Клайв Касслер: Typhoon Fury

A hundred feet in, they reached a laboratory, with equipment that must have made sense to Hayward. There were also several file cabinets and a desk littered with papers. A faint hiss came from the tunnel.

“My camera,” Hayward said. “It’s in my pack.”

Kekoa reached in and found the camera, with a flashbulb attached. He handed Hayward off to another soldier while he snapped a photo of the equipment. When the flash went off, Kekoa noticed something on the ceiling down the tunnel.

“What is that?” he said to one of the men, who took a flashlight to investigate. When he lit up the spot, Kekoa realized in horror what he’d been hearing. On a set of dull gray bars strapped to the ceiling he could make out the Kanji characters for Explosive . The hiss was burning detonation cord.

“It’s rigged to blow!” he yelled. “Everyone out of here!”

“No!” Hayward protested. “We need the intel!” He lunged for a file on top of the desk and grabbed it before Kekoa could yank him away.

With the help of another soldier, Kekoa carried Hayward by the shoulders as they sprinted for daylight. Kekoa’s lungs burned from the exertion, but the thought of being trapped under thousands of tons of rubble kept him going. They were the last ones through the tunnel entrance when the underground fortress erupted like a volcano. The concussive force flung them to the ground.

The explosives must have been linked to bundles in other tunnels because the entire hill shook from multiple aftershocks. Trees were uprooted and rocks tumbled down the slopes, raising a cloak of dust so thick that Kekoa couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction.

He found Hayward lying prone next to him, not moving. Kekoa flipped him over and saw that he was still breathing. His hand continued to clutch the file from the tunnel.

“Medic!” cried Kekoa. “I need a medic!” He looked down at Hayward, who opened his eyes. “Stay with me, Captain.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“That file almost got us killed.”

“Had to take it,” Hayward said. His finger tapped a picture on the front next to Japanese characters. It looked like the leaf of some kind of plant. “Tell me what the cover says.”

“That can wait until . . .”

“No, it can’t,” he said between ragged breaths. “That’s why I asked for you. You know Japanese. Tell me. Please.”

Kekoa saw a medic running toward them, so he indulged the captain.

“It says Project Typhoon. Morale Division, Unit 731.” At the mention of Unit 731, Hayward’s face went even whiter than it already was. Kekoa didn’t know what that meant, but it obviously terrified the military scientist.

The medic began tending to his wound and injected Hayward with morphine. As the drug began to take effect, Hayward mumbled, “Where . . . is it located?”

“You mean this Morale Division?”

Hayward nodded, his eyes barely open.

“It doesn’t list the name of a base, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” Kekoa said, “but it does mention a city.”

“Tokyo?”

Kekoa shook his head. “Hiroshima.”

1

VIETNAM

PRESENT DAY

Eddie Seng stood at the curb of Da Nang International Airport’s arrivals area, just as he’d been instructed. The awning of the modern facility shaded him from the midafternoon sun, but it made the muggy July day only marginally more comfortable in his light wool suit. An elegant black limousine showed up as expected and glided to a stop next to him. Eddie was familiar with executive vehicles and immediately recognized it as a Mercedes Maybach V12, the crème de la crème of exotic automobiles.

The uniformed chauffeur walked around the front of the car and opened a wide door. Eddie entered a resplendent interior and settled into a soft cream leather seat, wondering if he would get out alive.

A man in a black suit, sitting in the middle rear-facing row of seats, waved a metal detector over Eddie to check him for weapons, but he had followed instructions and was unarmed. In the rear seat next to Eddie, Zhong Lin, field agent for China’s Ministry of State Security, stared at him as the car pulled away. Instead of a suit, he wore a black T-shirt and pants, and his thin lips were creased with lines, the sign of a longtime smoker. For a moment, Zhong said nothing, merely appraising the person he thought was a Taiwanese traitor known as David Yao.

Eddie had, in fact, grown up in New York City’s Chinatown, learning Mandarin and English simultaneously from his parents. Because his normal accent was bland in both languages, he’d spent the past two weeks in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, getting accustomed to the local dialect.

Most of his career with the CIA had been as a deep-cover operative on the Chinese mainland, so playing a part was nothing new to him. However, he hadn’t been this close to an agent from the MSS, China’s intelligence organization, since his CIA cover had been blown and he was forced to escape back to the United States. As a wanted fugitive, he’d been sentenced to death in absentia , with his face well known to China’s authorities. If Zhong Lin even suspected who he was, he would be whisked out of Vietnam in shackles to Beijing for a swift execution.

His current disguise was meant to prevent that from happening. The real David Yao was a member of the Ghost Dragon triad, one of Taiwan’s most notorious gangs. Yao was suspected of being responsible for numerous extortion, racketeering, and murder plots, but his mutilated body had been found floating on the ocean by a U.S. Navy ship two weeks ago. When the CIA realized that his corpse provided the opportunity for Eddie’s current operation, they asked the Navy to delay notifying the Taiwanese authorities of the discovery.

Like Eddie, Yao had been in his mid-thirties, lithe and athletic, but they never would have been confused for brothers. Completing the disguise required a radical transformation of his face—widened nose, bulked-up chin, reshaped eyes, and an added mustache and beard, as well as fake tattoos on his arms and neck.

After a few moments, Zhong said, in Mandarin, “You have the information we need?”

Eddie didn’t betray his relief at not being recognized. “It’s confirmed. They’re making the exchange on a train. All of the seats have been reserved, so there won’t be any other passengers, and the crew are all Vietnamese recruited and paid off by the triad.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere between Da Nang and Hue. They’ll text me which train it is so I can meet it at the station to pick them up when they arrive.”

“And the Ghost Dragons have the memory stick with them?”

Eddie nodded. He’d originally opened the dialogue with the Chinese Secret Service by telling them what kind of data was stored on the USB flash drive, a piece of information very few people on the outside knew. The Taiwanese Ghost Dragons, who were enemies of the communist regime on the mainland, had carried out a daring heist to steal the memory stick from an MSS courier. Eddie was playing Yao as if he were a traitor not only to his home country of Taiwan but to his brethren in the triad as well.

“Why are you doing this?” Zhong asked him.

“You know why,” Eddie replied. “Five million U.S. dollars.”

“You won’t be able to return to Taiwan. Not after this. The triad will know who betrayed them.”

“I don’t want to. It’s been clear for some time that I will never rise to my proper rank in the Ghost Dragons. I plan to find a woman in Melbourne, Australia, and settle there.”

Zhong shrugged. “If you’re willing to sell out your country, I’m happy to pay.” He tapped on his phone. When he was done, he said, “Two-point-five million has been transferred to your account.”