As Wong and his loudly-dressed companion were greeted by the staff and escorted to a table inside, movement out on the street caught Cole’s attention.
Four Asian men were approaching the restaurant, jackets on despite the heat. Cole immediately remembered why Wong was wearing his jacket — to disguise the gun under his armpit. The guns weren’t so obvious on these men, but Cole nevertheless knew they must be there.
It was the way they moved — smoothly, assuredly, the masters of their bodies and their minds. They were professional men, on a mission; Cole could see it on their faces, in their eyes.
Cole’s blood ran cold as he recognized the men for exactly what they were; for they were like Cole himself, and it took one to know one.
The four men approaching the Vietopia were trained killers, and Cole remembered another military truism — plans rarely survived contact with the enemy.
Rolling off his shooting blanket and gathering his things, Cole prepared to move.
‘What the fuck was that?’ shouted Jeb Richards.
The rest of the room was silent, having just watched the horrific beheading of Brad Butler with a mix of shock and utter helplessness.
The group consisted of James Dorrell, Jeb Richards, and John Eckhart. They were in Eckhart’s office in the far corner of the West Wing, getting a first look at this horrific video before Eckhart briefed Abrams in the Oval Office.
‘Wait,’ Dorrell said. ‘There’s more.’
It had been one of CIA’s technicians who had first come across the video circulating on various extreme websites, and Dorrell knew that action had to be taken immediately, before it went viral and was appearing across the mainstream media. His contact at Al Jazeera was agreeing to give him twelve hours before broadcasting the tape, but that was all.
The three men watched as the menacing hooded figure, drenched in blood and holding Butler’s severed head as the corpse lay in a deep scarlet river, began to talk calmly to the camera. The words were Arabic, and had been digitally altered to disguise the voice and thwart electronic recognition systems, but the calmness of the voice — straight after carrying out such an horrific, bloodthirsty act — was disturbing beyond all measure.
‘What does it mean?’ Eckhart asked, and Dorrell passed around translated transcripts of the speech.
‘Let the death of this infidel,’ Richards read from the transcript, his voice dull with shock, ‘this disgusting pawn of the Western disbelievers, be a warning to America and any nation that sides with the Great Satan in the ongoing battle of good against evil.’ Richards choked on the last words, disbelief on his face; he screwed up the paper and threw it across the room. ‘Son of a bitch!’ he shouted, hurling the ball of paper across the room. ‘Son of a fucking bitch! Who the fuck do these rag-heads think they are? They can just kill a man, hack off his fucking head, and then threaten us? They —’
‘Calm down Jeb, please,’ Eckhart urged, hands up. ‘We need to keep cool heads on this one. There’s more.’ Eckhart pulled up his own transcript and started to read. ‘Arabian Islamic Jihad takes responsibility for the merciful killing of this vile pawn of American propaganda, and hear this, my people — the day will soon be here when the Great Satan is brought to its knees, and a glorious Islamic caliphate will triumph once and for all.’
Dorrell nodded. ‘Yup.’ He sighed. ‘That’s what it says.’
‘Have Butler’s family been notified?’ Eckhart asked. ‘The last thing we need is them to hear it on Fox News.’
‘His wife and kids are being brought in as we speak,’ Dorrell confirmed.
‘Okay, so just who in the name of holy fuck are Arabian Islamic Jihad?’ Richards asked. ‘Have we heard anything about them before? Do we know anything about them?’
Dorrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not much on the radar, no,’ he admitted. ‘But you know those rumours of a well-funded al-Qaeda off-shoot, responsible for those attacks in Muscat, Riyadh and Dubai?’
Richards and Eckhart nodded their heads in unison. The attacks on Western interests in the Arabian Peninsula had been spectacularly violent — a car bomb at a football game, a casino machine-gunned, and a five-star hotel levelled by a dozen suicide bombers — and no group had yet claimed responsibility.
‘Some of my boys think that they’re related, they think this AIJ organisation is just getting started, but the signs are that they’re planning something major, those attacks in the Gulf are just the prelude.’
‘Should we be worried?’ Eckhart said.
‘Well John, you know Islamic terrorism’s been dying down over the past few years, and a lot of that’s been due to a weakening in the leadership of key groups, especially al-Qaeda. But that doesn’t mean extreme beliefs aren’t there anymore, and it’s left a power vacuum that needs to be filled. Now,’ Dorrell stated, hands spread wide, ‘what we have are rumours about a new group we need to watch out for, one with a lot of money behind it — maybe from rich oil families, maybe from somewhere else — and this video, the first concrete evidence we have of Arabian Islamic Jihad’s existence. But now we have a name, we should be able to find out more. Once we’ve left here I’m on my way to brief Bud in on the situation and ask for his help identifying AIJ message traffic.’ Bud Shaw was the Director of the National Security Agency, America’s incredibly powerful electronic surveillance organization.
‘Good,’ Eckhart said. ‘Good. When I brief Ellen, I’ll keep it simple. When this gets out, the public will freak out, but I guess that’s her problem.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t envy her.’
‘Hey,’ Richards complained, ‘nobody asked her to apply for the job. She knew what it meant when she put her name forward.’
‘Do we know the provenance of the recording?’ Eckhart asked, ignoring Richards’ barbed comments. ‘Can we trace it?’
‘I’ve got my people working on it, and that’s another thing I’m going to ask Bud to help with,’ Dorrell answered.
Eckhart nodded. ‘Okay, that’s good enough for me for the time being.’ He sipped from his cup of coffee, then looked back at the two men. ‘Do we have anything else?’
‘Other than the Fu Yu Shan? Just the rumours about an attack on South Korea,’ Dorrell said.
‘Details?’ Eckhart asked.
‘Not yet, but I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Damn rag-heads,’ Richards grumbled. ‘Korea’s welcome to ‘em if you ask me. In fact, they can keep ‘em. If they’re blowing shit up over there, that’s less work for me here. Am I right?’
Dorrell and Eckhart exchanged glances.
Unpalatable though Richard’s words were, neither man was able to argue with them.
3
Park Hae-sung pushed through the door of the Vietopia and immediately saw his target ahead, seated at a table with a ridiculous-looking man in a pink t-shirt.
Park was not a patient man at the best of times, and believed that direct action should be used wherever possible. A sixth degree black belt in the Korean martial art of taekwondo and a fifth degree in hapkido, much of Park’s outlook on life was determined by the theories of the martial arts.
Whereas taekwondo was a hard, aggressive art, characterized by a spectacular variety of powerful kicking attacks, hapkido was considered a ‘softer’ method, more defensive in nature and using the opponent’s energies against them using many of the same principles of Japanese aikido.
Park was a taekwondo man through and through.
Like now, for example. As leader of the four-man special operations team which had just been called into action from their home base in Singapore, Park had been charged with determining the location of a pirate hideout by getting information from a man called Wong Xiang.