reclaiming her chair. “Or would it be better for me to work in the dark?”
“It would probably facilitate matters if you were fully informed,” Shen-wa said, reaching for a thick security folder. He was starting to like this bold woman more and more.
Pressing his thumb to the metal clasp, Shen-wa waited until it hummed twice, announcing that the explosive charge was deactivated, then tossed it onto the desk.
Uncrossing her legs, she leaned forward to pick up the massive folder, and started riffling the pages. As her fingers touched the paper, it turned bright red at that exact spot.
“Let me summarize,” Shen-wa said, excited, and slightly embarrassed, by the brief glimpse down her blouse. Her breasts were small but firm, and the lieutenant was obviously not wearing any sort of undergarment.
“Not necessary, sir,” she replied, speed reading through the pile of reports and documents. “Is…is this already in operation? Wait…yes, I can see that it is from the dates the cargo boxes were shipped.” She looked up, her eyes bright with excitement. “I gather the drones are a success.”
“Eminently so!” Shen-wa beamed proudly. “Every few hours a new flight is unleashed to secure a critical bridge, destroy a vital airfield or assassinate a potential troublemaker. In two days, we will be ready to move.”
“And then…?”
Tapping the keyboard, he started the printer humming, and said nothing in reply.
Sexy or not, he was a reticent bastard, Zhang thought. “What about the CMC in the August 1st Building?” she asked, spreading her legs on impulse to see if the major would notice.
Privately, she was sexually excited by the sheer force of the man and didn’t care in the least about the vast difference in their ages. Zhang had no objection to going to bed with a superior officer. She did that often, but only after being assigned to a project. Never before. She didn’t trade sex for advancement, as some female officers did. That was an insult to the uniform.
“The August 1st Building?” Shen-wa muttered, slowly returning his gaze to her face. This time he didn’t seem embarrassed in the least. “Once I inform the Central Military Command of these events, the fat occupants of the August 1st Building will have no choice but to comply with my plan and attack at full force in all directions!” He gave a cold grin. “Soon, the West will be crushed, and China will finally be the dominate military force on the entire planet!”
“As we should be,” Zhang acknowledged, placing the folder aside. “However, sir, there will be opposition.”
“And that is where you come in, Lieutenant,” Shen-wa whispered, the strobing light of the monitor highlighting his craggy features in stark relief.
“Sir?”
The printer stopped humming and Shen-wa passed her a photograph. “After the staff meeting, have Sergeant Ming find this enemy agent. He was nearly apprehended in Hong Kong by one of our operatives working as a cabdriver, but we both know what he will do next.”
“Of course. The obvious choice is Macao, so he will not try there. I would think that a clever man would attempt to sneak into China through the city of Guangzhou, what they call Canton. The heavy industry there will offer good cover,” she replied, then frowned. “No, that is the location of Red Star field office. There will be agents everywhere. Instead, he’ll try for…Fufa, on the coast, where there will only be the harbor patrol and a few police to worry about.”
Debating the matter, she gave a nod. “Yes, Fufa. The heavy industry there would offer good cover for a stranger. It is the more logical location.”
“He would have no reason to check Fakkah?”
“None, sir.”
“Good. And not even an American would be bold enough to go anywhere near Guangzhou,” Shen-wa said, making a short note on a sheet of sticky yellow paper with a stubby pencil. “Have Ming find the man, and detain him.”
“Kill him?”
“Not until he talks first,” Shen-wa said, gesturing with the pencil. “If he is CIA, I wish to know everything about all the other CIA operatives in mainland China—who they are, locations, specific goals and such.”
“So that we can remove them.”
“So that you can, Lieutenant,” he said, attaching the note to the side of the monitor.
Slowly, she smiled.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kowloon District, Hong Kong
Thick greasy water slapped listlessly against bare rocks along the jagged coastline, and liberal amounts of broken glass sprinkled along the weedy beach seriously discouraged any potential swimmers.
Situated on a rock jetty, the old warehouse was isolated from the rest of the busy dockyard by a sprawling junkyard of smashed cars. The huge mounds of rusting metal and cracked fiberglass effectively hid what happened at the private warehouse from the view of the general public, and the police. A tall wooden fence topped with razor wire kept out the curious, while hidden security cameras and teams of armed guards kept out everybody else.
The Amsterdam Import-Export Company was a well-known cover for Leland Ortega, the largest arms dealer in all of Hong Kong. Half Spanish and half Chinese, Ortega specialized in relaying a wide assortment of death dealers back and forth between Asia and South America. The Chinese street gangs loved the Imbel 12-gauge pistols from Brazil, possibly the strangest weapon Bolan had ever encountered. The soldier had been planning on visiting Ortega sometime to shut him down permanently. However, this day he was at the warehouse for a different purpose: supplies. And he was there to help himself.
As Tsai Adina had promised, Bolan had acquired almost everything he wanted in the warehouse, along with a few wholly unexpected items, such as a brand-new Martin. That had been his first acquisition, the second being an old friend, a .44 AutoMag. The monstrous pistol was a real man stopper, the staggering recoil so difficult to control that the weapon was no longer in production.
Unfortunately, he didn’t locate any ammunition for the gargantuan weapon, but he brought it along anyway, just in case he passed by a heavy machine gun on the way out. Only a handful of shells for the AutoMag could make a real difference in any fight.
There also weren’t any Beretta 93-R machine pistols to be found, his preferred sidearm. But he had located several brand-new Glock 18 pistols. Identical to a semiautomatic Glock 17, the 18 was a true machine pistol, and discharged all thirty-two 9 mm rounds contained in an extended clip in just under two seconds. The recoil was bone-jarring, but a lot worse for anybody on the receiving end of that metal storm.
However, Bolan had been able to load only a single clip for the weapon when Ortega unexpectedly returned.
“Guards! Guards!” Ortega shouted, triggering a spray of 12-gauge cartridges from the big Atchisson autoshotgun cradled in his hands.
Dodging between tall stacks of crates, Bolan got hit in the back by the spray of double-0 buckshot, but his ballistic vest easily stopped the pellets from reaching flesh. However, the brutal impacts still felt as if he were being pounded by a rain of hammers. Rolling behind another crate, Bolan was startled to see an open briefcase full of
