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  His ledger had revealed some concerns regarding Swords of Qing income and expenses. For the moment they were fine in terms of arms, ammunition, and nourishment, but helicopter fuel was expensive, and one could never neglect soldiers’ salaries, no matter how loyal they were. His acquisitions team would have to move on Shanghai once again, perhaps liberate funds from a bank, or barter with the warlords on Nanjing Road for payment in exchange for muscling extortions. But that would be no problem. The warlords were all his childhood friends.

  Yet aside from all that, so far his plan was proceeding. Gantu-62 was highly effective. The Americans were already repositioning some naval assets near the South China Sea. If he could effect a clash of titans between the Chinese Communist Party and the United States, the entire world would be grateful when the CCP was no more, and the Qings ruled again.

  He reached the bottom of the stairwell and entered a large, freezing stone cavern. The stone walls dripped with icy rivulets, which an electric heater off in one corner hardly seemed to be curing at all. But this wasn’t a place of creature comforts.

  Chained to the far wall by his wrists was a slumping figure. The slight bony man was heavily clothed in a quilted tunic, pantaloons, and fur boots, yet still he shivered in waves, and when he raised his pale face to look at Zaifeng, his black-rimmed glasses were fogged by the ragged breaths curling up from his wide nostrils. Zaifeng walked to a rickety wooden table in the center of the cavern, turned the switch on an electric teapot, and smiled at the poor fellow.

  “You won’t be here for very much longer, Mr. Casino,” he said. “But I need you to make one more telephone call.”

  Chapter 18

  Rosslyn, Virginia

  Miles Turner was not actually a sadist, but he could have played one on TV.

  He was a very large man with legs like a leopard that had mated with a giraffe, so his strides were incredibly powerful and long, and the three men and one woman who were trying to keep up as he tramped through the woods, vaulted over old stone walls, hurdled fallen tree trunks, and barreled through thickets of thorn were at this point praying he’d have a massive coronary and die.

  Their eyes stung with sweat that poured from under their boonie hats. Their shoulders were bleeding where the straps of their fifty-pound rucks had rubbed them raw. Their lungs were burning as they panted steam into the frigid night air, and all of the blisters inside their old-style cordovan jump boots had burst, soaking their matted socks in plasma.

  He’d issued them leather boots because they hurt more. The man was the progeny of the Marquis de Sade. They didn’t know his name, if he had one. He only referred to himself by the initials M.T. One of them had breathlessly grunted behind his back that “empty” was an apt description of his soul. Unfortunately, he didn’t look like he was going to expire anytime soon.

  In the past, the Program’s assessment and selection phase had begun at a remote patch of Fort Bragg called the Salt Pit, where prospective candidates were pitted against USASOC special operators to test their mettle in land navigation, weaponry, physical endurance, and hand-to-hand combat. The environment was secure, and the army types had no idea who these “OGA” (Other Governmental Agency) civilians actually were, but Ted Lansky had since decided that even Bragg wasn’t airtight enough. The entire A&S would now be conducted at Thorn McHugh’s donated patch of a thousand acres, where the only prying eyes belonged to raccoons and deer.

  Miles had begun with ten candidates, selected by Lansky and Betsy Roth from classified 201 files, all of them college-educated, multilingual combat veterans with multiple tours who looked ripe for an offer of “something new.” They were Army Rangers, Special Forces, and Air Force Special Tactics stars, and all had been vetted many times over so that, at least for the moment, deep background investigations and psychometric exams wouldn’t be necessary, until the group was pared down to a select few.

  Their first test had occurred at the firing range, where Eric Steele and Dalton Goodhill sat them all down and gave them an over-the-top OPSEC briefing.

  “This program does not exist,” Steele said. “If you’re accepted for the operator training course—’bout as likely at the Cleveland Browns winning the Super Bowl—neither will you. It is not an OGA. It is not part of the Beltway’s alphabet soup. If by some miracle you do move on to OTC, your current units of record will officially TDY you to someplace OCONUS no one’s ever heard of, and from there you’ll disappear, never to be heard from again. Are we clear so far?”

  The ten candidates nodded, but one of them raised a finger. At that point Goodhill growled.

  “No friggin’ questions, people. There’s not a goddamn thing you need to know. Going forward, you will not speculate, discuss, inquire, or conjecture, not with any of us, or each other. Furthermore, you will not, under any circumstances, answer any questions posed to you without first asking for ‘Condition X.’” (He used air quotes.) “If one of us grants that condition, then you can talk. But first, let’s see if you can hack it through twenty-one days of hell. Feel me?”

  They’d all seen some gnarly cadre, but this bald bulldog called “Blade” was like a colder version of Mr. Freeze. And, of course, they had no idea he was lying. The A&S would only last five sleepless days and nights, though it would feel like a month.

  Steele and Goodhill had then put them through their paces with M9 handguns, M4 rifles, M249 SAWs, shotguns, hand grenades, and LAW rockets, nonstop for nine hours. Half deaf, smoke-blinded, and powder burned, Stalker Seven and Blade had promptly failed them all. However, after defaming their performance and feigning disappointment, the Program duo had “reluctantly” allowed them to carry on.

  For a “break,” Steele had then given them a six-mile land nav exercise, timed, out and back. He issued them one map, gave them five minutes to study it, took it back, and said, “Bring me the red pennant on a pole. And don’t forget the log.” It was a 150-pound tree trunk.

  After that, Ted Lansky had sent in an Israeli contractor named Yigal Arbiv, one of the IDF’s top experts in the Gidon system of Krav Maga (penny-pinching Mrs. Darnstein objected but was overruled). Arbiv was a bullet-headed man built like a beer cask with Popeye arms, and when he was done, one Ranger had a broken elbow, an air force guy had been choked out and quit, four more had failed—for real—and the remaining quartet were those now chasing after Miles Turner, and half wishing Arbiv had knocked them out too.

  They’d begun the current phase running a country road at dawn. After seven fast miles of sole-slapping tarmac, Miles had taken them off into the woods. He didn’t appear to have any sort of map or GPS device and they had no idea where he was going—maybe he didn’t either, but it didn’t seem to matter. He’d given them two five-minute breaks, forbade them from sitting because he said they’d never get up, let them wolf a KIND Bar and slurp water, and pressed on. It was freezing. Their bodies steamed like cavalry horses. A cold high moon stabbed through the towering pines, but all they saw was M.T.’s massive back, into which they were tempted to put a bullet from their sweat-slickened M4s.

  “Y’all still with me?” Miles called from the point as he crashed through the woods.

  “Roger, sir.” That was the woman, a twenty-seven-year-old operator from the air force’s 820th Base Defense Group at Moody.

  “Outstanding. You just hit thirty miles.”

  “What percentage is that, sir?” one of the surviving Rangers asked.

  “None a ya goddamn business, troop,” Miles snapped.

  Two miles after that, they broke from the woods into a wide clearing of dew-soaked grass. Off in one corner sat a blacked-out Suburban, with the late Collins Austin’s former keeper, Shane Wiley, at the wheel. Penny “S” Amdursky sat in the passenger seat, taking notes on a manifest, with Steele and Goodhill in the back. They were all drinking coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts Box O’ Joe.

  “Well bust my buttons, he’s still got all four,” Shane Wiley said as they watched Turner position his sweating candidates at the co
rners of a large grassy rectangle, and then had them extract tactical lights from their ammo vests and point them up at the sky.

  “What if one of them had broken an ankle or something back there?” Penny asked.

  “Then the poor bastards’d be carrying that dude or dudette,” Goodhill said.

  “Oh gosh.” Penny was very happy to be an admin type sitting in a cozy car. “What happens next?”

  “More torment,” Steele said.

  The feathery black tips of the surrounding pines began to flutter, the thwops of incoming rotor blades loomed, and a black helicopter appeared. It was a contracted UH-1 Huey with no tail numbers, piloted by Allie Whirly. Miles Turner’s grateful candidates tore off their boonie hats, stuffed them in pockets, and basked in the rotor wash cooling their brows. Allie set the helo down, Miles hustled his flock into the open cargo bay, jumped in after them, and the helo pulled pitch and roared away.

  “Where they going now?” Penny called above the thunder.

  “Nowhere.” Steele smirked.

  Inside the Huey, the enervated prospects had slumped to the floor and were already shedding their rucks and making sure their M4s were on safe, barrel down. Turner sat across from them, back to the cockpit, his expression unreadable as Allie banked the big bird and winged out over the woods. The cargo door was open, the wind was a blessed thing, and wherever they were headed to next, at least they wouldn’t be walking.

  Shane Wiley rolled down the Suburban’s window and lit a cigarette. He was getting on in years, going fully gray, slimmer than ever before, and had almost quit the business after the loss of his beloved Alpha, Collins Austin. Langley had hired him as a training contractor over at Camp Peary, the CIA’s basic training facility otherwise known as the Farm, but his heart wasn’t in it. Then Lansky had called.

  Now, breathing the chilled mountain air and once again in the company of like-minded special operators, he felt happy to be there, like he’d finally come home. Sure, he was tired after nearly four decades of hard-driving missions, but he said to himself, Just thank the lords of war, old man. You can sleep when you’re dead.

  Two minutes later, Allie’s lumbering Huey swept back into the clearing and set down. Miles Turner jumped out first, followed by his four candidates as they grunted and stumbled and tried to sling their M4s and get their rucks back on, and chased after him back into the woods.

  “What happened?” Penny gasped. “Is something wrong with the bird?”

  “Nope,” Shane said.

  “Just part of the assessment,” Steele called from the back. “See how much shit they can take.”

  “You mean they’re not really going anywhere?”

  “Sure they are,” Shane said. “Another eighteen miles on foot.”

  “Oh my gosh. You people are awful.”

  “Life’s a bitch.” Dalton grunted and grinned.

  “And then you get Covid,” Shane said. He field-stripped his cigarette, tossed the shreds in the wet grass, rolled up his window, and drove off into the woods.

  Twelve hours later, the four candidates were naked except for their underwear, freezing and shivering in a slimy prison cell on the outskirts of Lynchburg, Virginia, and being water tortured and bitch slapped by men who appeared to be police officers but would definitely not have passed muster with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

  After their fifty-mile ruck hump—the last leg of which included pushing a Vietnam-era Willys Jeep laden with four thousand rounds of ammunition up a two-hundred-foot hill, and then fording a neck-deep rushing river—the candidates had arrived at a camouflaged trailer in the woods. They were ordered to dump their gear and weapons, shed their filthy utilities, wash up, dress in civilian clothes off a rack, and hustle back outside. The female prospect from the air force, known as Slick, had stripped naked along with the Ranger and the two SF men, and no one had even glanced at her. They hadn’t slept in fifty-two hours. That kind of exhaustion murders libidos.

  Outside the trailer, as dusk loomed, they slurped ice-cold coffee and ate putrid Spam from cans as Steele briefed them on their next task, a mission to the city of Lynchburg. At the Grand Hotel on Main Street, a Russian FSB agent named Katrina Rostoff was holed up in a suite, with a four-ounce flask of the deadly nerve agent Novichok in her possession, which she was about to pass to an unknown assassin. They’d have to gain access to the suite, recover the nerve agent from Rostoff, and try not to kill her, or themselves, in the process. Shortly after Steele’s briefing, a driver from Turner’s security detail drove them to Lynchburg in a blacked-out panel van.

  The infiltration phase went pretty well.

  Each candidate had a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of their off-the-rack jeans. Slick had the driver stop at the Lynchburg Community Market, where she bought a chocolate birthday cake in a white cardboard gift box and had “Happy Birthday Kat” scripted on the icing. Inside the hotel’s lush lobby, she burst into tears when the receptionist lady—in accordance with hotel policy—wouldn’t give her Katrina Rostoff’s room number (impressive, since Slick’s only dramatic acting prior to that had been in a high school production of Our Town). Slick showed the woman the cake and begged to be allowed to surprise her “beloved sister.” It worked. She hurried to the elevator bank with the box, her three coconspirators slipped into the lobby from a side door, and they all rode up to the seventh floor.

  The exfiltration phase was a disaster.

  Slick rang the room bell while her mates stacked up out of sight. When the door cracked open, they hurled themselves at it, broke the security chain, rushed the woman inside, and tried to pin her down to the couch. However, Katrina Rostoff was actually Ted Lansky’s adjutant, Betsy Roth, who happened to have a brown belt in Brazilian jujitsu, also enjoyed method acting, and was wearing a red silk Japanese robe with embroidered arachnids. Betsy screamed like a banshee, hurled lamps and ashtrays at her assailants, and cursed them in howling fake Russian. Six policemen were there in a flash, cuffing the four Program candidates while Betsy smirked and sipped wine.

  They weren’t really policemen, of course, though they looked the part with their Lynchburg PD uniforms, badges, and guns. They were contractors from a private military company called The Cauldron, owned and operated by a former Marine Force Recon captain named Kevin McMahon and his former NCOIC, Liam Flatley. In the final phase of their Marine Corps service, McMahon and Flatley had run the unit’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape school. They knew how to break hearts and minds.

  The “police station” was also a mock-up, a repurposed white brick warehouse on the far side of the railroad tracks between the Public Works Complex and Memorial Avenue. But the candidates never saw the exterior, because they were hooded like falcons and thrown into a phony paddy wagon outside the Lynchburg Grand, then dragged from the wagon at midnight, whereupon the fun began.

  McMahon screamed in their faces. The range of his pornographic lexicon was impressive. Flatley preferred to use his hands and SWAT boots. Neither man was large, but they could both summon cold dead eyes and had the kinds of arms that develop from constantly twisting things. The other four “policemen” delivered various implements of discomfort to their team leaders, like servants at a Hellboy cocktail party.

  In the basement of the building, which could have doubled for a dissident prison in Tehran or a Mississippi county jail, the four Program hopefuls had their handcuffs and hoods removed and were frisked and stripped to their skivvies. Their wrists were then bound in front with thick hemp, and they were left alone. Soon thereafter, the Ranger decided that this process was going to go on all night, so he might as well sit.

  “Who the fuck said you could sit?”

  McMahon stormed into the cell. Flatley appeared with a fire hose and blasted all four into the stone dungeon walls until their skins were raw and they were gasping for air. Then the other four “cops” appeared and helped rope the quartet’s wrists to meat hooks embedded in the ceiling, so that only the balls of their bare feet tou
ched the floor.

  “Who the hell are you people?” McMahon growled as he weaved between the stretched-out glistening bodies, slapping a truncheon against his thigh. “I want names!”

  “Dopey,” the Ranger said with a sneer.

  “Grumpy,” said one of the Special Forces NCOs.

  “Sleepy,” said the other.

  “Cinderella,” said Slick. “Snow White was a bitch.”

  Flatley hit them with the fire hose again, which made them spin like weathervanes in a hurricane. Then he dropped the hose, walked into the cell, pulled a stun gun from his duty belt, and said, “We don’t fucking tolerate disrespect,” and zapped each candidate in the ass, with a good long generous jolt.

  No one screamed. No one begged for mercy. However, Miles Turner, who was watching the proceedings on a monitor in a control room upstairs, along with Steele, Goodhill, Shane Wiley, and Penny (who mostly covered her eyes), wasn’t overly impressed. After all, these people were airborne and air assault qualified and each had at least one bronze star with a “V” device for valor. Steele, on the other hand, noted the performances of McMahon and Flatley. He thought they might make good Program candidates themselves.

  McMahon summoned his four cop subordinates. They appeared in the dungeon cell carrying beer tubs full of ice water. Flatley bound the prisoners’ ankles and submerged their dangling feet in the tubs. McMahon would have preferred to just waterboard them, but that was now an indictable offense. Both men, when not working contracts for the U.S. government in an effort to develop the finest special warriors, were actually doting fathers and loving husbands. Here, they were demons.

  “I’m gonna ask you again,” McMahon screamed. “Who the fuck are you people?”

  The Ranger began singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.” The other three joined in. McMahon and Flatley exchanged nods, both inserted earplugs in their ears, then Flatley tapped an app on his cell phone and the dungeon exploded with the most horrific music blasting from giant recessed speakers—the entire Barbra Streisand album Walls.