The particles of wall in Max’s eyes made them water, and he blinked in an attempt to flush out the debris. Gunfire sounded from the dining room, but with the variety of weapons used by his team and sensory overload, it was difficult to distinguish whom the shots were coming from.
The three Asians reached for something on the table. If they were grabbing for drinks, they were about to pay dearly for their thirst. Max squeezed the trigger and whacked the nearest man at the table, knocking him off his seat before he could grab whatever it was he was after. Eyes still cloudy, Max could make out the blur of his red dot as he placed it on a man pulling what appeared to be a handgun from beneath the wrappers on the table. Max popped him twice before he could shoot him or his teammates. From somewhere deeper inside the house came a woman’s scream, possibly a girlfriend of one of the thugs.
In the kitchen doorway, a man with a drink-filled glass dropped it and it shattered on the floor before he turned and ran away.
“I got a runner!” Max called out to his teammates. The runner might have been making a move for a weapon and a protected shooting position. He was noncompliant, so Max fired. Miss.
Max chased him into the kitchen, but the runner disappeared, and the kitchen door leading outside was open. Shots came from outside.
On the tile floor in front of Max, the man with the shotgun clutched his bleeding chest with one hand and his shotgun with the other.
“Don’t,” Max warned him.
The man with the shotgun seemed to think for a moment, but he made a move, and Max smoked him.
Vision still fuzzy, his eyes returned to the open kitchen door.
Max sprinted out the door to see if the agent there was okay but found him with a gunshot wound to the head and a pool of blood beneath. Drops of blood led away from the agent and the house. The agent must’ve wounded his attacker.
Max spotted a blur climb over a tall wooden fence. Involuntarily Max blinked, trying to clear the junk out of his eyes. He switched the fire-selector switch on his rifle to safe and transitioned his weapon to hang on his back by the sling as he made a running leap at the fence. Both hands grasped the top, and he pulled himself over—not knowing what he’d find on the other side.
As he cleared the fence, he spotted the shooter, now with a pistol in his hand, running between two houses. When Max’s feet touched grass, his hands returned to his weapon, and he gave chase.
The shooter collided head-on with a youthful brunette walking beside her house. He laid her out flat on a lush green lawn. Max jumped over her. Then the shooter tumbled down a steep grassy hill before he crossed a street in front of a furniture delivery truck that didn’t slow down. Max slid down the hill and crossed the street behind the truck.
In someone’s backyard vegetable garden, the shooter came to a stop, but instead of aiming his weapon at Max, he held a middle-aged woman at gunpoint. The chase must’ve knocked most of the crap out of Max’s eyes, but there were still tears, and he blinked them away. Dressed in blue sweatpants and a faded fleece sweater, the female hostage wore dirty gloves, and her red hair was tied in a neat ponytail. Near her feet were spinach plants, scissors, and a bowl with some cut spinach leaves inside. She didn’t panic, but her lips were taut, and her body tense.
Max lined up his red dot with the enemy’s forehead and clicked his weapon off safe. There wasn’t enough wind to affect a shot significantly to the left or right. Max didn’t want to shoot too high or too low. Too high would result in a miss and possibly anger the enemy into killing the woman. Too low might shatter the enemy’s nose and cause a lot of bleeding, but he’d still be able to pull the trigger. Max had performed the task again and again, and he believed he could do it this time, too.
The shooter turned and faced Max, who squeezed the trigger before the man could aim. Max’s bullet struck the would-be kidnapper in the forehead, gray matter spilt out the back of his head, and his body sank as if his bones melted.
The woman stood like a petrified tree.
“I’m with the FBI,” Max said in an unruffled voice. “Get in the house and lock the doors.”
The pupils in her eyes, and her whole body appeared stuck for a moment, unable to move. Max had seen it before. Then she bent down to cut more spinach, as if in denial of what had just happened. In her confused state, there was no telling how long she’d continue to do tasks that were no longer critical to saving her life.
Max’s speech turned terse, and he turned up the volume. “Leave the damn spinach and get in the house! Now!” He physically pulled her up, turned her around, and pushed her toward the house. The direction and momentum seemed to help because she walked to her home under her own power. “And lock the door!” He left the woman and the dead body and bounded back over the fence to help his brother and their friends.
31
While June, Pepper, and the other agents secured the rest of the house, Tom approached the last unsearched bedroom on the second floor. His adrenaline throbbed as his vision wrapped around the doorknob in front of him, but he couldn’t allow himself to get cocooned into tunnel vision now. He needed his peripheral vision, too. The door was locked, so he kicked it near the knob. The door flew open so violently that the knob punctured the drywall behind it and stuck there. Next to the bedroom window, an Asian man wearing jeans and a red shirt held a pistol at his side. Behind him, another man, this one wearing a brown leather jacket, was climbing out. Red Shirt turned toward Tom, a startled expression on his face. Red Shirt’s hand jerked, and he shot a hole in the floor.
Eager to drop him, Tom fired his first shot before his red dot was lined up between the enemy’s shoulders. Tom’s bullet struck the enemy in the side of the belly. The guy grimaced and faced Tom’s direction. Before he could bring his pistol up, Tom fired again, this time hitting high on the man’s chest. He slid down the wall as if hoping it would somehow stop his descent. Tom’s red dot traced the man’s downward movement, trying for another upper body shot, but his sights moved faster than the body fell, and his next round landed in the man’s thigh. He lay still, and Tom took an extra moment and gave the man an accurate parting head shot.
Tom had given the one man so much attention that he almost forgot about the man in the brown jacket, who had jumped out the window. Tom pointed his rifle outside and scanned the area below. He spotted an agent chasing Brown Jacket around the neighboring house.
Jumping from the second story seemed a bit extreme, but Brown Jacket seemed to have succeeded, and now he was getting away, so Tom switched his fire-selector switch to safe, slung his weapon on his body, and crawled through the window. He held onto the ledge and quickly lowered himself until his arms stretched long. Then he let go. His flight was quick.
The lawn wasn’t as forgiving as he’d supposed. Although he tried to roll off the brunt of the force, the impact on his legs, hips, and shoulder was significant. For a split second it made his ears ring, but he shook his head, readied his weapon as he stood, and took off.
When he turned the corner of the house where the agent and Brown Jacket had disappeared, only the agent was there, jogging toward the next house. “Friendly behind you,” Tom called to the agent, who glanced back and nodded. Ahead, the sound of barking dogs intensified—maybe Brown Jacket was passing through. Tom and the agent headed in the direction of the noise.
They tore across the grass of a house on the corner of the block, and a man sporting a comb-over stopped on the sidewalk and stared at them. Beyond him, Brown Jacket vanished between two houses. The softer turf became pavement, and their feet pounded it as they passed Comb-Over and closed the gap between them and their quarry. Two Rottweilers threw themselves against their fenced-in enclosure and barked up a frenzy, which stirred up the dogs in the surrounding neighborhoods. Tom loved dogs when they were on his side, but he hated them when they weren’t.
At the gap between the two houses, an Asian man—not Brown Jacket—knelt on one knee and aimed a weapon at Tom and the agent. If Tom’s heart was still b
eating, he didn’t feel it, and he held his breath. He hadn’t noticed an accomplice, but he could’ve bailed out the window before Brown Jacket. Or the man could be a law-abiding citizen defending his home. A pair of brick mailboxes stood in front of Max and the agent, so they crouched behind them, using them as shields.
“FBI, drop the weapon!” the agent shouted.
The man blasted at the agent and Tom on full auto—the sound of an AK was one that Tom had become intimately familiar with. Bullets smacked the brick mailboxes, and the sonic slap of a passing bullet sounded near Tom’s ear.
“FBI, drop it!” the agent repeated.
But the enemy continued to shoot at them.
There was a lull in the firing. Tom and the agent peeked around the mailboxes and aimed. As soon as Tom’s red dot touched the shooter’s body, he squeezed the trigger. The agent fired, too.
The shooter’s upper body twisted as if he was hit, but the AK rattled off again, so Tom ducked behind his shield. When the shooter ran out of bullets, Tom peeked from his brick barrier and let him have it as he was trying to reload his AK. The agent capped the shooter, too. Neither Tom nor the agent let up firing until they dropped the shooter on the lawn like a sack of fertilizer.
Tom felt like eyes were on them, but he and the agent didn’t stick around long enough to verify any onlookers. The two passed the body and cleared the gap between the two houses. They skirted a backyard fence before arriving at the rear of a string of stores facing a busy street. Now Tom and the agent could only guess where Brown Jacket was. The agent signaled Tom to go search the shops, and he would investigate a cluster of houses. Splitting up increased the odds of locating Brown Jacket. But it also gave Brown Jacket more favorable odds in a gunfight.
Tom ventured into a business district crowded with people. He wished he still had his tennis bag to conceal his rifle. C’est la vie.
32
Wei holstered his pistol, concealing it under his brown leather jacket, and blended in with the pedestrians in front of the shops as he continued to evade the two FBI agents chasing him. Although he tried to display a neutral attitude for his surroundings, the sight of a fat couple, clothing their supersized appetites with XXL Tshirts, disgusted him. America’s insatiable greed, short history, and shortsighted economics would be its downfall. Even though the Americans couldn’t keep their own house in order, they insisted on interfering with China. But China would triumph, and Wei had every reason to believe that he and Zhao were the keys to that victory.
Ahead, two uniformed police officers rushed across the street to his sidewalk. The cops didn’t seem to pay attention to him. He stopped and looked through a green-framed window to act like he was window-shopping. Across the glass the words “Murphy’s Pub” were stenciled in green letters. In his peripheral vision, opposite the police, he watched for the two FBI agents, but they hadn’t appeared yet. The uniformed cops still didn’t notice him. Maybe they were heading to the scene of the gun battle, but Wei didn’t stick around to find out where they were headed. He opened the door to Murphy’s Pub.
Inside the bar there were about twenty tables, and most of them were occupied with boisterous men and a handful of women watching a soccer game on an overhead monitor. The noise inside blocked all sound from the outside. A few middle-aged guys eyed Wei suspiciously. I am armed, have extra magazines, and possess superior skills in martial arts. I can deal with anyone in this pub and then some. At one table a young police officer sat with two unarmed men in uniforms bearing patches that read “Arlington Virginia Fire EMS,” but they seemed too busy talking to each other to notice Wei. The aroma of fried chicken and onions tantalized his taste buds. Above the bar was a neon shamrock and below it was a display of drinks, and Wei fancied drinking a Bushmills whiskey. There was something vaguely familiar about the bar, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Somehow it reminded him of a tavern in Guangzhou, China, that he and his South Blade commandoes frequented, yet there was nothing Irish about that place.
A waitress greeted him and offered to show him to a seat, but if trouble walked through the front door, he didn’t want to be sitting. “Can I see a menu, please?” he asked.
“Certainly,” the waitress said before she retrieved one and handed it to him.
“Thank you.” He opened it and glanced at spinach and artichoke dip and Murphy’s burger and pretended to continue reading as he kept one eye on the front windows.
The two cops he’d seen cross the street passed by. Wei would give them a couple minutes before making his exit.
Then one of the FBI agents who’d been chasing him appeared in front of the window. Wei mentally swore using the Chinese equivalent of the f-bomb: Cào!
He kept wishing for the agent to move along, but the agent lingered. Cào.
Although Wei favored his marksmanship abilities over the agent’s, the agent wielded an assault rifle that held more rounds and packed more power than his pistol. He hoped the agent wouldn’t enter the pub. But the agent turned toward the pub window and noticed Wei. Cào, cào.
The young police officer in the restaurant stared at Wei and whispered something to his EMS buddy. Outside, the FBI agent kept his eyes on Wei, shuffled sideways, and raised his weapon.
If I take a hostage, I can use the hostage as a shield while I move to a back exit and slip away. He closed the space between himself and the waitress, grabbed her forcefully, and quick-drew his pistol. He pressed the muzzle to her head and shouted, “Nobody make a move or I kill her!”
The waitress gasped, as did a couple others, which was the effect Wei intended.
Then he waved his pistol around the restaurant for emphasis. “Don’t move, or I kill everyone!”
Disobeying his command, many of the occupants in the bar did move. Wei wondered if there was something wrong with his English. Suddenly, pistols appeared from all around—the few middle-aged men who’d first eyed him with suspicion, the young cop, women, the bartender, and others—each of them aimed at him. He knew of America’s gun culture, but this was more severe than he’d expected. Although now he needed 360-degree protection, he only held one human shield. Because the customers were seated and he was standing, most of them could shoot up at him without hitting each other. Cào.
He aimed at the nearest attacker, focusing his sights on the young cop pointing his service pistol. From an unseen direction, a bullet struck Wei’s shoulder, and he couldn’t feel his pistol hand. Before he could turn and shoot his attacker, more bullets struck Wei’s upper body. It sounded like sitting in a small bathroom and lighting off a string of firecrackers. His body convulsed, and his blood sprayed like confetti from a cannon. It felt like being beat with clubs, and he wished the pain would stop. The sight of the young cop became blurry, and he couldn’t feel the metal trigger against his finger. A shot struck his neck, and he no longer smelled the fried chicken and onions. Then a snap sounded inside his head like a fuse blew, and the lights went out.
33
The FBI secured the crime scenes at the house and the pub. Meanwhile, Max, Tom, and June borrowed one of the Bureau’s unmarked vehicles and used it for an impromptu meeting. “I sent Young a photo of the Asian shooter who died in the pub,” Tom said. “He ran the photo through facial recognition. Young thinks he was a commando named Wei Wuyang.”
“Guess Wing-Wang won’t be waving his gun around in any more cop bars,” Max snickered.
“Wei was Zhao’s right-hand man,” June said.
“We must be getting closer to Zhao,” Tom said.
“Or Zhao is getting closer to us,” June said.
A knock sounded on the car window. It was Pepper. Tom opened the back door, and she sat next to him in the backseat.
“We confiscated the cell phone of the Asian shooter at the pub,” she said. “It was an iPhone 5C running on an iOS9 operating system, so our tech was able to insert a piece of hacking hardware to bypass the security feature so it wouldn’t erase all the data. Then it was easy for him to unlock th
e four-digit personal ID number. On the phone our tech found maps of the Pentagon and surrounding areas.”
“So maybe Five does refer to the Pentagon,” Tom said. “What about the code word Country? Do we have any intel connecting to a possible hit on the White House or the president?”
June cleared her throat. “The English code word Horizontal is a translation from the first Chinese character in the word ‘Yokosuka.’ And Pearl is the English translation from the first Chinese character in the word ‘Pearl Harbor.’ Five is the first Chinese character in ‘Pentagon.’ But Country isn’t a Chinese character in the spelling of ‘White House.’”
“Zhao targeted military leadership commanding the Pacific area,” Tom said. “Who could be more important in the military chain of command than the commander in chief?”
“If the president were assassinated,” Max said, “he’d automatically be replaced by the vice president. Such a change would shock the country, but it’d do little to deter the US military in the Pacific or worldwide.”
“If Zhao still has the anthrax,” Tom said, “he might try to kill the vice president, too. Kill two birds with one stone. Maybe three or four birds.”
Max shook his head. “Then Zhao would have to kill the Speaker of the House, president pro tempore of the Senate, secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and about twelve others before he wiped out the whole line of succession. The chance of getting all those people in one room at one time and being able to hit them with anthrax would be slim at best.”
June smiled. “You said Speaker of the House. And president pro tempore of the US Senate.”
“So?” Max said.
“The English code word Country is a translation from the first Chinese character in both the House of Representatives and Senate,” June said. “And Congress and the Capitol.”
Autumn Assassins: [#3] A Special Operations Group Thriller Page 20