Paul made sure to keep the drone locked onto the van. He and Gamay exchanged glances. Both had noticed the change in Kurt’svoice, a shift that was rare and menacing at the same time. Something was definitely wrong.
In the control room on theLyra, Kurt was on the edge of his seat, staring at the screen like a gargoyle perched on the wall looking down over the city. His face was a mask of stone, his eyes taut and squinting like a gunfighter in the hot sun at high noon.
He’d paused the image from the drone, run it back, and zoomed in on the Chinese man who had closed the door. The freeze-frame caught the man in full lean as he reached for the open door. The image was sharp, the zoom lens and the night optics delivering a better photo than Kurt could have taken with an expensive camera in broad daylight.
The Chinese man wore a red woolen hat. A few locks of black hair sprouted from the hat covering the man’s ears. A square face, featuring wide cheekbones and a prominently cleft chin, stuck out beneath it. A diagonal scar ran down from a spot near the right eye. It stood out prominently in the illumination from the dockside floodlights.
Kurt knew that face and he knew the scar.
“Gushan.”
Joe recognized him, too. “Small world,” he said.
Kurt nodded. “It’s about to get a lot smaller.”
Chapter 28
Paul and Gamay had cut through the park diagonally, sprinting through the snow, which got deeper near the trees. Paul had realized he could run with one eye closed and avoid the stumbling motion that made him look and feel intoxicated.
At the west end of the park they’d arrived at the main road, reaching it just as the black windowless van passed by doing thirty miles an hour. There was no way to keep chasing it on foot.
“It’s heading toward town,” Gamay pointed out.
Tromsø was a fairly large outpost for a harbor town this far north. Fishing was the main industry, but the oil fields to the west had brought more men, women, and industry to the town. There were dozens of commercial buildings and warehouses downtown. Not to mention scores of small shops, restaurants, and bars. Beyond that lay apartment blocks and government buildings.
“We’ll never find a single black van once it reaches the village,” Gamay added.
“I have an idea,” Paul said. Pulling the controller from his pocket, he scrolled a side wheel that brought up a menu. The Hawkeye Raptor had a tracking mode, designed to let it follow an animal movingout of range too fast for a human to catch up. If he could just get the system to acquire the van like it would a snow leopard or wildebeest.
“Got it,” he said as a white box appeared around the van on the projected image in the glasses.
“Now what?” Gamay said.
“We can slow down,” Paul said, breathing hard. “The drone is on autopilot now. It’ll follow the van and broadcast the video back to us and the ship. Kurt and Joe should be able to see where it goes.”
Chapter 29
Gushan, Admiral Li, and one of the admiral’s personal adjutants, a captain by the name of Haifeng, sat in the back of the windowless van on upturned crates like refugees or stowaways. It wasn’t much of a hardship for Gushan or Haifeng, but the admiral shifted uncomfortably and complained every time the van hit a bump in the uneven road. As it rounded a turn, he grasped wildly at a hanging strap, nearly falling as his crate tipped over. If not for the quick assistance of Haifeng, the admiral would have gone tumbling across the back of the empty vehicle.
Gushan turned away, barely able to suppress a laugh. Snickering at an admiral’s misfortunes in public was not a good career move.
With his face back to its normal stoic mask, he whistled for Haifeng, then nodded at the divider separating them from the driver’s compartment. “Get his attention.”
Haifeng banged his fist on the metal panel. The driver opened a plastic slider and looked through it.
“Slow it down,” Gushan ordered.
He had no authority other than the fierce glare in his eyes, but the scruffy-faced driver nodded and handled the last couple miles with more caution.
As they neared their destination, Gushan considered just how far the situation had diverged from the initial plan. The intended rendezvous on the ice runway was a risky move, but a calculated one. It was supposed to take place at night, immediately after the hijacking, over international waters. The location was admittedly a long way from China, but it was also five hundred miles from the nearest swath of NATO territory. Now they were docked in a Norwegian harbor, riding in windowless van to a clandestine meeting on NATO soil.
And this after trying to sink the NUMA ship to keep it from scouring the rest of the search area.
Gushan shook his head softly. The idea that he’d be ordered to sink an American ship on the high seas, outside of a declared war, was impossible for him to fathom. But it had happened. To follow that aggression by allowing a politically ambitious rear admiral to meet with some unvetted contact in the dark of night was almost as shocking.
The moves smacked of desperation. But the high command wanted its prize, and they would only trust Li to meet with their secret contact, and so the spit-and-polished admiral had donned some ill-fitting civilian clothes and stepped out of his castle. And while Gushan and Haifeng were armed and lethal bodyguards, they could easily be outnumbered and overrun if this meeting turned into a trap.
The van pulled to a stop. Through the slider Gushan could see the lights of a quaint street filled with taverns and other shops.
