“No!” Hayward protested. “We need the intel!” He lunged for a file on top of the desk and grabbed it before Kekoa could yank him away.
With the help of another soldier, Kekoa carried Hayward by the shoulders as they sprinted for daylight. Kekoa’s lungs burned from the exertion, but the thought of being trapped under thousands of tons of rubble kept him going. They were the last ones through the tunnel entrance when the underground fortress erupted like a volcano. The concussive force flung them to the ground.
The explosives must have been linked to bundles in other tunnels because the entire hill shook from multiple aftershocks. Trees were uprooted and rocks tumbled down the slopes, raising a cloak of dust so thick that Kekoa couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction.
He found Hayward lying prone next to him, not moving. Kekoa flipped him over and saw that he was still breathing. His hand continued to clutch the file from the tunnel.
“Medic!” cried Kekoa. “I need a medic!” He looked down at Hayward, who opened his eyes. “Stay with me, Captain.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“That file almost got us killed.”
“Had to take it,” Hayward said. His finger tapped a picture on
the front next to Japanese characters. It looked like the leaf of some kind of plant. “Tell me what the cover says.”
“That can wait until . . .”
“No, it can’t,” he said between ragged breaths. “That’s why I asked for you. You know Japanese. Tell me. Please.”
Kekoa saw a medic running toward them, so he indulged the captain.
“It says Project Typhoon. Morale Division, Unit 731.” At the mention of Unit 731, Hayward’s face went even whiter than it already was. Kekoa didn’t know what that meant, but it obviously terrified the military scientist.
The medic began tending to his wound and injected Hayward with morphine. As the drug began to take effect, Hayward mumbled, “Where . . . is it located?”
“You mean this Morale Division?”
Hayward nodded, his eyes barely open.
“It doesn’t list the name of a base, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” Kekoa said, “but it does mention a city.”
“Tokyo?”
Kekoa shook his head. “Hiroshima.”
1
VIETNAM
PRESENT DAY
Eddie Seng stood at the curb of Da Nang International Airport’s arrivals area, just as he’d been instructed. The awning of the modern facility shaded him from the midafternoon sun, but it made the muggy July day only marginally more comfortable in his light wool suit. An elegant black limousine showed up as expected and glided to a stop next to him. Eddie was familiar with executive vehicles and immediately recognized it as a Mercedes Maybach V12, the crème de la crème of exotic automobiles.
The uniformed chauffeur walked around the front of the car and opened a wide door. Eddie entered a resplendent interior and settled into a soft cream leather seat, wondering if he would get out alive.
A man in a black suit, sitting in the middle rear-facing row of seats, waved a metal detector over Eddie to check him for weapons, but he had followed instructions and was unarmed. In the rear seat next to Eddie, Zhong Lin, field agent for China’s Ministry of State Security, stared at him as the car pulled away. Instead of a suit, he wore a black T-shirt and pants, and his thin lips were creased with lines, the sign of a longtime smoker. For a moment, Zhong said nothing, merely appraising the person he thought was a Taiwanese traitor known as David Yao.
Eddie had, in fact, grown up in New York City’s Chinatown, learning Mandarin and English simultaneously from his parents. Because his normal accent was bland in both languages, he’d spent the past two weeks in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, getting accustomed to the local dialect.
Most of his career with the CIA had been as a deep-cover operative on the Chinese mainland, so playing a part was nothing new to him. However, he hadn’t been this close to an agent from the MSS, China’s intelligence organization, since his CIA cover had been blown and he was forced to escape back to the United States. As a wanted fugitive, he’d been sentenced to death in absentia, with his face well known to China’s authorities. If Zhong Lin even suspected who he was, he would be whisked out of Vietnam in shackles to Beijing for a swift execution.
His current disguise was meant to prevent that from happening. The real David Yao was a member of the Ghost Dragon triad, one of Taiwan’s most notorious gangs. Yao was suspected of being responsible for numerous extortion, racketeering, and murder plots, but his mutilated body had been found floating on the ocean by a U.S. Navy ship two weeks ago. When the CIA realized that his corpse provided the opportunity for Eddie’s current operation, they asked the Navy to delay notifying the Taiwanese authorities of the discovery.
Like Eddie, Yao had been in his mid-thirties, lithe and athletic, but they never would have been confused for brothers. Completing the disguise required a radical transformation of his face—widened nose, bulked-up chin, reshaped eyes, and an added mustache and beard, as well as fake tattoos on his arms and neck.
After a few moments, Zhong said, in Mandarin, “You have the information we need?”