Reaching behind him, he unsnapped the Chinese Type 73 assault rifle and pulled the plugs sealing barrel and receiver. Dragging back the charging lever, he chambered a round, carefully studying the dark forest ahead as the surf continued to splash and hiss around him.
To his left a barely seen shadow, black against the black of the water, moved forward in a crouch. A second shape joined the first. Another signal light winked from the forest, and the SEALs, death-silent, moved forward.
The body of a PLA sentry lay at the edge of the beach, the back of his neck pierced and his spine severed by a swift stab from a diving knife. Li was in the process of dragging the body back into the woods where it could be hidden.
The Team members were already fanning out through the night, silently taking up positions on a large perimeter, facing all directions. As more and more of the SEAL and Taiwanese commandos arrived, rising out of the surf like black, shapeless sea monsters, they began forming up into squads of eight men each, the better to move quietly and efficiently through the woods.
Before they set out, however, Chief Merriam assembled the compact SATCOM dish, connected the power supply, and punched out a coded signal to USSOCOM, a brief message meaning, simply, We're here.
The answer came moments later. Go.
Still in utter silence, the SEALs and Taiwan commandos slipped deeper into the forest, leaving the splash and wash of the surf behind. They had a long way to go.
There were no two ways about it, Chief Toynbee thought. Ken Queensly hadn't been to many bars in his life, but Toynbee and another sonar tech, ST1 Keller-man, had insisted that if he was going to see Hong Kong, he had to see the watering holes of Kowloon. Hell, forget the usual tourist sights — the tram up Victoria Peak, Government House, Hong Kong Park, or the Space Museum. You hadn't seen Hong Kong until you'd seen the Bottoms Up.
Kowloon, with its business district of Tsim Sha Tsui, lay directly north across the bay from Hong Kong proper, occupying a blunt peninsula thrusting south into Victoria Harbor. Until the new airport had been opened on Lantau Island in 1998, all of Hong Kong's air traffic had been handled by the old Kai Tak Airport on Kowloon's southeast corner — a single runway extending out into the harbor, which had offered stomach-dropping views of the city during the precipitously daring landings and takeoffs.
Kai Tak was closed now, but Kowloon murmured and jostled and festered as enthusiastically as ever, a seething anthill of people, shops, tenements, high-rise condos, market places, and mercantile mayhem. The skyline wasn't as modern, as thrilling, or as high as Hong Kong's; incoming aircraft had to skim Kowloon's rooftops during their approaches, resulting in stringent height restrictions to the buildings, though most of the development money had migrated anyway to the financial district across the harbor. Still, the sheer busyness of the place had Queensly wide-eyed and a bit dazed. Toynbee had to take his elbow to guide him through the looming doorway of the Bottoms Up.
Queensly's experience with bars had been limited to the joints along the main drag outside of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during his boot leave, and to an identical stretch of bars, tattoo parlors, uniform tailoring shops, strip clubs, tobacconists, and massage parlors outside the sub school complex at Groton. Some of those places had been pretty sleazy— shockingly so for a wet-behind-the-ears kid from Zanesville, Ohio — but none of them had been as sleazy as this place.
Tobacco smoke mingled with other, curiously exotic and alien scents filling the air, making both breathing and navigation difficult. Grease, spilled drinks, and dirt covered the floor and most other surfaces in sight; garish red lighting and pulsing disco strobes made it hard to see the larger-than-life James Bond posters on the walls.
There were seven Seawolves in the shore party— Toynbee, Queensly, Larimer, Bennett, Shaeffer, Haskell, and Ritthouser. They were wearing civilian clothing, as was expected on liberty nowadays in a world where military personnel were told to keep a low profile, but it was easy enough to pick them out as Navy, with their short haircuts, loud banter, and good-natured camaraderie. More, it was possible to pick them out as submariners. Their skins were uniformly pasty under the garish bar lighting.
"This place is real big on Bond… James Bond," Toynbee said with a snicker. "One of the Bond movies had some scenes shot in here, and they never let you forget it!"
"They've done some redecorating since the last time I was in here," Haskell said. "But it still looks pretty much the same."
"The Communists promised hands off for fifty years," Larimer pointed out. "They can't shut decadent places like this down until 2047."
"So we got that long, at least, to enjoy!" Ritthouser said. "Decadent is good!"
"I thought we were going to that other place you were talking about," Queensly said as a hostess led them to a table almost lost within the caliginous, smoke-wreathed recesses of the place.
"The Fuk Wai?" Haskell said, scraping his chair back and taking a seat. "Don't worry, Queenie! We'll get there!"
"Queenie's a little anxious, huh?" Bennett said.
"Wouldn't you be?" Shaeffer said, laughing. "His first real liberty?"
"Patience, Queenie, patience!" Toynbee said. "There's a proper order to these things. First, a few drinks here. Then we mosey up the street to the Fuk Wai and find out why…."
Shaeffer laughed. "I remember my first time ashore. Wow! It was in the Patpong in Bangkok—"
"Ha! Did you dip your dong in the ol' Patpong?" Toynbee asked.
"What's the Patpong?" Queensly asked.
"Red light district," Shaeffer explained. "Where all the bars and whorehouses are. Oh, man! There was this sweet, sweet little Thai girl, couldn't've been more than fifteen—"
"I don't want to even hear that shit, man," Ritthouser warned.
"Aw, it's the way things are there, Doc! You know! Cultural differences!"
"Don't make that kind of thing right," Bennett said.
"So?" Shaeffer said, eyebrows raised. "You tell that to a fifteen-year-old kid who comes in from the sticks, ends up alone in the city and has to find a way to eat!"
"We've got that back in the States," Ritthouser said. He nodded toward a cage where a teenage Chinese girl in a G-string gyrated to the thump of western hard rock. "And maybe here, too!"
Their waitress arrived and took their drink orders… scotch or bourbon for all but Toynbee, who ordered beer, and Queensly, who asked for kekou kele — a Coke — to the guffaws and good-natured jibes of the others.
"Maybe that's a cultural difference!" Haskell said, laughing.
"Speaking of cultural differences," Toynbee said, "get a load of them!"
Another party of westerners was being ushered into the back of the bar, eight men in white naval uniforms that showed horizontally striped T-shirts under the jumpers' V-necks. Their haircuts were distinctive as well, their scalps as closely shorn as those of any punk-rocker skinhead. The black patches giving their ship's name on their sleeves were picked out in Cyrillic letters.
"What are they, Russians?" Bennett asked, squinting through the smoke.
"Off that GKS in the harbor, I'll wager," Larimer said, nodding.
"I don't think so," Toynbee said, his expression turning serious.