in target location and interdiction, airborne insertion, sabotage and rapid offensive strikes.
“A paper trail that could lead back to our personal Hong Kong bank accounts,” Bao finished the general’s thoughts.
“Exactly,” Xi-Nan agreed.
“You have a dossier for me?”
The corrupt general immediately slid a flash drive across the smooth teak table to the spymaster, who promptly pocketed the item.
“That is everything we know about the operations the Americans are calling the Niger Station,” he said.
Chao Bao smiled as he set down his empty teacup. The smile did not reach his eyes.
“Leave everything to me, old friend,” he said.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER Chao Bao arrived on the Beijing waterfront.
He lost himself among the twisting alleys and chaotic heavily populated fish markets until he found a dilapidated warehouse on an unassuming wharf. The building was nondescript and appeared abandoned with piles of rotting fishing nets and soggy old shipping pallets set on the oil-stained concrete loading dock.
Spray painted on the doors were the worn and peeling ideograms representing the Water Dragon Triad.
Bao entered the building and immediately three men armed with Type 64 Chinese submachine guns emerged from shadows. The street soldiers were flat-faced with black eyes that glittered with sinister light.
He countered their advance with a few simple words of identification and was allowed to pass unmolested into the inner sanctum of the triad gangster known only as Illustrious.
Bao stepped across the threshold and the door to the room was slammed shut behind him. The room was ornately furnished and uncomfortably warm, darkened to the point of gloominess.
Three brass braziers smoldered, providing a red-tinged light that served more to throw shadows than to illuminate. On a couch of red silk cushions, his face obscured by a demonic mask of black plaster, reclined Illustrious.
To his left, immobile as a statue, stood a massive bodyguard. Bao had once witnessed the giant execute a disobedient underling with a single well-placed punch to the back of the neck.
Bao stopped, brought his feet together and gave a respectful bow.
“Thank you for granting me an audience,” the intelligence officer said.
“How may Illustrious be of service?” the masked figure replied.
The mask was more than a petty affect designed to create an aura of mystery. The Communist Party ran the People’s Republic as a totalitarian police state and did not suffer organized crime lightly. There were many in Chao Bao’s own agency who would gladly see such a powerful underworld figure dead.
“It seems we have a situation,” Bao explained, “in Africa.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to require the use of your Armenian connection.”
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
THE JUÁREZ CARTEL had turned the city into a free fire war zone.
In the year leading up to August of 2009 the border city had the highest murder rate in the world. Chaos was rampant in the streets, and the police department was utterly ineffective, or completely corrupted, in the face of drug money and paramilitary criminal violence.
Bodies littered the streets. People were executed, abducted and assaulted on an hourly basis. Sexual predators and serial killers so afflicted the city’s female population that Amnesty International had become involved with international relief efforts to save the women.
Federal police and Mexican army troops deployed in huge numbers to the area in an attempt to restore order. The drug cartels responded by fighting an insurgency campaign with weapons every bit as powerful as those wielded by the military.
The U.S. sent money and resources to help combat the problem, but the warfare spilled across the border, causing a dramatic increase in kidnappings and gang violence in El Paso and as far west as Arizona.
The drugs still flowed north. In return, money flowed south. Many analysts claimed American firearms flowed south, as well. While this might have been true to a degree, the cartels combated each other, as well as the police and Mexican army, with military-grade hardware unobtainable by the citizens of the United States.
The wealth to be accrued was so great that corruption was systemic. It filtered its way up from street cops to judges to army generals and national politicians.
Like a disease passing so quickly it was pandemic, the stain of drug money spread into the heart of the Mexican government’s establishment.
This included the officers and agents of the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or National Security and Investigation Center, CISEN.
Forty-eight hours earlier a high-placed official in CISEN sold out the location of an undercover team of agents from the American Drug Enforcement Administration to members of the hyperviolent and brutally sadistic Juárez Cartel.
The bodies of the American law-enforcement officers turned up in a ditch near the border.
Their heads turned up hanging from light poles throughout the city.
Now the CISEN agent responsible for the betrayal was meeting with his cartel contacts to receive his payment.
Thanks to the digital intercept capabilities of the National Security Agency, Stony Man’s Able Team would also be attending the meet. Except the elite counterterrorist team would be gate-crashing.
THE ABANDONED FACTORY of the now defunct company Servicious Plasticos Ensambles stood alone in a massive dirt lot cluttered with garbage and rubble. Once the factory sweatshop had closed down, the city cut the power to that section of the grid.
Now the structural skeleton of the factory, along with the shantytown neighborhood surrounding it, lay covered in an utter darkness broken only by the occasional lantern in some black eye of a window. The lights of the better sections of Juárez glittered in the background.
Somewhere several blocks over, a woman began screaming in long, looping shrieks. A man’s voice broke in, shouting angrily.
Seconds later a staccato burst of automatic weapons fire broke out.
Then there was an abrupt silence broken a heartbeat later by the screech of tires.
Able Team emerged out of the darkness.
They moved fast, with a purpose and a lethal confidence hard earned. Like one of the U.S. Army’s small kill teams hunting the lonely stretches of highway outside of Baghdad, they emerged from the desert and disappeared again into shadow.
Night-vision goggles, DARPA-supplied next-generation AN/PVS-9 models, turned them into cyclopean silhouettes. Sound-suppressed M-4 carbines hung under jackets, silencer-equipped barrels pointed downward. Muscular torsos were sheathed in Kevlar-weave protective vests boasting ceramic inserts.
They
