Not until he was nearly perpendicular to the wall did they spot him. The two startled sentries whirled, swinging their assault rifles. Too late.
Chiu fired from the waist. The spray of his nine-millimeter bullets ricocheted off the butt end of the wall. Sparks showered against the concrete side of the shelter.
The first sentry spun like a top and flipped over the wall. The second got off several wild rounds before Chiu’s bullets hit him in the upper chest, driving him backwards into the wall of the shelter.
Silence.
Chiu dropped to one knee. Keeping his MP-5N at the ready, he swept the perimeter with his NVG. No more sentries, at least that he could spot.
He signaled Kee to bring the team to the shelter while Chiu covered them from the corner. Kee stopped, kneeling to check the fallen commando. He rose, shaking his head negatively.
Chiu felt the fury rising like lava inside him. Another fatality. The losses they were taking, all in order to find a—
Through his boots he felt a vibration. A rumble came up through the concrete. Then another sound — a high-pitched metallic whine, swelling in volume like the wail of a banshee.
Perplexed, Chiu gazed around. In the greenish twilight of the NVG, he could see his commandos stopped on the tarmac. They were staring at the front of the shelter.
It came to him. The shelter door. It was opening. The rumble he felt through his boots — it was some kind of high-energy hydraulic device.
The other noise — the wailing metallic sound — was reaching a crescendo, bringing real pain to his ears. In the next moment, the advancing commandos broke and scattered across the sprawling concrete apron.
Even before the apparition burst onto the darkened tarmac, Chiu knew what it was. And he was too late.
Stunned, he stared at the specter. He saw only an amorphous shape, shimmering in the darkness like a winged wraith. Its engines were bellowing at full thrust.
As Chiu stared, the craft became invisible, blending into the night.
The Black Star. Chiu could tell by the changing roar that it was accelerating toward the runway.
He shouldered his MP-5N and fired a long burst. Not until the submachine gun had stopped stopped firing for several seconds did he realize he was still holding the trigger down. He’d fired the entire thirty-round magazine.
At nothing.
The Black Star was gone.
Another burst of gunfire, this time from inside the shelter. Chiu recognized the brittle sound of a Type 95. Another damned sentry?
One of the commandos yelped and dropped to the tarmac. The others dove for cover and opened fire on the shooter.
It was over in seconds. Chiu ran to the cavernous opening of the shelter. He saw the shooter — a man in coveralls, some sort of ground crewman. He was sprawled on the hangar floor, his body riddled with bullets. His assault rifle lay beside him.
A feeling of rage swept over Chiu. He had come this far to find the stealth jet — only to lose it in a single blinding moment. And he had lost another commando, killed by a grease monkey in coveralls.
He was still staring out into the darkness when Maxwell and Bass and the fire team came trotting up. The woman was with them.
“It was the Dong-jin,” she said in a flat voice.
He stared at her. For once she had been correct. The shelter contained the Black Star. But it didn’t matter now.
Chiu shook his head in frustration. “So what? It’s gone.”
“There might be another.”
He was too overcome with rage and frustration to listen. It had been so close. One minute sooner. In his mind’s eye he could still see the shimmering ghost of the Black Star vanishing in the night.
“I’ve lost too many men because of you. Our time is up. We will withdraw.”
“Listen to her,” said Maxwell. “She was right about this shelter. We have to look in the next one.”
“If she hadn’t led us to the wrong shelter, we would have stopped the Black Star.”
Maxwell inserted himself between Chiu and the others. In a low voice he said, “Listen Colonel, get over your problem with the woman. If there’s another Black Star out there, we have to find it.”
“Do not presume to tell me what I have to do. The woman cannot be trusted and neither can you. You have been sleeping with a traitor.”
“Damn it, use your brain. Don’t you understand that this is your last chance to stop China from winning this war?”
A long silent moment passed between them. He desperately wanted to kill the woman defector who had led him to this impasse. But despite the cloud of anger that enveloped him, he sensed that the American might be right.
“Our objective is to find the Black Star,” said Maxwell. “If we abort the mission now, the war will be lost.”
Chiu didn’t answer. It seemed that nothing that had occurred in his life up to this moment mattered. What he did in the next few minutes would define his existence.
And that of Taiwan.
Maxwell was standing there, looking at him. So were the others, waiting for his decision.
You are a warrior. Let them see how a warrior leads.
He released the empty clip from his MP-5N and shoved in a fresh magazine, letting them hear the hard, metallic click of the lower receiver.
He turned to his fire team. “Reload your weapons. Check flash suppressors.”
Only four of this squad remained, including the corporal who had been wounded by the crew chief in the shelter. He looked at the commando next to him. “Get the wounded man back to the helicopters. Kee and Lam, you stay with me.”
Chiu took the wounded commando’s MP-5N and handed it to Maxwell. He walked over to the dead Black Star crew chief and picked up his assault rifle. He tossed it to Catfish Bass. “You two are now commandos. Check that your weapons are loaded and ready, then follow me.”
Bass looked uncertainly at the Chinese rifle. “Where are we going?”
“To find the Black Star. Isn’t that what you came for?”
He didn’t hear Bass’s answer. From the distant runway, the roar of two jet engines reverberated across the open space, filling the night sky. Each pair of eyes swung to look for the departing fighter.
They saw nothing. The sky was empty.
I failed, Shaomin. I should have killed him, but I failed.
The words replayed in Mai-ling’s head like a mantra. For the rest of her life — measured now perhaps in minutes — she would wonder if the face staring down at her from the cockpit of the Black Star belonged to Colonel Zhang Yu.
She was sure he recognized her. They both wore night vision equipment. His oxygen mask had been hanging unfastened from the side of his helmet. Their gazes had met for only a couple of seconds, but it was enough. If it was Zhang, he would have understood in that compressed instant why she had come to Chouzhou.
It didn’t matter now. Whoever it was, he had escaped. Free to kill again, just as he had killed her beloved Shaomin. It meant that she had failed.
She carried the Beretta in the pocket of her utilities. She was not supposed to be armed — Chiu was emphatic about that — but she had conveniently recovered the pistol from the body of the fallen commando back at Shelter Number One.
But then came the time to use it — when the Dong-jin roared past her like a dragon from hell. With the shape of the fighter still shimmering in the darkness, she had glimpsed the face of the pilot sitting in the cockpit. She might have avenged the death of her beloved Shaomin.
She didn’t shoot.
At the last instant, she had been distracted by the gunfire — the crew chief, as it turned out — from inside the shelter. She stood there like a lump of clay. Then it was too late.