Autumn Assassins: [#3] A Special Operations Group Thriller

by Stephen Templin

  June cleared her throat. “Pardon?”

  Max continued with his detective work. “With the way you’re dressed and the gift poking out of your bag, it seems you’re about to meet him.”

  “Max, shut up,” Tom snapped.

  But Max kept at it. “A nice dress like that, you aren’t dressing for a six-hour flight or whatever,” he said. “And the wrapping and bow on that gift seem a bit more than the usual gift shop wrapping. The red color of the paper even matches your lipstick.”

  June turned her head away from Max.

  Max walked over to her. “You’ve got small breasts, and this is your attempt to make up for it.” He picked the gift out of her bag and looked at it. “I’d say you’re preparing to meet someone …” Then he read the name on the name tag: For Max. Then the air went out of his voice like a busted bubble. “… special.” His mouth closed, and he became still. He felt like such an ass. And sad for her. An uncomfortable silence seemed to go on for much too long. The quiet was painful.

  June broke the silence and turned toward Max. “You’re always so mean.” She seemed short of breath as she inhaled a big gulp of air. “So cruel. Mean and cruel.” She managed a smile on her face, but it didn’t seem real.

  Max swallowed hard, and his eyes shot down, but his gaze fell on the present in his hands, and he wanted to crawl out of his skin and escape, but there was nowhere to go.

  Tom and June stared at him.

  Max looked into June’s eyes, and his voice became unsteady. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.” He couldn’t remember the last time he apologized, if ever.

  She stood frozen, as if his apology had set off a stun grenade in the room. Then she picked up Tom’s cocoa cup from the table to take a drink, but it was empty. After regaining her composure, she calmly said goodbye and rolled her suitcase out the door.

  “She needs to stay,” Tom said. “She needs to go with us to the Pentagon.”

  “I feel badly about what just happened,” Max said, “but her participating in this mission is a separate issue.”

  “I agree that you’re an ass, and that’s a separate issue. But my gut is telling me she should stay.”

  “Is it your gut, or are you just feeling sorry for her?” Max asked.

  “It’s my gut.”

  “If she stays with us, she’ll be operating out of her league. She doesn’t have the skills or experience we do.”

  “The Lord lifts up the meek and casts the wicked down to the ground,” Tom said. “I agree it doesn’t make sense. But maybe she has more to offer, and we just haven’t found it yet. Maybe her Chinese skills or something.”

  “You might feel sorry for her now, but you’ll really feel sorry if she ends up dead. Or gets one of the good guys killed. One of us.”

  “I understand. But if I don’t follow this feeling, and someone else suffers because I didn’t act on it, I’ll have to live with that the rest of my life. And she did make you apologize, and that was pretty amazing.” The corners of Tom’s mouth turned up.

  Max frowned.

  “I’m going to catch her before she gets on a plane to Vietnam,” Tom said. “So she can ride with us to the mainland.” He hurried out the door.

  28

  Zhao learned that both admirals were in critical condition, so he and Wei packed their gear onto a private jet. Using a fictitious corporation, the official paperwork for the plane was easier to acquire than a driver’s license. Zhao’s men had replaced the fuel tanks with larger ones to increase the plane’s range and skirted the law by not reporting the modifications. Their pilot was an American citizen with a criminal background who exploited the fact that the US Federal Aviation Administration focused more on safety than law enforcement, and that wealthy private aircraft owners were powerful lobbyists against new regulations.

  The ex-con pilot flew Zhao and Wei through the night, and the next morning, they landed in Nevada. Then Zhao and Wei drove to another airport before they boarded a different private jet and flew east.

  The sky darkened as they soared above Virginia. Zhao had spent his lifetime transcending the fragile state of humanity to transform himself into something greater—a symbol that would inspire his men. Soon he would inspire them again. He leaned over the armrest of his seat and told Wei, “You know, in 230 BC, the king of Qin began to conquer the surrounding states, including the homeland of the master swordsman Jing Ke, who joined others in their fight for freedom. I will do the same. After your team kills the vice chairman and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and my man releases anthrax into the Senate, China will be free to restore its power in the Pacific.”

  Wei nodded. “As I’ve said before, it’s a brilliant plan.”

  “Jing was later hired to assassinate the king, so Jing disguised himself as a nobleman and offered the king a map of an area the king wanted to conquer and the head of a general who he wanted killed. However, inside the map scroll, Jing had hidden one of the sharpest daggers in the land, covered with poison. When the king opened the scroll, Jing picked up the dagger and attacked, but the king retreated, only suffering a torn sleeve. Jing threw his dagger at the king but missed, and the king drew his sword and cut Jing down. Then the king’s guards finished Jing off. But where Jing failed to strike the final blow with his poison dagger, I will succeed.”

  “Victory will be yours,” Wei said excitedly.

  Zhao sang a song that the assassin Jing had sung before riding off to kill the king. Although in Jing’s lyrics the hero didn’t return, Zhao’s song was more hopeful. “Wind blow, river freeze. The hero fords, and he returns!”

  “You would’ve been a great assassin against the king if you’d lived in the period of the Warring States,” Wei said.

  Zhao smiled confidently. “But I did. I did.”

  The thread of reincarnation connected Zhao’s past with his present and future. It was the sum of these threads that strengthened the material of his destiny, and his destiny for this operation included victory. He pulled out his smartphone and sent out two text messages—Autumn Wind Five and Autumn Wind Country—activating his remaining sleeper spies and their men.

  29

  Max, Tom, and June flew on an Agency jet out of Hawaii. It wasn’t Willy’s plane, but it was still a sweet ride. Max wondered what Tom said that convinced her to stay. As they entered Washington, DC, airspace, June sat in the custom leather seat beside Max and buckled her seat belt. She looked at him as if she wanted to say something but was hesitant. Tom sat in the chair facing him with a shit-eating grin like he was about to spring an ambush.

  June cleared her throat. “Tom told me about—he told me how life hasn’t been so easy for you. How you lost your mother. How your father was often away on training or real-world ops. And how much of your childhood you sacrificed to raise your brother. That you’d do anything for family.”

  This was uncomfortable. Max didn’t appreciate having so much of his personal life aired out in public, and he gave Tom a look that told him so.

  Tom leaned forward. “I told her that’s why you can be rough around the edges sometimes. And you don’t have truck with the sentimental. But that’s never an excuse for you to treat her poorly, and she doesn’t have to take any crap from you.”

  “Tom said you want me to stay,” June said with a tender smile, “but you just don’t know how to tell me. I understand.”

  Max didn’t remember telling Tom that he wanted June to stay. In fact, he remembered specifically telling him the opposite. He looked at Tom thinking, What the hell?

  A sheepish grin spread across Tom’s face.

  Max’s patience was near its end, but he kept his emotions in check. “Are we through with our little therapy session?”

  Tom and June continued to smile, making Max feel more uncomfortable, and he couldn’t wait to disembark the plane and meet their FBI liaison.

  They touched down on the runway and their plane taxied into a private hangar where it parked. A blonde wearing a bob hairstyle part
ed to the side met them as they stepped off the air stairs. She wore jeans, a jean jacket, and wraparound sunglasses. Her body was rockin’, but her handshake and tone of voice were all business. “Agent Angelina Cassidy, but everyone calls me Pepper.”

  Max became all smiles. “Max Wayne. And this is Tom Wayne and June Lee.”

  “Are you two brothers?” Pepper asked.

  “Yes,” Max and Tom said in unison.

  “Thought so,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Thanks for helping us out,” Tom said.

  “Bring your weapons.” Pepper said. “You can use our ammo. We have a great armorer, and if you need more weapons, you can borrow from our armory.”

  Max’s grin broadened. “One can never have enough weapons and ammo.”

  Pepper whisked them across town to the Bureau’s field office next to the Potomac River. In most parking lots, a group of athletic people with mission-focused eyes and sound-suppressed assault rifles was cause for alarm, but in the FBI parking lot, Pepper gave a pair of agents a friendly wave, and the agents didn’t miss a step, as if to say it was just another day at the Bureau.

  Pepper guided Max, Tom, and June past security inside the building. They convened with some of her fellow agents inside a conference room. She gestured for them to sit, and they did.

  “We’ve been receiving updates from your Agency colleague, Willy Madison, about an Operation Autumn Wind, so we’ve been on the lookout for any new clues regarding that operation. Recently, the Bureau copied a text message received by a Chinese gang we have under surveillance. The message was Autumn Wind Five.”

  “That’s awesome,” Tom asked.

  “Was that the whole message?” Max asked.

  “That was the whole message—three words,” Pepper said. “The gang house is located in Falls Church, Virginia. The owner is a Chinese-American whose history shows he was born in Virginia and has lived there his whole life, but the first three digits of his Social Security number indicate that it was issued in California. And he works at a company that has a history of employing illegal Chinese immigrants. I received a warrant to search the home.”

  “Could this guy just be an illegal immigrant?” Tom asked.

  “Could be,” Pepper said. “That’s why we need to be careful not to use any more force than is necessary. But like I said, that house is already under surveillance for gang-related activity. I can execute the warrant today, but I can only supply five agents in addition to myself. We’re part of an interagency task force that’s been planning a drug bust for months, and it goes down today. On top of that, the vice president is making a public appearance, and we’re assisting the Secret Service’s counterassault team. We’ll have more manpower tomorrow, if you can wait.”

  “Today would be better,” Max said. He looked at Tom.

  Tom nodded in agreement. “We’ll need one or more agents outside of the target building to catch any squirters.”

  “And some sort of cover,” Max added, “so Zhao or his men won’t see us coming.”

  “Right,” Pepper said. “We’ll outfit everyone with disguises so we can get in close without raising suspicion. Then we’ll approach the target area from three different directions. I’ll put an agent on the back and one on the side of the target building for the takedown. And I’ll position a tech near the target area so we can immediately gather intel off any electronic devices we find.”

  When the meeting was finished, Pepper helped Max and the others quickly put together some disguises. Max dressed in brown coveralls similar to a UPS deliveryman and concealed his M4 in a brown cardboard package. Tom wore shorts and a sweatshirt with his shorty M4 rifle in a tennis bag. June and Pepper wore regular street clothes with their pistols concealed under their blouses on their hips. Pepper also carried a guitar case with a shotgun inside.

  June twitched more than her usual squirrely tics, and Max wanted to give her some useful advice, but he couldn’t dump his years of experience on her in a few minutes and expect her to absorb it all. The assault on the target would flood her brain with even more information and stimuli, so he decided to keep it simple. “You’ll be fine.”

  She smiled at him nervously. “I hope so.”

  Max didn’t know if she’d be fine or not, but he lied to steady her nerves. “You will.”

  30

  Max rode in the front passenger seat with Tom in the back as June drove. Pepper and two agents rode in a second vehicle while three more agents came in a third. After driving to Falls Church, the vehicles split up and approached the target area from three different directions.

  As the Wayne brothers and June rolled through the streets, leaves welcomed them with a parade of colors—dandelion yellows, tangerine oranges, carnation pinks, russet reds, and burnt siennas.

  Max looked in the backseat to see how his brother was doing. He was quiet with his head bowed—probably saying a silent prayer.

  Max felt gratitude for Tom, Dad, Willy, Young, Bane, June, Pepper, and the many other friends and teammates he knew. He was thankful for his pistol. And his rifle. He was happy to have survived so many brushes with death. He appreciated the basic things in life—food, clothing, and a place to live. If he was a praying man, he would thank God for all of it, but he barely remembered saying a prayer as a child, and after Maman died, he never prayed again. Now he felt vulnerable not asking for divine assistance, but just asking for it didn’t mean that divine assistance would come.

  June parked their vehicle on a quiet street in the affluent neighborhood where their target lived. Max exited the vehicle with his brother and June. Outside, the air smelled crisp and clean. A sparrow sang what sounded like the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  From multiple directions the team members converged on a two-story, two-car-garage brick Colonial-style house with a tightly manicured lawn and boxwood bushes trimmed in the shapes of big balls. Plump pumpkins and squash decorated the flower garden in front of the house, and a harvest wreath hung on the door. Next door, a middle-aged man carried a handful of mail from his brick mailbox to his house. Out of the corner of Max’s eye, he watched the man for signs of suspicion or unease at the team’s presence. The man seemed oblivious to the real purpose of the deliveryman, tennis player, female musician, and casual woman—their arrival at the same location appearing random. As they traversed a carpet of leaves leading to the front door of the target house, the neighbor with the mail disappeared inside his house. So far, so good.

  Although autumn was a season of thanksgiving, the feast couldn’t begin without the reaping, and Max was ready to cut down some bad men. The front door had two deadbolts in addition to the lock on the doorknob. The good guys were on target and the time for the charade was over. Max opened his package, gripped his M4 assault rifle, and let the cardboard drop to the ground. He glanced around at the others on his team. Tom unzipped his tennis bag and produced his M4, too. Pepper didn’t have a key to the door, but she had a guitar case. More importantly, she had what was inside: a shotgun loaded with breaching rounds—frangible pellets that would dissipate after blasting through the door. June lifted the bottom of her blouse and drew her weapon. A woman in the house across the street stared out the window at them.

  Max second-guessed himself again for allowing Tom to talk him into bringing June along. She might get herself or someone else killed. But he and his mates were stacked beside the house—they were at the point of no return.

  Tom squeezed Max’s shoulder from behind, signaling that the train was ready to depart the station. Max faced Pepper, and she nodded. She aimed her shotgun at the first of the hinges and fired. Then she quickly blasted the second hinge. Immediately after the third hinge blew, Max rushed inside. Indoors, no lights were on and little natural light shone in. The stale air tasted so thick with stale tobacco and some other funk that he almost choked.

  Three Asians, two on a sofa and one on a stuffed chair, sat around a low table in the living room. Their hands moved in a blur, a
nd Max couldn’t make out whether their hands were empty or not. Even if they were holding something, the lighting was too dim to see what it was.

  “Don’t move!” Max and Tom shouted.

  Max had a vague sense that there were people in the dining room, but he already had his hands full with the left side of the living room, and the dining room to the right was in Tom’s area of responsibility.

  “FBI!” Pepper called out from behind.

  A man appeared from the kitchen, next to the living room. In his hand he held a drink. “Don’t shoot!” he pleaded.

  The three Asians at the low table held their empty hands up, but their hands weren’t high. There were items scattered all over the table—food, wrappers, beer bottles—and Max struggled to separate the wheat from the chaff, searching for weapons or other dangers. He knew his teammates entered the house with him, but his focus had become so intense that he experienced tunnel vision and couldn’t see them. He struggled between focusing on little details in front of his face and seeing the big picture.

  The man in the kitchen doorway continued to beg and held up his glass as if to show it wasn’t a weapon. “Don’t shoot!” The man’s eyes were wide with fear, and he didn’t seem to be faking.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” another voice cried out. It came from Tom’s side of the house.

  “FBI!” Pepper repeated.

  “Get on the floor now!” Max and his buddies shouted as they shuffle-stepped deeper into the house to take control.

  Crash. At first, Max thought it was a gunshot, but he realized it was a broken glass, as if someone’s drink had fallen and shattered on the hardwood floor. He didn’t see the fallen drink, and it probably came from the dining room on Tom’s side, but it was possible it happened in front of Max, and his senses were too overloaded to recognize it. Whatever the noise was, it raised the pressure in the house to the point of bursting.

  Bam! It sounded more like an explosion than an M4 or AK rifle. Particles of wall—fabric and plaster—sprayed his eyes, but he could see well enough to spot a shotgun barrel sticking out of the kitchen doorway between the scared man and the wall. Max returned fire, but the target was too small, and he missed, so he fired his M4 into the wall, hoping to punch through it and hit the bigger target of the shooter standing behind it. A loud thump sounded, as if a body hit the floor.