But it wasn’t quite all bad. There wasn’t a city on the planet that didn’t have an enclave of Chinese immigrants. And on that first night, while Hali trailed Tariq Assad, carrying a hand-lettered card proclaiming he was a mute to cover the fact that he spoke no Arabic, Eddie had gone off in search of Tripoli’s Chinatown.
What he found came as a shock, though, upon reflection, it shouldn’t have been. Buoyed by petrodollars, Libya, and especially Tripoli, was undergoing a building boom, and a number of the projects were being erected by construction firms out of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Apart from the workers brought in, there was also a large support system of restaurants, bars, shops, and brothels, catering strictly to a Chinese clientele, that was nearly indistinguishable from Eddie’s New York Chinatown home.
And, like New York, there were both legitimate and illegitimate layers of society. It had taken him only a few minutes of wandering to find gang symbols that he recognized spray-painted on a couple of the storefronts. And a few minutes more to see the symbol he wanted. It was small, just a few inches tall, and was sprayed in red paint on an otherwise plain gray metal door. The door was set in a heavy-duty structure of a warehouse, with a row of windows running only along the second floor.
Eddie knocked, using a code he knew from home. No one answered the door, so he knocked again, this time as a civilian would, a few hard raps with his knuckles. Judging by the dull echo he heard, he guessed the door was solid steel.
The door creaked open after a few seconds, and a boy of about ten poked his head around the jamb. There would be three or four armed men just out of sight. The boy didn’t say a word.
Neither did Eddie.
He pulled out the tails of his shirt and turned, exposing his back up to the shoulder blades.
The boy gasped aloud, and suddenly Eddie felt other eyes on him. He slowly lowered his shirt again and faced the door. He took it as a good sign that the two gang members now studying him had their pistols lowered.
“Who are you?” one asked.
“A friend,” Eddie replied.
“Who gave you the tattoo?” asked the second.
Eddie glanced at him with as much disdain as he dared. “No one gave it to me. I earned it.”
On his back was inked an elaborate, though now-faded, tattoo of a dragon fighting a griffin. It was an old gang symbol of the Green Dragon Tong, from when they had battled a rival gang for control of the Shanghai docks back in the 1930s. Only senior members of the Tong or especially brave foot soldiers were allowed it on their skin, and, given the global reach of the Chinese underworld, Eddie had known it would gain him entrée here.
He just hoped they didn’t test it because Kevin Nixon had applied the stencil only a few hours earlier from a catalog of gang and prison tattoos he kept aboard the Oregon.
“What are you doing here?” the first thug asked.
“There’s a man who works at the harbor. He owes people I represent a great deal of money. I want to hire some of your guys to help me keep an eye on him until it’s time to collect.”
“You have money?”
Eddie didn’t bother to answer. No one in their right mind would make such a request without being able to pay for it. “Four or five days. Eight or ten guys. Ten thousand dollars.”
“Too tough to exchange. Make it euros. Ten thousand.”
With the currency rates the way they were, that was almost fifty percent more. Eddie nodded.
And, just like that, he had enough men to keep Tariq Assad under twenty-four-hour watch, while he and Hali waited in a flea-bag hotel that the Tong controlled. The gang supplied updates on Assad’s movements every six hours via disposable cell phones, so over the course of a few days they had a pretty good pattern of his movements.
Generally, Assad worked eight hours on the night shift at the dock, though he would usually take off for a couple if no ships were expected. On those nights, he went to an apartment not too far from the harbor where he kept a mistress. She wasn’t the prettiest of the ones he frequented, but she was the most convenient.
After work he went home to be with his family, slept maybe six hours, and then went out to have coffee with coworkers before visiting other apartments dotted around Tripoli. Eddie asked his new employees to put together a list of the women’s names, and when he asked Eric Stone to cross-reference them using the Oregon’s computer it came back that Assad was bedding the wives of midlevel government employees. Even the plain girl near the harbor was the sister of the deputy director of the Energy Ministry.
Given that Assad wasn’t particularly attractive by anyone’s standards, his conquests were all the more impressive.
Eddie and Hali both concluded that Assad was nothing more than a mildly corrupt harbor pilot with an overactive libido and one hell of a pickup line. That was until Max Hanley called with his bombshell announcement. Assad’s ingratiation into the bedrooms of Libya’s government took on a whole new and darker aspect.
JUAN LISTENED OVER THE phone as Eric Stone described the route the old rail spur took through the mountains toward the coast, twenty-odd miles away. The satellite pictures didn’t give the gradient of the line, but Juan’s tracking chip had put him at nearly a thousand feet above sea level when he’d gotten off the helicopter at the terrorists’ training camp.
From the outline of a plan that was forming in his mind even as Eric spoke, Cabrillo decided it was going to be one hell of a wild ride.
Worse, though, the timing was going to be incredibly tight, and he could think of no excuse he could have Overholt pass on to the Libyans to delay their assault without tipping his hand.
Adding to his problems, he hadn’t slept more than six hours out of the past forty-eight, and, judging by the appearance of his three shipmates, they weren’t faring much better.
“What is it?” Linc asked, his surgical gloves covered with blood as he finished the last of the tight stitches. He had sewn the cut in Juan’s leg by layering three rows of catgut, moving from the deepest part of the wound out to the skin, so there was no way it would reopen. With a local anesthetic keeping the pain to a dull ache, Juan felt confidence in his body’s abilities.
“What?”
“You just chuckled,” Linc replied, snapping off the gloves and stuffing them into a red biohazard-containment box.
“Did I? I was just thinking that we are so deep over our heads right now I don’t know if what I have in mind is going to work.”
“Not another of your infamous plan C’s?” Linda groaned. She stood just outside of the Pig, looking over Linc’s massive shoulder.
“That’s why I laughed. Gallows humor. We’re well past C and into D, E, or F.”
There were two options facing Cabrillo but no real choices. He was about to put them all into a shooting gallery, with the Pig playing the role of sitting duck.
Linc duct-taped a gauze pad over Juan’s wound, and said, “If Doc Huxley has a problem with my work, tell her to take it up with your HMO.”
Juan struggled back into his pants. They were ripped in a dozen places, and so crusted with sand that they crackled when he drew them over his hips, but the Pig didn’t carry any spare uniforms. He did a couple of deep knee bends when he leapt to the ground. The cut was tight, but both the stitches and the anesthesia held.
The sun had yet to show itself over the distant mountains, so the stars blazed cold and implacable overhead. Cabrillo studied them for a second, wondering—and not for the first time—if he would live to see them again.
“Mount up,” he called. “The show’s gonna be mostly over by the time the Oregon arrives, and we’ve got a lot of grim work ahead of us.”
“Just curious, Juan,” Linc said casually. “Who are these people we’re going to rescue? Political prisoners, common criminals, what?”