Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Zoya’s attention had been on a different part of the bay. She had just lined her rifle up on one of the four men in the second tender to launch from the bar in the past three minutes, when the man in her sights tumbled out of the boat and into the water.

She was confused for an instant, but when a second man dropped down in the boat a moment later, she understood; Ruslan and Sasha were firing their silenced rifles at the little boat from the deck of the cargo ship off to her left.

The SVR operative on the hill at the southeast edge of the bay flipped her weapon’s fire selector switch up to the “safe” setting, then moved the rifle to her right, pointing it back at the bar. She was fascinated by what sounded like a full-on gun battle raging in there, and she wanted to see if she could get eyes on more of the action to determine what the hell was going on.

Just as she put her eye back in the cup of the scope, she focused quickly on movement. A man flew through the air, facedown and arms outstretched, swan-diving out of the bar and chased by what looked like two dozen or more frenzied men.

She saw nothing of the diver before he splashed awkwardly into the black surface other than the fact that he had dark clothing and he wore a backpack.

Men leaned over the railing now and held pistols at the water. Flashlight beams swept the bay, hunting for the man who’d disappeared there.

She put her crosshairs on one of the armed men on the deck, but she did not fire. He wasn’t engaging her men and was no threat at all to her operation.

She watched the water through her scope for over a minute, waiting for the diver to resurface.

While she peered intently, half in disbelief at the diver’s ability to hold his breath, Vasily came over the net for the first time since the raid began. “Anna One to all call signs. Objective secure. Report in.”

Zoya listened carefully while all eight Zaslon men checked in over the radio. Only one, Pyotr, had been injured in the takedown, and he reported he was ambulatory and did not need any aid.

Satisfied and relieved, she pulled away from the rifle and sat up. She pressed her mic transmit button and jumped onto the net herself. “This is Sirena. How many survivors?”

There was a delay, to the point that Zoya called back into her radio. “Did you copy my last transmission, Anna One?”

Vasily replied curtly now. “One survivor.”

Zoya fumed. She reached to key her mic when Vasily came back over the net.

“We’re sending the RIB to pick you up now.” A pause. “You probably should hurry up.”

Zoya pressed the transmit key so hard her finger turned white. “Shit! Your one survivor is injured?”

“Affirmative. Anna One, out.”

Zoya packed the rifle as quickly as possible, climbed to her feet, and headed towards the trail that led down the hill to the shoreline, cursing under her breath the entire way. As she started off, she gave one more glance over to the dive bar in the distance. She imagined she never would find out what the hell had just happened over there, but she couldn’t help but think about the American she’d seen that morning.

Although for the life of her she couldn’t picture him.

Court kicked with powerful strokes through the water, generating moderate speed as he swam through the black. He held the regulator of the spare-air bottle in his mouth and breathed slowly and calmly, and between his arms he held a fat rock he’d picked up from the surface of the bay to give him the ballast he needed to remain a steady ten feet down without additional effort.

He put his swim fins on when he’d made it forty or fifty yards away from his impact point, and he used the tritium compass on his watch to orient him back in the direction of the public pier.

It took him a few minutes to arrive at one of the coral-encrusted stanchions under the pier, and when he did arrive he simply dropped his rock and ascended slowly behind one of the vertical support beams, careful to make no bubbles or noise.

Holding on to the slimy wood to keep himself floating out of sight, he could see the well-lit bar in the distance. Someone had turned large overhead lights on, and it seemed as though the fire was under control. Men still looked over the railing into the water, and a half dozen dinghies churned circles around that part of the bay, waving flashlights around, looking for the white man who’d somehow managed to kill a number of their group and then escape under the surface.

Court was safe enough, and to his surprise he felt no new real pain, so he began to consider his next problem of the night. He had no weapon, and he had no boat. The only way Court could think of to get off the island was to find the captain of one of these vessels anchored around here, get him out of his bed with either the promise of money or the threat of a broken bottle in his face, and then demand a ride to Hong Kong Island or Kowloon.

Or else Court could just swim out to some small, unattended boat and pilot it himself. He knew how to sail, but he had a feeling the high-traffic shipping lanes between his origin point and his destination point would make sailing, even at this time of night, like being a student pilot landing solo at LaGuardia at night, or a student driver negotiating a rush-hour cloverleaf in a busy U.S. city. He’d have to avoid the Hong Kong coast guard and police, and he’d have to find a place to put the boat in where no one would immediately see him getting off.

Could he do it alone? Maybe.

Did he want to try? Not particularly.

Court pulled his night vision binoculars out of his backpack, doing his best to keep them from getting wet, and looked around the bay in the other directions now. He was surprised to see one of the two fifteen-foot tenders from the Tai Chin VI just forty yards behind him, beached in the rocks on the opposite side of the bay from the bar. The tender was two hundred yards away from the cargo ship itself, and Court saw no movement in or around the tenders, other than light stirring as it rocked in the gentle waves of the bay.

None of the little boats looking for him were anywhere near the darkness on the far side of the public pier, so he decided he’d swim over and check out the tender to see if he could use it. He slipped his spare air back into his mouth and descended just below the surface, then pushed off from the support column of the pier and began swimming in the direction of the fifteen-foot-long boat.

Zoya Zakharova stood on the bridge of the Tai Chin VI, her arms crossed in front of her chest, her back leaning against the wall, and her eyes on the man lying on the floor.

The Vietnamese captain was alive, but Zoya didn’t think he would remain so for long. A bullet had ripped through his gut above the navel; at first Zoya didn’t think he had more than twenty minutes or so before he passed out and bled out, but when she saw the blood draining from the exit wound Yevgeni showed her when he rolled the man onto his stomach, she amended her prognosis to less than ten minutes.

Zoya gave Vasily a disapproving look when she saw the extent of the man’s injuries, but he just turned away.

There were two more dead here on the bridge, and four more dead belowdecks. That made seventeen on board the ship in total when it arrived here in Po Toi tonight, with ten of the men going to the bar and seven remaining on the ship.

Other than Vasily and Sasha, the rest of the Zaslon unit was outside two decks below now, in covered and elevated positions, watching for anyone making a move out towards the cargo ship. Everyone expected a large response of police and firefighting forces on the way from Hong Kong proper because of the fire at the bar, but that was several hundred meters away. If any of the Vietnamese were still alive at the bar or in the water nearby, it wasn’t impossible to imagine they would send police to their cargo ship to check out reports of an attack there, but Zoya felt confident she and her task force would be gone by then, and it was more likely the Vietnamese were either all dead or in no position to go to the local authorities for help, no matter the situation.

Zoya took a bottle of water out of her pack and knelt in front of the captain. She lifted the man’s head, unscrewed the cap on the bottle, and poured a little water into his mouth, then more onto his forehead. This seemed to rouse him a bit, and he opened his eyes.

He blinked in surprise when he saw an attractive woman with short dark hair kneeling over him, cooling him off.

“Do you speak English?” she asked softly.

The man shook his head.

She switched to French. “Français?”

A slight nod.

In perfect French Zoya said, “The young Chinese man who boarded your boat Sunday night. You took him away. Where did you take him?”

The wounded captain closed his eyes and shook his head.

Zoya rubbed the water off the man’s face, stroking her fingers through his long hair. Even more softly now she said, “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

For several seconds he told her nothing, but finally the man spoke, though his eyes remained closed. “Saigon.”

Zoya nodded. “Saigon. Good. Who has him now?”

The captain’s eyes opened. He looked to the ceiling. “I… I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“Non,” he replied. “Je ne sais pas.”

Zoya smiled at the man a moment, still stroking his forehead gently. “It’s okay. Just tell me.”

He shook his head slowly.

Zoya sucked her lungs full of air, then blew out dramatically. Then she reached over onto the floor nearby and picked up an empty shell casing from one of the Vietnamese AK-47 rifles. She stopped petting the man, then calmly touched the steel shell against the open gunshot wound in the man’s gut.

She pressed in and twisted.

The screams made their way two decks down to the commandos scanning the sea through their gun sights.

Court swam between the shoreline rocks towards the tender, still not understanding why it was here and why it had apparently been left abandoned. Court closed on the boat, using his night vision binos to check it over from distance, and to look over the hillside nearby, searching for whoever had brought the boat here in the first place.

When he got to the boat he stepped onto the rocky shore and peered inside. To his surprise, two men lay on the deck, one facedown and the other faceup. Court leaned closer in the darkness, until he saw the bullet wound in the forehead of the man on his back. Suddenly Court realized there must be a sniper with eyes on the bay. He ducked back down into the low water alongside the boat.

But only for a moment; a groan from inside the tender caused him to move a few feet down the hull and chance a look over the gunwale, making sure to keep the little boat between him and the cargo ship, two hundred yards away.

The man lying facedown was clearly still breathing. He rolled slowly off his stomach and onto his right side, facing away from Court. Pushing himself up, the man now rose to his knees.

He grunted again with pain, and Court reached out and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, yanked him over the gunwale of the little boat, and splashed back down in the shallow water with him.

They were both out of the line of fire from the cargo ship, although Court was only assuming that was where the sniper had been positioned when he’d fired on the tender.

The wounded man was in his late twenties; he had longish hair and a scraggly beard and mustache. He wore a plain T-shirt and dark pants. The man put up little resistance; Court saw he was severely wounded, with blood covering the entire front of his shirt and a gaping wound near his left shoulder.

Court searched the man quickly by pulling him up onto the rocks, then rolling him onto his stomach and frisking him. He found a pistol tucked into the man’s belt and looked it over. It was a Type 54, an old Chinese knockoff of an older Russian model. In the dark here Court couldn’t see the caliber, but he checked and saw it had a full magazine and a round in the chamber. He stuck it into the small of his own back.

A flashlight’s wide, diffused beam from across the bay swept over Court’s position, and he ducked low, pushing his captive down with him. When it passed Court decided he needed to get away from this boat next to him. With all the violence necessary considering the urgency of his situation, Court pulled the man up into a crouch and led him up the rocks and off the beach, then into deep scrub brush just ten yards away. The man groaned in a rhythm, almost sobbing as he walked, and Court had no idea if the man was reacting to his pain or his predicament.

They walked together for another minute, and then Court pushed the man down into the dirt in a thick grove of trees and knelt over him.

From his backpack Court pulled a small microfiber towel. It had gotten damp because it was in an outside pouch with only a pull cord closure, but Court nevertheless put it on the man’s shoulder to stop the bleeding. The young man understood and held it there tightly himself.

He took the towel away after a moment and tried to look towards his ragged wound, but he could barely turn his head to see it on his collarbone. He applied hard pressure on his shoulder again to mute the pain and slow the blood loss, but Court still saw dark viscous blood oozing through the young man’s hand and the towel.

Court asked, “Do you speak English?”

The man shook his head.

Court switched to French. “Français?”

Another shake of the head.

Court said, “C’est des conneries!” That’s bullshit! And he pulled the Type 54 and pressed the barrel into the man’s hand that held his shoulder together. Blood ran down into the dirt below him.

“Arrêtez!” Stop! The man’s French improved dramatically. “Je parle un peu.”

Court relieved the pressure on the man’s wound by moving the barrel of the pistol from the hand over the shoulder to between the young man’s eyes. He asked, “Where did you take Fan Jiang?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Look. If you tell me, and I believe you, then I will let you live. You get up and walk away right now. You don’t tell me, or you lie, and you will die right here.”

“I don’t know anything. I am just a cook.”

Court looked this guy over. He shook his head. “Dommage, copain. Je ne te crois pas.” Sorry, pal. I don’t believe you.

The barrel of the pistol went straight to the man’s gunshot wound, digging deep into the hole.

Court used his other hand to stifle the man’s scream.