18 Dragons Read online

  “Let’s go,” she said. Urgency laced her tone.

  Zhang didn’t move. He just stared wide-eyed at them, as if he didn’t hear, as if he didn’t know what to do.

  “Let’s go,” she snapped. “Now.” Then, without waiting for him to respond, she opened the back door and assisted the man in the back seat. Her movements snapped Zhang into motion. He nodded quickly and got back into the front seat. He turned on the car as he shut his door, and the lady came around to his side and got into the seat behind him.

  Zhang’s heart was thumping in the back of his throat as he backed out of the woods and returned to the narrow road he had come in on. The Corolla’s windows were tinted dark, and when he glanced in the rearview mirror, Zhang noticed that the American operatives had removed their balaclavas.

  The woman had blond hair matted to her head, and she was speaking to her teammate, asking him how he was. She was beautiful, and Zhang had to force himself to pull his gaze away.

  The man had large, puffy cheeks but a strong jawline and close-cropped hair. He looked to be in great pain, and the skin on his hands and face was littered with dozens of nicks and scrapes. He laid his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. Zhang turned his attention back to the narrow dirt road in front of him. It wasn’t long before he came to the main road once again. There was no traffic, and he turned left and slowly accelerated to the speed limit of sixty kilometers an hour.

  Zhang’s palms were sweaty. He knew that if they were pulled over, if the authorities saw any reason to stop the vehicle, that they were done for. But he wouldn’t let that happen. He had been selected for this assignment not only for his commitment to American ideals but also because of his past as a regional courier. Only when he finally tired of it two years ago had he moved north and opened the fruit stand. No one knew the roads of this province better than he. He knew the alleys, the shortcuts, and had familiarized himself this morning with where the road closures and construction was. A voice from the back seat dissolved his thoughts.

  “We were pursued,” the woman said. “They may throw a net. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes,” Zhang replied. “I know back roads. I know a way around.”

  The woman nodded uncertainly. “All right.” She looked back out her window with focused, determined eyes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The further north they drove, the more Ellie and Virgil felt the tension ease. They were still in the country, and there were still too many pieces to play, too many people to trust to fully relax. But for now, they seemed to have escaped the initial manhunt underway back in the mountains.

  The driver took them across circuitous roads that led around small towns and busy intersections. When they finally came to Majianzhen, he took the Jhinga Expressway north for ten miles before exiting and continuing to take the rural roads back toward Shanghai.

  With each passing minute, Ellie could see the driver’s anxiety wane. His hands relaxed around the wheel, and his shoulders slacked. As they rode down a dirt road flanked by tea plantations, the driver reached over to the front passenger seat and lifted a canvas bag. He held it back to his passengers. Ellie took it and peered inside. There were bottles of water, apples, and dried meat. She nodded her thanks and distributed the contents between her and Virgil.

  They drank and ate in silence, looking out the window at the passing scenery, watching as the air grew thicker with smog with each mile they drew closer to the city.

  When Virgil was done, he tossed his waste into the bag. He looked into the rearview mirror and spoke to the driver. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “You’re betraying your country.” Ellie shot him a chastening look. Speaking unnecessarily to a domestic asset was against procedure. Especially questions that sought to excavate answers of a personal nature. Virgil gave her a sheepish shrug, then returned his attention to the front, waiting for an answer.

  The car bounced over a rut in the road, and the driver swerved to avoid another one. “My father,” he said, “he was killed at the Tiananmen Square...what is the English?”

  “Protests?” Virgil offered.

  “Yes. The protests. He was a graduate student at Peking University. Crushed by a tank. My mother, she had to raise me alone.” He evaded another hole in the dirt road and leaned in closer to the wheel as he focused on the course ahead. “My country,” he continued, “is like no other. I love it deeply. But one need not be a communist to love China. Communism is a new development here. We should not be defined by it or forced to accept it.”

  “So this is retribution for what they did to your father?” Virgil asked.

  “No. But my father wanted to see democracy in the homeland. But his voice, and the voice of many of his friends, was met with violence. My mother, she did not let me forget that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Virgil said. “Thank you for helping us.”

  It was quiet in the car again. Zhang finally left the back roads for good and took the on-ramp for Hukun Expressway into Shanghai.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nearly two hours later, the Corolla turned onto Wuhou Avenue in east Shanghai. Zhang pulled into line behind a dozen other vehicles, entering through the employee entrance. The Port of Shanghai was the world’s busiest container port, moving nearly forty million containers each year. At any given moment, 10,000 ships occupied the port region, importing and exporting three billion dollars’ worth of goods each day.

  The car crawled forward as the vehicles ahead of them presented their credentials and were granted admittance. Zhang rolled down his window as they approached the security checkpoint, where a middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform stood with a pistol in a side holster.

  They waited as the guard received the badge from the driver of the car in front of them and went into the guard house. He returned a minute later, gave the badge back to the driver, and waved them on. Zhang drove forward. The tension was thick inside the Corolla.

  Without speaking, the guard extended a hand. Zhang handed over a piece of paper. Ellie could see that his fingers were trembling. The guard unfolded the paper and then leaned down and peered into the backseat through Zhang’s open window. He locked eyes with Ellie before turning his gaze to Virgil, who simply offered a curt nod.

  The guard stood up and returned his attention to the paper. Then he looked back to Zhang and, saying nothing, returned the paper to him and waved them on. The guard turned his attention to the vehicle behind them, and they entered the complex.

  The port was huge, larger than any the Americans had ever seen. Ellie had been to the Suez Port of Egypt, and Virgil, the year prior, had met with an asset at South America's largest port in Santos, Brazil. But neither of those touched the magnitude and breadth of the Port of Shanghai.

  As they moved forward, Zhang rolled up his window and uttered a cathartic sigh. He followed the main road past a complex of office buildings before turning off into a maze of containers stacked four and five high. He drove for five minutes, navigating containers and oncoming cars, all the while moving farther and farther back into the stacks. He pulled over suddenly before a dark green container and looked in the rearview mirror at his passengers. “Okay,” he said. “This is it. There are no cameras here. You must hurry.”

  Zhang leaned down and pulled up on the latch that released the trunk. He stepped out of the Corolla, and Ellie and Virgil followed, shutting their doors behind them. Zhang removed two black backpacks from the trunk. He handed one to Virgil and one to Ellie before scurrying over to the container and unlatching the door. Ellie helped Virgil over, and by the time they got to Zhang, he already had the door open. The operatives stepped inside. It was dark, the only light coming from the open doorway.

  “There is a light in your bag,” Zhang said. And then, he looked both Americans in the eye. “Good luck.” He started to close the door.

  “Hey,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”

  He nodded absently and shut the door, slapped the handle closed, and locked it.
A port official would be by soon enough to check it and seal it.

  Zhang returned to the car, and after taking in another deep breath and exhaling deeply, he quickly performed a three-point turn and drove off, retracing the way he had come in.

  Virgil felt around in the bag and withdrew a flashlight. He clicked it on, and the halogen beam illuminated stacks of cardboard boxes on either side of them. Off-brand basketball shoes. They worked their way through the maze until they reached a door near the back. They stepped inside, and Virgil shut the door. A 2x4 beam of wood lay near their feet. Ellie hoisted it and set it into two steel hooks welded to either side of the door. Now it was locked.

  Virgil played the beam near the ceiling where a dull, thin stream of light came through a circular opening the size of a tennis ball. It was their air vent.

  Their living quarters for the next day was eight feet wide and four feet across. Ellie sat down. She knew that this shipping container had not been manufactured for their clandestine escape. It had only been repurposed—often used to smuggle people: desperate parents, trying to give their children a better life, young women willing to sell themselves for a chance to escape grim conditions at home, young men hoping for better work opportunities abroad—all of them deceived and surely coming to painful ends.

  Virgil reached into the bag and brought out three glow sticks. He cracked one of them and tossed it on the floor, returned the others to the bag. A soft blue glow grew brighter as the hydrogen peroxide inside the sticks combined with both the phenyl oxalate ester and the blue dye. Using the flashlight, Virgil searched the rest of the bag’s contents: six Power Bars, two apples, four bottles of water, and two empty plastic containers for urinating.

  Ellie unzipped her pack and produced a face mask, an aluminum cylinder containing twenty liters of oxygen, an accompanying regulator, and a sleeping cannula. Should the vent above become crimped or blocked by another container, they would still be able to breathe.

  If all continued according to the plan, they would be on a ship and out of port in the next six hours. From there it would be nearly a day and a half for the shipping vessel to arrive at the Port of Taiwan, five hundred and fifty miles south.

  Now that they were alone, now that they were finally away from the danger of an imminent pursuit, Ellie spoke. Her words issued from smiling lips. “You know, you should take up rock climbing when we get back. Maybe do a little free soloing.”

  He huffed, and in the dim blue glow, she could see him return the smile. “I deserve that.”

  “Damn right you do.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sun rose brilliantly into a cloudless sky, waking the city and sending millions of people scattering to work and school. Zhang walked casually down the street to his fruit stand. Yesterday’s events were still fresh in his mind as he opened the door to his stall and began to set the fruit displays outside.

  “Zhang?”

  He turned to see Sung Ling outside of her shop. “You are back already? I thought you said you would be gone for several days?”

  He smiled. “Yes. But my grandmother was not so bad as I was led to believe.”

  “Ah. Good. I am glad to hear that.”

  As Zhang laid out a row of kiwis, he saw two men walking down the street. Their movements were purposeful and confident. The sun was in his eyes, and he stepped to the side to get a better look from a spot of shade.

  His stomach dropped. The men wore the dark green uniforms of the MSS—Ministry of State Security. He felt a cold tingle ride up the back of his neck.

  They stopped in front of him. “Zhang Wei?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come with us.” The men flanked him and grabbed his upper arms.

  “What is this?” he demanded. “Where are you taking me?” Neither man spoke.

  He turned around and looked at Sung Ling. Her features were now molded into a tight contortion of scorn. “You do not have a grandmother,” she said, and then shaking her head, she went back into her shop.

  And in that moment, Zhang understood that Sung Ling was an agent of the State.

  The soldiers forced him down the street to where a black sedan was waiting. One of the back doors was open. His accosters stopped at the curb and quickly forced his hands down behind his back. He felt the coldness of the steel cuffs as they clicked around his wrists. “Get in,” one of them barked. He placed a hand on top of Zhang’s head and forced him down. The door slammed shut behind him, and Zhang turned to see an older gentleman sitting near the opposite door. He wore a dark suit; his hair was dusted with gray. His stern face was carved with deep lines, and his eyes, while piercing, were calm—the eyes of a man who was used to being in control.

  In that moment, beneath that cold gaze, Zhang knew that he would be interrogated until they finally labeled him a hanjian—a traitor to the People’s Republic of China. Lengthy, accusatory conversations lay in wait for him. Perhaps even torture. He would talk; he would tell them what they wanted to know. But he didn’t know anything. Nothing beyond what he did. Who the agents were, where they had come from, and where they were going. He did not know. After the torture, a period of internment lay in wait for him. A day maybe, even a month. Perhaps a year. And when they were done incubating the fear of the State into him, they would place him before a firing squad.

  He had betrayed his country. He had known the risks before he began. But he had no regrets. People needed to be free. Free to make their own decisions without filtering them first through the cold gaze of a nanny state.

  His father had believed that. And he believed it.

  People should be free to choose.

  Free to live.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ellie and Virgil braced themselves as a dockside crane lowered its spreader down and locked onto their container’s locking points. It lifted them into the air, swung them away from the boat, and lowered them onto the dock. Outside, they could hear the muffled sounds of dock workers yelling orders at each other and the whine of lift engines as they grabbed containers and carried them off to their designated area. They didn’t move for over an hour. The Taiwan Strait was a trade superhighway, and while not as busy as Shanghai, it still managed over ten million annual containers that came into Taiwan’s three major ports of Chilung, Kaohsiung.

  Finally, their container was selected by a forklift truck and picked up. They rode for several minutes before the forklift lowered the container and set it down.

  They had already packed everything up. Ellie helped Virgil to his good foot. When they heard a series of incongruent raps on the outside of the container, they opened the narrow door to their small space and made their way to the front.

  On the other side, the hatch clattered back, and the door opened with a whine. Bright light from an afternoon sun spilled in, and Ellie and Virgil squinted against it.

  “Damn, son. What happened to you?”

  Virgil smiled. “She pushed me.”

  “Well, you probably deserved it.” Captain Harris took the backpack from Virgil, shoulder up beneath him, and assisted him out of the container.

  As Ellie’s eyes adjusted to the light, she saw a helicopter beyond them, it rotors beginning to spin. The metal bird sat in an old dirt lot along the water’s edge. They were at the farthest, oldest end of the port, where old buildings now sat neglected, withering away in the hot, salty air.

  The three Americans got into the aircraft and buckled up. Captain Harris questioned Virgil about his physical condition and then slipped on his headset.

  The Sikorsky S-70 helicopter was part of Taiwan’s Air Force fleet. It was scheduled to take them two hundred kilometers over the Philippine Sea where they would rendezvous with the USS Rochester aircraft carrier.

  As the helicopter lifted off, it stirred the dirt and sent a cloud of dust billowing into the water. Ellie felt herself relax as the port grew smaller beneath them and the container that had been their lodging for the last day finally disappeared altogether.

/>   Their mission was complete.

  The leader of 18 Dragons was dead. Her father, Xu, and his ideological vitriol toward the West was widely known, fully documented within the U.S. intelligence community. But it seemed that he had not gone so far as to attack the United States. It was not he who was responsible for leaking the identities of the U.S. agents.

  So he lived.

  For now.

  Ellie would not have chosen such a mission. It was almost profane: a daughter and her father visiting the grave of her mother. The daughter being executed in front of her father. But such decisions were not up to Ellie.

  Virgil caught her eye and gave her an understanding nod, as if he knew what she was thinking. As if he were thinking the same thing.

  That they were fighting a war.

  And the war wasn’t over.

  THE END

  Keep an eye out for the second TEAM 99 mission, The Apostate, coming at the end of May 2019, where the team is in Cairo, Egypt, hunting down a formidable terrorist.

  New to Jack Hardin?

  Ellie O’Conner has her own suspense series, set in her hometown of Pine Island, Florida. You can jump in by clicking the link to Silent Ripple or Broken Stern below.

  Silent Ripple (a prequel novella)

  Broken Stern (Book 1)

  Shallow Breeze (Book 2)

  Bitter Tide (Book 3)

  Vacant Shore (Book 4)

  Breakwater (Book 5)

  TEAM 99 Ops Thrillers

  18 Dragons

  The Apostate