Thunder God

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Jason Lao had turned the top floor of an abandoned office building into a temporary HQ and Scarlet was silently impressed as she watched a group of men in boiler suits add the finishing touches to the office — wifi routers — telephones and laptops.

They had landed back in Shanghai less than one hour ago and after a rendezvous with Ryan, Sophie and Commodore Hart they travelled across the city in a private SUV to meet Lao. Scarlet was used to working fast and moving even faster, but even she had found a moment on the plane to think about what fate might have dealt Hawke, Lea and Han since their kidnapping back in the capital.

Now, somewhere in the distance she recognized General Frank McShain as he stood among a small group of American and Chinese military personnel. She considered how big and real a threat had to be to bring the American and Chinese military top brass together like this, and the conclusion was an unsettling one.

Lao and Lexi shared a few words of Mandarin before they were all invited to sit down for the briefing, which would be delivered by General McShain in English first. Scarlet took a seat at the back — an old habit — and Hart joined her, along with Ryan and Sophie. She watched Bradley Karlsson with more than a little suspicion as he took a seat at the front alongside Lexi Zhang and Jason Lao.

“As you know,” McShain began. “We are here to neutralize a serious threat that is jeopardizing both our nations and many others. That threat is the billionaire telecoms magnate and people trafficker Sheng Fang.”

Scarlet watched a ripple of excitement, tinged with apprehension go around the office. Something told her she was about to get the fight of her life.

“It has come to our attention that Sheng Fang is seeking a very ancient power the likes of which no one on Earth has experienced for millennia. We don’t know exactly what form this power will come in, but we do know…” McShain took a breath and looked anxiously around the room. All eyes were on him, hanging on his every word.

“He can hardly believe he’s about to say it,” Scarlet said.

McShain cleared his throat. “But we do know it more than likely contains the power to greatly extend a man’s life, possibly infinitely.”

The room erupted with agitation when the general delivered these words, with American and Chinese intelligence operatives and military personnel hardly able to believe their own ears.

“Everyone calm down!” McShain said firmly. “That’s enough!”

The room settled.

“I know what it sounds like, but there it is. We have very good intel on this, part of which came from a recent attempt to secure the…ah… power that I just described by a man named Hugo Zaugg, who thanks to British intelligence we now believe was being used as a sort of puppet by Sheng.”

“And what about the burning sky reference?” Scarlet called out from the back.

McShain looked at her with irritation as another wave of concern rippled through the room.

“That is nothing to be concerned about.”

“What does she mean?” shouted a man in the front row.

“It's nothing, like I said,” the general repeated. “There is a peripheral reference to the sky setting on fire if the source of eternal life is ever manipulated by mortal man, but that is not our concern right now. We don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all — and it’s just another reason for us to redouble our efforts to stop Sheng from getting his hands on the map that leads to this power, at all costs.”

Ryan smirked. “Nice work. You really put him on the spot.”

“Yeah, but I bet he’s not going to mention the Tesla device,” Scarlet said with a palpable lack of surprise in her voice.

“Hardly a shocker,” Hart said.

“Very funny,” Sophie said.

Scarlet remembered that only she, Hawke and Lexi had been at that meeting back in Hong Kong. “But Lao knows. I was in the office when McShain told us about someone swiping it from the American transport vessel. We now know that was Sheng.”

McShain ran through a raft of tactical details about Sheng’s retreat on Dragon Island, most of it garnered by on-going satellite surveillance, others gathered by spies posing as fishermen or tourists in the water park. He explained how Sir Richard Eden had confirmed that Lea’s tracker showed they were in the air, and sat-surveillance showed the airfield on Dragon Island was being readied for the flight so the inference was they would land on the island, not Shanghai.

“Another thing we all need to be aware of is that a few hours ago Sheng took two of our people and a third man hostage. They are Joe Hawke, a former British Special Forces man with considerable experience, and Lea Donovan, a former Ranger with the Irish Army. Both are very capable people who are able to look after themselves in grim situations like this but at this moment in time we have no idea if they are alive or not. The same goes for the monk. All personnel need to be aware of these three friendlies during the assault. The last thing I want to hear about is their deaths from friendly fire.”

Upon hearing McShain’s terse words and grim analysis, Scarlet thought about Hawke and Lea and whether Sheng had killed them or not. She thought not, because they would be good to barter if things got really sticky during a firefight and he was backed into a corner. But then second-guessing the logic of egomaniacs was never a great idea.

She wondered how Hawke would react if anything happened to Lea, knowing the terrible impact that Liz’s death in Hanoi had made on him all that time ago. She had heard about the murder when she returned from a joint SAS-SBS operation to rescue two kidnapped journalists in Iraq.

That was a good mission. They arrived by helicopter and marched for six hours in order to conduct a surprise attack on a compound near the Jabal Kumar mountain. They rescued both the hostages and killed all fourteen of the kidnappers in less than four minutes. Scarlet was disappointed. She had made a bet it could be done in less than three.

But when she was on the transport back to England, one of Hawke’s colleagues in the SBS had gotten wind of the murder and told everyone on the plane. She phoned Hawke when she landed but he had already dropped off the radar. When he resurfaced weeks later she tracked him down to his house, sitting in a darkened room with his hands wrapped around a bottle of cheap Scotch.

She hoped nothing like that ever happened to him again, and she put the whole thing behind her and focused. All those years in the SAS had to add up to something other than a reputation, after all, and she returned her attention to McShain’s briefing, which, she hoped, might at some point get interesting enough to pay attention to.

Later, after the briefing, Ryan and Sophie made use of one of the laptops to get deeper into their research of Sheng and the Tesla threat. Scarlet walked over with Olivia Hart while Lao and McShain finalized details with their teams in preparation for the assault.

“I noticed McToughnuts over there never mentioned the Tesla device,” Scarlet said, gesturing at McShain. “Anything about that?”

Ryan nodded grimly. Scarlet had only known him a short time, but lately he seemed to have aged a lot. She could see rings around his eyes from the lack of sleep and he seemed to spend a lot of time drinking coffee and Coke to keep himself going.

“Yes, but not a lot,” he said in reply. “As you can guess, to say a device like that would be classified is a ludicrous understatement and I’ve been trying to look at stuff away from what McShain’s already given me, just to make sure we’re getting the whole picture.”

“But what have you got?” Scarlet asked, sighing.

“Hey! He’s doing his best!” said Sophie. “I’d like to see what you could come up with.”

“I’d like to see my fist in your face, but…”

“Enough, the two of you!” Ryan snapped. He rubbed his eyes in an attempt to energize himself. “As a matter of fact I was able to find a few buzzwords relating to the project on conspiracy theory websites.”

“Oh God,” Scarlet said. “Not the tin-foil hat brigade, Ryan! This is serious.”

“It’s a very reliable forum, actually,” he said patiently, as if explaining to an infant why putting your hand in a fire is a bad idea. “From there, I was able to get some kind of idea about what we’re talking about and managed to hack some intercepts between the US Navy and an American professor of physics in California.”

“You see now what good work he does, no?” Sophie said.

Ryan reached out and touched Sophie’s hand. She smiled and rubbed his shoulder.

“All right, all right,” Scarlet said, seeing the contact. “Either get a room or get on with the briefing.”

“It’s not much more than we’ve already got. All I can say from reading the intercepts is that the device is definitely real, definitely works and was definitely stolen by Sheng. They also make it clear that if this thing is used it will annihilate an entire city and according to InsideMan, if it’s anything like…”

“Sorry?” Scarlet said. “But who the hell is InsideMan?”

“One of my hacking colleagues.”

“One of your nerd friends?”

“He’s an expert hacker and one of the finest conspiracy theorists in the world,” Ryan said with pride.

“You mean he sits at his computer desk in his underpants surrounded by empty takeaway cartons and wishing for a girlfriend?”

“I mean,” Ryan said with exaggerated slowness as if talking to a young child again, “that he has a very good track record on predicting natural disasters, for one thing.”

“Explain.”

“I mean that not all natural disasters are what they seem, despite McShain’s protests, and that’s why when this came up I contacted him. It seems right up his street.”

“Have you ever met this guy, Ryan?” Scarlet said.

“Of course not. We’re all anonymous.”

“He could be bloody anyone then!”

“And?”

“And he could be giving you disinformation!”

“Maybe, but our lives don't depend on what he gives me. All he tells me is that if a big global city has a major earthquake in the next few days then the authorities will simply tell the public it was a natural disaster while in the background they’re racing around trying to find and either kill or bribe the perpetrator.”

“Not sure how this helps us.”

“Well for one thing, it tells us we can’t trust McShain, because in Hong Kong he told Hawke outright that the US has never used the machine to artificially trigger quakes.”

Scarlet raised her eyes from Ryan’s laptop screen and glanced at McShain, now talking in animated fashion with Jason Lao. “You can’t trust anyone, Ryan, didn’t you know that?”