face, and handed them to his officer.

  General Kung jutted his head back, and Lily felt her bowels clenching. Hyo turned to Kung and spoke in clipped, angry Chinese, and Lily felt her palms going hot and slick.

  “Damn,” Shepard croaked in her ear. “Get the hell out.”

  But she couldn’t. There was nowhere to go, and she was surrounded by a storm of uniforms from every country but her own. General Kung was already recoiling from her, his face going crimson.

  Hyo leaned down across the table and stared into her eyes. “Facial recognition is so good these days. And, how do you say...speedy?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.” Her voice trembled.

  His smile was like ice. He reached out with his right hand and touched her left temple. And then he cocked his left hand back and slapped the other side of her face so hard that the crack turned the heads of everyone else in the room. She saw a burst of white light as her head snapped around, and then Hyo was looking at his right palm, where her green contact lens sat there like a screaming little mouth.

  General Kung jumped up from his seat and snapped his fingers at his bodyguards.

  “Arrest this woman!” he snapped to his men. “She is a spy— and an assassin.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dan Morgan’s gleaming Shelby Cobra roared down a long, straight highway—its snarling mouth eating up ribbons of tarmac and spitting them out from its rumbling tailpipes. He was coming up to his thirteenth hour of driving and felt it. His butt was sore, his trick knee was throbbing, and his eyes were starting to feel like he’d rubbed them with sand.

  But none of that mattered. It was all about the mission. He’d been tired before.

  Route 64 had started out interesting, winding its way northwest through the scenic lush mountains of West Virginia, where the high forests and looping turns kept him alert and feeling alive—the kind of driving he liked. But then it had straightened out, like a long pull of gray taffy, with barely a wave through the flats of Ohio—the kind of driving that he wasn’t as thrilled with.

  Still, the weather had been sunny and warm, and Neika was the perfect road trip companion. With the windows rolled down, she sat there on the passenger seat, pink tongue lolling, toothy smile wide, eyes squinted in pleasure, and the wind pinning her ears back. Even as the day faded, she never asked, “How much longer?”

  “You on comms, Cobra?”

  Shepard’s voice startled him. He turned down the western drawl of Kenny Chesney singing “Save It for a Rainy Day” on the radio. The song had made him brood about Jenny, so he was glad for the interruption.

  “Here,” he said. “You home from Wonderland for the night?”

  “Yeah,” Shepa
rd answered. “You’re my dinner date.”

  “Then work your magic and beam me up some grub. I’ve been living on sour coffee and stale donuts.”

  “Can’t do that,” Shepard scoffed. “At least not yet.”

  “So, what’s the big rig’s twenty?”

  “Approaching Lexington, Kentucky from the east on Sixty.”

  Morgan glanced at his navigator. “We’re about half an hour out.”

  “What are you going to do when you see him, Cobra? Run an eighteen-wheeler off the road with a muscle car?”

  “Maybe,” said Morgan. “Appreciate the track on this, Shep. Not sure why you’re still in the game, but thanks.”

  “I’m your biggest fan—actually, your only fan at the moment.”

  Morgan reached over and ruffled Neika’s head. “Hey, my dog still likes me.”

  “Okay, so that’s two.”

  By the time Morgan and Neika had reached the Shelby in the woods outside Virginia Tobacco, Shepard had already still-framed the video of the truck from the surveillance tapes, enlarged the image, and extracted the license plate. Then he’d tracked the truck down as a lease from a freight hauler in Colorado.

  Some sort of front company had leased the truck, so he couldn’t find any shipping manifests or delivery schedules. However, all the big trucking companies were using GPS trackers on their rigs to keep eyes on their drivers, so he’d simply hacked into the main company’s net and pinned the truck as a glowing blue dot on his laptop’s nav app.

  Unfortunately, the truck was already moving from west to east through southern Kentucky, so he had no point of origin. Finding that out would be up to Morgan, but Shepard had no doubt that he’d do it...somehow.

  “Heads-up,” Shepard said. “Got some news. That rig just pulled up somewhere. Might be a truck stop, on One Twenty-Seven just west of Lexington, right after the river.”

  Morgan squinted through the windshield at the fading sun. “Well, talk about timing. It’s obviously chow time. I think I’ll go spoil his dinner.”