‘I hope you do not shoot too well,’ Lung said slowly, his eyes mere slits.
‘I don’t want my man hurt.’
‘Then keep him out of our way,’ Lung said sharply, his voice hissing like a snake’s, his eyes glittering. ‘If he gets out of control, he is a dead man, you understand that, English?’
‘Look, I’ll be useless to you in the future if you force me to tip my hand,’ Varney pleaded.
‘Just stay clear when it starts!’ Lung repeated sharply, and Varney knew the discussion was Dyer.
He cleared his voice and said, ‘Right.’
‘We will be ready when you get there. Just do exactly as we discussed.’
Varney nodded, and after hesitating a moment, he left.
‘You trust the Englishman?’ Wan asked.
‘He has been on our payroll for more than a year. He cannot afford to refuse us about this. Besides, he is the one who spotted Hatcher in the beginning.’ He turned back to his binoculars and, without looking t his soldiers, added, ‘He will be a big risk after this. He has outlived his usefulness to us anyway.’
He turned back to the tall Chinese. ‘The Englishman is yours, Wan.’ He pointed to two of the henchmen who stood silently against the wall. ‘You will take these two and pick up Khan at the Gardens, follow the Englishman through the gates and hit the front of the house. Kill Varney and his partner and everyone on the grounds. My team will take out everyone inside the house. Just remember, Hatcher is a dangerous man — but he is mine. If you must take him on, wound him only, so I may finish the job.’
ASSAULT
Cohen had sent Tiana to Fat Lady’s for the night. He sat on the bed and watched Hatcher open the Halliburton case, snap open the video camera arid remove the plastic trigger housing. He unscrewed the le ns from the telephoto lens and took out the gun sight. He removed the short barrel from the other lens and the two magazines from the batteries.
‘That’s beautiful,’ Cohen said. ‘What is it?’ ‘Austrian Aug,’ said Hatcher as he assembled the weapon. ‘I need some ammo.’
‘No problem,’ Cohen said. He gave the order to Sing, and the big Chinese slipped out of the room and returned a minute or two later with four boxes. ‘Enough?’ Cohen asked,
Hatcher smiled, ‘Two hundred rounds oughta do it,’ he whispered.
Cohen gathered his small band in the living room, a sturdy enough-looking bunch dressed in black pants and turtlenecks and each wearing a black cotton mask so they would be well concealed in the dark. All were armed with Mac 10 submachine guns. He spoke to them in Chinese.
‘They will probably hit us front and back,’ he told them. ‘Hatcher, Sing and I will stay in the house. We’ll keep the lights out in the house. We’ll draw and make them come to us. Louie, you take the roof. George, Joey Chen and Lee — in the garden. Sammy, you’ll be on the ground in the back. Anything to add, Christian?’
Hatcher shook his head.
Hatcher had one final thought, but it was one he hesitated to discuss with these men. Joe Lung was the last of the five members of Dragon’s Breath, the men who had run dope for White Powder Mama from Thailand to Saigon, and there was a good chance he knew about the Huie-kui camp. He needed to keep Lung alive, at least long enough to try to question him. But that seemed too much to ask of Cohen’s small brigade, all of whom were putting their lives on the line for the Tsu Fi — and for him.
Finally he said, ‘If there’s a chance to keep Lung alive, I’d like to question him.’ Cohen locked at him with raised eyebrows. ‘But not at the risk of anyone’s life,’ Hatcher quickly added.
It had started to rain, a light drizzle with a portent of a heavier downpour to come. This was good news for Lung. It would cover sounds of the movement of the gangsters, all of whom wore black shirts and pants.
His driver parked the car on a curved street below Cohen’s house. Joe Lung and the other two assassins got out and moved quickly and silently up through the foliage to the foot of the wall that surrounded Cohen’s property. The ground here leveled off after sloping sharply away from the house for several hundred yards.
Lung guessed there would be at least one man on the ground at the rear of the house, possibly more, so he made his assault plan accordingly. He tossed a grappling hook up twice before it caught on the wall, then went up the line to the top of the wall and attached a twenty-foot-long insulated jumper to the electric wire on top of the fence, letting it dangle down. Lying flat on the wall, he slid one end of the jumper down the wire until it was taut. Then he crawled back. With the insulated Jumper firmly attached, he cut the electric wire. He punched the button on his flashlight twice, then dropped over to the inside of the fence, landing in a crouch in knee-deep vines and straw grass.
Above him, through the trees, he could see the spotlights on Cohen’s balcony several hundred yards away, throwing arcs of light on the foliage below. He stayed in the crouch, his ears alert for sounds in the darkness. The other two men dropped quietly beside him.
The drizzle turned into a steady rain.
They spread out quickly until the three mobsters formed a line from the east to the west wall of Cohen’s estate. They still had not spotted the guard on the back slope. They moved forward as silently as possible through the tangled vines and grass toward the house, keeping low, looking for a silhouette against the spotlights, each with an earphone in one ear attached to a battery-driven beeper.
It was Lung who spotted Cohen’s guard, Sammy, squatting in the cleared area at the foot of the balcony, his eyes searching the area beyond the arc of spotlights. Lung pressed his beeper button twice. The other two assassins heard the beeps and froze. It was up to Lung to take out the guard when their man signaled that the assault on the front of the house had begun. Lung was lying in the high grass perhaps thirty yards from the crouching Sammy) a black shadow with a mask over his face.
