“You certainly know how to make an entrance,” Lambert said.
“It’s not how I would’ve preferred it, Colonel.”
“I know. You got the job done, though. That’s what counts.”
Fisher nodded. “So, what’s new in the world? How’s the stock market? Read any good books lately? Are we at war with Iran?”
Lambert smiled. “No, we’re not at war. The documents from Abelzada’s house combined with his men from the Cat did the trick. In fact, the irony is something to behold: They were so anxious to take credit for the ‘glorious attack on the Great Satan’ that they haven’t stopped talking since they landed. Their own zealotry is their own worst enemy.
“The connections we put together between Zhao, the
“And how does all this get explained to the world?” Fisher asked.
“That’s a good question.”
“And it’s not our worry.”
“Right.”
“What about Zhao?” said Fisher.
“In about an hour, the Chinese ambassador will be sitting in the Oval Office. The message will be similar to the one to Tehran: Zhao was your problem; you let him run loose and did nothing about him. Give him up quietly or the world learns how a Chinese mafia kingpin who’s got half of Beijing in his pocket killed five thousand Americans, turned a town in New Mexico into a radioactive wasteland, and almost started Gulf War Three.”
“And if they refuse to cooperate or Zhao goes to ground?”
“He can’t hide forever,” Lambert replied.
57
The pilot’s voice came through Fisher’s subdermal: “Sir, we’re crossing the border.”
“How’re we doing?”
The electronic warfare officer, or EWO, answered: “Not a peep. As far as anybody on the ground cares, we’re a KAL flight en route to Moscow.”
They were in fact an MC-130E Combat Talon. Courtesty of the CIA, the transponder code they were squawking was genuine, a match for a Korean Airlines commerical flight out of Seoul with an equally genuine official flight plan.
“Distance to drop?” Fisher asked.
“We’ll be feet-dry in twenty minutes. Providing the North Koreans don’t change their minds or send up interceptors to put eyeballs on us, we’ll be in the zone in seventy minutes.”
“Wake me in a half hour,” Fisher said.
Two days earlier, as both Iran and U.S. started to draw down their forces and the region eased back from the brink of war, the President’s ultimatum to the Chinese ambassador sent Beijing into a tailspin.
Eight hours after the message was delivered, simultaneous raids were conducted on Zhao’s homes in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Changsha, as well as on his retreat on Cezi Maji. Zhao was at none of them; he had disappeared. Every border crossing, port, and airport was put on alert, but so far there had been no sign of him.
Thirty hours later, as Fisher, Redding, Bird, and Sandy were touching down stateside, a familiar signal on a CIA carrier frequency was intercepted by a NSA monitoring station in Japan and routed to Third Echelon’s Situation Room.
“That’s Heng’s beacon,” Fisher said. “His modified iPod.”
“Confirmed,” Grimsdottir said. “Same frequency, same pattern.”
“Can you triangulate it?” Lambert asked.
“Working on it… ” She had an answer two minutes later. She put a satellite image to the plasma screen. “Liaoning Province, northeastern China. Assuming Heng is still with Zhao and they’re on the move, it looks like he’s heading for probably the only place in the world that would have him.”
“North Korea,” Fisher said.
The Talon’s loadmaster finished checking Fisher’s equipment and straps, then patted him on the shoulder and walked him to the open door. At 35,000 feet, the air rushing through was bitterly cold. Beside him, the load-masters were wearing parkas and face masks. Fisher could feel the cold around the cuffs of his tac-suit and the rubber- sealed edges of his oxygen mask and goggles.
He spread his legs wide and braced his arms on either side of the door. Outside, he saw nothing but blackness and the faint shadow of the Talon’s wing and the rhythmic pulse of the nav strobe.
He took a breath, closed his eyes, pictured Sarah’s face in his mind.
He felt a pat on his shoulder.
Above his head, the bulkhead light went from red to yellow.
Green.
He jumped.
As it had with his
Having exited the Talon six and a half miles above the earth and 110 miles from his target, he was using the only insertion method that had a chance of slipping past the radar stations along the Chinese-North Korean border: HAHO, or High-Altitude, High-Opening.
He tested the toggles, veering first right, then left before locking them into position. He lifted his OPSAT to his face mask and punched up the navigation screen. Grimsdottir had overlaid his satellite map of the area with seven waypoints. He would break through the cloud layer at roughly twelve thousand feet, at which point he would, if he’d stayed on course, find himself aligned with the Yalu River, which formed the natural border between China and North Korea. The river would lead him straight to his destination.
According to a high-resolution pass by a KH-12 Crystal, Zhao had chosen to hole up in an abandoned Buddhist monastery on the banks of the Yalu, thirty miles northeast of Dandong. How long Zhao would remain there Fisher couldn’t tell. He suspected it depended on when the powers-that-be in Pyongyang arranged to send a special forces team to collect him. Fisher prayed he got there first. If Zhao managed to reach North Korea, he’d be beyond U.S. reach.
At 11,500 feet, Fisher broke through the cloud cover. Far below him, the Yalu was a ribbon of dull silver winding its way across the terrain. On either bank for as far as he could see were clusters of lights, each one a village or city along the border.
He took another bearing on the OPSAT and pulled his right toggle, sending the Goshawk into a gentle spiral that brought him in line with his next waypoint, eight miles upstream from the monastery.
Fisher pulled on the toggles and started bleeding off altitude.
At three thousand feet, the ribbon that had been the Yalu changed into a mile-wide expanse of water. Four
