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

The man called out again, whistling as if summoning a pet.

Hala’s hand shot to her lips, covering a gasp. “He said he’s coming in. He warned me not to run …”

Clark scanned the room. There’d been nothing to use as a weapon when they’d come in, but maybe he’d missed something.

Nope.

Clark dropped to his knees in front of Hala, taking her by both shoulders. “I need you to trust me.”

She nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

Clark stood and took the little douk-douk out of his pocket, opening the scimitar blade. He placed it on the ground, and then stepped on the handle, pinching the two metal sides together, effectively turning it into a fixed-blade knife. The cutting edge was just four inches long, not optimal for stabbing, but there were other ways to cause chaos and doom with a knife.

Clark nodded toward the entrance. The place where the wall had collapsed formed a natural funnel that would send the man to them.

“He’s going to come from there,” Clark whispered. “I will stand by the door. When I raise my hand, you make a noise. Don’t call to him, but let him hear you. Do you understand?”

She looked up with brown doe eyes, nodded around a mouthful of shirt collar.

“When you see him at the door, I want you to run.” Clark pointed to the far corner of the room.

“Run where?” Hala whispered, terrified. “There is nowhere to go.”

Clark gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “True,” he said. “But he does not know that. He will not be able to resist chasing you.”

“What if he catches—”

“He won’t,” Clark said, already moving to the door. None of this would work if the man saw or heard him.

Clark had the newcomer in height and weight, but that whole vitality-of-youth thing would be a problem. Fortunately, Clark had what Ding called “old-man strength,” which was really not strength at all, but cunning and pure meanness in the face of battle. He didn’t intend to let this evolve into a contest of strength or determination. In fact, if Clark did this right, there would be no fight at all. It would be an assassination.

Clark stood to the right of the door, opposite where the man’s sight line would be when he heard Hala. He held the douk-douk in his right hand, firmly but relaxed. A clenched fist moved much too slowly for what he needed to do.

He raised his left hand, listening for the tentative footsteps. The man called out again, just a few feet down the dark hall. Clark couldn’t understand a word, but the cruel intent came through clearly enough.

Clark let his left hand drop.

At the signal, Hala gave a gasp, shuffling her feet on the ground as if scrambling to get away.

The man laughed, whistling again, calling out. Clark imagined him saying, “I have you now …”

Clark caught movement to his left, checked his breathing, lowered his center, ready to move.

Hala sprang from her spot, digging in as though she intended to run straight through the far wall of the earthen chamber. Clark hadn’t told her to scream, but she did, and it only added to the effect.

The man’s predatory drive kicked in immediately at the sight of his fleeing quarry. He shouted at her to stop and bolted after her, thinking there must be a door in the shadows, and unwilling to let her slip away.

Clark stepped sideways, snaking his left hand behind the man’s neck and around his face, forearm to forehead, yanking him backward as his legs tried to run out from under him. At the same moment, Clark buried the blade into the side of the man’s exposed neck, impacting the brachial nerve so hard that his body jolted as if hit with an electric shock. The little douk-douk’s scimitar point slid in as if the flesh were butter, just behind the windpipe. Clark felt a sudden pulse of blood slap his arm, moist and hot. This wasn’t his first rodeo, and he’d rolled his sleeve above the elbow in anticipation of this to keep it clean.

With the edge of the blade facing forward, Clark pushed at the same time he gave a sharp backward tug on the man’s forehead, severing the trachea with a sickening pop.

The man struggled, but only for a moment, before becoming heavy. Clark let go, allowing him to pitch forward, face-planting on the floor.

Hala ran to him, ignoring the dying man’s agonal gasps, to grab Clark’s arm with both tiny hands. She was frantic with worry at the blood dripping from his elbow.

“John, you are hurt!”

He took a deep breath. “No,” he said, turning so she faced away from the gore. “I’m fine. It’s his. Not mine.”

“Okay,” she said, panting, lifting his arm to check it thoroughly, unconvinced.

He switched the open douk-douk to his left hand to keep from accidentally cutting her.

“Really,” he said, “I’m okay.”

Clark rubbed as much of the blood off his arm as he could with a blanket, and then went to look out the window. He’d thought to move the man’s car before anyone noticed it, but there was too much traffic for that. A steady line of open trucks and trailers filled with camels, cattle, goats, donkeys, and the odd, fat-bottomed sheep of the region formed an early-morning parade line toward the market grounds. None of them paid any heed to the thirty-year-old Dongfeng sedan that had apparently broken down on the side of the road.

Clark turned to see the girl standing over the dead man.

“Gather your things,” he said. “We should find another place to wait. It’s only six thirty. Still over two hours until we can meet my friend. This will be difficult to explain if anyone else happens along.”

Hala didn’t move until he took her gently by the shoulder and herded her into the corridor.

“I’m sorry you had to see such awful things,” he said.

She leaned against his leg and sighed. Still trembling, she spoke matter-of-factly, like a woman twice her age. “It was awful, that is true, but if you had not been here, it would have been much worse.”

39

Midas Jankowski was pretty damned certain that no one in the history of history had ever calmed down because someone else told them to “calm down.” Fortunately, no matter what Gerry Hendley was reading into his tone, Midas wasn’t spun up, he was just surrounded by camels and goats and weird-looking big-assed sheep.

A Uyghur with four goats stacked like cordwood on the back of a three-wheeled motorcycle truck barked “bosh-bosh, bosh-bosh” as he nosed Midas aside with the front tire and rode past. Hendley must have heard the change in Midas’s voice and was doing his level best to try and talk him off some ledge.

A woman’s voice playing an incessant loop over a loudspeaker forced him to cup his hand over the phone in order to be heard.

“Seriously, Boss,” Midas said. “I’m fine. Just got bosh-bosh ed out of the way.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

Midas thought of telling Hendley to think about calming down, but decided being a wiseass to the boss’s boss was not the smartest thing to do.

“Not sure,” Midas said. “Probably ‘get out of my way.’ Anyway, something’s come up with our mutual friend.” The line was presumed secure, but he still refrained from using names.

“All right,” Hendley said. “Let’s have it.”

“Everyone’s intact,” Midas said. “Our problem is egress. Our friend’s message said he has the package.”

“ Has the package? With him?”

“Sounds like it,” Midas said. “From the sound of things, something really bad went down in the neighborhood he was looking at. I’m not sure about the details, but I’m hearing three dead.”

“Our friend?” Hendley asked.

“Well enough to send the message,” Midas said. “He must have rescued the package.”