Mirage tof-9 Read online

  Solidly professional and deeply depressing. He had been thinking of somehow getting onto the roof and assaulting downward into the penthouse rather than coming up from below. These guys foiled that idea. As soon as contact was lost with one of the guards, the one by the elevator would go back to the penthouse and lock it down. By the time an attacking force breached the apartment, Kenin would be long gone.

  He laid out that scenario to Eddie.

  “So we flush him out and guard all exits, ready to snatch him off the streets,” Seng summed up.

  Juan immediately saw the flaw… two flaws. Kenin could hole up in an office on a lower floor and wait out the attack. And, two, the police would be called as soon as the breach was discovered. Kenin had needed local help to establish his safe house, local help with serious pull.

  The streets would be swarming with cops by the time he reached the ground floor. It would be impossible to follow him let alone stage a kidnapping.

  For several hours, nothing happened. Eddie was studying the roof while Juan paced the outer office trying to come up with a plan. The same three-man security detail emerged again from the elevator and performed another scan, checking that nothing had changed on their isolated mesa of steel and glass. Eddie called in the Chairman so he could watch through his binoculars.

  After the sweep, two of the guards went below while the guard posted at the elevator stayed where he was. Moments later, a woman wearing a plain white robe appeared. She looked Chinese and maybe a day past her eighteenth birthday. Apparently, Kenin liked them young but legal. When she reached the deck around the pool, she set down a wicker bag that she’d been carrying and shrugged out of her robe. Expecting a revealing bikini, Juan and Eddie were surprised she wore a sleek unitard swimsuit favored by Olympic swimmers.

  She settled goggles over her eyes, dove in, and began swimming laps.

  Cabrillo ignored her and watched the guard. He rarely glanced in her direction. Instead, he studied the surrounding buildings and the sky, looking for threats. Juan had to admit the guy was good. He never became fixated on any one spot, not even when a helicopter passed less than a half mile from the black tower. He watched it, yes, but it never became a distraction.

  The girl swam for thirty minutes without taking a break.

  It was nearing noon. A new guard came to spell the man at the elevator, and two others searched the rooftop terrace as if it had never been inspected before. One guard carried a sniper rifle with an enormous scope over his shoulder while the other cradled a Chinese Type 95 assault rifle. The bullpup design was the latest weapon in the People’s Army. The fact these two were armed with more than just pistols was a new development. It was an elevation in threat protection that told Cabrillo to expect Kenin to make an appearance.

  Next, a waiter arrived, pushing the kind of food trolley one sees in a hotel. He set out lunch at a table under an umbrella next to the pool. When all was ready, wine in a silver bucket opened and a last polish to the silverware performed, he stood back at a respectful distance. The girl pulled herself from the water with the easy grace of a river otter and toweled off.

  A new figure emerged from the pavilion.

  Juan felt his pulse quicken. He recognized Pytor Kenin immediately. He wore only swim trunks and rubber sandals so they could see the thick pelt of silvery hair that covered his bearish torso. He had typical Slavic features — a round head, firm chin, and deep-set eyes — and he moved with the vigor of a man twenty years younger. The girl offered her cheek and he gave her a quick peck. The little intimacy was almost believable. He must be paying her very well.

  Juan noticed that one of Kenin’s ears was bandaged and the other was red and swollen. The Russian was beginning plastic surgery to change his appearance and, as with everything else, he was being extremely cautious. Ears were as individual as fingerprints or DNA, and new sophisticated facial recognition software, coupled with the profusion of CCTV cameras in all the world’s major cities, made it necessary to modify more than just the jaw, nose, and brow. Juan knew of more than one terror suspect caught just by the shape of his ear. Kenin was sharp.

  He ate leisurely, like a man without a care in the world. Retirement certainly suited him.

  After the meal, Kenin busied himself with a laptop computer. Juan hoped he was using a Wi-Fi they could hijack, but the computer was hooked into an outlet by a thick, doubtlessly shielded cord. At one point, Kenin called over the waiter. The man vanished for a few moments, then reappeared with a humidor. The admiral selected a cigar and ritualistically snipped off the end with a gold cutter and lit it with a gold lighter.

  They remained on the deck until around three. The girl had swum some, and for a time Kenin had lumbered about in the pool like a water buffalo, mindful not to douse his inflamed ears.

  After the pair vanished back inside, the waiter tidied up, but it was the security detail that was the last to leave. They performed a thorough sweep, the fourth that day.

  Eddie had taken pictures of all the guards’ faces and uploaded them to his phone. He left Juan in the office to watch the deserted rooftop while he hustled outside. He found a good spot to watch the black tower’s service entrance from under a parked car. If the driver returned, he’d have more than enough time to shuffle to the next in the string of automobiles lining the street. As each building employee left, Eddie checked his or her face against his database. He was forced to switch cars a couple of times, and by ten that night few vehicles remained on the street and he had to abandon his observation.

  By then, no one had left the building for quite some time. None of the people he’d observed leaving the building had been among the guard staff. Like Kenin, they were locked in the building for the duration.

  He returned to their rented office. Cabrillo was peering through the big telephoto lens at the darkened terrace. “Any luck?” he asked without turning.

  “Nada. I’ll try watching the front doors in the morning, but I think they’re holed up like their boss. You?”

  “Zip,” Juan said sourly. “Looks like they check the terrace each morning and again when someone’s about to use it.”

  Eddie and he ended up staying a week. The routines varied only slightly. Kenin would sometimes eat dinner out by the pool or stroll along the garden paths. The girl was replaced on the sixth day with another that looked little different apart from hair length. It would take a huge team to have been ready to follow her, a group so large that they would give themselves away.

  They made other observations as well. Martial music played in most of Shanghai’s public spaces, and patriotic posters were appearing all over the city. Soldiers were a common sight, and most had the people flocking around them to shake their hands. And in the skies over the city, fighter planes put on what seemed to be impromptu air shows.

  In a country as tightly controlled as China, everything was done for a reason. The increased display of militarism was to get the people riled over the ongoing dispute with Japan about the ownership of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. What had started as diplomatic brinksmanship was quickly escalating. Since the discovery of the gas and oil fields in the waters around the islands, the saber rattling in Beijing and Tokyo was growing louder. Ships had been dispatched, and planes had engaged in games of chicken, pilots from both sides flying so close to one another that an accident was inevitable. The fallout from such an event was incalculable but certainly dangerous.

  The two men wiled away the boring hours discussing, and ultimately rejecting, idea after idea of how to get to Kenin. A chopper assault was out. The rotor sounds would alert the guards, and Kenin would lock himself inside. They talked about climbing the side of the building, but that would attract too much attention from people on the street. They considered a night HALO parachute drop. It had potential, but with the guards in constant communication, a sudden silence when the men were subdued would again alert the force still inside the building. Also, Chinese airspace was tightly controlled by the government, and an unauthorize
d flight would most likely be met by a couple of fighter jets long before they reached the Pudong District.

  In the end, Eddie and Juan came to the same conclusion. Pytor Kenin had locked himself in the modern equivalent of an impenetrable castle and was more than prepared for a siege.

  It was only when they got back to the Oregon and discussed their pessimistic assessment with the rest of the crew that new ideas were thrown at the project. In a burst of inspiration, it was Juan himself who finally made the breakthrough. He needed only Max’s mechanical savvy to pull it off. Hanley considered the challenge for a few seconds before agreeing. “It’s your neck, bucko.”

  “It’ll be a lot more than my neck.” The two grinned like schoolboys conspiring to commit mischief.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It took two weeks to get everything into position. Eddie had returned to Shanghai almost immediately with a small team to keep Kenin’s penthouse under constant observation. The office also served as an address through which they could ship certain items into the country. The advance team also got to work on converting a small panel van they’d bought on the black market. Their final task was to find a suitable place to transfer gear from a submersible. They had lost the Nomad off the coast of Maryland, but they still had her smaller sister, the Discovery 1000. The Oregon would remain outside of China’s twelve-mile territorial limit, and the illegal gear ferried in clandestinely. They would also use the Disco to get people out of the country as well.

  Juan wished he’d have more time to practice with Max’s brilliant piece of engineering, but the ship’s decks were too dangerous, and using it over the water was suicide if something went wrong. He just had to content himself with the little bit of practice he got in the Oregon’s main hold. Keeping the contraption stable was tricky, but he thought he had the hang of it. If something did go wrong during the actual assault, he wasn’t likely to survive.

  He piloted the submersible himself. They launched from the moon pool an hour before sunset and dove deep enough that they couldn’t be seen from above. Once it was dark, they could approach the surface. Linda Ross accompanied him. She would take the little four-man mini-sub back to the ship. All the equipment they were bringing was strapped to the top of the sub in a waterproof container.

  “Can I ask you something?” Linda said as they started the slow crawl to a rendezvous at an unused pier along the Huangpu River.

  “Shoot.” They were at a depth where there was just enough light to see feathers of biologic flotsam streaming by the thick domed canopy. The sub navigated through a lidar system — basically, radar with lasers.

  “Why not just lob a missile down on to Kenin while he’s sunning himself? Surely there are times he’s alone.”

  “If this was about revenge, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Juan replied. “But I want to get my hands on his stealth technology, or whatever it was, that made that ship disappear and capsize Dullah and you on the Sakir.”

  “I assume you then want to sell it to your and my favorite uncle.”

  “I whetted Lang Overholt’s appetite while we were laid up in Bermuda. He said — and I quote—‘Get me that and I’ll hand you a blank check from the Treasury.’ I foresee a number one followed by eight zeros.”

  It took Linda a second to imagine the figure. “A hundred million. My my.”

  “We just got them back their stolen billion. I think they can afford it. Though Lang’s going to grit his teeth handing it over.” Juan smiled at the thought. His old mentor was known as both a brilliant strategist but also the biggest miser in Washington, D.C.

  From time to time, they would rise close enough to the surface to get updated GPS signals to fine-tune the navigation plot. They were fighting the Yangtze’s current, so the going was slow. Because Shanghai is the busiest container port in the world, an unimaginable amount of ship traffic thundered overhead. In the submersible the hiss of steel through water and the chop of propeller blades was an industrial symphony. It dimmed little when they made the turn to start following the Huangpu River that bisected the megalopolis.

  They stayed close to the middle of the river. Juan knew on either side of them were mile upon mile of commercial docks. This was a city of industry, and its rivers were its lifeblood. When they passed the Pudong District, they were at a depth of forty feet but could still see the artificial neon glow of the numerous buildings cutting through the water. Twenty minutes later, they drifted toward their rendezvous. The site was in the process of renewal. A cement plant had once stood on a piece of real estate that now was prime for residential development. The towers that were to replace it would be home to five thousand people.

  Now the plant had been demolished, but the quay where raw materials had once been imported still stood. Juan had one of their encrypted walkie-talkies. “The Merman is here.”

  “About time, Merman,” Eddie replied. “For a while there, I thought you’d come to your senses and called the whole thing off.”

  Juan surfaced the mini-sub in the shadow of the quay and quickly saw that he could slip it between the dock and a partially sunken barge. They would be invisible. Eddie was parked in a Chinese knockoff of a Toyota van. A fine rain was falling, blurring the lights of the city. Juan unstrapped himself, gave Linda’s shoulder a squeeze, and made his way to the hatch.

  “Take care,” Linda said.

  “See you soon.”

  Eddie had already released the straps holding the cargo pod to the sub’s upper deck, and, together, he and Cabrillo lifted it into the van’s rear cargo box. The pod itself wasn’t much larger than those seen atop cars, and it weighed less than a hundred pounds.

  Once they were clear, bubbles boiled around the Disco submersible and it soon plunged back into its natural element. Linda would be traveling with both tide and current, so she’d be back aboard the Oregon in half the time it took to get here. Eddie drove the truck to a commercial parking lot that was less than two miles from Kenin’s tower fortress. They spent the next hour examining the items they had smuggled into China, making certain nothing had been damaged. Juan was trusting his life to this gear, so he was thorough and methodical.

  It was too late to find a taxi so they walked back to the rented office that overlooked Kenin’s penthouse retreat. MacD Lawless was watching the darkened terrace through the powerful camera lens. Mike Trono was stretched out asleep in the adjoining office. Cabrillo let him be and wrapped a sleeping bag around himself and curled up on the carpet. He was asleep in moments.

  Next morning, the rain had intensified, and the forecast said it would continue for at least another day. The men remained holed up in the office. Eddie was reduced to the role of errand boy, going out to get their meals. They maintained the overwatch of the rooftop terrace because there wasn’t much else to do. All of them had been on such stakeouts before and each had his own way to combat the boredom.

  Thirty hours after sneaking into the country, Juan was with Eddie in the truck. The weather had broken. Seng was behind the wheel while the Chairman rode in the cargo bed. He was strapped in and ready to go. The roof panels had been cut and hinges attached so he could open them with the pull on a length of rope. They just needed to wait for Kenin.

  Eddie found a parking space near where he’d spent part of a night watching the building’s back door. He had to remain with the vehicle in case a cop wanted him to move. MacD was in position farther down the street ready for the diversion while Mike was up in the office with a radio to tell them when Kenin went out to enjoy the sunshine after so many days confined indoors.

  The guards had done their dawn sweep, and at nine o’clock repeated it because the girl was coming out to swim. Mike relayed this information to the others using a predetermined series of clicks on their walkie-talkies. Not knowing the level of government monitoring made them prudently circumspect.

  Juan heard two clicks from his radio handset. Kenin had made his appearance. Juan’s stomach knotted. Minutes to go. He tightened his grip. He wouldn�
�t open the roof panels until he heard that final single click in case anyone in the surrounding buildings looked down and became curious enough about an open-topped van to call the police.

  He had to wait until Kenin was seated poolside. One guard would be standing outside the little pavilion that housed the elevator. But the real trigger moment would come when Mike saw the elevator guard switch frequencies on his radio and check in with the guards down in the penthouse suite. He did it every five minutes. A simple “All’s well.” Once he gave that, Juan had just those five min—

  Click.

  Cabrillo yanked on the rope, and the two precut sections of roof hinged downward, flooding the interior of the van in light. The truck shifted slightly as Eddie jumped clear and started making his way to another vehicle they had stashed nearby.

  Down the street, MacD set the paper bag he’d been carrying in the space between two parked cars and casually blended back into the throngs of people on the sidewalks. After a ten-second delay Cabrillo knew was coming, the contents of the bag started to erupt.

  It had been filled with tiny firecrackers. Ironically, they had smuggled them in because they couldn’t guarantee the quality of local fireworks from the nation that invented them. They lit off like echoing popcorn. Those people nearest the smoking eruption of tiny explosions stepped back smartly while nearly every other pedestrian edged forward to see what was happening. For half a block, all eyes were on the sparking and popping bag. No one paid the slightest attention to the van.

  They never saw what emerged from the top.

  The technology had been around since the 1960s. Max had found the design specs on the Internet. The only issue had been finding sufficiently pure hydrogen peroxide to fuel the contraption.