Cameron, Marc - Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

“I’ll go after her,” Lisanne said, already walking, showing Clark a grim smile. “You’re liable to scare her.”

“Copy that,” Clark said, moving to intercept the oncoming European. He was close, so it didn’t take long.

Clark got a clear glimpse of a pair of flex-cuffs protruding from the European’s pocket—and the black butterfly knife in the man’s clenched fist. It was closed now, as the European made his way through the crowd, but with a flick of his wrist, he could flip it open in an instant. It was a wicked little weapon, devastatingly effective in the right hands. And not at all likely to be carried by any sort of law enforcement in the process of arresting a fleeing teenage girl.

Certain now that the European had nothing but bad intentions, Clark jostled him lightly as he went by. There were plenty of non-Asians in the crowd, and the European gave the gray-haired Clark no more than a passing grunt for getting in his way.

The man had just begun to push off with his trailing foot when Clark drove the heel of a boot straight into his Achilles tendon.

Cursing in Slovakian, the man sagged, instinctively moving to shield his injury. With all the weight now on the man’s forward leg, Clark gave him a brutal side kick. Human knees were not designed for lateral movement, and the ligaments and cartilage fairly exploded. Clark snatched away the butterfly knife. It had all happened so quickly and the man was so immersed in pain that there was a good chance he wasn’t completely sure Clark was the person responsible for his injuries.

The crowd closed in around him as he fell, and Clark, as was his habit, melted into the shadows. Lisanne was still out there, watching out for the fleeing girl.

Clark found them less than a hundred feet away, at the edge of the no-haggle area where blue-smocked salespeople charged fixed prices for their wares.

Clark pushed his way through a knot of concerned gawkers—local Vietnamese and assorted tourists—to find another European flat on his back, unconscious, blood weeping from the burst flesh above a bushy black eyebrow. This one was shorter than the partner Clark had dealt with, broader, with the flattened face of a boxer—for all the good it had done him.

Clark scanned for other threats, but no one stood out. A frumpy saleswoman in a sky-blue smock held up her phone and rattled off something in Vietnamese. Clark recognized the word for police .

A frail Vietnamese woman who looked to be in her fifties clucked her way through the crowd. She wore a nun’s headscarf and a sincere but stern look that Clark knew all too well from his childhood. The frightened girl stepped from around Lisanne at the sight of the nun and rushed into her arms, tears and words pouring out of her. Clark caught part of it, but his Vietnamese language skills had grown worse than rusty after all these years. The sobbing didn’t help.

He shot Lisanne a look and nodded toward the market. Both knew any contact with the local gendarmerie would gain them unwanted attention that they didn’t need. The rest of The Campus would be working here for a week, and he and his new operative still had a lot of work to do.

The nun enveloped the girl with her arm, like the wing of a mother hen, and led her back the way she’d come, disappearing in the mass of humanity. Evidently, she didn’t want to get involved with the police, either.

“She’d come to meet the sister,” Clark said, tipping his head toward the nun.

“I only got to talk to her for a couple of seconds,” Lisanne said. “But as I understand it, those guys were pimping her out at a couple of the local hotels. They’d brought her to meet a client across the street and she bailed on them … At least, that’s what I think she said. Her English wasn’t much better than my Vietnamese.”

Clark walked beside her, turning down a narrow alley made of bolts of colorful cloth stacked nearly to the ceiling.

“You made short work of the hairy guy,” Clark observed. “I’ll be interested to hear how you did it.”

“Sure,” Lisanne said, smiling. “Remember that upright cement post where I was standing?”

“I do,” Clark said, seeing where this was going.

“Like you told me,” Lisanne said. “Sometimes you bounce a rock off the bad guy’s head, sometimes you bounce the bad guy’s head off the rock. I’m the weapon, I just choose how to use the tool.”

Clark gave her a wink. “Young lady,” he said, “I believe you will do.” He took out his phone and punched in his son-in-law’s number.

“You guys about done for the day?” he said when the man at the other end picked up.

3

People’s Liberation Army Navy Yuan -class attack submarine Yuanzheng #771 cruised twenty meters below the choppy brown surface of the Bering Sea, towing a tethered communication buoy. The Yuanzheng (Expedition) designation applied to all conventional diesel-electric submarines that were armed with ballistic or cruise missiles.

Expedition 771 carried ballistic missiles, but she was far from conventional.

The PLAN Submarine Force referred to each vessel by class and hull number, but 771 ’s crew, the collective soul that made her alive, called her Qinglong —Blue Dragon—after the dull color of her rubberized anechoic hull. Captain Sun Luoyang thought it fitting. The blue-green Dragon of the East symbolized the Yuan Dynasty’s great sea power, and the name gave the men immense pride in their vessel.

Sun was an effective leader who had his father’s strong hands and his mother’s rock-solid devotion to duty. Not quite five and a half feet tall, he’d also inherited his father’s narrow shoulders and diminutive stature. His size had been a nuisance in school, and much more so later in military training, when every success seemed to hinge on one’s ability to excel at sports. But a keen intellect and sheer determination carried him to the submarine force, where his small frame would serve him well. With an array of torpedoes and ship-killing missiles at his disposal, it didn’t matter one iota if he was good at football or boxing or table tennis.

He’d never married, but took seriously the responsibility of mentor if not father to the young people in his crew.

Now that he’d come shallow, three of them were suffering acute symptoms of seasickness.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Captain Sun and the crew of 771 had finally slipped free from a two-week exercise with the Russian Navy in the semiprotected waters near Anadyr, the administrative capital of Chukotka, Russia. There had been problems with two of his pumps, and he’d had to stay behind for the better part of a week after the others had returned south. Sun had remained on his submarine through the entire training evolution and repairs, never setting foot in the city. He surmised that like all frontier towns he’d visited, this one was filthy and full of itself for its perceived rugged independence.

Captain Sun had found the exercise interesting enough—docking, refit and repair at sea, submarine warfare theory. All well and good, necessary to sustain a formidable force. But PLAN superiors steadfastly refused to allow any vessels to take part in the “war” part of the war game. Though well accustomed to littoral defense and denial, in Sun’s opinion, the PLAN’s abilities in the open sea needed more severe testing. Beijing wanted them to drill, but they were not about to be embarrassed in front of the Kremlin. Moscow did not push the subject. To them, the exercise had been little more than a sales pitch. The Kremlin wanted to brag about their technology in order to sell more of it to Beijing. The less they had to work for it, the better. Moscow was vocal to the point of bombastic on news and social media about their success at modernizing the Russian Navy, but Captain Sun was astonished to see how clankingly aged most of the ships and submarines were. Chinese and Russian weapons alike often finessed American technology into tractorlike hardware, giving them the appearance of a well-designed sledgehammer.