Beyond all limits, p.29
Beyond all Limits, page 29
part #3 of Mark Cole Series Series
The pilot turned the chopper on its side, tilting over violently, and the door swung open again, Cole flying out with it, only just managing to keep his grip. The second solider wasn’t so lucky though, preoccupied with trying to get Cole and not having any warning of the pilot’s intentions, and Cole watched as he lost his balance and smashed his head off the metal airframe. His unconscious body collapsed into the doorway, held in position by the strap around his waist, and Cole recognized the gift for what it was – with the body in the way, the door could no longer close on his fingers.
But as Cole dangled from the door, his grip loosening now, pain ripping through his hands, his forearms, his shoulders, he could feel himself slipping, and knew he couldn’t hold on for much longer anyway.
The wind was rushing past him, the speed of the helicopter fast – so terribly fast – and Cole knew that the pilot was determined to kill him now, to strip him from the helicopter and send him plunging to his death.
As he hung on for dear life, he took in the sights around him, below him, his mind spinning as it tried to make its calculations. He was over water now, and he didn’t know whether they were over Qianhai Lake, or maybe even as far south now as Beihai, the speed incredible as one hand was finally wrenched free, the fingers of his other hand tortured as they clamped down even harder, until – mercifully – he was able to get both back on the door again.
He could see the familiar terracotta roofs of the Forbidden City now, and understood that the pilot must have lost it completely in his desire to kill him, plunged into a lunatic straight-line death flight, determined to shake Cole off once and for all.
Cole felt his hands going, knew it wouldn’t be long before the end; but then he saw it through his blurred, wind-damaged vision – the huge, curved structure coming fast towards him, its ellipsoid dome of titanium and glass resembling a gigantic black egg floating on the water of a huge man-made lake.
Cole recognized the National Center for Performing Arts immediately, perhaps Beijing’s most iconic building after the palaces of the Forbidden City; but what was more, when the chopper passed over it in the next few seconds, it would clear the apex of the structure by not more than a few feet at best.
But it would clear it – a single opportunity that was Cole’s best, his only, chance of survival.
Jake Navarone disguised his fear well; nobody looking his way would have any idea of the inner turmoil he was experiencing.
He was standing in a queue at Beijing South Station, his ticket for the ultra-fast, three hundred kilometer-per-hour Maglev train to Shanghai in his hand. The group had switched trains at Xianwumen and taken Line Four down to Beijing South, the huge, imposing modern structure which was the departure point for the world’s fastest train. The Maglev – even at restricted speed, well short of its maximum of five hundred kilometers per hour – would still demolish the eight hundred mile distance to Shanghai in just under five hours, with one stop at Nanjing South.
The tickets for the entire group had been pre-booked by the CIA, and left with the disguises in the sewer system, and Navarone reminded himself that – if he lived through this – he would have to send something very nice to the Beijing station. They’d certainly done an incredible job with the preparations, at such short notice.
But it wasn’t the authenticity or validity of the tickets which caused Navarone’s rapidly increasing heart rate, however; it was the heavily patrolled security checking line that all passengers had to go through in order to board the train.
He wasn’t so concerned for himself; he felt confident he could talk his way through anything, and they had no reason to suspect that he wasn’t who he said he was anyway.
No, what he was concerned about was the eighteen male Chinese politicians masquerading as women, the entire group of which was now approaching the security desk.
Would they give themselves away?
Their disguises – which had looked so good in the dim light of the sewer tunnels – now looked inadequate in the extreme, and for the first time, Navarone found himself questioning the very sanity of their plan. What if they had to respond to questions? Would their voices be convincing, or would they give the game away immediately? Would their awkward body language raise the suspicions of the guards?
Navarone, in a separate queue, inched steadily ahead towards his own checkpoint, all the while watching the passage of the Shanghai League of Women in Business and Industry as surreptitiously as he could.
He’d seen brief glances of Davis, Grayson and Collins during their journey here, but nothing too obvious. He could see them again now as they waited in line, but they didn’t stand out in any way at all; just three more passengers going about their business.
Navarone took a nervous gulp as he saw Barrington at the front of the line, the disguised members of the escaped Politburo behind her; he could see, even from where he stood two lines over, the unnatural, tense manner in which some of the politicians held themselves. Surely the guards couldn’t help but notice too?
But Barrington started chatting animatedly to the security personnel in her perfectly accented Mandarin, moving her hand around, motioning towards the women’s league behind her. Navarone couldn’t tell what she was saying, but her manner was authoritative, professional.
Someone else strode over to the group then, and Navarone could see it was a senior officer. What the hell was going on?
But then Barrington burst into her staccato Mandarin again, and after a few moments the senior officer nodded his head and – Navarone could barely believe it – actually smiled. He then gestured to the junior man, who ushered the entire party through the gate en masse, all of them permitted to board the train with no further checks.
Whatever Barrington said had obviously worked, and Navarone hoped he would get to work with her again; she was worth her weight in gold. Scratch that, he thought – she was worth Chad Davis’s weight in gold.
Relieved beyond measure, he watched as Barrington led the party through the gates and toward the Maglev train.
Now all he had to do was worry about himself.
9
Liu Yingchau heard the comments over his radio, barely able to decipher what was going on.
He had been angry with himself since watching the American commando exit Beihai Lake in the speedboat, completely at a loss to know how to help the fleeing man. No matter how good the agent was, the security network that would be heading north with him would be truly inescapable, and – despite his intentions to help the man – there was nothing that Liu could really do about it.
But the reports coming thick and fast through Liu’s communications system hinted that he was perhaps doing better than Liu had any right to hope; first there was the abandoned speedboat – the reason Liu was now hightailing it in a military squad car into the Houhai district – and then the sound of whistles, gun shots, and the garbled radio messages about the man climbing a wall. And then more messages as the helicopters found him on the rooftops.
Liu had assumed that this would be the end of it – the next thing he’d hear would be news of the man’s capture or death. But then – even before he heard the reports on the radio – his attention was drawn upward by the sound of a fast-moving helicopter, and he opened the squad car window and craned his neck out to see it.
And what he saw amazed him – one of the Harbin Z-9s blasting through the rain-filled skies above him, with what appeared to be a man dangling from an open door. It was as insane a sight as any Liu had ever seen, and the screams and shouts he heard over the airwaves soon after just confirmed the unreality of the situation.
But it seemed that the American had killed two of the soldiers onboard the chopper, and the pilot had then taken things into his own hands and was now doing his best to kill the man.
As Liu watched the helicopter accelerate off across Beijing, he already started to calculate his options should the man somehow miraculously survive.
Because it was now becoming a possibility that Liu had to seriously consider.
There were only twenty feet to go until the chopper passed over the curved roof of the performing arts center, and Cole knew he just had to hang on for a few moments longer, just a few short, painful moments . . .
But in those few moments, time seemed to distort, fractions of a second turning to minutes of pain and anguish, until Cole wondered if he could truly hang on long enough to see his plan through to the end, or if his grip would give up too soon, his body plummeting to the lake below, breaking apart when it hit water as hard as concrete.
His mind continued to play tricks on him in those moments, questioning the height of the chopper’s approach, its angle, where his own body truly was in space – too high, too low – and whether instead of clearing the roof, he would instead by dashed against it, legs and pelvis shattered by the impact; or else the entire helicopter itself would hit the structure in a suicide mission by the enraged pilot.
But then those fleeting instants were over, and the helicopter was over the roof, still accelerating onwards, and soon the roof would be gone, left far behind, and . . .
Cole released his grip without conscious thought as he let his instincts take over completely, guiding his body, taking advantage of the perfect time, the one and only opportunity he had left.
His body sailed down through the air and he felt the familiar lurch in his stomach as gravity pushed him savagely earthwards, and then the roof was there, right there at this feet, and he buckled at the ankles, the knees, the hips, his body rolling just as he’d been taught in jump school at Fort Bragg all those years before, the same way he had landed after his hundreds of parachute jumps; but this time the landing was on curved metal and glass, and – the breath knocked out of him – he was suddenly tumbling and spinning down the arched surface, falling uncontrollably down the elliptical building.
But then his instinct – hardwired and unassailable – prevailed again, and his hands, still weak from his grip in the helicopter door, had to go to work one more time, grasping out for the raised titanium frame which held the darkened glass in place, fingertips working to gain a hold of the rain-slicked metal.
They grasped, failed, and grasped again; and then again, and then again, his body all the while continuing its inexorable slide down the side of the building; but then his fingers grasped and held and his body finally, mercifully, came to a stop, a third of the way down the curved glass slope.
Cole breathed hard, gasping, almost unable to believe he had finally stopped his fatal descent.
But stop it he had, and now – with the sounds of the other choppers moving in towards him – all he had to do was find some way of getting inside the damned building.
General Wu looked at the monitors which showed the progress of the East China Fleet towards the coast of Japan. The entire battle group was still undetected, still far enough away from the target so that their radar would be ineffective.
But soon, Wu knew, everyone in the entire world would be aware of his plans. Would America intervene?
He hadn’t previously thought so, but today’s events were causing him to reconsider; they had already tried to intervene in his affairs, hadn’t they? At the moment he had no proof, but he felt sure that the dual incidents that had occurred that afternoon – the foiled assassination attempt on his own life, and the destruction of the Hall of Imperial Supremacy and the Politburo within – must have been the work of the Americans. Who else, realistically, could it have been?
Did that indicate that their resolve was greater than he had anticipated? Would they risk the four thousand sailors and aircrew of the USS Ford, the tens of thousands of their citizens trapped inside China’s borders, to help their ally?
Wu still couldn’t believe they had the stomach for it; what had happened today was low-key, a covert operation which reflected a last-ditch, desperate attempt on the part of President Abrams to avoid an all-out war. But when that war reared its ugly head – as it would do any day now – Wu was in no doubt that Abrams would back down.
He had leaked enough information to US intelligence sources so that they would have a vague idea of the massive nuclear arsenal Wu had under his command, and he was sure that the psychological profile they had on him would suggest that he would be willing to use that arsenal if pushed.
Which, of course, he was. Why have it otherwise?
The tunnels under the Taihang Mountains were so deep, so well protected, that no military airstrike could have a chance of taking them out. The Americans would know this, just as they would know that China could easily target the pitifully small US stockpile that remained. It was a one-sided affair if ever there was one, and was the major reason for Wu’s unshakeable confidence in attacking Japan.
And attacking Japan was something he had always wanted to do, something he had felt compelled to do, something he had fantasized over and dreamed about ever since he’d heard stories as a child of the atrocities visited upon his people by Japan’s imperialist armies. His own grandmother had been brutalized during the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, his grandfather bayoneted to death after being forced to watch her gang raped. His uncle was later beaten to death by Japanese officials in occupied Shanghai, which was when his own parents had fled north to Chengdu. They had hated the Japanese with a hot, burning passion, and had instilled the same vehement hatred in their son.
Now Wu felt close to finally making that nation pay for its atrocities, to finally bring it under Chinese control, to make it yet one more province of the Chinese empire. He would subjugate its people and take over their industrial base, achieving a huge propaganda victory for his new regime while also vastly increasing the wealth of his own nation.
And, he thought with a smile, vastly increasing his own personal wealth in the process.
He thought momentarily of his old friend Kang Xing, Minister of National Defense and – Wu could now admit – perhaps the true mastermind behind recent events. He had certainly seeded the ideas in Wu’s mind, given him the confidence to go through with his plans, made suggestions for an overall strategic direction to follow.
But now Kang was dead, killed by the bomb – or space-based weapons attack, they still didn’t really know – which had destroyed much of the Outer Eastern Palace. His emotions were mixed – the man had proved to be a good friend over the years, and a valuable mentor. But at the end of the day, he knew too much, and if Wu was ever going to step out of Kang’s shadow and become his own man, he would have ultimately had to get rid of his old friend anyway.
He had to admit, in a way the Americans had actually done him a favor, and the thought made him smile.
His head snapped round at the call of one of the officers monitoring the situation with the assassin, a situation that Wu had stopped following when it became clear it was degenerating into chaos; he had instructed the officers to only tell him when it was sorted out, and the man was dead or in custody.
Wu strode over to the excited officer. ‘Has he been captured?’
‘Not yet,’ the officer replied, ‘but we have him trapped. He has managed to get inside the National Center for Performing Arts, but he’s trapped himself. We have air coverage blanketing the area and ground troops moving in right now. There is no chance for him to escape whatsoever.’
‘Good,’ said General Wu as he turned back to monitor the passage of the carrier battle group across the East China Sea, his keen eyes assessing everything. Catching the assassin was important, but he knew that the invasion of Japan was infinitely more so.
Minister of National Defense Kang Xing smiled at the attendant as he accepted his glass of wine, relaxing his body back into the comfortable seats of the Maglev train.
He saw his reflection in the window and thought with amusement that he made quite a passable lady. Yes, he thought with a smile, not bad at all.
He had no idea how – with all international travel routes closed – the Americans were going to get them out of the country, but their performance so far gave him the confidence that they would succeed.
And if they did not? Well then, he and the other members of the Politburo would just be returned to their prison in the Forbidden City. The US commandos would probably be killed, or else captured and tortured in the basement dungeons, but that was hardly Kang’s concern.
He reflected momentarily on the fact that General Wu might arrange for him personally to have a little ‘accident’, though. After all, it was Kang who had guided Wu’s hand throughout the build-up to the coup, and Wu wouldn’t want the competition. While he was still being useful – providing ‘information’ from the Politburo members – he was relatively safe, but he was under no illusions that when Wu had no more use for him, he would go the same way as Tsang Feng.
But Kang hoped it would not get to that stage; the Americans had rescued him and the rest of the Politburo, Chang was rising in everyone’s estimation, and Kang’s own personal plans – just a portion of which related to Wu’s takeover of China – were going exactly as he’d anticipated.
In a way, it didn’t even matter if he was killed now; everything was in place for his ultimate goals to be realized, goals far more grandiose and ambitious than that brutal thug Wu De could even comprehend.
But he wanted to live, to go on to see the fruits of his labors; he had worked so hard for it over the years, he felt he deserved that, at least.
He wanted to see the results of his plans, his machinations, his political maneuverings. Was that too much to ask? He wanted to see what he had created, his ultimate tribute to the history of China, and then he could die in peace, a happy man.
He sipped his wine as the train accelerated along its track, finally breaking free from Beijing now, and wondered deeply about what the next days would bring.
10
Mark Cole crouched down low within the incredibly complex lighting fixtures that hung high above the Theatre Hall, looking down at the scene below him.
