The First End (17 page)

“Yes, this is the one.”

Hu then talked to the man rapidly in Chinese.
The thief responded. After a time, Hu looked up at Bill. “He know
where the plane is. He will show us best way to get there.”

“Yes, I will,” the thief agreed. He paused. “Do
I keep wallet?”

Bill spun the man around and put his nose an
inch in front of the smaller man’s face. “Get us there and you can
have the wallet.”

“I get you there.” He glanced around. “I take
you tonight.”

Chen Lee looked up as the young intelligence
analyst burst into his office. “News, sir. I have news.”

Lee grimaced in irritation and tossed the report
he had been reading onto the desk. “It better be important, boy,”
he responded sternly. “Or you’ll find yourself on some ship in the
High Seas trolling for junk on the bottom of the sea floor.”

The young man swallowed. Everyone knew that was
exactly where Lee had been assigned before his promotion and
subsequent duties to protect the new fighter plane, now housed in a
warehouse next door. “I just got a hit on Bill Gardner’s credit
card.”

It took Lee a moment to remember. “The American
in the UAE?”

“The same sir.”

“Well?” Lee said into the resulting silence.

“Oh! Sorry! Uh, I have a hit on the man’s credit
card.”

The young analyst looked so sincere, but Lee
didn’t have time to coddle the young fool. “You said that already.
Why is this important?”

“What? Oh! Because the credit card was used
right here in Beijing.”

Lee snapped to his feet. “Here?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Where? At a mall in the Chayoang District.”

That made sense. The Chayoang District housed
more than sixty percent of the foreign companies doing business in
China. An entire industry had grown up around these companies to
meet their usually lavish needs—lavish by Chinese standards anyway.
“How did he get into the country? I thought I ordered his passport
flagged.”

“You did, sir. His passport hasn’t been
used.”

“An alias then?”

The analyst shrugged. “If so, why use his real
credit card?”

Maybe the man wasn’t so foolish after all.
Unwilling to give the analyst any credit for the thought, he
snapped, “Shut up and let me think!”

A report a week ago about someone slipping
across the border down near the Vietnam boarder came to mind. The
report had been vague, although a death of a soldier had been
reported in the same area. Lee’s natural suspicion rose. He didn’t
think this American’s presence in Beijing at the same time the new
fighter plane would be demonstrated to the Iranians was a
coincidence. He had no doubt that the man was an American spy.

“Double security around the plane,” he ordered.
“I don’t want anyone who isn’t a known Chinese man to get near that
plane. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Get to it.”

The man saluted and left, leaving Lee to his
thoughts. He knew he should have taken the time to kill the
American in the UAE. He regretted that mistake, but he didn’t plan
on making another. No, this time, he would kill the American. It
had taken him nearly forty years to get this promotion and he would
be hanged if he allowed some American spy to ruin it.

He grabbed the phone from off his desk. “I want
to see Wong in my office immediately.” He hung up before the woman
on the other side could acknowledge the order. Wong, like himself,
worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS). MSS had been
tasked with seeing to the security of the new fighter plane and the
safe transfer to the Iranians once they had paid for it. However,
Wong, unlike himself, was a professional assassin. He would be
perfect for this job of hunting down the American and killing
him.

Lee smiled to himself. He relished hearing of
the American’s death.

Bill pulled his head back down and sighed. The
small red-headed thief sat next to him behind the wall, munching on
some unpronounceable snack. The wily little man hadn’t tried to run
off yet, much to the American’s surprise. His name, amusingly
enough, was Mouse. The significance of that was undoubtedly lost on
Gardner for Chinese tended to view things differently. For all he
knew, ‘mouse’ was a profound compliment.

Rubbing at his face and smearing the stuff he
had used to darken his features—he really didn’t want to know what
had gone into making the stuff—he hung his head between his hands
and let out another sigh. The crisp night air felt good every time
he took a breath, though the odors of the city were not that
pleasant when the breeze shifted, bringing in the smell of some
nearby slaughterhouses.

Hu, dressed in black fatigues similarly to Bill,
crouched on the other side of the thief. He too sat back down, and
even in the darkness, the lawyer could see the man’s fear. “No
good,” he muttered. “No good.”

Bill quite agreed with that assessment. The
rooftop they had found gave them a clear view of the warehouse
Mouse claimed the prototype aircraft was being kept. Based on the
amount of armed security that roamed the premises, Bill did not
doubt the little man’s claim. Mouse, after he had found out how
much money Bill was willing to pay, readily agreed to act as a
guide. Much as Bill had expected, the underworld knew of the
plane’s existence and where it was being kept. Bill figured that
this knowledge was important to a thief, if nothing else to know
where to stay away from.

Mouse, however, seemed to be cursed with an
overly curious mind. While that might seem wonderful in a child, it
often got a thief killed. Curiosity and greed rarely mixed well.
Nevertheless, Bill counted it fortuitous to have found Mouse. The
wily thief knew exactly where to go to observe the warehouse
without being detected. Without that advantage and this rooftop,
Bill felt he would have been caught for certain.

Security around the building would have done
credit to Fort Knox. Armed guards, dogs, and a nifty surveillance
system made trying to penetrate the perimeter a nightmare. And that
was just the outer layer. No doubt inside the building would make
the outside nightmare seem peaceful by comparison. “Maybe if I had
two months to plan,” he said slowly. But even then, he doubted it.
This job couldn’t be done by one man. He would need at least an
assault team just to breach the perimeter. The fence that
surrounded the warehouse compound looked deadly. Added to the razor
wire both on top and at the base of the fence, Bill suspected the
entire thing was electrified. Just touching the thing would be
enough to incapacitate an adult man.

Hu glanced over and shook his head. “No do this.
We die if try.”

“I know, I know,” Gardner responded holding up a
hand. “I don’t know what General Hynes was thinking!” He looked
down at the small device in his hand. Roughly rectangular, it was
made out of a black metal with but a single LED light in the
middle. It was showing a steady green, indicating that the tracking
beacon he had stashed on the Chinese fighter plane was within a
mile of his current location. Well, at least he knew where the
plane was.

Hu looked troubled. “You sent to die?”

That set the lawyer back a bit. “You think I was
meant to fail? Why?”

Hu shrugged. “Job too hard. You only one
man.”

True, none of this made sense. Bill understood
the need to keep the US government out of the equation, but what
could a single man do. Surely Hynes would have known of the
futility of this mission.
What’s going on?

“Air bomb?” Hu inquired.

“Air bomb? Oh, you mean an airstrike?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have any means of calling one. I don’t
think there is a US carrier within striking distance in any case.
Maybe the US bases in Japan, but an air strike would be an overt
use of force. They would risk a war.”

“War no good,” Hu agreed.

“Come,” Bill beckoned his companions. “We can’t
do any good up here. Let’s go back to the motel.” He stuffed the
night scope into his bag, shouldered the backpack of explosives and
crawled away from the roof’s edge. Mouse moved lightly, filtering
from shadow to shadow, hardly discernible in the darkness. Hu’s
size allowed him some freedom of movement, but Bill felt like he
was crawling like a bloated slug. “I’m too short for this crap,
man,” he muttered.

An old metal staircase led down to street level
on the side away from the warehouse. He didn’t fear being heard
from this distance for the warehouse was nearly three quarters of a
mile from the building they now stood upon. They descended quickly
into the gloom of an alley that stank of rotting food and other
things impossible to imagine.

Once on the ground, Mouse took three steps away
from the stairs and froze. So quickly did he stop moving that Bill
almost ran the little man over. He pulled up in time though and
backed off a step. Something was wrong. He could see it in the way
Mouse stood, his face tight, his nose lifted, and eyes half closed.
Bill looked around, but the deep shadows of the alley made seeing
anything impossible. He tried to listen, but he heard nothing.

Suddenly, Mouse squeaked—a very mouse like
sound—and started to run. Bill hesitated and that saved his life. A
bullet struck the metal staircase near Bill’s head and ricocheted
away, leaving a flash of sparks in its wake. A second later, the
gun report blasted the silence all to pieces.

Everything happened quickly. Hu yelped and
darted after Mouse, the thief having dove into the shadows of the
alley, disappearing so profoundly that it looked as if he had just
vanished. Bill, however, dropped straight to the ground and rolled,
knowing that the darkness could only serve him. He drew his own
handgun, but he didn’t have to wait long. A man, wearing a long
black overcoat, materialized out of the darkness, and unloaded
round after round in Bill’s direction. The bullets whizzed and
snapped around his head and body, ricocheting off of the brick
walls of the building or the metal staircase. One bullet grazed his
shoulder, leaving a bloody tear in his shirt.

Bill Gardner tried to return fire, but despite
what the movies showed, it is not an easy thing to hit a moving
target while trying to dodge bullets yourself. His shots went wide,
splattering into concrete walls or chipping off chunks of nearby
brick walls. Adrenalin finally overloaded fear, and he lurched to
his feet just as the assassin bore down on him with an empty gun.
Bill had a few more rounds left in his, but as he brought the gun
up to bring it into line with the assassin, the Chinese man let
loose with a kick that turned his wrist numb and sent the gun
flying away into the darkness.

Bill threw a punch of his own that the assassin
easily dodged before unloading a series of punches that drove Bill
straight back into the wall behind him. At least three of the
strikes landed on the lawyer’s chest, causing him to lose his
breath and sapping strength from his body at the same time. One
caught him square in the mouth, snapping his head back into the
wall. Pain and dizziness vied for his attention, and he nearly
blacked out.

If the assassin thought the American would
collapse under the punishing blows, he was disappointed only by the
fact that the wall kept the lawyer up right. Bill struggled to make
the man out in the gloom, fighting away his dizziness and the blood
that began to fill in his mouth. Instinctively he knew that if he
didn’t react immediately, the man would kill him. But the Chinese
man had Bill outmatched in pure skill. Bill had never seen someone
so quick and deadly with his fists. It looked for all the world
like one of those Kung Fu movies.

Finally, the assassin came into focus as the man
stalked up to finish Bill off. The man’s pock-marked face looked
sadistic in the gloom, his leering grin frightening in the pure
pleasure he took in the beating of his hapless victim. For one
awful moment, Bill couldn’t react. His arms and body refused to
cooperate, he couldn’t even lift his hands to defend himself. So he
did the next best thing.

He spat a mouthful of blood straight into the
assassin’s eyes.

The man screeched in surprise, and reacted by
unlimbering a powerful, but partially blinded punch to keep the big
American away from him. Bill saw it coming straight at his face. He
had no time to try to block or even dodge, so he jerked his head
forward as hard as he could to take the punch square on his
forehead.

Fortunately, his forehead was stronger than his
assailant’s hand. Bill heard bones snap as the smaller bones
yielded to the harder, thicker one of Gardner’s head. The assassin
screamed in pain this time. Bill’s eyes crossed from the blow and
he almost fell. Shaking off the sensation he leapt forward, grabbed
the assassin in a bear hug, twisted, and launched the smaller man
into a wall head first.

Although Bill’s head might be harder than the
assassin’s fist, the cruel murderous discovered that his own head
wasn’t nearly as hard as the brick wall of a large building. Head
and wall collided with jarring impact. The assassin grunted once
and then fell to the ground, either stunned or unconscious.

Staggering over to the inert form, Bill reached
down took hold of the man’s head and snapped his neck. He collapsed
atop the body, his breathing coming raggedly, and his eyes going in
and out of focus. He didn’t know how long he lay there, but he was
finally roused by someone shaking his shoulder.

“American? You okay?”

Bill looked up, blinking. In the darkness he
struggled to make out the face that looked down upon him. Finally
he recognized Hu’s voice. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said, his pounding
head disagreeing sharply with his words. “Just give me a
minute.”

Hu crouched down. “We go now. Soldiers
come.”

Ah yes. No doubt the gun battle had alerted the
soldiers. “Help me to my feet.”