Chapter 68
Beijing
Zhang looked up and saw Wu staring at him.
“Are you all right, sir?” she asked.
“I’m fine!” he barked.
He knew this wasn’t true. He wasn’t well at all, and he knew it was obvious.
His face contorted constantly from the shooting electrical pains, and he had difficulty concentrating—that had to be the drugs.
His stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in days, but the very thought of eating, of putting something in his mouth and chewing, was abhorrent. It would be like getting waterboarded.
He and Wu had again entrenched themselves in a private room. Compared to the loud, pulsing operations center, Zhang found the relative silence soothing. And it insulated him from the constant looks of pity.
Save for one.
“How long until the Ice Wolves reach their target?” he snapped at Wu.
“They are closing in,” she said evenly. She canted her laptop to show him a map that displayed the position of their forces. “The latest update shows that our first transport will be overhead in ninety minutes. The reinforcements are one hour behind them.”
Zhang pummeled his mind for what else he could do to retrieve Chen and Sky Fire. Nothing came to him.
Wu excused herself to use the restroom, but she left her laptop behind. The screen glowed brightly in the dimly lit conference room—Zhang had insisted on turning on only half the lights. In recent days, full illumination felt like knives stabbing from behind his eyes.
He concentrated on the screen and tried to force away his distraction.
The hits from Sky Fire’s periodic activations were noted on the map. The markers tracked east of the crash site at a relatively steady rate and were now roughly ten miles away. It wasn’t a perfectly straight line, yet there was inherent purpose to its geometry.
What are you up to, Chen?
Zhang knew virtually everything about the traitorous scientist. The man was smart and disciplined, but trekking off into Arctic wilderness simply wasn’t in his skill set.
Somebody was helping him, most likely either one or both of the CIA agents who had spirited him out of the Landmark Hong Kong to a luxury airliner in Macau.
According to the Russian news feeds, there were only nine survivors from the original crash.
Among them, surely, had to be one of his American escorts.
The pain in his face throbbed. Zhang ignored it.
It made sense that Chen and his minder would have run when they’d seen the Snow Dragon 2 approaching. Had Captain Yong been less incompetent, he could have tracked them down quickly and taken them into custody. Captain Yong… perhaps the only man in China with worse prospects than my own.
His gaze settled decisively on the most recent hit from Sky Fire. These were the coordinates sent to the pilots of the Ice Wolves’ transport. This was their updated target. But was Chen still moving? He decided it didn’t matter. The Ice Wolves would move faster.
Soon, however, his thoughts took a new and dismal turn. This movement by Chen. What could be the objective? Was he not simply running away from the crash site but running toward something else? If so, was it a potential rescue?
The very fact that Sky Fire was intermittently active suggested Chen was using it to communicate. And that pointed to the Americans. They would devise a plan for getting Chen and whoever was with him out. But how would they do it?
Zhang considered all the information he and Wu had been poring over.
Satellite imagery in the area was spotty, in part due to the storm, but more owing to a lack of coverage at that latitude.
China’s space-based reconnaissance was improving, but not yet comprehensive.
Still, nothing they’d seen in the images held any hint of a rescue mission.
Information was also flooding in from other agencies, some he had never even heard of.
The recovery of Sky Fire, not surprisingly, had become China’s highest national priority.
In all that data—troop movements, communications intercepts, human sources—he had seen nothing to indicate what the Americans were up to.
All he could do, Zhang realized, was fortify his own plan to every possible extent.
Snow Dragon 1, the sister ship of the icebreaker now in ruins on an ice floe, had been turned around hours earlier from her homeward journey.
She was now steaming at best speed to the area.
She would be the ticket home for Chen, Sky Fire, and the deployed Chinese airborne forces.
The fate of the Snow Dragon 2’s crew, who were presently in the hands of the Russians, had become nothing more than a footnote to the entire affair.
Any way Zhang figured it, the Ice Wolves were his last hope. They would soon be on the ground, and they would hunt down Chen ruthlessly. Once he and his device were in their custody, reinforcements would arrive to establish an unassailable defensive perimeter until the Snow Dragon 1 reached them.
Still, Zhang worried. The CIA had to be up to something. But what?
He heard a muted conversation in the hall outside and recognized one of the voices.
Wu’s tone carried an unusual tenor of excitement, although her words were indecipherable.
Soon she bounded through the doorway waving a piece of cardstock.
It turned out to be a photograph, and she sent it spinning across the oval table.
“Our satellites have finally captured something useful,” she said.
With two fingers, Zhang righted the photo and saw a satellite image.
Wu said, “It was taken an hour ago, roughly thirty miles from Sky Fire’s current position.”
He studied the photo and saw the black cigar shape of a submarine surrounded by ice.
It was, he would wager, the same submarine they’d seen on the surface many hours earlier over a hundred miles to the west. Next to her on the ice now were four men.
The resolution was high enough that he could see they were wearing skis and heavy packs.
And if he wasn’t mistaken, all were carrying battle rifles.
Zhang felt an undeniable wave of relief.
Here was his answer. This submarine was the Americans’ nearest asset, and they were sending out four crewmen to retrieve Chen and Sky Fire.
This was obviously the closest the boat could get to its objective, leaving the men a great distance to travel.
And leaving them exceptionally isolated.
Soon that team would find themselves up against twenty-four of China’s most elite warriors.
Not to mention over a hundred paratroopers dropping down right behind them.
Zhang was ecstatic. He could almost taste the victory.
But now was not the time for celebration or complacency.
He dictated a message to Wu, to be transmitted immediately to the Ice Wolves.
It explained this new development and left no question as to how it should be handled.
“If you encounter any resistance whatsoever, you must respond with overwhelming force. Show no mercy until your objectives are firmly in your hands.”