Mike Maden - Drone Command

“Did you bother to read Ambassador Pang’s report?” Sun demanded.

“Of course. Myers is mistaken. The Sixth Fleet wouldn’t dare challenge us.”

“She’s a failed president of a failing nation,” Feng said. “What does it matter what she thinks?”

“It matters because she’s a close friend of President Lane’s. My sources tell me she helped him win power. That means she has influence over him.” Sun leaned forward. “And she wants an apology from you, Feng. A personal apology.”

Feng was lost in thought. It suddenly occurred to him that Myers might be his best option yet. “If you were certain that the Americans would not oppose us, would you support the continued drilling at Mao Island?”

“Do you take me for an idiot? Of course I would. The amount of oil and gas located there would virtually guarantee our energy independence in the coming decade,” Sun said. “But you can’t guarantee the Americans won’t attack us.”

“Myers said the Americans don’t believe the Wu-14 is operational. You also said she has influence over Lane. If I can convince Myers the Wu-14 exists, she’ll convince Lane. And if Lane believes we have it, the U.S. Navy will, and the U.S. Navy will never risk an aircraft carrier, especially for the sake of Japanese oil interests.”

“Vice Chairman Feng is exactly right,” Admiral Ji said.

Feng relaxed, knowing he’d already won. “So let me propose this. I’ll invite President Myers to meet me in person, and I will apologize to her face-to-face.”

“Where and when?” Sun asked.

“At Admiral Ji’s headquarters,” Feng said. “Where the Wu-14 is currently located.”

President Sun unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair, thinking.

“Yes, that might just work.”

“I’ll make the arrangements immediately,” Feng said.

Once Myers saw the Wu-14 in person, the Americans would be convinced of its existence. China might just win this war without firing a shot.

“Do so, and keep me informed,” the president said, picking up a phone. He waived a spotted hand, dismissing the two men.

“As you wish,” Feng said.

Feng glared at Sun’s flaking scalp. He made a mental note as he left. The first thing he’d do when he took over this office was to have it thoroughly disinfected.

A curtain of heavy snow fell in thick flakes. Troy slammed the brakes in front of the bar, nearly plowing into the back of a familiar custom pickup, a ’66 Chevy 4x4 painted midnight black with orange flames raking the hood.

Troy leaped out of his own beater truck, leaving the motor running and windshield wipers slapping. He dashed through the front door just in time to see his dad smash a man in the mouth with his hammering fist. A gout of blood spewed out of the taller man’s bearded mouth as he howled in pain. There were two other men on the floor already, one crawling toward a table, the other out cold. Troy prayed he wasn’t dead. The air was hot and fetid and clouded with blue smoke. A honky-tonk steel guitar wailed on the jukebox.

“I’m calling the cops now, Troy,” the barkeep hollered. He slammed a rotary phone on the bar. Started to dial. “Get your old man outta here.”

A towering bear of a man shouted at the barkeep, six-foot-six if he was an inch and three hundred pounds. Big gut, bigger arms. Steel-toed boots and an ugly pockmarked face. “Fuck that. He started it, I’m gonna finish it.” He grabbed the rotary phone off the bar and yanked it hard, pulling the cord out, and tossed it across the room. The bell rang when it smashed against the wall.

“I shit bigger ’n you, you fat fuck,” Troy’s dad slurred. He was nearly a foot shorter and half the weight of the hulking brute. He started coughing fiercely.

“Fuck him up, JoJo!” A heavy woman in leathers horse-laughed, a cigarette dangling in her blistered mouth. She was perched precariously on a bar stool beneath a crumbling beehive of bleached purple hair matching the color of her lipstick and fingernails.

“That’s the idea, honey.” A wiry man with bad teeth and biker tats grabbed a pool cue.

“Put that down,” Troy growled. He’d grown in the last two years. Six-foot-two, two hundred pounds of hard ax-swinging muscle.

“You gonna make me?” the wiry man asked.

“Are you shitting me? Put that damn thing down or I’ll shove it up your ass.”

Troy’s dad wobbled on unsteady feet. “I don’t need your help, son. Get out!”

“Yeah, get out, son. Get out!” JoJo mocked, belly laughing. So did half the barflies crowding around the edges. JoJo reached into his oil-stained Levi’s. Pulled out a quarter and tossed it at Troy. “There’s a pay phone across the road. Call an ambulance. Your daddy’s gonna need it.”

The quarter hit the cigarette butt — littered floor at Troy’s feet.

“Idiot.” Troy picked up a chalk-stained cue ball from the pool table. Held it like a baseball. Pointed at the wiry biker. “Put that stick down now. We’ll clear out.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Troy’s dad glowered at him.

“Only to the morgue, little man.” JoJo stepped closer.

“You tell him, JoJo!” the purple-haired woman bellowed, hoisting a beer.

Troy threw the cue ball hard. It thudded into the skinny man’s chest right above the heart. He cried out. The pool cue in his gnarled hand clattered to the floor. He clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack and doubled over.

Troy was on him in an instant. Grabbed the man by his greasy hair and smashed his face with an iron-hard fist. The cartilage in the man’s nose cracked like a snapped pencil, gushing blood all over Troy’s shirt before he collapsed in a heap, howling and clutching his broken face.

Troy turned to his dad. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Troy marched over and grabbed at his father but, he got shoved back hard.

“Touch me again and I’ll put you down, you little son of a bitch.”

“You tell him!” the big woman shouted, laughing again.

“Get him out of here, Troy. I mean it!” The bartender held an old police billy club in his hands now, still hiding behind the bar as a shield.

“Dad, please.”

The man who had crawled under a table to escape his beating earlier suddenly leaped up behind Troy’s dad and wrapped his arms around him. Before Troy’s dad could break the armlock, JoJo lunged with a beer bottle from his blind side, swinging it like a hammer. It smashed against his dad’s skull with a sickening thud. The rock-hard bottle didn’t break.

His dad moaned and fell to his knees, reaching for his bleeding scalp.

JoJo turned and charged Troy, bottle held high in the air. He swung down just as he reached Troy, but Troy stepped into him, throwing a perfect punch into the lunging man’s face, doubling the strength of the blow. JoJo’s head snapped back like a Pez candy dispenser as his feet swept out from under him. He crashed to the floor, knocked out cold.

Troy turned just in time to see his dad collapse to the ground, his unblinking eyes staring straight back at him.

The freighter was nearly forty years old and looked every year of it on the outside with its peeling paint and rusted hull, but that was a convenient disguise. The old freighter’s cargo hold had been lavishly refurbished for an entirely new purpose, fit for princes and champions.

Tanaka sat next to Kobayashi- san , the most powerful yakuza boss in Tokyo, in the premium seats with the best view, high up, like a caesar at the coliseum. Half of Japan’s eighty thousand yakuza pledged allegiance to the Kobayashi- gumi , the most vicious and well-funded crime syndicate in the country.