Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was another vessel in the water near Po Toi Island, but Court couldn’t see it. It lay at anchor off the eastern shore, some two and a half miles east of the bay, and it was impressive to look at on the outside. But as luxury yachts went, the current occupants found it almost as cramped on the inside as living in military barracks. The yacht was a Numarine 68 Fly; it boasted a forty-seven-ton displacement and a cruising speed of twenty-five knots, and it had been rented out by the week from a service on Kowloon. Logistics personnel working at the SVR station in Hong Kong had acquired the vessel from the owners with an open-ended return date, stocked it for a week so it could house more than a dozen operatives and all their gear, then moored it in a slip at a large public docking facility.

Then the logistics personnel left it there.

And soon after they left, Zoya and the task force arrived and climbed aboard.

The boat was now crewed by Russian naval personnel brought down from Vladivostok, men who looked at this operation as a vacation from their normal daily grind on a coastal patrol boat, and they, as well as a team of security men brought in to secure the vessel, had no clue about the real mission of the main element of their small task force.

This yacht was designed to accommodate eight in luxurious comfort. Now seventeen in all — sixteen men and one woman — lived in stifling proximity to one another, sleeping in shifts on every flat surface, their massive stocks of gear filling all the cargo holds as well as every possible nook and cranny belowdecks, even stowed under black tarps lashed to the main deck.

The yacht had been docked in a mooring field north of the Hong Kong airport for the past three days, but the previous evening they’d relocated to this spot off Po Toi. Zoya had ferreted out information from a rival Triad gang that a Chinese defector pursued by mainland intelligence in Hong Kong had been taken to Po Toi on a Wo Shing Wo speedboat several days ago. Here he was to be handed off to a cargo ship called the Tai Chin VI that ran heroin back and forth between Wo Shing Wo and some Southeast Asian drug concern. The information was thirdhand at best, but Zoya liked her chances, so she moved her task force here to set up shop off the island.

After confirming the presence of Wo Shing Wo on the island and after a Russian spy satellite had found the ship heading back to Po Toi, Zoya and her task force decided their best chance for finding Fan before anyone else was to hit hard and fast soon after the ship arrived this evening.

They didn’t expect Fan to be on board, but they did expect the crew would know something of where the ship went last, and possibly even who had Fan now.

On the Russian yacht, a lone sentry armed with binoculars stood on the flying bridge and scanned the deserted shoreline to the west. On the main foredeck, two more crewmen readied diving gear, while inside the main-deck saloon, seven men pulled on neoprene suits. The operators were crowded, but they were accustomed to living and working in close proximity to one another. As members of the elite and secretive Zaslon (Shield) Unit of SVR, this very team of paramilitaries had helicoptered across eastern Ukraine and Dagestan on direct-action missions. They’d killed terrorists and kidnapped local rebel leaders in Chechnya after sitting huddled together in the back of armored vehicles for hours on end, and they’d parachuted into Syria to assist with the escape of a Syrian Army general from a position being overrun by rebels.

These men were all first-timers to Hong Kong, but tonight’s mission was no different from others in their careers. They would raid a cargo ship from underwater, capture any on board who could be captured, and kill those who offered resistance.

Vasily was in charge of the Zaslon team, with Yevgeni serving as his second-in-command. They stood in the middle of the saloon talking over last-minute details of the mission while everyone geared up around them.

Just as the men began a final weapons and comms check in the tight room, the hatch to the lower deck rose, and Zoya Zakharova climbed up from below. She wore a black neoprene shorty wetsuit, her bare legs and arms exposed. Her chin-length dark hair was pulled back and banded tight against her head, obviously so she could pull on the neoprene diving hood she held in her hand. On her right thigh she wore a sheathed knife, and over her shoulder she lugged a black backpack.

She pulled a holstered Glock 26 pistol from the pack and dropped the bag and her hood on a chair in the saloon, then racked the slide of the weapon. As she slid the pistol into a holster on the utility belt and dropped it next to the pack, she checked the threads on the silencer, housed in a case on the belt. After doing this, she glanced up at the other men in the room.

All seven of the Zaslon operators just stood there, staring back at her.

“What?” she asked.

Vasily addressed the SVR officer. “Off for a nighttime swim?”

She looked back to her gear, then checked to make certain her three extra pistol magazines were in their pouches on the utility belt. “Don’t start with me. I’m going with you.”

“No, you’re not. Someone will come back to get you when the Tai Chin VI is secure.”

“It’s ten minutes away. Twenty minutes round-trip. Plus, you might need me during the takedown.”

“We’ll have eight men. We need eight men. Men.”

Arseny and Pyotr both chuckled over by the navigation table.

Zoya asked, “What if that tender on shore returns to the boat? I can stay on the deck and watch the bay for any counterattack.”

Vasily knelt down to load rifle magazines into a load-bearing vest propped against the wall. “Not necessary. Ruslan and Sasha will stay with us just long enough to clear B deck; then they will return to the main deck. They can keep watch for anyone returning to the boat during the operation.”

“I can help them. I won’t get in your way. I’ve been in combat multiple times.”

Vasily snorted. “Really? Where?”

Zoya shrugged. “Classified.”

“Right.”

“You know I’ve trained at Yasenevo with FSB Spetsnaz forces.”

Vasily snorted. “Like I give a shit. They probably gave you fluffy towels and massages.”

“No, they did not.”

“And we aren’t FSB Spetsnaz, dear. We are Zaslon.”

“Which means you belong to SVR. I am an SVR officer, I remind you, and this is my operation.”

All the men looked at Vasily, but the paramilitary commander didn’t budge. “I have tactical control of direct-action ops. And I say you stay here and wait for us to call you forward. End of conversation.”

Vasily was technically correct. An SVR case officer had no authority to make herself part of the tactical team conducting a difficult “bottom up” raid on a ship full of potential hostiles. Still, they knew she’d passed all the Spetsnaz qualifications necessary to make her an asset to the op, not a detriment, so Zoya felt they should have had no problem with her trailing along.

But these guys were all ex-military, whereas Zoya was a civilian government employee and, of course, Zoya was a woman. These alpha males didn’t want her fighting alongside them.

She wouldn’t push it; she needed their help in this, and even though she thought these guys were assholes, she wanted them to remain focused on the mission at hand, not on her. Zoya said, “Very well. I’ll go to the hide on the island when you stop to pick up Mikhail.”

“Mikhail is breaking down the hide. We won’t need it.”

“Let me see you at work. I will give you overwatch during the raid, and I’ll be closer than I am here.” To that she added, “You can keep me off the boat, but you can’t keep me off the damn island.”

Vasily just shrugged, but before he could speak, Zoya’s radio chirped. “Anna Seven to Sirena.”

She grabbed her walkie-talkie out of her gear bag and brought it to her mouth, her eyes still locked on Vasily. “Go, Seven.”

“I have another tender leaving the target vessel. Five men on board, just like last time. They look like they are heading to that same bar the other subjects went to.”

This was good news for the Zaslon unit; they would have fewer hostiles on board the cargo ship. But Zoya didn’t like it. She had no idea how many would be on the ship when they hit it. Could it be possible that all the men who knew what happened to Fan Jiang would be drinking in the bar she’d visited that morning? In that case, Vasily and his men would have to wait around for them to return.

Zoya looked to the Anna team commander. “That’s ten off the boat you are hitting.”

“I call that good news.”

“Not if all ten come back at once.”

Sasha broke into the conversation now. “Ten men on two fifteen-foot launches? A shooting gallery.”

Zoya sighed, but Vasily acquiesced to her demand. He said, “You can go to the overwatch during the raid.”

“Thank you. One more thing.”

“What is it?” he growled.

“Survivors. Give me survivors. The more the better.”

“Roger that, Koshka.”

Zoya turned to go back downstairs to change out of her scuba gear and into clothing appropriate to return to the overwatch position. She stopped, suddenly, then turned back around. “Oh, and I want the VSS up there with me. Just in case.” She was speaking of the suppressed sniper rifle they had been using at the hide site all day for the reconnaissance powers of its scope.

Vasily showed his frustration with a heave of his big chest, then just waved a distracted thumbs-up her way before returning to his work.

Court Gentry approached the entrance of the raucous bayside bar and immediately caught long looks from many of the patrons standing around near the entrance. He acted like he didn’t notice, and like he was perfectly comfortable, but in truth he was already wondering if he had just ambled into a bear trap.

When he’d passed through the door some eleven hours earlier, he’d been surprised to see other Western faces, but this time, there was no surprise.

He was the only gweilo in the joint.

He never felt relaxed standing out in any instance, but he’d known he wasn’t coming in here to hide out in the corner. He was coming in here to provoke a reaction. The three British assassins missing for five days had been in this place — of that Court felt certain — something bad had happened to them, and people here knew about it. A new Western stranger was probably going to learn something about the fate of the others, Court surmised, although he knew his plan wasn’t among his most subtle or nuanced.

He entered the dimly lit establishment, passed the edge of the bar on his left, then made his way through tough-looking Chinese men as he walked all the way down to the opposite end of the wooden wraparound bar. He was lucky to find a single metal stool around the turn at the end, farthest from the door. He sat down, taking off his backpack and sliding it in front of him, hooking his leg around a strap as a force of habit in case of thieves. On his right he had a wall to the kitchen, and behind him were a few empty tables in a darkened corner with concrete-block walls. The covered deck layout of the bar meant that just twenty feet off his left was the railing that looked down to the dinghy dock and the water of the bay.

While he’d garnered a lot of attention since he’d arrived, there was still a good bit of laughing and talking in the crowd; for every man looking his way now there were three or four more who either didn’t know or didn’t care that a new Western face was in the building.

The age range ran from early twenties to late forties, but most people he saw, regardless of their age, were dressed roughly the same. Some sort of undershirt, usually a tank top, under a short-sleeve shirt left completely unbuttoned. Baggy pants along with shoes or sandals. It was a common look in Hong Kong, but here it seemed to be a dress code.

It slowly occurred to Court that there was a possibility, perhaps a strong possibility, that everyone in the bar belonged to the same group.

He wondered if he’d wandered into a Triad meeting.

If that turned out to be the case, Court told himself he’d rip into Colonel Dai. Dai had given him a list of known Wo Shing Wo hangouts, and this wasn’t on it.

Court noticed a big group of men in the middle of the room, taking up the largest portion of the dockside floor. They had pulled several small plastic tables together, and they sat around it drinking and talking. Court had just looked over at this group of men when another five men appeared up the stairs from the floating dock and began greeting the large group. These men were clearly not Chinese. Court thought they looked Vietnamese, Laotian, or Cambodian.

They shook hands and bowed to a group of Chinese at the near end of the row of tables, but on the far end, Court noticed several others who appeared to be of the same nationality as the newcomers. Since the five of them had just arrived from the water and he’d seen no new vessels in the bay for hours other than the Tai Chin VI, Court wondered if these ten or so men could be from the cargo ship.

Soon a good twenty men were seated together, Chinese and foreigners alike, drinking and smoking and talking, right in the middle of the dive bar.

Court took a full minute to scan his surroundings thoroughly. He decided that in any emergency, the galley kitchen, accessed from behind the bar, looked like the best possible avenue for escape, because he assumed it had a door to the outside. The only way to the kitchen from his side of the bar, however, was to go over the bar, so he’d have a damn hard time slipping away in any low-profile manner.

He watched while the bartender, the same man as earlier in the day, cleaned up a double shot of whiskey that had been knocked over by a man sitting at a stool and gesticulating to friends. The booze had been spilled over the warped wood bar top, and the man behind the bar sopped it up with a hand towel, then threw the towel on a shelf behind him, all the while grumbling at the patron for his clumsiness.

Court glanced down to his phone, held below the bar in his lap, and looked at the screen, which showed him a real-time view of the cargo ship from the camera placed on the hill. Using the infrared camera he saw a couple of men on deck but no other movement.

Court looked up just in time to see the bartender lighting a cigarette, tossing the lighter back on the bar, then stepping over to him. He looked at Court a long time, unease on full display as he recognized him as the man who had come earlier in the day and asked about the missing Brits.

Court was unaccustomed to being recognized, but he cut himself some slack. He’d made this guy nervous earlier, and he’d probably been the only Western male in the establishment since then.

Court smiled and faked his British accent. “Hi again. Can I get a Tsingtao?”

Without taking his eyes off Court, the man reached down in front of him, pulled a cold beer from a large metal ice bucket, then popped the top off the glass bottle and placed it down in front of his new customer.

Court smiled again. “Thanks very much, indeed.”

The bartender didn’t say a word; he just turned away and walked off with an expression that Court took for astonishment.

As Court drank his beer he kept his head low, but his eyes flicked up often enough to see that the bartender had moved down to the opposite end of the bar. He blatantly ignored one man reaching out asking for a drink and sought out a man in the crowd standing there near the entrance to the dive.

The bartender leaned into the group and began talking to the man there. The man listened intently, nodded, then glanced down the length of the bar at Court.

The man turned away from the bar and stepped over to a larger, younger individual, standing next to the group of men seated in the middle of the room.

Like a game of telephone, Court was able to watch the news of his arrival and the fact that he’d been asking about the three Brits from Sunday night make its way around the room.

Yep, Court realized, everybody in this place, other than himself, was part of one big group.

He was pretty sure he’d stumbled into a Wo Shing Wo get-together.

His plan to instigate a reaction from the patrons had worked, but he needed to learn something from their reaction, and so far he’d picked up nothing except that they didn’t like strangers in their midst.

He took a long, slow, calming breath. He was here to gather intel, not to get into a bar fight. If something bad happened, he told himself, he sure as hell was not going to be the one to start it. He’d sit here, as cool and confident as possible, and if he was confronted, he’d talk his way through it.

Court feigned ignorance of the bad juju growing in the room around him, and he glanced back down to his phone one more time. He used controls on his touch screen to adjust the view on the camera, backing out some to look around at other fishing boats, then tightening back up on the cargo ship at the mouth of the bay.

But Court didn’t keep his head down long. He had one foot on the floor and wrapped around his bag, the other tucked into the legs of the bar stool, ready to kick it out or hoist it up so he could use it to defend himself. He knew he needed to keep his own personal security in the forefront of his mind at all times.

He would have loved to leave the bar now, to just find a quiet copse of trees somewhere on the island and to sit there alone so he could concentrate on his camera, but he didn’t have that luxury. He was very aware of the fact that men from that boat out there were sitting here with him in this bar, and he had more opportunity to glean intelligence from them here than to pick up something on the boat on his night vision equipment.

Just as he forcefully reminded himself to keep one eye up and on the room around him, both eyes instead locked on to the screen of his phone.

“What… the… hell?”

Quickly Court switched from his low-light vision to his infrared and zoomed in from three-power to ten-power.

White-hot dots moved on the water’s surface, right against the hull of the cargo ship at the stern. They were human-sized, clearly divers emerging from below the surface of the bay. He counted four close together, then two more up near the bow.

The figures at the bow grew, then rose from the water, seeming to float in midair away from the ship.

Court’s mouth opened a little as he understood what he was looking at. Two men were climbing the anchor chain together, with four more at the stern, using a rope or a hooked ladder to ascend.

Right now, right out there in the darkness beyond the edge of the lights from the deck bar, just at the far edges of this little bay, the cargo hauler anchored right where he’d expected to find a ship related to the disappearance of Fitzroy’s men searching for Fan Jiang was being boarded by some sort of raiding party.

Court looked up to check the men around him — they seemed to be more overtly looking in his direction now — while he quickly dialed a number on his phone. This meant he lost the image of the ship for a moment so he could use the number keys, but as soon as the line began to ring, he put his wired earpiece in his ear and switched back to his infrared screen.

Colonel Dai answered on the first ring. “Way, ni hao?” Yes, hello?

Court’s voice was hurried and hushed. “Do you have an operation going on right now?”

“Of course. My men are all over Hong Kong looking for—”

Court interrupted. “I’m talking about a ship! Do you have men boarding a ship searching for Fan? Now. I mean… right now.”

Dai seemed genuinely confused by the question. “No. No one has reported any sightings or investigations of that nature. What ship? Where are you? I hear talking in the background. What do you see?”

Court looked around him. Young men were definitely filling the space between himself at the bar and the walkway along the bar towards the exit. No one had anything in their hands he could see, and they weren’t staring him down, but they were closing in and their bodies were showing cues that told Court they were squaring off for trouble.

Shit.

He was still convinced he could talk his way out of it, but the groupthink of fifty drinking buddies confronting one man certainly affected the attitudes around, and not in a way that encouraged polite discourse.

Court said, “I’ll check it out and call you back. Don’t worry… This could be nothing. If it’s something, I promise I’ll—”

“Just tell me where you are and—”

Court hung up the phone, checked the ship again through the infrared cam, and saw that the two men on the anchor chain were now disappearing over the gunwale near the bow. Two of the men at the stern climbed together, one on top of the other, while two more held it steady at the water line. Court thought it possible more men would be hitting the ship on the far side, as well.

Quickly he thought about calling Brewer to ask her if he was, in fact, watching CIA paramilitaries in action. He knew local Agency assets here were looking for Fan, and a Special Activities Division Ground Branch team had been moved close, ready to support him as soon as Court made contact with the target. Could this possibly be the Agency conducting an operation without his knowledge?

His gut told him this wasn’t SAD. He doubted Brewer would let a CIA hit take place without first making sure her asset in the area wasn’t in a compromised position. She might go ahead with a hit without giving him a warning, Court acknowledged, but he told himself she seemed too worried about her op getting out of hand as it was; leaving him somewhere out in the field during a direct action didn’t feel to him like the way she’d do business.

Plus, Court told himself, he didn’t have time to call Brewer and deal with the challenge-response code. A half dozen men, all Chinese, had moved to within striking distance, and they squared off against him now.