This chapter gets the Hong Kong section of the novel rolling.
Send feedback. I really appreciated all the feedback I received after the previous chapter... Everybody loved the action so much I decided to add some more. And yes, it is relevant... meant to mainly set the scene for the Hong Kong chapters.
--- --- --- --- CHAPTER EIGHT
--- --- --- ---
The sword killed more men as an argument than it did as a weapon.
The triads of Hong Kong were at war. The Luminous Path blamed the Red Arrow for offenses it did not commit, and vice versa. Stuck somewhere in between the two, in the middle, writhing out in the proverbial No Man’s Land, was everything and everybody else. Both triads operated openly on the streets. The Chinese government did not interfere, because in their eyes, the triads protected Hong Kong from outside influences, and operated as what they pretended to be: businessmen. Very harsh businessmen. Both groups forced the populous into associating with them, both groups attempted to grow out over the other, to control the city and flourish with strength.
Presently, however, no such things were being accomplished. The triads had become too destructive, backing even the most minor of all squabbles with force, bringing damage not only upon their enemies, but upon themselves. The Luminous Path frequently shrank back into their abode, Tracer Tong residing amongst them, and the Red Arrow continued to do the same, running their popular club, the Lucky Money.
The Chinese government had actually become more fond, if you could say they were very fond of either triad, of the Red Arrow because of its influence upon, not only the population of China, but also the economy. The Red Arrow ran its clubs, ran its businesses, but sometime ago, it had crossed a line not meant to be crossed. Its former leader had been discovered stealing from Versalife – forsaken technology – and was murdered soon after. MJ12 was responsible for this death. MJ12 was responsible for Versalife, and when the Red Arrow stepped into its business, it pushed it back out. Forcefully. And then established securities that would make sure it would never happen again.
The Red Arrow had a pet project, a secret weapon, called the Dragon’s Tooth. It was a very special sword that utilized nanotech technology to remain permanently, extraordinarily sharp. It endlessly emitted a blue, electric glow from its blade, and its bite was enough to render any man lifeless in one strike. With this weapon the Red Arrow could prevail. But after the Red Arrow’s leader was assassinated, its toy was taken away.
One of MJ12’s countermeasures was its deployment of Maggie Chow. Maggie, a former actress, and snake as she was, came into power suspiciously after the murder of the former Red Arrow leader. Chow stole the Dragon’s Tooth, in the name of MJ12. Nobody knew it. Some suspected it, but nobody could prove it, because the right people covered it up. And thus MJ12 successfully occupied both triads with each other.
The Red Arrow blamed the Luminous Path for the disappearance of the Dragon’s Tooth. The Luminous Path denied. Debate spread. Guns were drawn.
For a while, the Red Arrow seemed the more powerful of the two. But after Paul’s death, and then JC’s, the Luminous Path began to resist and lash out with such great force that surprised the Red Arrow. Of course, fire was fought with fire, and things slipped into a very grave state of skirmishes and assassinations. Neither triad was growing. Only shrinking.
Gordon Quick reflected on all of this as he masked himself in the shadow of an alley on the Hong Kong Canal Road. All of this except MJ12, of course, which he and most others knew nothing about. To him it was just an escalating war that he finally admitted needed end, no matter what the fighting traditions of the triads might say. Good had yet to come out of the spent bullets and the bodies.
The towering structures of Hong Kong stretched endlessly above him, tossing their stonework, metalwork, and glasswork hands upward to the sky with a frowning, anxious expression. Radiantly lit signs hung at their sides, like a sad boy holding a set of brightly-colored balloons. The sidewalks running along the rows of structures had no street between them, but instead, formed a deep canal. Its water lapped lazily. A chill wind crept along Gordon’s skin. Nothing else was heard.
Gordon, belonging to the Luminous Path, had been returning from business on Tonnochi Road to the triad’s compound in the nearby Won Chai Market. He had been ambushed, intentionally or not, he did not know, by a small band of ill-tempered Red Arrow patriots. One of them he had knocked unconscious. The rest followed him in pursuit. Gordon was unsure if he had lost them or not, and had not gotten the chance to count their numbers.
Gordon stood still. From his current view point he could only make out a couple of Hong Kong police officers standing against a brightly-lit poster decoratively covering the wall of one building.
He heard a boat glide by in the waters beneath him, but could not see it. Carefully, he stepped out onto the pavement, and glanced over the rail with one hand closed around it. The small fishing vessel had stopped at a lesser wooden pier on the water below. Its worn owner clambered up onto the dock, and it rocked slowly beneath his weight. He reached back into his sanpan and from it fabricated a bundle of meats. Stuffing them beneath one arm, the soiled man disappeared into an alcove, and through a thick metal door.
Gordon resolved that he had lost his pursuers, and drew his hand away from his concealed weapon. With one palm he rubbed the beading sweat from his shaven head, and began to walk vigilantly along the road.
He had not let his guard down when the knife spun, cut cleanly through the air, intended for his head. He leaned backwards. It brushed past his body and struck the wall with a clatter, then fell. Their second ambush attempt had met similar failure.
Gordon heard patting footsteps behind him. Drawing his gun and spinning around with an extended leg at the same time, his foot immediately met the attacker’s neck. The attacker stumbled stupidly, momentarily stunned. Gordon seized this opportunity to execute a series of hits – A combination of kicks – And a final jab that sent the attacker tumbling down into the water.
Gordon saw three others. Two were on one side of the canal. One of them had been the knife thrower. The other sported a sidearm.
The third approached from the same direction the first had come. He brandished a shotgun, and aimed in Gordon’s direction.
-- --
Not too far away, the two Hong Kong police officers reflected on the situation.
“Who do you think is going to win?” the first asked plainly.
“I don’t know,” the other said. “Think I can hit one from here?”
He raised his pistol.
-- --
Gordon smashed the newly approaching assaulter on the temple with a precise blow. He landed a kick to the Red Arrow follower’s teeth, and then spun, and kicked him in the side. The man crumpled to the pavement.
A bullet grazed past Gordon’s shoulder. He hit the ground, and rolled, pivoting between the columns of the railing, and hung on the ledge for a split second before dropping into the ominously dark water that seemed to swallow all sensations.
Bullets soundlessly pierced the surface above him. They trailed slowly around him, like metal raindrops, gleaming reflections of whatever light they caught. Gordon could see the twisting visage of the one firing the gun. It was the one that had been with the knife-thrower. The gun-wielder’s red cloak was a distorting smear seen through the water’s surface. He stood out against the black sky, leaning over the railing. Bright bubbles of fizzling light appeared in front of him, and with each such flash, a new bullet came.
There was a pause. The gun-wielder stopped to reload. His head suddenly seemed to rupture, and he leaned forward, and toppled into the canal. Gordon watched the corpse explode through the soft shell of the water’s surface, a bursting mist and excited crowd of bubbles momentarily swarming around the limp body like a crowd of locusts. Then all went still.
The corpse stared at Gordon. It drifted motionlessly, an image frozen in time.
-- --
“Nice shot,” the officer said. He raised his own rifle and pointed it at the last participant in the preceding skirmish, who had turned and began to flee. The officer squeezed, and with a jolt, he saw the last man seem to catch his foot on something, his back projecting a crimson mist, and then land face-first on the ground and lay still.
“Think the Luminous Path associate got away?” he said.
“Who knows,” the other spoke, and holstered his weapon.
-- --
Gordon grabbed hold of the dock and lifted himself out of the canal. He would have to follow the sanpan owner’s path to get out onto the streets again.
He suddenly noted that the thick metal door in the alcove was actually the back door to a kitchen, and that he was very hungry.
--- --- --- ---
“There’s something wrong with him,” Alex Jacobson said.
“I know there’s something wrong with him!” Jess paced back and forth in the warehouse they had retreated to. It was the same one the rest of Dom’s team had occupied nights before. They had nowhere else to go. “I know there is. Damn it. He’s not himself.”
Jaime gnawed at his nails. There was a pause.
“That was…” Jacobson stammered with a look of deep anxiety. “That was too much. I mean, sure, UNATCO deserved a little shaking up for what it had sunk into. Especially Manderley, he was a snake. But most of those people were just doing their job. I knew a lot of them. Jaime, Jaime operated on some of those people. Saved their lives. You can’t just… walk in and slaughter everybody.” He stood up and paced over to a grime-veiled wall, pushing his hands flat against it, hanging his head down low.
Jaime blinked. “They got us out.”
“Yes,” Jacobson said, turning around, “they got us out. They also destroyed everything in their path.” He shook his head and sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m just having trouble handling this. All of this.”
He began to massage his temples, eyes closed.
“We’re out now, and we’re with them, so there’s not much we can do about it,” Jock suddenly stated from the shadows. He had his hands in his pockets, and his eyes were hidden beneath the sunglasses that he still hadn’t bothered to remove. “What matters is now. We have to leave this city. They’ll be tearing it apart by sunrise. We probably have a bounty on our heads already.”
“Where would we go?” Dom asked. He had stepped into the room while Jock was speaking. Nobody noticed. Now they all looked at him like he had a tumor, as though he had forty eight hours to live, fear dabbled with anger mixed with anxiety swimming in their eyes. “And how would we get there?” Dom finally continued, realizing he had paused and no one had yet answered.
“We’ll need a chopper,” Jock said. “They impounded mine when they detained us. And we can’t take a public flight. They don’t know your names, but they know ours. And we’re going to Hong Kong.”
If Dom was surprised, he didn’t show it on his face. “What’s in Hong Kong?” he asked dryly.
“Tong. Tracer Tong,” Jacobson explained. “JC, Denton, he planned on going to Tong, to Hong Kong, after he escaped. Tong had the power to stop JC’s killswitch.”
“Killswitch?” Dom inqueried.
“Yeah, UNATCO had the power to kill its agents with the push of a button, or by saying a phrase. They had that much control. JC had about twelve hours to get his killswitch neutralized before he would’ve died. He never got out of UNATCO, you know that. Neither did Paul.”
“Tong is a powerful ally,” Jock said. “He’s part of the Luminous Path, the triad in Hong Kong. Things are violent over there right now. I’d give you the full story, but we don’t have the time. We should already be on the move. Tong knows things about UNATCO, about all the conspiracy theories and about MJ12. He-”
“MJ12?” Dom interrupted. His head was still swimming.
“He was a close friend of Paul. He trusted Paul. We can trust him.”
Dom glanced at Jess. He said, more to himself, “Where else would we go?”
Jess nodded. They had to leave the city, and they had to go far away, so what better place than somewhere where they might be able to gain a friend and pick up the pieces.
“Right,” she said. “We’ll go. How do we get a chopper?”
Jock frowned. “I know it’s a long shot, but we’d be much better off with a stealth chopper. With my old one. It’s been taken to an isolated helipad in Manhatten. MJ12 has those in Hong Kong, too, so we’ll have to be careful when we go.”
“How do we know where to find this helipad?” Jess asked.
“I’ve been there, I’ve seen other choppers impounded there. Every chopper gets impounded there by default. We just need to hope it hasn’t been moved yet. Oh, that reminds me, the chopper was bugged to begin with, which I can easily purge if we recover it. That’s why we got caught the first time around.”
There was another uncomfortable pause. Brian was scribbling on a crossword puzzle in a newspaper he had found. Dom doubted he had heard anything that was going on.
“So you suggest we go get your chopper back, then,” Dom stated. He nodded, already dreading another uncontrollable outburst on his part. He badly wanted to speak to Jess bout it… To explain that something was wrong with him, that he felt like a puppet. He wanted to scream about the whispering in his head, and he almost did at one point, only to be met with a shrieking pain in his brain, and a barely distinguishable screeching voice telling him not to mention it, never to mention it.
There was something wrong with him.
“We’re still bugged,” Jaime suddenly said, standing up.
“What?” three others said at the same time.
“Jock, Alex, we didn’t have time to talk about it at UNATCO because we were separated. They didn’t just bug your chopper, because how was I found? I was bugged. And if I was bugged, you were bugged. Hell, they’ll know where we are within hours. Minutes. They’ll recover some kind of order and realize that we’re gone and need to be accounted for.” He paused. “They might already be on their way.”
“We’re going,” Dom said, regardless of his weariness. He probably hadn’t slept in 48 hours. “Now.”
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