Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER ONE

The sleek executive jet descended out of the gray clouds just three miles west of runway 07 Left. As it lowered its landing gear, a set of binoculars focused on the plane, watching it streak over the water on its final approach.

“I’ve always wanted to kill a CIA officer. With my own hands. I’ve dreamed of the day, wrapping my fingers around his throat, squeezing the life from him, watching his eyes bug out and then go blank.”

The comment was in Mandarin, and it came not from the man with the binoculars but from his partner, on his left. Both stood on the roof of an airport outbuilding, doing their best to ignore the stifling morning heat. The man with the binoculars also did his best to ignore his colleague, and he kept his focus on the approaching aircraft.

He replied in Mandarin, as well. “Dassault Falcon. Might be a model Seven X. This should be our target.”

“Can you read the tail number?”

“Negative. Still too far.”

“Killing a CIA man won’t be anything like that guy I strangled Monday. I predict a CIA man will have real muscles in his neck. He’ll be a real fighter.”

With a muted sigh, the man with the binoculars said, “Why are you talking like this, Tao?”

“Because if someone gets off that plane, I predict Control will order us to terminate them. What do you think?”

“I think you are almost as crazy as Control.”

The man behind the Pentax binos kept his gaze fixed on the airplane as it touched down, then slowed on the runway. He checked the tail number now that it was close enough to make out through the ten-power lenses.

“It’s a match.”

“Good.”

Both men were relieved to see that the intelligence reports about the arrival of the plane had been accurate. The aircraft from America was right on time, and this meant the duo wouldn’t have to stand around up here on the hot roof all damn day.

While the man with the optics watched carefully, the aircraft taxied to the customs ramp, then over to the tarmac in front of Hong Kong Business Aviation Center, a fixed-base operator popular with high-end corporate jets visiting the city. Both Chinese nationals lowered their bodies to low squats to decrease any faint chance they could be detected from a cabin window. They didn’t expect to be spotted, because they did this sort of thing all the time and were confident in their skills, but the target today was likely to be someone adept in surveillance detection and countersurveillance measures, so they took no chances.

As intelligence officers with China’s Ministry of State Security, Wang Ping Li and Tao Man Koh were, by law anyway, precluded from working here without notifying the authorities in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong of the People’s Republic of China. The mainland had its rules, and HK, officially speaking, followed a different set of rules when it came to security matters. But these men were spies, and spies rarely followed the rules, and these two even less so, because they weren’t just any spies.

Their real mission in Hong Kong, the reason Tao and Wang and two dozen other men like them were here in the first place, meant they wouldn’t be checking in with the local authorities. They were ghosts, smoke.

They were assassins.

Wang didn’t like this morning’s pedestrian work, but he understood the situation. Airplanes operated by known CIA front companies landed at Hong Kong International Airport from time to time, but never this particular jet, so these two intelligence officers had been sent to check it out. It was a distraction, but orders were orders and they’d been ordered here.

That these were the only men close enough to respond to the request by the Ministry of State Security was unfortunate for them. Their real job here was for the Ministry of Defense; it was high-end wet work, and if it turned out getting an ID of the passengers of the Falcon took more than a couple of hours, their MOD control officer would hear they were off his job, and he’d ride them hard about it, their orders from Beijing be damned.

Because, in the viewpoint of these two men, MOD Control was fucking nuts, and getting crazier by the day.

Wang and Tao both had their long-range cameras out when the aircraft’s main hatch opened, and a black Mercedes S-Class pulled up in front of it. A rear door opened on the far side of the car, and both intelligence operatives focused their lenses there, assuming the Mercedes would disgorge a passenger. But the opposite happened. A man carrying his own luggage stepped down the jet’s stairs quickly and disappeared into the front passenger seat behind the smoked glass of the Mercedes.

“Shit! Did you get him?” Wang asked quietly.

“I’m not a photographer. If I had a sniper rifle, he’d be dead now.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I was focused on the back door of the Mercedes. I thought someone would come out. You?”

“I’ll check.” Wang looked back at the digital images on his camera. “I don’t have a clear image of the face; he’s shielding the sun with his hand. Dark hair, beard, gray suit, sunglasses. He’s Western, for certain. Gold wedding band on his left hand. Roll-aboard luggage and a backpack.”

“Whoever he is, he’ll be dead by sundown.”

Wang stowed his camera in his backpack. “Would you stop with that, already? Let’s get to the car.”

“That limo service is geotracked. We can see the movements of each car in their fleet from my laptop. Wherever the Mercedes takes him, we’ll know.”

“And if this man should get out along the route?”

The two walked quickly along the roof towards the stairs, their suits sticking to them with perspiration. Tao asked, “Why would he do that?”

Wang replied, “Because he is CIA and trained in countersurveillance.”

Tao felt some shame in not thinking the situation through. He made up for his humiliation by being the first to arrive at the stairs and the first to make it down to the black Toyota Aurion, an Australian-made vehicle that blended in well with the traffic here in the city of nearly eight million.

With Tao behind the wheel they fell in behind the black Mercedes as it left the front gate of the Hong Kong Business Aviation Center and entered the busy morning traffic of Chek Lap Kok Road.

While he drove, Tao said, “Colonel Dai is going to find out we’re off tailing some guy who has nothing to do with our assignment for MOD, and he’s going to order us to terminate him. Or else Dai will take it out on us, give us the crap jobs, a reprimand. The Americans have a saying.” He switched to English because both men spoke it well. “Shit runs downhill.”

Wang sniffed. “That’s not a saying. That’s physics.” And then he continued, “If anything, Colonel Dai will get us to rough him up, interrogate him, scare him out of town. This won’t go lethal.”

With that, Tao took his eyes off the road in front of him and looked to his passenger. “Disagree. Dai had us kill the man at the border, and he had Su and Lin kill the two Triads in Shek Kong. Fan Jiang’s bodyguards were executed the day after he ran in Shenzhen, and Dai gave that order, as well. The colonel is in a killing mood on this job, you must admit. I say Dai will have us terminate this CIA boy and dump his body in the harbor and then lie to Beijing about it.” Tao sniffed. “Dai is mad.”

“Stark raving,” Wang agreed. “But a dead CIA officer in Hong Kong will just make his operation more complicated, not less.”

Tao was unyielding in his opinion. “Complicated for us. Not for him. Colonel Dai doesn’t give a damn. Beijing has given Dai free rein, so that man in that Mercedes will be dead by midnight. There are no fucking rules for Dai in Hong Kong these days.” After a dry little chuckle in the back of his throat, he added, “The streets of this city will be running rivers of blood before this one’s over.”