Shadow of the Dragon

41

Illegal entry into a hostile nation was beyond tricky.

Adam Yao weighed the pros and cons carefully of which point of entry would be best to take the Campus operators across. Holograms and embedded biometrics had rendered forged passports all but anachronistic. Fortunately, stolen passports still worked, so long as the offended country didn’t report the missing numbers. The Finnish documents Yao provided were genuine, with matching biometrics and authentic barcodes. To add a touch of even more veracity, VICAR, Yao’s agent in place in Russian SVR, had arranged for a Russian entry and exit stamp, with which Yao was able to mark each visa. Travelers with some history drew less scrutiny — at least that was the theory. Thanks to Yao’s contact in Beijing, the last-minute Chinese tourist visas were all in order. Probably. Trust was always a risk. CIA did have the mole, but Yao told himself he’d mitigated that by keeping his asset off the radar, paying him off the books with discretionary funds. Assets were supposed to have control numbers, files. Langley, and, more important, Congress, liked to know where their money was going. Thank God he’d broken the rules on that one.

They’d seriously considered crossing by bus at Maikapchagai, Kazakhstan, into Jeminay, a sparsely populated county in western Xinjiang. Locals used the crossing, so tourists, even benign Finnish ones, would raise a fuss. Still, the border guards were poorly paid, and Yao felt certain he’d be able to sort it out with a few hundred well-placed American dollars. Scrutiny sometimes wasn’t quite as tight at land crossings as it was at airports.

The problem was one of logistics. Entry with a stolen passport was one thing. But regulations at the Maikapchagai/Jeminay crossing required them to take a bus rather than a private or rented vehicle. It was much closer to their destination on a map, but the realities of vehicle procurement and border delays could add hours or even days to the journey. A commercial flight into Urumqi had put them seven hours away, but at least they had the independence of their own transportation. Security had been tense, but they’d been admitted with Yao, a Hong Kong resident, acting as their guide and minder. Yao slapped magnetic signs on both sides of the rented van, proclaiming them a “Sun Country” guided tour to ease the minds of jumpy security patrols. Chavez had wanted two vehicles, but the XPCC officials were suspicious of outsiders as it was. An extra vehicle without someone Chinese driving it would be an extra chance for random search — particularly in the off season, when tourists were rare and personnel at the checkpoints had little to occupy their time. So far, they’d passed three, and Yao had gushed about the beauty and glory of mainland China at every turn.

A Web search revealed Lake Kanas, a day’s drive north of Urumqi, was situated in a mountainous forest on a small protrusion that was bordered by Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. It was remote, and difficult to police. It was also famous for a large fish that was said to drag unsuspecting horses into the water while they were drinking. Beginning in May, tourists would flock to the lake for the numerous tour boat excursions, hoping to catch a glimpse of China’s version of the Loch Ness Monster.

Ding Chavez rode shotgun, with Adara and Lisanne behind him. Ryan took the rearmost seat with some of the luggage. They didn’t have much, just a duffel apiece, but needed enough to pass for tourists. Most had grabbed catnaps along the way, wanting to be as fresh as possible when they arrived so they could hit the ground running.

An hour south of Burqin village — the entrance to Kanas Lake Park — Chavez got everyone’s attention. Yao was guide, but as an NOC, he operated by himself so much that he was more than happy to yield the role of team leader.

“Let’s do a quick gear check,” Chavez said. “Everyone up on commo?”

The group answered in turn.

Gavin Biery had modified their cell phones so they could function as radio and intercoms, allowing them a common net even when there was no cell service. Gone were the copper near-field neck loops and belt-pack radios. Linked to the Sonitus Molar Mics attached to each operative’s rear tooth, the entire communications system had been reduced to what looked and outwardly functioned exactly like a normal cell phone, and a piece of plastic that resembled a small retainer. It would be discovered only during an extremely invasive search.

Chavez looked across the front seat at Yao. “I know you didn’t want to dig out weapons prior to the checkpoints.”

“Now is probably okay,” Yao said. “Ryan, grab that camera bag in the back.”

Ryan did, passing it over the seat to Lisanne, who gave it to Chavez.

Yao nodded at the hard plastic case. “They’re in there. Two wide body cameras, a couple of lenses, and ten rolls of film.”

Chavez scoffed. “You’re still using film?”

Yao chuckled. “I’m not taking pictures, dude. Those little black film canisters are about the same size as the suppressors. Helps them blend in. The pistols are wedged in the camera bodies. Should be four total. One for each of you.”

Adara and Lisanne leaned forward to get a look. All the way in the rear, Ryan looked on glumly, chin resting in his hands over the backseat, waiting his turn.

“How’d you get this through security at the airport?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” Yao said. “The case was waiting for me at the rental car place in Urumqi.”

“You’ve got some serious contacts, my friend,” Lisanne said.

“A lot of people in this part of the country are good and pissed at their Chinese overlords,” Yao said. “I can usually find someone willing to do something for me as long as they figure I’m sticking it to Beijing. I use a couple of assets as cutouts, to keep my face off the transaction.” He shrugged. “Plus, you can accomplish more with a good cause and a duffel bag of cash than you can with a good cause alone.”

Chavez flipped open one of the cameras. “What the hell?” He held up a small black Beretta semiautomatic Bobcat.

“You got us toy guns?”

Ryan groaned from the rear seat. “You know what Colonel Jeff Cooper said about the .25 auto? You better not carry one because you might have to shoot someone with it, and if you shoot someone with it, they just might realize they were shot and it might piss them off… or something like that.”

“Shows how much you know,” Yao said. “These Bobcats are .22-caliber.”

“A .22…” Ryan fell back against his seat. “Well, that is just fabulous news.”

Chavez passed one of the diminutive black pistols over the seat for Adara and Lisanne to look at.

Lisanne activated the lever on the side, flipping up the barrel, obviously familiar with the weapon. “My mother had one of these. The tip-up barrel made it easier for her to chamber a round without having to work the slide. Pretty nifty, if you ask me.”

“I agree with Ryan,” Chavez said. “I’d take nine-millimeter over nifty. Beggars can’t be choosers, though.”

“They cannot,” Yao said, tapping the steering wheel with an open hand as he drove. “We’re in the Wild West, my friends. Adapt and overcome.” He nodded sideways to the case again, eyes on the road. There were wild horses there, and the occasional camel. “Unscrew the lenses. There should be five blades in there. Some of them are better than others. Give Ryan the Halo. Maybe a good Microtech will appease him.”

Ding unscrewed the plastic cap on the end of a telephoto lens and dumped the knives out in his hand. All of them were Microtech automatics with OTF, or out-the-front, blades. The Halo was the largest, with a blade just over four inches long.

“Excellent,” Chavez said. “Just in case I need a sexy knife to cut open an MRE.”

“You will find the icing on the cake next to those film canisters we talked about,” Yao said. “It took some doing to get those babies. Everybody on my pipeline kept wanting to steal them.”

Chavez held up a black metal cylinder, an inch in diameter and just under three inches long.

“Small for a suppressor,” he mused.

“You know as well as I that these things aren’t mouse-fart quiet,” Yao said. “But with subsonic ammo this thing is amazing. Solid, too. Instructions don’t call for you to shoot it wet, but I’ve put a little lithium grease on the baffles and… I’ve gotta tell you, it is sweet. Jack could pop a round in the backseat and we’d think we ran over a rock.”

“Custom job?” Adara asked.

“No,” Yao said. “Made by Bowers Group. They call it the Bitty. These are the same, they just don’t have any manufacturer’s markings, in case we have to ditch them.”

Adara screwed it onto the threaded barrel of the Beretta Bobcat and hefted the little setup. “Bowers Bitty ‘Black,’” she said. “Makes the .22-caliber much more interesting.”

She passed the gun over her shoulder to Ryan, who gave it a nod of approval. “I guess the little cuss grows on you after a while,” he said.

Chavez laughed and looked back at him. “Like somebody else I know.” He turned to Yao. “There are only four. What are you going to carry?”

“I’ll make do.” Yao chuckled. “Frankly, if things turn to shit, I plan to run screaming into the woods…”

Yao knew something was wrong when the Han woman at the front desk at the Hongfu Lake Kanas Resort fanned the collected passports in her hands like a poker hand, pushing his upward to separate it from the pack. She set that one aside and then gathered the rest into a neat stack before placing them on the counter. Probably in her mid-forties, her black hair had the slightly auburn tint of a person who spent a great deal of time outdoors. The tag on her navy-blue cardigan said her name was Ming.

Absent the frown lines of someone who looked as grim as she did at the moment, she was probably a very nice woman, or she would have been had not the two hawkeyed police officers been watching from the lobby — one a bulldog, the other a whippet.

“You may check in,” Ming said, loud enough that the two policemen could hear. “But I am sorry to inform you that we are too full to accommodate the foreign guests.”

“I see,” Yao said. He knew full well they had plenty of rooms, but it would have done no good to call her on her lie. Instead, he gathered the Finnish passports and passed them back to their respective owners. This would have certainly been the problem if he’d tried to get them rooms at one of the hotels right next to the lake. They were notorious for telling foreigners at the last minute that they could not be accommodated. He’d hoped to mitigate it by staying in Jiadengyu fifteen minutes away. “My secretary made the reservations,” he said. “I will speak to her about the error.”

“Perhaps,” the desk clerk said. “Or perhaps it was a problem with the computer system. It happens.”

Yao started to leave, but then turned, as if struck by a sudden idea. “What if we were to upgrade the rooms for my foreign guests? Their budgets are large. I’m sure they would happily pay for any larger suites you might have available, and, of course, any surcharges such upgrades might include.”

The clerk glanced at the bulldog, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Would your friends pay in cash?” she asked.

“Of course,” Yao said.

This brought nods from the bulldog and the whippet. The desk clerk took the passports again and made copies for her records. She’d saved face and Yao was able to secure the exact same rooms he’d originally reserved for a mere doubling of the cost. It was a small price to pay.

Yao moved to retrieve the passports again, but the whippet policeman walked over and put his hand on top of the stack. He looked them over one by one, examining each photo, comparing it to its owner.

“Finland?” he said to Adara in Mandarin. “I have seen photographs on the Internet. Forests and lakes like here, no?”

Of all the Campus operatives, Adara spoke the best Chinese. There was no need for them to know that, so Yao translated.

Adara smiled and unleashed her baby blues. Nodding enthusiastically, she said, “Yes, yes.”

“Okay,” Whippet said, and stuffed the passports into his pocket.

Yao protested. “They need those.”

“I have to make a report at my office,” Whippet said, pointing at the double doors with a slender chin. “One of you may retrieve them in…” He whispered to Bulldog, who thought for a moment and then grumbled something back.

“After dinner,” Whippet said. “And you must get them tonight. You will be unable to eat at a restaurant, take a boat or horse tour, or any of the other park concessions without your passports.”

“But—”

“Retrieve them after dinner,” he said again, nodding his skinny face once to show that the matter was closed.