The Brad West Files

by Fritz Galt

  Now it was his turn. To block the passage of air into his nose, the Venezuelan tilted his head back and threw the drink as far down his throat as it would go.

  He could cover up the flavor with spicy Chinese food in a moment.

  The bitter vapors hung on the back of his tongue long after he swallowed. Beyond the alcoholic content, there was something else in the concoction, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  People around the room suddenly turned with concern to the Chinese leader. Then Velázquez saw why. Qian was listing away from the table. Jade and others jumped to his side to grab the old man just as he slumped toward the floor.

  Velázquez gulped. The taste in his mouth made a final transformation. He, too, felt his knees buckling. He was nauseas and lightheaded and tried to steady himself.

  Final, self-recriminating thoughts passed through his mind as he fell to the polished bamboo floor. He couldn’t believe it. The Americans got him there, of all places. Maybe he shouldn’t have sent the president a box of pretzels for his birthday.

  But as his eyes slowly closed, he saw the other man also spread-eagle on the floor. The Americans had toppled the Chinese leadership as well. When it came to oil, he realized too late, there were no rules to the game.

  Chapter 25

  Brad stepped off the China Eastern flight and gaped at the interior of yet another modern Chinese airport. How many cities of a million-plus inhabitants were there in China? And why had he never heard of them?

  He looked out the terminal window at the surrounding terrain. Wuhan was disappointing from a geological standpoint. It was flat for as far as he could see.

  “Where’s the river?” he wanted to know. “Where are the mountains?”

  “We’re downstream of the gorges,” Earl said. “Just wait and see.”

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  Earl hired a taxi at the airport, and the three piled into the rusty old thing.

  The radio was blaring a dull march by a military band. Earl turned it off and shouted some instructions in the cabbie’s ear.

  The young man driving was looking down in the dumps when they first approached the car, but he mechanically followed Earl’s instructions and began to streak in a daze through the city.

  His hand occasionally reached for the radio button, but Earl slapped it away.

  Under pressure from Earl, the cabbie sped around blind curves as the road meandered through countryside, passed trucks without the slightest glimpse ahead, sped unchecked through crowded town centers, and generally made a nuisance of himself to other drivers by blaring his horn.

  But that wasn’t enough for Earl.

  He had the cabbie pull over. Then Earl kicked him out of the driver’s cage and took over control of the wheel and let the cabbie do the navigating.

  The first thing the young man did after Earl pulled back onto the road was to turn on the radio. The news had come on. Earl spluttered some instructions to the cabbie to turn it off.

  But the cabbie only leaned in closer to hear the report.

  Then Earl also took interest and slowed down to listen.

  From the ominous monotone of the announcer’s voice, Brad could tell that it was something other than the daily news. “What are they saying?”

  Earl looked solemn as he drove. “It seems that China’s president has suddenly fallen ill and may be on his deathbed.”

  Brad felt himself tense up. “Oh that’s just great.”

  “He’s an old guy,” Earl tried to reassure him. “It’s time for a new generation of leaders anyway.”

  “Don’t you know who’s next in line? Liang. Mr. Fly-boy with the trigger-happy finger.”

  Earl let out a laugh. “Don’t believe that. There’s a whole layer of men between Liang and the Party’s top spot. Haven’t you ever heard of the Party’s Central Committee?”

  “What about them?”

  Earl didn’t take his eyes off the road. “This isn’t some ancient dynasty. Bloodline doesn’t count for much any longer. If the president kicks off, the duties automatically fall to the Party elders in the Central Committee, kind of like the old Soviet politburo.”

  “So Liang will never be president of China?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Earl corrected him, and beeped his horn at a bicycle that had strayed into his path. “The Central Committee selects the next in succession. And it’s usually someone from their own ranks. I suppose if none of them wanted or could accept the chairmanship, it might fall into Liang’s lap, but that hardly seems likely.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Brad said. “I’d sure hate to have the same guy who buzzed me with a chopper then ran me off the road and blew me out of the sky taking charge of this huge country.”

  He looked to Sullivan for support. His face a deathly white, Sullivan leaned forward and knocked on the cage that separated Earl from the rest of the car.

  “Faster, please.”

  As they wound higher into mountains, every curve became a balancing act and each obstacle in Earl’s path had to swerve out of his way. He preferred the oncoming lane to his own.

  On a final rise, Brad had to catch his breath. There, laid out below them, was the entire Three Gorges Dam project.

  Earl pulled into what was designed to be a scenic overlook, complete with painted rocks in the dirt to designate parking spaces. On display were samples of construction material used to build the dam and a large diagram of the project.

  Brad stepped out of the car, leaned over, and waited for the motion sickness to pass. Finally, after a minute of deep breaths, he straightened his back and took in the layout of the world’s largest hydroelectric project.

  The diagram mounted on a railing at the edge of a cliff filled him in on the details below.

  To his right, five sets of ship locks, the world’s largest, would raise ocean-going vessels as big as 10,000 tons up to the reservoir, thus opening up central China to the rest of the world.

  To the left of that, an enormous ship lift was being built, apparently just for the heck of it.

  And then, on the far left stretched the kind of structure that only a kid with a truckload of Legos could envision. A solid block of reinforced concrete was set to hold back the Yangtze River.

  The diagram informed him that the resulting reservoir would extend over 660 kilometers and reach a depth of 110 meters at the base of the dam.

  To his alarm, the reservoir had already begun to fill up, and a sizeable lake already lapped at the base of the structure. A posted note advertised that at the opening ceremony, engineers would close off a floodgate that allowed water to flow around the dam and thereby begin the final flooding stage.

  Brad peered upriver beyond the dam into the dark gates of a gorge, the beginning of the famed Three Gorges that he had seen from the air.

  “Uh-oh. This won’t be easy,” Sullivan said. “I see choppers in the air and a row of tanks surrounding the dam.”

  Sure enough, there was even an entire airfield within the main gate of the facility. The place bristled with radar, satellite dishes, and a show of military hardware.

  Brad felt his heart begin to pound. With Liang responsible for the dam, May might be down there, too.

  Brad looked down to where several stretch limousines were entering the main gate of the dam facility. How could he, Earl, and Sullivan crash the opening ceremony?

  If they tried to infiltrate the fenced compound, they’d surely get caught in the security net. Nor did they exactly have the right credentials to get invited to the party.

  “I say we circle around the dam and get to those limestone formations before the tributaries get swamped,” he said.

  “I say we blow it off and let May look after her dad,” Earl said. “The poor old guy has bit the dust anyway, and any discovery he might have made will soon be underwater.”

  Brad stewed silently and made a vow to himself not to give in. He felt like his life depended upon getting down to the tributaries.

  “
There’s more,” Sullivan said. “Like Earl said, if the Central Committee were unwilling or unable to support someone from within their own ranks as president, it would give someone like Liang just the opportunity he needed to take power.”

  “Yeah, but to do that,” Earl said dismissively, “he’d have to knock off the entire Central Committee, ’cause there’s no way they would give it to some young turk like him.”

  Sullivan rubbed a slender finger over his moustache. “That might be his plan.”

  That stopped the conversation cold.

  Sullivan explained. “I read a dispatch yesterday saying that the entire committee is on a pleasure cruise. They will pay a final visit to ancient sculptures in a cave just prior to the opening ceremony. All fourteen of them are down there in one convenient little bundle.”

  Finding old relics before the dam began operation sounded difficult enough, but with the country’s entire government down there on the lake, security would be tight as a drum.

  Earl was thinking along the same lines. “So penetrating security would be close to impossible. The Central Committee must be surrounded by gunboats and secret service and military—”

  “Whoa,” Sullivan stopped him. “This is China, not the USA.”

  “Even tighter security, then,” Brad said.

  “On the contrary. China has a very different view of its own security. Would we build such a dam considering our vulnerability to terrorist attack? Well, the Chinese don’t feel that same vulnerability. Here, the government has complete control over all ports of entry and all airspace. And I can guarantee, the Central Committee is floating down that river feeling secure in the knowledge that no one will touch them.”

  “So no military escort?” Brad said. “No bodyguards?”

  “Why would they be necessary? If you’re a government leader in a state like this, there’s no need to create the perception that you’re among the people. There’s no interfacing with the public. Any event is completely staged. And even then, every other person in the audience is a member of state security.”

  “Fascinating,” Brad said. “Except here we are running about, and there’s a loose cannon in the military in the form of Liang.”

  “Which reminds me.” Sullivan whipped out his PDA and started pressing buttons at a furious rate. “Must see what the word is on the Chinese president.”

  Just then, Brad heard honking behind them. He whirled around and saw a black sedan with military plates and flashing lights leading another parade of limousines.

  “Pull in behind them,” Brad ordered and ran to get to the taxi. He pulled out the cabbie and stuffed him back behind the steering wheel.

  “Hope you’re right about security,” Earl told Sullivan. He took the passenger seat, and Sullivan and Brad jumped in back.

  The last limo flashed past their cab, and the cabbie eased into line behind them.

  Minutes later, the security gates opened before them like the parting of the Red Sea. Brad held his breath as they approached the guards.

  “Show your faces,” Sullivan said, and pushed Brad’s head toward the window.

  “Why?” His lips were smudging the glass.

  “Because we look foreign, like all the other dignitaries invited to the ceremony.” Sullivan also leaned over to show his face.

  Brad felt like he was trapped in a goldfish bowl. But the tactic worked. The guard allowed them in.

  The cabbie coolly followed the other cars until just before they reached a reception building. Television uplink trucks from all the major international news organizations lay siege to the building.

  “Brad, you’re the man to send up the tributary,” Sullivan said. “You’ve got to warn the committee.”

  They were easing past a hangar that housed a couple of fighter jets.

  “I’ll get out here,” Brad said.

  Earl had the taxi stop.

  “I’ll head for the river,” Brad said, “and look for the dig site, ah, I mean the committee, of course. But that’s a lot of territory, so exactly where are those Buddha statues?”

  Sullivan was consulting his PDA. “You need to find the Valley of the Caves. It’s a well-known tourist spot. To get there while the river is rising, you’ll probably have to bribe a boatman. You’ve got plenty of cash, so don’t hesitate to spend whatever it takes.”

  “When it comes to losing money, I’m your man. Maybe I’ll even get a clue as to what May’s father discovered.”

  “Just find that committee’s boat,” Sullivan said.

  At that moment, a proud, barrel-chested figure stepped out of the lead limousine and smoothed back his uniformly brown hair with a narcissistic sweep of the hand. It was Brad’s stepfather.

  “Richter!” Earl exclaimed. “I’m going to sneak in with the VIPs.”

  “Try to track Jade down. I can’t raise her on my PDA,” Sullivan said. “Tell her what’s going down, or up, as it were.”

  Earl had already stepped out of the car and was walking like a zombie toward Professor Richter’s entourage.

  “Hey, look at me. I’m a groupie,” he said over his shoulder. “You guys do your thing, and I’ll mix in with the crowd.”

  Sullivan looked ill at ease. “I’ll drive back out the gate. I need to get word to Langley.”

  Brad nodded. “It’s a plan.” He jumped out and headed for the hangar where he hoped to stumble upon May.

  Looking back, he could see Sullivan trying to get the confused cabbie to turn the car around.

  Ahead of Brad were two fighter planes and the distinctive smell of jet fuel. It felt intuitively like May’s kind of place. But there was no activity in the hangar, so he turned his attention to the chopper fleet. Three helicopters were on the ground and two were in the air. They were probably flying rotations.

  With bigwigs arriving by the carload, the ceremony looked about to begin. However, in the murky shadow cast by the enormous dam, he couldn’t make out where the ribbon-cutting ceremony would take place.

  Suddenly, he heard the thud of boots running on pavement behind him. Guards were closing in on Sullivan. They surrounded the taxi from all directions—the reception building, the guard booth, even the helicopter landing pads. Somewhat belatedly, they had identified the unauthorized vehicle.

  Make a break for it, Brad silently encouraged Sullivan.

  But Sullivan didn’t run. Nor did he lose his cool.

  With calm assurance, the trained CIA operative stepped away from the car and strode back toward the reception building, where the guards finally caught up with him.

  Sullivan was drawing their attention away from him.

  It was his chance to get away.

  Brad chose the hangar for cover and slipped into its cool, spacious interior.

  While the guards were preoccupied with apprehending Sullivan, Brad took a moment to inspect the hangar. It was mostly clear of people, save for two mechanics refueling one of the delta-wing fighter jets.

  He didn’t take his eye off them and edged along the near wall further into the enormous structure. He backed up against an office door just as it was opening. The hard metal handle caught him square in the tailbone.

  “Mother of…” he cried. He grabbed for his throbbing coccyx with one hand while clasping firmly over his mouth with the other.

  He looked for a place to hide, but realized there was none. He’d have to duke it out with whomever was about to emerge through the doorway. Out stepped a tiny soldier in combat fatigues.

  This should be easy. He raised his fist to clock the guy.

  No.

  Next thing he knew, he was doubled-over from having the wind knocked out of him, and from the hand of his still-sore arm being pinned just below his shoulder blades. He struggled to catch a breath. The pain from his shoulder forced tears to start streaming into his eyes.

  “Brad!” the soldier said. “How did you get in here?”

  He felt the pressure against his arm lift. Where had he heard that voice before? He looked
up to see that his small assailant had a familiar face to go with that voice.

  “Jade,” he wheezed, finally able to breathe. He began rubbing his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I injure you? Let me see your arm.”

  “No. I’m fine. Really,” he managed to say, and stumbled away from her. He didn’t need another session with Dr. Wang.

  “Fortunately, I realized it was you and pulled my punch,” she said. “Otherwise…”

  He didn’t want to contemplate “otherwise.” Straightening up, he looked around for a better place to talk, where they were out of view.

  Jade seemed to have the same concern. She took him by his tender shoulder and led him to a dark corner behind the nearest jet. She ordered the mechanics out of the hangar, and they complied. Despite her secret motives, she maintained an air of authority.

  She waited for Brad to collect himself, feel for broken ribs and restore normal breathing. She certainly was one very cool cookie.

  “What are you doing here?” he finally blurted out.

  “I’m part of security for this event,” she explained. “The dam will begin operation at five o’clock.”

  “You’ve got to stop it. Liang’s got the entire Central Committee bobbing around on a death cruise out there.”

  Her eyes widened, as if the larger picture suddenly came into focus.

  She looked at her watch and for a fleeting moment appeared slightly frustrated by time. “It’s four o’clock,” she said. “The ceremony starts in an hour. When they close the floodgates prior to firing the turbines, there will be a powerful backwash, almost like a tsunami.”

  “And May? Where is she?” he pressed.

  “Liang wanted her close at hand. He has had her inspecting the troops all week, but I happen to know she has been sneaking away to look for her—”

  “Does she know yet?” Brad interrupted. “Her father is dead.”

  Jade took a deep breath. “Well, that will certainly make one man happy.” Then she said in a tone so low that he could barely make out her words, “She might be down there now, looking for him. Maybe she has already recovered his body.”