Red Cell (22 page)

Pioneer stood in front of the Capital Theater, watching the traffic as though waiting to flag down a taxi. It was his preferred site for such operations. Pioneer enjoyed the performing arts and could speak intelligently about a broad range of plays, particularly Western musicals. The music of
Les Misérables
haunted him. Jean Valjean’s story of a man living a life of secrets felt like his own, and Pioneer had learned some
of his limited English by following the libretto’s text as he listened to the album in his apartment.

It was cold enough that Pioneer’s breath was visible in the air; yesterday’s warmth was gone. He wore a black overcoat and red scarf—not the blue one that he usually wore—positioned not to obscure his face. This operational act didn’t require him to do anything except be recognizable from a short distance. Pioneer carried no classified material tonight. There was nothing on his person that could incriminate him if he were searched, and yet he was more tense tonight than he had been any other night he could remember. Perhaps the evening he had first walked in and volunteered to work for the CIA could compare, but his stress that night almost twenty-five years before had merely been compounded by nervousness. Ignorance worked in his favor then. Now his anxiety was multiplied by experience. He wondered if the MSS had tracked how often he changed the colors of his scarves, the answer to which was
never
until tonight. He hoped that they wouldn’t realize that the change had to do with something more than mere fashion.

Mitchell approached the theater. He moved the car one lane to the left out of the rightmost lane. It was a purely diversionary maneuver that forced the MSS officers in the cars behind to watch his car instead of the sidewalk to his right as he passed the Capital Theater. The patrons, both Chinese and foreigners, were still mingling in front in a sizable crowd. Mitchell wished that he could park the car and buy a ticket to whatever was playing.
The Monkey King,
which had been as good as the reviewers claimed, had left the station chief thinking about another night out at the theater with his wife.

The time window for the sign of life was five minutes. There would be no contact between them, which would make it impossible for some counterintelligence analyst to prove that the close proximity wasn’t a coincidence. That was the theory. Proximity might be enough to set the MSS off, depending on their level of paranoia, if they were watching Pioneer . . . and the Chinese were a paranoid bunch.

Mitchell didn’t slow the car or turn his head to look for the asset. It was all done with the eyes. He looked right. Pioneer was there as scheduled.

Sign of life. He’s still free,
Mitchell thought. But Pioneer was wearing the red scarf, not the blue, and the CIA officer was sure he felt his chest seize up.

They’re watching him.

He made the left turn onto the Jianguomennei Dajie, the artery road that passed between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, both landmarks west of his position. He straightened out the car and drove east toward the embassy district. He said nothing until he arrived at his office, closed and locked the door, and dialed the number for Barron’s office. Only here could Mitchell open up. The room was swept for microphones and other such gear on a schedule. “Hey, boss.”

“How’d it go?” Barron asked.

“He’s alive and running loose, but they’re on him,” Mitchell said.

“Then why not pick him up? Any chance that the locals don’t really know?”

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Pioneer called it, not me,” Mitchell said. “And it could explain why the package wasn’t at the drop site.”

“That means there’s a high probability that you’ve been burned too,” Barron said. “Betcha the MSS had a microcamera inside that bathroom or outside pointing at the door.”

“Probably a safe bet,” Mitchell admitted. “Sorry you’re going to have to find a new station chief. Makes me wonder why they didn’t pick me up.”

“They’re still trying to pull apart the entire network, most likely,” Barron said. “We don’t know how long he’s been under surveillance. They could have been watching him for a year now, for all we know.”

“We can’t leave him hanging, boss,” Mitchell pleaded, his voice rising. “Twenty-five years has gotta count for something. We’ve gotta get him out.” His own emotion surprised him. He wasn’t a young man and thought he had mastered the art of keeping his feelings out of the way of his professional judgment a long time ago. It was a dangerous weakness and it disturbed him to see it in himself.

“It counts for a lot. We won’t hang him out to dry,” Barron said.

“I want to run the exfil to get him out.”

“No promises,” Barron said. “We don’t play the game stupid. When in doubt, get out. Live to fight another day.”

Mitchell frowned. The mantra had sounded smart the first time he’d heard it. Now it felt like a coward’s motto. “Words to stay out of jail by,” he said, not feeling the truth of them.

On the other side of the world, Barron nodded. Mitchell wasn’t
a stupid man. He was always professional. “We’ll make sure Pioneer stays that way. I don’t care what anyone says, yes or no, we owe him. I’ll talk to Cooke.”

REPUBLIC OF CHINA SHIP (ROCS)
MA KONG
(DDG–1805)
TSO YING NAVAL BASE
KAOHSIUNG CITY, TAIWAN

Captain Wu Tai-cheng stared down at the bow of the
Ma Kong
, sucked in a lungful of the cold open air, and enjoyed the swell of pride that rose in his chest. The ship was lit up by the dockside lights, and the hard metal structures of the vessel’s radar masts made for a frightening image illuminated against the black sky as he turned his head to look up. His pride was entirely justified. This was a vessel to be feared. He knew it and the Chinese knew it. There were only four
Kidd
-class destroyers in the entire world, Taiwan owned them all, and he commanded one of them. The Americans had built them for the shah of Iran, but that corrupt old tyrant had lost his throne to the mullahs before taking delivery. So their builders had put them to use, calling them the
Ayatollah
-class as a joke. Wu’s ship had once been called the USS
Chandler
before the Taiwanese government bought it and its sister ships years before.

Ma Kong
was not as capable as the
Arleigh Burke
–class destroyers that the Americans wouldn’t sell out of fear that the Chinese would be upset, but it was a deadly vessel in its own right. Its engines were quiet enough that it could hunt submarines, it carried the Harpoon missiles that could crack an enemy surface ship in half, and any plane within range of
Ma Kong
’s RIM-66 missiles and Phalanx guns lived only by Captain Wu’s good graces. Together, the four ships gave his country a considerable defense against the PLA’s air and naval forces. It irked Wu that the Americans still refused to sell his country its very best weapons, but
Ma Kong
still made the Chinese think twice, he was certain.

As Wu stared out past the dockyard perimeter toward the city lights, an entirely different emotion rose up inside him.
Fools,
he thought. The PLA had taken Kinmen in a day and the stupid fools who ran his country were cowering in their comfortable offices, dithering about what to do. “President” Liang—the man didn’t deserve the title in Wu’s opinion—was
a fool. His arrogance had cost his people dearly, and now his fear of the Chinese was just raising the price they would have to pay to free their countrymen.

The dock to the ship’s port side was busy as the workers loaded ammunition, fuel, and other supplies aboard, but the process was going far too slowly. It had taken too long for even those orders to come down from Navy General Headquarters.
Ma Kong
should be in the Strait already, he thought, churning through the water at thirty knots toward that sacred island with her sisters and planes overhead to lay waste to any Chinese soldiers they could catch out in the open. He had ordered his chief engineer to fire up the ship’s four General Electric turbines in anticipation of that very order, which had yet to come. The other captains in port were acting more cautiously, but Wu was not such a man. The order would come, he was sure. It
had
to come. To let the Chinese have Kinmen without a fight would be inexcusable.

And if the order didn’t come before, the Americans would come to Taiwan with one or more of their carrier strike groups and then the order would come. With American ships and planes strengthening the rubber spines of the government bureaucrats,
Ma Kong
would finally put to sea and lend her strength to the US Navy’s strike groups, fighting alongside her former family of ships, and then the PLA would see the terrible mistake they had made.

He turned his back and walked aft toward the ship’s stern, stepping in and around the crates that were stacked up on the deck. He passed through the maze, enlisted men and junior officers parting before him to let him pass without a word, and finally arrived at the helipad, where deckhands were securing one of the ship’s two helicopters for transport, this one a Sikorsky S-70B Seahawk. Two of the
Ma Kong
’s RIM missile launchers were just beyond with a pair of engineers checking and double-checking them. Wu had told his crew in plain terms that very morning that their lives depended on those weapons in more ways than one. Wu set his course for them.

The deck was noisy tonight and so he didn’t hear the whistling sound until the last second. And then the night was lit up as the ship bucked underneath, tossing him across the deck along with boxes, crates, ropes, and bits of the men that were once part of his crew.

Wu crashed down flat on his back, almost at the stern, lucky his spine hadn’t broken, and it took him several seconds to realize that he could hear nothing. His eardrums were ruptured and his ears and
nose were bleeding in a gusher. He pushed himself onto his side, mildly surprised that his arms were still working, and he tried to stagger to his feet. It took him three tries and he succeeded only when his blind groping led him to the stern railing. Then he managed to open his eyes.

The explosion had erupted amidship, just forward of the helipad, starboard side, tearing a hole in
Ma Kong
so large that he thought it might have ripped the ship almost in half. A fire blazed out of the hole, smoke rolling skyward into the deck lights, but he knew that wouldn’t last long. Part of the hole was below the waterline.
Ma Kong
was flooding. He prayed that the crew below was closing the watertight doors and starting the pumps, if they still worked. He couldn’t hear his own men screaming as they moved around the deck. He tried to yell an order but no one responded. Wu couldn’t hear his own voice and he wondered if the rest of his men were as deaf as he was.

He staggered forward and fell to his knees. His sense of balance was destroyed along with his eardrums, and he wondered whether
Ma Kong
wasn’t listing. If she had taken on that much water that fast, then she was surely dying, on her way to the bottom of the harbor, and some of his men caught below would drown. He pushed himself back to his feet and tried to move forward again to help the wounded, to organize the damage control parties or give the order to abandon ship. Then he began to fall forward again. An ensign caught him as he dropped to one knee.

The second explosion lifted them into the air and sent them both over the rail into the water. Wu managed to grab a quick breath of air before he plunged into the cold, black harbor. He found his mind strangely focused not on his own survival but on that of his ship. Had munitions on the deck cooked off? Did a fuel drum under pressure explode from the fire’s heat? Wu didn’t know. After a few seconds, something inside his mind told him to push for the surface, but he realized that he didn’t know where the surface was. His sense of balance told him nothing. He opened his eyes and managed to turn his head until he saw the dim light of the fire above the water. He tried to push up for that. His clothes were heavy with water and his broken bones made him want to pass out when he moved, but he finally managed to push his head above the surface.

Ma Kong
’s entire aft section was burning. The Sikorsky helicopter was a flaming wreck and everything else on the deck was engulfed. Wu
saw that the men on the bow were throwing lines to the wounded in the water.

Wu’s head slipped under the water for a moment and he kicked his one good leg to surface. He managed to wave an arm and he saw one of the crew point in his direction. Then he went under a third time and found he didn’t have the strength to rise above the water again.

I’m going to drown.

A hand plunged into the water and grabbed his arm. Captain Wu Tai-cheng of the now-dead ROCS
Ma Kong
broke the surface of Tso Ying harbor and sucked in the cold salt air. His first thought was to question whether President Liang had another reason to be afraid of the Chinese that he hadn’t shared.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Truman called the Oval Office the “crown jewel of the American prison system,” but unlike most federal inmates, every president of the United States is allowed to decorate his cell to his personal tastes at the considerable expense of the taxpayers. Harry Stuart had been more frugal than most in that regard. The office now satisfied the colonial tastes that stemmed from his heritage as the eighth president from Virginia, but a few pieces were constants that carried over through administrations. The
Resolute
desk sat in its usual place at the room’s south end, flanked by Old Glory and a Seal of the President flag with gold curtains behind framing the window to the South Lawn. Stuart had raided the Smithsonian for Lincoln and Washington portraits and a Churchill bust. Any piece of artwork in the office would have fetched hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, on the open market. The furniture could have paid for the BMW Cooke almost never got to drive. The room was a fine museum of American history in its own right. The CIA director would have liked more time to study the pieces, but the commander in chief had given her less than five minutes before ordering his staff to place a call to the president of the People’s Republic of China.