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

Ding unscrewed the plastic cap on the end of a telephoto lens and dumped the knives out in his hand. All of them were Microtech automatics with OTF, or out-the-front, blades. The Halo was the largest, with a blade just over four inches long.

“Excellent,” Chavez said. “Just in case I need a sexy knife to cut open an MRE.”

“You will find the icing on the cake next to those film canisters we talked about,” Yao said. “It took some doing to get those babies. Everybody on my pipeline kept wanting to steal them.”

Chavez held up a black metal cylinder, an inch in diameter and just under three inches long.

“Small for a suppressor,” he mused.

“You know as well as I that these things aren’t mouse-fart quiet,” Yao said. “But with subsonic ammo this thing is amazing. Solid, too. Instructions don’t call for you to shoot it wet, but I’ve put a little lithium grease on the baffles and … I’ve gotta tell you, it is sweet. Jack could pop a round in the backseat and we’d think we ran over a rock.”

“Custom job?” Adara asked.

“No,” Yao said. “Made by Bowers Group. They call it the Bitty. These are the same, they just don’t have any manufacturer’s markings, in case we have to ditch them.”

Adara screwed it onto the threaded barrel of the Beretta Bobcat and hefted the little setup. “Bowers Bitty ‘Black,’” she said. “Makes the .22-caliber much more interesting.”

She passed the gun over her shoulder to Ryan, who gave it a nod of approval. “I guess the little cuss grows on you after a while,” he said.

Chavez laughed and looked back at him. “Like somebody else I know.” He turned to Yao. “There are only four. What are you going to carry?”

“I’ll make do.” Yao chuckled. “Frankly, if things turn to shit, I plan to run screaming into the woods …”

Yao knew something was wrong when the Han woman at the front desk at the Hongfu Lake Kanas Resort fanned the collected passports in her hands like a poker hand, pushing his upward to separate it from the pack. She set that one aside and then gathered the rest into a neat stack before placing them on the counter. Probably in her mid-forties, her black hair had the slightly auburn tint of a person who spent a great deal of time outdoors. The tag on her navy-blue cardigan said her name was Ming.

Absent the frown lines of someone who looked as grim as she did at the moment, she was probably a very nice woman, or she would have been had not the two hawkeyed police officers been watching from the lobby—one a bulldog, the other a whippet.

“ You may check in,” Ming said, loud enough that the two policemen could hear. “But I am sorry to inform you that we are too full to accommodate the foreign guests.”

“I see,” Yao said. He knew full well they had plenty of rooms, but it would have done no good to call her on her lie. Instead, he gathered the Finnish passports and passed them back to their respective owners. This would have certainly been the problem if he’d tried to get them rooms at one of the hotels right next to the lake. They were notorious for telling foreigners at the last minute that they could not be accommodated. He’d hoped to mitigate it by staying in Jiadengyu fifteen minutes away. “My secretary made the reservations,” he said. “I will speak to her about the error.”

“Perhaps,” the desk clerk said. “Or perhaps it was a problem with the computer system. It happens.”

Yao started to leave, but then turned, as if struck by a sudden idea. “What if we were to upgrade the rooms for my foreign guests? Their budgets are large. I’m sure they would happily pay for any larger suites you might have available, and, of course, any surcharges such upgrades might include.”

The clerk glanced at the bulldog, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Would your friends pay in cash?” she asked.

“Of course,” Yao said.

This brought nods from the bulldog and the whippet. The desk clerk took the passports again and made copies for her records. She’d saved face and Yao was able to secure the exact same rooms he’d originally reserved for a mere doubling of the cost. It was a small price to pay.

Yao moved to retrieve the passports again, but the whippet policeman walked over and put his hand on top of the stack. He looked them over one by one, examining each photo, comparing it to its owner.

“Finland?” he said to Adara in Mandarin. “I have seen photographs on the Internet. Forests and lakes like here, no?”

Of all the Campus operatives, Adara spoke the best Chinese. There was no need for them to know that, so Yao translated.

Adara smiled and unleashed her baby blues. Nodding enthusiastically, she said, “Yes, yes.”

“Okay,” Whippet said, and stuffed the passports into his pocket.

Yao protested. “They need those.”

“I have to make a report at my office,” Whippet said, pointing at the double doors with a slender chin. “One of you may retrieve them in …” He whispered to Bulldog, who thought for a moment and then grumbled something back.

“After dinner,” Whippet said. “And you must get them tonight. You will be unable to eat at a restaurant, take a boat or horse tour, or any of the other park concessions without your passports.”

“But—”

“Retrieve them after dinner,” he said again, nodding his skinny face once to show that the matter was closed.

42

Seated to Ryan’s right beside Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Talbot, near the head of the polished Situation Room table, Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess got straight to the point, as he always did. He was brash, outspoken, sometimes downright combative, but, as Lincoln had said describing General Grant: “Where he is, things move.” Ryan didn’t often yield to Burgess’s hawkish nature, but it was good to have a plan. As Ryan’s dad had told him: Decide what you’re going to fight for, and how you plan to do it, then, when the time comes, you don’t have to waste any time making those decisions.

Bob Burgess provided Ryan with the military options, so he didn’t have to search for them himself.

The Situation Room, not exceptionally large to begin with, was packed to the gunnels. Arnie van Damm was there, along with Foley, Forestall, Commander Carter with the Coast Guard, and a dozen other military men and women—and their aides.

Commander Carter had completed his brief regarding the Healy ’s recently acquired new passenger—and the fact that the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long ’s Z-9 helicopter was already buzzing dangerously close to the Healy , while she closed the distance at a steady six knots.

Carter stood to leave, but Ryan asked him to stay, stating his desire to have all the smart nautical brains the room could hold.

“Mr. President,” Burgess said. “We believe the 880 is the Long March 880 , the Chinese Type 094 Jin -class nuclear ballistic missile submarine that took part in the Snow Dragon war games. Last year, President Zhao gave an address to the Central Committee where he noted a ‘revolutionary’ propulsion system for their submarines that would render them as quiet as any in the United States’ arsenal. It was, Zhao said, a new dawn for the PLA-Navy that would take them out of littoral waters and into the blue—an ‘underwater Great Wall’ of weapons that could protect Chinese interests from anywhere, and remain undetected.”

Burgess nodded to an aide against the wall on the other side of the room. A moment later, the two images appeared side by side on the screen at the end of the table and Admiral Talbot took over.

“These are both satellite images of a submarine believed to be Long March 880 .”