Lethal Risk

Liao stared at the doctor for a long moment. He’d heard what the man said, but it was as if his brain refused to comprehend the words. His mouth opened and closed as he struggled to come to terms with what was going on. “But…you can’t…what about my family?”

Xu checked his watch, as casually as if making sure he wasn’t running behind in his appointments. “By now, they are no doubt in the hands of the Ministry of State Security. But do not worry, Mr. Liao, you will provide a far greater service to your country and its people in death than you ever did in life.”

He turned and began walking to the door, temporarily blocking the guard’s view of the prisoner.

Blind, unreasoning rage suddenly filled Liao. If what the doctor had said was true—if his family was captured, and him slated to die, with no one possibly knowing where he was and what had happened to him—then he might as well take at least one of them with him.

Liao launched himself off the bed at the doctor’s back. He leaped on the doctor and bore him to the floor, his clutching fingers seeking the other man’s neck. If he could just get his hands around the smug bastard’s throat—

Blinding white stars exploded in his vision and Liao blinked them away, only to find himself lying on the floor, clutching his head. The guard stood over him, his pistol aimed at his face.

“Stop! Do not fire!” Xu said as he picked himself up and straightened his disheveled lab coat. “I do not hold your actions against you, Mr. Liao. In your circumstances, I cannot be sure I would not have reacted in much the same way to this news. I am sure that, given a choice, you would not have wanted it to end this way. However, sometimes we do not have a choice in what happens to us.

“Double the guard on this room, and no one is to attend to him alone,” the doctor said to the guard as he left.

Pistol still aimed at Liao’s face, the guard slowly walked backward to the door and exited, leaving the man bruised, sore and very much alone.

For the next several hours all he did was lie on the floor and weep softly.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_8f5371f5-1f84-5514-96ef-c5d2c80a1b93)

Forty-one hours after the briefing at Stony Man Farm, Mack Bolan sat in the back of a fifty-year-old, olive-drab military truck among a load of crated, bright green melons as it jounced along narrow mountain roads toward the outskirts of Beijing.

Unlike most insertions, this one had been much more difficult. There had to be absolutely no trace back to any US military involvement, which scratched most of the usual methods, such as a HALO drop into the boonies. There was no way the United States was going to risk sending an aircraft into Chinese airspace—it would most likely bring their air force and army down on him.

A commercial flight had been out of the question, as well. Even with an airtight cover, once he began moving through Beijing, any police attention would quickly trace him back to his entry into the country. Even if he had taken a trip through Europe, they would have backtracked him to the United States.

In the end Bolan had hopped on a commercial airliner to Moscow, changed his identity there and then caught a local flight to Irkutsk International Airport, in the middle of Russia. From there, he had taken a dizzying array of transportation modes—including a two-hundred-mile cab ride and a six-hour stretch in the back of a horse-drawn wagon—before reaching Beijing. He’d crossed Mongolia entirely; every time his Russian passport had seen him through.

Bolan had been careful to keep any answers to questions short and to the point. He didn’t have a native Russian accent, and didn’t want to give any customs officers a reason to suspect he was anything more than he was pretending to be: an ordinary Russian businessman traveling to the east.

It wasn’t the most perfect—or direct—plan, but it had gotten him here. Stiff from the many hours of sitting on things from a too short metal bench seat to a wooden wagon bed, he took a moment to stretch, careful not to dislodge any of the harvest surrounding him. Running on about ten hours of sleep total, he was still feeling pretty decent.

Bolan took a deep breath, feeling oddly naked at the moment and even more oddly free. The President had been so paranoid that he hadn’t allowed him any of his usual devices to maintain contact with Stony Man. Since he was in one of the largest cities on Earth, he would have to purchase off-the-shelf items to use for communication. What he did have, in a concealed belt around his waist, was Chinese yuan, and plenty of them. Buying most of his gear wouldn’t be a problem. Using it to find four needles in a gigantic haystack containing more than twenty-two million pieces of hay—that was going to be a problem.

And then, springing them out of wherever they were being held—another problem. Nothing exactly insurmountable, but definitely a challenge. And one Bolan was absolutely up for.

In fact, he felt as disconnected to the rest of the world as possible at the moment, a ghost floating through landscapes and small towns and villages, with no primary base of operations, no backup…and little to no options if he was captured. It was a strangely heady feeling, relying primarily on his skills and wits to sustain him.

The truck slowed and a fist thumped against the back of the cab. That was the driver’s signal—relayed through guessing and pantomime—for Bolan to climb up on top of the old 4x4, as they would be coming to a checkpoint soon. When the driver had stopped for Bolan, who had been walking at the side of the road after hitching a ride with three half-stoned college students on a driving tour through Asia, he’d blinked at Bolan’s attempt to tell his story—a stuck traveler trying to get to Beijing—and paid far more attention to the fistful of money Bolan had held out. He had scrutinized the Executioner carefully, then nodded as he fired off another burst of incomprehensible Mandarin. After a few minutes Bolan had gathered that he wasn’t supposed to have any passengers, so he would have to climb on top when the time came, which was now.

The soldier stood, careful to balance himself against the rocking truck, and headed to the open back. As he did, he wondered idly where the farmer had gotten hold of a battered and patched deuce-and-a-half.

Probably cut a deal with someone unloading surplus military hardware after Vietnam, he thought. Climbing onto the tailgate, he steadied himself against the side for a moment, then reached up and grabbed the flapping canvas roof. He pulled himself up and threw a leg over, then rolled on top, careful to situate himself between two of the metal framing ribs that gave the covering its shape. Lying down would also conceal him from any guards on the ground. Pulling out a knockoff Chicago Cubs baseball cap, he jammed it onto his head, counting on the brim to help conceal his face from security cameras.

The canvas was sun-faded and worn, but held his weight without difficulty. The truck lumbered on for a few more miles, with Bolan enjoying the spring sunlight after almost two days of being cooped up in cramped airplane seats and huddled on narrow benches. He was hungry, too—the last time he’d eaten was about twelve hours ago—and looked forward to getting a bite once they reached the city proper.

As they got closer to Beijing, Bolan noticed the smell first—a thick, acrid odor indicating they had reached the edge of the pollution zone around the city. The surrounding landscape was beginning to change from the foothills that had slowly fallen away from the mountains to the north to long sections of plains interspersed with rolling hills. Signs of habitation were becoming more common as well, with small clusters of single-room homes next to gardens or fields.

The farmer had let Bolan know that he’d be stopping on the outskirts of the city, far from its center. Given how sprawling Beijing was, Bolan knew he was at least an hour from the main city, perhaps two or more. He hoped he’d be able to find a ride into the neighborhood he needed to reach. A Caucasian hitchhiking along the road would definitely attract the wrong kind of attention.

With a grinding of worn gears and a belch of black smoke as the farmer downshifted, the truck began slowing. Bolan risked lifting his head just enough to see what they were approaching. He caught the glimpse of a large, metal-roofed, open pavilion that stretched across the entire highway, with a narrow, long building on one side. It was manned not by the standard police, but by what looked like camouflage-clad soldiers carrying assault rifles.

Damn! Bolan dropped back down, wondering if somehow the military was already on to him. The reams of data Kurtzman and Tokaido had provided had said nothing about the military manning city checkpoints.

The truck was about two hundred yards from the checkpoint and pulling into a line. Bolan gauged the height of the roof as he kept an eye on vehicles being inspected before they were allowed to move ahead. He couldn’t get caught here, before his mission had even really started.

His hope that they were doing a cursory inspection was dashed when a panel truck’s roof and underbody was checked with mirrors on poles. The next few minutes passed agonizingly slowly. There were only two positives to the situation. The first was that the soldiers seemed inclined to stay under the shade of the metal roof. The second was that most cars were content to pass the large truck and move through one of the other faster-moving lanes. Bolan divided his attention between the guards ahead and the traffic behind him. It wouldn’t do to be spotted by several civilians on their way to work.

By now the roofed structure loomed large in his vision; they would be driving under it in the next few minutes. Bolan wondered if the old farmer was sweating as much as he was at the moment, and what he would say if they detected the stowaway atop his vehicle. He wasn’t going to let that happen if he could avoid it, however.

He saw cameras mounted at the corners of the building and cursed. They appeared to be aimed below him, but he couldn’t be sure. Maybe I should have stayed inside with the melons, he thought, although the odds of escaping detection there were nonexistent—the guards were doing a thorough job of checking larger vehicles.

By now he was only a few yards away from the roof, which had at least a three-foot gap between the truck’s roof and the bottom of the building’s roof. He was going to have to jump up and swing himself onto it as fast as he could. Any slip-up or hesitation and his mission would be over before it ever really began.

Rising to his hands and knees, Bolan positioned his feet on the nearest metal strut and cast a glance behind him to make sure that no one was watching the truck roof. Five yards…four…three…two… Now!

In one fluid movement he exploded up in a perfectly timed leap. Catching the edge of the roof, he kicked his leg over, rolled onto it and over toward the center. The entire action had taken maybe two seconds.

When he was a few yards in, Bolan flattened himself against the hot metal and listened for any shouts of alarm or honking horns. When he heard no alerts that he had been detected, he rose to a crouch and carefully crept to the other side, listening for the deuce-and-a-half’s diesel engine, laboring at idle underneath him.

The truck inspection seemed to take forever, and Bolan kept glanced back, expecting a shout as a uniformed soldier popped up to arrest him. No one came, however, and eventually he heard the truck’s gears grind as it lurched into motion. Now came the second problem—getting back onto its roof without attracting attention. Ideally, the guards would be facing the incoming traffic, and the other drivers would be more concerned with the soldiers than watching for the unusual sight of a man dropping from the pavilion roof onto an ancient military truck.

The old vehicle pulled out from under the roof and Bolan jumped as soon as he saw the cargo roof. He landed with a bounce, and tried to keep himself as flat as possible, splaying his body as the truck drove away from the checkpoint.

That was too close of an escape, and way too far from my objective, he thought as the skyscrapers of Beijing gradually became visible through the haze of pollution. I’m going to have to disembark and find less conspicuous transportation.

He began looking for a good spot to get off the truck and head into the suburbs.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_9e256334-5666-56fb-a367-401ffae0fccb)

“Jesus H…” Hal Brognola tilted his head back and let the breath he’d been holding out in a long, steady stream. “Nearly scratched the whole op before it even started. That would have been embarrassing as hell.”

Just because the US government had forbidden Stony Man from assisting its man on the ground didn’t mean they weren’t going to keep an eye on him. Using a network of satellites orbiting the globe, the Farm could pinpoint Bolan’s exact location within a five-minute window. The satellite imagery was so crystal clear that they could read magazine print over someone’s shoulder if they had to.

Stony Man Farm had some of the most advanced technology in the world, including specialized computers used to advance weapons the likes of which the US military could only dream about, and yet all of that was worthless because of the parameters of their current mission.

Brognola and Price were standing in the Computer Room behind Aaron Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido, members of Stony Man’s top-notch cyber team. Kurtzman, a burly, bearded man confined to a wheelchair, had a no-nonsense attitude that could rival Brognola’s on a bad day. Tokaido was a laid-back twenty-something Japanese American who lived and breathed the twenty-first-century computing systems he worked with. They could do things with a computer that Price and Brognola could only dream about. But right now, they couldn’t do the one thing the mission controller desperately wanted to happen—somehow reach out through the monitors and wireless signals and burst transmissions to help Mack Bolan.

That was one of the worst things about being the mission controller: having to sit there, safe and sound, in a comfortable room in the United States and watch good men risk their lives fighting against the very worst kind of evil, whether it be terrorists, dictators or even the countless spying eyes of an entire nation’s government, as was happening right in front of her.

And the worst part was that if something went wrong, there wasn’t much Price could do about it. Sure, she could bring in reinforcements—usually—but that didn’t take away the agony of waiting and wondering if they were going to come out alive this time.

And the mingled anticipation and dread of knowing that the next time, they might not. While Price was an expert at weighing the risks and rewards of any given mission, the fact remained that although she didn’t look as if she was ever reacting to any of the various Stony Man operations around the world, the truth was that they always affected her, from the moment they began until the moment they ended.

But she was a professional, and the men who undertook missions for Stony Man were counting on her to do her job, which she took a lot of pride in doing very well. And she would be damned if she let them down even once—even if she had been specifically ordered not to assist.

Right now her lips were pressed tightly together and her arms folded across her chest as she watched Bolan evade the armed guards at the city checkpoint. “And why didn’t we know about these increased security measures?”